New Labour

12 Key excerpts on "New Labour"

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  Justifying New Labour Policy

  • J. Atkins(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  This strategy proved highly effective and, by the time of the 1997 general election, support for the Conservatives had collapsed to such an extent that ‘competitive politics from 1997 to 2006 [was] a fairly one-sided affair’ (Beech, 2009, p. 527). Although this crisis consisted in numerous dislocations, New Labour – in common with other third ways – defined it in terms of the failure of the traditional politics of left versus right, and offered its own approach as the solution to it (Bastow and Martin, 2003, p. 18). Indeed, we have already seen that New Labour’s primary objective was to move beyond the antagonism between ‘Old’ Labour, which it linked to the traditional state socialism of the past, and the New Right ideology of the Thatcher governments. The importance of the word ‘new’ in New Labour’s dis- course thus becomes clear, and it can be said to play a dual role. On the one hand, it distinguished the freshness and vitality of New Labour from the weary, tarnished Conservatives, who had held on to power for too long. On the other, it enabled the party to distance itself not only from the Thatcherites’ representation of Labour as excessively statist and the party of the ‘loony left’, but also from the perceived failures of previous socialist governments. Indeed, on the latter point, Hay notes that one of New Labour’s key objectives was to establish the ‘compe- tence of the party to assume once again the mantle of governmental power’ (1997, p. 377). 4 For Blair, the phrase ‘New Labour, New Britain’ was not merely a slogan; rather, it ‘embodie[d] a concept of national renewal led by a renewed Labour party’. This rhetoric of novelty implied that there was no rational alternative to its programme of modernization; indeed, Blair’s aim of forging a ‘new and radical politics for a new and chan- ging world’ (1996a, p. 3) both promised a solution to the crisis and gave expression to the hegemonic ambitions of the New Labour project.

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  Nostalgia and the post-war Labour Party

  Prisoners of the past

  • Richard Jobson(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Manchester University Press

    (Publisher)

  5 The New Labour era, 1992–2010

  New Labour emphasised the nostalgic and backward-looking dimensions of Old Labour and, up until this point, the analysis presented has centred on an assessment of the validity of these claims. This chapter will move on to assess New Labour’s relationship with the same type of nostalgia that it believed had previously limited the party’s political progression. As highlighted in this book’s introduction, the idea that New Labour actively distanced itself from the past has been put forward by both historians and political scientists. James Cronin has argued that the ‘rejection of the past was … central to New Labour’s emerging identity.’1 Similarly, studies that have suggested that Blairism represented an ideological accommodation of Thatcherism have tended to imply that New Labour was historically rootless.2

  Nevertheless, the notion that New Labour was an ahistorical entity that was uniformly hostile to the past has been contested. Nick Randall has argued that New Labour mobilised selective memories in an attempt to separate the party from its past.3 Furthermore, Richard Toye has stated that ‘The charge that the key figures in New Labour are ignorant of their own party’s history is quite wrong.’ Instead, Toye has suggested that Tony Blair’s ‘view of history’ stemmed from the idea of a ‘lost’ historical progressive alliance between social democrats and liberals that was presented by David Marquand in The Progressive Dilemma in 1991.4 More recently, Emily Robinson has also challenged the perception that New Labour had no use for history. Robinson has provided evidence that has shown that Blair’s historical interest in New Liberalism predated Marquand’s book.5 She has outlined the way in which, during their successful attempt to reform Clause IV in 1995, members of the New Labour project gained a strategic advantage by framing their political opponents as nostalgic whilst, simultaneously, portraying themselves as heirs to a longer-term historical ‘progressive consensus’.6

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  New Labour and Thatcherism

