20 New Times, New Labour

New Times, New Labour

If we are to rebuild and recover in this country, this Labour Party must be the party of production. That is where our future lies. It is not a new role for us, but it does require a fresh and vigorous reassertion. Over the years our enemies and critics – yes, and a few of our friends as well – have given us the reputation of being a party that is solely concerned with redistribution, of being a party much more concerned about the allocation of wealth than the creation of wealth. It was not true; it is not true; it never has been; and all our history shows that – from the great industrial development and nationalization acts of the Attlee government, which gave this country a post-war industrial basis, through to the Wilson government’s investment schemes and initiatives that brought new life to where I come from, to South Wales, to Scotland, to the Northeast, to Merseyside, to the new towns of the Southeast, right through to the actions of the last Labour government, which ensured that at least we retained a British computer industry, a British motor industry, a machine tool industry, a shipbuilding industry. We … need give no apology for being the party of production.
Neil Kinnock, speech to the 1985 Labour Party Conference
The great British–American alliance led the way – morally as well as militarily – in both world wars.
Margaret Thatcher, speech to the English-Speaking Union in New York, 1999
You are Neville Chamberlain, I am Winston Churchill and Saddam is Hitler.
Tony Blair to an official 2002/31
I think it’s my job to maximise global welfare, not national welfare.
Sir Gus O’Donnell, permanent secretary of the Treasury, 2002–5, cabinet secretary, 2005–11.2
The Communist Party, in the vanguard of all the progressive forces of mankind, brought tidings of new times even in the 1980s. Now the news was not good for the left. In its Manifesto for New Times (1989) the party told its workers that socialists did ‘not yet confidently speak the language of the future’, that capitalism was entering a new phase – of robots, computers, satellite television – and that what was needed was an alternative to Thatcherism’s ‘regressive modernisation’.3 The party journal, Marxism Today, opened its pages to politicians to its right, including Tony Blair, before he became Labour leader.4 The central idea of New Times was a classic vulgar-Marxist technological determinism, which, it must be noted, is, while vulgar, generally rather richer than the usual non-Marxist variety. The post-war ‘settlement’ was being remade, it was claimed: Fordism, standardized mass production, was giving way to post-Fordism (‘the economic and industrial core of the new times’), a more flexible system of production. The end of Fordism meant the end of large, unionized workforces in nationally organized welfare states. There were, they suggested, two ways of managing post-Fordism – the Thatcher way and an alternative which involved creating new solidarities, a new politics of consumption, an ‘alternative socialism adequate to the post-Fordist age’.5 The appeal was real – it was time to get rid of the grim, old-fashioned politics of production and embrace consumption, where the politics was essentially environmental, at this time focused on pollution, rainforests and whaling.6 It was also attractive in that it pointed to new forms of intellectual enquiry for the left – towards culture and consumption, identities and ideology, and away from political economy, production, international relations and indeed politics.
Theorists of technical change now celebrated information technology as a paradigm shift – the high unemployment unleashed on the world, and especially on the United Kingdom, was the product, not of policy, but of a technical development. Capitalism, they claimed, developed in long waves of growth followed by years of painful restructuring, which repeated every fifty years. The depression of the 1980s, like that of the 1930s, would usher in a new world.7 The new information or knowledge societies would be much more environmentally aware, and indeed it was in the late 1980s that politics took up what would later be called greenwashing. It was a feature of the 1987 SDP–Liberal Alliance manifesto, which had a section called ‘Green Growth’ – which called for cutting air pollution, and pollution of water by nuclear waste, protection of the green belt and more insulation. It was anti-nuclear and called for modernization and the expansion of coal.8 The Labour Party Policy Review of 1989 also mentioned the environment as a new concern.9
As is so often the case, these technological determinist arguments failed to identify the key technologies, and indeed the social phenomena they sought to explain. For all the confidence of analysis, it was derived not from serious analysis of machinery and society but from boosterist commentary of the moment. Realities, as ever, were rather different. For example, for all the talk of post-Fordism, the Ford Motor Company itself had a giant new engine plant come into operation in 1980, in Bridgend, which was to become the largest engine plant the United Kingdom had ever seen, making a very small range of globally standardized engines. Of course, technical change in manufacturing reduced labour needs, often very radically, as in the Ford case, but the new small, flexible manufacturing hardly replaced mass production. The new foreign car plants mass-produced; new forms of mass white-collar work emerged. In any case, mass production had never covered all of manufacturing, and manufacturing was rather less than the whole capitalist economy. And car use went up and up. The more post-industrial the commentators claimed the world was becoming, the more metals, plastics and nearly every kind of product was produced in factories the world over.
These arguments in any case missed the really important transformations of the economy we have described. What had changed was not so much the means of production, as political economy, and it did so, as we have seen, in surprising ways. Capitalism, not technology, was the issue. The transformation in the nature of the labour force would indeed have dramatic impacts. The new jobs were to be found in highly routinized services of many different sorts. In the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s it still made sense to differentiate between manual and non-manual work, between white-collar and blue-collar, wage- and salary-earners, between working-class and middle-class. Though this distinction has continued to be used by pollsters and advertisers (C2 is skilled manual, D is semi-skilled and unskilled manual), the statistical authorities recognized before the end of the millennium that working with one’s hands was no longer a sensible definitional criterion. This is not to say that manual jobs disappeared, rather the contrary. They multiplied in the ‘service’ sector, which was about caring, cleaning, shelving, serving in restaurants. These were often low-paying jobs, with wages so low in some cases that workers were also on benefits.10 In some parts of the country especially immigrants were important in these jobs. In a notable, though hardly noticed, development from the 1980s immigration exceeded emigration. It was to continue to increase (with very great increases in the twenty-first century), but the invisible need for people to perform routine tasks created a new foreign-born workforce of a scale never seen in the history of the United Kingdom.
