CHAPTER SEVEN

The Single Idea

‘It is us, the new radicals, the Labour Party modernised, that must undertake this historic mission. To liberate Britain from the old class divisions, old structures, old prejudices, old ways of working and of doing things, that will not do in this world of change.’

Tony Blair, 1999

The 1992 leadership election produced no surprises. John Smith was elected leader, promising a moderate social democracy which would continue the reforming practices of the Kinnock years, keeping the left marginalised and moving the party further to the centre. Under pressure from the media over Labour’s links with the unions, Smith successfully won the abolition of the trade union block vote at the party conference in 1993, the same year that Tony Benn was voted off the NEC.

After John Smith died suddenly in 1994, three leadership contenders threw their hats into the ring: John Prescott, Margaret Beckett and Tony Blair. It is revealing at this point that the left in the party was unwilling to field a candidate – centre-left MP Robin Cook refused to stand due to his fear that he would be unpopular with the electorate and might cost Labour the 1997 election. This represented a significant victory for the right: they had indoctrinated the left in the fear of their own unelectability.

Tony Blair emerged as the ‘obvious choice’ candidate and won. Young, professional and ambitious, he presented himself as the leader to get Labour back into power. The new leadership based itself on the managerial machine that Kinnock had built in his war against the left. Ensconced in Millbank Tower, the inner leadership formed a party within a party, autonomous and highly centralised. Unlike Kinnock, Blair had never been a socialist or even a social democrat. His father was a conservative-minded self-made man and Tony was largely apolitical until his wife Cherie recruited him to Labour. He wasn’t ‘betraying’ his roots as he had no roots to betray. Nevertheless, Blair saw himself as destined to fulfil the revisionist project: ‘With Neil Kinnock’s election as leader we began a long march of renewal. That project was taken forward by John Smith. We owe it to them both ... to finish the journey from protest to power.’¹ This Kinnockite mantra, that the left was only good for protesting and only ruthless right-wing pragmatism could achieve power, was by now an article of faith among the moderates. Being ‘a party of protest’ was both reckless and useless – only parliamentary success mattered. The Millbank Tendency replaced the Militant Tendency as the insurgent faction. In 1996, funded by rich backers like Lord Sainsbury, the Blairites launched a pressure group called Progress to further their aims in the party.

Blair and his allies were clearer than their predecessors about what needed to be changed. New Labour architect Peter Mandelson cited the Labour left in Lambeth by way of explaining his scorn for socialists: ‘I remember being warned by a local Labour activist as we canvassed in a local estate one Sunday morning that the party must at all costs avoid “compromising with the electorate”.’² Mandelson believed that compromise was essential – compromise with the right-wing media, with big business and with rich entrepreneurs. New Labour was founded on an appeal to class forces traditionally outside of Labour’s voting base – not to win them to a specifically social democratic politics, but to accommodate their prejudices and the assumptions of post-Thatcherite Britain. Mandelson frankly admitted that New Labour was comfortable with people ‘getting filthy rich’.

For What Shall It Profit a Man, If He Gain the Whole World, and Suffer the Loss of His Soul?

The landslide 1997 electoral victory produced a huge sigh of relief from millions across the country exhausted after 18 years of Tory rule. Labour won 418 seats in the Commons. After the election, the MPs crowded into Parliament to hear a speech from a triumphant Blair during which he warned against backbench rebellions which brought down Labour governments in the past: ‘They were all swept away, rebels and loyalists alike. Of course, speak your minds. But realise why you are here: you are here because of the Labour Party under which you fought.’³ The Blairite dream promised electoral victory, but only if the party was willing to forfeit its soul, to abandon its traditions and assumptions and embark on a new path.

