Copyright

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2018

Copyright © Lewis Goodall 2018, 2019

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Lewis Goodall author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780008226725

Ebook Edition © September 2018 ISBN: 9780008226701

Version: 2019-10-16

Dedication

For Grandad, for teaching me

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Prologue: Longbridge

1 What Went Before: New Labour and the Left

2 The Curious Case of Jeremy Corbyn

3 What is Corbynism?

4 The ‘A-Word’

5 Corbyn the Culture Warrior

6 A Class Apart

7 The Takeover

8 Fear and Loathing in the Labour Party

9 The Night Everything Changed: The 2017 General Election

10 What Comes After: The Next Election and the Future of the Left

Postscript: Grandad

Afterword: Between a Brighton Rock and a hard place, September 2019

Notes

About the Author

About the Publisher

Acknowledgements

I work in a profession in which my working days are essentially a series of sugar hits. In TV news, our deadlines are short, our working days long but our time horizons truncated. While most people’s jobs and projects can spread out for weeks, if not months at a time, in ours the complications, the highs, the lows, the screw-ups are compressed into a single day. For us, a week is a long-term gig. As a consequence my brain has been rewired by a thousand two-minute lives, three hundred three-minute packages, ten score of online instant analyses.

Writing a book then, all 130,000 words of it, was a major challenge, the ultimate slow burn. And then, every time I was able to concentrate for long enough, everything would change. In the time I’ve been writing, Jeremy Corbyn has gone from zero to hero (and some would say back again). Every time I thought I understood what was happening, political life would find a way of making me reach for the delete button, once again. In four years, the Labour Party has moved from extinction to the precipice of government, and therefore this book, its premise and its contours have fluctuated almost as much as Corbyn’s reputation. What began as an obituary became a living history of rebirth. At the same time, and to my surprise, it became infused with my own history. For this I am indebted, principally to my family, especially my mum and dad, for giving more political insights and wit and wisdom than I could glean from a lifetime in Westminster. I also have to say an enormous thank you to Tom Killingbeck, my editor, for encouraging me to strike out beyond my working life, beyond Westminster and the corridors of power, and for encouraging me to explore my own story – and how both were mutually reinforcing. I owe him special gratitude for his patience – especially given he inherited the book from his colleague Joe Zigmond, to whom I am very grateful for believing in the idea in the first place. The same is true of my agent Claudia Young – she took half an idea, in the Newsnight green room, and helped develop it into the book you’re holding. Iain Hunt, also of William Collins, handled the final stages of the edit brilliantly. I’d also like to thank the dozens of people, politicians, journalists, aides, activists and the rest, who spared the time to be interviewed. I hope they feel everyone, of every opinion within the Labour Party and without, has had a fair shake.

Special thanks must go to Sky News, especially the former head of politics Esme Wren and her successor Dan Williams, for giving me the space and time to write the book – and so many opportunities more generally, many of which have fed into the contents of these pages. In that vein I’m also grateful to the whole of the senior Sky News management team, especially Esme’s successor Dan Williams, Jonathan Levy, head of newsgathering, and John Ryley, the head of Sky News, for their interest and willingness to throw me new challenges. My colleagues, too, in the Millbank bureau were too many to mention, but were a never-ending source of inspiration, humour and fun. They made me, in so innumerable ways, a better journalist. After three years at Sky News, I can say without hesitation how extremely proud I have been to work for an organisation which reports politics without fear or favour and which, in my entirely impartial opinion, has the best political team in Westminster. In particular, my colleague and best friend in TV, Zach Brown, now doing his best impression of Woodward or Bernstein (or at least their teaboy) at the Washington Post. My best work – especially on matters Labour – has been with him. Long may it continue.

I’m grateful too to my friends, many of whom have contributed ideas to the book – apologies in advance if I’ve stolen them. In particular I’d like to thank Marc Kidson and James Stafford, two brilliant minds, who over the years since our Oxford days have helped shape my thinking on so many things. If you read something here that makes you think, chances are one of them had a hand in it.

As you wade through these pages, there is one man who looms large. My dear grandad, Alan. It is no exaggeration to say that without him there would be no pages to read. A more thorough tribute is reserved for him at the end – but it would still be remiss not to mention him here. His imprint, his essence, is in every bit of what you’re about to read. I only wish he could read them for himself.

Since the publication of Left for Dead, so many have written to me, tweeted me or told me face to face that they enjoyed reading about his story, that he sounded like a wonderful man. Indeed he was. And I cannot tell you how much comfort it is to me that so many people who will never have met him have read about his story. It is the story of a good man, whose life was blighted by much injustice, the story of a life less full than it should have been. It is the story of countless millions and I am just lucky that I was able to tell a small portion of his.

Lewis Goodall

London, September 2019

Prologue
Longbridge

Son, where we’re from, you could put a donkey in a Labour rosette and it’d win.

My dad, many, many times

I’m not sure there’s been a time when my family wasn’t involved in making things. Some of my earliest memories involve my grandad coming home and presenting the three- or four-year-old version of me with some samples of buttons, medals or coins that he’d helped make at the Birmingham mint. Grandad, as its works manager, got my dad a job there too. He was a lanky 22-year-old, just moved to Birmingham to be with the 17-year-old mum who had just given birth to me. They’d met at a Scarborough holiday camp a year or so before – my dad’s first ever holiday. He was from Middlesbrough, the son of a dockworker, and before then he’d barely left the town as a kid. He later said it put him off holidays for life. He didn’t have a qualification to his name, except a GCE in needlework. Alas, this didn’t help at the mint, where the only job my grandad had available was on a machine that needed a delicate approach and small fingers, which probably explained why all the other workers in the department were women. He didn’t, Grandad told me later, excel himself but he tried his best.* We all lived cheek by jowl in Erdington in north Birmingham: me, my two aunts, Mum and Dad, and my grandparents. I was the apple of my family’s eye; it probably explains why I’m, to put it charitably, unafraid of the limelight. It was a mindlessly happy existence for a little boy. But after my grandad could fiddle the figures for Dad no more, my nan phoned up the Rover plant, on the other side of the city in Longbridge, where she’d heard they needed some new workers. She asked if they had any openings for her son-in-law (just about – he’d married my mum weeks before). So we left Erdington and crossed the city to the south Birmingham suburb of Northfield, just next to the vast Rover plant. I walked past it to secondary school for five years.

For more than a decade my dad worked there nearly every working day. Each morning I’d leave for school just as he was getting in after a night shift; then, not long after I’d got home at around 4.30 p.m. Mum would instruct me (probably for the third or fourth time) to go and tell him to wake; he had to get up and eat before he started again. We were ships in the night. I didn’t mind. It was a given. Mum and Dad worked, and Dad worked more hours because he had to look after me and my younger sister. He worked incredibly hard (and still does), without complaint. These were the comforting rhythms of my earliest days.

Now I imagine it must be hard for kids in the playground to describe what their fathers and mothers do for a living. How, as a child, do you go about describing what Mummy, the management consultant, does? Or Daddy, who works as a computer software programmer? Or project managers? Or account directors? Or procurement experts?

But for many of us in Turves Green Primary School’s playground, we knew what our dads did. They worked at the Rover. They made cars. And most of them drove in the cars they had made. And I knew which bit my dad worked on: the doors. He was a welder. Today, in the increasingly unlikely event that you see a Rover on the roads, my dad probably welded it on its hinges.

I wasn’t uncommon. When I think back to my friends and classmates, so many of us had fathers and mothers who were employed on the Rover site and even more in the wider supply chain of the plant. Rover was ubiquitous, part of the bloodstream. They even sponsored our school technology labs and our curriculum, their branding and emblem proudly on display on many a classroom wall. Our families were connected through Rover socially via the ‘Austin’ Social Club, just down the road from the main site. I remember every Christmas Eve Dad taking me there for the afternoon, as he enjoyed a well-earned break and pint, played some snooker, or watched a football match. As we got older, some of my friends got their first jobs collecting glasses there a couple of nights a week. The company arranged trips to Weston-super-Mare and other seaside towns. Rover’s presence punctuated almost every aspect of life. It was, on reflection, an almost impossibly traditional working-class childhood, on the verge of being stranded out of its own time.

The plant’s quotidian certainties reassured not only our present but our futures too. I remember very clearly one lunchtime talking to another boy in my class. Like me, his father worked at the Rover. Somehow, as kids do, we started to talk about what we would do when we ‘grew up’. Even today I remember the confidence with which he talked about his own nine-year-old plans. He told me he would work at the Rover and that it would be easy; after all, his dad could easily get him a job. This was more than just the lack of imagination and naivety of a child not yet a decade old. It reflected the esteem a job there enjoyed. Longbridge was the Rover and the Rover was Longbridge.

Some 18 years or so later, I’m not sure what happened to him. I am certain, however, that he had to make a few changes to his career plans. For in the space of our schooldays the deep certainty attached to a life at the Rover gave way to the apprehension and unease of the twenty-first century. Globalisation came to Longbridge and shattered the quiet insularity of our lives. By the 1990s and early 2000s, as me and my friends grew up, changed schools and went into the sixth form, it had become ever clearer that our community was living on borrowed time.

By the time of my childhood, Rover had been manufacturing cars on the site for a hundred years. Ever since a young industrialist, Herbert Austin, discovered a disused printing works there in 1905, it had been a hive of industry. A century later, in 2005 it had largely closed. At its peak, 100,000 people were employed on that site alone; even by the dawn of the millennium, five years before closure, my father was one of 25,000, with an estimated 100,000 in the wider supply chain.

So, as its troubles mounted in the late 1990s and early 2000s, we all of us were aware of just how potentially devastating the factory’s closure would be. As the national media poured in to witness the slow decay of this last British brand of motor car, we kids went to school every day in something akin to grief. I remember seeing the worry in my mum’s eyes, I remember her asking my dad, every night before he’d even had chance to take off his coat, what news there was from the union, from management – something, anything that might give us some hope and if not hope then at least some certainty. This was reflected and amplified for me in the playground, all of us exchanging fragments of half-truths that had been ricocheting around our fevered imaginations. The plant’s travails, every twist and turn of the story, gripped us and the wider community like an all-too-real soap opera. I can recall, as an eleven-year-old, praying, on more than one occasion, that the factory would be saved and Dad would keep his job.

