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Posts Tagged ‘New Labour’

Ed needs to be clearer about what one nation Labour is not

18/02/2013, 07:57:43 AM

by Jonathan Todd

“‘You know something? It’s really quite satisfying when you help people to fulfil their dreams like that.’ ‘Christ, you fucking fascist,’ Tim said.”

This exchange between Malcolm Glover, a 1980s building society manager, and his son, Tim, features in Philip Hensher’s sweeping The Northern Clemency and comes after Malcolm helps a couple buy their council house. The formalities of this sale conclude thus:

“‘Goodbye, Mr Glover,’ the husband said, shaking his hand, ‘and thank you.’ He let go and, turning, took his wife’s beloved hand, and together they walked down the stairs. Malcolm watched them go with pleasure.”

The positive content of new Labour sought to appeal to voters like the grateful couple: attentive to their aspirations and eager to serve them. Notwithstanding this positive content, new Labour was immediately vivid because it clear about what it was not: the old Labour, the no-compromise-with-the-electorate vehemence of Tim.

New Labour connected with aspirant voters by relentlessly showing itself to be different from a Labour party that would deem it “fascist” to sell a council house to its tenants. It was new Labour because it was not old Labour.

Of course, this old Labour was always a caricature. The Labour party of Clement Attlee, Barbara Castle and Neil Kinnock was never as indulgent and disconnected as Tim Glover. The right to buy, for one thing, was a Labour policy before it was a Tory policy.

The sense, however, that Tony Blair’s election as party leader marked a year zero was reinforced early in his leadership by painting the past as an old Labour wasteland. Blair was the change that the country needed because he had the strength to move his party beyond the likes of Tim Glover.

The longer Blair was leader the less well this crude and simplistic contrast served him. What had cast him in broad strokes as a new leader came to motivate suspicion about him in the party later in his premiership.

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Labour’s swing voter problem

02/07/2012, 07:00:22 AM

by Atul Hatwal

Over the past 2 years a myth has taken hold within the Labour party: the fable of the lost 4 million working class votes. Votes that Tony Blair secured in 1997 which Labour had lost by 2010. The Unite political strategy mentions it and this factoid has been a staple at the union conferences this summer.

The implication being that Labour needs to recast its platform to attract these missing supporters rather than chase after pesky, centrist swing voters. It is the core vote strategy, reborn.

For those that can remember Labour in the early 1980s it is all eerily familiar, right down to the same wilful ignorance on the evidence.

At the last election, YouGov’s eve of vote poll – which successfully predicted Labour and Tory vote share to within 1% – identified the Tories as the most popular party among working class voters: 32% of the social demographic C2DE backed the Tories, 31% Labour and 26% Lib Dem.

Given that the Tories were the preference for working class voters, it seems fantastical to believe that moving further to the left will magically win a majority of this group.

But evidence and logic do not seem to be highly regarded qualities among Labour’s myth-makers. The story has taken hold and the absence of voices challenging such nonsense is tantamount to intellectual self-harm.

The renewed emphasis on the core vote seems to be driving a decidedly half-hearted attitude to swing voters for Labour. The mood music from the party’s leaders continually reiterates the desire to move on from triangulation, emphasis on the centre ground and New Labour’s campaigning approach.

It might sound good at the podium, and even feel good in the warmth of the applause. But outside of Labour audiences, in the real world of voters, the electoral damage is already becoming evident. It might seem strange to say this given the polls, but when looking at actual votes in real elections the danger signs are already apparent. The recent London elections shine a light on Labour’s lack of progress in winning back territory held by the Tories.

London provides a unique electoral laboratory because it held local elections on the same day as the general election in 2010, and then mayoral and assembly elections this year. In both cases, the ward level data is available which enables a unique comparison of how millions of voters have shifted their views over the past two years based on real elections rather than snapshot polls.

Labour’s current lead in the opinion polls is stable at almost 10% and the party needs a swing from the Tories of roughly 5% to form a government.

