The Blair Supremacy

A study in the politics of Labour's party management

Lewis Minkin

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780719073809
• eBook ISBN: 9781847799012
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Parties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Lewis Minkin has immense experience of the Labour Party and has acted as adviser to two major internal reviews of the internal party organisation. As the author of two widely acclaimed and original studies on the Labour Party, The Labour Party Conference and The Contentious Alliance, he possesses an unrivalled grasp of the subtleties and nuances of Labour's internal relationships. The Blair Supremacy is groundbreaking in its investigation of the processes, methods, character and politics of party management, during a period when Blair strengthened his own position as he and his allies and managers drove the party through a ferment of new developments under the name 'New Labour'. For this book Minkin has been able to draw on a wealth of sources unavailable to other scholars. What is uncovered here is revealing and at times startling. It includes an extensive covert internal organisation, a culture which facilitated manipulation and what can be described as a rolling coup. These developments are rigorously and critically examined with a strong focus on three fundamental questions: How were these changes achieved? Was it, as it was often represented, a complete supremacy? Why did it end so badly with Blair being forced, in effect, to step down? The study challenges many misconceptions and sheds new light on the Blair legacy and on the intense controversies surrounding him. It also adds greatly to our understanding of some acute contemporary problems in British political life.

PART I

Antecedents

1

The tradition of party management and the road to destabilisation

The distinctiveness of what happened in the governance of the Labour Party under Blair can only be fully understood in relation to the heritage of the party’s organisational form, its democratic culture and the traditional pattern of party management. Blair, his allies and his managers were politically born into this heritage and they drew from its character, attitudes and practices some useful lessons for the future but they also noted what they regarded as its inadequacies and unacceptable obligations. This, as will be shown, was to lead Blair into some crucially important organisational and cultural departures. The foundations of the original managerial tradition and its history are presented here as a compressed, complex but essential historical analysis, preliminary to the developments leading eventually to the Blair experience itself.

Party history, the pattern of organisation and the culture of management

The party was created in 1900 as a confederal alliance of affiliated independent organisations – mainly trade unions but also socialist societies, the Independent Labour Party, briefly the Social Democratic Federation, and then the Fabian Society. On to this was built after 1918 a unitary structure of individual membership. These different extra-parliamentary organisations were the basic units of what was, by convention, a conference-delegate democracy with multiple chains of mandated democratic representation stretching upwards to the annual party conference – recognised as the sovereign body.* From the party in parliament came the leadership of the party as whole. This had special discretion through various formulae but it was a natural extension of the principles of conference delegate democracy that the parliamentary arm of the Labour Party should have an obligation to implement party policy based on the decisions of the conference and the general election manifesto.

The democratic process also embodied what appeared to be complete union dominance. In 1918, after a reform of the constitution which established a national system of constituency parties (CLPs), at the party conference, the unions cast 2,471,000 votes, the CLPs 115,000, and the socialist societies 48,000. The unions controlled also a majority of the seats on the NEC elected from the extra-parliamentary units. In addition, the unions, by affiliation fees and donations, provided substantial finance for the upkeep of the organisation the party. They sponsored a substantial section of Labour MPs and provided extra financial resources for the expenses of fighting general elections. All of this created the possibility that working through these democratic and financial arrangements the parliamentary leadership would be subordinate to the extra-parliamentary party, and the unions through finance and votes would be the dominant power as they imposed themselves on the parliamentary public representatives.

Party leadership

In practice, to the repetitive disappointment of sections of the local parties, the unions, and some backbench MPs, neither the formal democratic arrangements nor the appearance of trade union dominance gave anything like an accurate characterisation of Labour’s internal power relations. When the party grew as an electoral force, becoming first the official opposition and then forming two short-lived minority governments in 1924 and 1929, a major change took place in the distribution of power. It became skewed towards the party’s parliamentary leadership with Ramsay MacDonald instituting the role of Leader as a pre-eminent figure. This was a pattern familiar to scholars of political parties after the study by Robert Michels,¹ and, later, in the British context Robert Mackenzie.²

Although the spirit of intra-party democracy continued to be an element in the elections and some internal procedures within the PLP, and at times led to attempts to revive party influence, acting as the Cabinet and Shadow Cabinet the leadership were not subject to policy control from below. Working within the historic grain of parliamentary and executive-dominated government, the normality was of a hierarchical relationship with the primary responsibility of the PLP being to support the policies formulated by a leadership. Added to the pressures of electoral competition and public representation, these influences contributed to the ascendancy of the party’s leading parliamentary figures.

The unions: roles, ‘rules’ and management relations

What was most unusual and consistently important about the cultural environment underpinning the ascendancy of the parliamentary leaders over the output of policies was a system of mainly unwritten regulation of relations with the unions. Often overlooked by observers, this system added a special element to the forces which sustained a high degree of influence by the leading politicians over the outcome of policy-making. The fundamental grounding was the mutual acceptance by the union and parliamentary leaders of different spheres and functions – the political and the industrial – each with its own roles, responsibilities and autonomy. On this basis, over time there evolved or was instituted a range of mainly unwritten ‘rules’ and protocols underwriting the mutuality and ethos of ‘the movement’ and dealing with its major potential conflicts. They were based on shared values of unity, solidarity, democracy and freedom, and a working principle of adherence to priorities; and in observance together they reinforced cohesion.

