by John Woodcock
The thing is, I love what New Labour has stood for and I am deeply, deeply proud of what we did in government.
And I just don’t buy into the idea that that should be a controversial thing to think or to say. In some Labour GCs, maybe (though probably fewer than many think). Perhaps even for the dwindling number of journalists still interested in finding Labour splits, who may wrongly think that puts me at odds with my leader.
But not with the public who voted for us.
We must indeed focus on the future, not get trapped in the past – even our more recent past. But I am no longer going to use that obvious fact as a device to dodge saying what I really think about the changes we pursued to make our country better.
Why come out with this now? It is not as though this were an unfamiliar debate after a four month long leadership campaign.
Because while the old battles on particular reforms are thankfully over and familiar slogans now stale, keeping astride the centre ground is essential as we renew.
Ed Miliband showed that with his excellent speech on the British promise on Friday.
But we need to keep saying it: we cannot assume that anything is a given in a policy process where we rightly re-examine the basics to come up with new perspectives.
So I am not going to hedge anymore.
We have so much to do to ensure that Labour, or New Labour, or Even Newer Labour, regains the trust of the British people.
We must go on learning where we went wrong. But we had better be sure of what we got right too.
Robustly siding with individual users of public services against vested interests who do not want those services to change; understanding that crime is a massive issue in poorer neighbourhoods and must never be ceded to the right; believing in the power of public investment but refusing to impose punitive taxes to resource it.
Those fundamental instincts were, among others, central to the coalition of support that New Labour assembled.
Whatever we call ourselves, a party that drifts away from those instincts will struggle to win back the right to change Britain.
John Woodcock is Labour and Cooperative MP for Barrow and Furness and a shadow transport minister.
Tags: John Woodcock, New Labour
I strongly agree with the statements, New Labour has become something that’s whispered. Remember that it got the party into government, made a generation feel that finally they were represented and switched onto politics.
“believing in the power of public investment but refusing to impose punitive taxes to resource it”
Hmmm. This essentially amounts to taking pride in running a deficit during the boom. We can argue about how serious the pre-recession deficit was for the economy, but I’d far rather we raised taxes to pay for that spending, thus avoiding the political gift that our opponents have exploited for the last two years.
“Because while the old battles on particular reforms are thankfully over and familiar slogans now stale, keeping astride the centre ground is essential as we renew.”
Absolutely spot on. Since EdM was elected leader there have been some fanciful speculation on the (keep) left- oh sorry: the “liberal left”- that we would ‘be returning to our roots’; ‘respecting our heritage’; ‘shifting to the left’. Some even suggested that we had ‘got our party back’ after the “nuu labour” epoch.
That sort of guff reminded me why we had New Labour in the first place (though the majority of these twenty and thirty something scribblers will not remember what it was like in 1992). Namely if you aren’t where a plurality of the voters are and don’t have empathy with their aspirations (as much as their fears) then you are never going to get into power and be able to achieve one single phrase of your manifesto.
“Robustly siding with individual users of public services against vested interests who do not want those services to change; understanding that crime is a massive issue in poorer neighbourhoods and must never be ceded to the right; believing in the power of public investment but refusing to impose punitive taxes to resource it.”
Indeed: it is time to separate out the Blair-Brown epochs domestic and foreign policies. It’s been too easy for lazy ‘keep leftists’ to tar the entire Blair-Brown project with Iraq brush. To easily forget the record improvements in the social infrastructure or that- topically- Blair was pushing hard (in 2004- 2005) for a funded and supported localism: not the privatised voluntaristic crackpot scheme currently being rammed down local councils and communities throats. The one serious mistake? Not to have a hardnosed spending review in 2005.
But you know, I think Ed M ‘gets it’ and the UK electorate.
I think some people who have been chirpily making hay the last 9 months as if it were an early 20th century October morning, will be quite surprised by the results of the policy review as they start to be announced in early 2012. I am thinking Tony Benns old bag carrier/ aide de camp Lansman (from the ruinous deputy leader challenge of 1981) over at ‘left futures’ for a start.
New labour means many things to many people as this article adequately demonstrates.
To some it came to mean the overweening top down control of the party. To others it came to mean a reliance on message control that exemplified unity (until it broke down) but denied debate.
To some it meant a triangulation strategy that put Labour on the centre ground of politics extremely successfully.
To some it meant an over-confidence and over-reliance on the City and a resulting failure to enact appropriate regulation and taxation policies.