For Labour to be on track to move into government, in the London election, the party should have won a comfortable clean sweep of Tory wards where a swing of 5% was required. Ideally Labour would have won wards requiring a swing of upto 8% to come near to the current poll lead and ensure a solid working majority.

But it didn’t.

In London, research by Uncut reveals that there were 61 wards held by the Tories vulnerable to a Labour swing of 5%. Taking the assembly elections as the best comparator to 2010 (rather than the mayoral election which was more driven by the personalities of the candidates), Labour managed to win in 31 wards.

This means that Labour failed to take 49% of the marginal wards it should have.

Granted, London does not define the position around the country, and there are specific regional factors, but this result does provide an indication of what is likely to be happening elsewhere.

Despite the government’s omnishambles, Leveson, the recession and the budget, Labour missed out on half of its ward targets against the Tories.

In comparison, in wards already held by Labour, the party went from strength to strength. The average increase in Labour vote in Labour wards was 13%. Lots of votes there. Shame none of them are worth much under first past the post.

If anything comparable were replicated at a general election, despite the current poll lead, Labour would fall substantially short of government.

This is the true result of the myth that has taken hold in the Labour party. Large national poll leads and an incompetent government cosset the party and keep us happy in our comfort zone. But when voters go to the polls in real elections, swing voters aren’t swinging.

The base is motivated. It’s turning out and small Labour majorities are becoming landslide leads. But marginal Tory wards are staying just that. Tory.

Atul Hatwal is editor at Uncut

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The return of toytown politics

08/05/2012, 05:36:41 PM

by Ian R. Stewart

Back in 1990, with thirteen million people refusing to pay the poll tax and the country in uproar, Neil Kinnock lambasted the unsavoury collection of Trotskyites in the SWP and Militant (now the Socialist Party; TUSC; Respect; Left List; take your pick) as being “toytown revolutionaries”.

He was right, as very few of them had ever been willing to take responsibility for their actions, or seriously made the kind of hard choices that even Liberal Democrats are willing to make these days.

Put simply, these people refuse to accept the reality of the world around them.

Yet toytown politics is not dead, in fact it is thriving, don’t just take my word for it, watch “The Wright Stuff” on Channel Five, or “The Daily Politics” on BBC2.

Or, closer to home, just read the blogs, tweets and articles of various hoary old “New” Labour hacks online or in the press.

Toytown has relocated to the media & Westminster village, where today we hear the nonsensical calls from some for Ed Miliband to stand down after a massive victory in England and Wales, spanning from Cardiff to Great Yarmouth.

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Cumbria was always New and Blue Labour

21/12/2011, 04:04:15 PM

by Jonathan Todd

No less an authority than Lord Mandelson has declared New Labour dead. Dan Hodges has called time on blue Labour. But the revisionist principles driving New Labour long predate it and will surely outlast it. They stretch back to Eduard Bernstein via Tony Crosland and are timeless. As Lord Mandelson certainly knows, they cannot die. And the quest for belonging in a globalised age that underpins blue Labour shows no signs of losing its resonance as we continue to live through globalisation’s biggest economic crisis since the 1930s.

If the revisionist principles of New Labour are un-dead and blue Labour retains significance, perhaps Labour’s future, as both David Miliband and James Purnell have postulated, lies in some fusion of New and Blue Labour.

Labour’s future, in other words, is Cumbrian.

New Labour made Labour’s peace with business; reconciling Labour’s values of social justice with a pro-business attitude at ease with globalisation. Little could be more open for business than a national park which welcomes around 12 million visitors annually, the largest concentration of nuclear expertise in Europe and a vital production facility for BAE Systems, the third-largest defence manufacturer in the world. If New Labour means being pro-business, then New Labour is Cumbrian.

