In their contrasting personal styles, they claimed that they wanted to make Labour’s century-old ethical values of liberty, equality, and fraternity relevant to the modern world—and not only in Britain. Brown and Blair believed that their project held important significance for the progressive left everywhere.
They wanted to marry economic efficiency with social fairness through the development of a successful open-market economy and a domestic agenda focused on the pursuit of social justice (they called it fairness). Under the New Labour project, the individual needs of the consumer and citizen were to coexist with the aspirations of the wider society. This meant trying to establish a balance between rights and responsibilities. Both men claimed that the project required a conscious break with the obsolete dogmas of their party’s socialist past. Too often, Labour’s troubled history had been an obstacle to the successful evolution of British social democracy. As a result, they argued, their party had held power for only twenty-three years in the entire twentieth century—and in no more than twelve of them with an absolute parliamentary majority. New Labour was born out of a legacy of defeat, after an unprecedented four consecutive lost elections. It sought a winning political formula that would appeal not only to Labour’s traditional voters—the poor, the old, the manual working class, and many living in the north—but more important, to the increasingly affluent and contented middle classes of southern England, committed to the pursuit of personal success. New Labour was to focus on the needs of hard-working families who wanted to thrive in an open society, with opportunities for all and not just the few. The project’s primary aim was to provide them with what fellow creator Philip Gould described as “the tools and resources they needed to advance and prosper.” In this way, New Labour was to lay the foundation for a “progressive century.”
Blair explained what all this meant in his personal introduction to New Labour’s general election program in April 1997, when he wrote, “We aim to put behind us the bitter political struggles of right and left that have torn our country apart for too many decades. Many of these conflicts have no relevance whatsoever to the modern world—public versus private, bosses versus workers, middle class versus working class. We must learn from our history, not be chained by it.” Above all, Blair and Brown argued that although their commitment to “the equal worth of all with no one cast aside; fairness and justice within strong communities” was strong, they wanted those values to translate into a more pragmatic set of economic and social policies. They defended profit, entrepreneurship, self-reliance, and a more prescriptive welfare state, where benefits would be a hand up and not a hand out. Blair argued in 1997 that he regarded “ambition and compassion” not as polar opposites but as partners. The concept of the public interest went together with the achievement of a more satisfied private realm of material wealth, individual freedom, and cultural diversity. “What counts is what works,” declared Blair. “The objectives are radical. The means will be modern.”
The political results of this philosophy were extraordinary victories in three consecutive general elections with substantial parliamentary majorities, something never before been achieved in the party’s history. And the relatively successful transition of power from Blair to Brown in June 2007 suggests that this success may continue.
SOME CRITICS would argue that the whole New Labour project was little more than a triumph of marketing techniques, of spin, manipulation, and hyperbole. Indeed, despite its rhetoric of modernity, in practice the project turned out to be surprisingly timid, defensive, and not especially competent. In their determination to occupy the center ground of British politics, Blair and Brown sought to stifle genuine debate over ends and means and to discourage dissent. They managed the delivery of public services—schools and hospitals—through the increasing use of private enterprise. Often they seemed to believe that their only enemies lay on their own party’s increasingly feeble left wing, with its supposed continuing belief in the virtues of collectivism over individual choice. In fact, the main story of the past thirteen years was the utter defeat of an Old Labour left that had once posed a credible challenge, or at least an irritating barrier, to the party’s rightward evolution.
The trade unions—the original creators of the Labour Party—have seen their authority and influence shrivel dramatically. In the House of Commons, the Party is no longer convulsed by conflict and factionalism—even if many of its members rebelled against Blair’s decision to take Britain to war against Iraq. A tentative left-wing challenge to Brown collapsed before it could be launched. For the first time since 1931, a Labour leader was elected without any formal opposition, in what turned into a coronation. A party famed for its internecine squabbling has became more professional, managed by a top-down system of centralized command and control. New Labour’s success owes much to its collective sense of self-discipline, loyalty, and cohesion.
