11Ralph Miliband, Parliamentary Socialism: A Study in the Politics of Labour, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1964, p. 43.
12Tudor Jones, Remaking the Labour Party: From Gaitskell to Blair, London: Routledge, 1996, pp. 4–5.
13Gregory Elliott, Labourism and the English Genius: The Strange Death of Labour England?, London: Verso, 1993, p. 33.
14Ross McKibbin, Parties and People: England 1914–1951, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, pp. 29–30.
15Andrew Thorpe, A History of the British Labour Party: Third Edition, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, pp. 59–60.
16Ralph Miliband, Parliamentary Socialism: A Study in the Politics of Labour, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1964, pp. 103–4.
17Gregory Elliott, Labourism and the English Genius: The Strange Death of Labour England?, London: Verso, 1993, p. 38.
18Ralph Miliband, Parliamentary Socialism: A Study in the Politics of Labour, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1964, p. 108
19Ralph Miliband, Parliamentary Socialism: A Study in the Politics of Labour, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1964, p. 112
20Ralph Miliband, Parliamentary Socialism: A Study in the Politics of Labour, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1964, pp. 128–36; Andrew Thorpe, A History of the British Labour Party: Third Edition, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, p. 66.
21Matthew Worley, Labour Inside the Gate: A History of the British Labour Party Between the Wars, London: IB Tauris, 2009, p. 123.
22Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century, London: IB Tauris, p. 57; Matthew Worley, Labour Inside the Gate: A History of the British Labour Party Between the Wars, London: IB Tauris, 2009, pp. 123–5.
23Gregory Elliott, Labourism and the English Genius: The Strange Death of Labour England?, London: Verso, 1993, pp. 43–5.
24See Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: 1918–1951, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. 38–40.
25Adam Przeworski, Capitalism and Social Democracy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, p. 33.
26Steven Fielding, ‘What Did ‘The People’ Want?: The Meaning of the 1945 General Election’, The Historical Journal, vol 35, no 3 (Sep., 1992), pp. 623–39; Ralph Miliband, Parliamentary Socialism: A Study in the Politics of Labour, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1964, pp. 272–4; Henry Pelling, ‘The 1945 General Election Reconsidered’, The Historical Journal, vol. 23, no. 2 (Jun., 1980), pp. 399–414.
27On the wartime reconfiguration of the state, see Paul Addison, The Road to 1945: British politics and the Second World War, London: Pimlico, 1994.
28Kevin Jefferies, The Churchill Coalition and Wartime Politics, 1940–1945, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995, pp. 60–3.
29Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, ‘Rationing, Austerity and the Conservative Party Recovery after 1945’, The Historical Journal, vol. 37, no. 1, 1994; David Seawright, ‘One Nation’, in Kevin Hickson, ed., The Political Thought of the Conservative Party Since 1945, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
30On the revisionist current, see Tudor Jones, Remaking the Labour Party: From Gaitskell to Blair, London: Routledge, 1996.
31Quoted in John Saville, The Labour Movement in Britain: A Commentary, London: Faber & Faber, 1988, p. 105.
32Figure quoted in John Saville, ‘The Labour Government (1967)’, in David Coates, ed., Paving the Third Way: The Critique of Parliamentary Socialism, London: The Merlin Press Ltd, 2003.
33On this, the most concise background is given by Paul Gilroy and Joe Simm, ‘Law, order and the state of the left’, Capital and Class, 9 (Spring, 1985), pp. 15–55.
34Peter Weller, ‘British Labour and the Cold War: The Foreign Policy of the Labour Governments, 1945–1951’, Journal of British Studies, vol. 26, no. 1, England’s Foreign Relations (Jan., 1987), pp. 54–82.
35John Newsinger, British Counterinsurgency: From Palestine to Northern Ireland, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
36Stuart Hall, ‘The Battle for Socialist Ideas in the 1980s’, Socialist Register, 1982.
37Two Keynesian economists offer an acerbic critique of the post-war record of Labour. See Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson, The Age of Insecurity, London: Verso, 1999. On the greatly exaggerated role of ‘planning’ in post-war Britain, see Nigel Harris, Competition and the Corporate Society: British Conservatives, the State and Industry 1945–1964, Abingdon: Routledge, 2013.
38Martin Pugh, Speak for Britain!: A New History of the Labour Party, London: Vintage Books, 2011, p. 359–60.
39Andrew Thorpe, A History of the British Labour Party: Third Edition, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, pp. 169–170.