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Sunday Review on Tuesday: The Purple Book

20/09/2011, 04:57:33 PM

by David Talbot

It is hard to recall now, but 2 May 1997 was a gorgeous spring morning. It felt as though it might have been 26 July 1945, the day that ushered in the first majority Labour government. The country seemed fresh again; there was a sense of something about to be born, a new world, a new start, a new Britain – a new Labour. Even the Conservatives, if you could find one, did not seem to resent the new era or begrudge this young, charismatic prime minister, who had led the Labour party out of 18 years exile to a stunning victory. It was, however, the beginning of his end. The triumphal procession of 1997 led to excited hopes that could never be fulfilled. It was, as George Dangerfield said of the Liberals in 1906, a victory from which Labour never recovered.

But we bought it, all thirteen and a half million of us. Those were the heady days of the new deal, taxes on the profits of privatised utilities, the minimum wage, sure start and five millennium villages (no, me neither). With British troops in Kosovo, even the wars were better.

Now, of course, it is different. The narrative of disillusionment and betrayal is almost beyond challenging. To speak well of him, these days, is to invite scorn, ridicule and worse among Britain’s self-appointed liberal intelligentsia. It is difficult to recall a former prime minister that was last faced with such rancour – much of it, it should be said, coming from his own side. (more…)

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Stop shouting at me – I’m on your side

16/07/2011, 02:00:18 PM

by Emma Burnell

I regularly read the blogs of people I disagree with. I think it’s vital to do so not only to challenge your own perceptions, but also to work out how best to frame your arguments. I also regularly read blogs of people I agree with. Sometimes these are the same people. Politics can be a bit like that. Some days the person I’ve had a blazing Twitter row with about the necessity of trident, the very next day I’m nodding in agreement with about the campaigning future of the Labour Party. Modern communications are both fun and confusing that way.

Like real life, people have different moods online. Some days I’m feisty and argumentative, others I’m contemplative and receptive. Sometimes I just want to have a laugh. Because I’m political that laugh will often be at the expense of the Tories or their allies.

There has grown up on all sides of the Labour party a filtered response to all other parts of the party. I know because I get both sides of it. Those on the right of the Party get called Blairites and those on the left Trots. Then they all go about their business with not a single idea improved through debate, a mind changed or a voter won over. This leaves me in despair when people I know to be interesting and highly intelligent are losing the opportunity to actually try to change a mind. (more…)

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Labour, like Britain, must look to the future

14/07/2011, 11:30:09 AM

by Ian Austin

I’ve been really worried these past few months. People kept asking me what I thought of “all this Blue Labour stuff”.

I wasn’t sure what to say, but I knew it must be significant because it was creating such a buzz.

You can imagine my relief when they put together an “e-book” setting out the details.

It explained that a series of seminars had been held in London and Oxford to “open up the Labour tradition to new syntheses of meaning, and so to originality and transformation.”

The introduction said it would discuss the “relationship with tradition and modernity, nation and class, labour and capital, community and the individual, society and the market, the state and mutualism, and between belief and empiricism, romanticism and rationality, obligation and entitlement.”

Fortunately, help was at hand in the form of an interview a week or so ago with Lord Glasman, the leading figure behind our new approach.

“There are three poles,” he said, when asked to explain Blue Labour. ‘”First: a conception of the common good. That comes from Aristotle. Second: an impulse to organise labour. That comes from Minsky and Alinsky. And third: decommodification. That means stopping things that were not produced for sale being sold. That comes from Polanyi.”’

Of course we need seminars as well as conversations on doorsteps, but it’s where the theory takes us that worries me, not the inaccessibility of the language.

Elsewhere we’ve been told the new big idea is based on the insight that New Labour’s response to globalisation failed to value and protect local and community services like post offices and pubs and the traditional high street, or failed to recognise the value of the human relationships that underpin our communities.

The danger, as Mary Riddell pointed out recently, “lies in a neverland inhabited by superannuated pigeon-fanciers who like Woodbines and Watneys and don’t think much of foreigners.” She was absolutely right to warn that “Britain is not a museum of nostalgia but a forward-looking country.” (more…)

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Will Progress ever have a clause four moment of its own?

