History is to put it bluntly, a contentious topic.

Who tells the history of an event, who forms what we consider to be the historical truth, is often as contentious as the history that is recounted. It is perhaps fitting then that political history, of all the forms of history that exist, is one of the most open to reinterpretation.

As Jon Lawrence and Alexandre Campsie once wrote “historians of politics disagree not just about the usual issues of theory and method, but also more fundamentally about what their basic subject matter should be.”[1]

Lawrence and Campsie’s argument was that historians of politics fell into two categories – those who analysed “true politics” i.e., the work of policy makers and those who spent their time looking at the politics of the everyday, the live of ordinary people and how the political and cultural landscape they lived in formed their world.

This work is, to an extent, focussed on the former. The History, 1997 and All That: How The Labour Party Used History To Win in 1997 is fundamentally concerned with how history impacted on those who ran the Labour Party’s 1997 election campaign, a campaign that has helped define modern British history.

It is worth stressing that, the history that is being looked at is fundamentally not the kind of history that you would find in a university department. Put simply, the people who make history aren’t often interested in the theoretical practices of practitioners.

For them the Annales School holds no great interest; Braudel’s analysis of land ownership is not what keeps them up at night. They aren’t pouring over von Ranke or Elton or Buckle or Carr because for them history is a practical tool. It is a means to an end rather than the subject of a thesis.

The often-quoted line from Cicero that “To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to always remain a child” is an apt one, particularly given Cicero’s skill as a politician. For Cicero, standing at the heart of the forum attacking Catiline and his cohorts, the recent history of the Republic was as crucial to remind his audience of as any political precedent is for any modern politician. For those that drove the Labour Party’s 1997 election campaign, history was a means of both learning from the mistakes of the past and for invoking it.

There is a quixotic quality of course to this in particular in regard to New Labour. Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Alastair Campbell, Peter Mandelson, Philip Gould and all those who were at the heart of New Labour sought to do their best to make people see that the Labour Party had changed.

That Labour was not the party that it had seemed to be in the 1970s and 1980s – a party of division and internal strife. The emphasis on making clear that “New Labour, New Britain” (one of the defining slogans of the 1997 campaign coined by Campbell in a meeting) was the order of the day was vitally important. Everything in that campaign, and certainly in the analysis after it ended, seemed to focus on the new – the newness of the leader, the newness of the policies and the newness of the way the campaign was presented.

The emphasis on presentation itself seemed to be new but it wasn’t. As was made clear through the interviews that I conducted during this process, there are clear parallels between the 1997 Labour General Election campaign and Labour’s previous campaigns, in particular 1964 and 1945.  What is also clear is that for historians, not just those that I interviewed but for many others, New Labour was not so new. As James Cronin argues in the introduction to his book New Labour’s Pasts “The very phrase New Labour announces a dual ambition: to distance the present Labour Party from the record and image of its predecessors and simultaneously to capture what is useful to its legacy.”[2] What I hope will become clear both in this piece and in any future broader study of the New Labour project and the 1997 election in particular is that history was an important part of both the Labour Party’s approach to that election and the result of it, both in its rejection and adoption of parts of Labour’s history.

The historian Christopher Hibbett, writing in his colossal work The English: A Social History 1066 – 1945 argued that Attlee’s government had been elected with a large majority on a programme of “limited nationalisation”.[3] Hibbert repeated the words of Lloyd George that, at the end of the Second World War as at the end of the First, Britain had a chance for genuine revolutionary social change. Hibbert ends on the bleak note that “The hopes expressed have yet to be realized.”[4] For Hibbert, as for other historians and public intellectuals in the 1980s the success of Thatcherism was evidence that, historically, Attlee and Labour had failed to make changes. The far more nostalgic and positive visions of the Attlee government were less vivid in an age when as many people could remember its failures as well as its successes – the visions of the “Norman yoke” being thrown off had not materialised. The ruling class still ruled and the peasants were still peasants, albeit that the ruling class now liked to wear Armani suits. The nostalgia around the Attlee government by subsequent generations has been examined at length by, amongst other, Steven Fielding and Chris Clarke. Clarke uses it, in his work Warring Fiction, as an example of the “Golden Age” myth that is repeated by and associated with some on the left – that the Attlee era represented a perfect period of the forward march of socialism, as Clarke describes it “left populists imagine the post-war years as the roar of unchallenged socialism”[5]

 It is, in this instance, important to clarify what is meant by the ubiquitous term the left – even the term “the hard left” can have numerous caveats given that, people who are lumped together as “the left” will often disagree on aspects of the Attlee government’s legacy; some wish to praise it whilst the more hard-line members will rebuke it for action they see as not “truly socialist” such as development of nuclear weapons, founder membership of NATO and participation in the Korean War. This can sometimes be labelled rather vapidly as “proto imperialism” or just “imperialism” without any further analysis of the context of these actions or introspection as to why they were “imperialist”. The left, I shall suggest in this piece, refer broadly to those who would consider themselves neither social democratic (in the Roy Jenkins tradition) or on the “right” of the Labour Party (in the Denis Healey tradition), unless otherwise stated to refer to the broader socialist/left wing movement that encompasses all Labour members. This can incorporate both the likes of Tony Benn and Michael Foot, and to an extent Neil Kinnock but again I will attempt to be as clear as possible as to what is meant when referring to the left within each section.

Within those that accept the Attlee government as a landmark of political achievement, particularly those on the left of the Labour Party who consider Attlee one of their own, there is often a need, as Clarke suggests, to cosset it in the myth of the perfect time.[6] It is a common human reaction – the Elizabethan Age was known as a golden period because it is easy to contrast it with the conflict that had gone before it – a savage break from Rome in the wake of a bloody civil war and dynastic bickering – and what came after – a union that annoyed both countries that became a part of it and a bloody civil war and brief Republic. Similarly, the court of Edward III was lionised because it seemingly projected stability in the face of prior and subsequent strife of the reigns of Edward II and Richard II. So too for the Labour Party does the Attlee era seem an attractive one to venerate, coming between the “traitorous MacDonald” and the complications of the Wilson/Callaghan governments.

Whilst presentation was, for both main parties, not at the top of their agenda in 1945, in 1964 Harold Wilson was certainly concerned with presentation and in particular his presentation of the Labour Party in opposition to the Conservatives. Not only Alec Douglas-Hume’s status as an Old Etonian and former peer of the realm but also the various sex scandals and instabilities of the latter half of the Macmillan years were used against the Tories by Labour in order to undermine the Conservatives and present both Wilson and Labour as not only viable alternatives but as the inevitable solution to the question “If the government fails, who can govern us?” There is a belief in both political circles and historians that only governments can lose elections and that it is by the government’s loss that oppositions win.

Hilary Benn, in the interview I conducted with him for this project, suggested something similar when he said “My mum, my late mum, always used to say there are two types of general election-there is steady as she goes and time for a change. And if you look back, you can fit quite a lot of general elections into one or the other category.”[7]

It is perhaps important before beginning the more fulsome task of examining Labour’s relationship to history and 1997 to briefly look at the relationship the Labour Party had to history prior to that point. History is a precarious thing; it is as much a hindrance as a help to those wishing to understand and study it as well as use it for political means. As Jim Tomlinson wrote when dissecting Labour’s economics policies, “Every generation since the Industrial Revolution has believed that it is living through a period of unprecedented economic change.”[8] The same can be said for any political or politically minded individual going through change – it’s why so often they grasp for historical comparison, to argue why now is a time of similar change to some great wave that happened before or to say why some failure of the past will be righted now. It is why history is so important both for the public and historians.

The importance of history to Keir Hardie was different to how important it was to Harold Wilson for instance. For Hardie, at the beginning of the movement that would forever remember his name, history was a means of showing that what he was advocating for, the socialism that so associated with his name was not some modern invention but rather the latest version of the continual struggle of the oppressed. In his work From Serfdom to Socialism, Hardie explores the rural and intensely romantic view he had of the direct radical precursors to the Labour Party. He wrote that:

“One reason for the extortionary growth of cities in the Middle Ages was not merely that life was more secure within than without the walls but also that the interests and welfare of the citizens were more carefully safeguarded. In very ancient times, in the palmy days that is to say of Greece and Rome, something closely akin to Communism seems to have been obtained. In Sparta there was not only common lands, but also a common table, whilst dogs and horses were practically common property also.”[9]

Hardie’s vision of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome having any form of communism is certainly as ahistorical as one can imagine it to be; the optimates of the Roman Republic would have balked at anything like Marx’s communism. It should be made clear that the idea of communism as Hardie would have utilized it at the turn of the century would have been less distinct from socialism and Hardie uses the terms interchangeably throughout the book.

What it is clear though from this example and others in Serfdom to Socialism, is that Hardie’s concept of history in connection to Labour was that the movement he was, for many, the de facto leader of was interlinked to those that had gone before. The use of history to invoke the “great struggle” against oppression is one that is used often today but not often by the Labour Party in the same way because of its stints in governments. Hardie’s vision was also not confined to the past of Western civilization as a whole (he remarks that the “communist” Spartans were the producers of the heroes of Thermopylae “one of the great inspirations of the world”[10]) but also specifically to British history as to link himself back not just to the Diggers and Wat Tyler and others but to an imagined socialist, medieval past meant that the arguments for change he was making did not lack precedent and it was merely the rise of capitalism and commercialism that had rendered all the worlds ills unto its people:

“Coming nearer to our own times, we have still more evidence of a fairly well developed communal life producing marvellous results. The great cities of the Middle Ages, now the show places of the world, were all built at a time when every private interest was held in subordination to the common weal. There were, primarily the Guilds, the trade unions of the period, in which craftsmen banded together for mutual aid and support. These undertook and carried through great public works, churches, town halls, bridges and the like under the direct authorisation of the Town Council.”[11]

For Hardie, these medieval predecessors of the Labour movement were in effect guild socialists before socialism had been created. They were evidence that the changes he was advocating for were not radical in many ways but rather a return to how the world had been organized before society became corrupt – his drawing on the fall of Rome after it dropped its “communism” is intended as a warning for what will happen to Britain and modern western civilization if there isn’t a return to the dominance of the common weal over society.

Attlee’s use of history was defined by the achievement of his government, the first long stretch Labour had had in government and the first time back in office for twenty years, as fulfilling the promises of a select group of founders, chief amongst them Hardie. Hardie’s death in 1915 in some way is responsible for his place as the only significant figure in the early history of the Labour Party that is not only remembered by a good segment of the populace but remembered fondly. Hardie was never, as some might see the likes of MacDonald and Snowden, stained by the office that he was unable to gain. Attlee’s speech on the beginning of the NHS in 1948 references that the achievement of the NHS in the context of what came before – an utter lack of security and support for the poor:

“First, a moment to the past. I remember when I went to work in East London, apart from what was done by voluntary organisations and private charity, and apart from the obligations imposed on employers in respect of industrial injury, the only provision for the citizen who through sickness, old age or unemployment was in need of assistance was that given by the poor law, the poor law was still based on the principle of deterrence. The principle that the necessitants was in a sense offenders against society.”[12]

Wilson in contrast was using history in a very different way because he lived in a world that had been shaped by the success of Hardie, MacDonald and others to make the Labour Party one of the two main parties. As Labour Leader, Wilson was not operating in a vacuum. He had served in the Attlee government, albeit not as one of its most senior members, and as such had to campaign on a record rather than simply offering the goal of constructive change, as Hardie or MacDonald or even indeed Attlee were able to. Wilson was, as Prime Minister, able to utilise the Labour Party’s past and the contrasts between its defeats and victories in a positive light in 1964, stating that:

“As a result of the faith they [the electorate] bequeathed to us, as a result of the courage of men and women in this room today, who have kept the flag flying – 33 years ago when our enemies thought this movement of ours was destroyed – as a result of the efforts of everyone in this hall and countless others in these past few months, the day for which we and those that went before us waited is here. It is our task to be worthy of the torch they have handed on us.”[13]

Wilson’s use of the historic endurance of the Labour Party in the wake of misfortune is a common characteristic of how, post 1945, the party and its leaders used history as a galvanizing tool. Wilson’s intent is clear here; to remind his audience not only of the length of the journey of the Labour Party to power but also that it is one of continuity. Whilst there were many internally and externally critical of the Attlee government it still served as a reminder of the ability of the Labour Party to make progressive, active change that Wilson wanted his government to do as well.

It is, to close the introduction, worth reiterating that history as it is viewed by historians and the public is not the same. There is a distinction between the active remembrance of history from a public perspective, the one politicians are most interested in, and the way historians who are primarily concerned with the academic study of the subject, use it. H M Drucker argued, in the introduction to his book Doctrine and Ethos in the Labour Party that:

“The Labour Party and most of those who have written about it, take its intellectual pretensions too seriously. The purpose of this book is to argue that there is more to the party’s ideology than socialist doctrine. Its ideology has been equally strongly influenced and controlled by the sentiments and traditions of the people who have created and controlled it. My argument is that the party is not simply an instrument for acquiring and using power – not simply a vote gathering machine designed for policy making and implementation. The Party has a life of its own – a fact which political scientists have acknowledged without taking sufficiently seriously.”[14]

Drucker’s argument is one that I not only think holds weight because it applies to history and the party. The sense and use of history does not belong to one faction or another; the Labour Party is perhaps in some ways more self-analytical and, bluntly, obsessed with its history and its triumphs and defeats than other similar political parties. This relationship, whilst not intentionally academic nor in some instances especially profound, is still important not only for analysing how history was used in the 1997 election but also why it was used. History always has a purpose – to invoke the positive or the negative and only by understanding the context of the history itself but also the way in which it is used can any judgement on its true importance be determined.

The rest of this piece will focus on the leaders immediately prior to Tony Blair and their relationship to the past. This is in order to make clear the exact extent to which Blair was or was not influenced by historical precedent in his pre premiership leadership and in the run up to the 1997 election. Each leader has a clear intellectual grasp on the history of the Labour movement but handled it in different ways. Their different approaches to the history of the party helped to not only form the stories of their times as leader but also laid the groundwork for the 1997 election campaign. It is important to stress of course that whilst this piece examines each leader that the sole focus is not on them; rather they are a handy means of placing the analysis for this whole project in a context that is as accessible as possible and as relevant to the modern understanding of political discourse. It is easy to think, as many historians do, that the essence of history is a collective versus an individualistic experience, that it is necessary to take one side of the other – the long march of factors contributed to by thousands if not millions of individuals in forcing the change of history versus the actions of a few brilliant “great men”. I will endeavour to, as far as possible, not take one side or another but rather to focus on using the individual leader as a means of opening a wider analysis of how history was important both to them and also to the wider party.

Foot and History

Michael Foot’s relationship with political history is perhaps, different, from his successors and much more similar to his immediate predecessors. Unlike all of his successors, Foot came from a family of MPs. Foot’s father Isaac has served as the MP for Bodmin as a Liberal MP, becoming President of the Liberal Party in 1947 after having served briefly in MacDonald’s National Government of the prior decade. Foot’s family was divided between the Liberals and Labour – Foot himself was a Labour member from his time at Oxford and first stood for the party in 1935 at the age of 22. His brother Dingle was both a Liberal and Labour MP, serving as Wilson’s Solicitor General in the early 60s. Their brother Hugh Foot served as Governor of Jamaica and in various colonial roles as well as a Minister in the Foreign Office under Wilson. John Foot, another brother, spent his entire life as a member of the Liberals.

