That Starmer fella...

Well, I certainly don't have answers myself, but here are some musings.

There's no 'who' yet, perhaps there could be one if Starmer managed to become more than himself (which I don't think he'll manage, but let's wait and see). It's entirely possible that Labour suddenly sprouts a real leader personality at some point in the near future.

As for 'what', where you're being unfair to Corbyn is that the election campaign in 2017 really was very good and with its 'let's (largely) ignore 'Brexit' and let's change some annoying things and go in the right direction' they had a very good manifesto and electoral strategy, plus all that Cool Corbyn stuff, obviously helped by a hopeless Theresa May. They got most of that completely wrong in 2019--no opportunity for Cool Corbyn in late autumn, an overloaded manifesto, no clear line, up against a strategy that worked for the Tories. Johnson was hopeless, too, but as unlike May he largely avoided being seen, that didn't matter so much.

The question for Labour has really been the same ever since the collapse of the Eastern bloc. While the Eastern bloc wasn't really socialist, it nonetheless represented that ideology/political direction in the world--in German there was the phrase 'real existierender Sozialismus', which probably doesn't need a translation, and here's the Wikipedia page ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_socialism

... i.e., a socialism that supposedly really existed. Whatever was written about that in the West, however much was wrong with it, however ridiculous the little cars and the 20-year waiting time for them were, however dirty the Braunkohlereviere and however cobbled the roads still in their pre-war state were, it was still there and provided a sort of backdrop against which at least a tenuous argument could be advanced that 'socialism' 'works'. When it all collapsed, the right wing started to gloat that now it had all collapsed as it was always going to, etc. Since then, all arguments in favour of socialism have been tainted with the perception that it can't work, as the right wing always said. Never mind the cleverness of the ideology, we've now seen it tested out in the real world, and so on. And never mind that Kerala is still a communist state, and that there are other, smaller places in the world that are effectively socialist, the big states that tried it have failed.

Then the main argument left to socialists is: 'Ah, but that wasn't really socialism. Look at other places, like Cuba, which only did badly economically because of the embargo. The people there are well-educated and they know what they've got and they're really equal.' (I've heard people say everything I mention here, by the way.) These are not strong arguments because they're only about small states and because they don't play a very strong role in world politics. By contrast, the right wing talks about capitalism. Monetarism. Big data exploitation. The billionaire oligarchs. The people who suffer from all that the most either can't vote/don't manage to vote (voter suppression), are gerrymandered, or won't vote. Most people who benefit, or think they benefit, from the way things are, will vote, every time.

Anyone plotting a way ahead for left-wing politics needs to do better than sell-outs like Blair or Schröder. A government that comes to power under a left-wing banner needs to do the most they can to counteract what has happened before and not to simply acquiesce in it and pretend the 'centre' will be in power for generations so that it has plenty of time to sort everything out when to all appearances it only does very unimaginative and ineffective things that can easily be destroyed by a ruthless right-wing government that doesn't give a toss if thousands of vulnerable people die prematurely and suffer injustice every day.

But then you're back at highly adversarial politics (and again, how do you even define a position in the face of the collapse of 'socialism'?), and in the age of data exploitation that seems to favour those who have no compunction about using data. It's merely the latest advantage in a series of ploys going back at least to the 1980s, e.g. either ridiculously liberal rules about party financing (UK) or illegal party financing (Kohl in Germany) (not trying to suggest that there isn't some party financing in the UK that isn't illegal, too). Obviously, Labour uses data, too, but I remember well how much was made of Labour's canvassing--a quaint method of collecting data now that you only have to scrape people's F****** accounts to know where they stand. After all the furore about the use of illegal data in the referendum, there was very little written about that in the 2019 general election. Was it no longer being used? I find that vanishingly unlikely.

As I said, I don't have answers, either, and certainly no political ability, but at minimum I think a new narrative must be established, with a credible intellectual backdrop, that does not have to refer too much to older ideologies but explain clearly and plainly, and positively, what should be done. How about 'every company above a certain size should be a co-operative'? We must not concentrate power in too few hands, so let's work co-operatively. What about the 'environment'? Should we even continue to call it that, seeing as the term seems to imply that it's only what's around us but doesn't affect us? (I know that obviously it can be understood differently perfectly well, but it does sometimes help to be excessively literal, as many people only understand abstract concepts superficially.) What policies--simple policies that don't need reams of 'climate science' that only a few people really understand--should we propose? And so on.