New Labour – Not Labour
New Labour’s current travails have prompted a number of people to recall a piece I wrote for the New Statesman in 1999 – it was a review of Paul Routledge’s biography of Peter Mandelson – and to ask if they can see it again. So, here it is.
“When Peter Mandelson’s resignation from the cabinet was reported in New Zealand – a resignation apparently caused by Paul Routledge’s investigations – he was described to a public which had never heard of him before as “the architect of New Labour”. “Yes,” said my New Zealand friends, who had noticed the capital N, “but what is New Labour?”
As many have remarked, the capital N is significant (though the New Statesman style sheet sticks resolutely with the lower-case version). It signifies that “New Labour” is, and was intended to be, much more than might have been expected as a rational response to four consecutive election defeats and to the huge social and other changes which have taken place in Britain over two decades. Those changes, whose pressing necessity by the end of the 1980s was surely evident to all but the most purblind, would have taken place in any case.
The modernisation of Labour, the reappraisal of Labour policy, the rethinking of the relevance of Labour principle to modern circumstances, the recognition of people’s aspirations as well as their needs, the positioning of Labour as a political force which empowers rather than limits, the reaching out to a new majority – all of this was already being undertaken by many Labour thinkers and activists who did not see the need for that capital N.
The truth is that “New” Labour is more than a renewal or modernisation or updating of Labour. It is a project born of the conviction that Labour was dead – in the sense that it would never again be electable. Something new – in the sense of a complete break – was required. It was the completeness of the break that mattered. New Labour defined itself by not being Labour. Issues on which the break could be highlighted were actively sought. New Labour is not Labour renewed. It is Labour rejected, Labour renounced. New Labour is a negative. New Labour is, and is meant to be, Not Labour.
We do not need to look far for the genesis of this belief. There is a constituency out there which is instinctively Not Labour. They knew immediately what the three-letter word beginning with a capital N really meant.
They are the people who had always wanted a party that would salve their consciences, would give them a sense of moral and intellectual superiority, would provide them with the illusion that they were – under the skin – blood brothers of the dispossessed, without threatening the comfortable privilege which they enjoyed and expected. They are the intelligent, well-meaning, agreeable dinner party companions who reveal that, despite their socialist convictions, it turned out that the local school was simply not academic enough or little Johnny was just too sensitive and so, after an appropriate struggle with their consciences, they had to send him to a fee-paying school.
These people had always had a problem with Labour. They did not like Labour’s sharp edges. They voted Labour in a good year, but also flirted with the Liberals, might even have supported a liberal Tory, and enthusiastically supported the Social Democrats for a time. They are found disproportionately among the liberal professions, the universities and the media. They are people who love to, and are often paid to, think, talk and write about politics.
Peter Mandelson, as Routledge’s book shows, understands this world very well. It is his world. It is in numerical terms a small world, but it is disproportionately important in shaping the political agenda. It is also a world which, despite its smallness, has the self-confidence (not to say arrogance) to believe that it is all there is, or at least all that matters. (It is one of the paradoxes of a complex society like Britain that it is possible to have an existence which is almost completely insulated against the lives and experiences of large numbers of other and different people.)
And so Not Labour was born – a party shorn of all those aspects that might frighten the bien-pensants. It was, from the outset, an exercise in exaggeration, in overkill. Yet what determined the 1997 election result was that Thatcherism was a busted flush, John Major had been permitted by the electorate’s casual decision in 1992 to demonstrate conclusively that he was not up to it, and the voters were determined to secure a change. The question of renewed Labour or new Labour was simply not a major factor.
But a Labour Party that had been brought, understandably, over years in the wilderness to the belief that any sacrifice was worthwhile for the sake of election victory had given up any will to contest what they were told by the experts. If embracing Not Labour was the price of victory, then so be it. The possibility that the sacrifice may not have been necessary was not allowed to intrude into the euphoria when victory finally came.
Yet sacrifice it clearly was. Much that is important and valuable to British politics and British democracy has been jettisoned. The prospects of acting on a non-establishment view as to how British society might be reformed have been fatally undermined. Democratic choice has been limited. Not Labour is self-consciously a centrist party whose purpose is to marginalise and starve of sustenance parties to the right – and the left. The only competitors allowed will be those who provide, for marketing purposes, merely an alternative brand of centrist politics.