It wasn’t and he didn’t. As BMW pulled out in 2000 and the factory was ‘rescued’ by a consortium of local businessmen, Dad decided to take redundancy. By his own reckoning, it was ‘one of the only good decisions I’ve ever made’. Although not exactly flattering for my mother and for me, it had the benefit of being true. By leaving when he did, he received a full redundancy package to reflect his decade-long service. Those 6,500 who chose to stick with the plant until 2005, when it finally closed its doors, received no more than half a month’s pay packet. At the same time, Rover’s newish and final owners made a pretty penny. While profits plunged and the news became grimmer, it transpired that the British Towers group, which in 2000 had bought the plant from BMW for £10, had been siphoning considerably more than a tenner of investment into their own pockets. In 2002, they pumped £12.95m into a trust fund for their retirement. At the end of its five-year tenure the Phoenix consortium had been remunerated with £42m while the company went into administration with debts worth over £1.4bn. The day after closure, while being interviewed by the BBC, John Towers announced the set-up of the Longbridge Trust Fund for ex-workers – where he pledged the assets of the company, which he hoped would raise up to £50m for the workers’ severely damaged pensions. As of 2018, those workers were yet to see a penny. Later, it became clear that 6,000 workers would receive next to nothing from the pensions they had paid into for years. The money had vanished. The news broke that Nanjing, a Chinese consortium about which nothing was known in Birmingham, was buying the intellectual property, branding and remaining assets of what was the Rover MG Group. A tiny handful of workers remained in Longbridge, with the rest of production moving to China.

At the same time, BMW had taken the only assets that made the brand profitable, including the iconic Mini that had been produced on the site for decades. When I look back, I can see it as a textbook indictment of the worst elements of globalisation and corporate greed, and it left our community bewildered and bereaved.

This canvas is the one on which my childhood and early life were painted, in colours that millions of others would recognise too, in Britain and across the West. Those same forces, and the anger and resentment left in their wake, form the base coat for the politics of our own age.

My family were not especially political. Both my parents’ families were congenital Labour types, the sort of people whose politics is motivated by an atavistic but powerful instinct: ‘We vote Labour because they are for us and the other lot are for them.’ One of my earliest political memories, perhaps my earliest political imprint, was my grandad telling me that Margaret Thatcher ‘made the rich richer and the poor poorer’ and Mum nodding sagely as he did so. As simplistic as it may sound, these are the fundamental political reflexes on which most people rely, the lenses through which they view and make sense of the world around them. Grandad read the papers and watched the news but they largely reaffirmed his own views; the rest of my family didn’t do much of that but they knew how they felt. None of them were much troubled by party politics; if they remembered to vote, they would vote Labour – and that was that.

And that’s why, at the time of Rover’s travails, I simply couldn’t understand why the then Labour government wasn’t helping my dad. My eleven-year-old brain, small but curious, was flummoxed by the events leading to the factory’s closure. I knew that the Tories were for them and Labour was for us. Yet Labour didn’t seem terribly interested in helping us, any more than the loathsome Tories were.

I remember walking around the by then rather tumbledown Grosvenor Shopping Precinct up the road from our house, looking at my mum as she nipped around the shops and thinking, Why doesn’t the government just buy the factory, employ the workers, they’ll pay tax and there won’t be a problem?† But there would be no question of much assistance. There was endless talk, and a lot of hype – one Labour cabinet minister after another traipsed to our little corner of Brum – but there was certainly no question of nationalisation or a rescue package. In fairness, the government did offer a £100m bridging loan to lure a separate Chinese company to invest in the business, but when they got cold feet, there was nowhere else to go. I remember my dad, late one night, over a bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale in our kitchen, musing, almost to himself, how funny it was that the fate of all his old mates was being decided in a boardroom somewhere, in another language, by people we’d never met, by a company we’d never heard of, in a country none of us were ever likely to visit. After a moment’s contemplation, he took another swig, shrugged his shoulders and said, ruefully: ‘That’s the modern world, I suppose.’

What my young brain also found difficult to understand was that our government, the body in which so much awesome power was said to reside, appeared so impotent. How pathetic, it seemed, to have British ministers, the chancellor of the exchequer himself, shuttling back and forth to China, begging a company that was itself owned by the Chinese state, to reconsider. Worse, even those efforts were for naught.

But my dad and his mates got on with it, and this fortitude wasn’t uncommon. Rover’s death had been a slow one; most had been braced for it. There was never any serious expectation that the government would step in directly. Ever since the 1980s, plenty of working people had seen their employers bite the dust and been told, rightly or wrongly, that the government ought not and could not step in, that it would distort the market, that the world had globalised, that the buck no longer stopped with the government. There was, then, no real backlash. The hard-working local Labour MP was re-elected in the subsequent general election, despite the factory’s closure. The BNP, and later UKIP, gained in strength but never seriously threatened. Most voters carried on voting Labour, in the knowledge, perhaps, that though Labour would do little, they would at least try and do a little more than the obvious alternative.

But eleven years later, in 2016, Longbridge, like hundreds of other places that had been forgotten, that seemed so powerless, discovered a political vent, discovered that alternative in its rejection of the European Union. Longbridge, and all of the other Longbridges, had had enough, they fought back.

And little wonder. Many promises were made in Rover’s wake. On the eve of its demise, Tony Murphy, then of the Amicus union, said: ‘Yet again I’m having to write an obituary for another stalwart of the British engineering and manufacturing industry. Longbridge and the whole of the West Midlands are becoming ghost towns. We are going to fight for every job possible at Longbridge … We don’t want to see another supermarket built.’

On a grey, December afternoon, the sort of midwinter day sunlight barely troubles, I returned to Longbridge and met up with my oldest friend, Liam. We’d met at our local primary school some twenty-three years earlier. My dad had worked at Rover, so had his neighbours. The place had changed much in twelve years, and yet not enough. Half of the old site had been transformed. At its centre was the biggest Sainsbury’s I’d ever seen. Later that afternoon, I found out Liam’s neighbour now worked there.

The Sainsbury’s wasn’t alone. It had been joined by a Hungry Horse pub, a Boots, a small shopping precinct, a Poundland, a large youth centre called (in what I can only assume to be the product of a town planner’s dark humour) ‘The Factory’ and a small business technology park. The promised industrial jobs never came. In truth, I doubt anyone expected them to. And the site of the main factory, the one I walked past every day on my way to school? Well, that had been replaced only by detritus, mainly plastic bags and rubbish, willowing in the wind. There was nothing there. Twelve years on, no one could think of anything to do with it.

This is not a book about Rover, nor is it one solely about my own experiences. This is a book about the decline, near-death and potential rebirth of social democracy and the left in Britain. It’s a story of how the left lost touch with the economic and cultural lives of its voters. How those voters became disillusioned with a party that seemed unable to imagine how to improve its own voters’ lives or tell a convincing story about their so doing. How, as a result, the centre left has withered but how also, a new Labour Party, a new left has emerged to take its place; but which, ironically, is no closer to the voters who became alienated in the first place. It’s a story of transformation, of Labour leaving its historic working-class moorings behind and sailing into a new world, depending on new people, new classes and new places. It’s a story that begins with Labour, centred in Britain, but which holds lessons for its left-wing sister parties and students of politics around the wider world. It’s a story that asks how Labour came so close to death only to be rescued, or at least reprieved, by forces not of its own making.

I feel I’m in a decent place to evaluate all this: I’ve been following what has happened ever since the 2015 general election. I’ve interviewed Jeremy Corbyn and nearly every single senior Labour figure. I’ve spent more hours than I care to remember travelling the length and breadth of the country speaking to Labour clubs, voters and members in all four corners of the kingdom.

Yet it’s more than that; I was born into a working-class Labour family but doing the thing that they wanted most of all – getting educated, moving away, going to Oxford, leaving the familiar and making anew. In so doing, in lots of ways, I feel removed from my family and our old way of life, in which I was happy. But on the other, I don’t entirely feel at home with the new world that has taken its stead, nor with the new Labour Party that has been created which looks, feels and sounds so much like the new rarefied world I’ve entered. Perhaps then, as a journalist, I’m in the right place, not as I used to think as a politically obsessed kid as a participant in the arena, but as a passionate observer.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should say at the outset that I joined the Labour Party when I was 15 years old, as soon as I was able. There’s no point in not being up front about that. I was a very political young man – I still am. For me, as a 15-year-old, I felt my sense of class very deeply. Labour was for kids like me and families like mine. I wanted to change my life and that of those around me and joining Labour, my eyes dazzled by the New Labour politics of the age, seemed natural. I sat in dusty leisure centres and school halls on Thursday evenings, debating motions and resolutions, and gave up my teenage Sundays to leaflet in the drizzle. It felt right. Today – with the bonds between Labour and the sort of kid I was frayed – I don’t know whether the 15-year-old me, now, would do the same. This is why I tell you this. Certainly, as a reader you deserve that honesty. You might argue that such history (and such openness) is incompatible with my job as a political correspondent. I would emphatically reject that. I have long left any party affiliation behind me. Every political journalist has a past and often a political one – indeed, given our borderline obsession with all things politics, it would be peculiar if we didn’t. Other journalists’ past (or present) political predilections are well known. But straightforwardness is not the only reason. Most importantly, I talk of my past here because it is directly relevant to the story I propose to tell. I was born into the automatic Labourism of my class and birth. As I have changed, moved on and grown up, so in a peculiar way has Labour. These pages tell the story of the evolution of the party I knew. I hope to tell the story of that evolution as fairly and dispassionately as I can. But it is nonetheless also a personal one.

The only living remains of the Rover factory today is the Austin Social Club, where I spent so many of those childhood Christmas Eves and my dad a fair bit of his wage. It’s a lingering remnant of what was: a workers’ club for a workplace long gone.

Around the new precinct, through the rapidly descending December fog, I noticed what appeared to be two road signs outside the shops. On closer inspection, I could see they weren’t road signs but instead each carried a phrase. They stopped me dead: on the left ‘WE SLEPT TO THE SOUND OF HAMMERS’ and on the right ‘IT WASN’T ABOUT CARS, IT WAS ABOUT PEOPLE’. Many of my friends find the notion of working in industry almost quaint. To us, it wasn’t just a way of life, it was a reason to be. It was under those hammers, and those like them up and down the country, that the Labour movement was forged. And now they’ve ceased to sound, the old movement has withered. But out of its shed skin something else has emerged, something new. It feels, with the 2017 general election result, that the new is half-formed. The old is not quite dead. But its new party is not yet quite born. Perhaps, like me, Labour is betwixt and between two worlds.

* He survived through a combination of Grandad’s munificence and a bit of light form-fiddling.

† I didn’t know it, but looking back, I’d stumbled upon Keynesian economics without realising.

Chapter 1
What Went Before: New Labour and the Left

I assessed that there were three types of Labour: old-fashioned Labour, which could never win; modernised Labour, which could win and keep winning, which was my ambition from the outset; and plain Labour, which could win once, but essentially as a reaction to an unpopular Conservative government.

