New Labour, New Narrative? Political Strategy and the Discourse of Globalisation
| Author | Daniel T. Dye |
| DOI | 10.1111/1467-856X.12043 |
| Published date | 01 August 2015 |
| Date | 01 August 2015 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
New Labour, New Narrative? Political
Strategy and the Discourse
of Globalisation
Daniel T. Dye
Research Highlights and Abstract
• Contrary to conventional analyses, the British Labour Party most closely pursued a
‘median voter’ strategy before 1994, to little success.
• ‘Globalisation-as-inevitability’ was a key organising trope of ‘New Labour’ discourse
across the subsequent Blair and Brown eras.
• Globalisation was represented in public texts in a way that buttressed New Labour’s
new strategic agenda of emphasising economic competence and pragmatism over
ideology.
• The globalisation discourse also changed over time, containing greater emphases on
the constraining effect of globalisation after Labour came to power in 1997.
• New Labour’s risky rhetorical support for the EU was linked to globalisation claims
and further served to distinguish Labour modernisation from Tory dogmatism.
At the Labour Party conference in 2005, Tony Blair declared that debating globalisation would be
like debating ‘whether autumn should follow summer’. This articulation of the imperatives of a
newly-globalised world was central to the creation of ‘New’ Labour. How should we understand
this turn from the autonomous socialism promised a generation earlier? In this article, I propose
that Labour’s discourse was produced in response to strategic demands of political competition.
Synthesising Riker’s concept of heresthetics with insights from discourse analysis, the article pro-
poses parties as discursive-herestheticians who constructively use rhetorical tropes to achieve con-
crete ends. This approach is applied to Labour through qualitative textual analysis of speeches and
documents, read in the context of electoral strategy. The analysis produces an alternative interpre-
tation of New Labour strategy that serves as a corrective to the ‘cartel party’ account of Labour
having abandoned real political competition in favour of the centre ground.
Keywords: party politics; discourse; globalisation; New Labour
The pace of change can either overwhelm us, or make our lives better and
our country stronger. What we can’t do is pretend it is not happening. I
hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation. You might as
well debate whether autumn should follow summer (Blair 2005).
This striking statement by Prime Minister Tony Blair to the Labour Party’s Annual
Conference is emblematic of the party he had rechristened ‘New Labour’. Less than
a generation earlier, the party had been led to defeat in the 1983 general election
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doi: 10.1111/1467-856X.12043 BJPIR: 2015 VOL 17, 531–550
© 2014 The Author.British Journal of Politics and International Relations © 2014
Political Studies Association
behind a manifesto promising autonomous socialism. Pinpointing the transitional
moment between the Old and New Labour Parties has been a source of controversy
in the field of British politics, with a variety of watersheds proposed anywhere
between the 1983 and 1994 leadership elections. In this article, I take the answer
to be 9 April 1992, the evening of Labour’s third consecutive general election
defeat. This was the moment when the party’s modernisers realised that they had
been playing a losing game, and the story of the ensuing decade would be their
attempt to change the accepted rules of British politics enough to secure a return to
power. This arc from marginality1to landslide victory in 1997 is hard to explain in
terms of traditional approaches to party politics. Rather, it was enabled by a
remaking of the party’s image that reached beyond policy positions to the public
narratives that shape the electorate choice. Central to this process was New
Labour’s far-reaching discourse of ‘globalisation’.
The existing narratives were structured against Labour, and the party made multi-
ple, successive attempts to intervene through the language of modernisation,
communitarianism, the ‘stakeholder economy’, and famously the ‘third way’. Con-
sistent from an early period, however, was representation of the world in terms of
inexorable globalisation. The party adopted a nuanced stance on the normative
merits—globalisation offering opportunities and threats—but the ‘objective fact’ of
globalising forces as a power beyond the control of national governments remained
certain. Critical and constructivist scholars of political economy have shown that
this is not the only possible reading of global economic developments, but it is one
with important implications. In this article, I propose that globalisation discourse
was neither an incidental nor an inevitable feature of Labour’s political resurgence.
It was, rather, the anchor for a set of carefully crafted arguments that enabled the
public to change its dominant representation of Labour from a principled-but-
dangerous opposition force to a respectable party of government. This suggests an
electoral-strategic reading of the globalisation discourse, and a discursive reading of
party strategy, which respond both to the ideational literature on globalisation and
to conventional studies of party politics.
By analysing New Labour’s rhetoric in detail, and examining how a specific idea
(globalisation discourse) is developed and attached to various arguments, we can
bring critical and constructivist findings about the power of discourse to bear on this
question of electoral politics. Also, to the extent that constructivists are correct that
the specific representation of globalisation has material effects, understanding the
strategic value of this discourse will be invaluable to speculating about its use and
impact in the future. I develop this argument in four steps: in the first section below
I briefly review the existing literature on New Labour, which consists mostly of
variations on the theme of accommodation with Thatcherite Toryism. Second, I
proceed to develop an alternative approach to political party analysis that will act as
a corrective to the narrowness of conventional analysis. Third, I go on to illustrate
and develop this approach by applying it to the well-known case of the Labour
Party’s deployment of globalisation discourse under Blair and Gordon Brown.
Fourth, and by way of conclusion, I discuss the implications of this approach for
understanding the present course of the Labour party, as well as for the study of
party politics generally.
532 DANIEL T. DYE
© 2014 The Author.British Journal of Politics and International Relations © 2014 Political Studies Association
BJPIR, 2015, 17(3)
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