right of the Tribune group, although they continued to vote with him in the National Executive Committee. Soft left candidates increasingly gained positions in the party leadership after 1983, but Kinnock and deputy leader Roy Hattersley kept the party to their right. 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. 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. 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'. Contemporary soft left The term was occasionally used during Labour's period in government from 1997 to 2010 to describe Labour politicians who were positioned to the left of New Labour, but to the right of the Socialist Campaign Group. In the 2010s, the term soft left has been used to describe politicians such as Ed Miliband or Lisa Nandy, who were seen as ideologically on the left wing of the Labour Party, but perceived to be more willing to make a political compromise rather than their hard left counterparts in Labour. The phrase has been used to describe political figures such as Sadiq Khan. In 2015, Neal Lawson, the chair of the think tank Compass, identified the organisation as a successor to the soft left. Compass disaffiliated from Labour in 2011 in order to open up their membership to people belonging to other political parties. The activist group Open Labour was launched in 2015 with the aim of developing a new forum for the soft left political tradition within the party, which it hopes to recast as the "Open Left". In the 2017 general election, several Open Labour activists were elected to Parliament including Open Labour Treasurer Alex Sobel, Emma Hardy and Rosie Duffield. In the aftermath of Jeremy Corbyn's party leadership (2015–19), the term was generally used to mean "the space between Corbynite remnants on the left, and Progress and Labour First on the right". Keir Starmer, the current leader of the Labour Party, and Angela Rayner, the current deputy leader, have both been described as soft left. Labour politicians on the soft left People belonging to the soft left may be called soft leftists or Tribunites.