Good Riddance to New Labour

[IndianaGreen]

TONY WOOD
GOOD RIDDANCE TO 
NEW LABOUR

The UK elections of May 2010 will mark a watershed in British politics. After thirteen long years, New Labour’s economic model lies in ruins, but a reckoning has been delayed until after the vote. Government measures to sustain the illusion of normality, including £950bn worth of bank bail-outs, asset guarantees and ‘quantitative easing’, have blown a gaping hole in public finances: the deficit now stands at 12.8 per cent of gdp—higher than that of Greece—and government debt will reach 82 per cent of gdp by next year. By the end of 2009, unemployment was marching towards 2.5 million. The present moment is thus a curious interval. The Blair/Brown model has been discredited and the avenues of financialization New Labour pursued are no longer open. Yet it is not clear what paradigm will replace it. Nor, in a longer-term perspective, is it apparent whether the crash of 2008 will bring a return to the previous trajectory of post-war decline, from which the UK seemed to diverge since the 1990s. The elections will not supply immediate answers to these questions, any more than they will throw up a government promising a radical break with what went before. But awareness of this larger problematic should inform our assessment of New Labour, and encourage us to examine its rule in a broader comparative framework.

Viewed in international context, what have been the salient characteristics of New Labour’s period in office? Firstly, its duration: part of a wave of Third Way governments that came to power in the 90s, Labour has outlived them all. Secondly, its whole-hearted embrace of the free market, far more open and enthusiastic than those of its European analogues. Most distinctive, however, has been its integral role in Washington’s serial military aggressions: Labour’s Atlanticism has exceeded not only that of Germany’s spd, which backed the assaults on Kosovo and Afghanistan but baulked at Iraq, but also governments of the centre-right in France, Italy, Spain. Finally, New Labour has led the way on torture and repression within the European Union—above all since 2001, when the reverberations of its own foreign policy began coursing back through the domestic scene.

New Labour’s remarkable longevity has largely depended on the unprecedented eclipse of the Conservative Party, which after its ejection from power in 1997 disappeared for a protracted bout of internal blood-letting; it only began to re-emerge as a contender after 2005. Within Britain’s two-party system, a decade without serious competition left the field empty for Labour, which—thanks also to the distortions of first-past-the-post—secured commanding majorities with declining levels of popular support. In 1997, 43 per cent of the vote won Labour 63 per cent of the seats, and an overall majority of 179—a ‘landslide’ achieved with the support of less than a third of the electorate. In 2001 the majority was fractionally reduced to 167, with only a quarter of the voting population backing the winning party. In 2005, the Labour majority was down to 66, still giving them more than half the seats in the Commons, with the support of only 22 per cent of the total electorate.

http://www.newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2830