IT MEANS a lot to me that the first article I’ve written in a national newspaper since being elected as the Labour MP for Leeds East is an article for the Morning Star.

The Star has a special place in my heart. I’ve bought it, organised events for it, raised money for it — and very occasionally written for it — for more than a decade.

On Thursday I left Leeds Arena having been elected with an increased majority of 12,533 and nearly 54 per cent of the vote. Yet I left Leeds Arena not elated at our local victory, but depressed at our national defeat.

In my acceptance speech I dedicated the victory in east Leeds to all those in the area who have paid the bedroom tax, to all those who have been forced on to zero-hours contracts, to all the Remploy workers thrown on the scrapheap by a cruel and callous Conservative-led government and to all those who have been made to pay the price for a banking crisis that they didn’t cause.

These people and more — here in east Leeds and across the country — will now suffer still more as the neoliberal zealots of the Conservative Party use the next five years to further intensify attacks on ordinary people, our NHS, our public services, the welfare state and the organised labour movement.

The ideological architects of the Labour Party’s unprecedented electoral disaster in Scotland are already lining up to tell us that the Labour Party across Britain must follow their Blairite blueprint or face electoral oblivion.

Their refrains are as predictable as they are incorrect: “Labour lost because we were too left-wing,” “too close to the trade unions,” “too concerned with the least well-off” and “because we did not stick to the centre ground.”

And the champagne had not yet been fully quaffed by the Bullingdon boys of the Conservative Party before Tony Blair had put pen to paper in The Observer calling for a trip back in time to New Labour.

Make no mistake: the loss of 40 of Labour’s 41 MPs in Scotland was a long-term “achievement” of New Labour. The road to Thursday’s electoral disaster for Labour in Scotland did not start with its failure to put forward a progressive, socialist case against independence.

It started over 20 years ago with the creation of New Labour. New Labour believed Scotland had nowhere else to go and that it was all about chasing the votes of Tories in the south-east of England while refusing to advocate a radical and necessary change to the way the economy works.

Heeding the advice of those who say the Labour Party must return to New Labour threatens to do to other Labour heartlands what more than 20 years of New Labour has done to previous Labour strongholds in Scotland.

It should not be forgotten that between 1997 and 2010 New Labour lost five million votes and four million of those were lost under Tony Blair. Neither should it be forgotten that New Labour put into place the conditions for the long-term

weakening of the bond between the Labour Party and working-class communities. It caused the epidemic of cynicism about the political process which has only benefitted the Establishment and the forces of reaction.

So where next? There must be no retreat to New Labour. There must be no journey back in time to Blairism. There must be no heeding of the siren voices that have led Labour onto the rocks in Scotland. There must be a recognition that under Ed Miliband’s leadership the Labour Party shifted cautiously in a progressive direction in a way that would never have been possible under Blair’s leadership. 

Having campaigned in many marginal constituencies over the years as well as my own, I know that Labour’s policies enthused more Labour and trade union activists to action than any time in my political life. And having spoken to thousands of voters, I know that the most common damaging refrain was: “You’re all the same — we don’t believe you.”

Returning to the soulless triangulation and focus-group politics of the discredited Blairite past will only make this disengagement worse.

Ordinary people are now staring down the barrel of a gun. We must not capitulate to calls for a return to New Labour’s neoliberal economics.

The trade union movement now has the fight of its life on its hands and Labour must stand shoulder-to-shoulder with it.
Labour councils across Britain must develop a political strategy to work with each other and with trade unions and community groups to find new ways of resisting the next savage wave of Conservative cuts.

And the parliamentary Labour Party must not follow the big business-backed media “consensus.” It must instead shape the consensus and a push the progressive, positive change needed to transform our economy so that it works in favour of ordinary people Creating that economy will enable the collective and individual aspirations of the many — not the few — to be fulfilled.

• Richard Burgon is Labour MP for Leeds East.