New Labour: An Obituary

...Having modernized itself, it found the tougher task of changing key political, social, and economic institutions more elusive...

...But as Alistair Muriel reported for Reuters in 2010, "Even as the government was making our system more redistributive, the economy was changing in ways which undermined this effort...

...Responses ranged from polite indifference from the politicians to outright hostility from some of the New Labour warriors, such as Le Grand...

...A few crocodile tears were shed over low trust and loss of trust, but the machine rolled on, comforted by the continuing inability of the Conservatives to mount a credible opposition...

...political reform of a centralized, secretive British state...

...Initiatives floundered in a welter of top-down, sometimes impossible, and often contradictory targets...

...Governments are, perhaps, doomed to disappoint increasingly detached and skeptical electorates, but it is remarkable how quickly Labour reached this stage...

...With the leadership candidates engaged so far in general ideological skirmishing, we simply don't know whether they realize the scale of the task...

...And, unlike social democracy, it is not egalitarian...

...The first saw the third way as a revised social democracy offering a distinctive governance project that recast the relations between state, market, and citizens, influenced by a stakeholding perspective...

...Both were fatally damaged by their long-term wooing of the City and haunted by regular boasts of a golden age for finance, light-touch regulation, and statements such as "in budget after budget I want us to do even more to encourage the risk takers...

...Blair's determination to align Labour with the neocon mission of the George W. Bush administration had disastrous domestic (to say nothing of international) consequences...

...To an extent, Labour took it...

...Not only did this mean constraint of progressive policies in the core departments, but the public was fed a diet of hype and spin as a substitute...

...Just as the victory of New Labour did not signal a broader triumph and reworking of European social democracy, so we should not conflate its demise with a broader set of ideas and practices...

...It was never going to be enough...

...New Labour persisted with its official economic narrative of the knowledge economy...

...We gathered together leading figures from the Labour-oriented think tanks and presented a case for a second wave modernizing agenda "based on non-market decentralised delivery of public service reform, a re-energizing of the democratic and constitutional reform agendas, and an economic policy that moved away from a belief in a benign knowledge economy towards grappling with an increasingly financialized capitalism that brought insecurity in its wake for workers and managers alike" (P...

...Core policies remained the same...

...The second advocated a pragmatic approach that sought to build a "radical center," influenced by Bill Clinton-style triangulation...

...in practice Brown had struck a form of Faustian bargain with the City in which tax revenues from the unsustainable boom were used for public investment and, worse, foolish cuts in the basic rate of income tax...

...Crisis and Endgame: 2005-2010 The outcome of the election confirmed the trend of 2001: low turnout (61 percent, down 11 percent from 1997) from a disengaged and disillusioned electorate...

...The problem with a technocratic ideology of competence and "whatever works" is that when the measures (mostly) don't there is no sustaining vision or political strategy to act as a resource for renewal...

...Instead, it was concerned with giving individual actors a stake in society...

...Although it was certainly true that there was no transformative project, it was not obvious at the time that Blair and New Labour were incapable of developing one...

...Most of the subsequent strategic choices—markets and individual choice in public services, the refusal to regulate the city or develop an industrial policy, an almost pathological unwillingness to talk of redistribution, the increasingly authoritarian attitude to civil liberties—were forged, in different ways, on this ideological anvil...

...There were modest hopes in the party and public that Brown would make some shift in direction, and there were some initial noises about political reform and measures to address the lack of public housing (as well as the unfortunate "British jobs for British workers...

...After the Landslide: 1997-2001 Many of the notable New Labour achieve-ments—the minimum wage, devolution to Scotland and Wales, investment in preschool education programs for poorer children—were implemented or initiated in the first two years...

...Business-friendly pragmatism was to the fore, but Blair was undoubtedly searching for a longer-term progressive vision...

...In that same Prospect article, he identified four building blocks of new identity: the idea of a stakeholder economy...

...and Julian Le Grand pushed for an acceptance of quasi-markets in education and health...

