New Labour

New Labour was the re-creation of the British Labour Party as a means of “modernizing” the party so that it could be electable in Great Britain at the end of the twentieth century, when it appeared that the neoliberal paradigm was so strong that its ideology could not be challenged. The process of “modernization” meant greatly reducing the connection between the party and the trades union movement that had initially created it and which continued to be its major funding source. New Labour was certainly successful in electoral terms, as it brought three consecutive victories for Prime Minister Tony Blair, which was an unprecedented measure of success for the Labour Party.

Background

With the victory of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party in 1979, soon joined by conservative administrations in both the United States (Ronald Reagan) and Germany (Helmut Kohl), politics in the Western world moved rightward. This shift was buttressed by the subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, which led many people to argue that capitalism was the dominant and victorious global ideology. Britain’s Labour Party, having undergone a lengthy period of opposition in which internal factions fought fiercely against each other, was moved toward the political center by the expulsion in 1982 of the leftist Militant Tendency, the defection of a centrist group to form the Social Democratic Party, and by the efforts of party leader Neil Kinnock to redefine Labour’s policies.

This led to the Labour Party’s defining “Clause Four moment” in 1995, when the party amended the portion of its constitution (originally written in 1918) that called for “the common ownership of the means of production”—classically socialist language. When this language was removed, it signaled to the political and business world, the media, and the population as a whole that left-looking policies, which had come to be routinely described as old-fashioned and discredited, had been abandoned by a party now taking seriously the need to be elected.

Blair, elected leader of the party in 1994 and prime minister in 1997, had considerable freedom to create both the image and manifesto of the New Labour brand. This process was undertaken using techniques such as the focus group discussions that had been so fruitful for the team coordinating Bill Clinton’s presidential campaigns and which have now become standard practice in marketing political parties and individual candidates. Blair drew upon policies such as “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime,” ethical foreign policy, and active promotion of financially successful individuals. These were popular policies, and his own personality burnished the brand, which was set in an even better light by contrast to a Conservative government that had been in power for eighteen years and that had to fight the political apathy of the large swaths of the electorate that had concluded the government was not just incompetent but incorrigibly sleazy. During his time as leader of the opposition, Blair dazzled lackluster Prime Minister John Major in setpiece parliamentary events such as the Prime Minister’s Questions and was further supported by what seemed a generation of “Cool Britannia” exponents urging change and freshness at the top.

Impact

In office, New Labour’s record was mixed. For decades, cherished public institutions such as the National Health Service had been starved of funds because of conservative tax cuts, and health, education, police, infrastructure, and all manner of public services absorbed enormous amounts of capital without always showing much short-term improvement. Public enthusiasm for New Labour waned when unsustainable expectations of an immediate surge in service provision could not be met. Some personal indiscretions and the difficulty of reconciling ethical foreign policy with Britain’s important arms industry also led to some attrition of support. But perhaps the most influential single issue in reducing enthusiasm for New Labour among its supporters was the Blair government’s decision to join the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

In order to minimize the problems of indiscipline common to left-of-center parties, when ideological integrity can seem more important than steering compromise legislation through Parliament, Prime Minister Blair insisted on absolute obedience to the party line through Director of Communications Alistair Campbell. Campbell and other aides aimed to control the public political discourse through spin-doctoring. The mass media in the United Kingdom is almost entirely under the control of right-wing interests inimical to all forms of the Labour Party, and New Labour leadership took steps to mollify those newspapers in particular that had claimed success in bringing about electoral success for the Conservative Party.

An additional means of enforcing control over the party was the so-called sofa government style, in which the prime minister directly met with policymakers and influencers, occasionally seeming to avoid customary cabinet or parliamentary scrutiny of some decisions as a result. It was also routinely alleged that continual plotting from the Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown to become prime minister, which was supposed to have been agreed previously with Blair, also meant there was a lack of transparency at the heart of government.

New Labour’s economic policy was largely formulated by Brown and his supporters. It centered on a light touch in regulating Britain’s important, perhaps over-important, finance industry so that revenues it generated could be directed toward the public services. He also instituted various economic tests that were used to justify keeping the country out of the eurozone, which turned out to be a wise choice. The economy flourished as a result of a decade of noninflationary growth that enabled Brown to claim he had brought about the end of “boom-and-bust politics,” right up until the global financial crisis of 2008 caused the worst recession in living memory. Brown, who had become prime minister in 2007, worked with new Chancellor Alistair Darling to inject liquidity into the system and prevented the recession from becoming a total economic disaster. Nevertheless, the imposition of fiscal austerity measures in most of the Western world meant that Britain’s economy was unable to recover as quickly as might have been hoped.

The 2010 general election in the UK was run, with the assistance of the pro-right press, on the basis that the global economic crisis had been caused by the profligacy of the New Labour government. That narrative became fixed in the public mind through constant repetition, and the resignation of Gordon Brown led to the election of Ed Miliband as party leader, appearing to represent a break from the Blairite model. However, the results of the general election produced a coalition government, and New Labour remained a potential future election winner.

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