Many of the party membership, worn down after years in opposition, were willing to follow Blair to his promised land. Despite the Blairite trumpeting of the ‘new mood’, New Labour was born out of defeats, not victories. Even some of the old guard could see what was happening. Kinnock initially railed in private against the new leader, despairingly concluding: ‘he’s sold out before he’s even got there ... Tax, health, education, unions, full employment, race, immigration ... It won’t matter if we win, the bankers and stockbrokers have got us already, by the fucking balls, laughing their heads off.’⁴ Gordon Brown was an ally of Blair throughout this period, though always with more concern to appease the old Labour crowd. Roy Hattersley was inveterately hostile to Blairism, describing it as ‘a Cuckoo in the nest’, building a new party from within Labour.⁵ A similar view was expressed by John Golding, who had relished his role in breaking the ‘loony left’ in the 1980s but was circumspect about what followed. After the Labour Party conference in 1998, travelling back on a train with his nemesis Dennis Skinner, he bitterly summed up the rise of Blairism: ‘we both lost; your socialism and my Labour’.⁶

The right have always built their politics around the economic orthodoxies of the time: in the 1950s it was the mixed economy, in the 1990s it was the free market and globalisation. Socialism seemed dead and buried by the ’90s; Thatcherism and the fall of the Berlin Wall had seen to that. Now the party leadership spoke with one voice, making an unequivocal claim to represent the ‘pensée unique’⁷ of individuals and overwhelming market forces – neoliberalism. Like all reformers, Blair adopted a new ideology to remake the party in the image that he thought would best accord with the new era – the Third Way. Blair described the Third Way as ‘draw[ing] vitality from the uniting of the two great streams of left-of-centre thought – social democracy and liberalism – whose divorce did so much to weaken the progressive policies across the west’.⁸ Social democracy was now to be replaced with social liberalism – a qualitative ideological shift. This represented a hybrid, taking the apparent vitality of the market driven economy and integrating it into the public sector. The tone was set early on, with the proposal in 1995 to replace the social democratic Clause IV with a more liberal version – closer to the spirit of Jean-Jacques Rousseau than to Hardie – scrapping the commitment to the socialisation of industry and replacing it with a vaguer commitment to ‘a common endeavour’.

The fight for the defence of Clause IV mounted by Arthur Scargill and others was intense. The debate happened across the party, with Blair personally touring CLPs and working-men’s clubs. In order to bypass the ‘cranks and extremists’, CLPs were instructed to ballot every member, not just local party delegates. Blairite union leader Alan Johnson convinced his members in the UCW to back the new Clause IV. The leadership frantically worked the media to pitch Blair as the modernising reformer against the tired old backward-looking left. The new wording wasn’t released until a month before the vote, and the tight deadlines meant the Defend Clause IV campaign had an almost impossible task to mobilise the constituents.⁹ A specially convened conference voted overwhelmingly to change the constitution. Blair had pushed this ‘symbolic change through a demoralised party, desperate for electoral success, and willing to pay almost any price for it’.¹⁰ This was followed in the 1997 manifesto by a promise that unions ‘would get fairness but no favours from a Labour government’. Taken together, Blairism was a package of measures designed to erode and eventually cut the link with the working-class base of the party, the better to serve the needs of the global elites. Most of the newer members fervently believed in the new ideology; many older Labour members went along with it as the price they had to pay to get back into government.

For Blair and Mandelson, their own politics and that of the New Labour project more broadly descended not from a specific Labourism or the principle of working-class autonomy or representation, but from a more nebulous ‘progressive’ movement. The term ‘progressive’ encapsulated the liberal tradition of Gladstone and Lloyd George as much as – if not more than – Keir Hardie.¹¹ The Progress philosophy was set out in Blair’s 1999 Labour Party conference speech: ‘The 21st century will not be about the battle between capitalism and socialism but between the forces of progress and the forces of conservatism. They are what hold our nation back. Not just in the Conservative Party but within us, within our nation.’¹²