40Gregory Elliott, Labourism and the English Genius: The Strange Death of Labour England?, London: Verso, 1993, pp. 75–6.
41Richard Crossman, The Diaries of a Cabinet Minister: Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House of Commons, 1966–68, Hamilton, 1976, p. 587.
42On the ‘new racism’ pioneered by Powell and others, see Martin Barker, The New Racism, London: Junction Books, 1981.
43Stuart Hall, ‘Thatcherism – Rolling Back the Welfare State’, Thesis Eleven, vol. 7, no. 1 (February 1983), pp. 6–19.
44This opposition between ‘state’ and ‘market’ has always been highly misleading. Markets are not, and never have been, self-generating or self-sustaining: they are politically and legally constituted. Their spread and their global connectedness has been expedited by strong, interventionist states. See Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire, London: Verso, 2013. At any rate, it is not quite correct to speak of ‘the market’ as if this exhaustively described the capitalism which Labour governments have sought to reform. And if, following Marx, we depart the noisy sphere of circulation and trade, and enter the hidden abode of production, we tend to find the state’s fingerprints everywhere. From tax breaks to subsidies to diplomacy and espionage, much of modern industry would be impossible without the continual coddling, nurturing and leadership of national states. The Apple corporation would, for example, be considerably less of a global giant were it not for the technologies made available to it by years of public sector investment and research, and the markets in labour and goods opened to it by aggressive US diplomacy. Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Myths in Risk and Innovation, London, New York: Anthem Press, 2013. In short, the issue is never ‘state intervention or not?’, but always ‘what kind of state intervention?’. This has been obscured both by Thatcherites, who claim an ‘anti-statist’ mantle, and Blairites, who try to distinguish their programme from Conservatism by reference to their acknowledgement of the role of government.
45Patrick Bell, The Labour Party in Opposition 1970–1974, London: Routledge, 2004; Martin Pugh, Speak for Britain!: A New History of the Labour Party, London: Vintage Books, 2011, p. 370–1.
46Tony Benn, Speech to the Engineering Union, AUEW Conference, May 1971. In Ruth Winstone, ed., The Best of Benn: Letters, Diaries, Speeches and Other Writings, London: Hutchinson, 2014, Kindle Loc. 621–733.
47Wyn Grant, ‘Business Interests and the British Conservative Party’, Government and Opposition, vol 15, no. 2, 1980.
48The idea of enforcing workers’ representation in company boards was supported by the Bullock Report of 1977, one of the first major turning points in the conversion of business to Thatcherism, but the plans were never likely to be implemented. In fact, moreover, Benn also had difficulty in gaining the support of trade unionist for industrial democracy, on the grounds that they felt such methods of inclusion were intended to obstruct or replace the exercise of real, rank-and-file power. See David Powell, Tony Benn: A Political Life, London: Continuum, 2003, pp. 122–3.
49Stuart Hall, ‘The Great Moving Right Show’, in Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques, eds., The Politics of Thatcherism, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1983.
50Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke a
nd Brian Roberts, Policing The Crisis: Mugging, The State, and Law and Order, London: Macmillan, 1978.
51Andrew Gamble provides an authoritative account of Thatcherite ideology and what might be called its ‘rational kernel’ in The Free Economy and the Strong State: The Politics of Thatcherism, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1994.
52Sir Ian Gilmour, quoted in Eric J Evans, Thatcher and Thatcherism, London: Routledge, 2004, p. 14.
53Neil Rollings, ‘Cracks in the Post-War Keynesian Settlement? The Role of Organised Business in Britain in the Rise of Neoliberalism Before Margaret Thatcher’, Twentieth Century British History, vol. 24, no. 4, 2013, pp. 637–59.
54Martin Pugh, Speak for Britain!: A New History of the Labour Party, London: Vintage Books, 2011, p. 365.
55Martin Pugh, Speak for Britain!: A New History of the Labour Party, London: Vintage Books, 2011, p. 371.
56A general tendency, if culpably exaggerated by the centrist intellectuals and politicians, in European social democracy. See Gerassimos Moschonas, In the Name of Social Democracy: The Great Transformation, 1954 to the Present, London: Verso, 2002.
57First-past-the-post converted 42 per cent of the vote in 1983 and 1987, into 62 per cent and 58 per cent of the parliamentary seats, respectively.
