The British Labor Party

...In such a world, it's hard to be a fighting left-winger, hard to make promises of dramatic social change that you'll be able to keep—but it's equally hard to be a doctrinaire right-winger...

...They also tend to blame excessive free-market individualism, not government, for signs of "social breakdown": drugs, crime, racial antagonism...

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...His opposite number at the head of Labor, Tony Blair, went to private school and Oxford, but this makes him unusual in Labor's front ranks...

...The leading trade unions of the sixties and seventies—the engineering (machinists) union, the mineworkers, the iron and steel trades, the railway workers—were bound to be eclipsed...

...Since 1992, however, punditry has fallen strangely silent on this theme...

...We will not consider manuscripts submitted simultaneously to several publications...

...At the same time, the technical and managerial classes— the fastest growing section of the work force— have been beset by job, housing and social insecurity...

...The autonomy of one small state's economic policies has been in question at least since Britain became the first advanced industrial economy to accept International Monetary Fund (IMF) direction (in 1976...

...It has moved far, far away from the Alternative Economic Strategy that its then-dominant left wing was advocating in the early years of Thatcherism: a kind of siege economy with high tariffs and state investment in heavy industry...

...It is likely that a defeated Conservative party will dump John Major and take as its leader someone like Michael Portillo, another media-friendly fortysomething, but also overtly hostile to Europe and willing to bang at least softly some nationalistic drums...

...If the party has a more faceless and classless complexion, that is partly because it reflects more faithfully its supporters' complexion...

...The upwardly mobile in Britain (the "aspirational" classes they are called here) retain many of the values of the working class they have left behind...

...A future Labor government might also bring the pound into the Deutsche mark-based European currency now under preparation...

...But in the nineties many more of them are protesting not against taxes and the welfare state, but against the costs of a free-market life-style, what has been called "middle-class taxation"—that is, private school fees, health insurance, private pensions, and high mortgage payments...

...No dot matrix submissions, please...

...It has abandoned its hammer-andsicklestyle emblem in favor of the red rose...

...A measure of redistribution that would pump life back into the National Health Service and state education is the single most desired policy in all of the opinion polls...

...Then it appeared that neither was Clinton stable nor was the American electorate in the mood for centrist consolidation...

...5) We're usually quick in giving editorial decisions...

...Party membership has started to rise for the first time in a generation...

...Its growing Europeanism reflects the line of thinking followed, for example, by the Danish Social Democratic party, which discovered that it was unable to run an autonomous economic policy when in power and has now successfully carried Denmark into the EU...

...Many of the new technical jobs are in parttime or contract work...

...it relies more on the mass media and less on its own "movement" organs of propaganda...

...Although this would subject British fiscal policy to the supervision of unelected bureaucrats and bankers in Brussels and Berlin, it would probably also give elected politicians on the European level more power over money than elected politicians currently have in Britain...

...The result has been privatization across the continent, under left- as well as right-wing governments, although in few places more extensively than in Britain, where oil, natural gas, water, coal, steel, automotive and aerospace, docks and airports, freight transport, buses, airlines, telephones, and many smaller state investments have been fully or partially sold off...

...On this point, betting people would be well advised to withhold their money a while yet...

...Labor has come to accept the internationalization of the economy that gives the bond markets such huge power...

...economic spokesman Gordon Brown is even blander and slicker, while foreign affairs spokesman Robin Cook and deputy leader Prescott provide some humanity and left cover...

...Check all your figures, dates, names, etc.— they're the author's responsibility...

...Following the example of many of its continental European counterparts, Labor has fashioned itself as a people's party rather than a workers' party...

...These changes have weakened the traditional class solidarities that provided Labor with its electoral machine and internal culture, though not necessarily its votes...

...So the breakdown of the traditional working class is also accompanied by signs of the "three-speed society" familiar elsewhere—a top third prosperous, a bottom third dependent on deteriorating state services, a middle third scrambling in a panicky way from the bottom but failing even to approach the top...

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...Between them Reagan and Thatcher (with some help from Gorbachev and Yeltsin) had demolished their two countries' left-wing parties, big governments, and welfare states, but also carried their own free-market policies too far...

...But will Blair be any more successful than Clinton in developing a program and in vindicating government's claim to strengthen communities and the economy...

...The reduction of union power in the party has transfered power from union leaders to ordinary union and party members, who now vote annually in the election of the party's ruling National Executive Committee and whose democratic ballots also elected Tony Blair as party leader...