Trade unionism, like the welfare state, did not disappear but changed, again in surprising ways. In 1950, as in 1900, the trade unionist was typically a male manual worker – a miner, an engineer, a cotton worker (though this was an industry with many women, and women trade unionists), a docker – overwhelmingly working for private employers. By the 1970s trade unionism was more oriented towards the public sector and had expanded to non-manual, white-collar workers including many more women. By 2000 trade union density, the proportion of workers in unions, was back to the relatively low levels of the 1940s, but now a majority of trade unionists were female, and over 60 per cent were in the public sector. Trade unionism was indeed now a middle-class phenomenon. While the miners’ and steelworkers’ and transport unions had shrunk, there were now large unions of teachers, university lecturers and nurses. The National Health Service had, in 2000, three times the number of employees it had in 1948, and these were more likely to be unionized as well. The number of teachers grew, indeed by the early 1990s the number of university teachers exceeded the number of miners. The most unionized parts of the private sector were those that had been public industries into the 1980s – transport, mining, electricity, gas and telecommunications.11
The weakening and the transformation of trade unions had an impact on the Labour Party. As the party of the trade unions, it lost influence and power in society and the economy. It was also weakened because for the first time since the Edwardian years a large (and growing) section of organized workers were not affiliated to the party. They included teachers, university lecturers, many of the nurses and other health workers and the largest civil service union.
The Labour Party itself went through an extraordinary transformation. The historical Labour Party had come of age in the 1970s and 1980s; only then did it achieve a certain intellectual coherence, and a programme reflecting its historical ambitions. But this moment did not last long. It lost the 1983 election very badly, admittedly in rather exceptional circumstances, garnering only 28 per cent of the vote. Its vote went up to 31 per cent in 1987 then to 34 per cent in 1992, significant but hardly earth-shattering increases, which left the vote share well below the 37 per cent achieved by James Callaghan in 1979, when he was defeated. The marginal increases in electors were achieved as the party went into a defensive shedding of its actual policies. The Labour Party which last won an election in 1974 never returned to office. James Callaghan was the last Labour prime minister, and the last prime minister to have served in the armed forces. Labour left office claiming to be the saviour of the nation but was not called to save it again. As the party of the nation, it found life in a post-national economy and society difficult to adjust to or respond to.
After the electoral defeat of 1983 the leadership of the Labour Party passed from Michael Foot to a so-called dream ticket combining the soft left and the right. The new leader and deputy leader were figures of much less substance than those they replaced. Neil Kinnock was neither an intellectual nor a worker, and for all the claims made for him as orator and parliamentarian, he was merely more prolix than Michael Foot. Roy Hattersley, the deputy leader with strong support in the parliamentary Labour Party, was a littérateur (like Michael Foot) rather than a robust specialist in international relations, as was his predecessor, Denis Healey.12 Kinnock and Hattersley were both formed by residues from the Labour Party of the 1950s: Hattersley by Croslandite reformism, Kinnock by Bevanism.13 The potential leaders of the left formed by the politics of the 1960s and 1970s, Tony Benn and Ken Livingstone, could not stand because neither were at that moment members of parliament.
With Kinnock and Hattersley came not new policies, but diminished and diluted versions of the radical 1983 ones. The overall aim was to overthrow and reverse what Kinnock called ‘Thatcherism’, which was interpreted not merely as morally wrong, but economically calamitous too. The central claim around the 1987 election was that ‘Labour would rebuild’ on the basis of its productionist agenda: it would repatriate capital (let loose by the lifting of exchange controls), focus on industry and production and create a Ministry of Science and Technology. While Labour would ‘reject EEC interference with our policy for national recovery and renewal’, it would (unlike its position in 1983) stay in. Labour was still committed to abandoning the Trident system and would invest in conventional defence, emphasizing new kinds of weapons.14 Following the defeat in 1987, Labour abandoned any remaining opposition to the EEC and to the Trident submarine and missiles. The claim from the left was that Labour did not stand for fresh ideas: it did not generate them, or fight for them, but rather fought them off if they came from further left. This seemed truer than ever.15 As Ralph Miliband scornfully put it, the Labour leadership has never ever wanted its members or supporters to be more active, to conduct campaigns with more vigour, or with greater resources.16
Labour advanced slowly by eating away not at the Tory vote but at the SDP–Liberal Alliance vote – which had nearly reached Labour’s in 1983. It looked as if the three-party politics of the 1920s was back, and indeed it was. However, the Alliance peaked at just below Labour’s trough in 1993. The politics of the SDP–Liberal Alliance, for all the insistence on their novelty, represented continuity. Although they criticized the other parties as class parties, fighting a class war, and presented themselves as committed to practicalities, there was a large element of the programme of the Labour right in it. They were appalled at unemployment levels and wanted to reflate the economy to create 1 million jobs; they were concerned, too, about the weakness of British manufacturing. While not rejecting nuclear weapons, they wanted to reduce their number and crucially were in favour of cancelling Trident. They were strong supporters of NATO and the EEC and wanted to reduce trade barriers. They did not see a case for the PWR and wanted the expansion of coal production.
