The British Labour Party in Opposition and Power 1979-2019

Forward March Halted?

Patrick Diamond

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781138817876
• eBook ISBN: 9781317595373
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book provides a novel account of the Labour Party's years in opposition and power since 1979, examining how New Labour fought to reinvent post-war social democracy, reshaping its core political ideas. It charts Labour's sporadic recovery from political disaster in the 1980s, successfully making the arduous journey from opposition to power with the rise (and ultimately fall) of the governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Forty years on from the 1979 debacle, Labour has found itself on the edge of oblivion once again. Defeated in 2010, it entered a further cycle of degeneration and decline. Like social democratic parties across Europe, Labour failed to identify a fresh ideological rationale in the aftermath of the great financial crisis.

Drawing on a wealth of sources including interviews and unpublished papers, the book focuses on decisive points of transformational change in the party's development raising a perennial concern of present-day debate – namely whether Labour is a party capable of transforming the ideological weather, shaping a new paradigm in British politics, or whether it is a party that should be content to govern within parameters established by its Conservative opponents.

This text will be of interest to the general reader as well as scholars and students of British politics, British political party history, and the history of the British Labour Party since 1918.

1
INTRODUCTION

The Labour Party and the reinvention of social democracy in post-war Britain

I notice now that there are Thatcherites in every audience. She has armed a lot of bright young people with powerful right-wing arguments, and, although I enjoy discussing them, I realise I am no longer dealing with the old consensus but with a new breed of right-wing concepts. It confirms my belief that there will be a hard inheritance which will never be forgotten, even when all Thatcher’s legislation has been replaced.

Tony Benn ¹

Introduction

This book provides a novel account of the Labour Party’s years in opposition and power since 1979. The focus is Labour’s sporadic recovery from political disaster, followed by the rise and fall of the governments led by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Marx’s dictum that history repeats itself ‘first as tragedy, then as farce’, could scarcely be more apposite.² Forty years after the 1979 disaster, Labour was on the brink of political oblivion once again. The book’s focus is the New Labour project, an undertaking that sought to reinvent post-war social democracy while reshaping its core political ideas. As an organising theme, New Labour was at the centre of the party’s evolution and development over the last forty years. The world that Labour confronted in the 1980s and late 1990s was being fundamentally transformed, a stark contrast to the post-war era. In The Age of Extremes, Eric Hobsbawm remarked that ‘the short twentieth century’ that began in 1918 ended with Communism’s demise in 1991.³ The revolution in global capitalism, rapid deindustrialisation, alterations in Britain’s class structure alongside the fall of the iron curtain necessitated sweeping reorientation of the Left’s political thought.

Drawing on a wealth of sources, the book tells the tortuous story of how Labour overcame innumerable political setbacks and adversities. The party’s onward march was halted abruptly in the wake of the 1979 defeat. British Labourism displayed the hallmarks of terminal degeneration. Labour’s support was now confined to its Welsh, Scottish and Northern English industrial heartlands. It had no coherent response to the free market counter-revolution inaugurated by Thatcherism. Shipwrecked, the party was unable to break free of the impasse created by permanent Conservative rule.

Yet the ensuing post-mortem into Labour’s political failure in the twentieth century, accompanied by sustained inquiry into the decay of Labourism, was the seedbed of eventual political and intellectual recovery. The revitalisation of the British Left from the mid-1980s absorbed the lessons of historical experience, drawing inspiration from the rejuvenation of social democratic parties across advanced capitalist countries from the United States to Sweden. Labour experienced an astonishing rebirth, undertaking the long march back to power and winning the largest parliamentary majority in its history. Far from being the heir of Thatcherism, optimists insist the post-1997 governments advanced constitutional radicalism, widely shared economic prosperity, liberal internationalism and social justice.

Even so, many commentators on contemporary British history and politics conclude that Blair and Brown’s party was nothing other than an expedient adaptation to Thatcherism. The 1997 victory is portrayed not as a watershed in post-war Britain, but a point of continuity with the era of the New Right and the Thatcher administrations. It has become a cliché in what passes for scholarly debate that New Labour’s ideas were the inheritance of neo-liberalism. Blair and Brown were ‘sons of Thatcher’. Proceeding from where the neo-liberals left off, New Labour is said to have governed according to the ideological blueprint imposed by Conservative administrations.⁴ New Labour was apparently determined to accommodate itself to the Thatcherite political order. As Blair and Brown came to office, class politics was abandoned. There was no reversal of anti-trade union legislation. Aggressively cut back, the public sector was stripped of democratic legitimacy. The ‘workfare’ state replaced the welfare state, coercing the destitute unemployed into jobs. The commitment to globalisation meant centre-left ministers reining in the state’s interventionist and regulatory powers. The perceived risk of capital flight ensured the Labour administrations maintained competitive rates of income and wealth taxation. The emphasis on fiscal orthodoxy rejected the post-war Keynesian legacy. New Labour’s vision of governance encouraged market forces to dominate state and society, culminating in the 2008 financial crash.

The programme of Blair and Brown’s party was thought to be ‘virtually indistinguishable from Thatcherism’.⁵ Labour abandoned the main postulates of post-war social democracy: a belief in regulating the capitalist economy through state intervention to strengthen prosperity and welfare. Having internalised Thatcherism, New Labour was believed to have performed catastrophically in government. Blair and Brown, it seemed, did little to reverse the rising tide of inequality. The Blair administrations became embroiled in disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, leaving the British public vulnerable to the virulent strain of jihadi global terrorism. The New Labour project was intellectually discredited. It then failed electorally as the party lost 5 million votes between 1997 and 2010. Scholars lamented that Labour’s policies merely entrenched the Thatcherite settlement.

