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Posts Tagged ‘New Labour’

I love New Labour and am proud of what we did

07/02/2011, 11:30:24 AM

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.

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Don’t call her babe: Dan Hodges interviews Hazel Blears

30/11/2010, 02:04:17 PM

“Hazel Blears? Good luck mate. She’s the most on message politician I’ve ever met”.

“Hazel is a robot. ‘Tony good. Labour good. Tony good. Labour good’. Scratch the surface and you just find another surface underneath”.

"I was asked to go and defend the government in some circumstances when no one else wanted to"

Hmmm. Uncut arrives at our meeting with the woman described by one Labour MP as the bionic Blairite with some trepidation. We like discipline and loyalty – in moderation. But we also like a peek behind the curtain. Will we be able to uncover what makes the bionic Blairite tick?

Let’s kick off with Ed Miliband. She voted for him fourth, behind Andy, David and Ed. According to reports, he offered her a job and she turned it down, although Ed’s office officially denies this. Hazel confirms that she had a meeting with Ed and told him she wanted some time out on the back benches. So what does she think of the new leader?

“I would characterise Ed’s leadership as calm, measured, steady, and actually, a surprise to people. I don’t think you have to come out as a brand new leader with fireworks and pazzaz. When Ed won, a lot of people said ‘Ed’s a blank page’. Well in a lot of ways that’s not bad for us, because we need to reflect on why we got the worst result since 1983. I don’t mind a bit of reflection”.

No fireworks. No pazzaz. This could be a long haul.

“But, if we don’t defend our record nobody will. If you walk round my city, it’s not paradise, it’s not nirvana, but it’s a damn sight better than it was. This narrative the Tories are getting traction with, that it was all a disaster, we bust the bank, spent all the money; it’s at our peril that we let that just be the story. People may accuse me of wearing rose tinted glasses, being gung ho; well sorry I’m not going to be snivelling and apologising for what I think in many ways was a damn fine government”.

A flash of passion. Not synthesised. Real, “I’ll see you out side”, anger. (more…)

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The big week uncut: what next?

03/10/2010, 02:00:39 PM

As Dan Hodges noted in Friday’s column (below), Labour reached the end of a long road in Manchester. If anyone needed closure on the New Labour project, we had it last week.

It was a journey which had begun where it ended: at Labour party conference.

Neil Kinnock’s 1985 speech in Brighton marked the start of a fight back which took 12 years to come to fruition and 13 more to end in failure.

Neil was the father of New Labour, but he was never part of it. With the passion that he showed in that brave and beautiful speech, he knew that we needed it. But he wished we didn’t. He would have preferred it the old way. By the end, he even knew that what we needed wasn’t him. (Just as he knew that it wasn’t John Smith either). But he could only be himself.

That is why he is so attached to Ed, who isn’t New Labour either. Ed was a contented but never ideologically committed member of the outer circle. He often notes that he wasn’t factional. This was helped by his not being political either.

There is nothing new or unusual here. Blair and Brown, for instance, were fellow travellers in Peter Hain’s Tribune group during the 1980s. It was a necessary accommodation with the prevailing orthodoxy.

Nor is it a weak position. It was Stalin who issued the Blairite dictum that “theory guides practice, but practice is the criterion of ideological truth”. And, whatever he was, Stalin was not weak.

Ed Miliband’s ruthlessness is beyond question. If he has a lack which comes to seem weak, it will be consistency, not cruelty.

Many whom one would call New Labour or old right very actively campaigned for Ed Miliband. And it is those influential individuals, not the facile nebula that is the term ‘the unions’, who are mainly responsible for Ed Miliband’s victory.

Which term (responsible) is apt in two senses: both cause and obligation.

So it is to them, as much as to Ed himself – and to his brother staked out in Primrose Hill-les-Deux-Eglises – that we pose the week’s overwhelming question: after New Labour, after permanent revolution and endless victory, what next?