Tony Blair, A Journey, 2008

If she wants a PR war, then she can have a PR war … I’ll Mandelson her. Nobody wanted New Labour, Jeremy. But we all know how it works.

Mark Corrigan, Peep Show, 2008

What we want to know is what kind of society this government is trying to create.

Barbara Castle, 1998

I’m a New Labour kid. That’s not to say anything about my politics especially; rather it’s a matter of my pedigree. The earliest political memory I have is John Major giving way to Tony Blair. I was seven years old, nearly eight, and had some dim conception of this grey man in big glasses being in charge. Mum had previously explained to me that, contrary to my assumptions, the Queen was not in fact the leader of the country. This struck me as being very peculiar: the Queen, after all, had a crown. No, Mum insisted, it wasn’t anything to do with the crown, power was actually exercised by this drab man in a suit rather than the old lady in the jewels. Put right, I forgot about it and focused on something else, like Lego.

But I remember the morning of the 1997 election, watching it on TV. This younger man driving up in front of a black door. Mum explained to me there had been a vote and a change. I was captivated by the idea. That the leader could change just because people willed it.* I asked Mum – worriedly – if she might change if there were a vote and be replaced. No, she laughed, that wouldn’t happen. I was relieved.

But I kept on watching. And watching and watching and watching. I can’t tell you why I’m interested in politics. I just am. In the same way that some people can’t explain why they’re interested in football, or cooking or butterflies, I am just fascinated by politics. I am addicted. There hasn’t been a day since I was about ten or eleven years old when I haven’t thought about it to some degree or other. The drama of it, the importance and scope of it, the power and vitality of it. I can’t understand why anyone wouldn’t be.

My political ‘education’, if you can call it that, started quite early, thanks to one man – my grandad. I used to spend every Easter, summer and half-term with my grandparents on the North Wales coast. Grandad, having been made redundant when the Birmingham mint closed, opened a small souvenir shop in the coastal town of Towyn, near Rhyl. Every day I’d work behind the counter, and there, or in his van, on our way to top up his stock, I would pepper him with questions: ‘What does the prime minister do?’ ‘What were the names of the old prime ministers?’ ‘What were they famous for?’ ‘Do you remember them?’ ‘Which one did you like best?’ ‘Did you like Harold Wilson?’ ‘Why didn’t you like Margaret Thatcher?’ ‘How often is an election?’ ‘Grandad, I’ve read about the miners’ strike – what was that?’ ‘How big is this Chief Whip I’ve read about?’ I must have done his head in but he never once expressed the slightest irritation or impatience, he just chuckled, took another puff on a cigarette and talked to me not like a child but an equal. I gorged on his knowledge and wisdom and words. It was the foundation of everything I was to learn later.

But, in a way, the knowledge he gave me and that I imbibed from book after book was secondary. Because I think that from quite a young age I was aware of how important politics was, not because I read about it in some theoretical or abstract way but because I could see, even as a child, the import and impact of political change around me. Not just with my dad’s work, in Longbridge as I’ve described, but on each and every aspect of my little life.

When I was small we lived in a pretty dilapidated council house. The worst part was that it had no heating upstairs. I remember as a little four- or five-year-old begging Mum to let me sleep with her when my dad was on his night shifts because it was just so cold upstairs. Mum didn’t mind,† but in the end she bought me an electric blanket and we left it on all night. God only knows how we didn’t set the house ablaze. Especially when you consider she occasionally gave me a hot-water bottle to go with it. Even with both, I rarely wanted to get up in the mornings – just now and again, in winter, you could see your breath inside.

I didn’t know any different: it was home, I was happy. I had two kind, loving parents, a mum and dad who although so young did everything they could to give me the best beginning that they could. But, looking back, the fact that a little boy and then a baby sister were allowed to live in a state-owned house without proper heating in the early to mid-1990s was appalling.

At some point, near the dawn of the new millennium, those houses on Willets Road in Northfield were declared unfit for habitation. They were rightly pulled down and we moved to a better house on a rougher estate but which nonetheless my mum and dad eventually bought under the right to buy scheme. One day, not long after we moved there, on my way home from school, I was beaten up by some older kids. They kept accusing me of ‘cussing’ their mum. I replied meekly, tearily, that I’d never even met their mum. It didn’t stop the next round of punches; I learned then that there’s nothing quite like the sound of the impact of fist on jawbone. Mind you, I was so fat at the time they probably rightly intuited that if they’d gone for anything else their hands might have disappeared under endless rolls of flesh. I was so ashamed that I didn’t admit it for days. When the indigo bruises began to appear, I told Mum I’d walked into a door at school. When she asked why they appeared to be on every side of my face I replied that it was, in fact, a revolving door. Unsurprisingly she wasn’t fooled. For a while I didn’t walk home from school any more. Mum worried we’d moved into the worst neighbourhood in south Birmingham; my dad, by comparison, who had been brought up in proper poverty as the youngest of a big Irish family in Middlesbrough, seemed to think it was, if anything, moderately swish. The trouble peaked one night when the garages around the back of our house were set on fire. I watched it from my bedroom, wondering to myself why anyone would want to do it. The truth is, though they might not have had much more than me materially, they lacked my real blessing: two loving parents, who both wanted me to achieve. In the end, the council put in a new neighbourhood team to sort out the estate. Over time, things got better. After a few years, the problems more or less disappeared.

I attended a lovely school, Turves Green Primary, just down the road. A year or two before I left, me and a few of my friends who were quite bright got an extra teacher, Mrs Clinton, who worked just with us on advanced English and maths lessons. It really helped bring us along and stretched us in ways we might not otherwise have been. Embarrassingly, I remember being thrilled she shared her surname with the then president and asked if there was any chance she might be related and could arrange a tour of the White House. I was more than a bit disappointed by the reply. Around the same time, we started doing something called ‘Literacy and Numeracy hour’. I remember my teacher Mrs Hicking, doubtless aware of this little weird boy already showing an odd, precocious interest in politics, telling me it was a new idea from the new government. I was puzzled but intrigued that teachers, the summit of all power, were being instructed from elsewhere. It was the first of many changes over the next few years.

Then the school was refurbished. I was disappointed to be leaving just as everything was unveiled. I didn’t get into King Edward’s Grammar School a few miles away and so accompanied my (male) friends and travelled a few hundred yards up the road to the local comprehensive, Turves Green Boys’ Technology College. It was a school that had its problems and that did its best with lots of kids who didn’t have that much in life. Many of the boys there didn’t think learning would help them and didn’t see much point in the subjects or knowledge the teachers, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, tried to impart. In my early days, you didn’t get the sense some of the teachers were doing much to help matters. I remember one maths lesson, the teacher, who usually taught PE, gave up trying to keep control of an especially riotous afternoon session. He called for the deputy head, the austere, taciturn Mr Williams. He remonstrated with us: ‘You’re some of our brightest lads, if you actually apply yourselves, you can get Ds and Cs … maybe more, if you’re lucky.’ Educational rallying call, it was not. The lack of ambition, on both sides of the teacher’s desk, was occasionally profound.

Over time, things improved and as they did a fair number of opportunities came my way. A ‘Gifted and Talented’ fund was established and (thanks to some very dedicated teachers) paid for me to learn GCSE Drama and GCSE Spanish after school. It also paid for a hotel in London for me to do a week’s work experience in Parliament, chaperoned by (you guessed it) Grandad. You can imagine my 14-year-old giddiness (‘Was that David Blunkett?! MY GOD, THAT’S DAVID BLUNKETT, GRANDAD!’). It was also the first time I’d properly visited London. I walked poor Grandad’s legs off. He spent the afternoons recovering before we set out on our travels again: Piccadilly Circus, the Embankment, Whitehall, Oxford Street, Leicester Square – places I’d hitherto known only on a Monopoly board. As I walked around Parliament and in London’s bright lights, I swore to myself that one day I’d come back to work in both. Sometimes, as I’m walking past Big Ben on my way to work, or dashing to meet an MP or going to do a live in Downing Street, I think back and can almost see my podgy 14-year-old ghost walking with his grandad, and I pinch myself.

Towards the end of my time at school, a senior teacher handed me a brochure with the words ‘Aim Higher’ emblazoned across its front. Inside, its pages outlined a new programme, a series of summer schools that had just been established across British universities to encourage kids from state schools without much history of sending students to Russell Group universities to apply. Everything was paid for, accommodation, train fare, food – the works. ‘You should think about the one at Oxford,’ he told me. I acted on his advice, applied to the programme and was accepted. I had the time of my life. Up to then I used to dream of what it would be like to escape my happy but small world and in that week, surrounded by the books and the buildings and the spires, I began, for the first time, to see the shape of a new, bigger existence that might take its place. From then on all I wanted to do was go and I was determined to do everything I could to make it happen. I spent weekends scouring the internet (dial-up, when not interrupted by calls from Nan, aunts and Mum’s friends) for every scrap of information I could to help me get there, be it about interviews, extracurricular activities, practice entrance examination techniques and the rest. I worked like a dog for my GCSEs, now knowing how important they were to the application process. Two years later, in what was then the proudest moment of my life, I was able to tell my crying, jubilant mum that I’d won a place at St John’s College, Oxford, to read History and Politics. I will never forget opening that letter, in full Charlie Bucket mode, reading the words aloud again and again lest they vanish from the page. Mum literally jumped for joy; once she came back down to earth, I noticed she had a look in her eyes. At the time I thought it was pride. But looking back I think it was more: it was vindication. Vindication in the face of all the people who had written her off as a hopeless teenage mum all those years before. I think much of the rest of my life has flowed from the contents of that letter, opened on that December afternoon. And yet I’m quite confident that the words inside would neither have been read nor written had it not been for that precious week in midsummer, two years before.

Just as I was packing my bags for Oxford, work was about to start on a new £3m sports hall at Turves Green Boys. Birmingham was changing around me too. Slowly but surely, with the new Bull Ring and revamped city centre, Brum had a spring in its step. The city was shining with fresh glass and things felt hopeful. My mum’s sisters, who had lived with us all together in Erdington, were by then starting to have kids of their own (waiting to the grand old age of their early and mid-twenties, which is pretty late in my family‡). They seemed better off than we had been. Not so much because their income was greater – if anything it was probably a touch less – but it was topped up by the new sprawling system of tax credits created by Gordon Brown. I couldn’t help but be aware of this because occasionally, in the car on the way home after we had been visiting, Mum’s eyes would flash and invariably she’d spit out something like: ‘They don’t know they’re born, we didn’t get tax credits or anything like that with you.’ Nothing quite like sisterly love, sometimes.

