New Labour Was A Radical, Revolutionary Project

by Joshua Yuan

With Neil Kinnock’s defeat of the Militant Tendency in 1991, a Troskyist group which aimed to infiltrate the Labour Party, most people nowadays view the New Labour project spearheaded by Tony Blair which began in the mid-1990s as a right-wing takeover of the Labour party. Many have even humorously claimed that Blair was “The best Tory Prime Minister we’ve ever had!”. This, however, could not be further from the truth. New Labour, stemming from Eurocommunism (a branch of communism aimed at transforming western europe socially), although was closely aligned to Thatcherite economic policies, had arguably the most radical social policies in modern British history.

Almost immediately after the May 1997 landslide, New Labour launched a constitutional revolution in the UK. The Scotland Act of 1998 and the Government of Wales Act of 1998 created a Scottish parliament and a Welsh assembly, with both bodies granted significant legislative power. This was an assault on the British Constitution, namely the Acts of Union 1707, and drastically altered the nature of the state, transforming the UK from a unitary, centralised state to a quasi-federal state. Although some might argue that these legislations were simply attempts to combat the rise in separatism in those regions and help preserve the union, this in reality is not the case as the SNP’s grip on Scotland has only strengthened since then. Such a dramatic transformation of the nature of the British state within such a short period of time underpins New Labour’s subversiveness.

Following the dismantling of a unitary Britain, New Labour introduced an act which would’ve been seen by most as unthinkable a decade earlier - The Civil Partnership Act of 2004. In modern British society, same-sex marriage is something that is universally accpeted, but back in 2004, when not so long ago it was illegal to openly promote homosexuality in school as a result of Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988, this piece of legislation was radical. This was part of New Labour’s plan to fundamentally reshape British society, from one that is predominantly socially conservative to one that is tolerant, open, and most importantly, ‘progressive’. To back up this claim, a further example is the fact that, Andrew Neather, a former adviser to Blair, stated that during one of his meetings in 2000 with Labour leaders, the party elites wanted to “rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date” by encouraging mass immigration. Thus, effectively reinforces the point that New Labour ultimately aimed to completely transform British society.

Finally, the Blairite project has utterly altered the role of government in British society, and has also fundamentally changed the relationship between the state and its citizens. New Labour’s emphasis on the ‘modernisation’ of the NHS eventually resulted in it being turned into a sort of cult that is being universally worshipped in modern Britain, and no party would dare to mention cutting the NHS budget in its manifesto (whereas a decade ago we had free-market Tories urging the end of the NHS). The project also introduced a national minimum wage, which at the time was completely revolutionary and controversial. As a result of these policies, the government was forced into playing a much greater role in society, and the state was being radically transformed into an enabling one.

Perhaps the most revolutionary aspect of the New Labour project was not that it has fundamentally reshaped British society, but rather that it has completely redefined British politics, namely by making its biggest opponent - The Conservative party more or less the same as itself, through shifting the political centre ground to the left. When comparing the Tory party that has outlawed the promotion of homosexuality in 1988 to the Tory party that has legalised same-sex marriage in 2013, and the Tory party that openly talked about abolishing the NHS in the early 1990s to the Tory party that has pledged to increase NHS spending in 2019, it isn’t difficult to grasp just how utterly radical and transformative New Labour really was.