God doth know, so shall the world perceive,
That I have turned away from my former self.
(Henry 1V Part Two, Act 5, Scene 5)
Our fundamental tactic of self-protection, self-control, and self-definition is … telling stories, and more particularly concocting and controlling the story we tell others – and ourselves – about who we are.1
For Blair, ‘Old Labour’ was ‘like a restaurant that poisoned its guests … Think of that restaurant. If you had come home after what you thought was a good meal and had been violently ill for a week, what would make you return?’2
He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.3
This chapter argues that the concept of ‘Old Labour’ was essentially a strategic device. Coined in the 1990s by a group within the party, known initially as ‘the modernisers’ and subsequently as ‘New Labour’, it was used to refer to the party as it existed prior to Tony Blair's assumption of the leadership in 1994.4 The concept was widely employed, both inside and outside Labour's ranks, and structured public discourse about the party to such a degree that, as the Independent put it, it became ‘an effortless part of our vocabulary’.5 As we shall see, it operated as the central organising concept of a larger, more encompassing narrative which creatively reimagined the party's past in a way that facilitated the New Labour ‘project’.
Eric Hobsbawm explains: ‘What is officially defined as the “past” clearly is and must be a particular selection from the infinity of what is remembered or capable of being remembered.’6 Not surprisingly, Labour's history has lent itself to a wide range of such definitions, but these represent scholarly divergences, grounded in evidence and logical reasoning and, hence, legitimately differing versions of the past.7 The view promulgated by the ‘modernisers’ amounted to something quite different: not a scholarly contribution but a strategic and rhetorical intervention designed to secure behavioural change by reshaping the popular image of the party.
The significance of the craft of persuasive communication is now widely recognised. Its point of departure is the gap between the social world as it objectively exists and as it is subjectively apprehended. Events in the wider world do not manifest themselves as ‘pre-existent entities’ whose meaning ‘can be read straight from reality’.8 In order for the raw material of existence to be transmuted into something intelligible, meaning has to be assigned. This applies, in particular, to the political world, where myriad events, mostly outside people's direct experience and frequently of little concern to them, swirl around in a kaleidoscope of bewildering patterns.
Inevitably, in a world of competitive politics, rival political camps seek to mobilise support by gaining assent for their slant on events. Blumler has described this as ‘the modern publicity process’; that is, the ‘competitive struggle to influence and control popular perceptions of key political events and issues through the mass media’. In this intensely fought struggle what counts is ‘getting the appearance of things right’.9 Two techniques increasingly deployed by party communicators to achieve this are the use of narratives and framing devices. A narrative ‘refers to the ways in which we construct disparate facts in our own worlds and weave them together cognitively in order to make sense of our reality’.10 It helps to organise and steer our understanding of the endless succession of events and messages that relentlessly bombard us. Those who devise and disseminate them have two main purposes: firstly, to supply a conceptual vocabulary to structure the target audience's understanding of the social world and, secondly, by helping to shape these understandings, to affect their behaviour in such a way as to serve the narrators’ purposes.11 This process of narrative dissemination we call framing. A frame highlights for public consumption the salient features from an otherwise baffling multitude of events, organising them in such a way that the frame offers both a diagnosis of what is wrong and a prescription of how this can be repaired.12 Framing lies at the core of persuasive communication, as it seeks to ‘assign meaning to and interpret relevant events and conditions in ways that are intended to mobilise potential adherents, to garner bystander support, and to demobilise antagonists’.13
The problem for Labour, as the modernising group which emerged in the late 1980s (for example, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Peter Mandelson, Philip Gould) understood, was that the frame of reference via which most voters viewed the Labour Party was unremittingly grim. Focus group research in the mid-1980s indicated that, for most voters, the party was identified with positions on such matters as welfare, gender and race that were (in Philip Gould's words) ‘beyond what ordinary, decent voters considered reasonable and sensible’.14 The party was seen as in thrall to trade union ‘barons’, riven by factionalism and prone to extremism. In the vivid words of the modernisers’ principal strategist, Philip Gould:
To millions of voters Labour became a shiver of fear in the night, something unsafe, buried deep in the psyche, not just for the 1983 election campaign or the period immediately after it but for years to come. Like a freeze-frame in a video, Labour's negative identity became locked in time.15
In Lewis Minkin's evocative phrase this constituted ‘the burden of history’.16 The proposition at the core of New Labour's strategic thinking was that Labour as a brand was so sullied that it was beyond redemption. As Philip Gould put it, ‘Labour had to modernize completely or eventually it would die’.17 The voters would regain trust in Labour's capacity to govern, and to govern in their interests, only if they were convinced that a surgical break with the past had occurred. The senior New Labour advisor, Matthew Taylor, recalled that, following the ‘gut wrenching defeat in 1992’, party modernisers ‘took it as read that Labour could not be elected unless they had completely eradicated any connection to the discredited party of the winter of discontent [of 1978–79] and the 1983 manifesto’.18
One response may have been to attempt to dislodge, or at least dilute these perceptions as unfair, inaccurate and one sided. But this was not the approach taken (or even seriously contemplated) by the modernisers after 1992, and for three main reasons. Firstly, they believed that these perceptions were, if perhaps a little exaggerated, largely correct. Secondly, they calculated that it would be conducive to the success of the ‘New Labour Project’ if party members could be induced to accept that they were indeed correct. Thirdly, they were convinced that popular attitudes were so solidly entrenched that the prospect of shifting them was minimal.