...But no, because Britain is not America...

...His entourage give mixed messages...

...What happened to those international pressures on ideologues of the right and left—are they still operating in Britain, even if in America Rush Limbaugh has managed singlehandedly to beat them oft...

...Succeeding where previous revisionists had failed, he is ditching the old Clause 4—the Fabian Sidney Webb's technocratic version of the Marxist creed, long considered the party's "Old Testament" by its socialist faithful—in favor of a less workerist and less economistic (though wordier) alternative...

...If Labor has given up much of its traditional economic policy, this does not mean it has abdicated in favor of the free market, either...

...Labor's proposal to bring Britain under the Social Protocol of the Maastricht Treaty would give workers rights in corporate governance, equality of opportunity and workplace health and safety that they have never had before (including under "Old Labor" governments...

...Labor might be able to reassure the jittery middle, essay some modest reconstruction of public services, and keep the economy on an even keel—but can it do these things if besieged simultaneously by bond traders and flag wavers...

...It's a community defined by inclusion more than exclusion, and one in which government plays a larger rather than a smaller role...

...It also aims to implant at the core of "New 304 • DISSENT Politics Abroad Labor's" creed a wider set of values than the old Clause 4 allowed, taking in racial and gender equality, democratic rights, consumerism, internationalism, environmentalism, and family concerns...

...In policy matters, Labor has also gone with the tide in downplaying economic dirigism...

...But whatever their real background, most leading politicians nowadays try to hide behind a studied shapelessness and evasiveness, partly the consequence of television and partly owing to the powerful structural changes with which they have to deal...

...in 1992 it was confidently expected that both British and American electorates would turn to parties of the center: Clinton's New Democrats and a Clintonized Labor party...

...Please use inclusive language so that we don't have to make adjustments during editing...

...So is Blair simply taking New Labor down the New Democrat road...

...6) Please bear with us—we have accumulated quite a backlog of material, and you may have to wait for a few issues before you see your article in print...

...Labor is becoming a people's party, run by professional politicians through the mass media, abdicating responsibility for economic policy and distancing itself from the Old Left social constituencies, but this does not make it Clinton's Democratic party, nor in all respects more "centrist" than before...

...Yes and no...

...Social changes affecting most advanced Western countries have also altered the composition of the electorate...

...Blair will have a lot more accumulated electoral goodwill than Clinton did, but he may prefer to husband it with inactivity than to spend it in the dubious hope of long-term benefits...

...2) Please don't write to ask whether we're interested in such and such an article—it makes for useless correspondence...

...The dominance of the male working class has been challenged by deindustrialization, new technologies, and feminization...

...Labor owes its huge lead in the polls to these, values that do appeal across a wide swath of the electorate...

...For one thing, it's not entirely clear that Blair believes his own rhetoric...

...The party's Borrie Commission on Social Justice has produced lots of good ideas for regenerating the welfare state, but the best of them cost a lot of money, and will Blair run that risk...

...The grip that top private schools like Eton and the elite universities of Oxford and Cambridge used to have on the leaderships of both Labor and the Conservatives has undeniably weakened...

...4) Notes and footnotes should also be typed double-spaced, on a separate sheet...

...The very fact that its appeal to the insecure middle class is so firmly based on the welfare state should remind us how different Britain is from America...

...Communitarianism" is in vogue here, but the "community" yearned for is not the Stepford Wives suburb—all white, all professional, 1950s stereotypes intact—but something like a yuppie version of the mythical workingclass neighborhood, where everyone looks out for one another, crime and truancy are unknown, and everyone is treated equally...

...Most notoriously, Blair has combined the people's party image with policy backpedaling in his redraft of Clause 4 —actually sub-section 4 of Clause 4—of the party's constitution...

...Prime Minister John Major left school at sixteen and worked as a bus conductor and a bank clerk...

...The face of British politics has also been changed in subtler ways...

...How will the British electorate take to European federalism, with its consequent loss not only of economic sovereignty but also of the symbol and substance of democracy...

...In the meantime, Labor is free to focus its ideological appeal on defense of the welfare state...

...A slick, classless, professional style is in vogue which makes them all look and sound alike, and more like their colleagues elsewhere in the world...

...In the eighties some of them voted Conservative in protest against Labor's workerist and high-tax image...