Much if not all of what I’ve just relayed followed inexorably from my watching the New Labour government to office, on that 1997 day. They put the money in to refit old dilapidated council housing on its last legs. They established the Gifted and Talented fund. They invested in regional cities. They refurbished schools. They established the Aim Higher Summer School Programme.§ In short, I have no doubt that I wouldn’t be where I am today were it not for the New Labour government. They say the personal is political. It doesn’t get more personal than that. You can say it was all on tick, all on borrowed time. You can say that Blair didn’t achieve enough, that he was a neoliberal, a Tory, a Thatcherite wolf in Labour clothing. You’re perfectly entitled to think this and you’re perfectly entitled to make the accusation that I am a Blairite (I’m sure some of you will). That isn’t true. I’m a journalist and like all journalists I can only relay to you lived experience as I see it. I can only tell you that those things were transformative to me and to those around me. I think it’s also the reason why – you wouldn’t know it from reading the editorials in the Guardian or listening to many of the bien pensant voices in London – in many working-class communities there are plenty of people (my parents and their friends included) who don’t have a bad word to say about Tony Blair. They remember their lives before his time in office and they felt their material lives tangibly improve. My own life is among that number. Many people I know want someone to arrest Tony Blair. I confess to you that when I met him for the first time as a journalist, part of me – a not insignificant part – wanted to thank him for what his government had done.

I got older, I saw many of the government’s imperfections, began to appreciate Blair’s and Brown’s personality defects, the endless tedium of their interminable psychodrama. I, like many others, felt disillusioned by the horrors of Iraq. By the end of my period at university, watching the results programme on my iMac with friends, drinking cheap Malbec in plastic cups right in the middle of my finals week, it felt like New Labour’s time was exhausted, tarnished in a thousand ways, in the sands of the Middle East, in the expenses office of the House of Commons, in the pages of the Hutton Report, in the meeting rooms of Downing Street where the Election That Never Was was called off. But it’s clear, now we can look at the period with a more neutral, dispassionate lens, that in most ways Britain got better in those years, especially for the people Labour was established to defend and promote, the working classes.

It is then a matter of some curiousness that Blair’s name is mud and that period of Labour government, the longest in the party’s history, is considered an embarrassing aberration by so many within and without the Labour Party. The fate of its reputation tells us much, not only about the inadequacies of both New Labour and its replacement but of the entire breed of ‘moderate’ centre-leftism that has all but disappeared around the world.

I don’t propose to give a blow-by-blow account of the New Labour years. It’s already been done. Instead, we need a different approach in our attempts to understand that era. The most common accusation against New Labour is that it had become a pale imitation of the Tory Party, that it had mutated into a form of Thatcherism with, at best, a human edge. This accusation was made in its earliest days. Even by 1996, before Blair became prime minister, the mid-1990s seminal state of the nation TV drama Our Friends in the North lambasted the project as a sell-out. The son of one of the main characters, Mary (who had started out on the left of the party as a local councillor only to become leader of Newcastle City Council in the 1980s and a Blairite MP), accosts his mother at a political meeting: ‘Mother, man, if you and your New Labour party sound any more like the Tories they’ll sue you for plagiarism.’ This belief was to embed itself, then multiply, before it finally became received wisdom in the party, and is the main reason, alongside his foreign policy decisions, why Blair has been disowned as a pariah.

There are many legitimate criticisms to be made of Blair. His decisions in the wake of 9/11, to religiously stick with a neoconservative American administration in particular, deserve much of the ire for which they are now known. Blair’s development into a political masochist, irritating his base, attacking students, the public sector, led to a drift from his social democratic beginnings. However, it is a gross, ahistorical and absurd contention that the New Labour years were ‘Tory-lite’. For all of its faults, the Labour government was not a Conservative (or conservative) one and did things that a Tory administration would never have countenanced. It fails to understand either what New Labour was or the historical and political moment in which the Labour Party found itself in the early to mid-1990s. Nonetheless, even though it was in fact a recognisably Labour government, it did, in its rhetoric, if not in its actions, sow the seeds of the leftist Corbynist revival that it was its raison d’être to banish and destroy. This is my attempt, 25 years on, to offer a rounded perspective on New Labour and its place in history.

NEW, NEWER AND NEWEST LABOUR

New Labour was an election-winning machine: it presided over by far and away the most successful electoral period in the party’s century-long history, achieving 13 years in office and three terms in government. It is nearly always forgotten now that before the 1997–2010 ministries the longest period the party had been continuously in office was five and a half years. Prior to 1997, the last time the party had won a decent majority was in 1966, under Harold Wilson. Yes, 1966. In other words, by the late 1990s it wasn’t just England fans enduring thirty years of hurt; decent Labour majorities felt nearly as rare as England winning the World Cup. The Conservatives were in office for sixty-six out of one hundred years of the twentieth century, about the same length of time as the Communists in the Soviet Union – and the Soviets hadn’t had the minor inconvenience of periodically having to secure the population’s consent. The Tories were election-winning dynamos and had moulded a nation in their own image. Labour’s performance, by contrast, had been anaemic.

New Labour, then, was a movement born out of desperation. The party, especially after the shock defeat of 1992, was questioning its very survival as a credible governing force. The original British (and better!) television series of House of Cards summed up well the mood of the early 1990s. The Machiavellian protagonist, Francis Urquhart, succeeds Thatcher as prime minister and goes on to win three more general election victories, each victory being narrow but absolute. At one point, Urquhart, seeking a new political adviser, asks a candidate to assess his government’s performance:

SARAH: Extremely effective. By not seeking the approval of all of the people all of the time you’ve put yourself in a very strong position. You’ve got 46 per cent of the people and that means you can afford to ignore all of the rest. And you do. Labour has no chance because it has no power base. Most of the underclass isn’t registered to vote. You’ve virtually destroyed the two-party system.

URQUHART: Good.

The exchange, initially broadcast in 1993, not long after the Conservatives’ fourth victory, is an insight into the now lost mindset of the mid-1990s political observer, especially when you remember that it was written by a Conservative peer. The Conservatives having enough people in the right places could dominate the House of Commons through the ‘first past the post’ system in perpetuity, especially given that Labour’s appeal was so limited. This theory was pre-eminent at the time: that Labour’s social base had proved too narrow and brittle, that as a party born in the fires of the smelter and the soot of the mines, of the manual and unionised working class, in an economy increasingly based on services, it was doomed to failure. The Tories, it was argued, had trapped Labour in a demographic cage. New Labour was an attempt to escape from its confines.

Such an attempt was hardly novel though. Today some talk in a way which seems to suppose that before New Labour came along the Labour Party was one monolithic bloc, ‘Old Labour’, comprised exclusively of miners, flat caps and whippets from the Jarrow marches onwards before the yuppies with the suits and briefcases and flat whites came along and snatched it from those to whom it truly belonged. In other words, that New Labour was unduly obsessed with and beholden to the middle classes. There’s truth to that charge but our problem comes with the assumption that New Labour was somehow unique in its bourgeois courtship; rather the Labour Party had been wrestling with expanding its appeal for a very long time, before Blair and Brown were even born.

As far back as the early 1950s, as the Attlee government slipped from power and an age of rationing and queuing gave way to one of affluence, Labour had been fretting about the salience of its ideological and social appeal. Much to socialists’ horror, many of whom had seen the 1945 government as the beginning of a destined age of socialist government, it was the Conservatives who would govern for the next thirteen years. It began to look as if the Attlee government, for all its achievements, would be socialism’s high-water mark, an apotheosis, an end, rather than a beginning. A new age of individualism and consumerism beckoned for which Labour seemed temperamentally and congenitally ill-suited. As one Conservative journalist observed, the English working class were characterised less by an interest in Marx and Engels, than in Marks and Spencer.

Thus the 1950s were a period of deep soul-searching for the party, and concern abounded that its reach was far too shallow. One study commissioned concluded that ‘Labour is thought of predominantly as a class party and the class that it represents is objectively and subjectively on the wane.’ Moreover, even members of that class were not necessarily friendly to Labour. As Hugh Gaitskell, by then party leader, said to the party’s 1959 conference in Blackpool: ‘We assumed too readily an instinctive loyalty to Labour which was all the time being gradually eroded.’ Harold Wilson’s ‘white heat’ speech, which came a few years after and today is remembered best as a call for state planning and investment in technology and science, was neither nearly so lofty nor futuristic as it appeared. It – and Wilson’s entire electoral strategy at the time – was an attempt to bring in new middle-class and technically educated voters. Wilson ran a campaign arguing that Labour was the classless party, the party of aspiration, for those who aspired to dispose of the primitive and outmoded distinctions of the place and status in which people were born. While the Tories of the grassmoor held back people of talent for reasons of snobbery, so a technocratic Labour government would liberate people of ability irrespective of class, so that socialism was for you if you wore a white coat or a flat cap. This built on Gaitskell’s observation at the party conference in 1959, where he said the worker (and voter) of the future would be ‘a skilled man in a white overall watching dials in a bright new modern factory’. Wilson was, he said privately, ‘making myself acceptable to the suburbs’. The language was different – Gaitskell and Wilson spoke of ‘intermediate voters’ rather than Blair’s ‘Mondeo Man’ or ‘Middle England’ – but the ambition was the same: to expand the Labour Party’s appeal in new quarters.

Wilson’s strategy worked for a while. In 1964 Labour scraped in and won big 18 months later, in 1966. By the 1980s, though, Labour’s white heat had long since cooled and the issue of the party’s social appeal once again seemed profound. MPs and leftists darkly whispered of the party’s ‘London effect’. As the party retreated to its old industrial heartlands of the Scottish central belt, the pit villages of the north-west and east Midlands, and the shipyards of the north-east, Labour struggled most of all in the capital. It seems hard for us to imagine now, but London – deindustrialised, service-dominated, liberal, full of non-unionised younger workers – represented all that Labour Party strategists and thinkers feared most. It was at the centre of the Thatcher revolution and potentially a harbinger of things to come elsewhere. By the late 1980s the party was 17 per cent behind the Tories in London, compared to only 9–10 per cent in the country overall.

Blair, interviewed standing for the 1982 Beaconsfield by-election, was alive to all this early on. He told the BBC’s Newsnight, with Michael Foot at his side:

‘The image of the Labour Party has got to be an image which is more dynamic, more modern, more suited to the 1980s. I don’t think it’s as much about right and left as people make out. We live in a different world now, 50 per cent owner-occupiers, many people working in services. Large numbers of people working in services rather than manufacturing and that means a change in attitudes and a change of attitudes we’ve got to wake up to.’ At its core, Philip Gould, Blair’s close confidant and personal pollster, wrote, would be ‘the new middle class; the aspirational working class in manual occupations and the increasingly insecure white-collar workers with middle-to-low level incomes.’ It would also include the urban poor, the inner cities, the suburbs, as David Marquand observed, every voter from ‘Diane Abbott’s Hackney as well as Gisela Stuart’s Birmingham Edgbaston’. Looked at in this way, New Labour wasn’t just a branding exercise or, ironically enough, that new: rather it was the latest version of a series of iterations of a new type of Labour Party, attempting to attract a new coalition of voters to a party whose electoral performance since the war had been lamentable.