  Political Change in Britain

  • R. Heffernan(Author)
  • 2000(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  The forward march of the New Right has prompted Labour to alter its programmatic stance, electoral strategy and stated political objectives. Unrecognisable as the party which fought the 1983 general election, the word a `shift' is too subtle to describe what has happened to Labour since 1983; `re-invention' nearer the mark but `transformation' perhaps more accurate. This change is both deep and fundamental. It was not an elaborate charade imposed on a reluctant party by the Kinnock and Blair leaderships. While attempts at programmatic renewal were opposed by an increasingly ineffective left minority, they won the active support of others. Throughout, the re-fashioning of Labour required the support of the Parliamentary Party: it depended upon the endorsement of trade union leaders, and last and, in this case, certainly least, the acquiescence of a dramatically changing party membership. Labour's transformation was encouraged by the belief that `The great ideological contest of the twentieth century has been settled. Free mar- ket capitalism has won; state planning and communism, of which social-market capitalism is alleged to be a subset, has lost.' 10 The 1980s and 1990s saw social democrats and socialists alike on the defensive: `The old faith in Keynesian instruments of economic management is in decline. States no longer commit themselves to full employment; they do not believe it to be possible. Instead they crave price stability and the approval of the global bond markets for their fiscal rectitude.' 11 Labour now accepts that traditional social democracy is a thing of the past, acknowledging its replacement by a new orthodoxy informed by neo- liberalism where inflation is the greatest economic evil, government borrowing unwise, progressive taxation a proven electoral millstone and an expanded public sector an impossible fantasy.

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  Ten Years of New Labour

  • M. Beech, S. Lee(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  1 New Labour and the Politics of Dominance Matt Beech So we’ve prepared the ground by moving to the centre. We’ve laid the foundations with our big idea, social responsibility. And now with our Policy Groups set to publish their reports, we can move forward to the next stage – showing what we will build for Britain. (Cameron, 2007a: 3) Under my leadership I am challenging our party to be bolder, to be more ambitious and to be more thoughtful. Unlike the Tories we don’t have to abandon everything we stand for in order to reinvent ourselves. Unlike Labour, we don’t have to shore up a crumbling edifice. There is a great opportunity for the Liberal Democrats. Because we are closest to the heartbeat of the British people. (Campbell, 2006: 6) Introduction In attempting to survey New Labour’s period in office one aspect appears to stand out. New Labour’s politics has been and continues to be the politics of dominance. As a government they have set the tone for political discourse and have been the victors in many policy debates. The purpose of this chapter is to argue that New Labour in government have dominated British politics and by doing so have recast the centre-ground. Implicit in this argument is the assertion that the centre-ground is not fixed and that since 1997, New Labour has moved the centre-ground leftwards. 1 2 Ten Years of New Labour Previously the political centre was dominated by tenets of neo-liberalism. In policy terms neo-liberals are suspicious of the state, its power and its ability to distribute efficiently goods and services. Therefore, free market economics is promoted as the mechanism for granting liberty to the individual who is seen as the most important of actors. Notions of social justice and egalitarian claims are dismissed as a mirage and a derivation of personal freedom.

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  The Labour Party

  A Centenary History

  • B. Brivati, R. Heffernan, B. Brivati, R. Heffernan(Authors)
  • 2000(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Monopolistic politics ceased to be possible on the progressive left when the Liberals began their national revival in the 1970s. It is the new politics of centre-left co-operation which will have to underpin Labour's electoral strategy in the 21st century. New thinking on policy, as well as on strategy, will be required to answer the second question and make Labour's future governments a success. The party's core mission has always been to tackle what we now term social exclusion, encouraging a fair distribution of the nations prosperity and helping the casualties of the market economy re-establish themselves within the community as a whole. The context in which that is done has changed greatly, however. In particular, today's political agenda has ceased to be purely domestic and, more and more, requires co- ordinated action at the European level. In government, as well as in campaigning, Labour's politics in the new century will need to be very different from the old. Although Labour is now in the electoral ascendant, many of its traditional policies have been jettisoned. The talk is of new forms B. Brivati et al. (eds.), The Labour Party © Brian Brivati and Michael Foot 2000 Calum MacDonald 173 of privatisation, not nationalisation. The tripartite consensus of corporatism has been replaced by the language of entrepre- neurship and competition. The welfare state is being reformed, away from universalism and paternalism, and towards targeted assistance and the rhetoric of self-help and responsibility. At the same time, the established power structures of the British state, which old Labour defended, are being broken up and dispersed through a programme of radical constitutional reform. These are profound changes. The political routines, organisational practices, membership attitudes and social culture which comprised 20th century Labourism are being rapidly and determinedly discarded.