This mixture between Liberal and Labour politics should not be deemed surprising; indeed it wouldn’t be unfair to say that much of Wilson’s cabinets were made up of the children of Liberals whose family had transitioned to Labour (that was certainly the case for Wilson). It could be called a natural progression as the early lives of Foot, Wilson, Tony Benn, Clement Attlee and many others who became members of Labour governments in the 40s, 50s and 60s were politically dominated by the death of the Liberals as a major party. Many in the left wing part of the party may have hoped for a further final transition from the Labour Party to a communist or more socialistic (in the Russian sense) party which of course did not materialise.

Foot’s time as leader of the Labour Party should therefore be viewed in this light. He was a product as much of the rise of the Labour Party as he was of many of the other important political changes of the early twentieth century – namely the rise of the US, the death of Empire and the rise and fall of fascism and communism.

It is easy to see, as we are often judged by our appearance and certain misconceptions about our own attitudes, that Foot was something of an old fashioned, out of touch leftie. The image of Foot as a “scruffy socialist”, an ex CND marcher who would bring down Britain because he wore a donkey jacket (which according to Foot himself was admired by the Queen Mother) is one that is appealing and has been played upon by members of the public, historians and politicians. The truth is somewhat more complex; would many of the people who admire Foot for his “scruffy socialism” agree with his speech in support of Margaret Thatcher’s defence of the Falkland Islands? Did his slightly eccentric appearance really denote anything about his politics? Foot’s beliefs were in some senses quixotic. In the words of his biographer Kenneth O Morgan, “He was not a natural isolationist…He never went in for the Churchillian note of the latter [Peter Shore] prepared to fight Brussels on the beaches… And Foot’s culture was distinctly European.”[15] And yet Foot was determinedly against the EEC in his political actions whilst Leader of the Labour Party, unlike earlier in his career in which he had been an advocate of a United Europe (though Morgan argues that Foot saw this as more of a useful tool to counter the United State and the USSR than as an inherently important coalition for Britain to join itself)[16]. Indeed the 1983 Election Manifesto sets out Foot’s (and many others in the Labour Party) feelings towards the EEC:

“We will also open immediate negations with our EEC partners, and introduce the necessary legislation, to prepare for Britain’s withdrawal from the EEC, to be completed well within the lifetime of the Labour government.”[17]

Europe would throughout the period be a difficult circle to square for both major political parties. Labour’s policy shift against the EEC (perhaps foreshadowed by Wilson decision to call a referendum in 1975, at least to some of the more Europhile members of the party) would certainly not impress some of the most fervent supporters of integration. This was however not simply a problem for the Labour Party – Britain’s exact relationship with Europe would be a continual sore point across the political spectrum for decades because of the questions it opened up about the UK’s place in the world post Empire and what that place would be.

It is also worth discussing Foot’s time as leader removed from the context as him as an individual and his relationship to history and the historical struggle to which he was a part of – mainly the perception of the culmination of the battle between the social democrats and democratic socialists in Labour that led to split between the likes of Jenkins, Owen, Williams, Rogers and others with Labour and the creation of the SDP. I must stress that this is a fight that was perceived to be the culmination, certainly at the time and for some in retrospect. There were many, such as Healey and Hattersley, who can be described as part of the social democratic tradition who did not leave the Labour Party at the time and who were disdainful of the actions of those who had left. Foot was seen to be at least partly personally responsible for this – not only for his seeming failure to deal with Militant but also because his own politics were deemed to be so radical as compared to the quote un quote mainstream of the party. This is at least partly retroactive; whilst Foot clearly was on the left of the Labour Party, he wasn’t a pariah; he had after all been Leader of the House prior to the 1979 election defeat, had served under Wilson and Callaghan and had been Callaghan’s Deputy Leader prior to his 1980 resignation. This could be suggested to simply be because of Wilson’s policy to attempt to balance the party, which many would argue was tilted too far to the left under Foot.

Whilst Foot was seen as core to the reasoning behind the departure of many social democrats, there had been feelings of ill will going back years. Jenkins had resigned as Wilson’s Deputy Leader over Wilson’s support for a referendum on EU membership and the internal politics of the party and petty resentments were as much a factor in the split as anything Foot did himself. Indeed, the perception that Foot was not handling Militant in anyway is one of the great myths of his era as Leader – Foot had in fact started the process to expel Militant from the party whilst he was leader. This and Foot’s support for Margaret Thatcher’s intervention in the Falklands shows a different side to Foot that is not in fitting with the fantasy of him as some swivelled eyed, absolutist leftist bent on wrecking Britain. Yet Foot was still committed to what he saw as the fundamentals of socialism. He had after all been on the opposite side to Jenkins in the battle in 1959-1960 to remove Clause IV from the Labour Party’s constitution, referring to an article by Douglas Jay in which he suggested co-operatives and municipal enterprise rather than nationalisation should be the way forward for the party as, an example of “the post-election revisionist demarche”[18] – Foot was as committed to Clause IV then as he was once he became leader in 1980.

What is important to note is that regardless of the historical accuracy of the vision of Foot as a raving left winger who dressed in a less than smart manner, it was one that did stick. For the future leaders of the Labour Party, the creators of the New Labour project, they took the lesson from the prior decade of professionalism, of competence and of appearing to be all those things from Foot’s failure as leader of the Labour Party. By Foot’s failure and his seeming representation of “Old Labour”, the likes of Blair, Brown, Gould, Mandelson and others took the clear lesson that in order to win the Labour Party had to be seen to be separate to messy conclusion of the balancing act that had been performed from the 50s onwards of attempting to keep the left and right wing of the Labour Party in perfect harmony and that one part of the party seemed, at least to the public, to be firmly in the driving seat. It is worth stating the view of some historians such as Patrick Diamond who argue that the difference between Old Labour and New Labour was, if anything, more about cosmetic branding rather than some ingrained distinction. As Diamond argues in the introduction to his epic work The Labour Party in Opposition and Power 1979 – 2019:

“The final historiographical myth is that Old Labour and New Labour were irrevocably divided. On the contrary under Blair and Brown Labour stood in the line of descent with modernising and revisionist traditions in the party. New Labour’s priorities echoed Attlee in the 1940s and Wilson in the 1960s.”[19]

Diamond’s argument gets to a core point that is often overlooked by some – that whilst within the microcosm of the Labour Party, the policies of New Labour and Labour under Michael Foot seem a million miles apart, they can still comfortably both exist within a broader framework of Labour Party policy, though of course distinctly separate from one another. What might be seen to be of more pressing importance in terms of history is that, compared to Blair and Brown, Foot’s use of technology and advertising was markedly pedestrian. His decision to not use a proposed poster of Margaret Thatcher as Mack the Knife for reasons of taste is an example of a rather old fashioned view of public relations in an era in which Gordon Reece and Saatchi and Saatchi were helping to transform Margaret Thatcher’s image. The power of image was far better understood by Blair and Kinnock than Foot – Blair in particular taking inspiration from Clinton’s 1992 campaign in a similar way to Wilson’s efforts to emulate Kennedy’s media triumphs three decades earlier. Michael Foot can be said to represent Old Labour most in that his view of how to present the Labour Party was frankly old fashioned. Blair’s borrowing of an image from an American leader perhaps shows the distinction between Foot’s approach to politics and Blair’s. Foot did not try to emulate the actions of an American politician in the way that Blair and Wilson did. In Wilson’s case his attempt to emulate John F Kennedy’s successful 1960 Presidential campaign during the 1964 General Election was commented on by Marcia Williams:

“Their Kennedy campaign was to get America moving again and we used it blatantly – we took it – and our PR team came up with ‘Get Britain going again’. It was a good slogan because it described how everything had come to a standstill and you needed to get some life back into the system. So, we watched how that had been done. Harold knew a lot of the Kennedy people; he had taught some of them at Oxford. He knew a lot of the Kennedy White House too, so we did get a lot of ideas from them, but you can’t actually translate America to Britain as it’s not really possible to fight Blackburn and Bolton and Newcastle and Truro in the way that you would fight Chicago.”[20]

The iconography of statesmanship that played on Blair’s mind – that of youth, dynamism, progressivism that was also strong on law and order and not seen to be “encouraging” welfare – was he believed crucial not only to his election victory but also defining himself in contrast to the likes of Foot. A much overlooked fact in Clinton’s 1992 election success is that he supported the death penalty, not simply in the case of flying back to Arkansas in the middle of the 1992 election to confirm the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a man convicted of killing a police officer in 1981[21], but in campaign ads during the election itself. Clinton and Gore defined themselves as not being like “old Democrats”[22] by supporting the death penalty and “calling for an end to welfare as we know it”[23] – an attempt to rebuke Republican attack lines such as Reagan’s infamous “welfare queens”[24] and the insinuation that the Democratic nominee in 1988 Michael Dukakis, Governor of Massachusetts was soft on crime because of the case of Willie Horton, a rapist who had jumped furlough on day release from prison in Massachusetts and as a result raped again.[25] Blair was keenly aware that similar attack lines had been used on Foot and his own successors and as such wanted to resist that comparison being used against him. Indeed, as one civil servant rather ruefully remarked:

“Blair would rather have liked to be a President, above the battles of Congress, and with the direct ability to be a major figure on the world scene. In that sense, however subliminally or even partially intentionally, Blair and his political team in 10 Downing Street have copied American television series “the West Wing”… Blair saw Clinton perform as President and believed he could do better.”[26]

This perhaps demonstrates part of the changing role of the leader of the Labour Party – Foot was more akin to Attlee in seeing himself as very much a member of a team whereas, as will be addressed later, Blair and New Labour’s emphasis on the individual as a historical actor lends itself to seeing individuals, akin to the Great Man theory of history, as above and beyond the rest. Like Wilson and Kennedy, Blair and Clinton was a relationship in which one leader sought not only to emulate the electoral tactics of the other but also to embrace the historical implications of this, something Foot roundly did not. As Richard Carr suggested when I interviewed him for this project, “part of the Blair/Clinton projects are both about detoxifying their parties of elements that the public don’t like.”[27] In both instances that was a great deal of the historical baggage that both leaders felt held their respective parties back. It is perhaps worth pointing out that in part this can be ascribed to the fact that Wilson/Kennedy and Blair/Clinton coexisted at the same time as one another – Foot was leader at the same time as Regan was President, a figure that most of Foot’s supporters saw as a “warmongering cold warrior”[28]– but it was also down to Foot’s own understanding of the Labour Party as a collective movement; whilst he was the leader he did not see himself in the same as it has been suggested Blair did, a leader above and beyond his own cabinet. Foot in contrast can much more be placed as someone who believed in being a first among equals.

It is important therefore to reflect not only on Foot’s own relationship to history but the relationship that the future leaders of Labour had to Foot’s time as leader. Living through history and analysing it at a later date can be a somewhat fruitful task for individuals but it can be frustrating for historians as, dependent on the outcome of the events the individuals in question experienced, there can be a matter of both confirmation bias and a willingness to accept one’s own role in events as somewhat different to those that they actually were. Indeed, it is also worth distinguishing from the accounts of those who were senior figures in the party to those who were only at the fringes of the PLP during Foot’s period of leadership. The likes of Kinnock, Hattersley, Williams, Jenkins and others were of course at the heart of the internal fight for the soul of the Labour Party whilst the likes of Blair and Brown were at the edge of the party. The differing views of the infamous 1981 split are viewed through various prisms by different core figures in the party’s then present and past. By comparing the differences in these accounts, we can aim to show not only the deceptive nature of first hand accounts (in so far as, the person’s own individuals feelings and involvement or lack of it in the events they are recounting can blind them to exactly how the sequence of events occurred rather than providing a balanced and comprehensive view, rather than being intentionally misleading) and how the differences in the interpretation of those events can lead to massive changes in the wave of politics.

Shirley William’s account of the 1981 split, for example, stresses that prior to the change in attitudes following the 1979 election MPs were only “dimly aware of it [the forthcoming change in Labour politics] as one registers the distant sound of thunder.”[29] Williams had become aware of the feeling of unrest thanks to her position on the NEC.[30] Roy Jenkins’ speech in November of 1979, calling for a new centre party[31] further cements that from Williams’ point of view at least, some kind of split was inevitable and less a result of the 1979 election loss but rather one that had built up for years prior. Jenkins’ resignation as Deputy Leader of the Labour Party in 1972 over Wilson’s openness to a referendum of Britain’s place in the European Economic Community was in truth the starting point for his own transference from Labour MP to Social Democratic Leader. Jenkins, in his account of the 1981 split, was clear that he had been considering his position in the Labour Party for some time – in 1979 Jenkins was already meeting with the Liberal Leader David Steel and discussing what the future held for each politically. Jenkins had envisioned on his return to Britain from Brussels in 1981, where he had served as a Commissioner since 1977, that he would become “a nominal liberal”[32] but he was also considering if we were to re-enter the British political fray that he would like to pursue a separate party that could work in alliance with the Liberals.[33] Jenkins that year gave the Dimbleby Lecture in which he argued that, historically speaking, British politics had fallen into a rut. Jenkins asserted that the British political system had not changed much since 1868 and formed into a two party system but that Britain had changed dramatically in that period.[34] Jenkins argument in the lecture was as much about the need for an alternative in the form as a political party as it was about a change to the electoral system itself and proportional representation.[35] For Jenkins, grounded in history as he was, the forces that were behind the split from Labour were historic, not simply borne as some might have suggested from a feeling of dismay at not only the direction of the party but how his influence on it had become lessened over time.

Denis Healey similarly saw the SDP split as part of a longer battle in the Labour Party; he considered the period of in fighting in the Labour Party after the 1979 loss and throughout Foot’s leadership to be “as damaging to the Party as the decade of struggle with Bevanism after Attlee lost.”[36] Healey similarly saw his individual struggle for the leadership and deputy leadership of the party as part of a similar historical battle, that Tony Benn “a worthy successor to Cripps of the thirties”[37] who was aligned as Healey saw it to similar ideals of feudal socialism expressed by Marx and Engels.[38] Healey strongly believed that Labour would have ceased to exist had Benn been elected Deputy Leader in his place, with MPs and members defecting to the SDP.[39] Again, Healey’s attitude demonstrates a clear historic mindset, one which seemed to have engulfed the party during the Foot years, of the internal struggle being a historic battle, one that had been played out before (Healey’s invocation of Bevanism and Gaitskell’s fight with it) and one that was bound to happen again.

Blair’s recollection of the 1981 spilt in his autobiography, A Journey, demonstrates the impact it had on his thinking not only about the Labour Party and its direction moving forward but also how it related to the public:

“The SDP had been formed mainly for policy reasons, but they also masked a cultural disjunction between them and traditional Labour. I always remember seeing in 1981 on TV the Limehouse Declaration by the “Gang of Four”… in which they spoke about their intention to leave the Labour Party. The actual declaration was important, of course, but what intrigued me was the photograph of the meeting. On the table was a bottle of wine. You may think this ridiculous, but I remember being shocked that they allowed themselves to be pictured with a bottle of claret. Then I became shocked at my shocked reaction. Did I have a bottle of wine on my table? Didn’t many people? Yet I kid you not, at that time Labour members would have been aghast at such a picture.”[40]

Blair’s reaction and his later suggestion that what he wanted was to couple the best of the Labour Party in the 1970s and 1980s, its progressivism on civil rights and equality for minorities, and “ally them to normality”[41] demonstrate not only Blair’s relationship with Labour but also his focus on the visual representation of the party. The iconography and visual representation of anything, whether it be an idea, a movement or a person help form the popularity or influence of that concept. Blair saw both the SDP’s casual inclusion of a bottle of wine and his own reaction against it as a result of a problem within Labour rather than with the SDP itself. This perhaps demonstrates, what I will argue later, about New Labour’s relationship during Blair’s time in opposition and during the 1997 election to history; that it was fundamentally crucial that the imagery and iconography of New Labour was seen as “new” whilst there was a clear effort to ensure that there was a sense of continuity between “Old” Labour and “New” Labour. In a sense, Blair saw the SDP, unlike Healey, as not simply an existential threat but a representation of all that had become wrong with the way Labour represented itself.