For the 1987 election the SDP–Liberal Alliance was still close in spirit to old Labour productivism. It spoke of the need to leap through a second industrial revolution (‘micro-electronics, biotechnology and new materials’), which required more R&D spending above all, noting correctly that this was in fact falling. They claimed, as many did still, that ‘Manufacturing industry is the driving force at the core of our economy. Its decline must be reversed.’17
By 1992 the SDP had merged with the Liberals to form the Liberal Democratic Party. In their programme manufacturing was no longer the driving force at the core of the economy; there was much less emphasis on industrial revolutions and much, much more on free trade and competition. ‘We are committed,’ they said, ‘to a free market, to free trade and to the creation of a competitive and enterprising economy.’ The role of government was merely enabling, for example, ‘playing a positive part in the construction of the new European economy and, above all, bringing greater stability to national economic management’.18
Labour was to abandon much more than the policies the left of the 1970s had got it to adopt. First, it rid itself of its national-productionist agenda, which, with the exception of the late 1950s, had been its guiding policy since 1945.19 It did this slowly, without advertising or perhaps realizing the import of the change. The policy review of the late 1980s called for a new industrial ministry with status equal to the Treasury, which would pursue a ‘Medium Term Industrial Strategy’. It still complained of low R&D investment and wanted the United Kingdom to be at the ‘leading edge of technology’, and to have a minister for science and technology in the new Industry Ministry. It wanted a Defence Diversification Agency to stimulate civil research.20 It was as if the white heat policies of the 1960s had never happened; the talk was 1960s talk but with no recognition that Wilson had once walked the walk. But by 1992 only a few dying embers of this white heat rhetoric were left in the manifesto, which claimed that ‘Britain’s industrial future depends on transforming our inventive genius into manufacturing strength’.21 But the industrial policy was gone, and a firm commitment to the European Exchange Rate Mechanism was an indicator of a new enthusiasm for the EEC.22 The diagnosis was still declinist, but the proposed cure was unrelated to the disease. Labour was out of office, and desperate for it, through all the 1980s and most of the 1990s – feeling that its policies were discredited and increasingly discreditable. Yet this was as much the product of political defeat as its cause, and one must wonder what policies a more confident and successful party might have come up with.
One possibility would have been a rethinking of welfare. Labour kept its welfare commitments into the 1990s. It aimed to restore the link between pensions and earnings, rather than merely keeping them constant in price terms; and it committed itself to a new State Earnings Related Pension. It was now once again what it had briefly been in the late 1950s: the party of welfare rather than the party of production. That last vestige of what Labour had stood for would go under New Labour.
NEW LABOUR
Neil Kinnock resigned as Labour leader after two election defeats. He was succeeded, briefly, by John Smith, who reiterated some Labour themes. For example he noted that ‘One of Britain’s most important resources is our immense coal reserves. It was ready access to coal that put Britain at the front of the industrial revolution and it is the plentiful remaining reserves that give us an edge over most of our European competitors.’ Yet, he complained, ‘Britain’s present government is proposing to abandon half of all the pits that remain. That is vandalism … it will destroy whole communities built around their role of providing the nation with coal … it will destroy a national asset which could meet Britain’s long-term energy needs.’23 He rejected any idea that the Thatcher-Major years were ones of success. ‘These have been fourteen years of waste, years of neglect, years of decline. Fourteen years of casino economics – a speculators’ paradise – have plunged British industry into two record-breaking recessions.’ He noted, accurately, that economic growth was ‘lower than in the 1960s and the 1970s; investment in manufacturing – the vital wealth creator of our economy – lower than in 1979’. There were huge deficits in public finance and trade, and still 3 million out of work. He called these and others the ‘facts that mock the Tory hype and propaganda … that explode their so-called economic miracle: the so-called Thatcher revolution’.24
John Smith died suddenly, and with him this renewed Labour critique. He was succeeded by another barrister, Tony Blair. Blair, working closely with Gordon Brown, created a new party leadership, committing the party to policies which both the old right and the old left would have thought unthinkable. It was indeed New Labour rather than Labour which went into the 1997 general election. Labour won it with 43 per cent of the vote, an astonishing jump from 1992. The proportion would fall with each subsequent election, along with turnout, but New Labour was to be in office until 2010, when it got only 29 per cent, all with falling turnouts. The Conservative Party, which had done so much to reshape the United Kingdom, not least New Labour, languished at around 30 per cent of the electorate, essentially where Labour had been in the 1980s and early 1990s. But much less changed than met the eye.
New Labour was born out of Labour but not of Labour. It was not, however, a new party. The party as a structure continued to exist, and there was no great transformation in membership. Old loyalties still mattered a great deal. The key difference was that the party leadership acquired quite extraordinary power over members of parliament and the party as a whole. It silenced its opponents and promised to succeed where Labour no longer did, a claim of enormous attraction to a party membership which believed that the Tories were vermin. Anything that could turn out the Tories was not to be sniffed at by Labour members and activists. The paradox was that this very hatred of the Tories made it possible for them to tolerate a party which adopted Tory policies.