...Sometimes it appears that Labor has abandoned all hope of managing the economy, and has focused instead on quality-of-life issues that directly affect the insecure middle third: health, education, crime, drugs, "the community" (one buzzword that Blair has certainly bagged from the Yanks...

...Left-wing victories almost always lead to runs on the bank Labor will not try to face this out alone, but will have to turn more boldly to Europe...

...The proportion of households owning their own homes has risen from under half to over two-thirds...

...THE EDITORS q 306 • DISSENT...

...In the autumn of 1992, international monetary speculation again humbled the politicians by forcing a devaluation against explicit government policy, in much the same way that markets have been dictating to Clinton this year on the fate of the dollar and the peso...

...Far from weakening the party and giving the media greater power, these democratic reforms may have saved the Labor party from extinction...

...The organized male industrial working class could not, for instance, continue to play the dominant role in the party's decision-making processes that it once did...

...The voters seem so fickle, so hard to please, and government seems so weak, so powerless to please them...

...What about the other half of the forecast...

...Trade unionism as a whole adopts a lower profile in New Labor, and the most visible trade unionists are to be found in different sectors, including a consolidated public-employee union (Unison), telecommunications (CWU), and technical and managerial staffs (MSF...

...Yes, in all of the above ways...

...SUMMER • 1995 • 305 Politics Abroad Of course, it's easy enough to talk about "community...

...Take the changes in party structure and culture, for instance...

...As we're not an academic journal, we prefer that they, wherever possible, be dropped altogether or worked into the text...

...Like other social democratic parties, it has turned increasingly to the European Union (EU) as the level on which economic interventionism must now take place...

...These are the contexts in which we have to judge Tony Blair and the "New Labor" party that he claims to be shaping...

...If not, then the convergence thesis may be back in fashion, with Rush Limbaugh popping up on the BBC and Michael Portillo offering a "Contract with Britain...

...it has reduced the weight of the unions (and especially of the union leadership) in the election of its leaders and determination of policy...

...It would be foolish to deny that some very powerful forces extrinsic to British culture and government have changed the face of politics here in the last twenty years...

...The new wording explicitly accepts the dynamism of the market economy, while hedging it about with guarantees of mutuality, fairness, and democratic control...

...It does not plan to renationalize any of the privatized investments (although it will reverse halfway-realized plans to privatize the railways and the post office...

...If there's a delay, it's because a few editors are reading your article...

...Only half of the electoral program was realized—Clinton's victory but not Labor's...

...Even among men alone, the proportion of the work force in the old manual and unskilled trades has dropped from two-thirds to half...

...Intense international competition in the energy, transport, and telecommunications fields has put pressure on the old state monopolies here as elsewhere in Europe...

...his principal comrades went to Scottish and provincial universities, except for his deputy leader, John Prescott, who hails (equally unusually) from the manual working class and is a former trade-union official...

...even political corruption is seen as stemming from Thatcherite materialism rather than intrinsic to "big government...

...The proportion of young people going on to college at age eighteen has increased by 50 percent...

...Is Tony Blair Clintonizing the Labor party—and will the results be as disastrous...

...It is a fair bet that a Blair government will remain substantially to the left of Clinton and won't be sandbagged so quickly by a fundamentally conservative electorate...

...The hard part comes in defining what you mean by it, devising policies that will defend it, and finding the money to pay for those policies...

...Some of the changes that Blair and his predecessors Neil Kinnock and John Smith have set afoot were probably inevitable...

...Look at our last few issues to see if your idea fits in...

...More worrying is Labor's continuing vulnerability to economic downturn...

...There were said to be international forces at work too powerful for merely national political cultures to resist...

...The costs of private health insurance and schools—two status symbols traditionally required to qualify for "middle-classness"— are proving beyond the reach of the new SUMMER • 1995 • 303 Politics Abroad middle class...

...College tuition is still free but underfunded, and parents now have to pay for students' living expenses...

...His rise has been so meteoric, his track record so scanty, that voters and party members alike are uncertain about whether Blair is a vigorous young reformer or just another anonymous professional politician in a telegenic suit...

...British politicians are not the confident, intellectual patricians that they once were—or if they are, they seek to hide the fact...

...It is therefore easier for Labor than it was for the Democrats, not only to recast its image as a "people's party," but also to forge policies that tie together the interests of the bottom two-thirds of society...