[7] As alliances were made between the soft left and the party leadership, the ideological distinctiveness of the LCC and the Tribune Group declined.
[19] Soft left MP Lisa Nandy advocates a "better name" for the faction; she has said the term "sounds a bit like you've sort of collapsed into a jellyfish".
[16] In common with the party right, the soft left was suspicious of the hard left's alliance with Trotskyism (particularly its links with Militant), supported a parliamentary rather than extra-parliamentary road to socialism, retreated from a commitment to widening public ownership of the economy, and tended towards Atlanticist or Europeanist rather than anti-imperialist foreign policy.
It stressed pluralism, including multifarious forms of social ownership and widening Labour's electoral coalition.
[16] Figures identified with the soft left in the 1980s included MPs David Blunkett, Robin Cook, Bryan Gould and Clare Short.
[29] While Kinnock initially emerged from the soft left, portraying himself as a "media-friendly Michael Foot", he tacked to the right of the Tribune group, although they continued to vote with him in the National Executive Committee.
Kinnock's defeat in the 1992 general election signalled an end to the soft left's rise, as they were increasingly marginalised by the modernisation project associated with Tony Blair.
[16] The 1980s soft left began to diverge over time; for example, some figures (such as Blunkett) became loyalists to Blair by the end of the 1990s.
[29] However, activist figures such as the National Executive Committee member Ann Black and a range of MPs continued to work as part of the 'broad left'.
In 2015, Neal Lawson, the chair of the think tank Compass, identified the organisation as a successor to the soft left.