Twenty years of Renewal: Labour, New Labour, social democracy.

AuthorJackson, Ben
PositionEditorial - Editorial

To leaf through the back issues of Renewal is a gripping but disquieting experience; it brings back the mixed political emotions of the last twenty years. The excitement, and relief, of the run-up to 1997, with the end of the long Conservative night and the emergence at last of a viable centre-left governing project. The awkward, but still hopeful, adjustment to the realities of government, as long overdue reforms moved from theoretical debate in publications such as Renewal to the official policy of the British state. And of course, as the issues flick past, there is also disillusionment, spreading like a stain until it obscures even the strong parts of Labour's record in power.

As Renewal reaches its twentieth year of publication, it is salutary, in considering the journal's future agenda, to remind ourselves of Renewal's history.

A journal of Labour and New Labour politics

Renewal emerged from the Labour Co-ordinating Committee (LCC) in the wake of the 1992 general election. The LCC had been a leading element in the realignment of Labour's soft left behind the modernisation of the party and played an important role in Labour's return as a force capable of commanding wide popular support. Or, in the more pungent summary to be found in Robin Cook's diary:

Renewal, a thoughtful leftist magazine, which was born out of the Labour Co-ordinating Committee who had been an important part of the coalition taking on the Trotskyists and exposing their intellectual bankruptcy. (Cook, 2004, 302) The struggle with the far left may have been successful, but defeat in 1992 was an unforgiving metric of the distance Labour still had to travel. A political journal could provide valuable space in which to debate Labour's intellectual and political dilemmas, and so Renewal, under the editorial stewardship of Neal Lawson and Paul Thompson, was born. As the initial editorial statement of the journal observed:

The fourth Conservative election victory brought home the deep crisis of ideas facing Labour and the left of British politics. Yet there are insufficient means for political dialogue, in-depth analysis and strategic debate to reverse that trend. It is against that background that the Labour Co-ordinating Committee and Lawrence and Wishart launched this journal. The statement added: 'We are unashamedly a journal of Labour politics' (Renewal, 1993).

But it was with the ascension of Tony Blair to the party leadership and the emergence of 'New Labour' that Renewal moved to the heart of the political action. 'A journal of Labour politics' became 'A journal of New Labour politics', and Renewal offered one of the key venues in which the emerging shape of the Blair and Brown era was delineated and debated. It was judged by commentators to be 'the modernisers' house journal--New Labour before the term was invented' (Happold, 2003). Some of the key figures involved in the journal were later described as 'the shock troops of Blairism in 1994-5' (Wintour, 2003).

In retrospect, it is easy to forget that the rise of Blair was accompanied by considerable good-will from academics and intellectuals: part of his appeal was a promise to rethink...

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