Ideas are only half the story.
| Author | Sayeed, Richard Power |
Patrick Diamond, The British Labour Party in Opposition and Power 1979-2019: Forward March Halted? Routledge 2021
Patrick Diamond's account of New Labour's origins focuses on the eighteen years preceding the 1997 general election, but he shows that the roots of Blair and Brown's project were as old as the party itself. Ramsay MacDonald's belief in making Labour a party of reform, rather than class struggle, was an obvious if rarely acknowledged starting point. New Labour also learned much from Clement Attlee's government, not least its patriotism and its co-option of liberal intellectuals such as Keynes and Beveridge.
Labour's post-war 'revisionist' tradition was a more easily identifiable influence. Hugh Gaitskell had dismissed Attlee's 'doctrinaire belief in public ownership' as a vote loser, and Blair and Brown agreed entirely. They also shared the fear that Gaitskell had felt ahead of the 1959 election about what voters would think of tax rises.
But Blair and those around him were so obsessed with not being Old Labour that they failed to learn key lessons from the party's history. Their opposition to even having an industrial policy would be one of their great undoings. And, like their predecessors, they operated with a Fabian confidence that all they needed to do was pull Whitehall's levers and 'mechanical' reform would be achieved. They were insufficiently influenced by the socialist humanist desire to achieve 'moral' reform by decentralising power to autonomous individuals and communities.
The traditions that formed New Labour were echoed across the continent. In 1956 Anthony Crosland had quipped: 'A spectre is haunting Europe--the spectre of revisionism'. He had lauded the Swedish and German social democrats for largely abandoning the goal of public ownership and for instead focusing on attaining social justice through welfare spending. That model still inspired Blair and Brown forty years later, and, because it was international, they felt able to admit to its influence. Another group of global guides whom they were happy to acknowledge were Bill Clinton's New Democrats. The Americans' lesson was that you didn't just have to shift right on the economy, you had to shift right on law and order too. When he was running for president, Clinton made sure he was back in Arkansas for the lethal injection of a murderer who had been lobotomised and who had serious mental health problems.
New Labour also learned from political failure. When he became French president in 1981, Francois Mitterrand had attempted to enact a radically socialist policy platform. But in the increasingly financialised world of the early 1980s, capital flight and the devaluation of the franc had forced him to reverse his measures. The lesson that Blair...
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