That is how it will seem, and rightly, to many Labour activists. For many of them (and I think particularly of members of the cabinet), the last decade has been a painful period, over which they have yielded up more and more of what it was that mattered to them as individuals and as a collective. This has involved more than the process of compromise and pragmatism which is central to all democratic politics. It is even more than the less savoury treacheries, large and small, that individuals make in secret for the sake of personal ambition. What was required of all those Labour activists was a sustained, deliberate and collective abandonment of what had brought most of them into politics in the first place.
Battle-scarred as they are (and the scars are in private as well as public places), most remain nevertheless grounded in Labour politics. For them, Not Labour is a device, a means to an end. Increasingly, they look from one to another, mutely asking for a sign that the sacrifice will soon be at an end and that the real business of government can begin.
It is beginning to dawn on them, however, that Not Labour is the end and not the means. When they look for reassurance that normal business is to be resumed, they discover a leadership whose instincts, particularly under pressure, are to reinforce the Not Labour message. Their leader’s response to some small local difficulties on returning from abroad is his announcement of new policies which will be “strict and authoritarian” – the authentic voice of Not Labour.
This is not an accident. When Peter Mandelson was famously or notoriously swapping horses in the race for the Labour leadership, it was not just presentational skills he was looking for. Gordon Brown was not instinctively a Not Labour man. Tony Blair was and is. In Blair, Mandelson found his political soulmate – someone who effortlessly and instinctively treads the same path that Mandelson, perhaps more consciously, had mapped out. It is not necessary to dislike Mandelson personally to try to lay this bare. Indeed, the Routledge book is on occasion seriously vitiated by the cheap shots – born no doubt of deep loathing – that he takes at his subject.
On the contrary, Peter Mandelson can be a delightful and charming companion. His charm is an important part of his armoury. It is not an exaggeration to say that he seduces those with whom he wishes to work closely – not in a physical sense, but for the purpose of establishing a sort of emotional thraldom. The bonds between Blair and Mandelson – emotional and political – will not be broken easily.
Nothing in politics is permanent, and Not Labour will fade away sooner or later. But it looks set for a good run. I think I can claim to have seen it coming. It is not for me.
A Brown Study
The following article by Bryan Gould appeared in the Sunday Telegraph on 21 September
The first two months must have been very heaven. The long-awaited prize had been grasped. Opposition from both within and without had faded away. A long period at Number Ten seemed assured.
The voters seemed to like the new leader. They liked his plain-speaking and the absence of spin. They liked his re-statement of basic values and his robust defence of the national interest. Most of all, they liked the fact that he was not Tony Blair.
So, one month later, how have we arrived at the 7% Conservative lead in today’s poll? Is Gordon Brown on track to join the ranks of those Prime Ministers who were never granted an electoral mandate because they fell at the first electoral hurdle?
The first and partial answer is that it may be premature to ask these questions. The “Brown bounce” was always going to be short-lived. There was always going to be an audible thud as the polls came back to earth. What matters now is what will happen over the next eighteen months, and the current volatility of the polls (something to which David Cameron is himself no stranger) tells us little that we need to know.
None of this means that Gordon has not compounded his problems by making avoidable errors. He has lacked a sure touch in presenting policy and in Parliament. He has appeared to contradict his declared distaste of spin. And he made a serious mistake in handling the issue of an early election – a mistake that suggests that there is behind the appearance of iron resolve a much less certain political calculator.
A more confident leader might well have gone for the kill in the period leading up to the conference season. He could have argued with some justice that he was unwilling to serve for long without a full mandate for a Brown premiership, and that the voters deserved the chance to say whether they wanted him or not. He could have launched an election campaign from the top of the “Brown bounce”. And he could have denied David Cameron the chance to make a life-saving conference speech.
But to concentrate on these immediate mistakes does not explain the speed and scale of the decline in Gordon Brown’s standing. There are other, deeper factors at work – contextual elements that, unlike those with a short life, such as a conference speech or a mistake in presentation, are likely to influence events for some time to come.
First, there were always going to be elements of the poison chalice about Tony Blair’s legacy to Gordon Brown. We should not forget (and nor should the Blairites) that Tony left office, not because he wanted to, but because his party saw him increasingly as an electoral liability. Glad of a change, intrigued by a new face (or at least a familiar face in a new context), the voters were always going to recall before too long that Gordon had been a centrally important figure in the Blair government. Its failings were his as well.
Gordon knew this, too, but foreknowledge made the problem no easier to resolve. He could go just so far in drawing a line under the Blair legacy, and trying to distance himself from its more unpopular aspects. If he went too far, he would provoke several unwelcome responses.
