New Labour comes crashing down
Dear Janet Daley,
Even though you are almost a year too late with your article in the Telegraph this morning, I largely agree with your analysis. You rightly ask whether New Labour was “ever anything more than a stupendously successful media operation?” The answer is yes, but not much.
Although Gordon Brown has made a large number of poor strategic and policy decisions that have led to his current plight, he has helped expose the charade that was Tony Blair’s reign as PM. Blair’s frequently cited charisma plus the “phenomenal skills of [his] image builders” made him appear to be greater than the sum of his parts, but Gordon Brown’s lack of ‘magic’, style and media savvy has let down New Labour’s guard. Being a Labour supporter was undoubtedly a matter of class loyalty in the past, but Tony Blair ripped the heart out of the Labour movement in a bid to make them electable and now the lack of principles, philosophy and ideology in the Labour Party is there for all to see. Blair started the ”open competition for the language of the high ground”, a competition which Cameron is now comfortably winning, but the Conservatives still retain their traditional focus of the last 20 years – the family, deregulation, personal responsibility, opportunity etc. That’s not to say they haven’t made a lot of mistakes along the way, but at least they can still count on the support of their core voters; a luxury which Labour is currently foregoing. Tony Blair’s obsession with bringing big business and profit-making into the public sector will have been loathed by traditional Labour voters, but now the party has nowhere left to turn in a bid to kickstart their revival – they can’t go back to the Left as the middle class will desert them, and they can’t go to the Right as their core voters will desert them.
I agree that “politics is now an open contest between conflicting solutions to real problems in which parties must convince individual voters of the force of their arguments”, although I can’t help but feel that with the demise of party loyalty will come a fall in turnout at the polls in future (bar the next election, when the entire country will want to get rid of Labour). In short, the Conservatives remain a party of principle. Sadly for Labour, they no longer have a soul.
Yours sincerely,
A.Tory
Witanagemot Blogs
The real question should be “why are voters so stupid they couldn’t see through the marketing hype”
Quite frankly democracy is useless if the electorate can be hoodwinked to the extent New Labour managed.
I think part of the problem was that British politics had never ever seen such a media / charm offensive from politicians and we all bought it.
Now that we’ve seen through the lies, deceit and general sham that was New Labour, voters are much more cynical.
I don’t really think we did all buy it.
It’s not like we didn’t all say they were liars and charlatans way back when they came into power. It’s like having lived with a junkie for 11 years, trying to convince them that the smack is bad for them and will only cause them pain in the end. Then suddenly they’ve woken up and started trying to convince you that the smack is bad for them and has only caused them pain.
The media are waking up to what we’ve been saying about Labour for 11 years, and now they’re trying to pretend that we were all deceived together, as if they can absolve themselves from blame by pretending they weren’t part of it.
It’s only politics that will suffer – imagine running for office now, having to try and convince the electorate that you’re not just another politician. People who genuinely have new and good ideas have just got no chance anymore.
Stu.
The media’s relationship with Blair and his team was bizarre, as they seemed quite happy to go along with him even when he was at his shallowest. It’s amazing to think they bought ANY of it in hindsight.
David Cameron et al now faces the enormous challenge of convincing the electorate that he is going to do the right thing and do what he says he is going to do, even though we have already entered an age of breathtaking cynicism towards politics and politicians.
“they can’t go back to the Left as the middle class will desert them, and they can’t go to the Right as their core voters will desert them.”
Aye, alas, this was painfully evident from the start – but still utterly worth doing in order to resuscitate public services post-Major.
My great regret is that new Labour has arrogantly never acknowledged its temporariness, and via lack of radicalism thus failed to make a hegemony of social democracy in the same way as thatcher did her hotchpotch of authoritarian conservatism and classical liberalism.
“I agree that “politics is now an open contest between conflicting solutions to real problems in which parties must convince individual voters of the force of their arguments”, although I can’t help but feel that with the demise of party loyalty will come a fall in turnout at the polls in future (bar the next election, when the entire country will want to get rid of Labour).”
I think this is a real shame. Though I applaud plurality, it feels much nicer when you can say that you’re sure chunks of society are bound to agree with you.
“In short, the Conservatives remain a party of principle. Sadly for Labour, they no longer have a soul.”
Exactly the same will happen to the Conservatives; the only difference between their position and Labour’s with regard to ‘principle’ is that the Conservatives have high finance behind them, and thus far more and better propaganda, especially in the written press.
Opposition eventually means that any party will unite. The question is how long this can be sustained within a triangulating government.
Sorry, don’t agree with that. The Conservatives will not have to pretend they are anything other than conservative before the next election, and therefore will not lose their soul. The party has obviously changed a lot since Thatcher but essentially they believe in the same things.
On the other hand, I agree that New Labour never fully shook off their past and have become stuck in a horrible limbo where they have pretended to modernise for so long, only to realise that they haven’t really modernised and now have no idea where to turn. Talking about ’social justice’ and ‘aspiration’ is hardly going to save them.
@Miller 2.0
Such a comment clearly illustrates the issue with becoming a politician with the current zeitgeist. Even if the Conservatives are on the straight and narrow, you wouldn’t believe they were anyway. What would it take, beyond having good ideas, to convince you that a politician is not simply another Tony Blair?
Anyway, I don’t think we’ve seen the half of what Cameron’s going to offer yet. Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think he’s crazy enough to try and fight an election while only saying what he has so far
“Tony Blair’s obsession with bringing big business and profit-making into the public sector will have been loathed by traditional Labour voters, but now the party has nowhere left to turn in a bid to kickstart their revival – they can’t go back to the Left as the middle class will desert them, and they can’t go to the Right as their core voters will desert them.”
They could actually try becoming liberal… if it weren’t for the fact that illiberalism is wired into Labour, Old and New.
I think the failure of PFI and so on can be attributed to the fact that Labour have never, fundamentally, thought of economic liberalism as a good thing. They are socialists who have fallen in love with huge corporations. Even Thatcher had an instinctive understanding of the small businessman, which no one in Labour has ever had.
So we get a rigged economy which serves big business and the state, and stifles enterprise. Small firms don’t need cosseting, they need a liberal system in which they can make their own prosperity. But this government lack a basic understanding of that, so they do all kinds of shite. And then when something goes wrong the far left turn round and say “ZOMG CAPITALISM!” when it isn’t a market economy at all.
But then, I’ve got my doubts as to whether the Tories were ever liberal.
I think this makes some vague sense. I’ve only just got to economic liberalism (I’ve always been socially liberal, but only recently did I start seeing through Polly Pot etc and realising that I support a market economy), so I’m trying to teach myself all about it. Perhaps I should rewrite my post in 5 years when I know what it’s all about
Thatcher was definitely an economic liberal but it’s hard to say how liberal Cameron is until he’s sitting in Number 10.
Lots of valid points from Stu and Asquith. Cameron is clearly holding a lot back and Labour’s authoritarian approach has unquestionably failed, providing the Conservatives with a nice springboard for the ‘less government / localism’ agenda at the next election.