New Labour got old and lazy

By Emma Burnell / @scarletstand

There was an intriguing post on LabourList from Alex White yesterday, but to me the piece seemed like a massively wasted opportunity. I’ve written many posts about New Labour , some more nuanced than others. I’ve generally written from my genuine position of always having been to the left of New Labour, but having a genuine appreciation for the victories of 1997 and 2001 ( as I’ve written before, I don’t think of 2005 as a New Labour win) and several of the policies we were able to enact as a result.There never seems to be a mirror from those who leaned closer to New Labour in its heyday. You don’t see an acceptance of its faults which would – in my opinion – bolster the efforts given to praising its virtues. This is utterly missing from this analysis. It may well take a dispassionate historian far in the future, and far removed from the passions aroused on both sides to truly do the story of New Labour’s rise and fall justice.

The other key problem with Alex’s article is that it offers an entirely false dichotomy. Labour must either be embracing of the monopoly-run utilities or anti-business. Labour must be New Labour as defined and sadly crystallised in 1994 or it is Old Labour as defined and sadly crystallised in 1983. There can be no other path.

During Alex’s wholesale embrace of New Labour, he offers a rather confusing argument where he posits that a hung parliament is extremely likely and that the electorate will do everything they can to avoid that. In doing so, he argues that we need to offer Lib Dem voters a manifesto they will be attracted to. I wholly agree, but feel that doing so would be quite dissimilar from any offer New Labour might have made on issues around security and surveillance.

Most glaringly, Alex completely ignores what was one of the key – and has become the most dated – strand of New Labour thinking, its top-down management of every aspect of the Party machinery.

While this always chafed with the membership, it was for some time accepted as a price worth paying both for moving on from the freak show that had been Labour in the 80s, and for power and the chance to enact a Labour agenda.

While that agenda became ever more diluted, by time and by the lingering fear of ’92, the world changed. Members started expecting a more transactional relationship with the Party. We wanted to be more than mouthpieces, we wanted our say and technology was enabling us to have it.

The collision of New Labour and new technology wasn’t pretty. Message control became a Sisyphean feat, but that didn’t (and doesn’t) stop people attempting it.

Sadly, New Labour got old and lazy. It didn’t learn and it hasn’t adapted. It became a parody of the fresh attitude it once became. To paraphrase, New Labour was the Future once…

Now is the time to keep not simply the best of what worked then, but only the best of what can and will work now. It is not the time to revist 1983, 1994 or 2010, but to look to 2015 and to work towards a new Labour. One fit for purpose, fit for the future and understanding or what that means in terms of the privileged few who will run it and the thousands of us whose shoulders they stand on.