But the Blairites weren’t only a new ideological current. They were the product of the realignment of British society under Thatcher, the destruction of old industries and unions, of old communities and ways of living, to be replaced by the emergence of the new media economy, and the growing influence of public relations and lobbyists. They were people who lived in a world of corporate shindigs, Non-Governmental Organisations and political consultancies, part of a revolving door of connections between money, capital and politics. For them, neoliberal politics was the new common sense; they lived that world, just as Hardie and Nye Bevan had lived the world of the blue-collar working class years earlier.¹³

The left were faced with the enormous challenge of carving out a space in the New Labour project. The Blair years were characterised by retreat, both organisationally and politically. New Labour was not merely a rebranding exercise, it was a different kind of party, one in which the left were to be completely isolated and, preferably, driven to extinction. Members left in droves over policies they could no longer stomach, resulting in a rightward spiral where – with a handful of exceptions – only Blairites became MPs and many CLPs were seized by the right. The Socialist Campaign Group, the radical left-wing of the PLP, made up only 7 per cent of the MPs after the 1997 Labour landslide.

New Labour was a party built for globalisation, an aggressive advocate of neoliberalism and the benefits of incorporating profit-making enterprises into the public sphere. Nationalisation and collectivism were considered dead and buried, to be replaced by public-private partnerships and Private Finance Initiatives, mediated through the market. Attacks on asylum seekers, hounding people on welfare, pandering to the reactionary newspapers and increasing the prison population were no longer the preserve of the Tories. The pernicious targeting of some groups was deeply worrying; Alan Simpson MP felt that ‘In the same way that the Mafia asks you to destroy something precious to demonstrate loyalty, [New] Labour MPs were asked to give a kicking to some of the most vulnerable in society.’¹⁴ Even policies heralded as progressive, such as funding increases for the NHS and schools, came with a sinister logic according to which the private sector had to be integrated into, and profit from, the public sector. Even the national minimum wage was brought in at very low level to reassure business interests.

The Vice Grip

New Labour was an exercise in management. Blairites would manage conferences, manage dissent, manage risk, manage the media, all with a focus on procedural conformity and centralism. Convinced that the media decided elections, they became obsessed with the tabloids to the point of paranoia.¹⁵ Although party managers wanted to move away from the ‘dogmatic, activist driven culture’ they associated with old Labour generally and the left more specifically,¹⁶ the Blairites themselves acted with the passion and discipline of Bolsheviks, believing fundamentally in the historic and essential role of a disciplined party in the furthering of their politics.¹⁷ Management became the new form of integrationist logic, involving the application of ruthless measures to ensure electoral success. This required preventing the crystallisation of a transformative left by blocking any avenue for possible left influence.

Labour conferences became thoroughly stage-managed affairs, more of a corporate networking opportunity than a democratic policy-making body. The rules were changed in 1998 to stop CLPs submitting motions directly to conference; instead they had to go to the National Policy Forum, a tightly controlled ‘consensus’ body run by the Blairites. Central to this consensus was weakening the union link. Social liberalism had no love for trade unions. The goal was to render them mere subordinates in a partnership that prioritised business interests. At the national conference in 1995 the union votes were reduced to 50 per cent of the conference total – a sign of the new commitment to distance the party from its trade union past. In The Road to the Manifesto, Blair explained that the New Labour approach was ‘based on stake holding, not an old-fashioned war between bosses and workers’.¹⁸ As we have seen, Labour’s leaders had never really believed in the ‘old-fashioned war’. But Blairism rejected old fashioned solutions; it was deeply antagonistic to corporatism and collectivist socio-economics. New Labour constantly reassured the public that there would be ‘no return to flying pickets, secondary action, strikes with no ballots or the trade union law of the 1970s’ – in other words, to the time when trade unionism was an effective movement. A telling indication of the direction that Blair wished to travel was his praise for Amicus leader Ken Jackson, who called for the TUC to scrap its annual conferences and merge with the CBI, to end the ‘us and them mentality’.¹⁹