Jonathan Todd warns of Osborne’s traps on the economy

David Prescott on David Miliband’s big speech

Kevin Meagher looks at the new leader’s in tray

Siôn Simon sketches Ed Miliband’s big speech

Peter Watt says the last thing we need is a membership drive

Jamie Reed MP looks beyond London for the shadow cabinet

Dan Hodges responds to Labour’s extraordinary week in Manchester

Sunder Katwala on Labour’s top baron: BAME voting in the leadership election

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Let’s not get carried away with the Coulson affair, says Dan Hodges

09/09/2010, 09:00:21 AM

Chris Grayling was right. There are parts of Britain that are beginning to resemble Baltimore. Illegal phone taps. Dodgy cops. Dirty pay-offs. Snitches. Political cover ups. Sheeeet! The Wire has come to Westminster.

We’ve had Tommy ‘McNulty’ Watson (a good Parliamentarian if ever there was one), fearless in his pursuit of the chief perp, ignorant of risk or reputation. Andy ‘Stringer’ Coulson, hunkering down in the safe house as five-oh circles and formerly loyal lieutenants sing. David ‘Royce’ Cameron, seeing no evil, hearing no evil, prepping his ‘game face’ as the political challenges mount.

It’s been a week to lift the spirits. The Tories on the back foot. The Lib Dems embarrassed. For the first time since the election, the Tory-Lib Dem government has lost control of the news agenda. Even the met. police may be forced to take a break from their regular Friday briefing in The Feathers and start to feel some collars. (more…)

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Big business, bad bankers and hard times for Northern Ireland, by Peter Johnson

08/09/2010, 02:06:37 PM

When it comes to its relationship with private industry, Labour can’t seem to win. In the period before the New Labour adventure, the party was perceived as being anti-business, the big battalions of which wasted little love on us in return. To prove that we had changed our ways, Blair and Brown “wooed big business and acted as if they were in awe of it”, to slightly re-cast Andy Burnham’s phrase. In this critical respect the Blair-Brown journey, with the party dutifully in tow, went too far. We should have stuck with our instincts about the barons of business.

In contrast to our tentative trust in it, big business – or specifically banks – repaid Labour’s new found faith and support by stabbing it in the guts. The blade was twisted to maximum effect and placed in the hands of Labour – who were caught red-handed by the electorate still holding on to the evidence.

Subsequently, everything Labour achieved and implemented in 13 years is being unravelled before our eyes by the policies of the corrosive Tory-Lib Dem government that replaced it. From the scrapping of the child trust fund; the freezing of child benefit, cuts to the disability living allowance and the scrapping of the free primary school meals project, the list reads dramatic and seemingly endless. Even the winter fuel allowance is in the assassin’s sights. Worryingly, the accuracy of the chancellor’s aim to date has been true and his trigger-finger pulled with the cold, ruthless efficiency of a professional hit-man.

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We lost the 2010 election during Blair’s watch, as well as Brown’s, says Michael Dugher

06/09/2010, 11:57:20 AM

ALL THE LABOUR leadership candidates have dared to disagree with Tony Blair that we lost the last election because we weren’t sufficiently New Labour. In yesterday’s Observer, Andrew Rawnsley lamented this lèse majesté.

Memoirs and diaries, especially from former prime ministers, are important. After ten years in office, with three general election victories under his belt, Tony Blair’s deserve to be read. But what is disappointing is that Blair is so palpably out of touch when it comes to understanding why we lost in 2010 and how Labour can win again in the future.

Much of what Rawnsley writes I agree with. He is quite right that Tony Blair “understood how to communicate with the public; he grasped that parties must constantly renew themselves to keep up with events, the world and the voters”. He is equally right that it is “foolish to fashion the party’s future policies or presentation as if the dateline were still 1994 rather than 2010”. And that Blair understood that “the centre-left wins and holds power only by creating a broad appeal which embraces not just their natural and traditional supporters, but voters without tribal allegiances to Labour”. (more…)

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We were elected as New Labour, we will govern again as New Labour, argues Peter Mandelson

21/07/2010, 01:22:40 PM

In London, Manchester, Leeds and Newcastle (and Hartlepool) this week, thousands of party members and the public have heard or will hear the third man speak about his book. They were interested and most bought copies. It seems a far cry from the condemnatory statements made by some of the Labour leadership contestants upon the book’s publication. They hadn’t read it, of course, but since then many others have.