The first would be the predictable question – if you were at odds with this or that policy, why did you not say so at the time? More damagingly, a break with the Blair record in government would prompt a damaging counter-attack from the still powerful guardians of the New Labour project.
And so it has turned out, and in a much shorter time than even Gordon’s enemies must have planned or hoped for. No sooner had Blairite spokespeople like Peter Mandelson declared that their long-nurtured hostility to a Brown premiership had ended than hostilities were resumed – and with a vengeance.
The all-too familiar off-the-record briefing is suddenly in full swing. Unnamed “insiders” warn darkly that they always knew that Gordon’s personal and political deficiencies meant that he would falter sooner rather than later. For the first time in years, we are now made privy to leaks from around the Cabinet table, designed to show that Gordon’s colleagues are unhappy. Blairite ex-Ministers proclaim their readiness, in effect, to campaign against the new leader. As we know, the voters hate to see division and infighting – and they look like getting it in spades.
Why has this happened? It is partly a matter of personal pay-back. The price is being paid for those brooding years at the Treasury, when the hint of an anti-Blair conspiracy was often in the air. But it may also be that there are issues of real political substance in play. The Blair government drew its strength only reluctantly from its democratic mandate, still less from the Labour party. Its main pillars of support were always Washington and the Murdoch press.
Any change of policy that Gordon Brown may wish to make would cause him real problems if it provoked an adverse reaction from these powerful allies. So, even a phased withdrawal from Iraq may be seen as unacceptable. Even the most careful hint of a slight move to the left, or at least towards traditional Labour values, might ring some alarm bells. The Blairite counter-attack may not be made in the interests of its front-men alone.
As it is, there is no quick victory – just the long haul. But the long haul – like the electoral arithmetic – may work to Gordon Brown’s advantage. He has time to get the balance right between acknowledging and distancing himself from the Blair legacy. He has time to confound his internal enemies by using the power of patronage and reminding his party of the electorate’s intolerance of disunity. He has time for the voters to understand and value his sterling qualities, and to turn his quintessential Britishness and love of his country to political advantage.
Above all, he has time to stop paying so much attention to “advisers” and to trust his own judgment. Today’s poll means that the campaign for the next election is only just beginning.
Bryan Gould
15 October 2007
Bryan Gould on Gordon Brown
The following article was published in the NZ Listener of 14 July.
In the ten years after Gordon Brown and Tony Blair entered the House of Commons together in 1983, Gordon was always regarded as the senior member of the duo – slightly the older, better grounded in the Labour movement, apparently with more substance than his more charming but perhaps more superficial colleague.
Little wonder, then, that Gordon was first bemused and then angry that the Labour Party “fixers” (and principally Peter Mandelson) decided at the last moment – and just in time for the leadership election following John Smith’s untimely death and my own decision to return to New Zealand – to back Tony as the preferred leadership candidate. Gordon was persuaded to wait for his turn – something he was promised in return for not challenging Tony’s candidature.
The result was a ten-year wait – profitably spent, it is true, in a successful term as Chancellor of the Exchequer – but a period of increasing frustration on Gordon’s part and an increasing reluctance from Tony to keep his part of the bargain. It was only when the post-Iraq opinion polls turned sour that Tony bowed to the inevitable and that Gordon had his chance.
What will he make of it? The omens look good. The main thing going for him is that he is not Tony. Despite Blair’s extravagant gifts, as communicator and persuader, the British public has grown tired and cynical at the glibness and the endless spin. They seem ready to embrace someone with perhaps less surface but more substance. They want, at least for the moment, someone who says what he thinks and means what he says.
Brown also has the good fortune to face in David Cameron a Tory leader who has made the Tories electable again but who looks better suited to fighting the last war – against Blair – rather than a new battle against the more solid virtues of the new Prime Minister. There is already a “Brown bounce” in the opinion polls as the British public suddenly see the dour Scot in a new light.
This is not to say that Gordon will find that election success falls into his lap. More than anyone else, he is ineluctably and correctly linked in the public mind with the Blair government and its record. He is as much identified with the government’s failures as is Tony. He will have a difficult task in convincing people that he can free himself of the Blair legacy; nor will there be any shortage of defenders of that legacy if he succeeds.
And the truth is that what is known of him is not without foundation. He does find it difficult to smile and to chat to people. He does demonstrate some of the characteristics of a control freak. He is at times excessively cautious and calculating. And his record is not free from blemish, including most memorably his determined support for British membership of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism long after its disastrous consequences were becoming apparent.