After the successful alliances forged in the 1970s between the trade unions and the left, the acquiescence of the unions was a particular blow to the socialists in Labour during this time. For instance, during the debates at the joint Shadow Cabinet/NEC meetings to agree the 1997 election manifesto, Dennis Skinner argued for greater workers’ rights and more comprehensive unemployment benefits, but none of the trade union delegates would second his proposals, despite them being union policy.²⁰ These retreats by the unions were largely due to the collapse of trade unionism as a direct action movement in Britain. By 1999 the number of days lost to strikes was only 242,000 – a number that steadily declined throughout the following years. Just as New Labour had absorbed the Thatcherite consensus into its bones, so too the unions had absorbed Thatcher’s anti-union rhetoric; they also believed that strikes and working-class militancy were things of the past. The union leaders ruthlessly policed their own members using the anti-union laws. Without sustained left pressure from their grassroots, union bureaucrats could freely side with the New Labour bureaucrats without fear of repercussions from their own members.

The key factor sustaining the control exercised by the Millbank Tendency was the sheer relief felt by the unions that Labour was electable again. They may have grumbled in public but within the Labour Party their half-hearted opposition was easily defeated by the might of the Blairite machine. Millbank operators kept the unions in line by threatening a return of a Tory government if they didn’t back the vision and course of action of Blair. This vice grip was too much for some – the RMT and FBU unions quit Labour during this period. The FBU disaffiliated after the 2002 firefighter’s strike, which was savaged by the Labour government and led to defeat. The RMT – a founding union of the party – was the first in its history to be expelled, after it backed socialists standing against Labour in Scottish elections.

A Last Stand?

The marked difference from Wilson’s day was the lack of even rhetorical concessions to the left when Labour won in 1997. It was depicted as a victory for New Labour, for the values of the new Progress wing of the party; everything else was irrelevant. The left’s concerns – for a restoration of trade union rights, for reinstatement of the recently sacked Liverpool dockers, for renationalisation – were all ignored. Even the jewel in the crown of the NHS came under attack from the social liberal agenda as private sector interests ate away at the core of the health service.

Although Blairism was hegemonic it was not unchallenged. As New Labour raced giddily on, opposition grew from within and without the party. There was still a mood among many in the rank and file of the party that was critical of the move to the right. Well-known leftists such as Skinner, Livingstone and Diane Abbott all got sizeable votes at the NEC elections, as did Jeremy Corbyn, ‘internationalist and indefatigable campaigner for everything the leadership disdains’,²¹ who got 25,000 votes. Even centre-ground candidates like David Blunkett and Robin Cook had to trade on some left rhetoric to ensure a larger share of the vote. To stop this the rules were changed in 1998 to prevent left MPs from being elected through the constituency seats. To get rank-and-file members elected, the Centre Left Grassroots Alliance (CLGA) was launched by activists around the CLPD, and succeeded getting four left-wingers elected to the NEC in 1998 amid fierce media criticism. Their victory was seen as a huge blow to Millbank who had spent a fortune promoting their slate. But on the NEC the CLGA members proved hopelessly outnumbered, in most votes they were the only four to oppose the leadership.²²

Outside of the NEC, the left pushed for more constituency-based organisation. In 2004, along with CLP activists, a number of unions both inside and outside Labour (RMT, FBU, CWU and BFAWU) set up the Labour Representation Committee, chaired by John McDonnell, to push for left policies. As Owen Jones described it in 2011: ‘Like LRC 1.0, it has the same underlying argument: working-class people currently lack effective political representation, and something should be done about it.’²³ The LRC was an explicitly socialist organisation in the belly of the New Labour machine. In the unions, left leaders like Mark Serwotka in the PCS and Billy Hayes in the CWU became more common, forming a block dubbed ‘The Awkward Squad’ in the media. The level of industrial militancy was far below what it had been in the 1970s, but they stood out for their opposition to the Blairite party managers.