It is worth reflecting a little further on these considerations. Firstly, the modernisers largely endorsed the voters’ jaundiced view of the party. As Gould's authoritative account – the so-called New Labour bible – stated, on such issues as nationalisation, taxation and industrial relations legislation the party had become ‘enslaved by dogma’.19 It had totally lost touch with ordinary ‘decent, hard-working voters’, declaring ‘political war … on the values, instincts and ethics of the great majority’. Indeed, so disconnected had it become that it ‘appeared to inhabit a parallel universe’.20 No less important, in its own past actions the party had proved unable to tackle the problems of inflation, low growth and unemployment and had allowed itself to become associated in the public mind with profligate spending, ‘penal rates of taxation’ and ‘the politics of envy’.21
Secondly, the modernisers felt that too many members were clinging to a version of the past that precluded them from adapting to the present. A party's collective memory not only affords a sense of shared experience and common purpose but also prescribes the lessons that can be learned from the past.22 This was particularly the case with Labour. As Drucker has explained, its sense of its own past was so powerful that it not only played ‘a crucial role in defining what the party is about to those in it’ but also established firm parameters limiting the types of policies deemed by members as desirable and tolerable.23 From the modernising perspective, this attachment to what the modernisers considered a sentimental, insular and narrow-minded view of the past inhibited party members from appreciating the scale of the changes required.
Thirdly, any doubt that the modernisers may have entertained about challenging the party's myths was removed by the scale and unexpectedness of Labour's 1992 defeat. Despite the policy changes effected by Neil Kinnock, the bleak message of post-election opinion research was that most voters continued to view Labour as ‘an old-fashioned party, remote from their concerns and aspirations, wedded to high taxation and extravagant expenditure’, dominated by the unions, too closely identified with the interests of the poor and ethnic minorities and simply not competent to run the country.24 For these three reasons the modernisers concluded that Labour's disavowal of its past had to be unequivocal and irreversible, encompassing a renunciation not of this policy or that but of ‘what the party has become, what it now stands for, how it works and who, quite literally, it is’.25
It is worth noting here the indebtedness of the modernisers to Thatcherism. The Thatcherites had always operated on a strategic plane, grasping the importance of carefully thought-out ideological formulae and idioms in the bid to forge a new common sense about politics. Labour under Kinnock, the modernisers were correct in noting, had never grasped this. It had never evolved its own project. It had, as Hall and Jacques commented, ‘no positive ambition to remould society and no concrete image of what such a Labour-transformed society would be like’.26 In contrast, Labour modernisers did learn from Thatcherism that ‘politics is either conducted ideologically, or not at all’.27 The concept of ‘narrative’ is crucial here.
As we have seen, narratives constitute structures of meaning, rendering otherwise perplexing events intelligible.28 This was the aim of the modernising narrative – and it required the coining of Old Labour. The term New Labour was ‘deliberately designed to distance the party from its past’ – to broadcast the fact that it had sloughed off its old ways.29 This ‘implied a fundamental demarcation between the party's past and present practice, advertising a caesura in the historical continuity of the party's evolution’.30 New Labour, in turn, logically necessitated Old Labour – its dazzling white contrasting with the tawdry, stained ‘brand X’ of the old. Old Labour ‘had to be created because if one is wanting to be seen slaying a dragon then it is important to make that dragon appear as terrifying and potentially dangerous as possible’.31 In short, for the party's past to be disowned, it first had to be reinvented. In constructing this Old Labour narrative, the modernisers made extensive use of two rhetorical devices which I call essentialism and stereotyping.
Essentialism refers to the belief that an entity or organisation is constituted by a set of properties which define its essential being and which are therefore a fixed part of its DNA. Further, it implies a deterministic analysis of behaviour, since the properties which define an organisation necessarily impel it to act in a particular way. Thus, for the architects of New Labour, Old Labour's dogged refusal to modernise sprang not from choice or contingency but from impulses deep within ‘its character, its ethos, implicit even in its founding moments’.32 In the vocabulary of contemporary social scientists, Labour's trajectory was, from this perspective, ‘path dependent’. Path dependency describes the process by which an initial sequence of events, which may be contingent, establishes norms, institutions and organisational practices that consolidate and impose strict parameters for future behaviour. Mahoney argues that an institutional pattern – once adopted – congeals, making it increasingly difficult for an organisation to change course even if to do so would be beneficial.33
Thus, for the modernisers, Labour's orbit was firmly set by the circumstances of its birth and by its early formative experiences. As Blair explained to Labour's 1999 party conference:
Born in separation from other progressive forces in British politics, out of the visceral need to represent the interests of an exploited workforce, our base, our appeal, our ideology was too narrow … . We were chained by our ideology. We thought we had eternal doctrines.34
Although Old Labour's precise properties – its ‘eternal doctrines’ – were never systematically enumerated, they emerge clearly from frequent New Labour usage. They can be itemised as follows:
Philip Gould summarised Old Labour more pithily as a combination of trade union-oriented ‘labourism’ and Fabian statism, embellished by ‘the utopianism of New Jerusalem’.36 This combination of labourism, statism and utopianism formed the mentality of the party, imposing a rigidity of outlook which rendered it incapable of adapting to the profound social changes – the decay of class solidarities and collectivist mentalities, the new realities of individual aspiration and the consumer culture, the dynamics of a globalised market economy – which had swept away the world in which Labour had been created. Because it was trapped in the web of its own past, and its own mythology, because its parochialism and dogmatism stifled its capacity for renewal, the party, Blair concluded, ‘had to be radically transformed … in a manner that changed profoundly its modus operandi, its thinking, its programme and above all its attitudes’.37
This essentialist depiction of Labour's character and experiences between 1979 and 1992 – however plausible it may have seemed to voters and the media – is not one that many historians would recognise. This is most notably the case of its portrayal of a fixed and immovable party locked into dogma and unresponsive to social change. As Neil Kinnock pointed out, Labour's ideas and methods ‘have always been in a state of progressive flux, of permanent evolution’.38 As long ago as 1956, Tony Crosland had urged the party to revise its programme and objectives to meet the realities of managed, mixed-economy capitalism and, in practical terms, his repudiation of the centrally planned economy dominated by publicly owned industries shaped the thinking of successive Labour governments in the 1960s and 1970s.39 Far from a ‘stubborn refusal to modernise’, Labour's voyage from 1979 to 1994 was a period of ideological struggle and extensive policy modifications, culminating in a period of major policy revisions. In what follows I seek to illustrate this point by a survey of the crucial moment of programmatic innovation, the party's Policy Review at the end of the 1980s.40
The Review, instigated in 1988 in the wake of Labour's bruising defeat the previous year, undertook a thorough, systematic and wide-ranging overhaul of all aspects of the party's programme. Consisting of four reports, it concluded with the 1992 election manifesto. Far from displaying a party ‘trapped by its past and a prisoner of an outdated ideology’, the Policy Review not only exhibited much policy fluidity but also progressively detached the party from some of its founding precepts.41 In what follows I organise a brief discussion of the Policy Review around two pivotal themes: firstly, the economic functions of the state and the balance between state regulation and the market, and, secondly, macro-economic policy and the efficacy of Keynesian demand management.
