This week’s saga is particularly hard to bear because it shines light on some of New Labour’s starkest failures

By David Carrington

This week’s failed coup has received a pretty angry response, partially for its poor politics and timing (burying as it did Cameron’s admission that he “misdescribed” his own policy and the Prime Minister’s strong performance at Question Time) but also because of the identity of the plotters.

There’s a sense that the constant calls for leadership challenges and resignations come from the personal bitterness of failed or rejected cabinet ministers who share a proportion of the blame for our predicament with Gordon Brown. Three governments shaped British politics in the 20th century, the Liberals from 1906, Labour from 1945 and the Conservatives from 1979. Each of them left behind a legacy that succeeding governments had to act in response to and each significantly altered the flavour as well as the fact of politics. The Labour government from 1997 has not managed to achieve the same feat. That’s the source of its current problems and that is why calls to change the leader rather miss the point.

“We were elected as New Labour and we will govern as New Labour” was the key line from Tony Blair’s triumphant speech on election night, 1997. It was meant to signal that the New Labour project was not simply an electoral exercise but a new approach to politics. The hope in those days was that this really was the beginning of something new, the talk was that then and there we could create a progressive, centre-left hegemony for the early 21st century. That has yet to emerge. Instead, the failure of New Labour since 1997 has been the failure to significantly change the terms of political debate in the UK.

New Labour was misunderstood as a mere rebranding exercise, but it was more than that. It was an attempt to build a political platform which readers of the Guardian and the Mail could both vote for (sometimes reluctantly). Philosophically it was a recognition that Thatcher had succeeded in changing British politics – and that required a Labour response. It meant compromises that many of us on the left weren’t comfortable with, but agreed to because the alternative seemed to be electoral oblivion. We accepted the influence of market forces, turned our backs on public ownership of the means of production – and we reconciled ourselves to a capitalist-consumer society. We knew we were “selling out” but we did so hoping that in return we’d get the chance to build a more just society, perhaps win constitutional reform, maybe a Human Rights Act, and even an end to fox hunting. The means to those ends included a managerial style of politics promising to govern more competently and fairly.

It couldn’t last. The problem with managerial politics is that the management can never be perfect and support will eventually ebb. There needs to be something more happening besides. Labour had a great deal of political capital in its first few years but that always drifts away and we blew the final amount on the Iraq War. A booming economy handed us another victory in 2005 but in some ways it felt like a defeat. Soon afterwards David Cameron’s emergence sparked a Conservative revival – in managerial politics a shiny new manager in a nice suit will always appeal.

The big problem is that Labour won the battles since 1997 but failed to win the wider war of ideas. That’s why David Cameron’s Conservatives are ideologically the same as they were in 1997 and 2001. Imagine for a moment that Labour had fought the 1997 general election with Tony Blair in charge and Michael Foot as a potential Foreign Secretary, using a pithier and glossier version of the 1983 manifesto. Now look at the Conservative Party in 2001 and today, and compare.

Ministers in the last Conservative Government were caricatured in Alan B’stard as self-important and selfish members of a “nasty party” that hated anything cosmopolitan and were only interested in making money. New Labour ministers have a different caricature in Hugh Abbott, vapid and inane with nothing to stand for beyond myopically proclaiming the present Utopia, more concerned about the media perception of a tragic event than the event itself. (To my mind, the person that Abbott most resembled was Geoff Hoon in office: a vacant shirt in want of filling.)

The seeds of our present plight were obvious early on in the fuel protests, in being wholly reactive to the agenda on immigration set by the rightwing press, in failing to change the public perception of the EU, never managing to make our case with enough force or conviction. The grounds that the groups like the Tax-Payers Alliance fight on, that the individual matters more than the community, could and should have been challenged.

Yet Labour has been like a rugby winger, given the ball with enough time and space to score, but failing to run directly and confidently at the line – we haven’t backed ourselves.

It’s not the failure of Brown alone that’s brought us here, that blame is shared with the failure of Blair, of Hoon, Hewitt, Clarke, Straw, Mandelson, Harman, Blears, Short, Darling, Milliband, Balls, Blunkett and the rest of the recent Labour leadership to create a new landscape for British politics that’s about more than presentation and perception.