Others were also uncomfortable with Labour’s lurch to the right, and in 2003 the centre-left Compass group was launched. Its manifesto The Good Society argued that New Labour had gone too far towards ‘unaccountable and unacceptable concentrations of wealth and power’ that ‘not only remained untouched, but have been encouraged’. The soft left, led in Parliament by John Cruddas, saw their role as being to challenge the outright free-market orientation, but they also distanced themselves from the actions of the 1980s ‘hard left’. Cruddas himself had been in the core Blairite team until 2001, but he and the others who went on to found Compass became disillusioned with the extreme neoliberalism of the New Labour message. Instead of direct ‘campaigning’ as the left understood it, Compass favoured an orientation to NGOs and pressure groups to lobby for policy changes on issues like an energy windfall tax. Attempting to carve out a space for a more plural party culture, Compass was a prolific publisher of pamphlets and organiser of conferences but found itself perpetually frustrated by the ‘command and control’ nature of the New Labour administration.²⁴

Opposition occasionally found its way onto the conference floor, though the balance of forces meant that only one set-piece battle could be launched each year. These fights ranged from pensions to civil liberties to foreign policy. While the left or the unions occasionally managed to win a vote at conference, the right either forced it to be taken again until they won, or Blair and Gordon Brown declared in advance they would ignore the vote – as Labour leaders had done previously.

One notable victory against the regime was when Ken Livingstone defied the Blairite machine and won the election for London Mayor in 2000. Livingstone was the firm favourite to stand as the Labour candidate, 60 per cent of party members backed him and 72 per cent of the union affiliates, but he was ousted by Blairite manoeuvring and replaced by Frank Dobson. Ignoring Millbank, Livingstone submitted his papers to stand and was immediately expelled from Labour. He won the election by over 200,000 votes (beating Dobson into third place), clearly supported and buoyed up by many London Labour Party members who were willing to campaign even for a non-Labour candidate, in anger against Blair’s reforms.²⁵ Labour allowed Livingstone back in during his first term, realising that his support among members was substantial.

Livingstone’s time as London Mayor was seen as a continuation of his time at the GLC – he even started his victory speech with the knowing ‘Now, where was I?’, before using the (far more limited) resources of the Greater London Assembly to pursue many of the same community projects he had been involved with in the 1980s. Once again he surrounded himself with Socialist Action associates, including John Ross as director of economics and business, and Simon Fletcher as his chief of staff. The secretive network had spent much of the 1990s ingratiating themselves into various organisations like Labour CND, and saw themselves as promoting ‘broad left’ politics, i.e. backing soft left politics as a way of promoting progressive politics more generally. They later pushed a form of Stalinism, calling for alliances with ‘progressive capitalists’ which fitted a wider softening of their previous socialist politics.²⁶ But their icon Livingstone appalled many of his comrades on the left when in June 2004 as mayor he urged tube workers to cross RMT picket lines – clearly seeing it as his job to ‘keep London moving’ at the expense of workers’ demands.

It was foreign policy that gave the Labour left a chance to escape the party straitjacket and reconnect with the wider public. The scale of the opposition to the Iraq war in 2003 was phenomenal, producing a social movement unrivalled in modern British history, larger even than the Poll Tax protests. The democratic deficit between the British public, including many Labour members, and the leaders of the PLP was obvious. Many felt the attack on Iraq was based on spurious claims, motivated by an imperial agenda coming from Washington, and that Blair was supporting an illegal war. The struggle outside found its way into the Commons as Blair was rocked by two huge backbench rebellions, one in February 2003 and the next a month later. He allowed a debate in Parliament in March on the eve of the attack, giving his reasons for supporting the US-led invasion, citing the threat of ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ and the continued instability in the region created by Saddam Hussein. Corbyn, McDonnell and the others on the left opposed the war on principle. They rejected the arguments around the WMDs and argued for Iraq’s national sovereignty in the face of unwarranted international aggression. Robin Cook resigned from the Cabinet in protest, followed by Clare Short. In all, 121 Labour MPs voted against the war in February, rising to 139 in March, in one of the largest backbench rebellions in parliamentary history. Alan Simpson MP, from the Socialist Campaign Group, launched Labour Against the War with the backing of Benn and Corbyn, which provided a much needed profile for the beleaguered left in the party. Internal challenges to the leadership over Iraq saw manoeuvres at the conference in 2003, where the entire Labour foreign policy was bundled together, forcing delegates to vote down everything if they wanted to oppose the Iraq invasion.²⁷

