New Labour Legacy: Comparing the Labour Governments of Blair and Brown to Labour Governments since 1945

The election of the Conservative–Liberal coalition in May 2010 provides the opportunity to start to map out the record of the Labour governments between 1997 and 2010. This paper deals with the specific question how the Brown/Blair governments performed on public expenditures when compared to the records of UK Labour governments since 1945. Did the public expenditure record of the 1997 represent a departure from that of previous Labour governments? This is important to ascertain since there are strongly held beliefs that New Labour was not committed to Labour's historic commitments of income redistribution and universal benefits. The analysis that follows is constructed around five major public expenditure programmes that reflect Labour's priorities. These include total expenditure, expenditure on health, education, housing and social security.     

The Split Personality of Prudence in the Unfolding Political Economy of New Labour

This article focuses on the economic ideas which underpin New Labour's two very different appeals to the notion of prudence. The first treats prudence as a macroeconomic phenomenon, drawing upon the work of the ‘time consistency’ theorists of the 1970s. It dominated the Party's economic policy‐making until the end of the first term in Government, emphasising the need for extreme vigilance on matters of public spending. The second treats prudence as a microeconomic phenomenon, drawing upon the eighteenth‐century work of Adam Smith. It has become dominant since the start of the second term, emphasising the need to encourage the savings habit more widely within society. The shift in priority from the macroeconomic to the microeconomic understanding comes on the back of New Labour's own growing imprudence in time consistency terms. The Government has incentivised private savings at the same time as it has become increasingly reluctant to be a saver itself.     

Putting it Right? The Labour Party's Big Shift on Immigration Since 2010

Under pressure from voters, and from other parties, Europe's centre‐left has had to re‐evaluate its position on migration. The UK Labour party is no exception. Public concern about large‐scale immigration clearly contributed to its heavy defeat at the 2010 general election. Since then it has been slowly but surely hardening its stance on the issue, although this is by no means unprecedented: while the rise of UKIP may have upped the ante in recent months, Labour has a long history of adjusting policy in this area so as to remain competitive with its main rival, the Conservative party. Labour is now asking itself whether it will be possible to do this without challenging one of the fundamental precepts of EU membership—the right of free movement of people. Whatever the result of this internal debate between the party's ‘beer drinkers’ and its ‘wine drinkers’, Labour may still have difficulty in neutralising immigration as an issue since, for the most part, it continues to insist on giving an essentially economic answer to what for many voters is actually a cultural question.     

Some Lessons of the SDP for Labour's Present Predicament

Jeremy Corbyn's election and re‐election as Labour leader, together with the emergence of a new Conservative Prime Minister committed to Brexit, has led to renewed speculation about the possibility of a new party appealing to the ‘politically homeless’ in the centre and centre‐left of British politics. This article draws lessons from the SDP experience in the early 1980s. Are the structural conditions more favourable to the progressive centre‐left now than they were then? Is there the sociological, electoral and ideological space for a new party? Does first past the post remain an insuperable barrier to an electoral breakthrough? From whom and in what circumstances might the leadership for a new party come? For all the depth of Labour's current problems, a new party seems an unlikely immediate prospect. In 1981, the SDP made a major miscalculation about the irreversibility of Labour's decline. However, the process of fragmentation in British politics seems set to continue.     

Politicians,voters and democracy: The 2011 UK referendum on the Alternative Vote

At the 2010 UK election, Labour proposed a referendum on changing the House of Commons electoral system from single member plurality to the Alternative Vote. Subsequently, a coalition was formed between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, yet it was Labour's policy on electoral reform that was implemented. The paper explains why this proved to be politically convenient for Labour's opponents. At the same time, however, holding the referendum reflected an emergent de facto convention that significant constitutional change should only be introduced after it has secured popular endorsement. The paper assesses whether the dynamics of public opinion during the AV referendum suggests that voters' eventual decisions about constitutional questions reflect their views about the merits of the relevant arguments.     

A New Progressive Coalition? The European Left in a Time of Change

This article examines changing patterns of voting for parties on the left in the UK and Europe. It shows that while combined support for social‐democratic, left and Green parties remains strong, the composition of the left's electorate has radically changed. Increasingly, left parties rely on a coalition of new middle‐class voters and traditional and new working‐class constituencies. This coalition is relatively cohesive on questions of economic redistribution, but divided on social and cultural issues. Recent instability in Labour's electoral coalition reflects broader structural trends facing left parties across Europe.     

Spending Preferences of Public Sector Officials: Survey Evidence from Finland

We examine the determinants that shape the spending preferences of public sector officials on several budgetary appropriations. Following Niskanen's budget‐maximizing theory, we test whether these officials prefer larger budgetary appropriations rather than less. We measure their preferences to increase their own bureau's appropriations and compare those against their preferences for other bureaus' appropriations. The empirical evidence is gathered via a mail survey targeting high‐level officials from different ministries in Finland. The analysis of the responses suggests that Niskanen's theory is in part supported.     

