Jonathan Davis - Labour and the Left in the 1980s

Eric Shaw

God doth know, so shall the world perceive,

That I have turned away from my former self.

(Henry 1V Part Two, Act 5, Scene 5)

Our fundamental tactic of self-protection, self-control, and self-definition is telling stories, and more particularly concocting and controlling the story we tell others and ourselves about who we are.

For Blair, Old Labour was like a restaurant that poisoned its guests Think of that restaurant. If you had come home after what you thought was a good meal and had been violently ill for a week, what would make you return?

He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.

The view promulgated by the modernisers amounted to something quite different: not a scholarly contribution but a strategic and rhetorical intervention designed to secure behavioural change by reshaping the popular image of the party.

In order for the raw material of existence to be transmuted into something intelligible, meaning has to be assigned. This applies, in particular, to the political world, where myriad events, mostly outside people's direct experience and frequently of little concern to them, swirl around in a kaleidoscope of bewildering patterns.

The party was seen as in thrall to trade union barons, riven by factionalism and prone to extremism. In the vivid words of the modernisers principal strategist, Philip Gould:

One response may have been to attempt to dislodge, or at least dilute these perceptions as unfair, inaccurate and one sided. But this was not the approach taken (or even seriously contemplated) by the modernisers after 1992, and for three main reasons. Firstly, they believed that these perceptions were, if perhaps a little exaggerated, largely correct. Secondly, they calculated that it would be conducive to the success of the New Labour Project if party members could be induced to accept that they were indeed correct. Thirdly, they were convinced that popular attitudes were so solidly entrenched that the prospect of shifting them was minimal.

From the modernising perspective, this attachment to what the modernisers considered a sentimental, insular and narrow-minded view of the past inhibited party members from appreciating the scale of the changes required.

The concept of narrative is crucial here.

In short, for the party's past to be disowned, it first had to be reinvented. In constructing this Old Labour narrative, the modernisers made extensive use of two rhetorical devices which I call essentialism and stereotyping.

Thus, for the modernisers, Labour's orbit was firmly set by the circumstances of its birth and by its early formative experiences. As Blair explained to Labour's 1999 party conference:

Although Old Labour's precise properties its eternal doctrines were never systematically enumerated, they emerge clearly from frequent New Labour usage. They can be itemised as follows:

• nationalisation as a centrepiece of Labour ideology
• the belief that a strong centralising state was the essential instrument for realising Labour's aims
• a commitment to high rates of taxation and spending
• a pronounced antipathy to business and to the use of market mechanisms

In what follows I organise a brief discussion of the Policy Review around two pivotal themes: firstly, the economic functions of the state and the balance between state regulation and the market, and, secondly, macro-economic policy and the efficacy of Keynesian demand management.

But this period was in many ways an aberration. The alternative economic strategy assumed, in some not very clearly theorised way, that Labour's mission was to radically reconfigure Britain's mode of economic organisation. This objective had never been mainstream thinking in the Labour Party, certainly not after 1945. For the leadership, the problem had always been to find the most appropriate and effective mechanisms and institutional arrangements to restrain, regulate and domesticate free market capitalism to facilitate the pursuit of Labour's traditional values of equality, social justice and co-operation. Not surprisingly, the reversal of the party's leftward slide saw a rapid disengagement from the planning state: in short the concept, far from defining Old Labour, had a short shelf-life and soon expired.

This had to await the Policy Review, introduced after Labour's third stinging defeat in 1987.

This view was accepted and incorporated in the second Policy Review report, Meet the Challenge, Make the Change:

It was, for Labour, an unprecedented public affirmation of the indispensability of the market. But, if Bryan Gould and his allies on the soft left (then including Robin Cook, John Prescott and David Blunkett) repudiated the dirigisme of the planning state, they did not share the enthusiasm for the Anglo-Saxon variant of capitalism soon to be articulated by the modernising proponents of the enabling state, such as Blair and Brown. The soft left had emerged as a result of deep fissures within the left over issues such as the Benn deputy leadership campaign, the expulsion of Militant, membership of the European Community and attitudes to the Kinnock leadership. With a weakened Bennite left (including the young Jeremy Corbyn) opting to play no constructive part in the Policy Review, the debate over issues of contention was principally between the soft left and the centre-right, a debate that concluded with the latter's decisive triumph.

by Richard Carr in this volume).

By 1990 such a stance was deemed to be both economically and financially unwise and politically reckless. Reassuring the City became a strategic priority and, with John Smith launching his so-called prawn cocktail offensive, considerable efforts were expended by Labour's economic team to convince financial institutions that they could rest easy with the prospect of a Labour government. This was an important step towards Gordon Brown's later light-touch regulatory regime for the City.

There was to be no serious questioning of the value of the Anglo-Saxon model of capitalism.

order to demonstrate its dedication to monetary stability, even if the short-term cost was higher unemployment, the party was willing to divest itself of control over exchange and interest rates as instruments of macro-economic strategy. In effect, price stability displaced full employment as the primary explicit objective of Labour's economic policy.

High levels of taxation, the party now averred, could be economically detrimental, while too much public borrowing could precipitate a serious loss of market confidence. Hence they promised to borrow only to finance public investment and to fund all current social spending out of tax receipts.

It is worth noting that soon-to-be leading figures in New Labour, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson, all played major roles in the Policy Review. The speed and alacrity with which the substantial changes it wrought dropped out of their collective memory is remarkable. Perhaps their very victory in shifting policy emboldened them to seek more sweeping reversals of policy than were previously thought politically feasible. But, above all, it did not suit their strategic purposes to acknowledge that the age of a newly refurbished and rejuvenated Labour Party was not ushered in by Blair's election to the leadership.

Stereotyping takes this a step further by defining a person or group in terms of a handful of simply understood properties and, in so doing, defying or denying the complexity of social and political life. The value of social and political stereotypes, as framing devices, lies in their persuasive efficacy: stereotypical images, particularly those of a more emotive cast, are more easily understood, processed and absorbed than more complex and rational messages and therefore facilitate message transmission. It is in this context that New Labour's use of the concept of Old Labour should be placed.