From Old Labour to New Labour: A Comment on Rubinstein
| Author | Luke Martell,Stephen Driver |
| Published date | 01 February 2001 |
| Date | 01 February 2001 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9256.00134 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
From Old Labour to New Labour:
A Comment on Rubinstein
Stephen Driver
University of Surrey Roehampton
Luke Martell
University of Sussex
In a critique of our book New Labour, David Rubinstein has argued that we exaggerate the degree
of difference between Old and New Labour and underplay the similarities. In this article we agree
with many of the continuities that Rubinstein outlines. However, we argue that he himself gives
plenty of evidence in favour of our thesis that change has been marked in many policy areas. We
argue that we give a good account of the wider social factors that he says accounts for such change.
In this article we offer a restatement of the view that New Labour offers a ‘post-Thatcherite’
politics. New Labour breaks both with post-war social democracy and with Thatcherism.
Was 1994, the year Tony Blair became leader of the Labour Party, the start of
something really new? David Rubinstein’s recent article in Politics (Rubinstein,
2000) provides a useful discussion of analyses of New Labour. It focuses on
arguments such as those made in our book New Labour: Politics after Thatcherism that
stress the break between Old Labour and New (Driver and Martell, 1998).
Rubinstein suggests that we exaggerate this break, ignoring significant continuities.
In-so-far as there has been change, he argues, we have underplayed the extent to
which it is a rational response to a changed social context.
Rubinstein is right to highlight the continuities in Labour’s political history.
Foreign policy under Robin Cook is ‘business as usual’, despite all the ‘ethical’
window-dressing. The Labour Party old and new has had to appeal beyond its core
of traditional working-class voters – and, yes, it is social change that has stacked the
electoral deck against the contemporary Labour Party, as we point out in the book.
Themes such as ‘community’ are old political hat for Labour. Harold Wilson loved
his technological revolutions every bit as much as Tony Blair does – and worried
more about education than tax-and-spend redistribution. Even the slogan ‘New
Britain’ isn’t, well, new. Not many of the many Old Labours – and Old Labour
came in all shapes and sizes – really stood for the class war against big business. By
and large, Labour governments have seen economic prosperity as the overriding
policy goal – certainly ahead of workers’ wage demands and even the threat of
inflation. No one in their right mind would ever suggest that the Labour Party was
a band of revolutionaries contemplating an assault on the forces of capitalism. The
Labour Party has always been a reformist social democratic (or democratic socialist)
party. Rubinstein is quite right to point to the social democratic aspects of the
current Labour government, such as the minimum wage and the interventions of
Stephen Byers at the Department of Trade and Industry. Gordon Brown may be
POLITICS: 2001 VOL 21(1), 47–50
© Political Studies Association, 2001.
Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
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