Emphasising that New Labour represented a fundamental break with the party’s dominant tradition, the unfavourable comparison with the governments of 1945–51 was encouraged. Since the 1960s, the predominant tone of discussion of the Attlee era verged on eulogy. The 1945 administration initiated a programme of socialist reform that transformed British society. The party came to power by forging the unique alliance between the manual and professional classes, brain workers and industrial workers, pursuing a vigorous plan of national reconstruction and egalitarian reform. Ministers and parliamentarians, alongside the trade union and Labour movement, were united in enacting Attlee’s agenda. The Labour administrations overcame daunting constraints, notably the ‘financial Dunkirk’ of the war-torn economy. Despite those obstacles, Attlee’s ministry instituted the National Health Service (NHS) while establishing the post-war welfare state supporting each citizen from the cradle to the grave. In the words of Attlee’s press secretary, Francis Williams, the 1945 government, ‘was the manifestation not simply of a transitory mood at one general election, but of a genuine and cumulative increase over many years of popular support for Socialist policies’.⁶ Fifty years later, Blair and Brown’s party was depicted as the stark point of departure. New Labour, beholden to neo-liberal ideology, apparently embraced the Thatcherite consensus. The Blair/Brown years were subsequently airbrushed from the party’s history in the wake of the 2010 defeat.

This book advances a perspective on Labour’s development that diverges from the scholarship of Left critics who so often shaped the dominant view of New Labour.⁷ The account breaks with the historiographical consensus that these critics have advanced, questioning a number of prevailing myths. The first is the widely held belief that New Labour was merely an electoral machine concerned with winning power, accommodating the preferences of Middle England’s voters. In fact, New Labour was primarily an intellectual organising framework rather than an electoral strategy. The second myth is that in so far as Labour had any ideas, they represented an accommodation with neo-liberalism. Yet New Labour came from within the Left. Its intellectual antecedents were pluralistic and heterogeneous. The third myth is of the irrevocable divide between Old Labour and New Labour, modernisers and traditionalists. Yet it is possible to identify important political and intellectual continuities with the parties of the past.

The chapters then consider New Labour’s performance in office. The account differs from previous assessments in avoiding the temptation to reach a simplistic binary verdict of success or failure.⁸ To consider the efficacy of the Blair/Brown administrations, a range of yardsticks are used: how far did New Labour ministers construct economic and social institutions that outlived them? To what extent was Labour successful in shaping secular trends from economic growth to inequality? How far did the governing party alter the beliefs, values, principles, norms and preferences of citizens? And finally, did New Labour succeed in initiating a lasting progressive settlement, shifting the axis of British politics towards the Left while refashioning the political landscape? The overarching judgement is that while Labour was certainly successful in gaining power, it was unable to win the recurrent battle of ideas in British politics. What New Labour stood for was obvious enough. But Blair and Brown’s vision of the New Britain remained oblique and ambiguous. This introduction delineates the book’s over-arching themes. The chapter begins by more closely examining the prevailing orthodoxies on New Labour in contemporary historiography, political science and popular commentary.

Myth one: New Labour and the role of political ideas

New Labour was an intellectual undertaking. It was principally driven by ideas. Previous scholarship that addresses the relationship between institutions and ideas in the British polity provides a theoretically persuasive framework.⁹ Samuel Beer was an American scholar of British politics. His intellectual approach is still of ground-breaking importance. Beer believed that ideas were decisive in the conduct of political activity in modern states. Not only were ideas effective instruments to acquire power. They enabled politicians to construct programmes and agendas, forging their practical ideal of the good society. Comparative scholarship emphasises the continuing importance of ideas in propelling institutional and policy change in advanced democracies.¹⁰

Nevertheless in the contemporary era, ideas had less purchase than might have been anticipated in the field of political analysis, particularly in the study of political parties. As one scholar attests, ‘It is notoriously difficult to explain the activity of any political movement in the context of ideas’.¹¹ Examining ideas systematically is methodologically burdensome. Influential perspectives from Marxism to rational choice theory assumed interests were the dominant force.¹² Yet as J.N. Figgis has written:

If ideas in politics more than elsewhere are the children of practical needs… the actual world is the result of men’s thoughts. The existing arrangement of political forces is dependent at least as much upon ideas, as it is upon men’s perception of their interests.¹³

Even scholars who took ideas seriously conceived New Labour as an electoral machine where intellectual concepts are expediently traded to win voters’ support.¹⁴ Less attention has been paid to the modern Labour Party’s relationship to ideas and their influence on the British Left’s political strategy and thought.¹⁵ Of course, ideas were not all that mattered in the party, given the salience of electoral politics, the balance of power between institutions from the trade unions to the national executive (NEC), the influence of sectional interests, alongside the external impact of a transformed society and economy.¹⁶ Individuals and leadership mattered too in mobil...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Dramatis personae
• Acknowledgements and preface
• Prologue
• 1 Introduction: the Labour Party and the reinvention of social democracy in post-war Britain
• Part I Labourism in decay
• Part II New Labour in power
• Part III New Labour’s legacies in British politics
• Bibliography
• Index