For me, I always thought of New Labour as a really bad branding decision (you really, really shouldn’t call anything New – it dates it almost instantly) coupled with necessary measures to realign the Party with the country – rather than continuing in failed attempts to do the reverse.
I am not New Labour, but nor am I Old Labour. I supported the Blair leadership in the 1990s and voted to abandon Clause IV because I saw the necessity of this strategy to allow Labour to implement the key policies our party can be proud of. I stopped supporting Blair and others as their strategy became a harsh and crystallised ideology.
New Labour started brilliantly, and the 1997 – 2001 government was brave and radical and in many really important way, it changed this country for the better forever. The problem was that success is not always healthy for politicians. New Labour changed from a short term strategy to make Labour electable to a rigid dogma, set on remaking the Party in the image of the country in 1992, unable to adapt its strategy to an ever changing reality 19 years later.
New labour also became schizophrenic in its attitude towards its own power, both acting to its members as if its majority were wafer thin and that more radical Labourism was not possible, while at the same time enacting thin-end-of-the-wedge policies in areas like public services which were fine in isolation, but clearly allowed the possibility for the kinds of retrenchment we are seeing now being sold as “continuing Labour’s reforms” – something that was warned of at the time.
Now is the time to look at everything that worked and everything that didn’t. Not just in isolation but in a broader political context. You can continue to be proud of New Labour – I am proud too of some of its achievements. But unless we can recognise too from its limitations, we will not be able to salvage the best of the baby when we throw out the stale and putrid bathwater.
Romila,
“Remember that it got the party into government, made a generation feel that finally they were represented and switched onto politics.”
It made labour supporters feel ‘represented’; over the 13 years, electoral turnout fell lower and lower. By the end, the public were, sadly, never more cynical about politicians.
(Remember, it was John Major who won the highest post-war popular vote!)
I broadly agree with the main points in the article; New Labour did have some success stories. I don’t think, however, that it is as simple as Rob Sheffield says to separate the domestic and international policies as success versus failure. Tax credits and Surestart were helpful to lots of families, as was the childcare vouchers, NHS investment had a major impact on treatment speed and efficacy; however in my opinion New Labour departed too far from social democratic principles with their attitude towards civil liberties. ID cards were a financial and popular failure and the attempts at introducing 90 day detention displayed pooor judgement.
Thank goodness someone said that. I feel just the same and am fed up with feeling ashamed of all the wonderful things we did. Shall now nip off to find you on twitter…
Rob!!! (excuse me, but haven’t other way to contact!!) Haven’t heard from you for ages!! Hope you’ve seen my blog – 23 in top politics blogs!! How ’bout that??? I’d love for you to comment now and then xx
You lot should be happy then the Tories are in, it’s your sister party, two shit wars lot of dead people for what democracy, welfare has now gone out the window, taking the poorest out of tax with a 10p tax base then removing it, and then the biggest recession in living history, yes I know it was America if you really believe that the UK had nothing to do with it then the simple question is of course is labour able to rule, answer on the back of a stamp, NO
And please do not give me the min wage lark… if thats all labour has done god help you in the enxt election…
@Rob Sheffield, the failure to have a hardnosed spending review in 2005 cost us the 2010 election because enough of the electorate realised the economic bust post 2007 was largely Brown’s fault(cf.Australia, Canada,Finland, countries that failed to abolish the economic cycle).To have any chance of winning in 2015, new policies are not enough.The electorate are not going to suddenly forget and forgive what happened.’It’s the economy ,stupid.’The tories succeeded, in part ,in getting rid of the nasty party image.We have to own up to past economic failings and demonstrate financial competence, as there may be a little bit of sunshine in 2014.
New Labour was shit. Sure the good things it did outweigh the bad but ultimately its legacy was/is zero as Blair/Brown never tried to transform the political landscape as the recent attitudes survey showed public opinion is now more Thatcherite than ever. With its huge electoral mandates and a broken opposition party it could have been truly transformational but instead it meekly accepted the rules of game.
@Rob
“The one serious mistake? Not to have a hardnosed spending review in 2005.”
Please save the Blairite revisionism. Blair fought the 2005 election on a platform of not cutting public spending and attacked the tories for not matching Labour’s spending plans all the way to 2012. Ireland was running surpluses for 5 years before the crisis and had a tiny national debt yet is totally fucked, same with Spain. On economic policy the really serious mistake was relying too much on the wealth generated in the city.
Proud of New Labour? Proud of the sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and the invasion that killed hundreds of thousands more?
The Labour Party should be ashamed that it was lead by Tony Blair and still has apologists like John Woodcock to represent it in Parliament.