Brown in contrast, despite mentioning other instances of Labour history is silent in his memoir on the 1981 split that shocked Labour. This perhaps demonstrates the distinction between the two – both believed in modernisation and the Labour Party but Blair clearly was more animated and engaged by the SDP’s argument and the individuals who were a part of it. Whilst Blair seems interested in the visual symbolism of the Gang of Four’s announcement, from that period Brown seemed more motivated into supporting devolution because of its long storied history in the Labour Party, back as far as Keir Hardie he notes in his autobiography.[42]

The issues that were tearing the Labour Party apart in the late 1970s only came to the forefront upon Foot’s elections. Labour’s history was effectively tearing it apart as different traditions argued what could and could not be considered Labour, with the Gang of Four and their adherents going as far as to argue that there needed to be an entirely new political party that effectively replaced Labour.

It is important to remember that prior to 1983, in the gap between 1979 and 1983 the 1979 election result had been Labour’s worst since 1931.[43] The decision to reject, as it were, the seemingly moderate Wilson/Callaghan vision of Labour for something more radical only to result in a worse defeat can perhaps be seen as similar to 2010 and 2015 – similar impulses were made about the direction of the Labour Party after New Labour had ended and a slightly more left wing figure who had cabinet experience seemed the obvious solution. In both cases, for Michael Foot and Ed Miliband, the result was not ultimately successful.

Foot himself was deeply interested in, engaged with and aware of history. His background, his families covering the slow death of the Liberal Party to the birth of the Labour Party is far from unique; many of both the core founders (Hardie, Snowden) were Liberals before breaking free from the party due to its failures and many of Foot’s generation (Wilson for instance) came from families that had seen the breakdown of the Liberal Party and the emergence of Labour. Some transitioned as a family to Labour – like Wilson’s – whilst others stayed with a foot in both camps, like Foot’s. This connection to a wider and broader historical understanding of British society – not as one that could easily and cleanly divided between Conservative and Liberal, Progressive and Reactionary meant that for Foot an attempt at political balance within the Labour Party at the time was, to a degree, not only a political necessity but a core principle. The left and the right had to have some kind of balance and this had been the case in the party since the 1930s and 1940s; the devastation of the 1931 election on Labour and the much maligned betrayal by MacDonald and Snowden (the deeper meaning of Snowden and MacDonald’s decision to form a National Government is one that cannot be fully explored here yet it is critical, on a basic level, to understand one thing about the 1931 split – it devastated the Labour Party and scarred many of those who were young activists and young MPs such as Attlee (who would become Deputy Leader a year later) and the likes of Foot, Healey, Benn and others who were youthful activists at the time) meant that the Labour Party felt it had to try and find some balance in order to make sense both as a political force in Parliament but also as a social project.

Indeed, to be a Labour Party member during this period was to be aware of a curated version of its history. Members joining the late 1970s and early 1980s would receive a membership pack that would not only explain the structure of the party but also its history in a fold out document highlighting particularly noteworthy Labour leaders such as Hardie, MacDonald, Attlee and Wilson as well as particularly important historical moments such as the formation of the ILP in 1893 and the passing of the Rent Act in 1965.[44]

History was equally important to the Militant tendency, whose activities would lead to Foot beginning to expel them during his leadership before the ultimate confrontation under Kinnock. Peter Shore writing in 1982 argued that whilst Marxism had always had a place in the Labour Party, Leninism and Trotskyism’s revolutionary tendencies were antithetical to the party and its history.[45] This distinction between what was considered a part of the Labour Party’s history and what was not was a pivotal part of the internal disagreement and discussion during Foot’s leadership which was ultimately focussed on the Labour Party’s past and how much of it was truly represented by one group or another – as Kinnock commented decades later “You might remember we had this quite Stalinist banner from the 1970s but it looked like the 1870s.”[46] The image of the Labour Party during Foot’s period was defined by its seeming ties to the past, of history, of a party that did not represent the future in the way many people perceived the Thatcher government to be. This ultimately lay both in institutional and presentational problems that Foot was unable to overcome during his time as Labour leader.

The 1983 defeat was cataclysmic for Labour. 18% of Labour candidates lost their deposit[47] and the party won 8.4 million votes, resulting in 209 MPs[48], the lowest figures the party had received since the 1935 general election.[49] It was clearly a historic loss and one that would change the direction of the Labour Party forever. Yet Michael Foot, as Peter Shore once remarked did remarkably well considering “no leader of the Labour Party – not even George Lansbury in 1931 -inherited so bankrupt and disastrous an estate as did Michael Foot in November 1980.”[50] Foot was faced with continual crisis that he attempted to deal with but that he was ultimately unable to properly deal with. The history of both the recent past – the Wilson/Callaghan years and the disputes that had festered within the party leading to the SDP split – and the longer standing arguments on nationalisation and the political ideology of Labour spilled over into causing Labour to be almost overwhelmed with too much historical baggage. Foot himself was as much a cause, unwittingly, of this as he was a product of it. His election had been because of his long history with the party, both in terms of his family and his own time in government, and as such he could not adequately present himself as a figure of change in the same way either Kinnock or Blair would go on to do. History defined and held Michael Foot’s campaign back; the comparison Peter Shore made to George Lansbury is perhaps apt given both were men who had become leader in the Labour Party’s hour of need and who were ultimately unable to save it because of what they were perceived to represent – not the future but most decidedly the past.

Kinnock and History

As part of this project, I spoke to Neil Kinnock several times regarding his relationship to history and the Labour Party. Kinnock’s approach can perhaps be summed up by this quote from the interview he gave to me “I can’t say that it [history] bowed down on my shoulders, like some appalling load, but I suppose I did use that history sometimes to try to get others to understand the price of self-indulgence. It worked –eventually –with quite a lot of them.”[51]

In essence, this perhaps demonstrates a difference between Kinnock’s leadership and Blair’s time as leader. A great deal of the internal changes and the removing of what was seen as Old Labour occurred under Kinnock rather than Blair. Clause IV’s revision was an important moment in demonstrating how Labour had changed but it arguably was nothing more than a symbol of the change that had happened under Kinnock. If anything, Blair’s pre election leadership was focussed on demonstrating the changes that Kinnock, Smith and Blair himself made to the Labour Party had not resulted in Labour being removed from its historic legacy. Kinnock was, Steve Fielding argued, “reassert[ing] the revisionist strategy employed by Gaitskell and Wilson, whilst taking into account the changed conditions of Thatcher’s Britain.”[52] Kinnock’s aim was to remove what he described as “religious devotions”[53] to policies like unilateral disarmament, leaving the common market and mass nationalization.

Kinnock’s time as leader has, in subsequent years, been seen as a “necessary” stepping stone to the New Labour era. New Labour could not exist without Kinnock and the 1997 election is widely credited as being made possible not only by Labour’s top team at the time but also by Kinnock and his time as leader of the Labour Party. Blair cited Kinnock’s contribution in his victory speech after the 97 election, saying:

“I’m delighted Neil Kinnock is here tonight… Neil took us back from the brink of extinction and help make this party what it is today.”[54]

In Kinnock’s own Labour leadership election victory speech in 1983, he said he wanted the audience to remember the night of the 1983 election and that Labour should never experience a similar defeat again.[55] Whilst in that speech Kinnock praised the leadership of his predecessor and friend Michael Foot, it was clear that Kinnock’s instincts were to take the Labour Party in a different direction – to begin the work of modernisation that he believed was vital for the Labour Party to survive. This modernisation meant that Labour had to reflect the scale of its 1983 defeat and realize why it had lost so spectacularly for a second time.

Part of this of course came in the continued moves against Militant. As Betty Boothroyd, Labour MP, former minister and future Speaker of the House of Commons recalled “Like Neil Kinnock, most of the members of the NEC were sick to the back teeth of Militant”[56] Certainly the party’s leadership felt that Militant had become a pest that needed to be dealt with, in part to improve the image of the party and to move away from the Foot era and in part because there was a feeling of a clear need for modernisation and unity around it, something the Militant faction would not have agreed to.

Part of the attempt to modernize Labour was to modernize the image of its leaders – PR worked on Kinnock’s image, not least in the production of the Hugh Hudson film that was dubbed Kinnock the Movie[57] but also having Kinnock appearing at the premier of the Patsy Kensit film Absolute Beginners with teenagers wearing Labour Party t-shirts.[58] The film’s title track, produced by David Bowie who would go on to accept the Outstanding Contribution Brit Award in 1996 from Kinnock’s successor Tony Blair,[59] was perhaps prophetic as Labour truly was at very start of the process of change that would consume it throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

Indeed, the 1987 campaign saw Kinnock wanted to emphasise the new, making sure that briefings were tight affairs with only those allowed present[60] and most of Kinnock’s media presences being located on television rather than to the old fashioned press (with the exception of the staunchly Labour supporting Mirror).[61] Even though much of the 87 manifesto contained policies that had been in the 83 manifesto, the presentation of it was as different from what had gone before with Kinnock presented to the press as a forward thinking modern leader in comparison to the public’s perception of his immediate predecessor.

The 1987 election defeat, James Cronin argued, “demonstrated in painful detail the limits of what could be achieved simply by improving presentation. The experience argued strongly for the need to move further and reshape more thoroughly the party’s programme, its detailed policies and its image.”[62] Kinnock’s leadership needed to prove that there was as much distance from the most immediate past of the Labour Party as possible in order to properly articulate how Labour could win the next election. The Policy Review that followed “would serve to reverse the recent domination of policy-making by the left and proceed to equip Labour with a conceptual framework, a rhetoric and a programme on which to base a renewed claim to the right to govern the nation.”[63] The aim of the Policy Review was to examine in detail which policies hurt the party, which polices helped it and devise new polices that would help convince voters of the change that was being undergone in the Labour Party under Kinnock’s leadership. Many outsiders believed it had, with Bill Rogers founding member of the SDP going as far to say that it “eventually made Labour an electable party again by shifting it on to SDP territory.”[64] Indeed it would only be through hard work both by the Policy Review that Labour would officially reject the policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament in 1989, eight years after its acceptance under Foot at the 1981 conference.[65] Labour’s shift away from the past ironically took its time – as Kinnock ruefully remarked to me:

“That’s what took so bloody long! Changing people’s minds on individual policies can often be done by simply making continual reference to altered realities. But with some people, and some institutions in the Labour body, the reality is that “old is good” –it’s proof of “fidelity” and “consistency”. And the response from those elements amounted to “don’t change the policies, change the electorate”, which is a pretty crazy way to view things.”[66]

It would be these series of changes that would prompt Martin J Smith, writing on how he believed Labour had changed, to state that by 1992 the party was now “a social democratic party with no pretensions of attempting to achieve a socialist society”[67] in contrast to “the policy in the 1982 – 83 period [which] was intended to initiate the transition to socialism.”[68] Smith concluded that “For Labour, the shock of electoral defeat and the economic constraints have made it increasingly cautious and therefore economically conservative.”[69] Smith did not judge this change to be solely down to Thatcher or Thatcherism, indeed he argues forcefully against it being the result of any one factor[70]. However, what is distinct in his argument and the critique of many on the moderate left of the Labour Party was that they believed that Kinnock’s changes, as compared to the party in the early 80s, had fundamentally changed and was no longer a socialist party in the way they viewed it.  Indeed, as Driver and Martell argued in their book on New Labour, by 1992 “employment spokesperson Tony Blair had shifted party policy to retaining most of the Tory industrial relations legislation rather than repealing it.”[71] This combined with their view that the Policy Review had seen “Labour embrace the market”[72] demonstrated to them that Labour’s movement under Kinnock had been firmly to move the party away from many of the preconceptions of prior eras and change the approach, not just to presentation, but policy as well. Kinnock’s time as leader was therefore a clear and demonstrable move in a direction of change. Kinnock’s Labour had to be viewed as forward looking and in that respect, it had to understand why the party had been rejected by millions of voters over consecutive elections. It is perhaps apt to invoke the infamous Tony Benn quote that argued that Labour was not a socialist party, merely one that had socialists in it, a phrase so evocative of a particular critique of Labour that Simon Hannah used it for the title of his book on the history of the Labour left.[73] Certainly the movements Kinnock moved angered those on the left who saw it as a betrayal but of greater importance to the leadership and much of the membership the party increased its share of the vote in the 1992 election and was close to victory, if not quite able to seal the deal.

It would, however, be wrong to see this change in policy to be simply the result of acceptance of Thatcherism or attempt to ape it one way or another. Kinnock’s policy changes and his beliefs, as Simon Lee argues, were formed “from within the tradition of One Nation socialist blueprints for British industrial renewal via a British development state.”[74] Lee argues that much of Kinnock’s policy intention was formed by the kind of ideals of Attlee and Bevin, that Britain could be forward thinking and competitive whilst not giving in to Thatcherite arguments. Kinnock’s beliefs and arguments, in contrast to New Labour which followed, were firmly rooted in “democratic socialism”[75] and not “social democratic renewal…reconciled with the opportunities and constraints afforded by the neo-liberal globalisation bequeathed by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.”[76] Kinnock, as Lee see him, fits into the small Labour tradition as Attlee and Bevan and there is clearly a greater European socialist tradition which influenced Kinnock’s thinking – he described to Anthony Seldon how the National Policy Forum was influenced by its Swedish equivalent[77] and that his decision to change the logo of the Labour Party to a rose was inspired by the Norwegian Labour Party.[78] Whilst Blair and Brown certainly seemed to take inspiration from the history of American politics (and in particular Bill Clinton’s New Democrats) Kinnock both historically and intellectually seemed more attuned to the old world; his deep seated patriotism and appreciation of the Wales that he grew up in. As Robert Harris remarks in a biography of Kinnock written during his initial leadership campaign, Kinnock was motivated by his past:

“It was this heritage that was to shape Neil Kinnock as a politician. His speeches, especially his early one, are filled with references to his family and upbringing.”[79]

Yet even from a young age Kinnock was defined by a lack of adherence to tradition – he was in this sense following Bevan’s tradition of non-traditionalism. As Harris recounts “the young Welsh MP chose, in his very first speech, to defy tradition”[80] by given a controversial maiden speech. This desire to do what he felt was right and not simply follow historical precedence perhaps explains the fierceness and drive that lay behind Kinnock’s modernisation of the Labour Party. Within that drive though there were echoes of the past – an adherence and respect to the values of his great hero Nye Bevan – and a belief in many of the arguments that had brought Labour to power in 1945.