OUR SURVEY SAYS …

Today there are some who argue that the New Labour victories came at too great a cost; that effectively Blair, in his courting of ‘Middle England’ and so-called ‘Mondeo Man’ and ‘Worcester Woman’, hemmed himself in, reduced Labour’s room for manoeuvre, and reined in radicalism all in the name of respectability, and that this was unnecessary. The academic Neal Lawson, for example, has argued that Blair’s 1997 majority was too large: ‘The tent was too big and you spent the next ten years trying to keep the wrong people in it: the very rich, for example.’1

That a political party is electorally successful but then spends the years afterwards self-flagellating because it had the wrong sort of votes cast by the wrong voters seems to me an argument that only the Labour Party could have. But even taken on its own terms, there are two key reasons why it is a wretched analysis. For a start it’s ahistorical. It looks that way now because Blair did achieve what he did. It seems the party was destined to win and win big. That is not how it seemed at the time: Labour politicians did not have the reassuring benefit of hindsight that we possess. Read any diary entry, any memoir or account of that period, and the scars of four successive defeats run deep in the psyches of the Labour politicians of the age. Even though the party had been ahead in the polls for years, even though the country was thoroughly sick of the Tory government, it didn’t seem a certainty that Labour would finally get over the line. Chris Mullin, in his safe Labour seat of Sunderland Central, still didn’t think it was going to happen until the last moments, as his diary entry from 24 April 1997 (exactly a week before polling day) records:

We’re going to lose. Blair knows it, too. I can see it in his eyes every time he appears on the TV news. The magic is fading. He looks exhausted. Major, by contrast, is as fresh as a daisy. The massive rubbishing to which our man has been subjected is paying off. The Tories have succeeded in turning him from an asset to a liability.2

Moreover (ironically given the accusation that all Blair wanted to do was achieve office at any cost), getting into government was not New Labour’s only aim. Blair’s objective was not to secure power once. Lawson is probably right that most (though by no means all) mainstream Labour leaders in 1997 would have won – the country was sick of the Tories after 18 years and the democratic elastic had been stretched to its maximum. But that was not the sum of Blair’s or Brown’s ambition. They wanted to govern for a sustained period in office. At the time that was mistaken for pragmatism over principle, but up to then one of the key critiques of the Labour Party was that it had never been able to enact a truly transformative programme because it had never governed for long enough – that too is forgotten now. Rather it had had periods of minority government followed by the stop-start governments of the 1940s and 1950s and especially the 1960s and 1970s. Blair didn’t believe that simply expelling the Tories from office every now and again was enough: he wanted to, in effect, displace them as the natural party of government. Listen to any speech, read any pamphlet written by Blair or Brown at the time, and the idea of securing that objective drips off the page; that, in their view, required fundamental political accommodations. In the 1940s, after the Labour government enacted some truly socialist policies, socialists were dismayed not just at losing office in the 1950s but because the scales fell from their eyes. Part of the ideological makeup of prewar socialism was that once the working class had had a taste of the truly transformative powers of the ideology, it would usher in a golden age in which Labour would rarely be dislodged. History had not turned out that way and Blair’s generation held no such illusions; they assumed they must act accordingly.

But there’s another reason why it’s easy to ridicule the Blair big tent, why it seems almost quaint as a political notion: because, for good or ill, it was precisely that – a big tent. Blair genuinely believed his was a new approach, a new conception of politics, and that much of the population could be brought into the tent’s shelter. His politics was not one based on antagonism but on unity. The contrast with what came before him, of Margaret Thatcher’s constant quest for enemies to slay, of her rhetoric of ‘our people’ and ‘one of us’, was a million miles away from Blair’s soft and conciliatory tones, of ‘one people’, transcending left, right and all the old dogmas. Francis Urquhart would not have approved. In as much as anything, this was rooted in Blair’s personality, in a tremendous self-belief in his own persuasive abilities and capacity to bring people together. As Professor David Marquand argued years later: ‘the central premise of his statecraft was that society was naturally harmonious: that apparent differences of interest or belief could always be compromised or transcended’.3

That contrast is not only striking for what came before Blair but for what has come since. New Labour’s big tent partly seems so kitsch because its open and pluralist approach seems so foreign to the politics of our own age. Today’s politics, of remain and leave, of heroes and villains, of identity politics, of authenticity and virtue and vice, is a politics that fundamentally rests on enmity just as much as did that which characterised the 1980s. It relies on showing who you are for and who you are against and in so doing revealing your truly authentic self. In this regard, the bonhomie of the settled politics of Blair’s 1990s seems as distant as Baldwin’s 1930s or Macmillan’s 1950s – indeed our own politics has manifested itself to some extent as a counter-reaction to it. Consequently, Blairism can appear unprincipled or rootless. The ‘authenticity’ of big characters like Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, Jeremy Corbyn and the rest must surely arise as a counter-reaction to the 1990s era of spin, PR politics and the idea of politicians trying to please all of the people all of the time. Better, it is said, to have politicians who really say what they think, even at the risk of being divisive, rather than those who try to be all things to all people. Today, as Britain is ravaged by new political and cultural schisms, I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard friends or colleagues or columnists yearn aloud for a unifier, a politics less coarse, less bellicose, someone or something that can bring people together. Yet it was exactly that sort of openness, and its accompanying rootlessness, which so many came to revile and which now makes Blair’s approach seem so antiquated and his political personality dismissed as a libertine.

Of course, Blair and Brown said the big tent couldn’t be constructed on a foundation of presentational changes alone; they believed deep policy shifts would be necessary as well. In the same way that the hunt for new voters and appeal is sometimes today considered a unique and grubby affliction of the New Labour years, so likewise the abandonment of certain policies and adoption of others is considered to be a distinct piece of New Labour treachery. Rather, it makes more sense to think of New Labour as the party’s latest attempt to respond to the changing material world around it, in a way that Labour hadn’t done in a comprehensive fashion for a very long time, probably since the revisionist Anthony Crosland attempted to update the Attlee settlement for the 1960s in his seminal work, The Future of Socialism. Blair’s and Brown’s thinking, nursed through the 1980s and ’90s, resulted in the so-called ‘Third Way’, in which the dynamism of the free market was combined with traditional social democratic goals of social justice and fairness.¶ As Blair was himself to say in 1999: ‘It was important for me to try and explain to people what the nature of my political project was about, this idea you could get beyond left and right but have a pro-business, pro-enterprise but also pro-fairness party.’ Decades after it had fallen out of favour, Blair was to reanimate that sentiment to me, saying that the Third Way and New Labour are just rhetorical vehicles ‘to describe an attitude, a way of looking at politics, the label is insignificant. What’s significant is the idea that social democracy has to keep renewing its policy applications and principles.’

This didn’t come out of a vacuum and it was a theme Blair spoke about often, throughout his leadership and after. When I asked him why he thought New Labour was successful he returned to the idea: ‘I think the reason is that we broke this stranglehold that elements of the progressive left had over associating policies which were appropriate at one time with principles for all time. It’s not complicated but it is essential; if you don’t break that stranglehold you have the world changing but you are in the same place over policy.’ In other words, he challenged the view that Labour policy had to be constant, that it would always look the same, and that to deviate from it was heresy, that there was only one road to socialism.

Blair won that argument for only a short time, and perhaps he never could win it in the end, because for most of his party the only road to socialism still runs to and from 1945 and hasn’t changed much since.

1945 AND ALL THAT

Clement Attlee’s 1945–51 government remains the party’s most important administration, one of the three most significant governments of the twentieth century. Its achievements are ones of which the party can be justly proud. Its ability to stir hearts in members of the party is unparalleled, despite the fact that no one even elected to that Parliament remains alive, much less anyone who held ministerial office. In the summer of 2015, I made a film about the seventieth anniversary of that government’s coming to power. As part of that I interviewed Margaret Beckett. She described an occasion when, in 1994, not long after John Smith’s death, she attended the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day in Normandy, as leader of the opposition:

‘We had a ceremony at the cemetery at Bayeux. The Queen was there, President Clinton, the Prime Minister and so on and so on. After the ceremony, the people broke and there was an opportunity for people to mix informally. And I was mobbed … by veterans and their families. I remember looking around and there were lots of people around the Prime Minister of course but I was mobbed. And it’s not just me who thinks that I was, because the Defence Secretary [Malcolm Rifkind] was there and said to everyone a few days later, did Margaret tell you, that she was mobbed by the D-Day veterans? And I thought … that was for Attlee’s government.’ As she told the story, she became quite overcome with tears.

It’s hard to compete with that, and every government before and since hasn’t. It is the only Labour government of the half-dozen or so there have been that has emerged with its reputation intact. Perhaps because of this and because of the strength of its achievement, it has acted as a sort of eternal litmus test against which each and every government since is judged within the Labour movement. It has become Labour lore.**

But just as subsequent Labour governments and prime ministers struggle to compete with its emotional pull, so they struggled to compete with Attlee’s greatest gift: the moment in which he lived, a moment primed for socialism. The total-war strategy articulated by Churchill entailed doing all the things that the Conservatives under Chamberlain and Baldwin had told the country were not possible: nationalising swathes of industry, huge government intervention in every sphere of existence, taking profound stakes in not only the economy but the day-to-day affairs of life. It controlled what you ate, what you did, whether or not your children lived with you, how much you paid for consumer goods, where you worked, whether or not you fought in the war, whether you lived or died. Public expenditure as a proportion of overall national spending and income skyrocketed.†† As a result, the ideological superstructure of the country changed. It was a unique moment and one that couldn’t last.

The new consensus Attlee and his ministers bequeathed held for the next thirty years or so, with both Labour and Conservative governments managing Attlee’s inheritance. But by the late 1970s Labour (and Conservative) governments had found it increasingly difficult to manage that settlement, which was by then decaying. As Britain struggled economically and the rest of the world fell into economic malaise, the traditional Keynesian methods of reflating the economy through public spending were in trouble across the globe. Jim Callaghan, who endured a pretty unsuccessful stint as chancellor and was now prime minister, sounded its death knell. He told the Labour Party conference in 1976: ‘We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists, and in so far as it ever did exist, it only worked on each occasion since the war by injecting a bigger dose of inflation into the economy, followed by a higher level of unemployment as the next step.’