For what was remarkable was not only that New Labour was not Labour but that it was barely New either. It owed a good deal to the policies long espoused by the Conservative Party.25 Indeed, it aspired to, and to some extent succeeded in, becoming a party much like the Conservative Party or the Liberal Democratic Party in both structure and policies. It was a party in which the parliamentary leadership dominated, was comfortable with plutocrats and had slight and wary connections to the working class. Millionaires, including Lord Sainsbury, funded New Labour. The plutocratic Murdoch press, which had vilified Neil Kinnock, and indeed John Major, supported New Labour, as no capitalist newspaper with the exception of the Mirror had. It was telling, too, that as they lost ministerial office the Labour high command took to going off to join boards of regulated companies, lobbying firms and aspiring private health providers.26 It was the party of the management consultants, the PR agencies, the outsourced public services and the aspiring public sector high-fliers. Whereas the left had been strongly declinist in the 1980s, and indeed saw Mrs Thatcher’s policies as strengthening the forces that led to decline – finance, free markets, trade liberalization – by the late 1990s these ideas were weakening even on the left. For New Labour there was no longer a problem of underperforming British capitalism.
There was, it seemed, a New Economy, a new weightless, past-less economy, which appeared to defy what seemed like old-fashioned laws of economic gravity, not least in the stock market boom which ran into 1999. People made fun of Gordon Brown for talking of ‘neo-endogenous growth theory’, but it was rather revealing that he was making a very general economic argument which suggested that what really mattered in growth was R&D and ‘human capital’, and not such things as investment or trade policy. For Brown, ‘It is a knowledge-based economy, in which the key to success and profitability is to get the best out of our people and all their potentials.’27
The 1997 manifesto was quite clear that, as far the economy was concerned, we ‘accept the global economy as a reality and reject the isolationism and “go-it-alone” policies of the extremes of right or left’.28 It was ‘a new and revitalised Labour Party that has been resolute in transforming itself into a party of the future,’ claimed the 1997 manifesto. Labour promised a fresh re-engagement with the global forces of modernization, a rejection of class politics, a commitment to efficiency. It presented itself as the modern, aspirational party, engaged with the deepest historical processes.

Illustration 20.1: Tony Blair as New Labour Prime Minister, by Steve Bell, 1999. Blair as the modernizing e.pope at a time when e.government and e.commerce were popular. The cart-horse representing the TUC is in homage to Low, who created the image. (© Steve Bell)
We aim to put behind us the bitter political struggles of left and right that have torn our country apart for too many decades. Many of these conflicts have no relevance whatsoever to the modern world – public versus private, bosses versus workers, middle class versus working class. It is time for this country to move on and move forward.
‘New Labour is the political arm of none other than the British people as a whole.’29 The rhetoric of novelty, newness, modernity, the global, was central to New Labour.30 It was an argument for the obliteration of the past. Indeed, New Labour got rid of Labour’s remaining welfarism: New Labour never promised to restore the link between the basic state pension and other benefits and earnings. This was at once a technical and a crucially important point, and a major break with Labour revisionism.
New Labour was close to the Liberal Democrats, and particularly to Roy Jenkins. He certainly pushed the idea of a progressive alliance in the United Kingdom, harking back to the New Liberals of 1906. There were continuities between Jenkinsite enthusiasm for Europe, social liberalism and New Labour. Yet the analogy should not be overdone. The Jenkinsite Labour right of the 1950s and 1960s believed in taxing and spending to redistribute income, to make society more equal. Roy Jenkins as Labour chancellor in the 1960s had fought and won battles to cut defence spending and get out of east of Suez, because, as he insisted, the United Kingdom needed to rid itself of the notion it was a world power. These policies were not ones which would appeal to New Labour.
In other words, what was striking about New Labour was not that it was a response to Thatcherism but its child.31 As Eric Hobsbawm put it in 1998,
the difficult truth seems to be that the Blair project, in its overall analysis and key assumptions, is still essentially framed by and moving on terrain defined by Thatcherism. Mrs Thatcher had a project. Blair’s historic project is adjusting Us to It. That touches half – the modernising part – of the task, as Marxism Today argued it. But the other, more difficult, half – that of the Left reinventing a genuinely modern response to the crisis of our times – has been largely abandoned …. Mr Blair seems to have learned some of the words. But, sadly, he has forgotten the music.32
Anyone looking for consensus in British political history will find it in ‘Blatcherism’ rather than ‘Butskellism’. The period from the mid-1990s was the period of the greatest identity of view between the major parties since 1950, or indeed since 1900. The lack of contestation over the key issues and practices of government was by twentieth-century historical standards extraordinary. It was an achievement of Mrs Thatcher and John Major that they converted one party to radical economic liberalism and had a hand in the creation of another committed to the same policy. There was agreement on free trade, for example. This was pointed out by one of the few remaining protectionists, Alan Clark, who was ‘still not ashamed to argue the archaic but traditional Tory case that we should protect our manufacturing industry … The choice will be between the welfare of our constituents as producers and their welfare as consumers.’ But he complained that both sides of the House now subscribed to the ‘consumerist ethic, and that the service industries and the ephemeral earnings of show business, with all its shallowness and triviality, will support a major economy of 55 million people’.33
This achievement went deeper than merely destroying a certain kind of opposition dangerous to capitalism, it involved weakening the very idea of opposition. Labour was always in part a party of protest; New Labour was nothing but a party of power. For all the weakness of the British socialist project, it always needed to mobilize on the basis of a distinct truth about society; it needed to expose, to criticize the nature of power in society. It had a crucial critical function, prided itself on being empirical, public, honest in contrast to the necessity of obfuscation imposed on parties of the status quo. Much as it rejected too-radical critiques of society, it was nevertheless in a world of critique. New Labour was very different. It took to dissembling about the nature of power with polished cynicism. Its task was not to generate any critique of economy or society; its publications were characterized by obfuscatory management speak. This gave rise to ‘Bullshit Britain’, as it was called, with reason.34
It operated in a world where parliament was marginal to real politics. The level of debate fell – by the end of the century members aimed to get reported not in the national press (which no longer covered parliament, except in sketches), but their own local press. They thus raised issues more appropriate for a local council and failed to discuss the key issues in which only parliament was competent with much seriousness or knowledge. Members of parliament, especially Labour members, given the nature of their constituencies, were overwhelmed with local casework which should have been the province of social workers or local councillors. Politics was the province of lobbyists – much better paid than MPs – special advisers and ministers. Those, like the majority of Labour MPs, with no external income, had lower incomes and status than the lobby correspondents or indeed the lobbyists who entertained them. Party conferences were places not of political debate between activists but lobbying sites protected from the world by heavy security barriers. MPs, like public opinion, were there to be manipulated.