...In essence, two positions emerged...

...and a postimperial role centered on reform of the European Union...

...The Iraq debacle shouldn't disguise the fact that as the second term reached midpoint there was a palpable sense that the government had run out of steam and had no sense of direction...

...The figures on inequality and income distribution are complex and contested, but they appear to show that Labour's tax-and-benefit measures slowed the rate of inequality from the Thatcherite years...

...I say formal because the project has been politically dead for quite some time...

...Decisive action over Northern Rock and RBS, plus a leading role in shaping the global response, undoubtedly avoided even worse consequences...

...Despite a Downing Street summit, chaired by Blair, it failed, but the debate revealed much about the fault lines of New Labour's ideological and strategic choices...

...Then the leadership contenders—all but one prominent ministers in the last government—compete with each other to distance themselves from that government's policies...

...In order to win, the Old Labour brand had to be decontaminated...

...The only "modernizing" agenda in town was more markets and individual consumer choice in public services, including an expansion of academy schools outside local authority control...

...It was no accident that many of the culprits found with their fingers in the till were Blairites who had long since come to treat New Labour as a self-perpetuating machine without any substantive purpose other than its and their own survival...

...That is not to underestimate the scale of crisis and challenge facing such parties, including Labour...

...It didn't really take hold, and for good reasons...

...Aside from pure cowardice, this failure of his critics in the higher reaches of the party to act decisively reflected the absence of an alternative message...

...This concept had the advantage for the terminally timid that action could be focused solely on the supply side, leaving macroeconomics to the market...

...Where they were larger in scope—notably in Blair's embrace of the neocon project—they were largely out of line with their social democratic sister parties...

...A key intellectual influence on the later New Labour project was the Demos think tank and its leading lights Geoff Mulgan and Charlie Leadbetter...

...Within weeks of Brown's resignation, the leadership candidates had declared that the New Labour project was, to quote Monty Python, a dead parrot...

...New Labour was always a project to win more than to exercise power...

...The plan to go to war was massively unpopular among large sections of the British public and had virtually no support in the Labour movement (139 Labour MPs eventually voted against the decision to invade...

...In the Beginning: Preparing for Power After his 1997 victory, Tony Blair briefly bestrode the European stage, presenting the New Labour recipe as the basis for renewing social democracy...

...He is currently Professor of Organisational Analysis at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow...

...Taming it is another matter, but this lies at the heart of progressive political strategy, not least for the successors to New Labour...

...One outcome of this view was that the government tried to block or water down EU legislation on improved worker rights...

...Romantics believe that Labour would have won in 1997 with anyone as leader...

...Paul Thompson has been a longtime leading figure on the modernizing Left of the Labour Party...

...What I want to argue is that New Labour was not killed by its opponents, a hostile media, or even the global financial crisis...

...The MPs' expenses scandal that emerged in 2009 was a classic double whammy for the government...

...Initial talk of a third way was a means of reconfiguring relations between the state, markets, and civil society, but a distinctive social democratic project never emerged...

...Such policies never had much resonance with the public and provided little to differentiate Labour from the Tory opposition in the 2005 election...

...Though unimpressed by the first term, the public was prepared to give New Labour another chance...

...indeed, if anything, some parts of it have a rather authoritarian flavor...

...There is a simple explanation for these seemingly strange behaviors—a lurch to the Left, similar to what (disastrously) happened after the 1979 defeat to Thatcher...

...Thompson and N. Lawson, "Over and Out: Reflections on an Extended Conversation with New Labour," Renewal, 11:4, 2007...

...In other words, it was more a case of society changing us, than us changing society...

...But neither Brown nor Labour received much domestic political benefit, and for good reason...

...The victory of left neoliberals such as Le Grand and the Anglo-American model modernizers around Demos was New Labour's defining intellectual moment...

...Such an orientation was also shaped by the idea of Anthony Giddens and others that the inexorable forces of globalization were something that governments had to adapt to (for example by having flexible labor markets...

