Such an attempt was hardly novel though. Today some talk in a way which seems to suppose that before New Labour came along the Labour Party was one monolithic bloc, ‘Old Labour’, comprised exclusively of miners, flat caps and whippets from the Jarrow marches onwards before the yuppies with the suits and briefcases and flat whites came along and snatched it from those to whom it truly belonged. In other words, that New Labour was unduly obsessed with and beholden to the middle classes. There’s truth to that charge but our problem comes with the assumption that New Labour was somehow unique in its bourgeois courtship; rather the Labour Party had been wrestling with expanding its appeal for a very long time, before Blair and Brown were even born.
As far back as the early 1950s, as the Attlee government slipped from power and an age of rationing and queuing gave way to one of affluence, Labour had been fretting about the salience of its ideological and social appeal. Much to socialists’ horror, many of whom had seen the 1945 government as the beginning of a destined age of socialist government, it was the Conservatives who would govern for the next thirteen years. It began to look as if the Attlee government, for all its achievements, would be socialism’s high-water mark, an apotheosis, an end, rather than a beginning. A new age of individualism and consumerism beckoned for which Labour seemed temperamentally and congenitally ill-suited. As one Conservative journalist observed, the English working class were characterised less by an interest in Marx and Engels, than in Marks and Spencer.
Thus the 1950s were a period of deep soul-searching for the party, and concern abounded that its reach was far too shallow. One study commissioned concluded that ‘Labour is thought of predominantly as a class party and the class that it represents is objectively and subjectively on the wane.’ Moreover, even members of that class were not necessarily friendly to Labour. As Hugh Gaitskell, by then party leader, said to the party’s 1959 conference in Blackpool: ‘We assumed too readily an instinctive loyalty to Labour which was all the time being gradually eroded.’ Harold Wilson’s ‘white heat’ speech, which came a few years after and today is remembered best as a call for state planning and investment in technology and science, was neither nearly so lofty nor futuristic as it appeared. It – and Wilson’s entire electoral strategy at the time – was an attempt to bring in new middle-class and technically educated voters. Wilson ran a campaign arguing that Labour was the classless party, the party of aspiration, for those who aspired to dispose of the primitive and outmoded distinctions of the place and status in which people were born. While the Tories of the grassmoor held back people of talent for reasons of snobbery, so a technocratic Labour government would liberate people of ability irrespective of class, so that socialism was for you if you wore a white coat or a flat cap. This built on Gaitskell’s observation at the party conference in 1959, where he said the worker (and voter) of the future would be ‘a skilled man in a white overall watching dials in a bright new modern factory’. Wilson was, he said privately, ‘making myself acceptable to the suburbs’. The language was different – Gaitskell and Wilson spoke of ‘intermediate voters’ rather than Blair’s ‘Mondeo Man’ or ‘Middle England’ – but the ambition was the same: to expand the Labour Party’s appeal in new quarters.
Wilson’s strategy worked for a while. In 1964 Labour scraped in and won big 18 months later, in 1966. By the 1980s, though, Labour’s white heat had long since cooled and the issue of the party’s social appeal once again seemed profound. MPs and leftists darkly whispered of the party’s ‘London effect’. As the party retreated to its old industrial heartlands of the Scottish central belt, the pit villages of the north-west and east Midlands, and the shipyards of the north-east, Labour struggled most of all in the capital. It seems hard for us to imagine now, but London – deindustrialised, service-dominated, liberal, full of non-unionised younger workers – represented all that Labour Party strategists and thinkers feared most. It was at the centre of the Thatcher revolution and potentially a harbinger of things to come elsewhere. By the late 1980s the party was 17 per cent behind the Tories in London, compared to only 9–10 per cent in the country overall.
Blair, interviewed standing for the 1982 Beaconsfield by-election, was alive to all this early on. He told the BBC’s Newsnight, with Michael Foot at his side:
‘The image of the Labour Party has got to be an image which is more dynamic, more modern, more suited to the 1980s. I don’t think it’s as much about right and left as people make out. We live in a different world now, 50 per cent owner-occupiers, many people working in services. Large numbers of people working in services rather than manufacturing and that means a change in attitudes and a change of attitudes we’ve got to wake up to.’ At its core, Philip Gould, Blair’s close confidant and personal pollster, wrote, would be ‘the new middle class; the aspirational working class in manual occupations and the increasingly insecure white-collar workers with middle-to-low level incomes.’ It would also include the urban poor, the inner cities, the suburbs, as David Marquand observed, every voter from ‘Diane Abbott’s Hackney as well as Gisela Stuart’s Birmingham Edgbaston’. Looked at in this way, New Labour wasn’t just a branding exercise or, ironically enough, that new: rather it was the latest version of a series of iterations of a new type of Labour Party, attempting to attract a new coalition of voters to a party whose electoral performance since the war had been lamentable.
OUR SURVEY SAYS …
Today there are some who argue that the New Labour victories came at too great a cost; that effectively Blair, in his courting of ‘Middle England’ and so-called ‘Mondeo Man’ and ‘Worcester Woman’, hemmed himself in, reduced Labour’s room for manoeuvre, and reined in radicalism all in the name of respectability, and that this was unnecessary. The academic Neal Lawson, for example, has argued that Blair’s 1997 majority was too large: ‘The tent was too big and you spent the next ten years trying to keep the wrong people in it: the very rich, for example.’1
That a political party is electorally successful but then spends the years afterwards self-flagellating because it had the wrong sort of votes cast by the wrong voters seems to me an argument that only the Labour Party could have. But even taken on its own terms, there are two key reasons why it is a wretched analysis. For a start it’s ahistorical. It looks that way now because Blair did achieve what he did. It seems the party was destined to win and win big. That is not how it seemed at the time: Labour politicians did not have the reassuring benefit of hindsight that we possess. Read any diary entry, any memoir or account of that period, and the scars of four successive defeats run deep in the psyches of the Labour politicians of the age. Even though the party had been ahead in the polls for years, even though the country was thoroughly sick of the Tory government, it didn’t seem a certainty that Labour would finally get over the line. Chris Mullin, in his safe Labour seat of Sunderland Central, still didn’t think it was going to happen until the last moments, as his diary entry from 24 April 1997 (exactly a week before polling day) records:
We’re going to lose. Blair knows it, too. I can see it in his eyes every time he appears on the TV news. The magic is fading. He looks exhausted. Major, by contrast, is as fresh as a daisy. The massive rubbishing to which our man has been subjected is paying off. The Tories have succeeded in turning him from an asset to a liability.2
Moreover (ironically given the accusation that all Blair wanted to do was achieve office at any cost), getting into government was not New Labour’s only aim. Blair’s objective was not to secure power once. Lawson is probably right that most (though by no means all) mainstream Labour leaders in 1997 would have won – the country was sick of the Tories after 18 years and the democratic elastic had been stretched to its maximum. But that was not the sum of Blair’s or Brown’s ambition. They wanted to govern for a sustained period in office. At the time that was mistaken for pragmatism over principle, but up to then one of the key critiques of the Labour Party was that it had never been able to enact a truly transformative programme because it had never governed for long enough – that too is forgotten now. Rather it had had periods of minority government followed by the stop-start governments of the 1940s and 1950s and especially the 1960s and 1970s. Blair didn’t believe that simply expelling the Tories from office