At first New Labour promoted itself as an alternative to the Tories, armed with fresh concepts such as ‘stakeholders’ and ‘the Third Way’, a concern with the need to develop autonomous regional poles of economic development. It was, to be sure, much more consistently pro-European, more socially liberal, more open to constitutional change, to freedom of access to state information, to the minimum wage, than were the Conservatives as a party, though the contrast with the policies of John Major was far less clear.
There was talk of something called ‘Cool Britannia’, which effortlessly generated new industries in the bright new knowledge economy. In the 1990s ‘Cool Britannia’ stood for a celebration of a new swinging London and a revitalized pop and art culture – it was lost on New Labour that it was a term of 1960s irony. Neither the art nor the music was original: it was at best a replay of the 1960s, but without any radical or critical edge. The Rolling Stones were still playing, the Beatles still selling. It was perhaps telling that the plays chosen for revival in the 1990s were those of the 1950s – indeed those of J. B. Priestley, Noël Coward and Terence Rattigan, with only the occasional Arnold Wesker. The ‘creative industries’, as they came to be called, had little actually original about them. By contrast, by the end of the 1990s the declinist emphasis on the poverty of British science gave way among elite scientists to an emphasis on the strength of British academic science in comparative terms. This new argument for support, congruent with the emergent anti-declinist accounts, had evidence in its favour, long overlooked by declinists.35 Academic scientific research was expanding strongly, with funding supported by the argument that in the new economy national R&D would indeed produce economic growth. The reality was that funding academic research gave the illusion of action; it was little more than a safe and cheap substitute for a real industrial policy. It had been discovered earlier in the century that funding research, or even just talking about it, was a wonderful alternative to, for example, agricultural protection, or protecting the wages of miners. It was as if this notion had found its way back into the methods of liberal governance.
The ascendancy of New Labour meant the total marginalization of what remained of the Labour left. The Labour left, like the independent left parties which had grown up in the 1970s and 1980s, shrank radically or disappeared. A telling indicator of the fate of the left within Labour was what happened to Ken Livingstone. Livingstone was elected to parliament in 1987 but made no progress. He was even actively prevented by New Labour from being the candidate for the new mayoralty of London it created. Forced to stand as an independent, he beat the New Labour as well as the Conservative candidate in the first mayoral election of 2000. The first mayor of London, one of the greatest centres of global capitalism, was the only socialist politician of significance left in the United Kingdom.
The London left also had other small but significant victories. It was critical in getting non-white politicians into the House of Commons for the first time since the interwar years. In 1987 Diane Abbott, Paul Boateng and Bernie Grant were all elected for London seats, and Keith Vaz for a seat in Leicester. Most had started in politics in London local government. Bernie Grant had been leader of Haringay council between 1986 and 1988, one of a handful of black council leaders. All were condemned in the press and much of the Labour Party as loony leftists. The Labour Party had indeed been hostile to the creation of black sections within the party. The London left of the 1970s and 1980s had also been critical in making a public space for gays and lesbians, and the GLC played a key role in this. In the 1980s there was only one out gay MP, Chris Smith, who sat for Labour in Islington South in London. In 1997 he became the first out gay cabinet minister. New Labour repealed the notorious, though essentially unused section 28 of the Conservative Local Government Act, which sought to counter the example of the GLC in promoting gay rights, one of the very few bits of Tory law to go. After 1997 there were many more openly gay and lesbian and bisexual MPs, in all parties. The equalization of the age of consent came in 1999, though it must be noted that it had been reduced to eighteen under John Major and nearly equalized at sixteen under him.
By far the greatest change in the composition of the House of Commons in 1997, though much less associated with the left than the advance of black MPs, was in the extraordinary and sudden increase in the number of women. In 1997 the number of women sitting doubled, from sixty to 120, overwhelmingly now with the Labour Party. This was a huge change – for most of the years since 1945 the number of women was far fewer than working-class MPs before 1918, and they tended to focus on women’s issues: that would change from 1997.36
NEW LABOUR IN OFFICE
The Millennium Dome, planned to mark the arrival of the year 2000 by the Conservatives but taken up by New Labour, was perfectly emblematic of the new politics. It seemed to look to the future but plagiarized the past. It was not much more than a set of Skylons from the Festival of Britain of 1951. Peter Mandelson claimed it would display an amazing new computer game called Surfball. Why a computer game needed a gigantic dome to house it was not asked. Nor was Surfball looked into. It never existed.37 In that and much more it was rather like the notion of a distinct New Labour ideology, which, if it did exist, dissipated like the thinnest of mists.
When New Labour came in there were some gestures towards an alternative programme. A national minimum wage was established, and trade union representation at GCHQ restored. But there was no significant change in the Conservative trade union legislation. One of the first New Labour economic measures was the granting of control over monetary policy to the Bank of England, a point it was still proud of long after the financial crash of 2008.