The process of programmatic change can be elucidated by distinguishing between three conceptions of the economic role of the state: the planning state, the development state and the enabling state, each of which, for a time, structured Labour's understanding of the relationship between public power and private economic activity. The concept of a ‘planning state’ built upon and expanded the left's ‘alternative economic strategy’, which was elaborated in the 1970s and held sway in the brief period of left-wing ascendancy in the early 1980s. It envisaged a much enhanced role for public authority in the management and control of the economy. This took the form of a large and complex apparatus of economic planning (so-called Planning Agreements) which would steer investment, encourage new technology and foster balanced economic growth. Planning was tied to schemes with comprehensive proposals to promote industrial democracy and to extend public ownership. Full employment would be secured by a Keynesian reflationary programme engineered through higher public expenditure, with the balance of payments protected by controls on foreign trade and global capital. A tripartite ‘national economic assessment’ would involve the unions more deeply in policy making, in return for which, it was anticipated, they would regulate the growth of wages. Overall, this constituted a highly dirigiste approach to economic management.42
But this period was in many ways an aberration. The ‘alternative economic strategy’ assumed, in some not very clearly theorised way, that Labour's mission was to radically reconfigure Britain's mode of economic organisation. This objective had never been mainstream thinking in the Labour Party, certainly not after 1945. For the leadership, the problem had always been to find the most appropriate and effective mechanisms and institutional arrangements to restrain, regulate and domesticate free market capitalism to facilitate the pursuit of Labour's traditional values of equality, social justice and co-operation. Not surprisingly, the reversal of the party's leftward slide saw a rapid disengagement from the planning state: in short the concept, far from defining Old Labour, had a short shelf-life and soon expired.
‘Labour's Programme 1982’, the high point of the left's influence, had condemned ‘the view that the operation of the free market – guided only by the forces of profit, self-interest and greed – can ensure that industry meets the needs of the Community’.43 The three figures largely responsible for framing economic strategy between 1983 and 1987 – party leader Neil Kinnock, shadow chancellor Roy Hattersley and shadow industry secretary Bryan Gould (no relation to Philip) – all took a more nuanced and positive view of the market.44 But the years 1983–87 were an interregnum where policy development was hampered by crises both internal (the struggle over the Militant Tendency and over ‘looney left’ councils) and external (the miners’ strike). The main changes were negative. The planning, controls, public ownership projects and bold reflationary schemes envisaged by the alternative economic strategy were abandoned and a more rigorous approach to the control of public expenditure was adopted. Hammering out an alternative programme proved more difficult.45 This had to await the Policy Review, introduced after Labour's third stinging defeat in 1987.
Bryan Gould, Kinnock and Hattersley all believed that the key question pertaining to the respective roles of the state and market was not (as the left in particular tended to believe) which should have primacy but which tasks were best performed by the one and which by the other.46 This meant acknowledging – as in practice the party had long since done – that in large areas of economic life the market was irreplaceable. As Bryan Gould, the co-convenor of the Productive and Competitive Economy Policy Review group, put it, the market was ‘a more efficient and acceptable allocator and distributor of scarce resources, and a more sensitive means of meeting consumer preferences, than any system of planning could conceivably be’.47 This view was accepted and incorporated in the second Policy Review report, Meet the Challenge, Make the Change:
In very many areas of the economy the market and competition are essential in meeting the demands of the consumer, promoting efficiency and stimulating innovation, and often the best means of securing the myriad, incremental changes which are needed to take the economy forward.48
It was, for Labour, an unprecedented public affirmation of the indispensability of the market. But, if Bryan Gould and his allies on the soft left (then including Robin Cook, John Prescott and David Blunkett) repudiated the dirigisme of the planning state, they did not share the enthusiasm for the Anglo-Saxon variant of capitalism soon to be articulated by the modernising proponents of the enabling state, such as Blair and Brown. The soft left had emerged as a result of deep fissures within the left over issues such as the Benn deputy leadership campaign, the expulsion of Militant, membership of the European Community and attitudes to the Kinnock leadership. With a weakened Bennite left (including the young Jeremy Corbyn) opting to play no constructive part in the Policy Review, the debate over issues of contention was principally between the soft left and the centre-right, a debate that concluded with the latter's decisive triumph.