Scotland Out the Union? The Rise and Rise of the Nationalist Agenda

The election of the Scottish National party as a majority government in 2011 is as challenging to the British state as it was unexpected. While explanations for SNP success focused on Labour's faulty campaign and poor leadership, the last half‐century has seen the rise and rise of the nationalist agenda in Scotland. Scotland's politics are now more different from England's than at any time since the 1950s. The Scottish parliament is the effect of that change rather than its cause, while party competition between Labour and the SNP north of the border has shifted political gravity centre‐left in contrast with England. It is not inevitable, however, that Scots would vote for Independence in a referendum. Nevertheless, Scotland is a more semi‐detached country than at any point in the history of the Union, and the future of the British state, at least in its present form, cannot be taken for granted.     

Creating Public Value with Tax and Spending Policies: The View from Public Economics

According to the framework rooted in public economics, governments can create public value by focusing tax and spending policies on remedying market failures and addressing concerns about fairness embodied in a social welfare function. By pursuing optimal tax and spending policies, governments navigate the omnipresent trade‐offs between equity and efficiency. Of course, in practice, the process by which policies are adopted does not resemble the planner's problem in social choice theory. In addition, real fiscal policies do not look much like the recommendations that arise from the optimal tax literature. Governments operate in public choice environments that are not conducive to focused remedying of market failure, and they suffer from their own tendencies to fail to achieve their objectives. Nevertheless, many of the tools are in place to help the federal and state governments focus tax and spending in ways that can maximize public value.     

The regulatory state and the UK Labour Government's re‐regulation of provision in the English National Health Service

Following its election in 1997, the UK Labour Government embarked upon a 10 year program of reform of the National Health Service (NHS). By 2005, Labour had doubled the NHS budget and dramatically transformed the shape of the Service. In England, a basic characteristic of the NHS is the organizational split between provider and commissioning agencies. In this article I argue that Labour's re‐regulation of NHS provision is a coherent representation of the influence of the “regulatory state” in restructuring arrangements between government, market, and society. The article offers an account of the regulatory state based on a discussion of five key theses: The Audit Society, Regulation Inside Government, The New Regulatory State, The British Regulatory State, and Regulatory Capitalism. The article unfolds Labour's program of reform across themes common to these accounts: the division of labor between state and society, the division of labor within the state, the formalization of previously informal controls, and the development of meta‐regulatory techniques of enforced self‐regulation. It concludes that the key themes of the regulatory state are at work in Labour's transformation of NHS provision and it offers a discussion of the implications for both scholars of regulation and the UK and European health policy literature.     

From the Wembley Conference to the ‘McDonnell Amendment’: Labour's Leadership Nomination Rules

A recent change to the Labour party's nomination rules for leadership elections was the eighth such major modification of this brief clause in the party's rule book since 1981. These changes have provided a barometer of factional conflict over this period and indicate the importance of gate‐keeping powers in leadership selection. This article recounts the history of these eight rule changes. It shows how the proportion of Labour MPs (and later MEPs) required to nominate candidates in leadership elections has oscillated markedly, as the left has tried to reduce it while centrists have sought to increase it. The most recent change in 2017, when the threshold was decreased to 10 per cent of Labour MPs and MEPs, was a victory for the left. The article argues that the changes to Labour's nomination rules, while lower‐key than the extension of voting rights from MPs to ordinary members, have been just as significant.     

Austerity Policies,the UK State and the Energy Utilities: a Changing Paradigm or Business as Usual?

In 2008, the economic downturn coincided with a major shift in the energy sector paradigm. This state of emergency forced the UK government to try to steer the objectives of its major energy players. This crisis put the UK state's capacity to influence its mostly privately‐owned energy sector to the test. Using the example of energy utilities, this article aims to explore whether the austerity agenda impacted the relationship between the UK state and its public services. The purpose is to determine whether current multiple crises have forced the UK state to adopt an exceptionally interventionist approach that doesn't tally with the austerity agenda, or whether these crises merely revealed dynamics which had been underlying in the management of its energy utilities since the beginning of the neo‐liberal era.     

The Quiet Revolution? The Labour Party and Welfare Conditionality

Labour's 2017 general election manifesto contained a pledge to ‘end the punitive sanctions regime’ in the British welfare state. Whilst the specific implications of this pledge were not elaborated, such a policy would nevertheless constitute a profound break with a welfare consensus spanning over twenty years. The depth of the suggested changes on welfare are also evident in the scale of reform proposed to disability benefits, as well as plans—confirmed in August 2018 by the Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell—to pilot universal basic income. Collectively, these policies would seemingly be deeply at odds with public opinion on the benefits system, which over the course of the last two decades has significantly hardened. Yet despite the seemingly radical and controversial nature of the policy, it received very little media or public attention during the election campaign. This article explores Labour's ‘quiet revolution’ on welfare, examining whether Labour's new welfare approach is indeed a bold attempt to reshape public opinion on welfare or, alternatively, a mostly pragmatic reaction to changing social attitudes. The argument presented is that whilst there are persuasive explanations that Labour is responding to a change in the public mood, there is also evidence of a more ambitious goal at stake: the aim of reshaping, not simply responding to, public opinion on the welfare state.     

