Does Labour need a new New?

It’s not 1997 any more

This is the fourth post in a series exploring the question: What has changed since 1997 that bears on the way we should govern?

The series was prompted by the realisation that 2050 is now closer than the 1997 UK general election. So if Labour win next time around, they can’t just dust off the old ‘how to’ manual. They’ll need to write a new one.

In the first post I focused on the digital revolution and the way this changes the logic of our economy and society, which in turn changes how the state needs to work.

In the second and third posts I looked at changes to the way we understand the world, specifically fresh insights from behavioural science and complexity/systems science. I suggested that these insights equip us to govern in ways that aren’t just more efficient and effective but also more integrated, sustainable, and human.

In this post I’ll turn to something else that has changed since 1997, which is that we have the benefit of hindsight.

Enough time has passed that we can look back on the governing paradigm that underpinned Labour’s last period in office and see what worked and what didn’t.

I’m conscious that it’s a sticky business evaluating the New Labour government, so it might be best to start with some clarifications.

When I talk about evaluating Labour’s governing paradigm I don’t mean I’m going to relegislate the whole debate about Blairism and ideological triangulation.

I’m also not thinking about public service reform agendas like choice and competition, or policy mechanisms like academies. And I’m not even really thinking about more general schools of thought like New Public Management, although that gets closer to what I have in mind.

What I’m more interested in is the hidden stuff. The unspoken premises, metaphors, and mental models that sat beneath policy-making in the 1990s/2000s and defined the kind of work Labour thought they were doing. The ideas that were powerful because we didn’t talk about them. Hence using that ugly word, paradigm. [1]

One last point before we jump in.

I’m conscious that I keep slipping into phrases like ‘Labour’s governing paradigm’ or ‘the 1990s/2000s paradigm’, but actually that’s misleading.

The ideas — or ‘ways of seeing’ — that I’ll be writing about long predate 1997 and they run on past 2010. In fact they still shape policy-making today. They were also — still are also — shared across the political spectrum, from Conservative staffers to civil servants.

So we’re better off not thinking about this as a policy paradigm of Labour’s making. It’s more like the historical-intellectual context within which the New Labour project took shape.

PART 1: A way of seeing the world

Let’s start by defining, or at least surfacing and describing, those hidden ways of thinking. Then we’ll see if we can say anything sensible about the strengths and weaknesses of the way of governing they gave rise to.

I’m keen to avoid loaded terminology like Blairite or Brownite, so instead I’ll use more literal (and admittedly ugly) words, describing the 1990s/2000s paradigm as: industrial, technocratic, and economic.

1. Industrial

First off, I think it’s fair to say that policy-making in the 1990s/2000s was industrial in its style and form.

Industrial in the sense that our main metaphorical language for the state/public policy at this time was mechanical, or associated with the production of things, centred on the organising idea of the state as a machine. And this determined how policy-making was done.

Policies were thought of as levers, or tools to solve problems, or mechanisms to effect changes in the world. Which, in turn, defined the qualities to which policy-making aspired. Policy-makers tried to specify problems as precisely as they could, in technical terms, so that those problems could be solved. So, for example, when Labour said they would ‘fight child poverty’ what they mainly meant was: ‘we will reduce the proportion of children who live in households with incomes (net of taxes and benefits before housing costs) below 60 percent of the median on an equivalised basis’. Which is fair enough as a way to think about poverty but is only one of many options.

Policies were then optimised for these technical specifications, so these ways of thinking had a real impact on people’s lives. Tax credits, for example, one of Labour’s main devices for tackling poverty, were optimised for allocative efficiency. Ministers/civil servants tried to maximise the proportion of each pound spent that reached children in households that met the above definition of poverty, as estimated in the Treasury’s tax-benefit model. And this came with opportunity costs, as other other goals were traded off in the process.

Again, I don’t think anyone would argue that allocative efficiency is a daft goal for welfare policy. But it’s clearly only one option. By way of illustration, here are some other goals that could have been prioritised:

• Increasing financial security, or a felt sense of security (which are two different things)
• Trying to promote equality of standing, for example by fostering feelings of agency and self-esteem
• Making the social security system simple or intuitive for people to interact with
• Rooting social security in a morally intuitive ethical principle like a livable income, or an income that allows people to live a life free of shame
• Using social security to enhance feelings of belonging and community, for example by making the system demonstrably universal, so that it feels ‘there for everyone’, like the NHS. Or by using people’s interactions with the system to create little moments of human connection — times when people lock eyes with someone different to them and realise they’re both part of one community.

Finally, an industrial worldview showed up in the way policy was made. (And indeed the word ‘made’ is itself a mechanical metaphor.)

Think, for example, of the organisational forms (hierarchies and siloes) and the processes (relay/waterfall planning) of policy-making, which wouldn’t be out of place in a factory.