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  Marketing the Populist Politician

  The Demotic Democrat

  • R. Busby(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  5 New Labour and Tony Blair 113 The emergence of Tony Blair and New Labour was an event in British politics which would shape the bedrock of the political establishment for more than a decade. Blair’s control of the political agenda, decisive election victories and, overtly at least, control of his party and polit- ical apparatus was important in conditioning the evolution not only of his own party but also that of his opponents, the Liberal Democrats and the Conservative party. There were several areas of note regarding wealth, identity and marketing in British politics which are relevant to the issues addressed by this text. Blair was from a wealthy back- ground and enjoyed a lifestyle and education removed from that of the mainstream populace. As already discussed in Chapter 3 he faced an opponent in 1997, in the shape of John Major, who could realistically claim to come from a background with which many in the electorate could associate. However, Blair could rely upon widespread dissatisfac- tion with the Conservative party as a whole. There were a number of unpopular aspects of the party with respect to its economic profile and perceptions that it was immoral and sleaze ridden. On the face of it, the strength of Blair as a leading political candidate in the run-up to the 1997 election was not based on a direct comparison between the two leaders or a mere personality contest. It was largely an election where the prevalent impression was that a discredited political agenda and a faltering party could and should be removed in favour of a leader and party which had undergone a modern reinvention to cater to voter needs in the 1990s. Needless to say the position of the party leader and how he conveyed himself was a fundamental aspect of how Blair’s New Labour would be received, and how he, as an individual, would be considered across time by the voter. Blair was untypical of the traditional Labour party

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  The Making of New Labour's European Policy

  • Russell Holden(Author)
  • 2001(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  However, the ‘winning rhetoric’ revealed little concerning Europe as part of the new culture of Labour and its policy programmes were more inclined to favour populist ideas and policy adjustment. Where possible, this was applied to Europe, most notably in the tone used in the 1997 mani- festo (Labour Party, 1997). The term ‘new’ actually appeared some thirty-seven times in the leader’s speech to the party conference in 1994 (Butler and Kavanagh, 1997) and was still used heavily (107 times) in the ‘Road to the Manifesto’ document (Labour Party, 1996a). In his declaration of New Labour faith at the 1995 party conference, Blair, praising Kinnock, recalled that: ‘1983 was, for me a watershed. New Labour was born then.’ This reference to newness recognised an acceptance of the new global political economy, which, as Hay (1999), as well as Smith and Kenny (1997) rightly remark, reflected the difference between the modernised party and the traditional party that grew out of the Labour Movement. In the latter, emphasis had always been placed on the concepts of egalitarianism, corporatism, collectivism and expansive welfarism. Blair rapidly acknowledged that a distinction 124 The Making of New Labour’s European Policy had to be drawn between the policies of earlier eras and those appropriate to contemporary conditions, yet he also made refer- ences to the successes and values of the past wherever possible. This was most notable in his speech to the Fabian Society (1995) com- memorating the fiftieth anniversary of the 1945 election victory, whilst as early as 1991 (Marxism Today), he emphasised his desire to learn lessons from Labour history as opposed to being shackled by it. In effect, this was still part of constructing a new party out of the shell of the old, ending Conservative hegemony and Labour’s minority status.