The indispensability of markets was common ground between these two currents of opinion but they adopted different views over the scale of reform that the existing British model of capitalism required, with the soft left's ‘development state’ and the modernising right's ‘enabling state’ representing conflicting orientations towards the institutional structure and dynamics of British capitalism.49 Gould was the most formidable exponent of the former. The centrepiece of his analysis, largely endorsed by Meet the Challenge, was that problems that had consistently afflicted the UK economy, notably lagging investment and productivity, resource misallocation and weak export performance, were largely the effects of the excessive power of the City. Gould criticised the propensity of all British governments to give ‘absolute priority to the interests of those who hold assets and deal in money, as opposed to those who made and provided goods and services’.50 The outcome was a City-dominated economy with a ‘fixation with the short-term’, chronic under-investment, the tardy deployment of new technology and the neglect of research and development and training.51
It followed that a Labour government ‘should intervene in the market as a matter of conscious policy and for defined purposes’, particularly over investment and financial flows.52 But this did not involve the complex planning structures and enlarged public sector envisaged by the planning state. Instead Meet the Challenge proposed a ‘medium term industrial strategy’ which drew heavily upon the activist industrial policies of the Pacific Rim states (notably Japan and South Korea). The report called for the establishment of two powerful new institutions, a British (or National) Investment Bank and British Technology Enterprise, to provide long-term investment capital, stimulate new technologies and identify and nurture new strategic sectors and enterprises (see chapter 4 by Richard Carr in this volume).
But, almost immediately, the advocates of the development state encountered stiff resistance. Its soft left supporters were in effect recommending a challenge to the neo-liberal drift in economic management that had been underway for a decade and a return to more collectivist and (as we shall see) Keynesian recipes. But the bulk of the party leadership visualised a more accommodationist stance, with the centre right broadly endorsing much of the new neo-liberal consensus. This was for a number of reasons. Firstly, their faith in the state's capacity to steer economic life was palpably dwindling, with Kinnock opining that ‘the government has neither the means nor the judgment to make large-scale manufacturing investment’.53 Secondly, they were increasingly determined to avoid any steps that might alienate the City. Indeed, a major re-orientation in attitudes to the role and contribution of the City was a key, if neglected, aspect of the later stages of the Policy Review. For Gould and his allies, the excessive power and reach of the financial sector was economically highly detrimental; hence his argument that ‘the attempt to gain the confidence of the financial establishment is not only futile but is not even desirable’.54 By 1990 such a stance was deemed to be both economically and financially unwise and politically reckless. Reassuring the City became a strategic priority and, with John Smith launching his so-called ‘prawn cocktail offensive’, considerable efforts were expended by Labour's economic team to convince financial institutions that they could rest easy with the prospect of a Labour government. This was an important step towards Gordon Brown's later ‘light-touch’ regulatory regime for the City.
With Bryan Gould's summary removal as industry spokesman in 1989 (replaced by the rapidly rising Gordon Brown), it was plain that the days of the development state were over. Instead, Kinnock, Smith and Brown, the three key players, introduced the concept of the enabling state. This approach conceded important market failures, such as lack of investment in human capital (for example, in training and skills acquisition) and in infrastructure, which the state had to address. This was common ground with the development state. But it placed much more weight on the capacity of the market and profit-seeking private firms to allocate investment efficiently and was chary of any institutions that sought to second guess the market or channel investment. In short, the proper role of the state was to accomplish those tasks which the market alone tended to neglect while leaving intact the major institutions of the market economy. In consequence the Medium Term Industrial Strategy vanished and much-diminished roles were assigned to the British (or National) Investment Bank and British Technology Enterprise.55 There was to be no serious questioning of the value of the Anglo-Saxon model of capitalism.
In parallel with disagreements over industrial policy, a split steadily widened between the soft left and the centre-right over macro-economic policy. Between 1979 and 1989 macro-economic policy was strongly Keynesian in orientation, with the party committed to restoring full employment and boosting economic growth through a public-expenditure-driven rise in demand. Inflationary pressures would be combatted through a revamped social contract in which the unions would exchange wage restraint for social concessions and a greater role in public policy formation. This approach was forcefully articulated by Gould – but confronted rising opposition from Kinnock, John Smith, Gordon Brown and their economic advisers. Prefiguring the policy line taken by New Labour after 1994, they expressed doubts about the efficacy of traditional Keynesian techniques, given the UK's mounting exposure to an increasingly globalised and liberalised world economy. They no longer believed in the viability of incomes policy as a method of containing inflationary pressures and feared that, in an ever more globalised and integrated world economy, stimulating demand would fuel an inflationary spiral (as had plagued the 1974–79 Labour government), which would in turn provoke speculation against sterling and capital flight.56
An increasingly heated debate came to a head over the issue of membership of the European Community's Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) at sterling's existing parity. Perceiving the ERM as anti-Keynesian in tone, purpose and effect, Gould persuaded his policy review group in 1989 to lay down stringent conditions for UK membership, but other key figures in the leadership, notably Kinnock, Smith, Brown and their advisers (such as John Eatwell) were unconvinced. Concurring with the government that ERM membership would operate as the sheet-anchor of price stability, John Smith, for example, reasoned that a fixed exchange rate would depress inflationary expectations by denying employers the option of competitive devaluation if they conceded excessive wage claims, and labour market behaviour would adjust accordingly.57
Overriding Gould's strenuous objections, the third Policy Review report, Looking to the Future (1990), called for Britain to join the ERM at ‘the earliest possible opportunity’.58 Enthusiasts for ERM membership – who included Gordon Brown until ‘Black Wednesday’ – were in effect signalling that, in order to demonstrate its dedication to monetary stability, even if the short-term cost was higher unemployment, the party was willing to divest itself of control over exchange and interest rates as instruments of macro-economic strategy. In effect, price stability displaced full employment as the primary explicit objective of Labour's economic policy.
An equally cautious stance was taken over fiscal policy. To reassure the markets and voters that the days of the party's spending ‘profligacy’ were over, Kinnock and Smith committed themselves to expenditure restraint: despite years of tight Tory spending control, the shadow chancellor envisaged only a ‘modest increase’ in public spending as a proportion of GDP.59 High levels of taxation, the party now averred, could be economically detrimental, while too much public borrowing could precipitate a serious loss of market confidence. Hence they promised to borrow only to finance public investment and to fund all current social spending out of tax receipts.
