Corbyn
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There is also the distinctive formation of Blair himself to take into account. Although he had claimed in correspondence to Michael Foot that he ‘came to Socialism through Marxism’,9 it seems rather unlikely that he had ever come within a country mile of either. Nothing he has ever said or done indicates the presence of such formative influences, and the most realistic explanation seems to be Labour historian Martin Pugh’s, that Blair entered politics ‘as an impressionable and largely non-political young man’, that he gravitated to those with power and success, and that his attraction to ‘fairly extreme right-wingers’ such as Bush, Berlusconi, Aznar and Sarkozy was in part a reflection of his formation in a Conservative family and in part a reflection of his susceptibility to power.10
One of the things that was meant by New Labour, moreover, was that it was a fundamentally different kind of party to that which had been known. As the former Marxism Today intellectuals astutely argued, Labour had been ‘running, ever since Neil Kinnock’s election to the leadership, mainly against itself. Key speeches to party and trade union audiences have nearly always emphasised departures from traditional party thinking, and taken the form of public demonstrations … of how different New Labour was from what had gone before’.11 The dramatic dropping of one social-democratic nostrum after another was the main policy mood music, culminating in the symbolic change to Clause IV of the constitution, wherein the rigours of the market were to be the main instrument of delivering fairness. But the party itself also had to change.
The centre of power in the Labour Party had never been the constituency membership. In the party’s classically federal structure, in which individual members were one component alongside trade unions and various socialist societies, the main power had traditionally been invested in the union leaders. At national conference, after 1918, unions had cast 2,471,000 votes, as compared to 115,000 cast by constituency branches, and 48,000 cast by socialist societies. Through the first experiences of office, the weight of power began to shift to the parliamentary leadership, but this didn’t necessarily trouble the union leadership, which understood the need for firm party management, and whose interests were usually congruent with those of the party elite. What is more, managers of both unions and the party tended to converge on their view of the constituency membership as a control problem, being filled with middle-class idealists and unreliable socialists. They were useful to connect to the electorate, but otherwise to be kept away from decision-making.12 Hence, unions for most of the twentieth century provided the party leadership with a reliable ally, and ensured the unshakeable dominance of the Right and centre over the party machinery.
This was the core of the old Labour Right’s power in the organisation. But it had begun to slowly enter into a crisis in the 1960s, in part because the union leaderships began to move to the left, and in part because the social-democratic compact was breaking down. By the 1970s, a section of the party’s right-wing was convinced that unions themselves were the problem, rather than their best ally. And by the early 1980s, the party had seen several union leaders line up behind Tony Benn’s radical socialist candidacy for deputy leader. Not only that, but thanks to the trade union influence, the National Executive Committee, traditionally controlled by the party’s right-wing, had been increasingly populated by the Left – something that the right-wing backlash of the 1980s had only partially succeeded in fixing.13 The new Labour Right wanted a different kind of power base and, to that purpose, had been enjoying a longing look abroad, at the Democratic Party of the United States. The ‘American Tendency’ in the Labour Party, as it was dubbed by Robin Ramsay, had always been strong, but it was in the course of early 1990s junkets funded by US businesses that Blair and Brown had begun to forge their alliances with the ‘New Democrats’.14 There was a party in which a dynamic layer of ‘New Democrats’ was coming to the fore, ready to swing their party hard to the right and bring the grass-roots activists to heel, in order to win. There, the unions had their proper place: as subordinate clients, donors who might be able to buy a few concessions but who had little say in policymaking or internal power struggles. The founders of New Labour convinced themselves and those around them that the union influence in the Labour Party had been a major cause of the party’s ongoing electoral difficulties, despite psephological studies providing little evidence for this.15
Blair and his allies – Mandelson, Brown, Campbell, and Gould – set about radically reorganising the Labour Party and transferring power to the top and centre of the organisation. The first change was to consolidate the powers of the leadership, which was seen as both an electoral asset insofar as it helped project Blair’s telegenic image. It was also construed as being more democratic, insofar as the leadership would be more responsive to popular opinion, as gauged in polls and focus groups, than the unrepresentative party membership. Finally, it would help the leadership secure the support of business and the City, if the membership were seen to be under firm control. The second major change was to the annual conference. Increasingly stage-managed debates took the place of actual policymaking, which was shifted to the National Policy Forum. This was linked to the third change, in which the union block vote was replaced with a voting procedure inaccurately dubbed ‘One Member One Vote’ (OMOV). In fact, the new system was based on an electoral college in which each MP’s vote had the same weight as thousands of members votes. A genuine OMOV system was not used until the 2015 leadership election. Alongside these constitutional changes, the Blairites proved extremely adept at managing and neutralising NEC discussions, and intervening in selection procedures for parliamentary candidates. With the internal lobby group Progress backing them up and with funding from Lord Sainsbury, they successfully parachuted candidates in to safe seats, to ensure that the parliamentary party more closely aligned with the leadership.16
The scale of the changes wrought in Labour were all the more remarkable because the actual number of Blairites in the party, even in the parliamentary party, was quite small. The pro-Blair columnist Martin Kettle estimated the number in parliament at perhaps a dozen MPs.17 They were always operating as a minority vanguard, and would not have been remotely as effective had it not been for the demoralisation of the entire party. Yet, in their way, they merely continued the lines of political and organisational change already signalled under Neil Kinnock, whose hoarding of leadership power and attempt to isolate and disempower the constituency and union base in the interests of ‘electability’ was the prototype upon which Blair’s reign was fashioned.18
New Labour in Power
While the Blairites adapted Labour culturally, politically and organisationally to the success of Thatcherism, there had been a growing revolt against it among some of its former supporters, particularly after a major economic debacle in 1992, in which the Major administration attempted to pilot Britain into the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), only to find it had to support the currency’s value with soaring interest rates. This underlined the economic insecurity that the Conservatives had brought even to some traditionally comfortable middle-class layers. Almost nothing in the interim between ‘Black Wednesday’ in 1992, when the UK crashed out of the ERM, and the general election in May 1997, altered or reversed the huge shift in a critical section of the electorate. The Conservatives languished at around 30 per cent in the polls, while Labour tended to poll in the low forties. Labour’s biggest gains in 1997 were among (white-collar and middle-class) AB voters, while it actually saw a small decline in its support from (‘unskilled’ and unemployed) DE voters.
