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.
If Tory absence provided the negative foundations of Labour’s ‘weightless hegemony’,footnote1 its positive basis was supplied by the long economic boom that began under the Major government, and from which Downing Street continued to benefit until 2008. This record-setting period of expansion was premised on the inflation of a series of asset-bubbles, above all in housing, which, together with the spread of more complex debt-based financial products, permitted the creation of significant wealth effects for UK homeowners and property speculators.footnote2 New Labour was thus ensured the passive consent of a significant share of the population, while not facing any contenders for legitimacy among the rest. This continuity with the economic legacy of its Conservative predecessors relates in turn to the determinants of New Labour’s ideological complexion. For if Labour in office has been more overt in its allegiance to neoliberalism than Europe’s other centre-left parties, this is because it has subscribed to its tenets for far longer, and followed on from a more successful free-market vanguard. Thatcher was able to inflict more serious defeats on organized labour, and carry out more of the heavy lifting of privatization, than any of her European peers. After the 1980s, there would be no resistance in the UK to compare with that which greeted Juppé’s reforms in 1995 or the Hartz Agenda in 2003. At the same time, Labour completed in the 1980s the ‘modernization’ carried out by other parties in the following decade, leaving the final stage of its social-liberal turn to be pushed through by Blair after 1994. When New Labour took office, it did so as heir to Thatcher rather than opponent.
With the approach of the 2010 electoral deadline, New Labour’s apologists have begun marshalling arguments in its support. What reasons have been offered for still, despite everything, voting Labour? They fall into three main categories. The first holds that Labour’s record has actually been rather good, but that the government has simply failed to communicate its successes to the public. Reduced nhs waiting lists and falling crime figures, for example, have been buried by poor ‘news management’; clearer messages should bring the electorate to its senses.footnote3 A second line of reasoning is that extending Labour’s hold on power is the only way to bring about, finally, a return to its better social-democratic self.footnote4 The third category—the eternal default position among Labour camp-followers—simply insists that, however bad Blair and Brown have been, the Conservatives would be worse: Cameron’s unabashedly elitist cabinet will implement swingeing budget cuts that will damage public services and further set back the cause of social justice.footnote5 On this view Labour, whatever its faults, remains the lesser evil, and the only means of keeping the disaster of Tory rule at bay.
How should these arguments be assessed? The principal measure must be New Labour’s record in office—what has it done with the parliamentary carte blanche it has enjoyed for thirteen years, and how does it compare with its Conservative predecessors? I will then examine the condition of the party itself, and the political traits of its leading figures, the better to weigh the chances of a social-democratic renewal, before turning to the character of the Tory opposition, to gauge the substantive differences between the evils the British electorate is being offered.footnote6
If, in global perspective, New Labour’s zealous warmongering has been its most distinctive characteristic, it also marks the clearest break—for the worse—from its Tory predecessors. For the most part, the Major governments pursued a conventional Atlanticist foreign policy, participating in the first Gulf War without demurral and joining the us in launching airstrikes on Iraq in 1996 (cheered on by Blair from the opposition benches). But relations with the Clinton administration were cool: Foreign Secretaries Hurd and Rifkind both objected to the us intensification of war in Bosnia and bombardment of Serb positions. From 1999 onwards, New Labour assumed a much more forward role. Not just a follower, Blair became an active advocate of us imperial aims: urging a reluctant Clinton to send ground troops into Kosovo, dispatching his own team of spin-doctors to Brussels to run nato’s communications during the bombing campaign. In April 1999 he presented Americans with the first theorization of neo-imperial ‘humanitarian’ warfare, the ‘doctrine of international community’—something that Clinton, preoccupied by the Lewinsky scandal, had been too busy to produce. After 9.11, Blair assumed the role of recruiting sergeant for Bush, flying 50,000 miles in eight weeks to drum up support for the assault on Afghanistan; the ‘coalition of the willing’, by which token troop deployments from some 40 states have been inflicted upon the long-suffering Afghans, largely owes its existence to New Labour. British secret services manfully assisted the Americans in torturing detainees, and raised no objections to UK citizens being disappeared to Guantánamo.