It is true that for Labour's ‘modernising’ right the policy changes orchestrated by the Policy Review were considered too tame and circumspect. Nonetheless, they represented a major shift away from policies espoused earlier in the decade and formed a platform upon which New Labour could later build.60 In effect, the shift from Keynesianism to a more market-oriented approach that was to define economic policy making under Brown (until the 2008 crash) unequivocally began before Blair's accession to the leadership. Although it suited New Labour's strategic purposes to depict Kinnock's attempts to renew the party between 1983 and 1992 as tepid, superficial and largely ineffectual, in fact, as the National Institute of Economic and Social Research pointed out, the outcome of the Policy Review was that ‘the economic policy differences between the two major parties are narrower than they have been for twenty years’.61 The same pattern unfolds in other policy areas such as employment law, where the party reversed its earlier pledge to repeal most Tory industrial relations legislation: given its draconian character, this showed a remarkable degree of flexibility, especially on the part of the affiliated unions. So, to conclude, as Philip Gould did in the wake of the 1992 defeat, that the party ‘was still the party of the winter of discontent; union influence; strikes and inflation; disarmament; Benn and Scargill’ seems a curious historical judgement.62
It is worth noting that soon-to-be leading figures in New Labour, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson, all played major roles in the Policy Review. The speed and alacrity with which the substantial changes it wrought dropped out of their collective memory is remarkable. Perhaps their very victory in shifting policy emboldened them to seek more sweeping reversals of policy than were previously thought politically feasible. But, above all, it did not suit their strategic purposes to acknowledge that the age of a newly refurbished and rejuvenated Labour Party was not ushered in by Blair's election to the leadership.
The second framing device used by New Labour was that of the stereotype. A stereotype can be defined as ‘an oversimplified mental image of … some category of person, institution or event which is shared … by large numbers of people’.63 Stereotyping is part of the wider social process of social categorisation, which is a mechanism to reduce the complexity and ambiguity of social reality through the attribution of a small number of defining collective traits to particular social groups.64 Stereotyping takes this a step further by defining a person or group in terms of a handful of simply understood properties and, in so doing, defying or denying the complexity of social and political life. The value of social and political stereotypes, as framing devices, lies in their persuasive efficacy: stereotypical images, particularly those of a more emotive cast, are more easily understood, processed and absorbed than more complex and rational messages and therefore facilitate message transmission. It is in this context that New Labour's use of the concept of Old Labour should be placed.
It is important to distinguish here between the two concepts of ‘New Labour’ and Old Labour. The former is not a stereotype but a descriptive category because it refers to a phenomenon whose properties can be identified and itemised and which manifested themselves in actual behaviour. Old Labour, in contrast, is a rhetorical invention, devised by New Labour strategists who drew selectively from the historical record to weave together a composite whose resemblance to empirical reality was often tenuous.
Like most stereotypes it was misleading – squeezing and distorting a more complicated reality. Old Labour was depicted as an essentially homogenous entity, with all who composed it, whatever their differences of style, values and priorities, inhabiting a common ideological universe. Cronin describes how ‘the essential premise of New Labour's break with the past’ was the supposition of the fundamental coherence of Old Labour. Left, right and centre were bound to a common stock of flawed and archaic principles which ‘pervaded the entire party and its seemingly diverse and competing tendencies’.65 As Labour's pre-eminent contemporary historian, Lewis Minkin, commented, the usage of the term Old Labour was ‘a broad brush and caricatured repository of what was regarded as the misapplication of values, outdated and extreme attitudes and policies, off-putting images and antiquated organisational forms’.66
It was a remarkable interpretation of such a conflict-strewn and disputatious party. We are invited to believe that the issues that divided Michael Foot and Denis Healey, Roy Hattersley and Tony Benn, Bryan Gould and John Smith were all minor matters of tone and detail. In fact, just a brief glance at one issue from 1979–94, the future of public ownership, indicates that this was far from the case. In this period, as in the 1950s and the 1970s, Labour was seriously riven over whether an ambitious programme of nationalisation was a precondition of a more equal and a socially just society or whether (as the ‘revisionists’ contended) it was one instrument among many, and not a very effective one. During the left-wing surge after 1979 the former view prevailed, but not for very long. In 1986 the party published a major report, jointly authored by the then soft leftist David Blunkett and John Smith, on Social Ownership which, while proclaiming boldly that common ownership was ‘as relevant today as it has ever been’, in effect sounded the retreat.67 The report attracted some criticism but the course was set and, in the second half of the 1980s, the party disassociated itself ever further from any steps to enlarge the public sector or even to restore to public ownership the many industries and utilities privatised by the Tories. Public ownership as an issue hardly figured in the Policy Review debates.68 The 1992 election manifesto contained no nationalisation pledges and no longer even called for a reversal of any Tory privatisation.69 Far from representing a defining characteristic of Old Labour (as alleged by the modernisers), public ownership ceased to figure as a goal of public policy several years before the emergence of New Labour. The later revision in 1995 of Clause 4 on Labour's Aims was of real symbolic significance, but in substantive terms it merely registered a change that had already occurred.
In truth, Labour's complex political culture has always embraced a wide range of traditions, strands and tendencies – ethical socialism, Fabianism, labourism, Marxism and revisionist social democracy – all with their own distinct understandings of the party's role and purposes.70 This indeed was never more so than in the 1980s, when an array of different groups – the hard left, the soft left, the traditional right (for example, Roy Hattersley and John Smith) and the ‘modernising’ right (Blair and Brown) – engaged in a contest, sometimes impassioned, to influence party policy, ideology and strategy. This was manifested on an institutional level in a proliferating world of factional competition, between the Manifesto Group, Labour Solidarity, the Tribune and Campaign Groups, the Labour Co-Ordinating Committee and the Rank and File Mobilising Committee. It is hard to conceive how all could be fitted into the one category – Old Labour. But, as Randall has explained, ‘the nature of memory is such that it gains its power from sweeping narrative and abhors nuanced analysis’.71 The object of the exercise was not dispassionate historical scrutiny but a creative reconstruction of Labour's past which would serve the strategic purposes of what was soon labelled ‘the New Labour project’.