What New Labour would do with power was not entirely clear at this point. In an era in which the very power of national governments to deliver reforms was under question, the Blairites gainsaid the question. The traditional range of reforms was barely aimed for, while the word ‘reform’ itself was captured for purposes entirely contrary to social-democratic traditions: for example, the application of market ‘efficiency’ to even those treasured and sentimentalised achievemen
ts of Labour’s past. The legacy inherited by the incoming government was bleak. At the foundation was an economy that lacked competitiveness, whose share of global trade had plummeted, and whose manufacturing base was withering. The UK economy was disproportionately pivoted on finance and commerce, something that the Major administration had struggled to rectify but without the requisite policy instruments. In the interstices of economic decline there had arisen unprecedented levels of poverty and, despite the increasingly broad diffusion of multicultural sensibilities, much of it was concentrated among ethnic minorities who had been forced into urban enclaves by a combination of council policy and white racism. Income inequality had risen faster in the UK than in any comparable industrialised country. In the rush to home ownership and sales of council housing, the housing stock had been left to crumble in large areas of the country. The falling value of pensions meant that a growing number of pensioners were in poverty.19
New Labour’s instrument for dealing with this legacy was what Gordon Brown called ‘post-monetarist economics’. This entailed a rejection of Keynesian demand-management techniques, and an acceptance of the doctrine of the ‘non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment’ (NAIRU), according to which spending to create jobs was likely to drive up inflation to unsustainable levels. Mainstream economists argued that the ‘natural’ rate of unemployment was approximately 5 per cent. Brown’s strategy was to reduce that level through supply-side measures intended to make hiring more attractive to employers. This could be done by reducing taxes on profits, cutting taxes on employment and even subsidising employment in certain conditions. It also involved maintaining strong anti-union laws to reduce the bargaining power of labour, investing to increase the skills and productivity of workers. Gordon Brown, recognising this, placed particular emphasis on skilling up labour.
Thus, New Labour reduced corporation taxes and small business taxes, kept most of the anti-union laws in place, and introduced various schemes such as the ‘New Deal’ which were intended to skill-up workers and pay employers to give them work experience. There is not much evidence of success on this front. Employment rose, in general, despite continued low productivity, and expansion was predicated on low-skilled labour.20 Aside from this, there was little progressive about such supply-side strategies. Improving workers’ skills may be a good strategy for business but, on its own, would simply raise the supply of skilled workers and thus depress the cost of labour. And indeed, the imperative to keep labour cheap and flexible shaped and limited many of the measures Labour implemented to satisfy their base – a minimum wage was introduced in the spring of 1999 but at a pitiably low level of £3.60 for adults, some of the worst anti-union controls were repealed but the majority were kept in place, and Labour continued to seek UK opt-outs from EU labour codes.