Outwardly, it is perhaps not surprising that the Blair/Brown project has found innumerable admirers across the democratic left in other countries. After all, these remain challenging times for the left. In France, in 2007, the Socialists suffered a particularly bitter defeat. In Sweden, the Social Democrats find themselves in unexpected opposition after a narrow defeat at the polls in September 2006, while in Germany the Social Democrats may form an important part of Angela Merkel’s grand coalition, but they remain in a weakened strategic position. In Italy, Romano Prodi’s center-left government looks fragile and divided, while the Socialist administration in Spain faces growing electoral trouble. Only Britain’s New Labour appears to have found the inner self- confidence and capacity for renewal in government.
But whether the Blair/Brown approach really provides useful lessons for democratic left politics is another matter. Indeed, it is questionable whether the New Labour project represents any recognizably progressive position on the center-left of the political spectrum. There are underlying tensions, even genuine contradictions, within it that were vividly evident within the few days that surrounded Gordon Brown’s accession to the premiership at the end of June 2007.
The first iconic moment was the final speech that he made as chancellor of the exchequer to the assembled financiers and company chief executives at the annual dinner of the City of London in the Guildhall. On this glittering occasion, Brown sang a hymn of uncritical praise to London’s astonishing success as one of the undisputed centers of global capitalism—a position achieved under New Labour. He pointed out that 40 percent of the world’s sales of foreign equities and nearly a third of all currency transactions were now conducted within the famous Square Mile, more than in New York and Tokyo put together. He spoke enthusiastically about the dramatic upsurge of private equity companies, the growth of hedge funds, and the endless wave of mergers and acquisitions that were transforming the face of international business. He took pride at the low levels of corporate and personal taxation imposed on the wealth and income of the new super rich. He described with enthusiasm “a new world order, greater than the nineteenth century industrial revolution” with Britain at its epicenter. The man who was about to become prime minister only a few days later listed the conditions that had made all this possible—openness to world trade and global trends, a “deep and abiding belief in open markets,” the importance of flexibility and deregulation, diversity and adaptability. He even noted with pride how New Labour had successfully resisted pressures to introduce Sarbanes-Oxley-style legislation to deal with corporate misdeeds (as in the United States after the Enron and WorldCom scandals). No wonder Britain is seen alongside the Cayman Islands and the Seychelles as a welcoming haven for the global elite. London is now full of Russian oligarchs who plundered their country’s assets, Arab potentates replete with the largesse of oil revenues, and a host of buccaneering capitalists, made rich through speculation and capital accumulation. Their hedonistic lifestyles have fueled a huge property price boom and widened the already massive gulf of wealth and income between them and everybody else. Under New Labour, London is reminiscent of the Wall Street of Oliver Stone’s movie of the same name, with another Gordon’s motto that “Greed is good.”
But there was another seemingly different Gordon Brown on public display only a few days later as he entered 10 Downing Street. Now he was the man who claimed that he possessed a “moral compass” and that he would dedicate himself to service with modesty and seek to restore lost trust through an ethical commitment to duty and prudence. As a Scottish preacher’s son, Brown promised he would create a new age of probity and integrity after the implied excesses of sleaze and glitz that had characterized the Blair years. The aborted terrorist attacks that greeted his first days as prime minister revealed him to be a strong but unassuming leader, intent on firm action and resolve, yet averse to headline grabbing and simplistic promises. Brown appeared to herald the return to a more consensual style of government. He seemed keen to live down his previous reputation as a control freak at the Treasury, which he had run almost as an alternative government to that of Blair. Now the emphasis was to be on collegiality around the cabinet table. A few Liberal Democratic Party senior figures and nonpolitical experts were recruited onto the government’s payroll. It was to be a “government of all the talents” that transcended petty party differences. As a passionate believer in the need for a British identity, Brown wanted to project to the world a country that practiced decency and tolerance in what has become an increasingly multinational, multifaith, and culturally diverse nation.
In his style of humility and self-restraint as prime minister, Brown seemed to hanker back to a lost age. He promised a new constitutional settlement that would return power and authority to Parliament, restore the independence of the civil service from overt party political control, and encourage the revival of the Cabinet as a place where ministers would not only be consulted before decisions were made but encouraged to speak their mind. Blair had run his administration autocratically from the comfort of his sofa in 10 Downing Street, with a close attention to media management and contempt for the House of Commons. Now Brown appeared to be encouraging pluralism and decentralization; he was prepared to learn from others.