The fact that their narrative was devised for strategic purposes does not mean that its protagonists did not believe it. For such modernisers as Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Philip Gould and Peter Mandelson, the fraught 1980s was the formative period of their political lives. It was a decade characterised by vitriolic divisions, unstable leadership, rank and file eruptions and a lurch to the left that culminated in the left-wing 1983 election manifesto and electoral disaster. Equally disconcerting were the furious and acrid clashes over the 1984–85 miners’ strike, destructive Militant entryism and the behaviour of so-called ‘looney left’ councils. ‘Common to all modernisers’, Blair's speechwriter Peter Hyman reflected, ‘were the scars caused by the battles with the Left – including Militant – in the eighties. For this generation, Labour was a party that lost elections, that had a series of unpalatable, extreme, often suicidal policies and that was crucified by the newspapers.’72 Those who came to form New Labour, in short, were ‘obsessed with the battles against the ghosts of yesterday’.73
New Labour's recoil from the past was as much psychological and emotional as intellectual, a profound sense of alienation from what the party had stood for and how it had operated. ‘Tony’, Hyman observed, ‘has an allergy to old Labour. It's not just that he finds policies such as nationalisation and high direct taxes barmy. He also hates losers, hates impotence, hates meaningless protest. He breaks out into a rash at the thought of being lumped with the failures of Labour's past.’74
The depth and vehemence of the modernisers’ ‘allergy to Old Labour’ imparted energy and conviction to their narrative, but ultimately it was driven by cool-headed strategic considerations. Its essentialist and stereotypical character was part of wider bid to lay the modernisers’ imprint on a broader universe of political discussion, to populate this with its own distinctive concepts, imagery and rhetoric.75 The aim was to reformulate the terms which the party used to think about itself, its past, present and purposes. It was a deliberate attempt by the modernisers to break free from the party's traditional understanding of its own past, to displace what it regarded as its complacent and self-congratulatory tone by a more searching and self-critical spirit.
But there was another strategic calculation at work. There are always multiple frames and narratives, although not always equally accessible. The capacity of a narrative to resonate, its perceived plausibility, will vary according to the extent that it is congruent with the wider culture – the common stock of beliefs, perceptions and understanding that circulate widely and constitute some form of conventional wisdom.76 Stories about the past and present will seem more authentic and truthful to the extent that they conform to the ingrained contours of common-sense wisdom.77 Persuading voters (especially floating voters) that their perceptions of the party were often one sided, exaggerated and inaccurate would have been a tough assignment. New Labour strategists opted instead to narrow the cognitive gap between Labour's sense of itself and how it was popularly viewed by remodelling the former so that it more closely corresponded to the latter. By confessing the party's past sins it could more persuasively claim to have paid penance and would be – hopefully – absolved: the sinner that repenteth. The very connectivity of the frames deployed by New Labour with established repertoires of belief meant that it appeared merely to be relaying common sense.
What helped immeasurably here was that the Old Labour narrative was widely shared and indeed echoed and amplified by the media. Delivering messages that fitted comfortably into existing media mindsets facilitated effective communication. Thus, rather than contesting the media portrayal of Old Labour, the leadership effectively endorsed it and in this way, they calculated, achieved a more sympathetic hearing.78 And, indeed, this approach met with real success, since the extent to which the media bought, uncritically, unthinkingly and unquestioningly, into New Labour rhetoric is quite striking.
New Labour's framing strategy was, then, effective – in the short term. With the advantage of hindsight, we can now see that it was sowing the dragon's teeth. Speaking of earlier generations, Drucker noted how its ‘strong sense of its own past’ operated as a force of cohesion, pride and confidence, binding its members together.79 Collective narratives about the past play a major role in fostering party unity, furnishing members with common understandings and interpretations and a shared sense of purpose.80 The ‘modernising’ project hinged on expunging Labour's past, depicted as a litany of frustrated hopes and failed endeavours from which little or nothing could be salvaged. Liu and Hilton argue that ‘[a] group's representation of its history will condition its sense of what it was, is, can and should be, and is thus central to the construction of its identity, norms, and values’.81 But what happens when a party disowns its own past – when its past becomes the object not of pride but of scorn, shame and ridicule? What are the consequences for its sense of identity and purpose and the implications for its morale? For many of its members and its supporters Labour was a party which, whatever its defects and disappointments, represented their values, aspirations and interests. It was the party responsible for the NHS, the welfare state, equal pay, improved education and much else besides. How would they respond to the message that their efforts had been squandered, themselves deluded?
Not surprisingly, New Labour's rhetoric left a residue of bitterness. Since Old Labour was presented so unflatteringly, it was inevitable that those attached to it would experience a sense of personal disparagement and affront. Many came to see New Labourites as ideological interlopers with scant affiliation to the party's ethos and traditions.
Some left, others pragmatically accepted New Labour because it did have real accomplishments and, after all, presided over an unprecedented three successive general election victories. Others kept their own counsel. But the crucial point is that New Labour never won any ideological hegemony within the party. The appeal of its most substantial ideological innovations, such as the commercialisation of greater competition within the public services, its deregulatory drive and its eager embrace of the City, was limited to a small number of ‘true believers’. It deployed astute and energetic party management techniques, coupled with highly skilled media and public relations operations, to stabilise its rule and marginalise its critics. But once its electoral performance began to flag, so did its hold on the party's loyalties. New Labour's ‘disarticulation of the party from its past’ became a defining feature of its own ethos – but it was one which caused many Labour supporters to wince.82 Its willingness to play fast and loose with the party's own history came to be seen as a typical example of ‘New Labour spin’, nurturing the perception of Blair, Mandelson and the rest of the modernisers as masters of manipulation but destitute of probity and integrity.