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  British Labour and Higher Education, 1945 to 2000

  Ideologies, Policies and Practice

  • Tom Steele, Anthony Haynes(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Continuum

    (Publisher)

  (Miliband, 1983, quoted in Coates, 2003, p. 185) Labour Ideology and the Context for Higher Education Policy British Labour and Higher Education, 1945 to 2000 14 15 The Labour Left has campaigned, as a minority, against the dominance of the right-wing leadership. Its purposes have been twofold: to push their leaders into accepting more radical policies and programmes and to urge a more assertive and socialist response to challenges from their political opponents. But this Labour Left has almost always approached politics from within the same ‘parliamentarist’ framework of assumptions, challenging not the fundamental structures and the ideology which underpin them, but rather reacting to specific policy issues or crises, and seeking specific, short- to medium-term, solutions. One of the remarkable features of the Labour Party’s history in the twentieth century has been the regularity of the crises, whether economic, political, or foreign policy in nature, and the consistently conformist policies that have been pursued in response by Labour. As Miliband puts it, ‘Like Hobbes and fear, crisis and the Labour Party have always been twins – Siamese twins . . . (and) what is so remarkable about the Labour Party is the similarity of the problems which have beset it throughout its history’ (Miliband, 1973, p. 16). The Labour Left in essence changed very little over the twentieth century, in terms of its ideological approach, from that of the Independent Labour Party (ILP) in the Labour Party’s formative years (for discussion of the ideol-ogy of the ILP, see Nairn, 1966; Beer, 1959; Howell, 1976). The ILP believed that there were no irreconcilable differences in society and that discussion, compromise and working through established institutions – including, pre-eminently, Parliament – were desirable, responsible and necessary.

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  Discourse Theory in European Politics

  Identity, Policy and Governance

  • D. Howarth, J. Torfing, D. Howarth, J. Torfing(Authors)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  (2000) Mandelson (London, Harper Collins). Mandelson, P., and Liddle, R. (1996) The Blair Revolution: Can New Labour Deliver? (London, Faber & Faber). Manifesto for New Times (1989) 'The New Times', in S. Hall and M. Jacques (eds), New Times: the Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s (London, Lawrence and Wishart). Mouffe, C. (1993) Return of the Political (London, Verso). Newman,]. (2001) Modernising Governance: New Labour, Policy and Society (London, Sage). Panitch, L. (1972) 'Ideology and Integration: the Case of the British Labour Party', Political Studies, 19: 2: 184-200. Pedersen, S. (1993) Family, Dependence and the Origins of the Welfare State (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press). 254 Discourse Theory in European Politics Pelling, H. (1965) The Origins of the Labour Party 1880-1900 (Oxford, Oxford University Press). Rentoul,]. (2001) Tony Blair (London, Warner Books). Ritzer, G. (1993) The McDonaldisation of Society (Thousand Oaks, CA, Pine Forge Press). Sassoon, D. (1996) One Hundred Years of Socialism (London, Fontana). Shaw, E. (1996) The Labour Party since 1945 (Oxford, Blackwell). Stedman Jones, G. (1983) Languages of Class (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press). Vanderbrouke, F. (1999), 'European Social Democracy', in A. Gamble and T. Wright (eds), The New Social Democracy (Oxford, Blackwell). Wilkinson, H. (ed.) (2000) Family Business (London, Demos).

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  New Labour

  The Progressive Future?

  • S. White(Author)
  • 2001(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  His emphasis upon the responsibilities entailed by the opportunities to be opened up by New Labour promises to give a defining purpose to the remodeled welfare state. Some critics doubt that he can deliver on the promise. His immense per- sonal popularity is a source of weakness as well as strength. While differ- ences of economic class will remain in the New Britain as in any society where there is considerable equality of opportunity, the old class system with its premodern solidarities, Tory and socialist, is fading. This loss deprives the political parties of that unwavering support which surveys of the electorate used regularly to report in the 1950s and 1960s. As in the 1997 general election, today’s more volatile electorate will be more likely to vote for the Leader than the party. Thus far, Tony Blair has been a formida- ble vote getter. But, again to reflect on American experience, can a chief executive dependent on such a volatile constituency turn aside the pres- sures against the hard edges of his policies? Judging by what Tony Blair has said and done, I am betting that he has what it takes. The author and editor are grateful to The Economist for permission to use extracts from ‘The Roots of New Labour’ © The Economist, London, Feb. 7, 1998. 3 New Labour and Public Opinion: the Third Way as Centrism? Pippa Norris 1. Introduction The strategic shifts in Labour’s attempt to dominate the center ground of British politics started under the leadership of Neil Kinnock, strengthened with John Smith, but only received an apotheosis under Tony Blair. Like Thatcherism in the early 1980s, the project has continued to evolve and take concrete shape in the early years of the Labour government. In a series of subsequent speeches Blair has sought to develop and flesh out the core components of a so-called ‘third way’ approach to governance.