18/05/2011, 04:00:19 PM

by Sunder Katwala

“A Fabian clause IV moment may loom for the ole statists’ new chief”, wrote the pressure group Progress, as their think-tank column sought to stir up some speculation about the future of the Fabian Society under its next general secretary. (I leave this summer. Do apply here, before May 26).

A week later, Progress published a “reform or die” injunction to the Fabian Society, though doing more to stoke a little distant nostalgia for the early “big tent” Blairism of the Britpop era than to credibly suggest an existential threat, particularly when Fabian Society membership is today higher that at any point in our 126-year history.

Still, the argument for a fabian clause four moment is a good one. Fabianism is full of clause four moments. It is because it has been the most open, plural and self-critical, hence regenerating and revisionist, of intellectual and political traditions that fabianism has endured and thrived across a century and more. As Progress gathers for its annual conference this weekend, it would be a good moment for that organisation to consider how to emulate that fabian tradition, and to try a clause four moment of its own.

The Fabians can, uniquely, stake a claim to have been a significant contributor to both of Labour’s own clause four moments. Sidney Webb’s 1918 clause four was, in its own time, the moderate, gradualist and democratic socialist riposte to the Bolshevik revolution. Its appeal to workers “by hand or by brain” was designed to expand Labour’s appeal beyond the trade union interest by seeking middle-class support for democratic socialism. That this was a fabian achievement was never a barrier to fabian interrogation and criticism of it.

Arthur Henderson favoured rewriting it by 1929. Fabians were at the heart of the revisionist social democratic push to revise clause four in the 1950s. Fabian general secretary, Bill Rodgers, was central to the modernising campaign for democratic socialism, which sought to mobilise support for Hugh Gaitskell’s ill-fated assault on the old clause four.

Fabians returned to the fray in the 1990s, as the society put Labour’s “southern discomfort” at centre stage after the 1992 general election. Giles Radice called on leader, John Smith, to revise clause four, and returned to the theme as the latest follow-up pamphlet was published on the eve of the 1995 conference. “There would be no better way of showing that Labour is putting forward a credible vision for the future than by rewriting clause four”, wrote Radice. His diaries recount that he had no prior knowledge of Blair’s plan to do exactly that, but was able to tell a fabian fringe meeting on the Tuesday night that “I have been outflanked by my leader”. A decade later, we were making the case for Labour to revisit its foundational values in every generation, not twice a century. Having successfully helped to put the language of equality back into mainstream politics – with the argument for more equal life chances now echoing across the political spectrum. So I argued that Labour ought now to have the confidence to make its commitment to a fairer and more equal society an explicit part of its political mission.

By contrast with the fabians, Progress has never had nor contributed to a clause four moment yet.

Founded in 1996, the organisation had been a mere glint in Derek Draper’s eye when Tony Blair revised clause four the year before. The self-styled modernisers of Progress, arriving afterwards, did not offer an independent, insurgent challenge for Labour to rethink its ideas. Rather, as Tom Watson has set out on Uncut, the organisation was created “from above”, through explicitly seeking out and receiving the patronage of the party leadership for its offer to consolidate and mobilise support for what had already become the new status quo. After fifteen years of flying that New Labour flag, arriving metaphorically in its late adolescence, Progress may increasingly face a “forward, not back” challenge of its own.

If the Fabian Society‘s next leadership should embrace the challenge to define the society’s own next clause four moment, it must also be time for Progress to consider how to have their first.

With Progress fashioning a new trend in fraternal advice and organisational scrutiny between progressive allies, it would seem only fair to reciprocate and to draw on the fabian experience to identify three signposts as to what Progress‘ first ever clause four moment might look like. (more…)

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Opening doors and breaking barriers, or smoke and mirrors

14/05/2011, 12:00:22 PM

by Hugh Goulbourne

Nick Clegg’s social mobility strategy – Opening Doors, Breaking Barriers – has attracted much attention from the media. But are the proposals anything more than just a way of diverting attention from this government’s clumsy budget cuts which have left millions of people, especially those aged 16-25, without access to vital traineeships and work experience opportunities?