The resentments and antipathies that had festered over the years, the profound sense of alienation from the whole of the ‘New Labour project’, eventually exploded in the 2015 leadership election race. This was remarkable not only for Jeremy Corbyn's wholly unexpected and astonishing victory but for the very poor performance of the only unhesitatingly pro-New Labour candidate, Liz Kendall, who mustered less than 5 per cent of the vote. Indeed, the Corbyn insurgency can be seen as a delayed reaction by party members against those who, they felt, had stolen their party.
The concept of Old Labour was the centrepiece of a past that was reconstructed and re-imagined for political purposes. Historical narratives involve the selective appropriation of past happenings, but, for Labour's modernisers, the choice of which version of the past to exhume, so to speak, was driven principally not by any interest in historical accuracy but by strategic considerations. The strategic objective of their distinctive ‘mobilisation of memory’ was to validate ‘New Labour’, within both the party and the public at large, by delegitimating Labour's past. Only, so the argument read, by convincing the electorate that Old Labour had been decisively repudiated could the party be fully rehabilitated.
In the short term, this appeared to have worked, with the validity of the ‘Old Labour/New Labour’ dichotomy taken for granted in public discourse about the party. How successful New Labour rhetoric was in reconfiguring the party's public image is, though, highly questionable. A comparison between polling in 1993 and 2010 indicates an astonishing persistence of often highly adverse perceptions of the party, despite the tremendous alterations that had occurred in ideology, policy and leadership in the intervening years.83 Indeed, it could be argued that the modernisers’ caricatured view of Old Labour legitimated it in the eyes of many voters. An Old Labour which ‘only existed in the imaginings of the Labour modernisers and, by osmosis, the media’ came to acquire the aura of a more solid reality in the public mind.84
Internally, too, the effects of the Old Labour myth could be said to have been, for the modernisers, counter-productive. Their success in marginalising and, indeed, reducing to an impotent rump the hard or Bennite left was reversed with spectacular suddenness. The backlash against ‘Blairism’ amongst disaffected and estranged party members was so intense, partisan and indiscriminating that New Labour, for many, became as stereotyped and caricatured as Old Labour had been, its achievements either derided or ignored. For the avatars of Corbyn's ‘authentic’ Labour, ‘New Labour’ has become the new Old Labour.
1 David Dennett, quoted in David Lodge, Consciousness and the Novel (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002), p. 15.
2 Peter Hyman, One Out of 10: From Downing Street Vision to Classroom Reality (London: Vintage, 2005), p. 53. Hyman was a senior No. 10 aide.
3 George Orwell, 1984 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1949), p. 26.
4 The appropriation of the label of ‘modernisers’ was in itself a strategic initiative, an attempt to control the terms of the debate within the party: James E. Cronin, New Labour's Pasts: The Labour Party and its Discontents (London: Longman, 2004), p. 4. For this reason, throughout the text, I place inverted commas over the word ‘modernisers’.
5 Independent, 22 July 1995, p. 16.
6 Eric Hobsbawm, ‘The Sense of the Past’, in Hobsbawm, On History (London: Abacus, 1997), p. 27.
7 See, for example, Brian Brivati and Richard Heffernan (eds), The Labour Party: A Centenary History (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000); David Coates (ed.) Paving the Third Way (London: Merlin Press, 2003); Cronin, New Labour's Pasts.
8 Ignacio Bresco de Luna, ‘Form and Content of Historical Accounts: Studying the (Re)construction of Past Events’, Psychology and Society 2 (2009), p. 107.
9 Jay G. Blumler, ‘Elections, the Media and the Modern Publicity Process’, in Marjorie Ferguson (ed.), Public Communication: The New Imperatives (London: Sage, 1990), pp. 103, 106. Emphasis in the original.
10 Molly Patterson and Kristen R. Monroe, ‘Narrative in Political Science’, Annual Review of Political Science 1 (1998), 315–31.
11 P. L. Hammack, ‘Mind, Story, Society: The Political Psychology of Narrative’, in Michael Hanne (ed.), Warring with Words: Narrative and Metaphor in Domestic and International Politics (New York: Psychology Press, 2014), pp. 61–2.
12 Donald Schön and Martin Rein, Frame Reflection (New York: Basic Books, 1994), p. 26.
13 David A. Snow and Robert D. Benford, ‘Ideology, Frame Resonance, and Participant Mobilization’, International Social Movement Research 1 (1998), 197–217, at 198.
14 Philip Gould, The Unfinished Revolution (London: HarperCollins, 1998), p. 50.
15 Gould, The Unfinished Revolution, p. 21.
16 Lewis Minkin, The Blair Supremacy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), p. 68.
17 Gould, The Unfinished Revolution, p. 161.
18 Matthew Taylor, ‘“Modernisation” as Labour's Meta-Narrative’, Political Economy Research Centre, University of Sheffield, Annual Lecture, 16 May 2002.
19 Gould, The Unfinished Revolution, pp. 3–4.
20 Gould, The Unfinished Revolution, p. 19.
21 Labour Party Manifesto, Because Britain Deserves Better (London: Labour Party, 1997), pp. 1, 3, 12.
22 Phillip. L. Hammack and Andrew Pilecki, ‘Narrative as a Root Metaphor for Political Psychology’, Political Psychology 33 (2012), p. 84.
23 Henry M. Drucker, Doctrine and Ethos in the Labour Party (London: Allen & Unwin. 1979), p. 25.
24 Giles Radice and Stephen Pollard, More Southern Discomfort (London: Fabian Society, 1993).
25 Cronin, New Labour's Pasts, p. 2.
26 Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques, ‘March Without Vision’, Marxism Today (December 1990), pp. 26–31.
