Left for Dead?: The Strange Death and Rebirth of the Labour Party. Lewis Goodall
sisters, who had lived with us all together in Erdington, were by then starting to have kids of their own (waiting to the grand old age of their early and mid-twenties, which is pretty late in my family‡). They seemed better off than we had been. Not so much because their income was greater – if anything it was probably a touch less – but it was topped up by the new sprawling system of tax credits created by Gordon Brown. I couldn’t help but be aware of this because occasionally, in the car on the way home after we had been visiting, Mum’s eyes would flash and invariably she’d spit out something like: ‘They don’t know they’re born, we didn’t get tax credits or anything like that with you.’ Nothing quite like sisterly love, sometimes.
Much if not all of what I’ve just relayed followed inexorably from my watching the New Labour government to office, on that 1997 day. They put the money in to refit old dilapidated council housing on its last legs. They established the Gifted and Talented fund. They invested in regional cities. They refurbished schools. They established the Aim Higher Summer School Programme.§ In short, I have no doubt that I wouldn’t be where I am today were it not for the New Labour government. They say the personal is political. It doesn’t get more personal than that. You can say it was all on tick, all on borrowed time. You can say that Blair didn’t achieve enough, that he was a neoliberal, a Tory, a Thatcherite wolf in Labour clothing. You’re perfectly entitled to think this and you’re perfectly entitled to make the accusation that I’m a Blairite or Blair defender (I’m sure some of you will). None of this is true – I’m a journalist and like all journalists I can only relay to you lived experience as I see it and experience it. I can only tell you that those things were transformative to me and to those around me. I think it’s also the reason why – you wouldn’t know it from reading the editorials in the Guardian or listening to many of the bien pensant voices in London – in many working-class communities there are plenty of people (my parents and their friends included) who don’t have a bad word to say about Tony Blair. They remember their lives before his time in office and they felt their material lives tangibly improve. My own life is among that number. Many people I know want someone to arrest Tony Blair. I confess to you that when I met him for the first time as a journalist, part of me – a not insignificant part – wanted to thank him for what his government had done.
I got older, I saw many of the government’s imperfections, began to appreciate Blair’s and Brown’s personality defects, the endless tedium of their interminable psychodrama. I, like many others, felt disillusioned by the horrors of Iraq. By the end of my period at university, watching the results programme on my iMac with friends, drinking cheap wine in plastic cups right in the middle of my finals week, it felt like New Labour’s time was exhausted, tarnished in a thousand ways, in the sands of the Middle East, in the expenses office of the House of Commons, in the pages of the Hutton Report, in the meeting rooms of Downing Street where the Election That Never Was was called off. But it’s clear, now we can look at the period with a more neutral, dispassionate lens, that in most ways Britain got better in those years, especially for the people Labour was established to defend and promote, the working classes.
It is then a matter of some curiousness that Blair’s name is mud and that period of Labour government, the longest in the party’s history, is considered an embarrassing aberration by so many within and without the Labour Party. The fate of its reputation tells us much, not only about the inadequacies of both New Labour and its replacement but of the entire breed of ‘moderate’ centre-leftism that has all but disappeared around the world.
I don’t propose to give a blow-by-blow account of the New Labour years. It’s already been done. Instead, we need a different approach in our attempts to understand that era. The most common accusation against New Labour is that it had become a pale imitation of the Tory Party, that it had mutated into a form of Thatcherism with, at best, a human edge. This accusation was made in its earliest days. Even by 1996, before Blair became prime minister, the mid-1990s seminal state of the nation TV drama Our Friends in the North lambasted the project as a sell-out. The son of one of the main characters, Mary (who had started out on the left of the party as a local councillor only to become leader of Newcastle City Council in the 1980s and a Blairite MP), accosts his mother at a political meeting: ‘Mother, man, if you and your New Labour party sound any more like the Tories they’ll sue you for plagiarism.’ This belief was to embed itself, then multiply, before it finally became received wisdom in the party, and is the main reason, alongside his foreign policy decisions, why Blair has been disowned as a pariah.
There are many legitimate criticisms to be made of Blair. His decisions in the wake of 9/11, to religiously stick with a neoconservative American administration in particular, deserve much of the ire for which they are now known. Blair’s development into a political masochist, irritating his base, attacking students, the public sector, led to a drift from his social democratic beginnings. However, it is a gross, ahistorical and absurd contention that the New Labour years were ‘Tory-lite’. For all of its faults, the Labour government was not a Conservative (or conservative) one and did things that a Tory administration would never have countenanced. It fails to understand either what New Labour was or the historical and political moment in which the Labour Party found itself in the early to mid-1990s. Nonetheless, even though it was in fact a recognisably Labour government, it did, in its rhetoric, if not in its actions, sow the seeds of the leftist Corbynist revival that it was its raison d’être to banish and destroy. This is my attempt, 25 years on, to offer a rounded perspective on New Labour and its place in history.
NEW, NEWER AND NEWEST LABOUR
New Labour was an election-winning machine: it presided over by far and away the most successful electoral period in the party’s century-long history, achieving 13 years in office and three terms in government. It is nearly always forgotten now that before the 1997–2010 ministries the longest period the party had been continuously in office was five and a half years. Prior to 1997, the last time the party had won a decent majority was in 1966, under Harold Wilson. Yes, 1966. In other words, by the late 1990s it wasn’t just England fans enduring thirty years of hurt; decent Labour majorities felt nearly as rare as England winning the World Cup. The Conservatives were in office for sixty-six out of one hundred years of the twentieth century, about the same length of time as the Communists in the Soviet Union – and the Soviets hadn’t had the minor inconvenience of periodically having to secure the population’s consent. The Tories were election-winning dynamos and had moulded a nation in their own image. Labour’s performance, by contrast, had been anaemic.
New Labour, then, was a movement born out of desperation. The party, especially after the shock defeat of 1992, was questioning its very survival as a credible governing force. The original British (and better!) television series of House of Cards summed up well the mood of the early 1990s. The Machiavellian protagonist, Francis Urquhart, succeeds Thatcher as prime minister and goes on to win three more general election victories, each victory being narrow but absolute. At one point, Urquhart, seeking a new political adviser, asks a candidate to assess his government’s performance:
SARAH: Extremely effective. By not seeking the approval of all of the people all of the time you’ve put yourself in a very strong position. You’ve got 46 per cent of the people and that means you can afford to ignore all of the rest. And you do. Labour has no chance because it has no power base. Most of the underclass isn’t registered to vote. You’ve virtually destroyed the two-party system.
URQUHART: Good.
The exchange, initially broadcast in 1993, not long after the Conservatives’ fourth victory, is an insight into the now lost mindset of the mid-1990s political observer, especially when you remember that it was written by a Conservative peer. The Conservatives having enough people in the right places could dominate the House of Commons through the ‘first past the post’ system in perpetuity, especially given that Labour’s appeal was so limited. This theory was pre-eminent at the time: that Labour’s social base had proved too narrow and brittle, that as a party born in the fires of the smelter and the soot of the mines, of the manual and unionised working class, in an