MANY of the more thoughtful critics of Jeremy Corbyn argue a “soft left” candidate would make the best challenger.

He won thanks to the worst aspects of Blairism, when Labour backed war, PFI, setting Atos on the disabled and so on.

So a pure New Labour challenger will fail. But Jeremy has gone much too far, so let’s have a “compromise candidate.”

Someone in-between the members’ urge for change and the MPs’ urge for caution. Someone from the “soft left,” not the “hard left.”

This, the argument runs, has happened before with the Labour Party: from Harold Wilson to Neil Kinnock, Labour leaders have come out from the lands of the “soft left.”

What this argument misses is how much the New Labour years stripped out the “soft left.”

The meetings of the Tribune Group — one key “soft left” focus — shrank to very little during the Blair years.

While the campaign group left just about managed to hang together as a small, committed group, the desire to “do well” under New Labour wore the “soft left” to a shadow.

Which is why Labour MPs find it so hard to come up with a “compromise candidate” who turns out to be not much of a compromise.

Hence Angela Eagle. She declares she is “not a Blairite, not a Brownite, not a Corbynista” but someone “on the left” — “a practical socialist driven by a strong set of values who wants to get things done.”

This confuses Corbyn supporters who think her voting record looks pretty much the same as the rest of the New Labour gang.

But look very hard, and it is possible to see why Eagle is described as “on the left” by those firmly in the centre. But it is subtle.

Eagle was a social security minister in 1998 and got straight into the New Labour business of privatising benefits for the disabled.

She worked with Harriet Harman to get a private company, Sema, to take over medical inspection of benefit claimants. Sema did badly, and the contract was eventually handed over to Atos, which did worse.

Eagle then moved to the Home Office where she defended the New Labour government putting asylum-seekers in prison (“necessary”) and the growth of private “detention centres” run by G4S and the like.

Having helped to run the cruellest privatisations of the New Labour years, Eagle then loyally voted for the Iraq war — the worst foreign policy blunder of the time.

Eagle told her local paper, the Liverpool Echo, that “no-one wants a war in Iraq and no-one contemplates the current crisis there without an awareness of the horror of war.” And promptly voted for war.

However, Eagle did briefly get rebellious. In 2002, according to Gordon Brown’s special adviser Damian McBride, “Tony forgot Home Office minister Angela Eagle existed, gave someone else her job and effectively sacked her from the government by mistake — and without informing her.”

Released from ministerial responsibility, Eagle began turning. After backing a 2003 “rebel” Labour motion trying to hold back some New Labour reforms on NHS foundation trusts, Eagle broke cover and founded New Wave Labour, a new “left-wing” group in the party.

According to the 2003 manifesto of Eagle’s group, “Markets have limits. They are good servants but poor masters.

Neoliberalism is the ideological antithesis to democratic socialism.” 

They argued: “Public service reform is best approached in partnership with a forward-thinking workforce and the users to preserve and build upon all that is good about the public service ethos. Market forces don’t give us all the answers.”

Adding that “our links with the trade union movement are vital and should be strengthened” and “Labour’s internal democratic structures need to be reinforced with a greater role for the membership in policy decisions than the flawed policy forum process has allowed.”

Eagle said: “I’m not a rebel and I don’t intend to be a rebel. This is not a group within a group like Militant, which was an organisation that didn’t have Labour’s interests at heart.

We want to contribute in a beneficial, rather than a confrontational, way in the run-up to the writing of the manifesto for the next election.

“At the moment, policy has been outsourced to think tanks which are self-appointed from a particular section of society and with no significant left-wing input.

“The prime minister has asked for a consultation and we have to make the assumption that he is going to listen to us.”

New Wave’s 10-point manifesto urged Tony Blair to strengthen ties with the trade unions and to ensure that “rampant individualism does not lead to worse solutions for all.”

It also demanded the “overthrow of market fundamentalist control in international institutions, including the International Monetarist Fund, the World Trade Organisation and the World Bank.”

And, given the experience of Iraq, they made the very striking call that “collective security is a vital component of the post-September 11 world. This will be safeguarded by a reformed and effective UN and not by neocolonial US adventures.”

That’s very strong stuff for the “soft left” in the New Labour years.

Then over 2005-06 Eagle helped to lead an opposition against academy schools.

Eagle told Parliament she was “worried about the concept of trust schools, and especially because of the ethical and financial probity of the sort of organisations that may get involved in such schools.”

But she very rapidly backed off. After “reassurances,” she switched from the rebellion to supporting the government over trust schools.

By 2007 she was again a minister and the signs of “rebellion” disappeared. Serving Gordon Brown, there was no more talk of opposing market forces, neoliberalism and neocolonial adventures.

The brief “soft left” rebellion of 2003 turned out to be very soft indeed. There was a chance to actually push back the New Labour governments from privatisation, deregulation and war. But it fizzled out.

That not only meant a chance to change things then was abandoned. It also means the “soft left” doesn’t have a credible candidate now.