Despite Kinnock’s own personal beliefs clearly having historic resonances, it is easy to argue that the relationship his leadership had with history is perhaps more cut and drier than Blair’s, as this section has I believe demonstrated. As I will argue later, because the vast majority of crucial internal reforms happened under Kinnock (the Policy Review, the expulsion of Militant that had begun under Foot, the beginning of aesthetic changes and branding with Mandelson’s appointment as Communications Director, attempts to pass One Member One Vote which were eventually successful under Smith, the Kinnock faction’s domination of the NEC) and Blair’s time as leader was in part both completing modernisation and squaring the circle as to how the “New” Labour Party fitted in to its previous self. Yet Kinnock was still to an extent influenced by what went before – he certainly was influenced by both Bevan and Attlee – but that influence was much more tangential than with other leader.

As Kinnock himself suggests and his actions as leader reinforce, history was not a major concern to him – he was firmly focussed on the future of the United Kingdom and wanted to try as hard as possible to deliver that future. He was aware of the need for change – both internally and externally and that he had to represent that change as much as possible. Though the public did not make him Prime Minister, his legacy of change to one of our two major political parties is undeniable and it is core part of why the Labour Party continues to exist as an electoral force today.

Smith and History

John Smith’s time as leader of the Labour Party was significant but brief. There is a tendency to view Smith, particularly by some of those Labour members who are more to the left than the Blairite faction, as a great what if. What if the reforms of the Labour government of the late nineties and early 2000s had been achieved by Smith rather than Blair? Whilst what ifs can be fascinating, they cannot ultimately be seen as supplement for considering what actually happened. Smith may indeed have made a great Prime Minister but there is a distinction between Kinnock and Blair and Smith. Whilst Kinnock and Blair’s approach to party management can be broadly perceived to be bold in a broad strokes sense, Smith’s time as leader has been seen as more a steady as she goes approach. A stable hand at the tiller if you will. Yet is this fair and what does this say about Smith’s relationship to the Labour Party and indeed its history?

Smith is, especially interesting when considering that he had, unlike his successor, experience of government. Smith was in this way more tied to the past of the Labour Party and aware how Labour governments could go wrong, simply from his own time as a minister under Jim Callaghan, than even the supposedly ever cautious Blair could be. As his widow Elizabeth Smith remarked in the introduction to John Smith: Life and Soul of the Party “It was a matter of great pride to him to have served for six months as the youngest minister in Jim Callaghan’s Cabinet. He understood office, having had a junior post at Energy and responsibilities for the Devolution Bill, which he took to with zeal.”[81] This history helped to distinguish himself from his immediate predecessor and successor – it also may explain some of Smith’s caution. However, his brief time in government gave him authority to speak both as the voice of experience and as the voice of the future. Smith, was in this way, perhaps better placed than Kinnock or Blair to make the argument about how Labour needed to fundamentally change itself in order to be given the opportunity to change the country. However, this wasn’t entirely the case as Smith’s leadership style and his approach to the Labour Party often hinged on attempting to keep Labour as close to its roots as possible.

Indeed, modernisers were often frustrated by Smith’s desire for consensus with one commenting that “the price of victory was a large nod in the direction of old-fashioned Labourism.”[82] In fact, during a speech on the 7^th September 1993 at the TUSC conference Smith declared that he wished to reiterate Labour’s commitment to full employment and reverse the Thatcher era trade union legislation.[83] Smith went so far as to declare:

“The goal of full employment remains at the heart of Labour’s vision for Britain. Labour’s economic strategy will ensure that all instruments of macro-economic management… will be geared to sustained growth and rising employment.”[84]

This allegedly angered Smith’s Shadow Chancellor Gordon Brown who felt Smith should have been clear to reiterate to Labour’s pledge to combat inflation and to not revert “to the Keynesian policies that had failed so decisively in the past.”[85] This half heartedness from Smith resulted in a decidedly close result in the battle to introduce One Member One Vote but one that Smith still one, ensuring that the trade union block would have far less power over who would become the next leader of the Labour Party.[86] The closeness of the vote and the fact Smith had to threaten resignation[87] to achieve victory demonstrated that in contrast to Kinnock, who had been forceful in his attempts to distance Labour from its past, Smith seemed much less reluctant to change things internally. Will Hutton commented that “the grip of “Labourism” on the party remains tight”[88] an expression which demonstrates the extent to which both the idea of “labourism” was seen as representing the past of the party and how much it seemed to be linked to the act of labour, something that seemed distant from the party as it stood in the mid 1990s. Despite this it was clear that by 1993 the Labour Party had dramatically changed from the situation it was in during the Foot era and prior. There had been a development of the party’s relationship with the public that focussed on the need to present Labour as a party that, as in 1945 and 1964, faced the future that was concerned with that and the developing world rather than one that no longer existed.

However, the closeness of the passing of One Member One Vote to the modernisers was a wake up call that Smith, unlike Kinnock, would not be as direct in his attempts to change the Labour Party. The argument the right of the party made was the OMOV had historic precedent, first being suggested back in the 1960s[89] and was not simply “a device invented by the right in the 1980s to frustrate the left’s attempt to wrest power from MPs”[90] an argument disputed by the left of the party who saw it as simply a means to weaken the power of the left and in particular the trade unions.

Smith’s time as leader, brief as it tragically was, was ultimately defined by the pace of change that came before and the cementing of that change. Had Smith remained leader and become Prime Minister, Labour would more likely than not ended up winning power. Smith’s status for historians is as I mentioned more as a great ‘what if’ than anything else – similar to how some Democrats wistfully talk of what the United States would have been like had Al Gore won. Ultimately, it is an activity that has no relevance to understanding history or even the present. Smith would certainly have been an important and proactive Prime Minister had he lived – sadly however he didn’t. Smith’s legacy can therefore be judged as historically interesting more because of that possibility of what could have been than what actually was.

Blair and History

Blair’s relationship with the history of the Labour Party is perhaps as complex as any part of his political career. As historians that I have interviewed as part of this project have discussed, how to fit Blair into the history of the Labour Party is intensely difficult, dependent on the point of view you take.

Blair’s relationship to history has been viewed differently by many and some have questioned the amount of knowledge Blair had of history and indeed how relevant it was to him. Anthony Seldon argued that Blair “knew relatively little of the history of the Labour Party when he became leader; and what little he did know he didn’t like.”[91] In contrast to Seldon, I will argue that Blair had a grasp of the history of the Labour Party that whilst not academic was grounded in a sincere understanding of how Labour functioned and its relationship with both history and the public’s perception of that history. As Jon Sopel said in his biography of Blair, published whilst he was still leader of the opposition:

“Blair is not hewn from the rock of previous leaders. He stands outside many of Labour’s traditions and causes consternation, alarm and excitement in roughly equal proportions in his efforts to articulate a new, more pluralist language for centre left politics in Britain… And while Tony Blair has studied more closely than many the history of his political forebears, he believes passionately in change.”[92]

For Sopel, Blair was outside the traditions of the Labour Party but aware of them. Like Seldon, Sopel seems to argue that Blair is aware of the history of the party (and it is intriguing that Sopel’s chooses to emphasise that Blair had clearly studied Labour’s history) but that he is somehow separate from it – the emphasise on being new and change being predominant amongst all else. Blair’s language is “new” and so cannot be compared to previous Labour leaders or the past of the party.

 Yet as Steven Fielding argued when writing about the 1974 – 1979 Labour government “”New” Labour’s roots in fact originate in many of the assumptions that underpinned post war revisionism, especially as articulated by Hugh Gaitskell and Anthony Crosland.”[93] Given Blair’s drive to rewrite Clause IV early on in his leadership and his clear understanding of the potency of some of the almost semi mythical figures from Labour’s past such as Attlee and Hardie, this demonstrates that New Labour and Blair in particular not only understood what history could teach them and of the potency of it but that Blair and New Labour can be considered products of the Labour Party’s past rather than a wholly new tradition inserted into the Labour Party.

Therefore whilst the moniker of “New Labour” and the expression of newness was important to Blair  it equally was not the sole drive behind his Labour Party.

To focus on the perception of on newness, it is important to consult how some of the figures in New Labour saw the newness of the project. The emphasis on newness is supported by Alistair Campbell who, in the first diary entry in his “The Blair Years” diaries (edited excepts of Campbell’s diaries that were eventually published in full several years later) remarks:

“Historically, the Labour Party has not been blessed with really talented people in this area of politics [media relations] and political strategy but I think we can be different.”[94]

In this relatively brief statement, Campbell is succinctly articulating the distinction between New Labour and what went before – presentation. Yet the New Labour project understood that the Labour Party’s relationship with history was a crucial part of its success, something Blair would be particularly conscious of internally. The fight over Clause IV, for example, mattered because of the history that lay behind it. Gaitskell had tried before to remove it and subsequent leaders had mixed feelings about its relevance and potency to the electorate. Victoria Honeyman, in her biography of the Labour minister Richard Crossman, argues that “The dominant position that social democracy occupied within the Labour Party and the move away from socialism could be seen when Tony Blair pointed out in 1996 that “it is not and never was satisfactory to define socialism by state ownership and centralized planning.”[95] Crossman himself was fairly unconcerned with Clause IV itself, remarking “I don’t give a fig about Clause IV”[96] an example of his own moving away from the left of the Labour Party but also of how many Labour members felt about it. The nationalisation programme of the Attlee had not been as full blown and dynamic as many on the left wished it had been and by the 1990s the idea of the Labour Party in government nationalising anything seemed fantastical. What was important though was that it was perceived as important, particularly to the left of the party. The presentation of the Labour Party of the 1990s being distinct from its predecessors was therefore a crucial aim to achieve, hence why so much was made of the rewriting of Clause IV. Campbell’s 94 diary suggests that Blair was keen to remove Clause IV almost from day one:

“He was reminded to have a review of the constitution and scrap Clause 4. I have never felt any great ideological attachment to Clause 4 one way or the other…People had talked about it for years. Here was a new leader telling me he was thinking about doing it in his first speech as leader. Bold.”[97]

At a later date the importance of the Clause IV issue was raised by Blair to Campbell with Campbell’s diary recording:

“TB said it was important people understood that if we lost a vote on Clause 4, he would quit as leader. He also believed that if we lost the vote on Clause 4, we would lose the election because the public would conclude we were not a serious party. ‘” People need to understand if we lose on this, we might as well pack up. ‘””[98]

The fight over Clause IV was itself a historic one; the refighting of a battle that the right of the Labour Party had lost in the 1950s when Hugh Gaitskell had been leader of the Labour Party. The origin of Gaitskell’s desire to remove Clause IV came, like Blair’s, in the wake of the most recent in a long line of Labour Party defeats, with some seeing the formulation of the argument coming 48 hours after the 1959 election defeat at a farewell party for Hugh Dalton at his house in Hampstead.[99] Gaitskell and allies like Douglas Jay and Roy Jenkins saw it as crucial to rewrite the clause because nationalisation was judged to have been a part of why Labour lost the 1959 election, in part due to the unpopularity of some nationalised industries and because the public lacked a clear insight into where Labour stood on certain issues.[100] From Blair’s perspective winning a fight on Clause IV was not only a demonstration of his power as leader but also a sign as to how Labour had changed – opponents to previous revisions of Clause IV during Gaitskell’s time as leader had of course included Michael Foot.[101] What was important for Blair in his fight over Clause IV was to exercise it in a way that did not repeat the mistakes of Gaitskell – for many the execution of Gaitskell’s attempt to change Clause IV was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of Labour Party management and of how significant the issue had been to voters.[102] In contrast, Blair’s approach to revising Clause IV focussed on winning support from the party and demonstrating that it was a necessary and important step towards power. Unlike Blair, Gaitskell allowed the issue to demonstrate how weak his leadership was with a coalition of Labour traditionalists and Bevanites forming with the express aim of keeping it.[103] In part Blair was helped by a change in attitudes. In 1980, trade union membership stood at 53% of the civilian workforce; by 1994 it had fallen to 32%.[104] March of 1993 Jack Straw, then Shadow Environment Secretary, wrote a lengthy pamphlet for the Blackburn Labour Party entitled Policy and Ideology in which he argued that Clause IV needed to be revised.[105] Straw’s pamphlet was covered in the Independent with the headline “Straw accuses Labour of timidity over Clause IV: Shadow cabinet member says party must establish a new ideology.”[106] Whilst John Smith viewed Straw’s initiative with “displeasure as to its timing”[107] Blair would fully embrace Straw’s argument for further need for reform and make the revision of Clause IV one of his early priorities. Straw’s argument was similarly echoed by Neil Kinnock, who commented in February 1994 that he didn’t believe that “Clause IV is an adequate definition of modern democratic socialism.”[108] This kind of change in attitudes reflected a growing acceptance in the party, perhaps personified by Blair’s election, that Labour had to change or at least had to be seen to change, that the visual imagery of the party in relation to Clause IV needed to be redefined before the next election. Despite this, The Economist noted that “nostalgic sentiment”[109] would hold Blair back from being successful. This would not be the case but the magazine expressed concern over how much Blair could change the Labour Party and how likely Blair would be able to succeed on Clause IV when so many had failed to change it before him.

Yet against the backdrop of the Clause IV fight, there was also a clear desire to emphasize the importance of the Labour Party’s past and its achievements. It is at this juncture important to look at Blair’s own relationship during his time as leader of the Labour Party to history. As one might imagine, the majority of Blair’s pre premiership Leadership was concentrated on Labour’s present rather than its past. The two most significant instances of Blair directing his gaze at the past of the Labour Party came in in his introduction to a collection of essays published in 1996 entitled What Needs to Change and his 1995 lecture to the Fabian Society marking 50^th years since the 1945 election; the lecture was edited and published as a pamphlet by the society (from which I will use to quote in this piece).

In the introduction to the essay collection, Blair argues that:

“I said in my 1995 conference speech that I wanted to see Britain become a “young country” again. I meant that instead of trading off our past, we needed to develop the energy, enthusiasm and the ideas to match the challenges of the future. We need to be proud of our history but not bound by it; judicious in embracing news ideas but open to new thinking; above all aware that we live in a radically changed world from that left by our grandparents, we need to construct a new and radical politics to serve the people in the new century ahead.”[110]

Blair’s introduction and the New Labour project as a whole are bound by these interwoven messages – the party has been modernized because “only then could it be the vehicle for modernizing Britain”[111] and yet on the same page there is a clear desire to show that New Labour isn’t a new party but rather following on from the traditions of the past:

“In 1945, Labour was truly representative of the nation as a whole. In 1964, it summed up the spirit of national progress. Today I want the party to capture the spirit of national renewal.”[112]

For Blair his principles, his beliefs, those of New Labour were not different in anyway from the heroes of the past – he argued that:

“My values system is based on a belief about individuals and the society in which they live…These are the principles of practical and popular socialism championed by Keir Hardie and Clement Attlee. And they are the source of Labour’s enduring appeal.”[113]

The desire to emphasise certain aspects of Labour’s past – the 1945 government in particular – was viewed by Jim Tomlinson as a means to use the combined watchwords of “efficiency and fairness.”[114] For him, this demonstrated that in the sense of Labour continuing to struggle throughout its history to embody these ideals “there is perhaps little that is new in New Labour.”[115] Tomlinson’s argument is in a broad sense correct – the eternal struggle for the Labour Party to represent these values and to argue whether one or the other value was fully represented in policy is a seemingly eternal fixture. Yet New Labour cannot be said to be exactly identical to what came before. That distance is not merely presentational but also intellectual; Blair’s argument as Labour leader stems from not simply recognizing that the Labour Party had failed to attract voters but also to directly and quite clearly verbally distance himself from parts of the party and its history. Despite Blair’s own relationship with Michael Foot for example, there is no desire to exalt him and the Wilson governments, whilst praised, are praised with a certain degree of caution. Whilst Blair praises the 1964 election victory in his introduction, he also remarks that:

“The Wilson government did not fully succeed in modernizing the economy or establishing the Labour Party as the natural party of government. Without change within the party there was bound to be a tension between what he wanted to do and the culture and politics of the party that had to do it. The modernizing edge was blunted.”[116]

Blair’s use of language is revealing about his approach to history and how he viewed the history of the Labour Party – the government is Wilson’s, the change is “what he wanted to do” rather than what the government as a whole wanted to do and the contrast between the collective direction and culture of the party versus that of Wilson suggests that for Blair the clear onus should be on the decision of the leader; significant and “great men” make political change, political organisations and parties have to follow through with it. This is understood in regards to how easy it is to view history – people tend to view it through the lens of individuals rather than movements – but it is also suggestive of and understanding that it would less be the party that would be judged in the long term rather than himself, dependent on the result of the 1997 general election. As Steven Fielding argued, Blair and other New Labour figures liked to “appropriate conveniently dead and distant figures from the Party’s past such as Keir Hardie, R. H. Tawney and Clement Attlee”[117] It was easier to exalt Attlee and Hardie, as Blair does in his introduction than to do so without qualification which Blair felt was necessary in Wilson’s case.

