Of course Labour needs to learn from its history, but it needs to avoid the rose-tints offered by Alastair Campbell and Peter Mandelson et al (Labour figures from 1997 victory warn Starmer against cautious approach, 5 October).
Other than reducing some primary school class sizes, the 1997 pledge card was neither bold nor ambitious. When Labour was elected, the civil service – at the time I worked on policy in the Department of Health – was not presented with a set of thought-through policies, and the first two years of government were characterised by initiatives rather than policy shifts. The first meaningful structural change was the minimum wage, in 1999.