WHAT IS already evident is that Brown, like Blair, is not a recognizable social democrat, a man of the progressive left. Unlike his predecessor, however, he is a self-confessed intellectual, a voracious reader, and eclectic lover of books. Although his range of cultural interests may be narrow, Brown has none of Blair’s superficiality, hollowness, and obsession with pop stars and celebrities. Blair once said his favorite book was Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. Brown is made of sterner stuff. But the volumes that helped to shape his political beliefs are not those of any known left. It is hard to spot many that come from the progressive ranks, and none at all that come from socialists—except for the ubiquitous George Orwell. Among his living favorites are the works of James Q. Wilson and Gertrude Himmelfarb, normally seen in the United States as leading neoconservatives. Long-dead political economists, such as Adam Smith, David Hume, and David Ricardo also figure prominently on the Brown reading list. In his recent, well-written volume on eight people of courage, he could find no room for anybody on the progressive left except for Robert Kennedy in his final days and Nelson Mandela. What is so striking is who is missing from the Brown pantheon. Not one hails from Labour’s own past or that of international socialism. And yet, this is the man who, as a young radical, with a first-class degree in modern history from Edinburgh University, wrote an affectionate biography of Jimmy Maxton, the Clydeside firebrand Member of Parliament, who raised the banner of a messianic socialism in Britain during the 1920s and 1930s. Indeed, Brown is still mistakenly regarded on the more sentimental left and on the conservative right as a closet socialist, familiarly at home with the ethos and cultural traditions of an older Labour.
There does seem to be something of a Jekyll and Hyde quality to the Labour project’s co-founder—the passionate cheerleader of an aggressive capitalism not seen in the world since the Gilded Age, but also the puritanical, principled Scot with a firm “moral compass” and an ethical commitment to abolishing global poverty, eradicating disease, and appealing to our better nature.
In her recent book The De-Moralisation of Society, Gertrude Himmelfarb set out what she regarded as the “values” of the moral individual—thrift, hard work, self-reliance, self-respect, patriotism, neighborliness, stability, frugality, and cleanliness. She described them as “Scottish Tory values.” In her view they were dominant in the Victorian Age, but they are also reflected strongly in Brown’s own outlook on the world. It all seems far away from the socialism of his youth. Perhaps what attracts Brown to Himmelfarb is her firm conviction that in the nineteenth century “the poor had the will to those same values [as the rich] and the ability to realize them,” that “common virtues were within reach of the common people.” She views individuals as “free moral agents” not trapped by specific social and economic conditions of life beyond their control. “A liberal society requires a moral citizenry,” she insisted.
The writings of James Q. Wilson also appealed to Brown through his concept of the “moral sense.” “We are bound together by mutual interdependence and a common moral sense,” argued Wilson. He listed among the virtues those of fairness, sympathy, self-control, and duty. But perhaps most important of all, Wilson sought to reconcile that moral sense with the harsh realities of our uncertain and dangerous world. As he once wrote, “Mankind’s moral sense is not a strong beacon light, radiating outward to illuminate in sharp outline all that it touches. It is rather a small candle flame casting vague and multiple shadows, flickering and spluttering in the strong winds of power and passion, greed and ideology.” To Wilson “the passions of man are in conflict. His moral sense is one of the calmer passions but it cannot always prevail over its wilder rivals; its reach is uncertain and contingent.”
New Labour’s project has been powerfully influenced since its inception by such neoconservative thinking. Moreover, Brown’s economics were inspired by Alan Greenspan, who became one of his advisers at the UK Treasury, rather than by John Kenneth Galbraith, Paul Krugman, and others from the American liberal-left. He may have taken his summer holidays regularly on his beloved Cape Cod, but Brown was less under the influence of American economic liberalism than his admirers believe.
STILL, THE “moral compass” does have a socialist past, even if Brown now fails to acknowledge it. The early pioneers of Labour often spoke of rights and responsibilities. There is a strong tradition in socialism that reflects an authoritarian tendency. It was apparent in the writings of Beatrice and Sidney Webb and H.G. Wells. Even the blessed Keir Hardie called for coercive labor colonies to deal with the “undeserving poor,” the shiftless idle and dissolute among the poorer working classes who could not be saved or converted to socialism. In the messianic vision of the Commonwealth of Labor there was to be no room for the morally and physically unfit. The coercive nature of New Labour’s welfare-to-work policies for the socially excluded and unemployed were never as draconian as the rhetoric might have suggested, but their greater emphasis on individual responsibility than on rights of dependency was not unfamiliar during the Party’s formative years. What was missing from the Blair/Brown project, however, was a determination to pursue a public agenda of equality and redistribution. Britain today has less upward social mobility than ten years ago. The targeted use of tax and benefit credits has had surprisingly little positive impact on millions of people who remain in relative poverty. It is now suggested that more people exist outside the formal labor market than in 1997, when New Labour first came to power, with as many as one in five households where nobody is in paid employment. Training and skill levels of millions of manual workers lie stubbornly behind those of their contemporaries in continental Europe.
