The left had to respond to these changes and more which were to come: the Soviet Union was collapsing, the Berlin Wall was coming down, and the ideological and geopolitical underpinning of much of twentieth-century leftist thinking was coming down with it. This was the era of the supposed ‘end of history’, as the academic Francis Fukuyama (sort of) said. Liberal market-based democracies had triumphed – it would have been bizarre if no reckoning had come and doubly bizarre if the response had been to double down with policies of nationalisation, higher taxation and stricter economic controls. Indeed, what is striking is that the left responded in a similar way across the West. Wherever you look, whether it’s Clinton’s Democrats or Schroeder’s SDP, there was a conspicuous move to the centre and an acceptance of market methods. New Labour might have embraced it with more brio than the others, but the pattern was the same. The left fundamentally changed because the world around it had done so too, including the attitudes and beliefs of the voters. Thus, even if the dreaded Blair and Brown hadn’t led Labour, even if New Labour had never been created, there is no doubt as to what the direction of the party in the late 1990s would have been because we have a control: the rest of the world. New Labour and Blairism were just a British version of an attempt across the West to respond to the profound crisis of social democracy that had taken place in the late 1970s and beyond.
Blair’s personal take on Labour’s lack of success in the 1980s and 1990s period was a simple one. He told a 1996 BBC documentary analysing the party’s 18 years in the wilderness: ‘The problem of the Labour Party of the seventies and eighties is not complex it’s simple. Society changed and the party didn’t. So you had a whole new generation of people with different aspirations and ambitions in a different kind of world. And we were still singing the same old song that we were singing in the forties and fifties.’7
Brown agreed. He told the same documentary: ‘I don’t think anybody believed that you would have a Conservative government that would be able to maintain itself over four elections and be in power for now 16 years. I think what Mrs Thatcher understood in 1979 was the need for change. I think what Labour failed to understand then was that change had to come about and that Labour should have been sponsoring that change and I think we’ve had to come to terms with that over a period of 16 years.’8
But what would that change look like when all the old tools of tax and spend had been taken out of the toolkit? Well, the truth is, as we shall see, that New Labour did dust off some of the tools in the end – but in the early days, before Brown’s tax hikes of the early 2000s, things were different. Harriet Harman, then shadow chief secretary to the Treasury and Brown’s deputy, described the approach:
Gordon developed the mantra that, to have growth, we needed to build the supply side of the economy. He was determined that our economic policy, which had been our electoral Achilles’ heel over so many years, would shift from taxing and spending the proceeds of growth to focus instead on increasing the rate of economic growth. He wanted to move beyond the idea that our economic policy was only about taxing the rich and spending more on benefits. Government policy should not just be about dividing up the cake but increasing the size of the cake as well. This was the background to his ‘endogenous growth’ speech in 1994, in which he said that economic growth could come not just through increasing demand but through increasing the capacity of the economy by investment in people, through education and training; in industry, through research and development. And in infrastructure, like roads and public transport … This was a huge change. For so long, the only thing people knew about Labour’s approach to the economy was that we would raise taxes and use the money to improve benefits and public services. The public perception was that they would have to pay more taxes and that, subsequently, their money would be thrown down the drain … Now our weekly Treasury team meetings would always begin with Gordon intoning that Labour was not just about taxing and spending but about investment. To get our message across, we had to invoke the supply-side investment strategy as the frame for every point we made.9
This idea, of unleashing people’s latent talent and investing in training and education in order that they might release latent potential was not exactly red-in-tooth-and-claw stuff – it wasn’t bailing out my dad’s job in Rover as the Labour governments of the 1940s and 1960s might have done, but it was still recognisably a Labour innovation. Its transformative impact, on the public realm and on people’s lives, is often underestimated and damned by some on the left and right today who, frankly, would never have come within a thousand feet of feeling its effects. But it was the underlying philosophy that directed government money into my Aim Higher programme and Gifted and Talented. It was the approach that allowed my mum, a woman who had had me at 17 years of age and had had to quit her education early, to retrain as a midwife and start a new life as her kids were growing. It was the philosophy that led to the reinvigoration of the public realm and civic infrastructure that I could see all around me growing up. I’m not convinced that would have happened had New Labour not come to power and the best thinking Conservatives, including David Cameron and his team, learned its lessons. It was a quiet radicalism to befit a benign age.
The irony is, as the government grew in confidence, it quietly became much more bullish about redistribution and the tax and spend policies from which it resiled in its early days. But you wouldn’t have known it; that hushed radicalism led to its own decline.
DIDN’T THEY DO WELL?
Aside from its foreign policy,§§ there are several powerful critiques of the New Labour years. The first is an egalitarian critique. Although the New Labour government can objectively be considered among the most redistributionist and empowering of its predecessors, it was perhaps the first not to place equality as part of its central and organising political mission. This was genuinely new for Labour. The fundamental Labour critique, which underwrote its view of political economy, was that society would not only be better to live in if it were more equal but that it would be more just. It was a profound political insight and one that endured. As early as the late 1990s, senior figures worried the party was drifting away from it and, ergo, the basis of its political and philosophical power. Roy Hattersley, a man partly inspired to become a socialist because of his reading R. H. Tawney’s seminal work Equality as a schoolboy, said in 1995:
We had a big idea, a more equal therefore a better country. Sometimes we called it fairness. Sometimes we called it social justice. But our idea was a more equal and free society. Now that was the idea we should have propagated with determination and consistency and we should sell to the people, the idea we’ve failed to sell to the people. But it’s still the only idea that socialism could possibly stand for.10
It was not entirely clear that Blair and others did share that idea. Equality didn’t improve much in the New Labour years, although there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that it would have got worse than it did had New Labour’s policies not been in place. Regardless, it wasn’t something the leadership seemed very concerned about. Tony Blair famously said that he wasn’t ‘especially interested in controlling what David Beckham earns, quite frankly’. Peter Mandelson likewise observed that New Labour was ‘intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich … as long as they pay their taxes’. Under the Conservatives the Labour rallying cry had always been, just as my grandad used to say to me, that ‘the rich got richer and the poor got poorer’. Under Labour, the poor got richer but the rich got richer too (and faster). For a while it was satisfactory enough, but inspiring rallying call it was not.
The important thing, it was argued, was to create the right conditions that allowed individuals to thrive, that equality of opportunity, not outcome was what mattered. As I’ve