What Blair’s introduction ultimately demonstrates is a willingness to use the past as something to be proud of and a core difference between himself and previous Labour leaders (like Peter Mandelson’s photoshoot in which he posed with a bulldog, it is an attempt to highlight patriotism – pride in one’s country’s history, it should follow, equals pride in the nation as a whole) whilst also emphasising the need for change and renewal. History here is what might be described as a flexible tool; useful to demonstrate that Labour had achieved things in the past but that it did not hold the Labour Party in an iron grip. New Labour was as much a part of the Labour Party’s history and traditions as any other strand and this was inevitably, for internal matters, important to address as a means of promoting the legitimacy of the project internally. Like Henry VII pointing to his lineage and that of his wife, New Labour needed to show that it was the natural progression of the Labour Party’s intellectual and electoral history and not a usurper.

This is made abundantly clear in Blair’s lecture to the Fabian Society in 1995 to mark the 50^th anniversary of the 1945 election victory. In the lecture Blair emphasises his succession to the Labour Party of the 1940s by emphasising that the true tradition that New Labour represented was very much that of forging a new path forward:

“In 1945, as now, we faced enormous changes in the global economy and in society. Then, as now, Labour spoke for the national interest and offered hope for the future; the Tories spoke for sectional interest and represented the past. Then, as now, Britain needed rebuilding and the voters turned to Labour to take on that task; because then as now, the people know that market dogma and crude individualism could not solve the nation’s problems. That is why I honour the 1945 generation: to learn the lessons of their victory and their achievements and to set out how the enduring values of 1945 can be applied to the very different world of 1995.”[118]

What is especially interesting, given Blair’s focus often on the individual, is his attack on the “crude individualism” of the Conservatives; the crude part is crucial in understanding the disagreement between New Labour and the Conservatives. The issues is less with individualism or the individual but rather the crudeness of it – the echoes of how hollow greed is good had become in the eyes of the electorate would have been apparent to any Labour Party member or politician by the late 1990s. Indeed, as Stephen Driver and Luke Martell argued in their book New Labour: Politics After Thatcherism, “Labour, in short, is both attracted by and repulsed by Thatcherism.”[119] The contradiction between the New Labour view that community was important but at the same time praising the buccaneering spirit of individuals in business who utilised the free market lies at the heart of the appeal of New Labour; welding the freedom of choice that many associated with the Thatcher years to the community support that was strongly associated with prior Labour governments (hence Blair’s emphasis, in particular, on the NHS and the Attlee government) squared the circle of what people wanted – stability and change. As Blair himself argued in the introduction to Growing and Prospering: Your business and a Labour government:

“Small and growing businesses are the bedrock of a successful enterprise economy. A healthy, vibrant small business sector creates wealth, employment and new ideas and products. But setting up and running a small business takes hard work, drive and imagination. I am determined a new Labour government will respond to your priorities and back your efforts to succeed.”[120]

Here Blair was emphasising the needs of small business to be supported by the government – to some a sign of the Labour Party following the Thatcherite model – but this support for business is carefully balanced through Blair’s time as leader prior to the 1997 election with an emphasis on community; an echo of 1945 government.

Blair goes on throughout his Fabians speech to construct a clear argument linking the past to the present and emphasising what Labour could learn from the 1945 government. Indeed, in one part of the speech he goes as far to say that “I wish to highlight both the achievements of the 1945 government and the achievements we can learn from it…I want to put today’s modernisation of the Labour Party in its historical context.”[121]

The historical context Blair’s speech gives is to argue that “In respect of the 1945 government itself, I shall argue that its achievements were enormous, it’s impact enduring. But it is important to understand where its strengths came from… The reality, I shall try to show, is that the Labour government’s agenda grew out of the coalition government of the war; that it cut decisively with not against the grain of political thinking”[122] Blair’s argument is not an unfamiliar one – Margaret Thatcher similarly argued that the 1945 victory had its roots in the war time national government.[123]

The war time consensus, Blair argued, was one that was directly linked to the modernization of the Labour Party –“the challenge of modernisation today, which arises from the fact that with the possible exception of 1964, Labour has been unable to recreate the strong political consensus of 1945. The truth that we must take seriously is that 1945 was the exception and not the rule.”[124] For Blair, 1945 was a success because it drew on the consensus built by that war time coalition and was not focussed on ideology, for which Blair saw as “almost fatal”[125] to the Labour Party in the 1970s and 1980s. Blair’s comparison of modernisation to the wartime consensus demonstrates an attempt to ground New Labour as the party and project that represent the vast majority of people, in line with his famous line about Labour becoming “the political wing of the British people”[126]. He is not only arguing that modernisation is necessary for the Labour Party to survive but that it has deep roots within the party itself – again reinforcing the argument that New Labour is a direct continuation of what went before. For Blair to succeed, he needed to reinforce arguments like this as they provided the internal legitimacy for the New Labour project whilst also allowing for and easy way for him to connect any prospective Labour government to popular forebears.

The death of Harold Wilson in 1995 inevitably drew comparisons with Blair, given Wilson was the last Labour Leader to have won an election. Campbell’s diary records that Blair:

“was developing his arguments re Wilson into one about the nature of the party – that Wilson had wanted to do more but had been restricted by the party. It was both a way of playing down the direct comparisons between them but also underlying the nature of the change.”[127]

Blair’s engagement with the history of the party and its relevance is further highlighted by a later entry from the Campbell diary in which Blair is described as getting into a “heated argument”[128] with Jim Callaghan and Barbara Castle on the subject of devaluation of the pound (Wilson had been forced into devaluation in 1967 following a worsening of Britain’s economic situation) which Campbell recorded as being “as if they were making the decision today.”[129] Blair later compares a letter sent to him by Jack Straw on behalf of Straw, Robin Cook, Chris Smith and Frank Dobson relating to their concerns over Labour’s economic policy as being like “the Wilson era, the belief that all politics was plots and cabals”[130] According to Campbell’s diaries, Blair had during Wilson’s funeral asked Lord Tonypandy (former speaker of the House of Commons George Thomas) whether it was true “they really were all plotting the whole time as the books suggested”[131]

The need to place New Labour in the context of Labour’s history was clearly keenly felt not only by Blair but others as well. Campbell’s diaries note an instance in which Kinnock argued that Blair’s 1995 Conference Speech should “say in his [Blair’s] conference speech that New Labour is Old Labour winning; that 1945 was New Labour, Labour renewing itself to renew Britain, 1964 ditto.”[132]

Blair’s own relationship with history was viewed from a critical point of view as lacking any coherence or genuine interest in the subject by David Wells in his book Tony Blair: Making Labour Liberal, in which Wells argued that unlike Conservatives who saw history as “a learning process”[133] or socialists who saw history as “the process of history that leads to the present day at which point it continues, but if a revolution is achieved, in a new direction”[134] Blair was an “extreme Liberal” to whom “history has no significance or value.”[135] Wells’ work is ultimately motivated more by a personal dislike of Blair but without any exact reason for it other than the conclusion he hammers home of Blair being an “extreme Liberal” without giving a concrete sense of what that is. It’s a worthless little book except for the above extract that illustrates the perception that Blair was lacking in history and that the New Labour project was, in essence, removed from it.

In contrast, David Willets’, then Conservative MP for Havant, wide ranging pamphlet for the Centre for Policy Studies in 1996 about Blair’s gurus, a loose term for individuals that Willets had ascribed as having an intellectual influence on Blair and therefore New Labour’s thinking, shows a genuine interest in analysing Blair’s connection with the past and providing a critique that is bound in more than pure dislike. In his essay on Andrew Marr, Willets suggests that New Labour’s proposed changes to the constitution weren’t revolutionary but rather the extension of “conventional wisdom”[136] as expressed by the likes of Andrew Marr in his Rule Britannia: the Failure and Future of British Democracy, Peter Hennesey’s Hidden Wiring and Vernon Bogdanor’s Politics and the Constitution.[137] Whilst Marr is noted for his journalism, the others are academics and historians of some note and Willets cites the Labour MP, historian and biographer of Ramsay MacDonald David Marquand in an attempt to undermine the authenticity of the New Labour argument on constitutional reform.[138] In his essay on Marquand suggests that due to his 1988 book The Unprincipled Society, Marquand was “a Blairite before Blair was a Blairite.”[139] That Willets cites academics alongside political advisors suggests that whilst he is critiquing the New Labour project and clearly attempting to attack Blair and Labour (there should be no bones made about the fact Willets was and is a Conservative MP and his approach to examining New Labour was by necessity always going to be biased in some way or another) he is at the same time taking it seriously and unlike Wells puts effort into constructing his argument and attempting to understand the hinterland of thought that lay behind the New Labour project and how certain historians influenced it. In particular the essay on Marquand, whilst rejecting his argument vigorously, analyses Marquand’s explanation of British decline in comparison with Britain’s European counterparts in an intelligent and engaged way. Marquand’s influence on Blair, Willets suggests, is pointing to the social democratic successes in Europe and showing the way for the once anti Common Market Blair to embrace the European ideal. Willets of course is slightly contradictory is portraying Marquand as an influence and critic of Blair in more or less the same breath but his inferences about the sources of much of the New Labour agenda in academia suggests that Conservatives willing to engage in honest debate around it could see that the New Labour project did not evolve out of thin air but rather out of a specific wing of Labour intellectual thought that had a deep rooted history in the Labour Party.

Other members of the New Labour team were seen to be more closely connected to the history of the Labour Party however. Gordon Brown, Shadow Chancellor and Blair’s eventual successor wrote his PhD thesis on one of the great rebels of Scottish Labour history, James Maxton,[140] and as a child had written an obituary of Hugh Gaitskell for his school newspaper before becoming “a firm supporter of Harold Wilson.”[141] In her introduction to one of Brown’s later speeches on the constitution, collected into a volume published a year before he became Prime Minister, historian Linda Colley described historical writing as “one of Brown’s strengths.”[142] Colley goes on to argue that:

“History is rarely a wholly reliable guide to the future: but an instinctive sense and informed understanding of the past can help politicians (and everyone else) to place contemporary challenges and debate in a much broader context, and to move beyond obscurantist myths, glib slogans and easy generalisations.”[143]

In this sense Colley is accurately summing up not only Brown’s approach to the history but that of New Labour as well. Whilst Brown clearly had the greater academic grasp of the history of the Labour movement and New Labour’s placing of it within that tradition, Blair equally understood how his leadership need to both challenge and accept the history of the Labour Party in order to allow it to win in 1997. This is part of the distinct difference between Blair and Brown – Blair’s understanding of history was less academic and more instinctive. His references to the past were always through the lens of the constraints of the present.

Indeed, in the wake of the 2001 election victory, Peter Hennessy records that “Mr Blair has confided in his mentor, Lord Jenkins of Hillhead, “his regret that he read Law and not History at Oxford” and in Jenkins’ words that he “has become a considerable addict of political biography.”[144] Blair’s remark about his wish that he had studied History rather than Law is one he has repeated many times since in numerous interviews and demonstrates a personal concern about history. Hennessy, as others before and since suggested, believe this was solely because Blair “plainly cares about his place and the place of his administration in the “big picture” of political history.”[145]

Yet Campbell’s Diaries and Blair’s own writing and speeches from the time suggest that his interest in history and the way it shapes and forms political parties was perhaps deeper than is often recognized. Blair’s own words, both in the run up to 1997 and after it, suggest that a great deal of New Labour, from his own perspective, was motivated by a sense of history and a need to learn from it – to prevent, for want of a better word, the party and he as its leader to not repeat mistakes of the past.

However, the very nature of the New Labour project – a distancing of the current incarnation of the Labour Party from the past – meant that Blair’s invocation of history, especially later on during his premiership, was to see historical achievements as all well and good in their own way but to not place too much importance on them. In his 2002 Fabian Society pamphlet “The courage of our convictions: Why reform of the public services is the route to social justice” Blair repeatedly argues throughout that Labour should not be prisoners of the 1945 settlement as he terms it.[146] Blair goes as far as to say that:

“we must demonstrate the same courage and vision shown by Clement Attlee and Aneurin Bevan. Like them, we must challenge the status quo and refashion the public realm to meet the needs of our time…But modern public services must also match modern expectations of quality and choice – not those of the 1940s.”[147]

Here Blair is both lauding the achievements of the 1940s Labour government whilst also saying that to be bound by that history is to do a disservice to it – that his reforms to the public sector, especially the NHS, should be viewed as similarly radical to those enacted by Attlee and Bevan. Whilst it is certainly debatable as to whether or not Blair’s reforms could or should be viewed in similar terms, what is fascinating is that even in government Blair felt the need to evoke the history of the Labour Party to gain support for reforms and policies that he certainly had a mandate to enact anyway. New Labour, as much in power as during its election campaigns and Blair in particular, were aware of the history of the Labour Party and that any policy change or change in the aesthetics of the party had to be crouched in that history, a fact that was important to the 1997 general election.  As the historian David Rubinstein argued in his history of the Labour Party and British society, “Students of the Labour Party’s history, of the strong leadership of Ramsay MacDonald, Hugh Gaitskell and Tony Blair, the impact of left wing dissidents Aneurin Bevan and Tony Benn, can be in no doubt about the importance of individuals in history.”[148] For Tony Blair and New Labour this reading of history, the importance of the individual in shaping both party policy and the politics of the country was crucial to selling both Blair’s leadership and the New Labour project as a whole.