After the party has suffered electoral defeat, it is timely to debate our past as well as our future. The two are linked. And we don’t have to dismiss one in order to make progress in the other.

In The Third Man, I take the reader back over twenty five years of our party’s fall and rise, not simply the thirteen in government and not just that period after the Iraq war until 2006 when relations between our Prime Minister and Chancellor entered a trough and when their policy differences over NHS and schools reform, university financing and pension policy flared.

Political change on the scale we undertook it, in the creation of New Labour, required intense and sustained teamwork and partnership, trust and mutual support, over a long period of time. Tony and Gordon were at the centre of this – in the main – productive and creative activity. But in a truthful memoir and autobiography, when I was personally a part of this relationship over so many years, you cannot explain the good and the bad times without describing what the participants said and did, to as well as with each other. And it is better to tell the story earlier rather than later, before preparing for the next election.

If I have one abiding memory of the period when we were creating New Labour it is the friendship and comradeship amongst all those who made it happen. And that friendship endures, including in the election campaign this year. It has been a happy time and a very successful one. We must have been doing a lot right, although you might not think so to listen to those hastily announcing the ending of New Labour as if you can turn its principles and precepts on and off like a tap.

Millions of voters didn’t think this way and we have to ask – as my book does – why so many of them decided not to support us in this year’s election. Was it because they thought all of a sudden that we were too New Labour? I think not. And that is the central message of The Third Man.

Peter Mandelson is a Labour peer, a former cabinet minister, and author of The Third Man: Life at the heart of New Labour.

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Labour must start to make its case on the economy, says Nick McDonald

19/07/2010, 12:46:46 PM

The leadership contest offers the chance for a debate about the future of our party. That debate is important; it will define us for the next decade. But whilst we must reformulate what it means to be a progressive party, and be seen to do so, debate will not win us the next election.

To do that we have to convince the electorate once again, not that we are progressive, but that we are trustworthy and that we have the right economic polices. Moreover, we must persuade the public that the economic decisions the Coalition Government is now taking will be disastrous for this country in the long-term. That is largely how Labour won power in 1997 and it is how we will win again. It is natural and necessary that we turn inwards after defeat and re-evaluate what the Labour Party stands for, but let’s not equivocate too long; we need to get back at them, and soon.

The party that develops the best lexicon to explain its economic position will win the next election. Voters do not necessarily care that cancelling the Future Jobs Fund is simply wrong, or that cancelling school building projects, or transport projects, is wrong. However, they will care if they believe that cuts will harm growth, or remove confidence, or adversely affect the housing market.

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Sunday News Review

06/06/2010, 08:04:50 AM

The candidates

“The insipid campaign has laid bare the paucity of talent on Labour’s benches, and the party’s ideological exhaustion. No serving Cabinet minister lost their seat at the election; Tony Blair aside, the Milibands and Ed Balls are the best Labour has. That’s a grim prospect if your colour’s red. Ed Balls has the panache of a Vauxhall Safira; and the two Milibands are trapped in a Beckettian whirl of meaningless jargon, convinced that using abstract nouns is a mark of vital intelligence.” – The Spectator

“”They have all grown. I got on very well with Ed during the campaign. But in the end you’ve got to make a judgment. Of all of them, I think David [Miliband] has got the most rounded political and policy skills that you need. I’m a pragmatist about this. I think about who can take on Cameron best.”” – Alistair Campbell, Independent on Sunday

“One rival, Ed Balls, Gordon Brown’s anointed heir, offers a clear contrast as a centraliser in the Fabian tradition, backed by Unite, the giant union. He has one great achievement to his name for which we can all be grateful: he convinced his master that Britain should stay out of the euro.” – The Times

“Labour leadership hopeful Ed Balls says he is the man to take Labour back to Number 10. As the campaign to find Gordon Brown’s successor gains momentum, the former schools secretary said he is the only candidate to hold on to the “New Labour understanding”. – Staffordshire Newsletter

Movement for Miliband

David Miliband says he will reform the Party

“Mr Miliband said: “We are at a very, very important moment. Instead of the leadership being ashamed of the membership the membership feels let down by the leadership, and it’s really important that those of us in a leadership position understand that. A fundamental part of correcting that is to reconnect the leadership with the membership.”” – The News of the World