58As Tim Bale put it, Thatcher won not because she persuaded a majority of people of her views, but because the macroeconomic conditions were sufficiently congenial for a sufficient plurality of people at just the right times. Tim Bale, The Conservative Party: From Thatcher to Cameron, London: Polity, p. 24. On shifting social attitudes under Thatcher and their electoral manifestations, see Anthony Heath, Roger Jowell, and John Curtice, ‘Understanding Electoral Change in Britain’, Parliamentary Affairs, Oxford University Press, 1986.
59Stuart Hall, ‘The ‘Little Caesars’ of Social Democracy’, Marxism Today, April 1981.
4. New Labour and Corbyn’s Route to Power
1Quoted in Samuel Beer, ‘Liberalism Rediscovered’, The Economist, 7 February 1998.
2Quoted in Martin Pugh, Speak for Britain!: A New History of the Labour Party, London: Vintage Books, 2011, p. 419.
3Jon Stone, ‘Liz Kendall says she lost the Labour leadership election because she was the “eat your greens” candidate’, Independent, 26 January 2016.
4John Reid is quoted lauding ‘Labour hegemony’ at the moment of the Iraq invasion in Andrew Pearmain, The Politics of New Labour: A Gramscian Analysis, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2011, Kindle Loc. 235; Peter Hyman describes the rough contours of this ‘hegemony’ in ‘This is an existential moment in Labour’s history. It may not survive. And it may never win again’, Guardian, 20 December 2015. As Pearmain points out, these ways of construing Gramsci’s concept of hegemony are bowdlerised and narrowly focused on electoral party politics in a way that has little to do with any rigorous use of the idea.
5By far the most historically and theoretically detailed account of these origins is Andrew Pearmain, The Politics of New Labour: A Gramscian Analysis, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2011.
6A fairly typical settling of accounts with the Left over its failure to recognise these changes can be found in Stuart Hall, ‘The Culture Gap’, Marxism Today, January 1984; and Stuart Hall, ‘The Meaning of New Times’, in David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, eds., Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, Abingdon: Routledge, 1996. Hall would later recant on some of this line of argument, arguing that ‘there was that odd moment, when the critique went overboard, when we almost hero-ized consumption and designer capitalism’. Quoted in Pearmain, The Politics of New Labour: A Gramscian Analysis, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2011, Kindle Loc. 1597.
7The case for realignment, to exclude the hard-Left, was put by Hall in characteristically mollifying tones. It was not about trying to expel enemies or create a monolithic culture, but about repudiating ‘the “hard-Left” as a peculiar and distinctive political style, a set of habits, a political-cultural tradition, stretching right across the actual organisational sub-divisions of the Left’. The results were, of course, quite other. Stuart Hall, ‘Realignment – for What?’, Marxism Today, December 1985.
8Pearmain notes that Marxism Today in the eighties was ‘mesmerised and on occasions plainly excited by what Martin Jacques still calls its “power and strength”’. The Politics of New Labour: A Gramscian Analysis, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2011, Kindle Loc. 1597–628. Once Blair took the helm of Labour, a sign of its forced adaptation to Thatcherism’s ‘power and strength’, Hall saluted the ‘necessary’ changes that New Labour signalled for the Labour Party. Stuart Hall, ‘Parties on the verge of a nervous breakdown’, Soundings, no 1, Autumn 1995. As late as 1996, Hall et al. were inclined to cautiously welcome New Labour’s policy developments. Editorial, ‘What is at stake?’, Soundings, no. 2, Spring 1996; by the following year, the disillusionment had thoroughly set in, and was explored in a series of brutally pessimistic analyses, beginning with a pre-election piece written by Hall and Jacques on New Labour for Guardian, ‘Tony Blair: The Greatest Tory since Margaret Thatcher?’. Later pieces theorised the changing analysis in a distinctively Gramscian idiom. Stuart Hall, ‘New Labour’s Double-shuffle’, Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, vol. 27, no. 4, 2005; and Stuart Hall, ‘New Labour has picked up where Thatcherism left off’, Guardian, 6 August 2003.
9Martin Pugh, Speak for the People!: A New History of the Labour Party, London: The Bodley Head, 2010, p. 412.
10Martin Pugh, Speak for the People!: A New History of the Labour Party, London: The Bodley Head, 2010, pp. 413–15.
11Editorial, ‘What is at stake?’, Soundings, no. 2, Spring 1996.
12Lewis Minkin, The Blair Supremacy: A Study in the Politics of the Labour Party’s Management, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014, Kindle Loc. 372–467.