The 1997 Election and History

The 1997 election was itself set again a wave of disapproval for the Conservative Party. It is as important to consider the damage the Conservatives had done to themselves in the 90s to understand how Labour was able to win as it is to understanding the role history played for the Labour Party in the election victory. From the deposing of Margaret Thatcher in 1990 to Black Wednesday only two years later to the scandals of the late 90s, all besides the continual infighting over Europe and Maastricht and the economic decline and psychology hit inflicted by the forced departure of the pound from the ERM, by the time of the 1997 General Election the Conservative Party was in a mess and had run out of ideas. Michael Portillo’s New Blue movement, which he began to germinate in 1995, would not have saved the Conservatives. There is conceivably little that could have done. Unlike Francis Urquhart, Major’s Conservative Prime Ministerial counterpart in the House of Cards trilogy, Major was not lacking in strong internal or external opponents. Battered and embittered, his “Put Up or Shut Up” leadership campaign against John Redwood in 1996 only served to highlight the loss of ideas that the Conservatives had and the failure on their part to bring together a coherent message for why the public should give them another term. Similarly, the “New Labour, New Danger” campaign was flawed in how out of touch it was – painting Tony Blair as a dangerous socialist agitator was as ridiculous then as it is now; the last desperate breath of a party who could not understand why it should be in power other than that it should be. As Nicholas Jones succinctly puts it in his book on the election, Campaign 1997: How the Election was Won and Lost “By dint of sheer repetition, the word “sleaze” became firmly associated with Tory MPs.”[149]

Writing in 1997 after the party’s defeat at the general election, former Conservative MP and member of Edward Heath’s government, Ian Gilmour noted that “Well before the crushing defeat in 1997 general election, right wing triumphalism had been replaced by virtual civil war in the Conservative Party.”[150] Gilmour was of course writing from the perspective of a well known “wet” ascribed to him by Margaret Thatcher. Gilmour’s argument can be easily placed in the fight between the liberal “One Nation” wing of the Conservatives and the more Thatcherite wing of the Conservative Party post the 1997 election as an example of the more liberal Conservatives arguing that the swing to the right under Thatcher had only worked for a short time whilst ultimately making the party weaker. Indeed, Gilmour went so far as to argue that “By May 1994, if not before, both Labour and the Liberal Democrats seemed to be getting nearer to the ideals of One Nation Toryism than the Government.”[151]

Conversely, whilst Gilmour felt that by the 1997 election Labour had shifted towards being similar to a moderate One Nation Toryism as he describes it, others saw New Labour as embracing the legacy of Thatcher and Thatcherism. Richard Heffernan argued in New Labour and Thatcherism: Political Change in Britain that “Tony Blair stands far closer to Margaret Thatcher than he does, say, a social democratic revisionist such as Tony Crosland.”[152] For both Heffernan and Gilmour, Labour under Blair had changed but in different ways. For Gilmour it was a party that had shifted towards the liberal conservatism that he believed in, for Heffernan it had moved towards the Thatcherism that he disagreed with. What was important, electorally speaking, was the view that the Labour Party had in someway changed and that it was not the same party as it had been in the past. Heffernan does though couch his remark in the suggestion that Blair’s politics was merely a reflection of the time he lived in and suggests that had Crossland been alive in the 1990s he may have been to the right of where he had been in the 1960s and 1970s.[153] The degree to which politicians might be argued to reflect their times and in fact shape them is a difficult one to address given how much of a chicken and egg problem it is – did the times shape the views or the views shape the times? Regardless of the answer, the importance of the perception of change to Labour by 1997 and how much it could be claimed to resemble its historical predecessor is an important factor in understand the 1997 election campaign.

The use of history was therefore partly in the Conservatives’ court – they had to defend their time in office throughout the campaign and explain why they should continue into the future. As partly illustrated above, the “New Labour, New Britain” slogan in many ways seemed to deal with the issues that might come up in connection with Labour, it’s past and the campaign. The issue of how the Labour Party had been in the past and the perceptions of that past would of course persist – the issue of Blair’s personal beliefs and the difference between the Blair of 1983 and 1997 were raised by David Dimbleby forcefully during Blair’s leadership interview as part of the campaign.

Dimbleby’s instance on asking Blair about the past is a revealing insight into how the press and the public, to a certain extent, wished to judge the Labour Party during the election campaign. Most people, as was clear from Labour massive poll lead, felt that the party had changed and was one that those who had previously supported the Conservatives could support. The paradoxical nature of the issue that the Labour Party has faced throughout its existence is that a party that is obsessed by its own past and how that past is interpreted often only wins support from the public when it has judged to have “changed” from what occurred before. The change in Labour between 1931 and 1945 was important if some subtle as compared to 1983 and 1997. Yet the essential issue that faced Labour during both periods was a need to woo the electorate by seeming to have been transformed to be new and therefore able to do new things as opposed to a Conservative party that only represented continuity – in both 1945 and 1997 the incumbent Conservative Prime Minister did not seem to want to be agents of change but rather focussed solely on maintaining the status quo. The Conservatives had, after all faced similar problems in the past – Wilson’s victory in 1964 is often equally seen as a result of “political exhaustion and sleaze.”[154]

The Conservatives attempts to use the status quo as an attempt to woo votes in the election was perhaps always doomed to fail. From the very beginning of the General Election year, Conservative attempts to show that their time in office should continue because of an illustrious record were easily batted away by Labour. Michael Heseltine, in January 1997 for example, stated that there were 55,000 more qualified midwifes and nurses working in the NHS than there had been in 1979.[155] Labour quickly faxed over a response stating that in fact the figure of qualified midwives and nurses had fallen from 358,447 in 1979 to 353,123 in 1994, the last year that there was a full figure for.[156] Similar attempts by John Major to claim that the price of fuel duty was rising at a rate of thirty percent year on year under the last Labour government.[157] Labour’s press team were quick to respond, pointing out that “electricity prices fell in 1977 and 1978.”[158] Using the Excalibur fact checking software procured by Blair at the start of his time in office[159],  Labour were soon batting off suggestions that the previous Labour government had been an unmitigated failure. Blair’s used of the Excalibur system was crucial in not only showing Labour’s effectiveness but to continue to keep the pressure on the Conservatives to justify their continual presence in government. It was a death by final cuts approach – the greater number of negative stories about the Conservatives and rebuttals of Labour’s suggestive ineffectiveness in government were pivotal to gaining victory at the election. The closeness of the 1992 result and how if Labour had been trusted more Kinnock would have been in Downing Street[160] were a stark reminder that the Labour Party couldn’t afford to let up in its continual attacks on the Conservatives and the at times paradoxical approach of disproving that previous Labour governments had been failures whilst also reiterating that the Labour Party had changed under Blair.

For the BBC Industrial Relations journalist Nicholas Jones, who wrote his own account of the 1997 campaign, “Labour were determined at all costs to avoid reviving public memories of the party’s 1979 general election defeat and their impotence at the time in the face of damaging industrial disputes.”[161] This was for Blair core to why Clause IV had to go prior to the 1997 election – to make the party look in control, to demonstrate that Labour was not unable to deal with the trade union movement in a way that some compromised it. As Derek Draper, a former assistant to Peter Mandelson, put it at a conference Jones attended, they didn’t want media outlets broadcasting a “dishonest image of trade unionists and sellers of Socialist Worker ganging up on Tony Blair.”[162] This was in part core to the motivation for Labour to shift itself politically. The perception of the Labour Party even under Neil Kinnock, had at times been one of union domination and socialist agitation – Blair’s vision was a Labour Party separated from those perceptions, one that could be seen as friendly to business. Indeed, only the previous April Blair had remarked:

“Old Labour thought the role of government was to interfere with the market. New Labour believes the task of government is to make the market more dynamic, to provide people and business with the means of success.”[163]

As remarked upon earlier, Blair’s perception often focussed on the individual and in a post Thatcher political landscape – where, whilst institutions seen to be core to the social good were still very popular (indeed polling showed throughout the Thatcher period support for the NHS remained very high)[164] that kind of individualism, as opposed to bogeyman of trade unionism was important to emphasise. As Blair would sometimes like to remark he was less of a socialist and more of a social – ist,[165] the distinction being an important one in understanding both the distinction and appeal of New Labour. The New Labour argument in 1997 of course in part had its roots in 1992 and the revolution during that period of Kinnock’s argument against Thatcherism of supply side socialism[166]  but differed in that the emphasise on the individual and individual actors – Blair’s remarks about the past of the Labour Party often focus on individuals rather than collective action – which broadly feels more similar to the arguments that had been made during the 1980s by the Conservatives. Yet as Labour Party adverts during the campaign wanted to emphasise, particularly the one broadcast on xxx featuring Pete Postlethwaite emphasised[167] institutions closely associated with community such as the NHS were a priority for any Labour government. Labour’s electoral strategy was to emphasise that it would not be a party that would stand against business or investment in a way it was perceived to have done in the past but nor would it be one that would neglect the usual battleground of the public sector. Richard Heffernan argued that “contemporary Labour practise is essentially cast in the “shadow” of Thatcherism”[168] and it is perhaps in this context that the party’s 1997 campaign and in particular its approach to business has been viewed by many. However, it would be erroneous to see that as the sole core of the New Labour project or the 1997 election campaign. Management Today showed in October 1995 that Blair’s popularity amongst major business owners was not staggeringly high[169] with the magazine’s polling of Chairmen, Chief Executives and Board members of Times Top 500 companies revealing that only 5% intended to vote Labour and only 9% thought Tony Blair would be the best person to become Prime Minister.[170]  Comments from some business leaders reflected this with Spiko Huismans, Chief Executive of Courtlands welcoming Blair’s comments in the interview[171] but expressing caution over Labour’s policies on inflation and higher rates of tax, stating “I don’t like the idea of paying more personal tax.”[172] The pursuit of a policy like the minimum wage was equally hardly in keeping with a pure free market ideal. If Heffernan’s argument that “Since 1975 the reform agenda in British politics has been dominated by market liberalism”[173] was entirely true, then the persistence of the NHS in the face of these market forces and its continuing popularity as an idea throughout the Thatcher era[174] seems at odds with what Heffernan describes. Similarly at odds with Heffernan’s critique is the emphasise prior to Blair’s leadership victory on community being important during a speech given in the wake of the murder of Jamie Bulger[175]  and Brown’s 1992 Sovereignty Lecture speech in which he argued that:

“I want to argue that we require an entirely new settlement between individual, community and government: that a modern version of socialism must retrieve the broad idea of community from the narrow notion of the state; and that we must ensure that the community becomes a means by which individuals can realise their potential”[176].

Part of the issue was that Blair’s and New Labour’s notions on the economy in particular were often seen as wholly accepting of the Thatcherite economic model. Blair argued in his interview with Management Today that “There are a million people who are paid under £2.50 an hour. I don’t think that’s morally right”[177]  and that takeover bids were not inherently bad but nor were they inherently good.[178] As Patrick Diamond argued, “Blair was keen not to repudiate Keynes’ inheritance, acknowledging that his prudent vision in the capitalist market economy remained relevant to the British centre left.”[179] These kinds of arguments were core to the New Labour project and the attempt by Blair and Brown to synthesise the emphasise on individuality that had become to be seen as the hallmark of Thatcherism and the older traditions of communitarianism that had deep roots in the Labour Party. This shows that New Labour was as much about demonstrating the Labour Party had changed as it was about emphasising the things – community, care, state support – that had drawn people to the party in the past. Therefore, whilst it was clear that the Labour Party had changed throughout the 1980s and 1990s, this was as much an aesthetic change as it was anything else. New Labour was not born fully formed from the head of Peter Mandelson but rather a continually evolving project, tied to its main protagonists whose own views had evolved throughout their time as members of the Labour Party and reached a consensus as to what they considered crucial to winning victory. Whilst keen on emphasising that Labour had changed, Blair wished to emphasise continuity in a more direct way than Kinnock had because of the changing circumstances in which they acted as leader – Kinnock, elected after a damaging defeat wished to focus on change and how Labour could bring that change to itself and the country – whereas Blair, although also promoting himself as new and as separate from the Labour Party’s past was also aware of the need to demonstrate the continuity between “Old” Labour and “New” Labour.

Conservative attempts to disprove that Labour had changed would form the heart of their campaign. Rather than attempting to convince the public that they would be able to bring anything new to the table, the focus was on discrediting the Labour Party and insisting it was still exactly the same as it had been in the past. A classic example came months before the election in November 1996 when the Conservatives attempt to revive the attack line that they had used to great effect in 1992 of the Labour “tax bombshell” that would occur if Labour won the election.[180] Kenneth Clarke’s budget and Conservative press around it attempted to imply that families were £1000 better off in 1997 than they had been in 1992 which Labour disputed.[181] Labour were, as they would partly during the campaign, focussing on attack Major for the “twenty two tax increases”[182] that had occurred since the 1992 election, utilising a similar tactic as the Clinton campaign had deployed in the 1992 Presidential Election when incumbent President George Bush was lambasted for his failure to keep his pledge not to increase taxes.[183]

In the midst of this, New Labour’s strength in part came from rebuffs from some internal party figures. Barbara Castle who had served under Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan in the 1960s and 1970s, attacked Labour for seemingly failing to keep a promise to look at increasing the state pension in line with rising in earnings rather than prices[184] and Gerald Kauffman, who had once been a key member of Neil Kinnock’s Shadow Cabinet team as Shadow Foreign Secretary from 1987 to 1992, who complained that Peter Mandelson’s attacks on the press in particular Telegraph journalist George Jones were uncalled for because “Tory newspapers were giving the Conservatives a harder time than at any period since the dying months of the Macmillan government.”[185] In both instances, these reactions showed that New Labour was distinctive in the minds of the public from old Labour, a useful electoral tool to convince voters who had previously supported the Conservatives that they may wish to reconsider the Labour Party. In particular, Barbara Castle’s vocal complaints may have been especially useful given her link to In Place of Strife and her support for Clause IV in the 1959-1960 fight to remove it.[186]

By the time of the campaign itself in May 1997 there had been a clear indication that the result of the election would be historic either way, with the polls and by election and council victories in prior years indicating that Labour would win by a landslide. On the day that Major announced the date of the election and dissolution of Parliament, things looked grim for the Conservatives – the previous day columnist Richard Harris remarked that Major was facing, like Jim Callaghan before him, the wave of change “he, like Callaghan, has turned what might have been a close race into what begins to look, increasingly, like a sea change.”[187] Similar historical comparisons were made with the 1945 campaign the day after Major’s announcement with the length of the campaign being compared to that of 45 and the Conservative’s polling deficit against Labour being the largest since modern polling began, just before the Second World War.[188] Blair’s team still warned against complacency which became a watchword for the campaign[189] and yet it seemed almost certain that Labour would win. Although the spectre of the 1992 election still hung over the party to a degree, the likelihood of Labour not winning seemed relatively low. The early decision by the Sun to come out for Labour certainly helped the campaign; the Sun which had been vitriolic against Labour on the Conservatives behalf in 1992 were “as vicious”[190] towards Major’s Conservatives on Labour’s behalf in 1997. The campaign would only highlight the distinctions between New Labour and the Conservatives – not that Labour was dangerous as the Conservatives hoped but rather the opposite. As Worcester and Mortimore put it:

“Compared to the slick, news management “control freak” world of New Labour, the Tories were left looking old fashioned and amateur in their approach.”[191]

The reversal of the 1983 election had occurred to the Conservatives – Labour looked like the party that was forward thinking, of the future not the past. Defining themselves against the Conservatives Party’s record gave Labour and enormous advantage in the election and would ensure its victory.

As Gisela Stuart, Labour’s candidate in Birmingham Edgbaston and whose success in gaining the seat from the Conservatives would be the first sign of the scale of Labour’s victory, remarked to me when I interviewed her for this project:

“The discipline meant that when the polling stations open in the morning, and they’re closed at 10 o’clock, you do not stop campaigning and working until 10 o’clock. That was very much the ethos of 97, and it was very new”[192]

The focus on both discipline and “newness” was core to understanding the appeal to a public that were not invested in the ins and outs of Labour Party policy. Despite much of the manifesto being the product of both Kinnock’s Policy Review, initiated over a decade before, and of the 1992 loss and much of Labour’s argument of mixing individuality and community bearing the marks of long standing Labour commitments – the minimum wage had after all been first proposed as Labour policy in the early 1900s – the public still viewed the party as new and its distance to the memories of the 1970s and 1980s was a core part of its success, particularly in comparison to a Conservative Party that seemed weighed down with its time in office.

