New Labour Flashcards
1997 election results
- Blair’s Labour won a landslide 418 seats, the most seats the Party has ever held.
trade union funding of New labour
. the trade unions financed 2/3 of Labour’s 2001 campaign, despite New Labour refusing to overturn any of the Thatcherite anti-union legislation.
swing from Tories in 1997
- Huge Conservative-Labour swing of 10.2% on a national turnout of 71% (the last national vote where turnout exceeded 70% until the 2016 EU Referendum). * 2001 election:
2001 election results
- Labour re-elected with another landslide majority (dubbed the ‘quiet landslide’), suffering a net loss of only 5 seats.
2005 election results
- Labour won its third consecutive victory with only a 35.2% share of the popular vote, but its majority was now only 66.
Brown as Labour Leader and PM.
- Blair resigned
pursuant to the alleged Blair-Brown Deal of 1994
Brown Blair deal
1994
* Brown would not stand in the forthcoming Labour leadership election so as to allow Blair a better chance of easy victory, and in return Blair would appoint Brown Chancellor upon Labour’s presumptive victory. In government Brown would be granted unprecedented powers over domestic policy, which would make him the most powerful Chancellor in British history
public desire for a third way
appetite for 3rd way - a constituency that existed only because its Thatcherite predecessor had ultimately proved, for many people, to be both economically ineffective and socially unacceptable.
Labour’s economy
- Economy New Labour inherited was simultaneously prosperous and in trouble - living standers were higher than they had ever been - if the UK economy was in decline, it was only in a decline relative to the superior performance of its competitors.
- By 1997, the UK was predominantly a service economy. (76% of workers) – deindustrialisation had taken a heavy toll on manufacturing jobs, with twice as many now working in retailing / banking as in manufacturing.
economic norms in 1997 society
- New Labour inherited a society in which the vast majority of potential voters were used to the high and rising standards of personal consumption of the long post-war boom.
- New labour faced a working class whose members largely shared the concerns of middle England. - a working class less likely to be unionized, more likely to own its own home and transport.
- Women now tended to work outside the home, and there were more women in higher education than men. Women were now no longer predisposed to vote Conservative, so there was no gender voting gap.
1997 economic disparity
- Large regional disparities in unemployment, wealth and poverty, health, life expectancy, and education. In 1997, GDP per capita was only 80% of the national average in the North East of England, whereas London exceeded the national average by 25%.
- 1/3 children were living below the official poverty line (compared to just 1/10 in 1979).
*
classic Labour thinker- Crosland
- Tony Crosland, the party’s prime purpose was to promote ‘wider social equality embracing also the distribution of property, the educational system, social class relationships, power and privilege in industry’.
he died in 1977
pre-existing party policy -eq of opportunity in higher education
- The Open University was established to provide another means by which a university education could be acquired by those beyond the school leaving age.
Hugh Gaitskell way of thinking- traditional Labour
maintained, a per-son’s life-chances, his ‘income, way of living, education, status and opportunities in life depend[ed] upon the class into which he is born’.
Party leader 1955
pre-existing party policy -eq of opportunity in education
- a general recognition that educational standards could only be raised if more money became available and during the 1964–70 Labour Government spending rose substantially from 4.8 per cent to 6.1 per cent of national wealth.
- The 1974 election manifestos committed the party to speed-up the phasing out of selection, give more priority to pre-school education and provide better education and training facilities for those who left full-time education at the age of 16.
- By the time Labour left office in 1979 in most parts of the country comprehensives dominated secondary education.
pre-existing party policy -eq of opportunity in pensions
- In 1976 legislation was enacted tying increases in pensions with rises in wages rather than prices – the effect being a significant and sustained improvement in the material conditions of pensioners, who figured disproportionately among the poor (this was not cozzy lives times)
Cronin on what Labour stood for
- Cronin has argued that economic collectivism so defined constituted the common intellectual framework for the party at large (until the rise of New Labour).
Harris on post war Labour
- Harris- The principal institutional manifestation of collectivism, was not planning or public ownership but the social democratic welfare state ‘defined in terms of citizenship rights distributed outside market according to the principle of socially recognised need, whose fulfilment was a matter of justice’. the post-war Labour Government to extend rights of citizenship to the social sphere. All citizens should enjoy a corpus of social rights extending from the ‘right to a modicum of economic welfare and security to the right to share to the full in the social heritage and to live the life of a civilised being according to standards prevailing in society’.
signs of moderation in Labour pre 1997 - welfare
- In 1967 the Pensions minister, Peggy Herbison, proposed to increase family allowances (a universal benefit) while clawing back part of the additional cost by raising tax for the better-off. A large slice of the cabinet, including the Chancellor, Jim Callaghan and Crosland preferred a means-tested approach.
signs of moderation in Labour pre 1997 -spending on welfare
- in the late 1970s, the egalitarian consensus in the party favouring greater equality through a combination of high public spending and progressive taxation began to fracture as a significant section of the right queried both their economic benefits and even their moral justification. ‘Socialism and equality’:
o Crosland still maintained in 1974, ‘require a relative transfer of resources from private consumption to public expenditure’.
o Others on the party’s right –notably Roy Jenkins and his allies (most of whom were to defect to the Social Democratic Party in the early 1980s) – argued that the proportion of the nation’s wealth spent on social programmes was beginning to exceed the socially, politically and economically acceptable.
divergence in old Labour over economic control
- Pamore- Labour’s National Executive Committee fell under the control of the left in the early 1970s and the outcome was the incorporation into the manifestos of 1974 of commitments towards extended public ownership and an elaborate system of planning, but this had very little influence on the policies pursued by the 1974–79 Government. Even in their most radical phases Labour governments were ‘prepared to leave large swathes of the economy subject to market forces and private control’ with ‘the bulk of economic activity in private hands’.
strength of clause 4 pre Blair
- Lord (Harold) Lever observed, ‘Clause 4 or no Clause 4, Labour’s leadership plainly believes in a mixed economy’ for ‘it knows as well as any businessman that an engine which runs on profit cannot run faster without extra fuel’.
pre Blair Labour and keynsianism
- Shaw- The aim of successive Labour governments, however much they intervened in the economy (then, anyway, generally in vogue) was emphatically not ‘to suppress market forces but to regulate them via Keynesian demand-management with its primary social purpose being secured through a universal welfare state’
Labour and the ethos of public services
- The maintenance of a large and expanding public sphere, governed by an ethic of public service, came therefore to be seen as the principal institutional expression of ethical socialist values… As Gordon Brown was later to note, ‘a well-established ethos of public service rightly runs deep in our history, determines the character of our country, defines Britain’s uniqueness to the world’.