To a surprising extent, Britain’s New Labour project was the work of two remarkable young men who came together to save their party from oblivion by renewing its existence in a more modern form. They seized the opportunities open to them. But it would be wrong to conclude that their project came out of nowhere. Blair in particular liked to see the time he was elected as party leader in 1994 as Year Zero; previous history was a dark age, at most a warning or at best a preface to his own reign of achievements. But this was not the case. The project was not really even the result of a socialist revisionism. It was much more a hardheaded recognition of the new realities of the world that Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan had helped to create in the nineteen eighties. It did not seek to break with their legacy but to consolidate and advance what they had begun. Unlike earlier British general election victories—in 1906, 1945, and 1979—New Labour’s triumph in 1997 reflected much more continuity than change. Blair and Brown were not revolutionaries, intent on challenging conventional wisdom and the existing social and economic order. Indeed, Simon Jenkins, the influential political commentator, has described them as Thatcher’s faithful sons. They followed her legacy, inspired by what she had done. They appealed to the winning political coalition she had created among the affluent middle and working classes. They agreed not to restore trade union power, not to raise the level of taxes on incomes, to extend private ownership further into the public sector, and to emphasize the need for personal choice and individual empowerment. Like her, they saw the state not as an owner or controller but as an enabler.
It is true that they did not share her illiberal attitude to private behavior. Brown, like Blair, did help to make Britain a more tolerant and compassionate country through the introduction of more gay rights, longer licensing hours for the consumption of alcohol, and less censorship. But this was paralleled with relentless assaults on civil liberties, determined in part by the threat of terrorism. In New Labour Britain the prisons have never been fuller. We are still a long way from the moral Utopia of Himmelfarb and Wilson
A BARELY concealed contempt for the party’s history was always a feature of the New Labour project. Blair even used to argue that Labour’s creation by the trade unions in 1900 had been a terrible mistake because it split the progressive left and guaranteed a Conservative century in Britain. This is bad history. But it is true that for much of the time in its first hundred years Labour was forced to wrestle with the consequences of its trade union origins and to try, often unsuccessfully, to accommodate the politics of class with the wider national interest. The New Labour project came into its own with the passing of the world of manufacturing, pits, and factories. It provided a political response to the dramatic emergence of a modern society, where the individual consumer and not the collectivist producer was sovereign. Blair and Brown reflected the often fragmented society that they inherited and did not create. Both of them were sensitive to the new emerging social forces, and they reconstructed the Labour Party in order to respond to those realities.
They also embraced, with mounting enthusiasm and uncritical admiration, the new capitalism. Sadly, this economic order eerily resembles the world of steel and gold, cartels, trusts, and monopolies that dominated the globe before the outbreak of the 1914–1918 Great War. Over a hundred years ago the British labour movement was founded partly to challenge that world order with its socialism. It was made up of trade unions, cooperative societies, social organizations, non-conformist chapels, and single-issue pressure groups. It was a coalition of hope, conscience, and reform, based on Enlightenment principles. Moreover, Labour was part of an international response. Today, we can see few signs of any comparable development on the left. The forces of antiglobalization remain fragmented, divided, prone to nationalism and protectionist tendencies. The death of socialism has left an aching void. It is being filled with religious fundamentalism, reactionary political dogmas, self-destructive ethnic and racial conflicts. All this poses a fatal threat to what remains of the politics of the Enlightenment
What we lack is a self-confident and rational democratic left that can find new answers to our world’s seemingly endless disorder. Brown and Blair were able to construct a project to transform the political fortunes of their party in Britain. Whether its uneasy commitment to an unstable amalgam of free markets and moral duty has anything to offer the progressive left elsewhere is, however, another matter.
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