As the results came in, James Walsh of Time magazine wrote “The results left Blair’s own faithful, partying in London’s Royal Festival Hall, practically speechless with wonder.”[193] As Walsh put it “All the warnings of water shortages during Britain’s rainless spring could have been cancelled by Labour’s tears of joy.”[194] The scale of the Conservative Party’s loss was also apparent – Walsh making clear how the “great political fighting machine of Margaret Thatcher”[195] had been defeated in spades. For an international audience, Walsh’s mentioning of three memorable Conservative leaders – Thatcher, Churchill and Wellington and the latter two’s electoral thrashings helped to solidify the historical importance of the moment.

For the British press, there was a similar need to review the size of the result to put it into historical context. Clear comparisons were made during election night between 1997 and 1945 – comparisons that are still made today – and the almost mythical proportion of the swing from Conservatives to Labour has become a clear high watermark of electoral success. Yet there was some dissent that suggested the victory had not solely been the result of Labour’s electoral machine. Peter Kellner writing in the Evening Standard on the 2^nd of May 1997, suggested that whilst “Labour now enjoys its biggest victory”[196] that “Labour’s support, at 45 per cent, is almost exactly what Harold Wilson achieved in 1964 when Labour came to power with a majority of four – and only one point higher than Labour scored in 1970 when it lost power to Edward Heath’s Tories.”[197] What Kellner went on to argue is that the public had decided they didn’t want a Conservative government rather than inherently wanting a Labour one and that the scale of Labour’s victory exaggerated that of the Conservative’s defeat. Whilst history, and two successive election victories another in 2001 by a landslide, makes clear the flawed nature of Kellner’s argument, it is important to understand that Labour’s success in any election is often seen in combination with success for the Liberals/Liberal Democrats – part of New Labour’s electoral success in 1997 can certainly be credited to the successful leadership of the Liberal Democrats by Paddy Ashdown, helping to make a great impression on the public than his predecessors.

In contrast to the Evening Standard’s Kellner piece, Trevor Kavanagh, The Sun’s Political editor’s piece for the front cover of the paper’s 2^nd of May edition seemed gleeful in the fact that the Conservative’s loss signalled “the worst result for the Conservatives since 1832 when the Duke of Wellington got the boot.”[198] Kavanagh’s piece went as far to highlight particular relevance such as that Labour’s victory was the biggest “EVER!”[199] and that Labour had enjoyed a 13 per cent swing against the Conservatives.[200] David Wooding’s piece, “It’s the Sun Wot Swung It!”[201] not only emphasising the Sun’s role in the election and the previous election[202] but also how grateful Blair seemed to be to the paper.[203] In a further article, Kavanagh identified Major’s 1997 loss as being rooted “five months after his shock victory in 1992”[204] with Black Wednesday. Other pieces in the paper emphasised its view that Major had been a nice man let down by his party[205] and that Blair “will not let Britain down”[206] with Thatcher’s former advisor Sir Charles Powell emphasising what he considered to be the distinction between New Labour and Old Labour – that the “young dynamo”[207] must not give into union control and that the “ghost of the anarchic Seventies must be laid to rest for ever.”[208] The Mirror was perhaps even more understandably effusive in its coverage with Brian Reade writing “Britain basked in sunshine yesterday. We’ve known such days before, when strangers smile instinctively at strangers, when laughter seems to echo from all directions, when people walk with a kick in their step…Labour’s coming home.”[209] Reade emphasized the long journey that Labour had been on and that “when Tony Blair stood on those No. 10 steps which had been deserted by his party for a generation, it finally hit home. They HAD come home.”[210] Reade’s emphasis on the almost generational struggle as he rendered it for the Labour Party to come home to government highlights how even whilst New Labour did its best to resist the grip of history, the project and its election victory simply by dint of the scale of the win and the gap between the last Labour election victory of any scale, let alone one of a size comparable to 1997 meant that it was always going to be a moment and project that was grounded in history – in truth because it made history.

Postscript “A New Dawn Has Broken, Has It Not?” The Blair Government and History

It can be said, without a shadow of a doubt, that the Blair government will go down in history. For some of the people I interviewed for this project and for this piece, it will go down as being the time when Britain went to war with Iraq and as a great missed opportunity of a progressive turning point. Alwyn Turner argued that the 1997 election would be likely forgotten in the great sweep of history 100 years from now[211] and that it wasn’t “a great watershed moment… I don’t think there’s enough in the Blair programme as presented or that distinguishes itself from the government that went before.”[212] Adam Boulton in contrast, writing at the end of Blair’s time in Number 10 in his book Tony’s Ten Years, said that for him:

“New Labour was indeed something new. It was the story of my time. We may never have joined up or even voted for it, but all those of my generation who were actively involved in politics in the period just gone by have been shaped by New Labour”[213]

This feeling that, for many people, the New Labour project felt like the culmination of a generational shift is an important factor in understanding its significance and why both Blair and New Labour are regularly cited today as important political markers both for the Labour Party and the Conservatives.

As Glen O’Hara articulates in his own article on the pitfalls of writing the history of this era, “Looking beyond this, to real achievements in office as well as the true flaws of each policy, can be difficult when faced with a storm of abusive debate on social media, all part of Labour’s ‘forever wars’ with itself.”[214] As O’Hara correctly argues the one word most people associate with Blair is Iraq[215] and this might not change anytime soon. Of course, many people believe that this will always be the case – that Iraq will be a permanent mark on the record of the Blair government and that association will always be there, that it will set like a toad across the vast consciousness of historical memory, obscuring everything else. I am not so convinced that this will be the case. Whilst not entirely comparable, Wilson’s stance on Vietnam caused concerted anger from all sides but has been overshadowed by the renewed interest in his achievements. Attlee’s participation in the Korean War is, again, outweighed by his domestic achievements. Whilst the perception of Iraq as an epoch defining moment may seem to be distinct from these other conflicts, it is important to remember that war, more so than any other human activity, is at its rawest when the combatants are alive, when their suffering or otherwise can be seen by individuals. As time passes so does, to an extent, the hurt and the potency of the memory of the conflict. This is not to say that Iraq will be forgotten but rather it is easy for a generation that experienced it to confidently predict it will still loom large in the historical or public consciousness than those that come after it. The Boer Wars were seen as epoch defining moments and yet I doubt that many people will be able to recall why, for example, the Siege of Ladysmith held any significance or why the wars even started to begin with. I may be wrong – the invasion of Iraq may, for generations to come be seen as a betrayal and an example of the war to end all wars – neo liberalist imperialism run mad as I’m sure some Guardian columnist must have written at the time. It was, like most wars, potentially preventable. It was, like most wars, the cause of heart ache for the families of coalition troops who lost their lives and the Iraqi civilians who were at the sharp end of a violent conflict. Yet for all this, for the potency of it to a generation that experienced it, I do not believe it will be seen as defining for the view of the Blair premiership as others do. It may be used as a way, from the past, to put into context for a future audience why Blair became unpopular but I do not think in of itself it will be seen as the most defining feature of his premiership for future historians.

Leaving aside Iraq for a moment, what else might the Blair government be remembered for? There is certainly a list of achievements that stand in stark contrast to the achievements of other administrations. It is difficult to determine however which may stand the test of time – devolution certainly was historic and a fundamentally transformative moment for the United Kingdom’s internal structure. It gave power back to countries that had for the past couple of hundred years not had true, nationalised representation. Similarly, the seeming boost it gave to the SNP in Scotland helped to spark many of the internal struggles to help define British identity in the last 2010s and early 2020s. How much that success can also be accredited to the personalities of Salmond and Sturgeon is also yet to be determined by future historians. Yet without devolution neither politician would have gained nearly the kind of prominence that they had and invited so many questions about not only Scotland’s place in the union but the union itself.

The continuation of some of the Thatcher era economic policies can also be judged, at least from the historian’s point of view, to have a lasting impact on the course of Britain’s story. Had the Blair government, as many of its internal critics wistfully said then and now, be more left wing in its economic policies, had it veered more towards nationalisation then we would have been saved the bother of the 2008 financial crisis and Britain would have been all the more prosperous. Given the 2008 crisis was a global one and as much a result of American sub prime mortgages and the extreme laisse faire approach of US banks as it was global deference to the banking sector, a radical change of course by any UK government of any stripe could be argued to have caused a singularly British crisis to occur years earlier. Look, many would have said, at the 1970s and the problems of the 1970s Labour government – it’s happening again. Through a mixture of genuine belief and political necessities, the Blair government was straightjacketed into following a particular pattern of behaviour in regard to economic planning. This had a short term, net positive – it ensured relative confidence from the markets in Labour in government. It can and I’m sure will be argued about by economic historians for decades to come whether the continuation of many Conservative spending plans during that first term was worth the then confidence of the markets to further bed in the Thatcherite economic consensus. It would be wrong to argue, of course, that Blair’s government solely followed the economic arguments made by the Tories – indeed somewhat insulting to policy makers themselves. Not only did the minimum wage mark a massive change in British economics, one which the Conservatives vociferously opposed, it also demonstrated that even in a period of increasing emphasis on the freedom of the market that state actors could – and should – make economic interventions.

Of Blair himself, history will clearly have a complex view of him. Blair’s personality will certainly be separated from the work of his government as is perhaps necessary; it is often too easy for historians and the public to view eras through the lens of singular individuals and their own particular achievements whilst failing to judge that those individuals needed capable others around them in order to achieve their aims. Napoleon utilised Talleyrand.[216] Richard III had his “rat” Sir Richard Ratcliffe[217] and other figures throughout history as diverse as Gladstone and Julius Caesar have needed capable individuals around them in order to function. The same is clearly the case with the New Labour government and the extensive work done before Blair even became a viable leadership contender to create an intellectual and electoral argument for a figure like him. Yet despite all this there will be a desire to return to examining the consequence of him in the wider view of history; John Smith or Gordon Brown would clearly have led distinctly different governments from Blair had they won in 1997 and had he done, even if many of the policies and the policy outcomes would have been similar.

In this sense, Blair is as much bound up with historical comparisons to other figures as any other leader, the most continual comparison being with Margaret Thatcher but other even stranger ones, such as a comparison to William the Conqueror[218] exist.

Blair’s government was, in many ways, a reminder that history does not fit into a set pattern. By winning three consecutive elections the New Labour government kept the Conservative Party from office for a remarkable 13 years; an achievement that had not been seen since the 1700s. That in of itself shows that the course of events of all our lives are not decided by precedent. Precedent, in a historic sense, can be useful to the historian but it binds the mind both of the public and of the politicians who are elected to serve them. The greatest lesson that can be taken from the 1997 election and how it broke the previous political consensus, both the short term consensus and a much longer, more established one, is that change no matter how long it takes can happen. History may shape us, it may help provide a roadmap for how to move forward but it does not and should not define us. Nor should we consider events that happen to be inevitable – the historian is often forced, by the very nature of the way that history is recorded in books and chapters and articles, into assuming that what has happened would always have happened. As Steven Fielding argued, “Had [James] Callaghan responded differently to events during the autumn of 1978 it is possible “New” Labour would never have happened – because it would not have been required.”[219] Events and individuals, whether they know it or not form history by their very actions either intentionally or unintentionally. What I hope this piece of analysis and this project demonstrates is that too often we are defined by and trapped by the actions of others; the past is important but it does not provide an inevitable road map for social harmony or a greater understanding of the people of our own country or the world. What happened before does not have to happen in the same way again for things to get better. The success of New Labour was in part due to both a rejection and an acceptance of the past. It was the forging of these two seemingly disparate elements, as disparate as the words “New” and “Labour”, that helped make it an electorate force to be reckoned with.

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[1] Jon Lawrence, Alexander Campsie, “Political History”, Writing History: Theory and Practise, ed by Stefan Berger, Heiko Feldner, Kevin Passmore, (Great Britain: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020) p.323

[2] James E Cronin, New Labour’s Pasts: The Labour Party and its Discontents, (Great Britain: Pearson Education, 2004) p.1

[3] Christopher Hibbert, The English: A Social History 1066 – 1945, (United Kingdom: Grafton, 1987) p. 756

[4] Ibid

[5] Chris Clarke, Warring Fictions: Left Populism and Its Defining Myths, (United Kingdom: Policy Network, 2019) p.165

[6] Ibid

[7] Will Barber-Taylor interview with Hilary Benn, University of Warwick Modern Record Centre, p. 2 < https://mrc-describe.epexio.com/records/WBT/11>, [Last accessed 21/05/2024]

[8] Jim Tomlinson, “Economic Policy: Lessons from past Labour governments” New Labour in Power: Precedents and prospects, ed by Brian Brivati and Tim Bale, (United Kingdom: Routledge, 1997) p. 11

[9]  Keir Hardie, From Serfdom to Socialism, (United Kingdom: GMB, 2015) p 65

[10] Ibid p 66

[11] Ibid p 66 – 7

[12] Clement Attlee – New Social Services and the Citizen, 4 July 1948, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rqyzWzDONQ, [Last accessed 21/05/2024]

[13] Nick Thomas Symonds, Harold Wilson: The Winner, (Great Britain: Weidenfield & Nicolson, 2022) p 208

[14] HM Drucker Doctrine and Ethos in the Labour Party, (United Kingdom: George Allen and Unwin, 1979),  p.vii

[15]  Kenneth O Morgan, Michael Foot, (Great Britain: Harper Perennial, 2008) p. 273

[16] P. 273 ibid

[17] “1983 Labour Party Manifesto”, Labour Party General Election Manifestos, 1900 – 1997, ed Iain Dale, (Great Britain: Routledge, 2000) p. 246

[18] Tudor Jones, Remaking the Labour Party: From Gaitskell to Blair, (United Kingdom: Routledge, 1996) p. 42

[19] Patrick Diamond, British Labour Party in Opposition and Power 1979 – 2019, (United Kingdom: Routledge 2021) p 11

[20] Linda McDougall, Marcia Williams: The Life and Times of Baroness Falkeneder, (Great Britain: 2022, Biteback Publishing) p. 70

[21] Michael Mello, Dead Wrong: A Death Row Lawyer Speaks Out Against Capital Punishment, (United States of America: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997) p.79

[22] Clinton-Gore Ad, 1992, Youtube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1rS9R-uNiY, [Last accessed 24/05/2024]

[23] Ibid

[24] Tom Mould, Overthrowing the Queen: Telling Stories of Welfare in America, (United States: Indiana University Press, 2020) p. 4

[25] Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Packaging The Presidency: A History and Criticism of Presidential Campaign Advertising, (United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 1996) p 306

[26] Peter Riddell, “How New Labour sees Old Labour”, New Labour, Old Labour: The Wilson Callaghan Governments, 1974 – 1979, ed Anthony Seldon and Kevin Hickson, (United Kingdom: Routledge, 2004) p. 313

[27] Will Barber Taylor interview with Richard Carr, University of Warwick, Modern Records Centre, p. 1 < https://mrc-describe.epexio.com/records/WBT/7>, [Last accessed 24/05/2024]

[28] Peter Jones, America and the British Labour Party, (United States of America: Taurus Academic Studies, 1997) p. 189