...In early 2003, I was at Downing Street for another gathering of intellectuals and policy wonks...

...What largely drove the public disenchantment was the policy decision, prior to the election, to stick to Tory spending plans for at least two years...

...By the end of the third term everyone knew the game was up...

...Constitutional reforms, notably the Jenkins Report on electoral reform and changes to the House of Lords, were shelved or sidelined (though a watered down Freedom of Information Act hit the statute book in 2000...

...There is some truth in the belief, but Blair's interpretation of the concept was never primarily about the economy and the action of firms and markets...

...Though it involved members from all parties, Labour suffered the public backlash disproportionately, partly because it was in office and partly because the public expected more from a party that notionally believed in fairness and a check on privilege...

...There is no escaping the fact, however, that the second term became indelibly associated with the Iraq misadventure...

...Labour had won its "historic" third term, but lacked the legitimacy or ideas to do anything with it...

...In this article I want to attempt a political autopsy, drawing on the experience of someone who, as editor of the journal Renewal, had for a long time one foot in and one foot out of the New Labour camp...

...The machine flexed its muscles by heavy-handed interference in internal elections and selections of candidates, quickly extinguishing hope for a more pluralistic politics...

...The latter, a London School of Economics professor of social policy who became a key intellectual influence on New Labour policies, distinguished the approach from both social democracy and neoliberalism: Unlike neoliberalism, it is not libertarian...

...The former were locked into a version of modernizing politics based on passive adaptation to perceived social trends rather than an active process of social transformation...

...Perhaps so, but the polling evidence is clear—there was a qualitative leap under Blair, who found a reassuring, modernizing language and picked a symbolic transformative moment—the dumping of Clause Four, the historic commitment to public ownership of the commanding heights of the economy—to define the process...

...But the people joining the party and joining in the critique are not, by and large, rabid leftists...

...Reflecting their earlier advocacy of post-Fordism through the pages of Marxism Today, they, alongside Gordon Brown, preferred the knowledge economy as the policy framing device...

...From 1993-2007 he was editor of Renewal: A Journal of Labour Politics and before that chair of the Labour Coordinating Committee...

...Stasis at Home, Disaster Abroad: 2001-2005 Despite an uninspiring campaign and a fall in turnout, the 2001 election resulted in another large victory against a demoralized Conservative opposition...

...Dissenters, inside and outside the party, were likely to be described as dinosaurs standing in the way of modernization...

...He had learned from Thatcherism the benefits of supportive intellectual networks and think tanks...

...When it became clear that the policy was built on lies and false premises, the catastrophic breach of trust was compounded...

...relies on ensuring minimum standards and equality of opportunity rather than in redistribution and equality of outcome (From unpublished document, "The Third Way: Summary of the Nexus Discussion...

...From the beginning Blair, Brown, and New Labour had distrusted public sector professionals and other workers as viable agents of change, preferring bureaucracy, the market, or a combination of both...

...We now know what the beast looks and acts like...

...there is undoubtedly a commitment to social justice within the Government, but it...

...In some ways, events brought out the best in Brown and his chancellor, Alistair Darling...

...It is possible, indeed necessary, to highlight the things that it did in office and shouldn't have...

...In other words, it was an interpretation more consistent with Blair's one nation, communitarian leanings...

...Two new elections began to change that picture: the accession to the Tory leadership in December 2005 of the Blair-apparent, David Cameron, and the long-awaited arrival of Gordon Brown as prime minister in June 2007...

...The party was like a GPS locked forever onto the wrong coordinates...

...What New Labour had developed in opposition was, above all, a ruthless and efficient media and party machine that became a central institution of governance...

...The resilience of the Labour vote in Scotland, urban areas, and among ethnic minorities prevented a rout...

...This required a partial reversal of previous ultra-caution on "tax and spend," with the government raising National Insurance contributions to partially fund the investment (albeit on the back of a still historically low level of taxation...

...New Labour's choices were conditioned primarily by a (mis)reading of the domestic environment...