@Chris
“Blair/Brown never tried to transform the political landscape as the recent attitudes survey showed public opinion is now more Thatcherite than ever.”
Were you around in the 1980’s? We did our best between 1981 and 1987 to do precisely what you recommend: to lead the public in a socialist direction.
Result? It got us 10 years of Thatcher and paved the way for the current shower.
This is that classic leftist combination of historical-revisionism and being plain out-of-touch. Your approach *might* work in a dictatorship…but we actually live in a democracy !!
If we had followed post Keynesian economics and trimmed spending and raised taxes- particularly on the city and banks- during the 2002 to 2006 boom then we would have been in a much better position circa 2010 and the current mob of oiks would not have the degree of excuses they have used to sneak in a Libertarian-Thatcherite agenda.
Furthermore, to compare us with Ireland with Greece is absolute rubbish- but of course it’s what the Tories do! We have *completely different* economic bases, structures and institutional cultures.
@William
“To have any chance of winning in 2015, new policies are not enough. The electorate are not going to suddenly forget and forgive what happened.”
Ah but the next election is going to be ‘the economy stupid….plus all the other nonsense and ideological rubbish you have imposed on us but that we did not vote for’.
What is a credible economic policy? I suspect one that promotes employment (of all types not just manufacturing or food and drink) and supports social and public infrastructure (like health and education and transport).
We live in a mixed economy. The mistake the zealots of the government make is to actually sincerely believe that there is some pent up anti-state well of emotion out there!! They actually do believe that in the way socialists like @Chris believe that within every voter in the UK is a budding Tony Benn !! Boy are they wrong. The next election will be a “big choice” between a paternalist-libertarianism (as Cameron calls it) and an enabling-social-democracy that is as much concerned with peoples aspirations as it is their fears (neo-Blairite for want of a better term).
I’m quite optimistic actually: this government have no mandate for the chaos they are wilfully inducing. People have long memories about economics yes. But they also have long memories about policies that vandalise the social contract.
Wait and see !
@Robin
“New Labour departed too far from social democratic principles with their attitude towards civil liberties.”
You are obviously not with the current government then either given their policies on security plus their undermining of social welfare (itself a civil liberty)…..?
@Sue M
allo!
Yes I have seen it a lot but I don’t want a wordpress ID or any of the others (not private enough for me currently) and there was no ‘anon’ comment option last time I looked.
Brilliant pieces though- I always thought (and said) you are a fantastic writer.
BTW have you seen the rather odd ego-fest that is Eoin Clarkes? OK OK to be fully accurate I should say ‘id-fest’!
I pop a sneak from time-to-time and it can often be (unintentionally) very amusing. He is still compelled to praise everyone other than reds and to keep telling his loyal (and small) flock how brilliant Osborne or Cameron are. Oh and persistently contradicting himself in terms of predictions and standpoint. Priceless.
Is somebody seriously proposing,that come the next election,with government ACTUAL expenditure having risen in real terms(CUTS,from Brown’s madness of insane growth),and the possibility of an economic recovery,by 2014,that Labour will win without DISOWNING its selfmade reliance on tax revenues from the City(the FSA catastrophe, as in wild west Ireland) in its lunatic policies of the past?Blair won,Brown lost.
Well said John. I agree New Labour was the best thing to happen to the Labour party did amazing things and gives us a blue print for going forward.
@Rob
“Were you around in the 1980?s? We did our best between 1981 and 1987 to do precisely what you recommend: to lead the public in a socialist direction.”
In the 80s, the Labour went collectively insane. Seeking to move public opinion gradually while in office is different to attempting to get elected on manifestos advocating policies far to the left of public opinion.
“Result? It got us 10 years of Thatcher and paved the way for the current shower.”
Blair paved the way for the current shower by not being transformational because he was/is a proto-tory. As he said in 2001, he really did believe it.
“This is that classic leftist combination of historical-revisionism and being plain out-of-touch. Your approach *might* work in a dictatorship…but we actually live in a democracy !!”
WTF?! So, only through dictatorship can things actually change? Thatcher was a political giant because she changed things, she broke with consensus and established a new one which went tits up in 2008 but is unfortunately coming back into fashion.
“If we had followed post Keynesian economics and trimmed spending and raised taxes- particularly on the city and banks- during the 2002 to 2006 boom then we would have been in a much better position circa 2010 and the current mob of oiks would not have the degree of excuses they have used to sneak in a Libertarian-Thatcherite agenda.”