27 Stuart Hall, ‘Thatcher's Lessons’, Marxism Today (March 1988), p. 274. Emphasis in the original.
28 Alan Finlayson, ‘From Beliefs to Arguments: Interpretive Methodology and Rhetorical Political Analysis’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations 9 (2007), p. 557.
29 Independent, 22 July 1995, p. 16.
30 Nick Randall, ‘Time and British Politics: Memory, the Present and Teleology in the Politics of New Labour’, British Politics 4 (2009), pp. 190–1.
31 Ivor Gaber, ‘Slaying the Dragon’, in James Curran, Ivor Gaber and Julian Petley, Culture Wars: The Media and the British Left (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), p. 189.
32 Gould, The Unfinished Revolution, p. 23.
33 James Mahoney, ‘Path Dependence in Historical Sociology’, Theory and Society 29 (2000), 507–48, p. 508.
34 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/460009.stm (accessed 20 July 2017).
35 See, for example, Hyman, One Out of 10, p. 54.
36 Gould, The Unfinished Revolution, p. 25.
37 Tony Blair, A Journey (London: Hutchinson 2010), p. 48.
38 Neil Kinnock, ‘New? We've Always Been New’, New Statesman, 28 February 2000, p. 28.
39 C. A. R. Crosland, The Future of Socialism (London: Jonathan Cape, 1964 [1956]).
40 For detailed accounts see Eric Shaw, The Labour Party Since 1979: Crisis and Transformation (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 81–107 and Colin Hughes and Patrick Wintour, Labour Rebuilt (London: Fourth Estate, 1990).
41 Peter Mandelson and Roger Liddle, The Blair Revolution (London: Faber & Faber, 1996), p. ix.
42 Labour Party Manifesto, New Hope for Britain (London: Labour Party, 1983).
43 Labour Party, Labour's Programme 1982 (London: Labour Party, 1982), pp. 8–9.
44 See Neil Kinnock, Making Our Way (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986); Roy Hattersley, Choose Freedom (London: Penguin 1987); Bryan Gould, A Future for Socialism (London: Jonathan Cape, 1989).
45 Richard Hill, The Labour Party and Economic Strategy, 1979–97 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 136, 138.
46 Gould, A Future for Socialism, p. 95.
47 Gould, A Future for Socialism, pp. 95–6.
48 Labour Party, Meet the Challenge, Make the Change (London: Labour Party, 1989), p. 10.
49 John Smith took an intermediate position.
50 Gould, A Future for Socialism, p. 22.
51 Labour Party, Meet the Challenge, p. 13.
52 Gould, A Future for Socialism, p. 108.
53 Guardian, 2 May 1990, p. 13.
54 Gould, A Future for Socialism, p. 85.
55 Labour Party, Looking to the Future (London: Labour Party, 1990), p. 15.
56 Hill, The Labour Party and Economic Strategy, p. 147.
57 Independent on Sunday, 6 May 1990, p. 1 (and pp. 10–12 in the Business on Sunday supplement to the same issue).
58 Labour Party, Looking to the Future, p. 7.
59 Independent on Sunday, 6 May 1990 p. 1 (and pp. 10–12 in the Business on Sunday supplement to the same issue
60 Richard Heffernan, ‘Labour's Transformation: A Staged Process with No Single Point of Origin’ Politics 18 (1998), p. 104.
61 National Institute of Economic and Social Research, ‘Policy Options under a Labour Government’, National Institute Economic Review (London: NIESR, 1990), p. 52.
62 Gould, The Unfinished Revolution, p. 158.
63 Stallybrass, quoted in Henri Tajfel and Joseph P. Forgas, ‘Social Categorisation’, in Joseph P. Forgas (ed.), Social Cognition (San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 1981), pp. 113–40, p. 129.
64 Tajfel and Forgas, ‘Social Categorisation’, p. 135.
65 Cronin, New Labour's Pasts, pp. 10, 14.
66 Minkin, Blair Supremacy, p. 128.
67 Labour Party, Social Ownership (London: Labour Party, 1986), pp. 1–2.
68 Shaw, The Labour Party since 1979, pp. 47–9, 85–9.
69 Labour Party Manifesto, It's Time to Get Britain Working Again (London: Labour Party, 1992).
70 See for example, Nick Ellison, Egalitarian Thought and Labour Politics (London: Routledge, 1994); Stephen Meredith, ‘New Labour: “The Road Less Travelled” ’, Politics 23 (2003), 163–71.
71 Randall, ‘Time and British Politics’, p. 197.
72 Hyman, One Out of 10, p. 52.
73 Minkin, The Blair Supremacy, p. 131.
74 Hyman, One Out of 10, p. 11.
75 See Alan Finlayson, Making Sense of New Labour (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2003) and Norman Fairclough, New Labour, New Language? (London: Routledge, 2000).
76 Edwin Bacon, ‘Public Political Narratives’, Political Studies 6 (2012), pp. 768–86, p. 782.
77 Snow and Benford, ‘Ideology, Frame Resonance’, p. 210.
78 Gaber, ‘Slaying the Dragon’, p. 215.
79 Drucker, Doctrine and Ethos, p. 25.
80 Patterson and Monroe, ‘Narrative in Political Science’, p. 321.
81 James Liu and Denis Hilton, ‘How the Past Weighs on the Present: Social Representations of History and their Role in Identity Politics’, British Journal of Social Psychology 44 (2005), 537–56, p. 537.
82 Randall, ‘Time and British Politics’, p. 194.
83 Compare the findings of Radice and Pollard, More Southern Discomfort and Patrick Diamond and Giles Radice, Southern Discomfort Again (London: Policy Network, 2010).
84 Gaber, ‘Slaying the Dragon’, p. 215.