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  Critiques of Capital in Modern Britain and America

  Transatlantic Exchanges 1800 to the Present Day

  • M. Bevir, F. Trentmann, M. Bevir, F. Trentmann(Authors)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  195 9 New Labour and ‘Third Way’ Political Economy: Paving the European Road to Washington? Colin Hay No single concept is more closely associated with the ‘modernization’ of the British Labour Party and, now, the European social democratic tradi- tion more broadly than that of globalization. * The notion of a qualitative and epochal shift in the contours of contemporary capitalism, marking the transition from an era of closed national economies to a single global market, has come to dominate Labour’s understanding of the context in which it now finds itself. It lies at the heart of the conception of the ‘third way’ New Labour now seeks to export to Europe and more broadly. 1 As the following discussion will hopefully demonstrate, it is a very particular – and distinctly Anglo-US – conception of globalization that has come to inform Labour’s radical and increasingly infectious reassessment of the parameters of political possibility. 2 Globalization has come to be invoked by New Labour, in opposition and now in government, as a largely non- negotiable external economic constraint necessitating market-conforming social and economic reform. 3 Consequently, the ‘harsh economic realities’ of ‘new times’ are held to compromise not only the Keynesianism, corpo- ratism and traditional social democracy of the postwar period, but also the ‘over-regulated’ ‘European social model’ which was developed and consoli- dated throughout Northern Europe over this period of time. The casualties of globalization are, on the basis of this account, considerable; the stakes of New Labour’s understanding of the challenges and constraints it imposes significant indeed. Yet Labour’s programmatic transformation and subsequent proselytizing for a rejuvenated and somewhat ‘leaner and fitter’ European social model is not merely a story of the translation of the constraints of globalization into a series of non-negotiable economic imperatives.

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  Between Europe and America

  The Future of British Politics

  • Andrew Gamble(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  Socialism was part of Labour from the start, and was codified (however ambiguously) in the 1918 Constitution, but the alliance that came to be formed by a right-wing parliamentary lead-ership and conservative trade-union leaders limited the partyÕs internal democracy, and meant that the party was a class party in a Labourist rather than a socialist sense. The stress on Labourism became an important strand in the class narra-tive. The root of the difficulty in transforming Labour into a socialist party was seen to lie partly in the absence of an agreed framework of ideology and doctrine, and partly in the relative weakness of Marxism on the British left and in British intellectual culture, so that the ideas and doctrines which had gained influence were those of Fabians and new Liberals, which did not disturb too much the defensive and cautious instincts of LabourÕs lead-ers. 35 Labourism both as doctrine and as practice was seen as extremely conservative, its horizons bounded by the need to defend existing rights and privileges of workers. It was a class perspective, but one limited to wages and hours, and rarely capable of embracing a broader vision of recon-structing social and economic relations. What gave it such prominence in the United Kingdom was the sheer size of the working class, and the extent of its unionization, bolstered by the existence of distinct working-class Labour Old and New 203 communities and a strong working-class culture. 36 Labourism expressed a powerful corporate interest, one which had to be accommodated, but one which was also subordinate, and mostly resigned to being subordinate, to other centres of power in the United Kingdom. A third variant of the class narrative has concentrated on the constraints within which Labour and other centre-left parties have operated.

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