Very few of the protestors joined Labour – why would you join the war party? – but it established a relationship of trust and camaraderie between many thousands of people alienated from mainstream politics alongside left Labour activists. Jeremy Corbyn in particular was a prominent figure in the Stop The War Coalition. This alliance would be renewed again during the anti-austerity struggles after 2010, with McDonnell and Corbyn also playing key roles in the various campaigns that were launched. That at least some Labour MPs were on ‘the right side of history’ was clear to many thousands of people desperate for change.

The Cost of Blairism

New Labour tried to create a new ideology for the modern age. But the idols of free-market social liberalism turned out to be false. It was a reactionary creed, an economic and social philosophy that, termite-like, ate away at the social base. In its policies, Blairism succeeded in building an alliance with the liberal and conservative middle classes, an electoral calculation that was sustainable for a while, but at the expense of Labour’s working-class vote. The neoliberal policies did little to rebuild communities shattered by Thatcherism where precarious service-sector jobs continued to replace the industries that used to give communities a sense of pride and purpose. The rise of the BNP and then UKIP attested to the alienation of huge swathes of deindustrialised England and Wales; racist demagogues provided easy answers to the generational social crisis facing many working people.

By triangulating into the centre, social liberalism blurred the lines between New Labour and Conservatism. Bill Morris, head of the T&G in 2002, summed up the problems of New Labour in an article for his union’s magazine: ‘My fear is that by pursuing policies like foundation hospitals, university top-up fees and describing decent trade unionists as wreckers and dinosaurs, Labour is creating a dangerous divide between the party and its natural supporters.’ This was a very real problem between 1997 and 2007. Studies showed that members’ views on traditional issues such as state intervention in the market, strong trade unions and redistributionary policies remained positive.²⁸ Alienated from New Labour, voters looked for alternatives. The Scottish National Party grew by stealing Labour’s social democratic clothes, and by promising to free Scotland from the unrepresentative rule of Westminster. Even the Liberal Democrats – at the time led by the SDP wing – were winning votes from Labour in 2005 by posturing to Labour’s left. George Galloway’s election as a Respect MP off the back of fighting Islamophobia and opposing the Iraq War also stung Labour.

If we cut through the spin of the Labour right about how successful Blairism was, it is worth noting that five million voters were lost between 1997 and 2010, marking the beginning of a dramatic decline of support in working-class heartlands in the north and Scotland. The grip of Blairism on the party eroded both the membership and the voter turnout. Membership fell from 405,000 in 1997 to only 176,891 in 2007.²⁹ This had an obvious effect on the activist base. By May 2006, one MP could complain that ‘the Party has disappeared. There are no local parties. There’s nothing to campaign with. It’s all top down and instructed from Party headquarters; all the regional organisers have gone.’³⁰ Of course, this was not a concern for the Blairites, who anyway preferred a smaller ‘professional’ party with the elected politicians doing all the campaign work. They could be easily managed. But it fostered resentment and frustration in the remains of the ranks that the party was being treated only as an auxiliary to the politicians.

It was this combination of factors that precipitated the explosive return of the Labour left – the voters lost, the decline of trade unionism, the crisis of working-class representation and the sense that politics was too elitist, too stage-managed: in essence too Blairite. However, within the party, all that remained were the few huddled survivors of the transformative aspirations of the Labour left. Groups including the LRC kept the egg warm waiting for better days. The key factors in the historic revival of the Labour left included contingent internal changes in the Labour Party rules (more on which in the following chapter) but also their life-line links to mass forces in campaigns and struggles outside the party. The space for the socialist left was perhaps only an inch, but as the saying goes, it is in that inch that we live or die.³¹