New Labour in Power: Five Problems of Contemporary History

The history of New Labour is highly politicised, deployed either for its policy lessons (good or bad) or as a weapon in Labour's factional struggles. But, just as historians in the 1990s reassessed the premierships of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, so the distance of time and the opening of archives offers an opportunity to reappraise New Labour as history. Such work raises five methodological challenges: the lack of sufficient distance from the subject to tell whether policy innovations will remain popular and permanent; the long shadow the Iraq war casts over this whole period; the deluge of data and sources available; the continuing and controversial part that key actors, such as Tony Blair, are still playing; and the lack of expertise any one author will inevitably face in some policy areas. This article addresses each of those difficulties in turn.     

New Labour

Abstract

This paper examines the use made by political parties of branding, as a means of establishing party values and winning political support. It looks in particular at the way in which political parties use communication to create, build and maintain political brands.

The paper involves an examination of the recent history of the British Labour Party. After a long period in the political wilderness, the party re-branded itself as “New Labour” in the mid-1990s, and-as New Labour-swept to power in a landslide election victory in 1997, under their new leader, Tony Blair.

Using media coverage and material written by some of the architects of New Labour, the paper will describe the creation of the “New Labour” brand, and look at how it was developed and used to generate political support. The paper will also consider the evolution and development of the brand, as the substance underlying the stated brand values has come to be questioned, not least by so-called “Old Labour” supporters of the party.

The paper will draw conclusions regarding the successful management of a political brand, pointing in particular at the need to ensure that the performance of a party espousing a particular brand supports and reinforces communicated brand values and the brand itself.     

A New Look at New Labour

This article challenges the current orthodoxy, for instance put forward by Driver and Martell (1998), that New Labour represents a clearly defined break from the Labour Party's past. Drawing upon accounts of Labour's historical development, I argue that Labour in government has always been concerned with forging cross-class alliances, more often than not in the face of bitter internal opposition from the party's grass-roots membership. I conclude that the objectives of the Blair government are not dissimilar from those of the Attlee and Wilson administrations, and that where the means to achieve these ends differ – for example with regard to social policy – this is a rational response to the profound economic and social changes that have taken place since the 1970s.     

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.     

Departmental Restructuring under New Labour

Despite their emphasis on joined up government, which was to be one of the defining features of the New Labour governing project, attempts to enhance policy delivery would also result in major departmental restructuring within each of their three terms in office. This article asks three questions with regard to the New Labour and departmental restructuring. First, from a historical comparative perspective was there a greater degree of departmental restructuring under New Labour than under previous governments? Second, in the case of New Labour what was the motivation for departmental restructuring? Finally, was New Labour characterised by successful departmental restructurings? Utilising select committee material for the views of civil servants and combining this with questionnaire feedback from former New Labour ministers this article seeks to address these questions to assess the record of departmental restructuring in the New Labour era.