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In an exchange about the Labour Party recently I bemoaned the fact the Labour left had no competence and the Labour right no ideas. So far Keir Starmer’s approach has not been about new

ideas, but about absolutely hammering home the competence message. It makes a very refreshing change. The Labour left, at least the very public part of it, has not responded well to its

defeat. None of the key “outriders” — those media activists who fought for Corbyn — has the gift of genuine self-criticism, so you get weak beer such as “Jeremy isn’t anti-Semitic but…”

which is the closest most of them will get to acknowledging anything went wrong at all. These outriders are now in trouble. They don’t have new ideas and they don’t have a new champion. The

2016 Labour leadership election made the whole thing personal and all about one man. It worked beautifully — until that man was no longer on the scene. It turned out they had embedded

loyalty specifically to Corbyn and not to a movement. Rebecca Long Bailey couldn’t get the support of people who had given their fealty not to a movement but to a man they felt was being

unfairly targeted. Starmer then won the race to lead Labour. The “outriders” have run out of road. But they still have Twitter. And they use it both to talk to each other and to their

shrinking audience. They are angry about Labour getting its act together. It seems that Starmer being competent is all a plot to make Jeremy look bad. The question now is how much they

matter. There are some who are too closely tied to the Corbyn project to come back from its failure. But there are others who still have much to give and should not be written off. How to

tell the difference is what matters. Labour needs people who are able to reflect not just on how they won in the Labour Party but how they lost the country — and why. Keir Starmer today has

set out a challenge to get Labour out of the shadows. He was blunt about the failures of the last regime, saying that anti-Semitism will be pulled out from the roots and that Labour is now

“becoming a competent, credible opposition,” very much making clear that they haven’t been for some time. There has recently been a great deal of energy on the left of the Labour Party. But

too much of it was wasted on defending the indefensible. A more reflective left, capable of making arguments that hit home outside their echo chamber would be an incredible asset to the

Labour Party as a whole. It may be the this defeat will come to be seen as a good thing for Labour’s left. Maybe now it can move on from the lazy complacency into which it fell, just as

Labour’s right did during the Blair years. Now it can move on from people who have failed it and find new leadership among those who were invested in neither Tony Benn nor Jeremy Corbyn. One

day, we might get a left wing Labour leadership that is also competent and focused on domestic politics. As someone who considers herself on the left, but who was made to question that by

Corbyn’s leadership, I hope so. But it won’t be led by those who made their name during 2015-2019: not those who still champion those years as a success; not those who prioritised their

Patreon crowd funding account over the people who need a Labour government; and not those who play an increasingly shrill tune to a diminishing audience. I have met brilliant and thoughtful

people well to my left within the Labour party. I hope to see those people thrive now. I want to see them move us on from the period where the left became as nepotistic as the right, into a

time where talent, ideas and policy wins through. That energy still exists on the left of the Labour Party. Now would be a good time for some new faces to showcase it.