These roles ‘rules’ and protocols were later detailed in full in Minkin’s The Contentious Alliance³ and are too extensive to be fully laid down here, but the most important elements relative to party management are registered below. Although the regulation had a mutuality of restraint and protected the industrial freedom of the unions, the jealously guarded autonomy of individual unions and the independence of the Trades Union Congress – which continued to speak for all the unions regardless of party affiliation – and though the rule guaranteed political access, advance information and consultation to the unions, the most significant feature was the extent to which they restricted the unions. On the face of it union leaders with the backing of their organisations were free to use their formal position in terms of votes and finance to at least co-determine party policy and to control its political leaders in their implementation. Yet within the regulatory arrangements they were more constrained than the politicians and it was the political leadership which gained regular supportive mechanisms in party management. Since the Wertheimer analysis of 1929,⁴ which puzzled over the difference between government policy and that of the TUC, this difference of role and the rule-governed union restraint have frequently confused observers as well as being subject to continuous crude misrepresentation about the behaviour of ‘union barons’ and ‘party paymasters’.

Key to it was that within these mainly conventional arrangements, the union leaders and their representatives who formed a distinct group within the PLP and on Labour’s NEC were generally understanding of the need for party management. Their own internal union experience usually involved such activities and the factional alignment of the loyalist right in the party corresponded and overlapped with that in the unions. In addition, the rules and protocols reflected highly motivating allegiance and values. In spite of recurrent tensions (see below) there was a continuous and at times an emotional sense of solidarity of the unions with the Labour Party – ‘our party’ – and a Labour government – ‘our government’ – together in ‘this great movement of ours’. It was a protective loyalty that continued to operate in spite of disappointments. Protectiveness also extended to the party’s organisational health, its financial stability, its developing boundaries of membership and its changing electoral needs. Solidarity led the majority of unions to seek a supportive role acting as ballast to the parliamentary leadership in debates and votes within the various forums of the party. A collectivist view of party democracy and freedom also reinforced the management of party discipline. There was a strong emphasis on loyalty to majority decisions rather than furtherance of minority rights.

Union-favoured policies, as they emerged annually through their internal processes, could cover a wide range of territory, and each union had its own traditions and interests and a distinctive mix of policy positions, but normally the priority policy issues were on economic-industrial concerns, especially on union territorial areas, widened to welfare issues and exceptionally to major political issues judged as close to the immediate concerns of the members.⁵ These needs and the assertion of priority workers’ interests, whether general to unions or of an individual union, could also be pursued in terms of a justice which dovetailed into the party’s social values. They could also act as territorial shields of the industrial sphere against interference by the politicians. Nevertheless, the most striking feature was of a division of responsibilities whereby political initiative and detailed policy-making on the wide policy agenda was generally understood to be a matter for the politicians.

Leadership, the NEC and party management

The parliamentary leadership also became pre-eminent in influencing the NEC. Though it was accountable to the conference and obliged to carry out conference policy, the NEC had the constitutional authority to propose to the conference amendments to the constitution and resolutions and declarations affecting the programme, principles and policy of the party.⁶ At the annual conference it had important procedural rights and advantages including initiating major statements of policy and making a final judgement of the acceptability of resolutions initiated within the party before a vote was taken.^† Through these facilities it became in effect a joint leading policy body as well as the ruling administrative authority.

On the NEC, a majority of seats were held or controlled by the unions, but members of the TUC General Council were prohibited from membership. These NEC members were heavily committed to a politics of what was seen as moderation and common sense rooted in practicalities of working-class life. Operating as the NEC trade union group, their role definition emphasised their limited involvement in strategy and policy and acceptance that the politicians should be ‘left to get on with their job’.⁷ There developed a crucial prohibition against the use of organisational or financial measures on the committee against deviant actions of the Labour governments or in pursuit of policy claims. ‘Rules’ of reciprocity governed union voting for membership of the NEC, ensuring representation by size and various other criteria. These reinforced the continuity of the NEC role and behaviour. A similar pattern governed the operation of the elected Conference Arrangements Committee (CAC), also at times known as the standing orders committee, the body formally responsible for organising the party conference. It had a loyalist majority drawn by size and tradition from the unions and was in practice very responsive to the leadership and the collective party interest.

Management intervention

Adding to the resources of loyal support, anticipating the potential for political problems and finding ways of producing outcomes that were in the party’s best interest became a regular managerial activity in party forums. With the resources of party organisation and the growing authority and skills of those playing leading roles, especially the long-serving Party Secretary (later termed the General Secretary) Arthur Henderson, the extra-parliamentary party was managed in a way which was conducive to producing outcomes which the leadership considered to be in the party’s best interests. By 1914 ‘leading performers were turning conference management into a fine art’.⁸

As the party grew in its public representation, it became a permanent priority for the senior party officials in alliance with the NEC and especially those who played leading roles, to manage procedures in various ways which dealt with the potential clash between the responsibilities and practicalities of this public representation and the conduct and outcomes of internal party democracy. This had a formal character through the powers of the NEC to initiate rule-making and lead in ensuring policy coherence. Successful party management also drew from the NEC’s general supervision of a party organisation and the rules under which it operated. It drew also from the increasing authority of the leader represented on the committee and from the general prestige, expertise, charisma and communicational skills of leading figures. Management could organise support for the leader preparing the ground for his performances. In turn, backing from the leader and the NEC reinforced the authority of management.

Where sometimes the conference management arrangements failed to produce a policy outcome which suited the parliamentary leadership, the parliamentary leaders had considerable discretion in imple...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface: Origins, roles, methods and sources
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I: Antecedents
• Part II: Forging ‘New Labour’ management
• Part III: Crisis and control
• Part IV: Appraisal
• Index
• Footnotes
• Backcover