Spending was also constrained by the promise that taxes on higher income earners and company profits would be kept low, such that corporation tax was cut from the first budget. Further, borrowing was constrained by Gordon Brown’s ‘golden rule’ identified in his first budget – ‘over the economic cycle the Government will borrow only to invest’.21 Given the attempts by Conservatives to claim that Labour ‘overspending’ produced the deficit – barely contested by Labour – it is important to outline the facts of how Blair and Brown managed spending. In New Labour’s first term, from 1997 to 2001, the top priority was not public investment but establishing credibility with financial markets by reducing government debt. The debt was reduced by a total of £34bn in the last year of New Labour’s first term – a larger total reduction than all the cumulative debt reduction of previous governments for fifty years. This meant that investment in most government departments fell precipitously for the first years of the New Labour administration. Overall public spending fell from over 40 per cent of GDP in 1997 to 38.1 per cent in 2001. Even with successive fiscal problems in the ensuing years and a subsequent need to borrow to plug black holes, by 2004 Gordon Brown had reduced the debt from 44 per cent of national income to 34 per cent. By 2005, the combined spending on debt interest and unemployment benefits had fallen by a half. In the latter half of the 2000s, public spending would rise to above 40 per cent again, reaching 41.1 percent in 2007–08. Only with the credit crunch and ensuing recession did it return to levels last seen in Thatcher’s first two terms, rising to 47.5 per cent of GDP for 2009–10. The deficit that arose resulted from the reduction in the tax base as unemployment soared and the economy shrank, along with the massive bailouts for the financial sector.22
Nor could such investment as was provided be disaggregated from the wider policy framework guiding its use. It was one thing for the government to boast of monies for new hospitals and schools, but the most immediately obvious and visible way that it chose to invest these was in futile semi-privatisation schemes, in which private contractors were given lucrative thirty-year contracts to build and maintain services at greatly inflated cost, and with significantly reduced services.23 Finally, and most importantly, the entire model of investment depended upon the economic growth provided by a booming financial sector and soaring consumer spending. As soon as that growth model no longer availed, the basis for New Labour’s cautious experiments in social democracy was gone.
Work, Flag and Family
The government’s economic policy dovetailed with a social moralism that shaped both its welfare and its penal policies. Since, after all, the government was providing ‘opportunity’ and removing the sources of ‘exclusion’, any lingering resistance to inclusion on these terms had to be the result of welfare dependency or other behaviours needing discipline. As Gordon Brown put it in his first budget, anticipating the current government’s language on workfare, since Labour was offering young people the chance of paid work or training, ‘benefits will be cut’ for anyone refusing to ‘take up the opportunities’. This was also related to the government’s obsession with proving its pro-family bona fides. Like any Conservative, Blair tended to locate the blame for social problems in the decay of the family. In Mandelson and Liddle’s account of the formation of New Labour, they quote Blair’s explanation of the Jamie Bulger killing that it was undoubtedly a result of the ‘breakdown in family life’. Later, the government would also add the string of ‘Britishness’ to its bow, arguing that to be included was to be integrated into a core of – always vaguely defined – British values. This produced a strange effect. On the face of it, New Labour was cosmopolitan, socially progressive and averse to bigotry. Its abolition of Section 28, opposed by Conservatives who would blush to admit it today, seemed to signal the arrival of, dixit John Major, ‘a nation at ease with itself’. Yet in many respects New Labour’s model of social inclusion, guided by the virtues of work, flag and family, reflected the social values of a provincial fifties suburb.24
Social policy under New Labour put a premium on the promotion of ‘paid work’ as the critical means of social inclusion. The shift on the spectrum from welfare to workfare, part of a long-developing consensus among governing elites since the 1980s, was necessarily also a shift from safety net to discipline. Surprisingly, despite cleaving to social values more typically liberal than Blair’s, the centre-Left press was at times an important ally for New Labour on this front. For example, when Blair, shortly before his resignation, planned policies cutting welfare for jobless single parents and introducing agencies to ‘nudge’ benefits claimants back to work, the Observer was there to cast this as another example of Blair’s magic rapport with some mythical, mysterious creature named ‘Asda Woman’.25 Likewise, when the government first floated workfare – later implemented fully as a Conservative policy – the liberal columnist Polly Toynbee was among its most vociferous champions: ‘The Tories were right,’ she announced, ‘workfare really works.’26 Nor did Labour stop once it had started. Having immediately cut benefits for single mothers after being elected with a landslide, in a policy graciously left to Harriet Harman to steward through parliament, it was soon going after the disabled and fu
ture retirees. Cynically, one might applaud such measures if they did ‘work’ on their own terms. In fact, where New Labour did succeed in reducing forms of poverty it was through surreptitious forms of spending and targeted benefits increases.27 Total employment continually climbed until the credit crunch, but there is no evidence that benefit cuts or the threat thereof had any significant impact.
In addition to welfare cuts and inducements to take paid employment, the government looked for ways to discipline and erase forms of bad behaviour that it claimed were eroding families and communities and contributing to social exclusion. With curfews and Anti-Social Behaviour Orders, the government set about criminalising otherwise perfectly lawful behaviour. Often the law was strange and nasty in application: a boy with Tourette’s syndrome was given an ASBO for swearing. Another man was threatened with an ASBO for joking about the death of the Pope. A boy was ASBOd for the grievous offence of wearing a hoodie. And as if to underline just how callous and perverse the law was, a woman with noted suicidal tendencies was given an ASBO forbidding her from going near railway lines or multistorey car parks.28 The definition of ‘anti-social behaviour’ was so vague that practically any behaviour could be subject to such an order, and any citizen could thus end up threatened with prison for non-compliance. New Labour developed such confidence in its measures that, toward the end of his reign, Blair began to suggest that the government could pre-emptively intervene to prevent the children of problem families from becoming a ‘menace to society’ – a form of intervention that could even take place ‘pre-birth’.29 Finally, if parents of children acting ‘anti-socially’ refused government help, there were to be ‘parenting orders’ mandating forcible state intervention to nudge them along.30