Rise Of New Labour

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ISBN: 978-1-90304-783-5
extent: 96pp
binding: paperback
price £3.99
pub. date January 2002

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Introduction

What This Isn't

This isn't a bite-sized summary of all the books written about New Labour and its personnel synthesised into a nice neat narrative for the busy reader. Some of those books are cited here and some are not. Most of those I have read are pretty poor, the best bits generally being accounts of who hates whom and why, who stabbed whom in the back or leaked what to which journalist. Some of this is entertaining but little of it is of any importance.

Nor is this an account of the stage-by-stage takeover of the Labour Party's organisation by the tiny group who called themselves 'New Labour'.

Nor is this an attempt to make sense of the term 'New Labour' or to provide a coherent account of its ideology. New Labour was simply copied from the American Democratic Party - there was a brief period when Bill Clinton tried and failed to get 'New Democrats' into general use - and is simply a piece of banal rebranding which means little. New Labour's ideology is a hodgepodge of opportunism, sound bites, kowtowing to powerful interests and attempts to copy America. The whole mess is validated or rejected by opinion sampling conducted by Philip Gould.

What This Is

This short book contains a brief account of what is best described as the American tendency in the Labour Party: from Hugh Gaitskell in the 1950s to the formation of the Social Democratic Party in the 1980s, and then into the rise of New Labour from the Labour election defeats of that decade. Another theme is the changes in Labour's economic policies central to and accompanying the rise of New Labour. Economics may sound dull but what I mean by economics is more like economic politics. In this case, the imposition of the ideology of the City of London on the rest of the economy by the Conservative Party led by Mrs Thatcher - and how Labour came to accept it. En route, there are accounts of some of the little-known aspects of the biographies of the New Labour faction's leading members and an account of how the faction's thinking, especially its obsession with imitating the United States, led to its present role as international boosters for globalisation and transnational capital.

One of the most fatuous things Tony Blair tried to do before Labour won the election of 1997 was the brief attempt to rebrand Britain the previous year: 'Britain: A Young Country' and 'New Britain' were the catchphrases. Of course, this is a very old country. Bllair's own party is over 100 years old and even the faction within it which he represents can be traced back to the beginnings of the Cold War half a century ago.

the rise of New Labour is the consequence of events in the 1970s and 80s. Labour was perceived - wrongly - to be economically incompetent and to be responsible for the inflation and the industrial trouble of the late 1970s. This lost them the 1979 election. Taking office promising to reduce unemployment, the Conservative Party, led by Mrs Thatcher, promptly tripled unemployment (from 1 million to 3 million) and would have been turned out of office in 1983 had it not been for the appearance, in time for the election, of the Social Democratic Party which took millions of votes off Labour. Mrs Thatcher won again (with a little boost from the Falklands War) and, with North Sea oil revenues to keep the ship afloat, set about the Tory 'counter-revolution.' They privatised the nationalised industries, sold council houses, smashed the trade unions and redistributed wealth from bottom to top.

Having lost again in 1987, under Neil Kinnock and then John Smith, Labour began to remodel itself on the apparent electoral popularity of Thatcherism (I say apparent because the Conservative Party never won even 50% of the votes between 1979 and 1992) and the apparently overwhelming power of the City of London, whose policies the conservatives had been implementing.

In 1977 I went to a meeting in a pub in the Lake District at which the local Tory MP addressed an audience mostly consisting of hill farmers. The farmers believed that it was Labour Party policy to nationalise the land. The meeting was generous enough to let me, their urban visitor, speak: but nothing I said made any difference to this belief. (Nothing I could have said would have made any difference.) That was the first time I can remember realising that in politics what people believe to have taken place can be more important than the historical reality. Some of the people are fooled some of the time. Between 1979 and 1992 enough of the people were fooled into blaming Labour for the inflation created by Edward Heath to return four Conservative Governments. We are still living with the consequences of this.

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