The overarching principle set out in Opening Doors, Breaking Barriers is a sound one, namely that “no one should be prevented from fulfilling their potential by the circumstances of their birth” and instead “what ought to count is how hard you work and the skills and talents you possess, not the school you went to or the jobs your parents did”. Indeed it is the very principle that all of us in the Labour party sign up for when we join.

Under New Labour, a series of interventions were made to help target internships and apprenticeships at those from unprivileged backgrounds. Perhaps the most successful of those programmes was the future jobs fund (FJF). The FJF programme provides a grant to charities, social enterprises and local government to offer a paid contract of employment to an individual aged 18 – 24 who has been out of employment for six months – in effect a paid internship.

The experience of the FJF demonstrates the importance of paid internships in opening up vital work experience to those without existing financial support. In West Yorkshire, a consortium of not for profit arts organisations have used the final slice of FJF funding to provide an internship to a local arts graduate, who, despite a good degree and several voluntary positions, has not been able to find the requisite workplace experience to be able to secure full-time employment. All over the country, the programme has been a success, with well over 50% of those who have joined the FJF scheme ceasing to claim job seekers allowance and entering into paid employment seven months after they started the programme.

FJF was axed in April, together with a number of other Labour programmes as part of the government’s spending cuts. It will be replaced by a new code for government internships, a new business compact for fairer, more open internship and work experience programmes and the new work programme.

The first limb of Clegg’s proposals – the reform of government internships and the removal of barriers to internships within the professions and corporate organisations – has already attracted widespread support from those within the Labour party. These are certainly sectors of the economy where significant investment should be directed towards developing a new generation of workers from a range of backgrounds. (more…)

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Purple bookers try to revive past New Labour glories

19/04/2011, 11:00:48 AM

Leading “Blairites” plan to publish a modernisers’ manifesto, to “reshape politics on the centre left” . It will be called The Purple Book.

by Sunder Katwala

Looking back at the successes and shortcomings of the New Labour years, it could be argued that, if there was a missed opportunity which set the limits to the party’s ambitions for progress, it came with the 2001 general election campaign.

It was an election which Labour was never going to lose. William Hague’s unpopular populism was never taken seriously across the country. Yet New Labour high command could never quite believe that the party was going to win, and was concerned to close down issues which it feared were resonating.

So the posters were purple – a lot done, a lot to do – in a bid to seek a largely mandateless re-coronation of the then very popular Tony Blair.

The result was a landslide – a slow motion replay of 1997, with almost no seats at all changing hands, but on a much lower turnout in a way that did little to shift the centre of political gravity. In retrospect, Labour’s 1997-2001 term stands up well, with a ream of manifesto commitments taken into office delivered in a way that endures, from the minimum wage to devolution.

What always remained elusive was “renewal” in office, though politicians and think-tankers talked of little else. The 2001 campaign may have a good claim to be the most cautious run by any winning party in the post-war period. (The major themes of the second term had been kicked into the long grass. It was a big deal for Gordon Brown to put up national insurance for the NHS, but it was safely “under review” during the campaign. Tony Blair’s big second term idea was to win the European argument, but he planned to begin it at the TUC conference on September 11th 2001, in a speech never given, rather than to take Hague’s “foreign land” campaign head on at the hustings).

Given that 9/11 came to dominate all else within a few months, perhaps events meant that it didn’t matter. But 2001 was probably the moment at which Labour needed to give its argument and vision more positive content.

Instead, Labour emulated Bill Clinton a few years earlier. It was re-elected, but did not seek to realign the political debate explicitly. It did shift policy arguments, but was less confident than Margaret Thatcher in believing that politicians could reshape the contours of public and political debate. (more…)

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