The cosy Keynesian postwar balloon was slowly leaking air. As it did so, the social ideas that underpinned it were also dissolving. As we’ve seen, the party’s grip on the working class was never entirely firm but by the 1970s it appeared almost loose. One of the central problems was the idea of greater public spending and, in a portent of things to come, a dissatisfaction with newer streams of more liberal leftist thought focusing on minorities and individual rights. As Denis Healey was to relay to his cabinet colleagues in 1975:

At the Labour clubs, you’ll find there’s an awful lot of support for this policy of cutting public expenditure. They will tell you all about Paddy Murphy up the street who’s got eighteen children, has not worked for years, lives on unemployment benefit, has a colour television and goes to Majorca for his holidays.4

In other words, as the years of postwar plenty gave way to a harsher economic climate, so the social solidarity that had paved the road to 1945 diminished. At the same time, globalisation, membership of the European Economic Community and increasing integration of global markets continued to lessen the power of social democratic governments to enact the policies that they might like: the idea that socialism or social democracy in one country was possible seemed less and less likely. Globalisation, the end of dollar convertibility and the development of a truly international capital market had disrupted the cosy world of 1940s Britain, where socialist or social democratic governments could pursue their dreams of a new Jerusalem without much regard to the rest of the world. The experience of the 1968 devaluation crisis under Wilson and the 1977 IMF crisis under Callaghan was searing to the Labour movement, but also illustrated how powerful international capital flows and financiers had become and how weak national governments now paled when set against them. Blair showed himself alive to these forces early in his leadership. In a university lecture in 1995 he said:

Governments can no longer adopt stimulative policies that boost demand without risk of being punished by markets and higher interest rates. We must recognise that the UK is situated in the middle of the global market for capital, a market which is less subject to regulation today than for many decades. An expansionary fiscal or monetary policy that is at odds with other economies in Europe will not be sustained for very long … to that extent the room for manoeuvre of any government in Britain is already extremely circumscribed.5

Blair and Brown were obsessed with this idea; from their earliest days in office it’s clear now that they were genuinely quite scared of the market reaction against their government. Harriet Harman, in her memoir, recounts a story that is revealing of her bosses’ mindset. As the new Labour government’s social security secretary, she had been tasked with finding several billion pounds’ worth of cuts, so the government could stick to its election pledge of matching Conservative spending plans (something the man who drew them up, Ken Clarke as chancellor, later said he wouldn’t even have done had the Tories been re-elected). This entailed cutting child benefit for new claimants by £6 a week, a move deeply unpopular within the wider Labour Party. She recalls that she went to see Brown to spell out the problems and find a remedy:

But he said it was a manifesto commitment and that it would have to be carried out. If we didn’t, it would send a signal that we weren’t going to be financially prudent in the way we’d promised, it would cause instability in the money markets, there would be a loss of confidence, the government would fall, and I would be responsible for bringing down the first Labour government for eighteen years … Our government still felt fragile to me, I couldn’t do anything to threaten it.6

In retrospect, this seems quite incredible. The Labour administration was only a year old, elected with a stonking majority, the economy was booming, the markets were sanguine, the world economy was enjoying stability and growth, but a Labour chancellor and cabinet minister were worried that a £6 a week cut in benefits for lone parents might be the issue on which the government’s fortunes turned and which risked sending money markets into a spin. Perhaps Brown was over-egging the pudding to get his way, but what is striking reading the accounts of the time is just how commonplace fears like this were.

So in every direction by the 1990s, whether it was economic, social or ideological, the world seemed to have given way beneath social democracy’s feet. The postwar social democratic settlement seemed to be increasingly unobtainable because the pillars on which it had been constructed were vanishing. Callaghan could see what was happening better than anyone. When polls indicated he might be doing a bit better in the run-up to the 1979 election than he might have hoped, his aide, Bernard Donoghue, ventured to suggest he might win after all. ‘Bernard,’ the old warhorse replied, ‘I’m afraid to say I think there’s been a sea change and it is for Mrs Thatcher.’

It is sometimes spoken of as if Blair and Brown ‘abandoned’ socialism all on their own. That’s putting the cart before the horse. By the time New Labour came along the process of abandoning the trappings of the old Attlee settlement (which many people then took, and today continue to take, as the quintessential socialism) was already well underway. Because New Labour was not only an attempt to broaden the party’s sociological appeal: it was also an attempt to respond to a world where traditional methods of social democracy and socialism had been deemed bankrupt, in a metaphorical and a real sense; and many of the people who declared them so were – guess what – the social democratic politicians of the day.

And while the old leftist ways withered the right wasn’t sitting idly by, it was seizing the moment. The next decade and a half after the 1979 election transformed the political and social landscape in Britain, a more economically liberal, individualistic and enterprising culture was born and much of the time Labour was nowhere to be seen. Thatcher clocked up three general election victories and her successor, John Major, secured an unprecedented fourth in 1992.

In the meantime, a betrayal myth developed across some parts of the Labour Party that not only had Blair and Brown sold out but that Wilson and Callaghan had done so before them, that they had given in to international capital, and that if they had taken a properly left-wing approach to managing the economy, things might have been different and Thatcherism might have been resisted. We will never know for certain, but there are two important indicators that might suggest such revisionism is without much basis. The first is that the idea of betrayal might be more credible if similar phenomena were not taking place all across the West. Britain might have led the way, but the entire world was heading in a more ‘neoliberal’ direction. Whether it was Reaganomics in the United States or Rogernomics in New Zealand,‡‡ the picture was much the same everywhere. Even governments that were ostensibly left wing, like François Mitterrand’s in France, implemented more economically liberal policies once in office. The same phenomena that were running the left ragged in Britain were much the same elsewhere; the malaise and stagflation of the 1970s gripped the world; the corresponding decline in social democracy took hold partly as a result of changing technology and work patterns, and partly simply as a result of the final dissipation of some of the solidarity that had so characterised the immediate postwar world. There had, in other words, been an ideological changing of the guard around the world in favour of markets and their creative potential. Just as in the 1940s, the sweep of leftist governments across Europe led the historian A. J. P. Taylor to lament that belief in private enterprise seemed as hopeless as Jacobitism after 1688, so in the 1980s and 1990s did an untrammelled statism appear equally futile.

The left had to respond to these changes and more which were to come: the Soviet Union was collapsing, the Berlin Wall was coming down, and the ideological and geopolitical underpinning of much of twentieth-century leftist thinking was coming down with it. This was the era of the supposed ‘end of history’, as the academic Francis Fukuyama (sort of) said. Liberal market-based democracies had triumphed – it would have been bizarre if no reckoning had come and doubly bizarre if the response had been to double down with policies of nationalisation, higher taxation and stricter economic controls. Indeed, what is striking is that the left responded in a similar way across the West. Wherever you look, whether it’s Clinton’s Democrats or Schroeder’s SDP, there was a conspicuous move to the centre and an acceptance of market methods. New Labour might have embraced it with more brio than the others, but the pattern was the same. The left fundamentally changed because the world around it had done so too, including the attitudes and beliefs of the voters. Thus, even if the dreaded Blair and Brown hadn’t led Labour, even if New Labour had never been created, there is no doubt as to what the direction of the party in the late 1990s would have been because we have a control: the rest of the world. New Labour and Blairism were just a British version of an attempt across the West to respond to the profound crisis of social democracy that had taken place in the late 1970s and beyond.

Blair’s personal take on Labour’s lack of success in the 1980s and 1990s period was a simple one. He told a 1996 BBC documentary analysing the party’s 18 years in the wilderness: ‘The problem of the Labour Party of the seventies and eighties is not complex it’s simple. Society changed and the party didn’t. So you had a whole new generation of people with different aspirations and ambitions in a different kind of world. And we were still singing the same old song that we were singing in the forties and fifties.’7

Brown agreed. He told the same documentary: ‘I don’t think anybody believed that you would have a Conservative government that would be able to maintain itself over four elections and be in power for now 16 years. I think what Mrs Thatcher understood in 1979 was the need for change. I think what Labour failed to understand then was that change had to come about and that Labour should have been sponsoring that change and I think we’ve had to come to terms with that over a period of 16 years.’8

But what would that change look like when all the old tools of tax and spend had been taken out of the toolkit? Well, the truth is, as we shall see, that New Labour did dust off some of the tools in the end – but in the early days, before Brown’s tax hikes of the early 2000s, things were different. Harriet Harman, then shadow chief secretary to the Treasury and Brown’s deputy, described the approach:

Gordon developed the mantra that, to have growth, we needed to build the supply side of the economy. He was determined that our economic policy, which had been our electoral Achilles’ heel over so many years, would shift from taxing and spending the proceeds of growth to focus instead on increasing the rate of economic growth. He wanted to move beyond the idea that our economic policy was only about taxing the rich and spending more on benefits. Government policy should not just be about dividing up the cake but increasing the size of the cake as well. This was the background to his ‘endogenous growth’ speech in 1994, in which he said that economic growth could come not just through increasing demand but through increasing the capacity of the economy by investment in people, through education and training; in industry, through research and development. And in infrastructure, like roads and public transport … This was a huge change. For so long, the only thing people knew about Labour’s approach to the economy was that we would raise taxes and use the money to improve benefits and public services. The public perception was that they would have to pay more taxes and that, subsequently, their money would be thrown down the drain … Now our weekly Treasury team meetings would always begin with Gordon intoning that Labour was not just about taxing and spending but about investment. To get our message across, we had to invoke the supply-side investment strategy as the frame for every point we made.9

This idea, of unleashing people’s latent talent and investing in training and education in order that they might release latent potential was not exactly red-in-tooth-and-claw stuff – it wasn’t bailing out my dad’s job in Rover as the Labour governments of the 1940s and 1960s might have done, but it was still recognisably a Labour innovation. Its transformative impact, on the public realm and on people’s lives, is often underestimated and damned by some on the left and right today who, frankly, would never have come within a thousand feet of feeling its effects. But it was the underlying philosophy that directed government money into my Aim Higher programme and Gifted and Talented. It was the approach that allowed my mum, a woman who had had me at 17 years of age and had had to quit her education early, to retrain as a midwife and start a new life as her kids were growing. It was the philosophy that led to the reinvigoration of the public realm and civic infrastructure that I could see all around me growing up. I’m not convinced that would have happened had New Labour not come to power and the best thinking Conservatives, including David Cameron and his team, learned its lessons. It was a quiet radicalism to befit a benign age.

The irony is, as the government grew in confidence, it quietly became much more bullish about redistribution and the tax and spend policies from which it resiled in its early days. But you wouldn’t have known it; that hushed radicalism led to its own decline.

DIDN’T THEY DO WELL?