It stressed that it was not going to increase public spending in the beginning and it didn’t. It claimed it had to make ‘hard choices’. In fact, it made, from the point of view of its political programme, the easy choices, just to follow the previous government. A particularly telling case is the National Health Service – something which New Labour, like Labour, particularly associated with itself. Did New Labour have a different approach to the NHS than the Conservatives? Did it have a fresh plan? The answer must be no. The New Labour government spent no more on the NHS than the Tories had planned for the first two years – it had committed itself in advance to do this for all public sector spending. It did, however, seem to promise a pushing-back against the internal market which the previous government had created whereby GPs became purchasers of health services for their patients. Yet the reform was cosmetic, and the internal market became an increasingly important feature of the system. Another example was domiciliary care. Under John Major there began a process of shifting from local authority homes to privatized care homes. Under New Labour the programme continued with no discernible break such that by 2000 more than half of the sector had become private.38
There was, as we have seen, no promise to renew the links between benefits and earnings. This was profoundly important, as it first drove down the pension as a proportion of average earnings to 16 per cent, where it stayed essentially to the end of New Labour in 2010. It had stood at 26 per cent at its peak during the 1970s Labour government.39 New Labour was content, it seemed, with a welfare state of minimal generosity, and special measures for a rediscovered underclass of the ‘socially excluded’. It created a new means-tested system of support for the working poor, one which radically extended means-testing and in effect subsidized employers paying low wages.
After 1999 public spending did increase under New Labour, notably in health and education (which had been singled out as a priority area). There was growth in welfare by stealth. Yet we need to recall that welfare spending had also been increasing under the Conservatives as we acknowledge that New Labour did become consciously keen on some public sector interventions. We should not think, however, that this tax and spend made New Labour like Old Labour. As we have seen, tax and spend had been the policy of the revisionists of the 1950s, not of Labour in general. Furthermore, when Old Labour wanted to provide more public services, it did this through the public sector. New Labour’s public spending increasingly went to the private sector.
New Labour took up ideas which the Conservatives had found difficult to pursue on any scale. The Private Finance Initiative (PFI), by which the private sector built facilities for the public sector to lease, only really got going under New Labour, with its hospital building programme, which stood at the centre of the PFI, renamed Public Private Partnerships (PPP), programme. The theory was that the private sector would build more cheaply, despite the higher cost of capital it faced. A more real accounting advantage was that the spending could be kept off state accounts. The truth was that costs were higher overall, and the state got lumbered with high-cost contracts it could not get out of. The contractors were also able to get leasing contracts at exorbitant prices. Accounting tricks and poor supervision allowed rich investors to loot a public sector left with huge long-term liabilities. It was as if New Labour created a new rentier class, living not on interest on the national debt, but on very much richer skimmings of the national tax take. Yet New Labour remained deeply committed to the PPP, not just for hospitals but for all manner of state investments. It was pronounced a good idea by New Labour think tanks funded by private companies and consultancies with interests in this lucrative business.40
Public money was paid in increasing quantities to private corporations to deliver public services, corporations whose only business this was, though often in more than one country. Central state services and local government services expanded, but through contractors, who paid high salaries to top management and miserable wages to the rest. New Labour greatly extended the transformation of the public sector not only by bringing in ‘outsourcers’ but also by bureaucratizing the state and para-state sectors, which were now clogged with performance indicators, targets and form filling.
There was not merely an accommodation to the existing ideological regime, but active conversion to it. The former socialist Gordon Brown was felt by some to be to the left of the prime minister he soon came to resent and plot against. Yet as an exceptionally powerful chancellor of the exchequer he was a strong supporter of the PFI. He came to read, quote and approve of US conservative thinkers.41 This was a powerful indication that New Labour was itself more than a mere tactical accommodation to the reality of the 1990s – it embraced the Conservative agenda at a deep level.
It was perhaps only in the constitutional sphere that New Labour did things the Conservatives would not have. A new Northern Ireland government and assembly was formed, with important elements of co-jurisdiction with Ireland under the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement of 1998. Here, acknowledgement of the long and patient work of John Major is needed. However, in the cases of creation of the Scottish parliament, the Welsh assembly and the London assembly the story is rather different. Tellingly, all these bodies were given different electoral systems to the first-past-the-post used for Westminster, and that for the European parliament changed.42 These were New Labour initiatives, as was the reform of the House of Lords to eliminate most hereditary peers. However, the crucial parliament remained Westminster, and this was determinedly unreformed. New Labour had promised a referendum on a new electoral system to be proposed in the future. A commission under Roy Jenkins was set up which rejected an enhanced Alternative Vote system. New Labour kicked the proposal into the long grass – the old system was working only too well for them.
