The New Labour Experiment: Change and Reform Under Blair and Brown by Florence Faucher-King & Patrick le Galés

Author:Florence Faucher-King & Patrick le Galés [Faucher-King, Florence & Galés, Patrick le]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, American Government, General, Political Process, Political Parties, World
ISBN: 9780804762342
Google: ckYvwCGfqP8C
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 8346217
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2010-02-12T00:00:00+00:00

4 The Reinvention of the Labour Party: “New Labour, New Britain”

Parties that do not change die, and this party is a living movement not a historical monument.

—Tony Blair, Labour Party Conference, 1994

In 1992 Neil Kinnock narrowly lost to Margaret Thatcher’s successor, John Major. This fourth defeat (following Labour’s electoral disasters in 1983 and 1987) led observers to wonder whether Conservative domination might be interminable (Jowell et al., 1994; Heath et al., 2001). During the 1980s, an internal debate on the left of the party had opposed modernizers to those who awaited the collapse of the Thatcher governments. The former made a significant contribution to a renewal of analyses of power, multiculturalism, and capitalism. Having understood the extent to which Thatcherite strategy was a response to the transformation of the British economy and globalization, they sought to develop a Labour response to “New Times.”1 For them, returning to the past was no longer an option. The premature death of the leader John Smith in 1994 made possible the rapid emergence of young leaders.

When Tony Blair was elected leader of the Labour Party in 1994, the activists were ready to accept unprecedented political changes in order to win back power. The young leader exploited this inner-party atmosphere to embark at once upon a program of “modernization” of the party that involved a host of measures, ranging from the symbolic (rewriting clause 4 of the constitution,2 and accepting the market model), to the mediatic (adoption of a new name: New Labour), the political (a promise to observe the constraints of the Conservative budget and not raise taxes), and the organizational (reform of discussion procedures and centralization of membership services). Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, and their teams had one idea in mind: to prepare for the return to power and a medium-term strategy for government. These new leaders had virtually no nostalgia for the great working-class movement that was Labour. They wanted to modernize the party, modernize the country, and seize the opportunities offered by the new era to win elections and govern. A number of these changes were based on reforms introduced after 1983 by Kinnock and Smith, but what was new was that the forces of New Labour also changed the party’s internal culture and image.

For them, the party served as an experimental terrain. The internal reforms were comparable to those subsequently introduced in the country by the Blair governments: distancing from the trade unions in favor of think thanks and communications experts; stressing the individual; reforming policy-making procedures; and introducing the logics of management and audit. Political leadership was important: changes in form, procedure, and policy orientation altered the expectations, interests, and participation of activists, at the cost of tensions inside the party.

The rhetoric of novelty, constantly harped on by the leadership, was adopted by the media and gradually naturalized. It depicted the representatives of New Labour as modernizing heroes wrestling with conservative forces attached to outdated privileges and reluctant to seize the opportunities offered by the new age that was dawning.

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