Labour’s loss of once rock-solid Hartlepool in May’s parliamentary by-election topped off woeful results for the party in local contests across England. With Labour’s support plunging, the crisis-stricken leadership around Keir Starmer announced a wide-ranging policy review to try to reconnect with voters. Kicking off this latest round of ideological soul-searching was the creation of a new organization, “Progressive Britain.”

On May 17, it held a one-day virtual conference on how the party must change in order to win power and achieve a new “post-Brexit, post-pandemic” political settlement. Yet despite its promise of open debate around the party’s future — offering a platform for “critical thinking, political education and policy making” — Progressive Britain and its supporters remain trapped in the ideological and factional comfort zones set by the legacy of Tony Blair and New Labour.

Progressive Britain is the latest organized expression of Blairism within the Labour Party; a merger of Progress (a once explicitly “New Labour” body, founded in the late 1990s as a grassroots base for Tony Blair) and the think tank Policy Network, founded and run by some of the leading lights of the 1997–2010 New Labour government, notably former Blair strategist Peter Mandelson. While a new organization, the merger is the product of a much amalgamation process on the party’s right, which has previously overcome its own ideological or cultural differences through a common opposition to the Left.