Aside from its foreign policy,§§ there are several powerful critiques of the New Labour years. The first is an egalitarian critique. Although the New Labour government can objectively be considered among the most redistributionist and empowering of its predecessors, it was perhaps the first not to place equality as part of its central and organising political mission. This was genuinely new for Labour. The fundamental Labour critique, which underwrote its view of political economy, was that society would not only be better to live in if it were more equal but that it would be more just. It was a profound political insight and one that endured. As early as the late 1990s, senior figures worried the party was drifting away from it and, ergo, the basis of its political and philosophical power. Roy Hattersley, a man partly inspired to become a socialist because of his reading R. H. Tawney’s seminal work Equality as a schoolboy, said in 1995:

We had a big idea, a more equal therefore a better country. Sometimes we called it fairness. Sometimes we called it social justice. But our idea was a more equal and free society. Now that was the idea we should have propagated with determination and consistency and we should sell to the people, the idea we’ve failed to sell to the people. But it’s still the only idea that socialism could possibly stand for.10

It was not entirely clear that Blair and others did share that idea. Equality didn’t improve much in the New Labour years, although there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that it would have got worse than it did had New Labour’s policies not been in place. Regardless, it wasn’t something the leadership seemed very concerned about. Tony Blair famously said that he wasn’t ‘especially interested in controlling what David Beckham earns, quite frankly’. Peter Mandelson likewise observed that New Labour was ‘intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich … as long as they pay their taxes’. Under the Conservatives the Labour rallying cry had always been, just as my grandad used to say to me, that ‘the rich got richer and the poor got poorer’. Under Labour, the poor got richer but the rich got richer too (and faster). For a while it was satisfactory enough, but inspiring rallying call it was not.

The important thing, it was argued, was to create the right conditions that allowed individuals to thrive, that equality of opportunity, not outcome was what mattered. As I’ve said, this isn’t to be underestimated. My life was transformed. I was and am exactly the sort of person Blair’s socialism would benefit. But once I succeeded and had skyrocketed up, the gap in income between me and my old classmates back in Longbridge was something about which New Labour seemed to have little to say, especially in the post-industrial Midlands and north, the small towns and the left behind, what we would one day come to call ‘Brexitland’. That was a clear weakness in New Labour’s political strategy and one that gave its opponents on the left and the right the space to destroy its reputation in years to come – and more importantly, weakened the social and political fabric of the country.

Nonetheless, the last part of the Mandelson quote is still important and often forgotten: that getting filthy rich was acceptable ‘as long as they pay their taxes’. Because, as it turned out, Brown was slowly redistributing vast sums of money, especially after 2002, when he increased National Insurance to pay for greater NHS spending. The tax credit network redistributed money from rich to poor. Take a look at this chart, from the Institute for Fiscal Studies. It shows how much the population gained or lost as a percentage of their income.

The impact is clear. In terms of what the government was doing, there was one sort of person you really didn’t want to be. And it was rich. Quietly, without much fanfare, in a way that it barely dared to say aloud, the New Labour government was redistributing money hand over fist.

But the people who didn’t make a song or dance about it most were the Labour government itself. It was so desperate to appear respectable, not to hark back to Labour governments of long ago, that the most social democratic things they did were never presented as such. They were offered to the country and to their own voters, from conception to implementation, through the way they were explained and communicated, in terms of the market and of individual empowerment. Consequently, what they didn’t do is sew the threads together in a moral critique of capitalism, or of politics more generally. It revelled in its banality, in its dull managerialism. New Labour was often radical but it usually pretended that it wasn’t. Today’s leftists are the opposite. New Labour did social democracy on the quiet, in deed if not in spirit. Corbynism does it through a loudspeaker.

But the sense of mission matters much more than Blair thought it did – as Peter Shore, the former Labour cabinet minister, once said:

‘You’ve always got to have in mind with a Labour Party that if it isn’t a radical party, if it isn’t a party of change, if it isn’t a party that’s committed to making Britain a fairer more equal society then that idealism, that enthusiasm, that energy that goes with that, will be denied it. And if the Labour Party plays too safe for too long then it really will be denying its own heritage.’

Too often, New Labour, desperate to be accepted and to be seen to be in the middle ground, was insufficiently proselytising about just how radical its own achievements were. Looking back it’s clear it was, broadly speaking, a social democratic government. But it didn’t always look or feel that way at the time. As a result, it allowed its internal opponents to cast it as dull technocrats and themselves as the true inheritors of the party’s radical flame. At times, inexcusably, Blair and others acted as if they weren’t political at all. Indeed, he would say in 1999 that ‘I was never really in politics. I never grew up as a politician. I don’t feel myself a politician even now. I don’t think of myself as being a politician in that sense of someone whose whole driving force in life is politics.’ And in so doing he managed to lay the foundations of his own unmaking within the Labour Party.

James Graham’s 2017 play Labour of Love wrestles with recent Labour history and, in so many words, this precise tension. The plot revolves around a Midlands MP, David Lyons, and thirty years of tribulation and trial within the party. In one scene, the MP’s caseworker, Jean Whittaker, offers a killer assessment of the New Labour period: ‘All looks good on the outside but it only takes one little tremor to bring the whole thing down.’ Lyons jumps to the government’s defence, listing all of the new schools and hospitals that have popped up in the area and the new-look town centre, but Whittaker is unimpressed: ‘Yeah, spending, good, fine, but not the actual difficult work of digging deep down into the underlying factors woven into the rotten fabric of this unfair fucking country.’

In other words, New Labour did not in any way challenge the fundamental economic assumptions of the British economy. It believed – as most people did – that at base the British economy was working well and that it was a new sustainable settlement. The basic economic model did not need to be challenged or changed; the sole question was about what you did with the bounty of the untrammelled free market – and New Labour’s answer was, among other things, spend it on kids like me. The problem was, as Whittaker says in the play, that as soon as the good times ended, it was all too easy to turn the taps off. This happened again and again across the West where social democrats had governed. As the academic Shiri Berman told me:

‘These new centre-left politicians celebrated the market’s upsides but ignored its downsides. They differed from classical liberals and conservatives by supporting a social safety net to buffer markets’ worst effects, but they didn’t offer a fundamental critique of capitalism or any sense that market forces should be redirected to protect social needs. When the financial crisis hit in 2008, this attitude repelled those who viewed globalisation as the cause of their suffering and wanted not merely renewed growth, but also less inequality and instability.’

It was all too easy for such measures to be reversed by the Tories, as soon as the good times ended. By contrast, as a signifier of the power of their achievement, Labour did not attempt to reverse the changes to Britain’s political economy that the Tories augured in the 1980s. By way of illustration, Labour’s enduring reforms – which were substantial – were usually structural ones: the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly, the London mayoralty, the minimum wage, civil partnerships to name but a few. But New Labour was too dewy-eyed about the virtues of the market. As a result, the question Giles Radice posed on that heady day in 1997 is still apposite: ‘What will Tony’s success consist of: election victories or something more permanent? The jury is out.’ The answer, we now know, was somewhere in between. Some permanent structural changes, a reinvigoration of the public realm but not a new settlement in favour of social democracy.

In fairness, it is easy now to say with hindsight what they should have done. Moreover, it seemed before 2008 at least as if New Labour had created a new settlement. When they assumed the leadership of their party, David Cameron and George Osborne did not initially dare to question Labour’s spending. On the contrary, they called on the government to increase spending on public services. It would not even explicitly commit to tax cuts, the raison d’être of Toryism; only cautiously, gingerly, daring to say that they would ‘seek to share the proceeds of growth’ at some undefined point, probably far in the future.

This, as we now know, did not endure. The New Labour settlement was not as successful at changing the minds of its opponents as the Thatcherite one had been. But perhaps one of the reasons for that is Blair himself, who was dedicated not only to the market but to the idea that he wasn’t even political at all. This critique is perhaps the most damaging.

HOOK, LINE AND SINKER

At times New Labour seemed to go out of its way to undermine the very notion of political change itself. So convinced did Blair become about the virtues of the market and of the overweening power of globalisation (and the cultural changes with which it was associated) that New Labour appeared to forget that many of its voters voted Labour to protect themselves from those same forces. Over time, Blair’s rhetoric adopted increasingly determinist and fateful overtones. His interpretation of the globalised world came to imply that political action was barely possible. That was because globalisation was an unstoppable, inexorable force that could be neither halted nor much changed. In conference speech after conference speech a parade of government ministers trotted out the same mantra. Blair’s conference speech of 2005 is the most chilling example:

Change is marching on again. The pace of change can either overwhelm us, or make our lives better and our country stronger. What we can’t do is pretend it is not happening. I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation. You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer.

The character of this changing world is indifferent to tradition. Unforgiving of frailty. No respecter of past reputations. It has no custom and practice. It is replete with opportunities, but they only go to those swift to adapt, slow to complain, open, willing and able to change.

These are not words you’d expect from a social democratic prime minister. Social democracy, if it is to mean anything, must surely be about doing its best to protect its citizens from the harsh winds of international capital and globalisation, to preserve personal sovereignty. This was a very different vision. It was a vision of an almost nihilistic politics. As we’ve seen, leftist governments all over the West were wrestling with the challenges of globalisation and the constraints that its associated processes implied, but Blair seemed to come to embrace that new order with zeal. That zeal led New Labour to accept and encourage high levels of migration (especially the immediate extension of free movement to the new EU accession countries of eastern Europe in 2004), without much thought to the reaction of its culturally conservative voters, the consequences of which would prove profound. Blair was not merely wearing the ‘golden straitjacket’ of the global economy, perhaps as any social democratic prime minister would have had to do or will yet again, but appearing to enjoy the fit that little bit too much. Tony Benn used to say that the most powerful letters in the English language were ‘TINA’, or ‘There is no alternative.’ It was one thing taking that from a Conservative prime minister, but hearing the remorseless market logic from a Labour one – and worse still a Labour premier who seemed to salivate at the thought – felt like a bitter pill.

Today, Blair is unrepentant. He maintains that he was right to be straightforward about the inevitability of globalisation, telling me:

‘I wasn’t zealous about globalisation the way you described it; I was saying it was a fact. I haven’t decided as a matter of policy that the world is changing in this way, it is changed in this way and it’s changing for reasons to do with technology, with trade and migration; things that no single government or country either can stop or will stop … I was aware of the potential for a populist backlash from early on. So the thing I find odd about today is that people accuse me of allowing populism to develop; yes, sure, they were developing when I was in power it’s true but I was dealing with them. Social democracy is shifting because the workplace has also been shifting – therefore many of the things that are happening today are the product of new coalitions in politics and new fragmentation of politics that has been going on for a long period of time. What we did very consciously was create a coalition that could see us through that process – why was it both before becoming leader and after, I obsessed about law and order? Some people thought it was some sort of fetish. But it was because I could see that for working people who we traditionally represented a mere economic message was not enough, we also had to be dealing with their problem with security and the changing nature of their communities because of migration. These were questions that we were actively working on and we should have been actively carrying on working on, but what happened after 2007 was a feeling that we went too far on that stuff, that we should actually pull back – whereas that was never the answer; the answer was to carry on; all of those issues were going to intensify.’