I’d have been all in favour of increasing taxes on bankers but that was the whole point of New Labour, no increases in the top rate of income tax, can’t punish the “wealth creators”, etc. There were calls throughout that period for a windfall tax on banking profits but I doubt Blair was arguing in favour of them. But the fact remains that the vast bulk of the current fiscal deficit was caused by the credit crunch recession, it lead to a massive decrease tax receipts coupled with a tax base over reliant on bankers and house prices. And you’re only looking at the liabilities side of the government’s balance sheet, the money that Labour spent on infrastructure and people is an asset.
“Furthermore, to compare us with Ireland with Greece is absolute rubbish- but of course it’s what the Tories do! We have *completely different* economic bases, structures and institutional cultures.”
Actually Ireland’s economy over the past decade has been very like ours, growth based on unregulated banks and property price booms. The difference now is that the Irish banks were too big for them to bail out and there government too useless to realise this before they’d guaranteed every single penny. The tories never compare us to Ireland because of that excellent quote from Osborne singing the praises of their economic model and because serves as a very cautionary example of austerity. I never mentioned Greece.
“They actually do believe that in the way socialists like @Chris believe that within every voter in the UK is a budding Tony Benn”
Yawn, so anything to the left of Thatcher is obviously an attempt to destroy democracy and install a dictatorship of the proletariat? Because I was so obviously calling for the nationalisation of large parts of private industry in my comment above…
It may come as news to you but voters didn’t actually like Blair in the end.
This comment has been edited.
Chris,we want you,Wednesday, on Thought for the Day, it means an early start,time limit 3 minutes.
Disappointing that John leaves out any mention of co-operatives, being a Labour and Co-operative MP and all.
For most, New Labour is understood as a compromise with the City – though there was talk of “the stakeholder society” and “the new mutualism” there was little meaningful private sector reform because that would have meant challenging the neoliberal agenda of big business and the banks and potentially encountering the same resistance faced by previous Labour governments.
As a result of this inertia, the response to the recession was difficult – how to explain a crisis in global capitalism if you can’t articulate a social democratic vision for fear of destabilisation? Rumour was that when Brown was about to be orderly transitioned into being party leader and hence PM, he was going to make co-operativism his vision thing.
@ John,
I’m proud of NL too, and I’m not even a party member! I think it was a hugely reforming party and government and we will only come to understand how reforming in the fullness of time.
Unfortunately I think you party is out of power for at least a couple of decades. Sorry, but above all else, especially with the decisive votes being in the south of England, Labour only wins when it has a leader who reaches right across the board.
I long suspected this. So, having come late to understanding Blair’s New Labour party and his leadership of it, I recently did some research.
Do you Labour people, especially those who kick Blair for everything you and he achieved, realise how long it took your party to find another electable leader after they found Harold Wilson in 1964?
18 years? Forget the “18 wilderness years”.
It took 33 years to find a Blair.
Google it to read the facts. All FACTS.
Much as I disagreed with Blair on a lot of things and think the last Labour government launched too many trial balloons that paved the way for the Tories to do similar but much worse things, I’m also proud of what the last Labour government did. The good outweighed the bad by a significant margin, and the worst Labour government is better than the best Tory one.
But every GC would accept this, contrary to John. The big problem with New Labour is not what it did, it’s that its current defenders insist on lazy ad hominem attacks on those left of them, whilst insisting on the need for party unity to avoid a return to the 1980s.
You cannot hold both these positions simultaneously – provoking old opponents is not conducive to unity. Those who still think it matters whether or not we’re New Labour need to decide whether they want to help Labour win the next election, or whether they want to play the role of the Bennites in the next Labour civil war. Everybody else in the party is too busy attacking the government to care about Blair these days. Let’s keep it that way.
@ EC Browne,
I suppose it’s cos you’re such a “caring” party that I won’t be voting for you, no matter what. I remember waching in incredulity as most of the Labour party averted their eyes as Brown, Balls and cohorts stuck knives into the country’s elected PM.
Well, on second thoughts, I would if the REAL leader came back.
Is this what you call “busy attacking the government”? Ed M is mute most of the time, which in many ways is a blessing. And even Balls can’t score against the Tories’ lies and distortions re fault for the economic downturn.
I also disagree with you on your other point. It is the Blairite wing, or what’s left of it, that is constantly attacked by the rest. Even Little Ed doesn’t seem to know the good that it did.
The left deserve no less than attack, anyway. Losers. Always losers.
Yeah, that was kind of my point. You also reminded me of the persecution complex, so thanks for that.