[29] Shirley Williams,  Autobiography, (Great Britain: Virago, 2009) 267

[30] Ibid

[31] Ibid, 268

[32] Roy Jenkins, A Life at the Centre, (United Kingdom: Macmillan, 1991) p. 514

[33] Ibid

[34] Ibid, p.516

[35] Ibid

[36] Denis Healey, The Time of My Life, (Great Britain: Michael Joseph, 1989) p. 466

[37] Ibid, p. 471

[38] Ibid

[39] Ibid, p.482

[40] Tony Blair, A Journey, (Great Britain: Hutchinson, 2010) pp 89 – 90

[41] Ibid, p. 90

[42] Gordon Brown, My Life, Our Times (United Kingdom: The Bodley Head, 2017), p. 55

[43] Alan Sked and Chris Cook, Post War Britain: A Political History (United Kingdom: Penguin Books, 1993) p. 423

[44] “Our History”, Welcome to the Labour Party, (United Kingdom: Labour Party, 1983)

[45] Hayter, Fightback, p. 148

[46] Anthony Seldon, “Neil Kinnock Reflects” Neil Kinnock – Saving the Labour Party? Ed by Kevin Hickson (United Kingdom: Routledge, 2022) p. 15

[47] Harry Harmer, The Longman Compaion to The Labour Party 1900 – 1998, (United Kingdom: Addison Wesley Longman Limited, 1999) p.42

[48] Ibid

[49] Ibid, p. 34

[50] Andrew Scott Crines, Michael Foot and the Labour Leadership, (United Kingdom: Cambridge Scholars Limited, 2011) p. 151

[51] Will Barber-Taylor interviews Neil Kinnock, University of Warwick Modern Record Centre, https://mrc-describe.epexio.com/records/WBT/6 [Last accessed 20/05/2024] p. 3

[52] Steven Fielding, The Labour Party: Continuity and change in the making of “New” Labour, (United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) p. 26

[53] WBT Interview with Kinnock, University of Warwick, p. 4

[54] Tony Blair’s Victory Speech, Youtube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bldWwrgS_E [Last accessed 21/05/2024]

[55] Eileen Jones, Neil Kinnock, (United Kingdom: Robert Hale Limited, 1994) p. 58

[56] Betty Boothroyd, The Autobiography, (United Kingdom: Century, 2001) p. 115

[57] Duncan Watts, Understanding US/UK Government and Politics, (United Kingdom: Manchester University Press, 2013) p. 253

[58] Rodney Tyler, Campaign! The Selling of the Prime Minister, (United Kingdom: Grafton Books, 1987) p. 65

[59] David Bowie wins Outstanding Contribution presented by Tony Blair | BRIT Awards 1996, < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaJETvp_YL4>, [Last accessed 21/05/2024]

[60] Tyler, Campaign!, p. 65

[61] Ibid

[62] James E Cronin, New Labour’s Pasts: The Labour Party and its Discontents, (Great Britain: Pearson Education Limited, 2004) p. 291

[63] Ibid

[64] David Rubinstein, The Labour Party and British Society: 1880 – 2005, (Great Britain: Sussex Academic Press, 2006) p. 164

[65] Harmer, The Longman Companion, p. 26 – 27

[66] WBT Interview with Kinnock, University of Warwick, p.4

[67] “Continuity and Change in Labour Party Policy, Martin J Smith, The Changing Labour Party, ed by Martin J Smith and Joanna Spear,  (United Kingdom: Routledge, 1992) p. 223

[68] “Continuity and Change in Labour Party Policy, Martin J Smith, The Changing Labour Party, ed by Martin J Smith and Joanna Spear,  (United Kingdom: Routledge, 1992) p. 217

[69] Continuity and Change in Labour Party Policy, Martin J Smith, The Changing Labour Party, ed by Martin J Smith and Joanna Spear,  (United Kingdom: Routledge, 1992) p.229

[70] Ibid

[71] Stephen Driver and Luke Martell, New Labour: Politics After Thatcherism, (United Kingdom: Polity Press, 1998) p. 40

[72] Ibid

[73] Simon Hannah, A Party with Socialists in it: A History of the Labour Left, (United Kingdom, Pluto Press, 2022) p. 1

[74] Simon Lee, “One Nation Socialism: Neil Kinnock and the quest for a British Development State”, Neil Kinnock: Saving the Labour Party? Ed Kevin Hickson, (United Kingdom: Routledge, 2022) p.44

[75] Ibid, p. 50

[76] Ibid

[77] Kinnock, Seldon, p. 14

[78] Ibid, p. 15

[79] Robert Harris, The Making of Neil Kinnock, (Great Britain: Faber and Faber, 1984) p. 23

[80] Ibid

[81] Elizabeth Smith, “Introduction”, John Smith: Life and Soul of the Party, ed by Gordon Brown, James Naughtie, (Great Britain: Mainstream Publishing, 1994) p. 13

[82] Cronin, p. 347

[83] Cronin, p. 347

[84] Ibid

[85] Ibid

[86] David Judge, Representation: Theory and Practice in Britain, (Great Britain: Taylor and Francis, 2005) p. 82

[87] Cronin, p. 347

[88] Cronin, p. 348

[89] Dianne Hayter, Fightback! Labour’s traditional right int the 1970s and 1980s, (United Kingdom: Manchester University Press, 2005) p. 36

[90] Ibid

[91]David Rubinstein, The Labour Party and British Society: 1880 – 2005, (Great Britain: Sussex Academic Press, 2006), p. 175

[92] Jon Sopel, Tony Blair: The Moderniser, (Great Britain: Michael Joseph Limited, 1995) p. 3

[93] Steven Fielding, “The 1974 – 1979 Governments and “New Labour”, New Labour, Old Labour: The Wilson Callaghan Governments, 1974 – 1979, ed Anthony Seldon and Kevin Hickson, (United Kingdom: Routledge, 2004) p.285

[94] Alistair Campbell, The Blair Years, (United Kingdom: Hutchinson, 2007), p. 7

[95] Victoria Honeyman, Richard Crossman, A Reforming Radical of the Labour Party, (London: 2007, I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd), p. 47

[96] Idbid

[97] Alistair Campbell, The Blair Years, p. 11

[98] Alistair Campbell, The Blair Years, p. 37

[99]  Tudor Jones, Remaking the Labour Party, p. 41

[100] Ibid, p. 46

[101] Ibid, p. 47

[102] Ibid, p. 58

[103] Ibid, p. 59

[104] David Rubinstein, The Labour Party and British Society: 1880 – 2005, (Great Britain: Sussex Academic Press, 2006) p. 172

[105] Ibid, p. 133

[106] Anthony Bevins, Straw accuses Labour of timidity over Clause IV: Shadow cabinet member says party must establish a new ideology, The Independent, 22 March 1993, < https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/straw-accuses-labour-of-timidity-over-clause-iv-shadow-cabinet-member-says-party-must-establish-a-new-ideology-1499171.html>, [Last access 19/05/2024]

[107] Jones, p.134

[108] Ibid

[109] Blair’s October Revolution, The Economist, October 8 – 14^th 1994, p. 15

[110] Tony Blair, Introduction, What Needs To Change: New Visions for Britain, ed Giles Radice, (Great Britain: Harper Collins, 1996), p. 3

[111] WNTC, p. 4

[112] WNTC, p.4

[113] WNTC, p. 5

[114] Tomlinson, p. 113

[115] Tomlinson, p. 13

[116] WNTC, p. 10

[117] Fielding, New Labour, Old Labour, p. 287

[118] Tony Blair, Let Us Face The Future – the 1945 anniversary lecture, (United Kingdom: The Fabian Society, 1995) p. 1

[119] Stephen Driver and Luke Martell, New Labour: Politics After Thatcherism, (United Kingdom: Polity Press, 1998) p. 3

[120] Tony Blair, “A message from the Rt Hon Tony Blair MP”, Growing and Prospering: Your business and a Labour government, (United Kingdom: Labour Party, 1996) p. 2

[121] Blair, Face the Future, p. 2

[122] Ibid, p. 3

[123] Martin Francois, Ideas and Policies Under Labour, 1945-1951: Building a New Britain, (Great Britain: Manchester University Press, 1997) p. 225

[124] Blair, Face the Future, p. 3

[125] Ibid

[126] Pippa Crerar, ‘Coming back to finish the job’: Starmer aims to reclaim centre ground, The Guardian, 02 September 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/sep/26/labour-conference-starmer-party-financial-responsibility, [Last accessed 25/05/2024]

[127] Alistair Campbell, The Blair Years, p. 61

[128] Ibid, p. 63

[129] Ibid

[130] Ibid, p. 64

[131] Ibid

[132] Ibid, p. 80

[133] David Wells, Tony Blair: Making Labour Liberal, (United Kingdom: Rain Press, 2000) P. 53

[134] ibid

[135] ibid

[136] David Willets, Blair’s Gurus: An examination of Labour rhetoric, (Centre for Policy Study, 1996) p. 45

[137] ibid

[138] Ibid, p. 47

[139] Ibid, p. 59

[140] Gordon Brown, My Life, Our Times (United Kingdom: The Bodley Head, 2017) p. 75

[141] Brown, My Life, pp. 40 – 41

[142] Linda Colley, “Constitution” Moving Britain Forward: Selected Speeches 1997 – 2006 Gordon Brown, ed Wilf Stevenson, (United Kingdom: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2006) p. 27

[143] Ibid

[144] Peter Hennessy, The Prime Minister: The Office and Its Holders Since 1945, (United Kingdom: Penguin Books, 2001) p. 536

[145] Ibid

[146] Tony Blair, The courage of our convictions: Why reform of the public services is the route to social justice, (United Kingdom: Fabian Society, 2002, p. iv)

[147] Ibid, p. 3

[148] David Rubinstein, The Labour Party and British Society: 1880 – 2005, (Great Britain: Sussex Academic Press, 2006) p. viii

[149] Nicholas Jones, Campaign 1997: How The General Election Was Won and Lost, (Great Britain: Indigo, 1997) p. 11

[150] Ian Gilmour, Whatever Happened to the Tories? The Conservatives since 1945, (Great Britain: Fourth Estate Limited, 1997 p. viii

[151] Ibid, p. 370

[152] Richard Heffernan, New Labour and Thatcherism: Political Change in Britain, (United Kingdom: Palgrave, 2001) p. ix

[153] Ibid

[154] Nick Ellison, “From Welfare State to Post Welfare Society?” Labour’s social policy in historical and contemporary perspective, New Labour in Power, ed by Tim Bale, Brian Brivati , (United Kingdom: Routledge, 1997) p. 38

[155] Nicholas Jones, Campaign 1997, p. 21

[156] Ibid

[157] Ibid

[158] Ibdi, 21 – 22

[159] Ibid, p 20

[160] Anthony Broxton, “How Labour lost the “unlosable election””, The Critic, 09 April 2022, https://thecritic.co.uk/how-labour-lost-the-unlosable-election/, [Last accessed 25/05/2024]

[161] Jones, Campaign 1997, p 33

[162] Ibid

[163] Heffernan, p. xi

[164] Richard Murray, “From Margaret Thatcher to Theresa May: 30 years of the public’s views about the NHS and public spending”, The Kings’s Fund, 1 February 2018, https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/insight-and-analysis/blogs/30-years-public-views-nhs-public-spending, [Last accessed 24/05/2024]

[165] Michael Freeden, Liberal Languages: Ideological Imaginations and Twentieth-Century Progressive Thought, (United States: Princeton University Press, 2004) p. 198.

[166] Lee, “One Nation Socialism: Neil Kinnock and the quest for a British Development State”, Neil Kinnock: Saving the Labour Party? Ed Kevin Hickson, (United Kingdom: Routledge, 2022) p.44

[167] Labour Party Election Broadcast 28 April 1997, Youtube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyaoRXAsGGo&t, [Last accessed 24/05/2024]

[168] Heffernan, p. xii

[169]Peter Oborne, “Blair’s bid for business”, Management Today, October 1995, p.46

[170] Ibid

[171] Ibid, p. 45

[172] Ibid

[173] Heffernan, p. 1

[174] Murray, From Thatcher to May, https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/insight-and-analysis/blogs/30-years-public-views-nhs-public-spending, [Last accessed 24/05/2024]

[175] Cronin, p. 360

[176] Cronin, p. 361

[177] Oborne, p. 42

[178] Ibid

[179] Diamond, Labour in Opposition and Power, p. 83

[180] Nicholas Jones, Campaign, p. 82

[181] Ibid

[182] Ibid

[183] Wynton C Hall, Economically Speaking: George Bush and the Price of Perception, The Rhetorical Presidency of George H. W. Bush, ed by Martin J Medhurst, (United States of America: Texas AM University Press, 2006) p.178

[184] Ibid, p. 83

[185] Ibid, p. 82

[186] Jones, p.49

[187] Ibid, p.149

[188] Ibid

[189] David Butler, Dennis Kavanagh, The British General Election of 1997, (United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997) p. 136

[190] Roger Worcester, Roger Mortimore, Explaining Labour’s Landslide, (Great Britain: Politico, 1999) p. 106

[191] Ibid, p. 111

[192] Will Barber-Taylor Interview with Gisela Stuart, Baroness Stuart, University of Warwick Modern Records Centre, https://mrc-describe.epexio.com/records/WBT/16, [Last accessed 23/05/2024]

[193] James Walsh, Power and Glory, Time Magazine 12 May 1997, p. 22

[194] Ibid

[195] Ibid

[196] Peter Kellner, “How tactical voters sent Tories packing” Evening Standard, 2 May 1997, p. 37

[197] Ibid

[198] Trevor Kavanagh, “Yes, It’s Me!” The Sun, 2 May 1997, p. 1

[199] Ibid

[200] Ibid

[201] David Wooding, “It’s The Sun Wot Swung It”, The Sun, 2 May 1997, p. 2

[202] Ibid

[203] Ibid

[204] Trevor Kavanagh, “That Was The Weak That Was”, The Sun, 2 May 1997, p. 4

[205] Charles Powell, “Nice Man, Shame About The Party”, The Sun, 2 May 1997, p. 6

[206] Ibid

[207] Ibid

[208] Ibid

[209] Brian Reader, “Tone Downing St”, Daily Mirror, Saturday 3 May 1997, p. 3

[210] Ibid

[211] Will Barber-Taylor interview with Alwyn Turner, University of Warwick Modern Records Centre, < https://mrc-describe.epexio.com/records/WBT/12>, [Last accessed 22/05/2024]

[212] Ibid

[213] Adam Boulton, Tony’s Ten Years: Memories of the Blair Administration, (Simon and Schuster, United Kingdom: 2008) p. ix

[214] Glen O’Hara, New Labour in Power: Five Problems of Contemporary History, Political Quarterly, Volume 94, Issue 2, April/June 2023, Pages 223-229, < https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1467-923X.13258>, [Last accessed 24/05/2024}

[215] Ibid

[216] David Lawday, Napoleon’s Master: A Life of Prince Talleyrand, (Great Britain: Random House, 2011) p. 5

[217] David Horspool, Richard III: A Ruler and His Reputation, (Great Britain: Bloomsbury, 2015) p. 98

[218] Ian C Sharman, News, Propaganda & Spin in Medieval England Vol. 1, (Great Britain: Dovecote-Renaissance Publishing, 2000) pp. 172 – 173

[219] Fielding, New Labour, Old Labour, p. 193