It is true that Blair rightly identified the social conservatism of many of his voters (something often ignored by the current Labour leadership) and acted accordingly. But often that sat uncomfortably with New Labour’s deep economic liberalism and laissez-faire approach to globalisation – for example, the 2004 decision to allow untrammelled migration from eastern European accession states to the EU was thought permissible because it pleased Blair’s economic liberalism – but no matter what safeguards he put in place in the form of ID cards or extra police, he seemed little able to assure his voters. Rather, as so often, he found himself in the worst of all worlds, annoying every constituency of opinion. His traditional working-class voters were irritated by his openness to migration while his culturally liberal middle-class voters were lured to the Lib Dems and others on the basis of the draconian social policies Blair instituted to compensate. This helps explains the hollowing of the Labour vote, to only 35 per cent by 2005 – bleeding in every direction, to the authoritarian right and the liberal left. Both offending strands of Blair’s thought became more pronounced and problematic as time proceeded. Even for critical friends of New Labour this is difficult territory. All the more difficult because it isn’t where Blair began, as Jon Cruddas explained to me:

‘The danger is we get further away from it and we look at it more and more in the one-dimensional sense through the rearview mirror: New Labour was this or that. I remember going into Downing Street the day after we won in ’97 and at that stage there wasn’t one Downing Street, there were many Downing Streets – more liberal Downing Streets, more communitarian, more European, more Eurosceptic, people who wanted a more systematic labour market structure, or refinancing the public services or tax policy – but what I’m trying to get at is that it was a lot more plural political project than people give it credit for especially across the left now. The question is how it’s shrunk over time – which is very dangerous in terms of the collective memory of the left and the Labour Party, but it has lost nuance, and the character of it has diminished over time. In turn, Blair changed over time: compare the speeches of 1995–6 to 2004–5 – they are very different characters. The arc between those speeches explains that change in dynamics. It lost its ethical components primarily and became quite a dystopian liberal sink-or-swim agenda by the end. Where you can trace it back to is his philosophical reference points, his spiritual and ethical history, who he studied with at Oxford, his letters and communications in Opposition. You can trace a more thoughtful ethical and moral dynamic to a social democratic agenda, and over time it became empty, and more economistic and instrumentalised and cold – it lost its soul over time.’

In other words, to begin with New Labour retained a starkly moral component, a strong critique of and distaste for the worship of Mammon and the individualism of the Thatcher and Major years. Blair, whose political philosophy, like that of the early Labour Party leaders, was far more influenced by the teachings of Mark and Matthew than Marx and Engels, felt comfortable on this terrain and even invoked scripture. He told a Labour conference in the mid-1990s:

‘Socialism for me was never about nationalisation, or the power of the state, not just about economics, or even politics. It is a moral purpose to life. It is how I try to live my life. How you try to live yours. The simple truths: I’m worth no more than anyone else; I am my brother’s keeper; I will not walk by on the other side. We are not simply people set in isolation from one another, face to face with eternity, but members of the same family, same community, same human race. This is my socialism.’

He said this at his second conference as party leader. On the platform, as a special guest, was Mary Wilson, the widow of the recently deceased Harold, who had once said that ‘the Labour movement is a moral crusade or it is nothing’. Wilson was right. The link, physical, intellectual and ethical, from New Labour to old was there for all to see. It was only later, in the mid-2000s, that Blair appeared to choose to sever that link, in that his philosophy had mutated into something quite alien to Labour tradition. In that, Blair sowed the seeds for the trashing of his own reputation, the Blairites’ loss of Labour’s crown and eventually even Britain’s repudiation of the sort of moderate, centrist politics that Blair had so hoped to permanently embed.

LET’S SEE WHAT YOU COULD HAVE WON …

In pure Labour terms, the party from its inception had the trappings of religion. We live in an age characterised by a caustic suspicion of politicians and their motives, yet we have not to go back too far into history to see a missionary evangelism about politics and a particular fervour associated with socialism and the Labour Party. It is not for nothing called ‘the Labour movement’. That movement and ideological crusade was at its zenith in Attlee’s 1945–51 administration. Imagine a contemporary politician of any stripe speaking with the moral and political certainty, if not the evangelical overtones, of his deputy prime minister, Herbert Morrison: ‘The good Socialist works with religious zeal for the redemption of mankind from the evils of poverty and ignorance. … He is conscious of the beauty of the ideal … he works … for the deliverance of the human spirit from the enslavement of material things.’11

It’s hard to imagine Peter Mandelson’s grandfather as Moses but there we are. And such a sentiment was not unusual. At Labour’s birth, and for much of the twentieth century, for many people it was nothing less than an article of faith that a Labour government, and ergo the use of state power, would positively influence their lives. A fusion of class attachment and group thinking led to a solid conviction among a significant portion of the population in the importance of voting Labour. The state could and would tame capitalism and help build that new Jerusalem for the working class. Over time, however, that faith, in both Labour as an entity but perhaps more crucially in the state’s capacity to ameliorate social conditions, has eroded. Time and again, up and down the country, I’ve heard voters tell me some variant of the same thing, as one elderly lady in Manchester explained: ‘I’ve voted Labour always. It’s just what we did. My mum told me, we were poor so we voted Labour, for our own kind. The rich vote Tory and we don’t.’ These are not unique insights, they’re sentiments the like of which would have been repeated countless times in families up and down the country for decades, including in my own family. Yet, unfortunately for Labour, what she went on to tell me has become an all too common addition: ‘I don’t vote Labour any more. Doesn’t matter who gets in. Nothing ever changes.’ Leave London or any of the big cities and this sense of powerlessness among voters is as palpable as it is ubiquitous, especially among Labour voters.

And, extraordinarily, to some extent Labour brought this on itself. Throughout the New Labour years, the refrain was the same: that voters simply had to accept this new world. Do or die. Sink or swim. This was hardly inspiring talk for a party whose essential aim since its inception had been to reform industrial capitalism and alter its character. Here, 105 years after the party’s birth, its most successful electoral leader was offering it a vision of society that was less a shining city on a hill, but rather a burning one.

This repeated insistence that perpetual change was on the way and that national governments could do little to alter its path did more than just demoralise Labour’s party faithful. It helped erode the very basis of Labour’s raison d’être, in the public’s collective psyche. If even the Labour prime minister was of the view that nothing could or indeed should stand in the way of global economic forces, then what was the point of their supposed gatekeepers? Why not replace them with stewards of the free market who were true believers and ultimately had more credibility, i.e. the Conservative Party? And, true enough, as soon as Labour’s economic credibility was damaged beyond repair in the late 2000s, that is precisely what the public did.

Worse, with Labour’s retreat from the state, others have filled the vacuum. Across Europe, a similar phenomenon has occurred. Voters who have become sick and tired of social democratic politicians telling them what they can no longer do have decided to fill that space with politicians on the far right. If you take Nigel Farage’s UKIP, or Marine Le Pen’s Front National or Donald Trump, one thing unites them: their unabashed enthusiasm for state power and the pitch to voters that contrary to what they’ve been told, another world is possible. While many liberals may find the populists’ rhetoric dark and distasteful, one reason it appeals is its political and economic certainty. There is no hands-up expression of woe, no plea to global forces outside our control – all of this cast of characters offer safety and security to the dominant tribe in their respective societies: we will protect you, and your family, and we’ll use the state to do it. Whether that translates into deportation, stronger border controls, or promises of greater economic self-sufficiency, the underlying theme is the same: that of state power; that voting for some – any – sort of political change must be better than voting for parties that offer none at all. This is why the prospect of ‘taking back control’ was so potent in the Brexit referendum – it was speaking to a powerlessness that politicians, especially of the centre left, had for too long cultivated. In Scotland, in a different case, lost Labour voters turned to nationalism rather than populism but the phenomenon was essentially the same: a group of politicians expressing the belief that alternatives were possible, that the future was not set in stone. What, social democracy’s antagonists in every case implicitly and explicitly argued, do you have to lose? As Sheri Berman told me: ‘The decline of the centre left is one of the most important pre-conditions for the rise of the populist right. Not in a narrow way that people have currently focused on – that traditional left-leaning voters have shifted over to the right. That’s too simplistic. Something more profound is that in the course of the last decade, the centre left (not necessarily the far left) has lost the ability to speak effectively to the two main challenges that are facing European and American society: economic challenges and social or cultural challenges. The left has lost its voice on both these things, and so it has left the space open for parties to move in with answers to these types of things. Without the decline of the centre left both across Europe and in the US, you’d never had a political space for the rise of populism.’

It is in this where late Blair loses his connection with Labour leaders before him. He too often presented the laws of economics as if they were the laws of physics. Politics became boring and hopeless, trapped by its own confines. It removed the magic of possibility on which politics must rest. Jeremy Corbyn’s biggest virtue is perhaps that, under him, that has been restored. And if Berman is right (as I think she is) that the populism of our own age can be attributed to the decline of the centre left, and its modern inability to speak to voters, then Corbyn’s achievement to arrest that decline is all the more important. It is vital, then, to understand what he has done, just who, exactly, this rather curious man is and how he came to be there in the first place.

* I think children to begin with are natural authoritarians, responding to one leader is all they know.

† Not least because she was cold too!

‡ I’ve got to the age of 28 without any so I’m pretty sure they think I’m infertile.

§ To my sadness and frustration, one of Michael Gove’s first acts as education secretary was to abolish the scheme.

¶ Note, not necessarily equality, of which more later.

** Yet it is forgotten now just how disappointing many socialists found the government at the time, how shoddy they thought it had become, how irritated they were with the compromises they had to make. The Conservatives have no equivalent – it would be like judging Theresa May against the actions of Macmillan or Baldwin.

†† By 1943 it accounted for 54 per cent of GDP, against 24 per cent in 1938. It turned out that total war was extraordinarily egalitarian.

‡‡ So-called for Finance Minister Roger Douglas. He was a Labour minister by the way.

§§ This is a vast area and an important one. There is no doubt that Blair’s foreign policy helped incubate the leftist revival that was to occur in the 2010s. However, I do not go into the details of the foreign policy decisions in any great detail in this book. It seems to me to have been very well documented elsewhere.

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