...rebuilding a sense of community through a balance of rights and responsibilities...

...The policy also shifted the terms of political debate on to social democratic territory, and in this respect it is interesting that until the recent deficit crisis, the Tories had promised to match Labour's spending plans...

...Renewal had been asked by the prime minister to organize a "way forward" seminar...

...Hollow election victories allowed it to stumble on, zombie-like, across the political landscape, and only an actual defeat could lay the body to rest...

...Lacking the will and ultimately the intellectual resources to fashion a radical, realistic, modernizing project, in essence it suffered from too much New Labour, not enough New Britain...

...What these events do mark is a palpable and pervasive sense of relief at the formal end of the New Labour project...

...Modernization became the focal point of debate between the leadership and its (center-) left critics...

...In 1996, Blair said, in Prospect, "We have cleared out the deadwood of outdated ideology, policy and organisation, and made the party relevant again...

...On the domestic front the second term was about delivering on the chancellor of the exchequer's claim that Labour had asked for and won a mandate to invest in public services...

...Whereas the public's expectations and appetite were raised by the unexpected scale of the election victory, the party seemed to be frightened by it, reluctant to budge from its view, formed by the wilderness years, that Britain is a fundamentally conservative country...

...But I won't be holding my breath...

...Indeed, many popular policies were manifesto commitments that Blair inherited...

...Rather, the death was a case of suicide by stages...

...Its supply-side and welfare-to-work measures had modestly positive effects on social inclusion...

...The government stumbled into the 2010 election with one theme—the Tory cuts will be more horrible than ours...

...By the end of the first term, it was abundantly clear that, despite positive achievements, Labour hadn't been delivering enough on the ordinary things by which voters judge good government...

...There were a couple of feeble attempts to get rid of Brown...

...a reduced Labour majority of sixty-five based on the lowest share of the vote for a ruling party in modern times...

...This seemed to confirm the earlier judgment of the Blairite commentator John McTernan, "What now seems entirely possible is that we are witnessing the slow death of the Conservative Party...

...plus a string of urban losses to the Liberal Democrats on the Iraq issue...

...That investment was, of course, welcome and to a large extent, popular...

...it is equally important to focus on the things it didn't do...

...Brown's miscalculation in the 2007 budget of abolishing the lowest (ten pence) income tax band would have left five million of the poorest households worse off and seemed to symbolize Labour's disconnection with its own mainstream support...

...Of course, such domestic political concerns were soon overshadowed by the global financial crisis...

...Irrespective of these particular outcomes, judged by the objective described earlier—the project was a resounding failure...

...With Labour offering freemarket economics plus high social spending and just a touch of social authoritarianism...there seems nowhere for the Tories to go" (Scotland on Sunday, 21 September 2003...

...Among the latter's adherents, Oxford academic Anthony Heath argued that government should only seek to regulate the economy in case of "market failure...

...But this was not a changed or reforming administration...

...Chances for an Afterlife: 2010 and Beyond New Labour left Britain a different place in many respects and certainly more socially tolerant...

...Unwilling or unable to fashion forms of state intervention that promoted equality and liberty, New Labour was increasingly perceived as taking the soft option of intervention in the social sphere, with accusations of a "nanny state...

...A key problem was a somewhat one-sided love affair with the new economy and a failure to come to grips with actually existing, financialized capitalism...

...10 Policy unit, the main focus of the network was to push forward the third way debate...

...However, what continued to bedevil the party was the problem of finding the means and consent to deliver reform...

...They argued forcefully that the successful model of capitalism and the business firm came from the "entrepreneurial culture of the United States" rather than German or Japanese stakeholding variants...

...Just after the publication of the article, a serious attempt to provide that was initiated via the Renewal journal in the form of the Nexus network...

...Even they knew that...

...Under the aegis of David Miliband, head of the party's (then) No...

...The corrosive spin-offs of the "War on Terror," such as identification cards and detention without trial, continued...

...The debate over the third way and stakeholding took place over the two years before and after the 1997 election...