“They include allowing Labour members to elect the party chairman; launching a “find-a-friend” campaign to double Labour’s membership; training Labour Party members to become community organisers; and maintaining, in opposition, the requirement for the Labour leader to have weekly meetings with a committee of backbench MPs.” – Press Association

Policy pronouncements

“As Labour seeks to rebuild trust with the British people, it is important we are honest about what we got wrong. In retrospect, Britain should not have rejected transitional controls on migration from the first wave of new EU member states in 2004, which we were legally entitled to impose. As the GMB’s Paul Kenny and others have pointed out, the failure of our government to get agreement to implement the agency workers directive made matters worse.” – Ed Balls, The Observer

“In a BBC Politics Show interview later, Mr Balls is also expected to urge more debate about policy in the contest. Mr Balls’ comments could be a sign that dividing lines between candidates was opening up, says the BBC’s Iain Watson. David Miliband, another leadership hopeful, will also be speaking to the BBC to outline his proposed party reforms.” – The BBC

Burnham sprint finish

Andy Burnham hopes to make the cut

“Burnham’s campaign managers said yesterday they believed he would secure enough support to run. In his pitch to MPs tomorrow he will criticise new Labour’s courting of big business, saying it sent out the wrong message to the party’s core supporters. “We were in the thrall of big business. We lost sight of the impact that had on individuals and their circumstances,” he plans to say.” – The Times

“Andy Burnham is set to win enough support to battle for the Labour leadership. Party sources say the ex-Health Secretary will get the required backing of 33 Labour MPs before Wednesday’s deadline to be the fourth and final contender for the top job.” – The Sunday Mirror

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Sunday News Review

30/05/2010, 08:59:44 AM

Next Labour

Ben Bradshaw backs David Miliband

“David’s breadth of leadership skills and experience, combined with his clear vision of where he wants to take the party and Britain also, offers our best chance of winning again in Norwich, Swindon and Milton Keynes, without which there won’t be another Labour government.” – Ben Bradshaw MP, The Observer

“The issue has been forced because of the doomed coalition talks in the last days of the Labour government which revealed a deep chasm between the “progressive” and the traditional wings of the party. That division wasn’t just about whether to do a deal with the Lib Dems, it was about a divergent approach to politics.” – The Scotsman

“It is more eyebrow-raising that the denigration of New Labour has also been joined by the Miliband brothers, Ed Balls and Andy Burnham, a quartet who served their political apprenticeships in the courts of Blair and Brown and then ascended to the cabinet. They are jostling to criticise the government of which they were very recently prominent members.” – The Observer

“Perhaps the Labour front bench believes that having been mercifully released from the death grip of G Brown, it is now under no obligation to accept responsibility for his errors: that expunging the chief perpetrator was itself an absolution.” – The Sunday Telegraph

Talent show

“David Miliband threw caution to the wind last night by calling for a full television debate between all candidates for the Labour leadership, in a move that could help boost his rivals.” – The Observer

“Labour leadership contender David Miliband is challenging his rivals to a TV debate. The former Foreign Secretary made the suggestion in a letter this weekend to the five other candidates.” – The Sunday Mirror

Old, New Labour

Campbell tells of power struggle at heart of New Labour

“The full extent of the explosive feuds at the heart of New Labour are revealed today in a new book by Alastair Campbell.Tony Blair’s former spin doctor discloses furious shouting matches between the ex-PM and Gordon Brown that left both men “with purple faces”.” – The Sunday Mirror

“Whilst many of us want to concentrate on the future and the rescue of our economy, the next few months will also see some reappraisal of the Labour years. For the first time we will be able to debate them without the choking blanket of spin coming from Downing Street.” – John Redwoods Diary

Baby boom

“Both the Prime Minister and Opposition leader could be on nappy-changing duty within months if Ed Miliband wins the race to succeed Gordon Brown” – The Mail on Sunday

“The family theme to Labour’s leadership contest took a fresh twist last night as it emerged that Ed Miliband is to become a father for the second time later this year.” – The Independent

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