TO WAR
Another area in which New Labour was a dogged follower of the Conservatives was in matters concerning the warfare state. In its 1987 manifesto Labour promised to get rid of the Trident programme and to use the money to increase conventional defence spending. In 1989 the Berlin wall came down; in 1991 the Soviet Union was dissolved. In 1992, and 1997, Labour and New Labour nonetheless backed Trident. The first deployment was in December 1994. The last of the four submarines went into service in 2001. New Labour went to extreme lengths to keep up defence expenditure (which had been falling under the Tories). By the late 1990s the United Kingdom spent about the same proportion of GDP on defence as France, but more than the European average. It is not clear that it had the general technological edge over Europe it once clearly held, not least since most weapons systems were shared (for example, the main RAF aircraft was the European Tornado fighter and bomber). Nor, importantly, did it have the capacity to wage a serious war independently. In 1998 New Labour staged a defence review quite unlike previous ones – the aim was to define new roles, not to eliminate unaffordable ones. Indeed, the review led to the start of the design of two aircraft carriers, bigger than those cancelled in the 1960s (the first started its sea trials in 2017). The aim was to provide a complete but small air, sea and land force, to assist US operations. Without that, the whole justification for forces beyond those needed for home defence, for military budgets above German levels, collapsed.43
New Labour would create a story of British exceptionalism to justify a newly global orientation of British armed force. It reinvented the United Kingdom as a global contender, retrieving long-established clichés, of bridges, or overlapping memberships of international organizations, which required a global military role. They implied that the 10 million British citizens living abroad needed defending, presumably from the Americans, French, Australians and Spaniards among whom they lived. They invoked the fact that the UK exported a lot proportionally and that it invested a lot abroad; it did not note that the UK attracted a lot of investment, which by the same argument meant others should defend the United Kingdom. They even claimed dependence on foreign oil, when the UK was still a major oil producer. ‘We have particularly important national interests and close friendships in the Gulf,’ they claimed, not stating that these concerned arms sales, not oil. The key export market became Saudi Arabia – United Kingdom supplied Lightning fighters from the 1960s, and from the 1980s European Tornados. There were a series of state-to-state deals involving corrupt payments, all shrouded in deep secrecy. As a result of these deals in the early 1990s 75 per cent of all British arms exports went to Saudi Arabia. Discounting this rather special contract, the United Kingdom’s share of the world’s arms trade slumped dramatically.44 It was claimed that ‘The British are, by instinct, an internationalist people … We do not want to stand idly by and watch humanitarian disasters or the aggression of dictators go unchecked.’ This was projecting into the future what had once been true many decades earlier. Lurking was the notion that the United Kingdom could maintain a seat at the ‘top table’ by virtue of its military prowess – the familiar idea that the United Kingdom ‘punches above its weight’ in matters military.
But the upshot was that the United Kingdom was returning permanently, consciously, if not to bases East of Suez, then to a commitment to intervene East of Suez. Not that this was a New Labour innovation. In 1991 British forces (including an armoured division) had taken part in the war to get Iraq out of Kuwait. Nineteen British died, nine by mistake by US aircraft. But into global action New Labour did go. In 1998 British aircraft bombarded Iraq from Kuwait. In 1999 British forces were in action, again with others, in Kosovo. In 2000 they went in, on their own, to Sierra Leone, a former British colony in Africa. Something called the ‘military covenant’ was invented in the year 2000, as if it had been an eternal bond of obligation between nation and soldier. In 2003, the 1st Armoured Division was back in Iraq alongside a very much larger US force. In total forty British service personnel, from all services, were killed in Iraq in the course of 2003. The toll would mount to 179 British; the Iraqi toll at the very least 1,000 times more.
IRAQ
The decision to join in with the USA in its extraordinary war against Iraq was in effect made long before 2003. It was implicit in the decision that the United Kingdom military policy was to supply additional forces for US operations. The armed forces were eager to participate. But to uphold it in the circumstances that arose was difficult too. Tony Blair found himself having to make a case for war, for many months, in opposition to the views of important allies such as France, Germany and much of the rest of the world, as well as many people in the United Kingdom. From this all the distortions, exaggerations and mendacities followed. In order to justify this basic decision to ally with the USA, not itself unreasonable, an extraordinary set of misconceptions had to be created.
The USA had decided to invade Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein in the light of the false belief or pretext that he was connected to Al-Qaida, who had destroyed the Twin Towers in New York in September 2001. Tony Blair nailed his colours to this policy early and decisively, working himself up into a world-historical frenzy in the process. In the crucial Iraq debate of 18 March Blair claimed that ‘many people’ thought that the danger from the Nazis was ‘fanciful’ or ‘worse, put forward in bad faith by warmongers’. Such a view was not at all widely held in the 1930s, not least because the political and military threat from the Nazis was obvious, at least to the left. Blair was as wrong about history as about Iraqi ‘weapons of mass destruction’ (WMD).
The case for war against Iraq was doubly misleading. It centred on WMD proliferation and mass-casualty terrorism: ‘This fusion of longstanding concerns about proliferation with the post-9/11 concerns about mass-casualty terrorism was at the heart of the Government’s case for taking action at this time against Iraq.’45 The problem was that Iraq neither had WMD nor supported terrorism. Sir John Chilcot’s post-mortem was brutally clear on this crucial point: ‘While it was reasonable for the Government to be concerned about the fusion of proliferation and terrorism, there was no basis in the Joint Intelligence Committe (JIC) Assessments to suggest that Iraq itself represented such a threat.’46 It is also telling that the British did not believe their own propaganda. While British troops went into action, ‘The risk of CW [Chemical Warfare] attacks was assessed as low, but the UK’s NBC [Nuclear, Biological, Chemical] protective capability while there for troops, would be “initially fragile”.’47 No clearer confirmation is needed that the invasion was about regime change and not chemical weapons. Yet the claim that such regime change was justified because Saddam was an especially vile dictator in that he killed his own people with chemical weapons was itself a serious distortion. He had used gas attacks against Iran, and its Kurdish allies, at a time when the British and US governments supported him and covered up the attacks.