13On this backlash, see Dianne Hayter, Fightback!: Labour’s Traditional Right in the 1970s and 1980s, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005.
14See Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?: CIA and the Cultural Cold War, Granta Books, 1999; and Hugh Wilford, The CIA, the British Left, and the Cold War: Calling the Tune?, Frank Cass Publishers, 2003; Robin Ramsay, The Rise of New Labour, Pocket Essentials, 2002; Andy Beckett, ‘Friends in high places’, Guardian, 6 November 2004; Anthony Seldon, Blair, The Free Press, 2005, pp. 119–137.
15The major factor in Labour’s defeats continued to be the historic split in its coalition initiated with the defection of the SDP faction in 1981. See Anthony Heath, Roger Jowell and John Curtice, ‘Exclusive: How did Labour lose in ’92?’, Independent, 28 May 1994; and Anthony Heath, Roger Jowell and John Curtice, Labour’s Last Chance?: the 1992 election and beyond, Dartmouth, 1994, p. 285.
16Lewis Minkin, The Blair Supremacy: A Study in the Politics of the Labour Party’s Management, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014; Liz Davies, Through the Looking Glass: A Dissenter Inside New Labour, London: Verso, 2001. Len McCluskey was sufficiently irritated by the Labour leadership’s anti-union drive in 2013 to publicly blow the whistle on the Blairites’ selections strategy. See Len McCluskey, ‘Yes, Labour’s selection process has been abused, but not by the unions’, Guardian, 8 July 2013.
17Lewis Minkin, The Blair Supremacy: A Study in the Politics of the Labour Party’s Management, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014, Kindle Loc. 2788.
18Colin Leys, ‘The British Labour Party’s Transition From Socialism to Capitalism’, in David Coates, ed., Paving the Third Way: The Critique of Parliamentary Socialism, London: The Merlin Press, 2003.
19David Coates, Prolonged Labour: The Slow Birth of New Labour, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, pp. 3–23
20David Coates, ‘“Darling, It Is Entirely My Fault!” Gordon Brown’s Legacy to Alistair and Himself’, British Politics, no. 3, 2008, pp. 3–21.
21‘Plan to Reduce Budget Deficit’, BBC News, 2 July 1997.
22David Coates, Prolonged Labour: The Slow Birth of New Labour, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, pp. 64�
�5; Simon Rogers, ‘UK public spending since 1963’, Guardian, 26 June 2010; for some background on New Labour policy on spending and employment, see Richard Seymour, The Meaning of David Cameron, Zero Books, 2010, pp. 57–8; David Coates, ‘A different double shuffle’, Renewal: A Journal of Social Democracy, vol. 15, no. 2/3, 2007.
23The first serious exposé of this remarkably corrupt arrangement between state and privileged sectors of capital was George Monbiot’s Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain, London: Pan Books, 2001
24Peter Mandelson and Roger Liddle, The Blair Revolution: Can New Labour Deliver, London: Faber & Faber, 1996, p. 48.
25Gaby Hinsliff, ‘Jobless single parents to face benefit cuts’, Observer, 4 March 2007; Mary Riddell, ‘Why Asda Woman matters to Tony Blair’, Observer, 4 March 2007.
26Polly Toynbee, ‘The Tories were right: workfare really works’, Independent, 27 February 1997.
27The analysis of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, not unsympathetic to New Labour, chiefly credits benefit increases and tax credits for falling child and pensioner poverty. Robert Joyce and Luke Sibieta, ‘Labour’s record on poverty and inequality’, Institute for Fiscal Studies, 6 June 2013, ifs.org.
28Steven Morris, ‘Asbo bars suicidal woman from rivers’, Guardian, 26 February 2005; ‘Council withdraws Asbo against boy with Tourette’s’, Press Association, 28 December 2005; Vikram Dodd, ‘Asbo call over jokes about the Pope’, Guardian, 9 April 2005; Debbie Andalo, ‘Teenager handed hoodie ban’, Guardian, 26 May 2005.
29‘Blair to tackle “menace” children’, BBC News, 31 August 2006.
30‘Blair “respect” speech in full’, BBC News, 10 January 2006.
31See ‘Police Service Strength, England and Wales: 31 March 1997 to 30 September 2000’, House of Commons Library, Research Paper 01/28, 16 March 2001; and also ‘Police workforce, England and Wales: March 2011 supplementary tables’, data.gov.uk.
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