I remain, however, optimistic about a Brown premiership. Here is someone who is a much more authentically Labour figure than his predecessor, someone whom the voters will easily recognise and therefore trust. Here is someone who has a better grasp of the fact that we would not bother with the messy business of politics if it were not for the need to reconcile competing interests and allocate scarce resources, with the consequent inevitability that some people must be disappointed – something Blair instinctively shied away from. Here is a Prime Minister who will want to use power, as opposed to simply holding on to it, and to use it for purposes that will commend themselves to voters who want a recognisably Labour government.
If he is to make that fresh start, however, he must do some difficult things. He must draw a line under the Iraq disaster; the appointment as Foreign Secretary of the Iraq war sceptic, David Miliband, is a good start but the most effective step would be to establish an independent inquiry into the origins of the war, and set a timetable for the withdrawal of British troops. He must reaffirm the value of public service and the public sector, and not turn always to the private sector for solutions. He must stop hobnobbing with the rich and powerful, something for which his predecessor had a fatal weakness. Above all, if he is to make that essential connection with the British public and to do so without Tony Blair’s exceptional presentational skills, he must re-establish trust in the political process. He can do that best by being his own man.
Bryan Gould
29 June 2007
British Labour in 2007
As we enter the new year, the first task for Labour should be to draw a line under an egregious error made in its name – an error that began with an abuse of power and a breathtaking deception of the British people, and then proceeded to devastate a faraway country, undermine the rule of international law, threaten the fragile integrity and cohesion of British society, increase the burden of religious division – in Britain, the Middle East and around the world, advance the claims of terrorism, and engulf the entire ten-year record of the Blair government in disrepute. It is hard to think of a parallel in modern times to such a tragic catalogue of catastrophe brought about by the blind certainties of an inherently good man.
Tony Blair’s departure will help to draw that line. So will the election of a new leader. That new leader, however, will face a Herculean task if a fresh start is to be made and a renewed mandate obtained.
If the new leader is Gordon Brown (as I – and most others – assume it will be), his first hurdle will be the need to demonstrate that, without the presentational skills of a Tony Blair and faced with a Tory opponent who is at least electable, he can still engage with the British electorate and enlist their support.
His best strategy in approaching this task is to be himself – to demonstrate that, when the voters look at him and the Labour Party, what they see is what they get. So, what is needed is an end to spin, to the short-term preoccupation with electoral advantage and news manipulation at every turn, and a return to recognisable Labour values – values updated and adapted to society’s needs of course, cutting-edge values applied to new and as yet unrecognised issues, but values so true to Labour that voters will feel that they know where they are.
So, let us have an end to hobnobbing with the rich and powerful, to riding shotgun for the Americans however crazy the enterprise, to the indifference with which widening inequalities in our society are tolerated, to the casual assumption that the government is above the law, to the disdain for the Party and the trade unions, to the belief that globalisers like Rupert Murdoch represent the only possible future, to the gut instinct that the private sector will always offer better solutions than the public sector, to the carelessness with which divisions in our already divided society are exacerbated, and to the self-serving belief that what the government wants is, for that reason alone, good and right.
Let us, in other words, have an end to New Labour (or, rather, Not Labour). Let us have instead Labour tout court, Labour unadorned, Labour true to itself. That would free the new leader to use 2007 to begin to build a new trust with the voters, based on a commitment to restoring the cohesion of our society, across social, economic, ethnic and religious divides. It would mean a return to Robin Cook’s ethical foreign policy, so that a relationship of trust is extended to include our international partners. It would mean recognising that the current world order, disfigured as it is by huge and growing imbalances and a dizzying attempt to stop the United States from toppling off the high wire of its unsustainable deficit, must be reformed.
It would mean a return to that central Labour preoccupation with diffusing power and wealth throughout society, rather than aiding and abetting its concentration in fewer and fewer hands. The new leader could give priority to the real economy in which most people live and work rather than the financial economy which disproportionately rewards the few, reassert the value of public service and the public domain, and return the most important decisions about the economy to the democratic process rather than handing them over to self-serving bankers.
If any of this is to be attempted, let alone achieved, there is no time to lose. It is essential that the first part of 2007 should not be wasted on the personal rather than collective project of protecting what remains of the Prime Minister’s reputation. The sooner the new leader is in place, the better.
Bryan Gould
19 December 2006
This article will be published in the first 2007 issue of The Parliamentary Monitor.