Austerity's Wasted Years

Austerity has become the norm of economic management in the EU, Britain and the USA. In each it is offered as the answer to different problems but everywhere the result is cuts in public spending, higher unemployment and low growth, none of which helps recovery from recession. Labour's response should not be to endorse or continue austerity but to initiate a Keynesian expansionary stimulus based on borrowing and spending on a huge programme of building public housing for rent. This should be accompanied by a competitive exchange rate, an industrial policy to boost the manufacturing sector and a National Investment Bank, the aim being to expand the production base so that it can pay the nation's way in the World and support the structure and the improvements Labour needs. This makes the choice at the next election the issue of what kind of Britain the electorate wants to see: a low wage, mean economy or a determined attempt to rebuild a stronger nation with a more powerful economy.     

Focus Group Follies?

Abstract

Media coverage of the contemporary British Labour party routinely suggests party leaders, notably Tony Blair, have been overly reliant on using focus group as a means of obtaining voter feedback. The paper explores this popular understanding by considering how and when qualitative forms of opinion research began to play a significant role in developing campaign strategy. Following their incorporation into party planning during the mid-1980s, focus groups provided an increasingly influential (and at the time more discreet) source of data and support for the leadership's Policy Review later that decade. Following the 1992 election defeat selective findings from the party's qualitative research programme became integral to the public relations' initiatives of Labour's self-styled “modernisers,” particularly in their largely successful attempt to delegitimise and then marginalise the role of the party's once formidable affiliated union supporters in internal affairs. Crucially this contributed to a climate that enabled the key moderniser Tony Blair to emerge and win the leadership.     

Was ``V' for Victory or Votes? A Public Choice Analysis of World War II Federal Spending

Several studies on the New Deal have found that politicalfactors played a significant role in determining 1930s federalspending. This suggests that federal spending was not capturedby special interest groups and self-interested politiciansrecently, but rather, that it has been affected by thesefactors since the ``era of big government'' began. We examinethe military emergency of the 1940s to determine whetherfederal spending during this crisis was similarly affected bypolitics.     

Labouring in the Shadow of the British Political Tradition: The Dilemma of ‘One Nation’ Politics in an Age of Disunification

The British state is in flux and the Labour party is struggling to shape an effective response to the politics of disunification. This article reflects on the nature of Labour's governing project and its conception of modern statecraft which has evolved since the party became a serious contender for power in the aftermath of the First World War. We argue that Labour's initially pluralising instincts cultivated in opposition have been checked by the ongoing reality of a state‐centric mode of governing, in which the party continued to robustly defend the Westminster model operating within the parameters established by the British Political Tradition (BPT). Ed Miliband's conception of ‘One Nation’ Labour threatens to reinforce this historical pattern of reversion to the Westminster model, at precisely the moment when devolutionary forces are destabilising the existing political settlement. To break out of this impasse, Labour must look elsewhere in its ideological lexicon for inspiration, chiefly to the tradition of socialist pluralism and associationalism.     

Politics of childcare policy beyond the left–right scale: Post‐industrialisation,transformation of party systems and welfare state restructuring

Childcare policy has become an integral part of social and economic policy in post‐industrial democracies. This article explores how the transformation of party systems structures the politics of childcare policy. It reveals that political parties contend with each other over childcare and female employment policy on the social‐value dimension as well as the redistributive dimension. Assuming that different party policies have distinct impacts on public childcare policy, it is hypothesised in this article that a government's policy position – composed of the governing parties' policy positions – affects changes in public spending for childcare services. Through an analysis of the pooled time‐series and cross‐section data of 18 advanced industrialised countries from 1980 until 2005 using multivariate regression methods, it is revealed that a government's redistributive left–right policy position interacts with its social liberal–conservative policy position, and that a left–liberal government raises its budget for childcare services while a left–conservative government does not.     

Buttery Guns and Welfare Hawks: The Politics of Defense Spending in Advanced Industrial Democracies

In this article, we present a new theory that, given the economic consequences of military spending, some governments may use military spending as a means of advancing their domestic non‐military objectives. Based on evidence that governments can use military spending as welfare policy in disguise, we argue that the role of ideology in shaping military spending is more complicated than simple left‐right politics. We also present a theory that strategic elites take advantage of opportunities presented by international events, leading us to expect governments that favor more hawkish foreign policy policies to use low‐level international conflicts as opportunities for increasing military spending. Using pooled time‐series data from 19 advanced democracies in the post–World War II period, we find that government ideology, measured as welfare and international positions, interacts with the international security environment to affect defense spending.