Tony Blair’s Iraq adventure was often compared to Anthony Eden’s Suez. They were both much criticized for not telling the truth, but this was not their greatest crime. This was that they acted against the best interests of their nation, as well as against international norms. But there was one important difference. Eden was taking the lead in a British-French-Israeli rather than a US position. The serious charge against New Labour is not that they were deluded, but that they blindly followed the deluded policy of a particular foreign leader. The blame cannot be Blair’s only. The war was decided on by the New Labour cabinet and by a majority of Labour MPs; the majority of newspapers and the BBC were in tow. The Tory opposition was strongly in favour. The military and the intelligence services were keen; the army became desperate when the original plan to use a British division invading from Turkey was shelved. There was in 2003 no anti-war party in the United Kingdom, with the temporary exception of the Liberal Democrats. Yet many saw through all this, most notably a former foreign secretary, Robin Cook, who denounced the policy in parliament in the debate on 18 March 2003. People from all political positions did not believe it either and marched through London in what was and still is the largest political demonstration in British history.
The domestic consequences of the war were minimal. Tony Blair won a general election in 2005 and sent troops to Afghanistan, where they would die and be wounded in much greater numbers than Iraq. The reputation the army had created for itself in counter-insurgency did not survive Basra and Helmand. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq continued for longer than the First and Second World Wars combined. They brought not victory, but civil war, chaos and suffering of all sorts.
These extraordinary failures destroyed the last vestiges of a belief that the British state and its agencies told the truth if not the whole truth; the sense that the British state was primarily concerned with British, or European, interests. They also showed that the British state machine had lost the capacity for rational and critical examination of policy.48
OLD TIMES
Just as the adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan could be read as a return to previous times, so could other features of the twenty-first-century United Kingdom. Although British capital no longer dominated, even at home, London was restored to its Edwardian cosmopolitan pomp. Free trade, a laboriously created reality, made national economic borders non-existent in many key respects, again in ways which echoed the beginning of the twentieth century. Furthermore, the number of working-class members of parliament was reduced to 1910 levels.
Yet it was at this moment of the ending of the nation that the Labour chancellor, Gordon Brown, attempted to make ‘Britishness’ real. In a doubtless unconscious echo of the Edwardian campaign for Empire Day, he proposed a British National Day, a United Kingdom equivalent of 4 July and Bastille Day, to supplement St George’s Day, St Andrew’s Day, St David’s Day and St Patrick’s Day. Of course, politicians, even those with PhDs in History like Gordon Brown, are not required to be historically accurate or describe the present adequately. What is of interest is the vision, which in this case was one of both astonishing banality and great political import. He defined Britishness in ways that insulted the intelligence, and European partners. ‘British patriotism is, in my view, founded … on enduring ideals which shape our view of ourselves and our communities – values which in turn influence the way our institutions evolve,’ he intoned. These ‘enduring British ideals’ were ‘in addition to our qualities of creativity, inventiveness, enterprise and our internationalism’, nothing less than ‘a commitment to liberty for all, responsibility by all and fairness to all’. He repeatedly invoked the trinity ‘liberty, responsibility and fairness’, as if this tawdry trio could match up to ‘liberty, fraternity, equality’. Indeed, the speech barely mentioned Europe and implied a distinction from Europe. The central references are contained in the following extract:
I believe that, more sure of our values, we can become a Britain that is an increasingly successful leader of the global economy; a global Britain for whom membership of Europe is central; and then go on to help a reformed, more flexible, more outward-looking Europe play a bigger part in global society, not least improving relationships between Europe and the USA.49
Again, the implication was of British difference and superiority (‘helping’ Europe!); it was ‘global Britain’ with a special link to the USA. This was a moment of post-truth politics, as it would later be called. Blair and Brown in complex ways opened the way to UKIP and to non-fringe Euroscepticism, not least by encouraging fantasies of transformative revival and distinctiveness.
New Labour’s futurism, and Brown’s ideas about Britishness, wiped out the Labour past, not least its national past. But New Labour paid its dues to history, and in revealing ways. General Augusto Pinochet was arrested in London in October 1998 on a Spanish warrant for human rights violations in the 1970s and 1980s. He was arrested and held under house arrest into 2000, when the Labour government contrived to have him freed on health grounds, to avoid a ground-breaking legal judgement that he was liable to arrest and extradition. In doing so, New Labour undermined a new global human rights regime in favour of the most notorious butcher of socialists since the Second World War. Pinochet was called, without irony, ‘Britain’s only political prisoner’ by the right-wing press. Margaret Thatcher was voluble in his support, as well she might be, given his free market views and his help in the war against Argentina. Her last speech to the Conservative Party conference, in 1999, was on his arrest.50 It is even more telling that while in office New Labour agreed to an all-but-state funeral for Lady Thatcher, a ceremonial funeral with military honours. Big Ben was muffled, and Prime Minister’s Questions cancelled. Most prime ministers were buried privately: Winston Churchill was the only one since William Gladstone to have had a state funeral. The country saw her passing, when it came in 2013, rather differently. Her body was carried on a gun-carriage from the National Gladstone Memorial at the Aldwych, at whose unveiling in 1905 crowds had thronged years after his demise, along Fleet Street into the City of London and St Paul’s Cathedral, where her funeral service was held.51 There were no cranes left to be dipped in respect by dockers in the unprecedented honour the London proletariat gave Churchill in 1965. In the old and distressed pit villages of England, of Scotland and of Wales, forgotten former miners celebrated bitterly. Tony Blair, meanwhile, was making money working for some of the vilest torturers and dictators on earth.52 Only satirists, not historians, could do justice to this turn of events.