Gripped by the past: Nostalgia and the 2010 Labour party leadership contest

Ed Miliband was elected to the Labour leadership claiming that ‘the past is another country’. In this article, we assess Labour's transition from office to opposition in 2010 and we address the nostalgic dimension of the party's politics through an examination of the 2010 contest for the party leadership. We scrutinise the role of nostalgia in shaping Labour politics and evaluate its contribution to debates within the party. Historically, Labour has been identified as a nostalgic party, one deeply attached to the past. New Labour, however, claimed to have broken with such an outlook. During the 2010 contest for the party leadership, both leading candidates, David Miliband and Ed Miliband, also claimed to reject a nostalgic orientation. An examination of their campaigns indicates, however, that both, along with two other contestants, Ed Balls and Andy Burnham, made reference to the past in the orientation of their candidacies. All four male candidates offered signals locating themselves within Labour's history. We conclude that nostalgia shaped the 2010 leadership contest: it hindered the development of any candidate developing the kind of modernising appeal on which New Labour was based; it helped to define the locations of the candidates; and it moulded the claims and counter-claims made by the Miliband brothers against each other. Labour's relationship with the present remains defined, in part, by its complicated historical understanding of the past. As far as the Labour party is concerned, the past is rarely another country.