And think of the linearity of policy-making, and of how policy was (still is) seen as separate from and prior to delivery (more on that here). This all reflects the idea of ‘making’ a policy; first you design the policy, and sometimes you test the policy in a time-limited R&D phase called a ‘pilot’, then you put the policy into production.[2] You ‘roll it out’.

2. Technocracy

A second defining characteristic of the 1990s/2000s policy paradigm is that it was technocratic. Here I’m thinking less about the state and more about how Labour conceived of the project of social democracy.

From 1997–2010 Labour pursued a relatively technocratic conception of the project of social democracy. Relative, that is, to the broader and more human/spiritual/liberatory conceptions of social democracy that were more salient around 1900 or in 1960s movements like the New Left. [3]

As someone who came of age politically in the 1990s, I suspect the technocratic bent of this period owes a lot to the schools of philosophy that were dominant in the final third of the 20th century. Especially strands of analytical political philosophy that held sway from the 1970s-1990s when this generation of politicians and policy-makers came up through education.

I’m thinking, for example, of the outsized influence of John Rawls’ framework of liberal egalitarianism. Or actually of quite a partial reading of Rawls’ philosophy. Because alongside Rawlsianism there was a revival of utilitarianism, despite utilitarian reasoning being in tension with much of Rawls’ project. So what we ended up with was something of a hodgepodge from a philosophical perspective: the technocrat-friendly material from Rawls (e.g. devices like the difference principle or ‘maximin’) against a backdrop of quite technical utilitarianism.

We’ll put a pin in the question of whether this is or isn’t a coherent philosophical basis for policy. The point I’m making here is just that these schools of philosophy — modern, western, analytical— dominated public policy during this period to a striking degree. By the time I went to university in the early 2000s, for example, Rawl’s framework was treated less as one theory among many and more as a comprehensive system within which all thinking about justice and equality could be done. (Katrina Forrester puts it nicely when she writes that Rawls’ framework ‘domesticated’ much of political philosophy, taming some historically important arguments that didn’t deserve to be tamed.)

So the point again isn’t that any of this is wrong. It’s just that (a) these ways of seeing are very particular/narrow and (b) from 1997 to 2010 (and some distance either side) they have dominated our thinking.

In fact these intellectual traditions still dominate our thinking. So much so that it can be hard for policy nerds like me (people educated in Britain/America in analytical philosophy/economics) to even think of alternatives. So again just by way of illustration, here are some other ways to think about justice/equality/poverty:

• Theories of relational equality that focus on how people relate to one another, emphasising felt sentiments like dignity and respect
• Analyses of power and discrimination that are less abstracting than Rawlsian mechanisms like the original position and that instead situate justice in history and identity
• Approaches that are less individualist, so that a community isn’t just seen as an arena in which individual people make choices, but as constituting part of who those individuals are
• Non-ideal theories of justice, which don’t worry so much about trying to define the perfectly just society and spend their time trying to articulate our responsibility to act to improve things
• Philosophies informed by wisdom traditions, which think less in terms of ‘doing things to the world’ and more in terms of ‘being a certain way in the world’, so that ethics becomes a lived practice
• Traditions informed by spirituality, such as the philosophy of Martin Luther King Jr, who emphasised excellence of character and civics as a shared ethical practice. Or, coming full circle to Labour’s origins, traditions like Christian socialism.

So other traditions are available.

And although it’s hard to distinguish cause and effect here — did analytical political philosophy make us technocratic, or did we embrace analytical philosophy because we were technocrats? — we can see how this all clicks together nicely. [4]

It adds up to what a sociologist might call, in that catchy way of sociology, a schematically coherent thought system. A thought system that felt, throughout the 1990s/2000s, like just the way government should be done. But a thought system that was actually quite historically unusual and that tightly constrained/determined Labour’s approach to issues like poverty.

3. Economic

The last word I’ve chosen to describe the 1990s/2000s policy paradigm is ‘economic’, which I have to say I don’t love as a term. I’m using it really just as a shorthand for the way economics came to dominate policy-making at this time.

I have a hunch that when we look back on the 1990s/2000s from, say, 2050, one thing we’ll find odd is the way we gave economics such a monopoly in public policy.

I’m thinking of how, by the late 20th century, economics had become a kind of trump discipline in our policy discourse, so that an economic idea/argument would trump an idea/argument from a discipline like history, ethics, design, sociology, psychology, and indeed philosophy (although maybe not politics).[5] In fact, these other disciplines often weren’t even in the room.

I’m also thinking of the institutions we use to make policy, and of how, by the late 1900s many of our ‘policy-making’ institutions were really there to apply economic techniques/reasoning. Institutions like the OBR, or the Council of Economic Advisers, or the many Chief Economist roles in Whitehall, or non-profit organisations like the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Or even softer institutions like the annual ritual of the Budget. It’s interesting to ask: where are the equivalent institutions/rituals for disciplines like sociology, design, or history? The answer is that they’re either missing entirely or they exist, e.g. like the Design Council, but aren’t so central/formally sanctioned in the way we govern/make policy.[6]

Finally, think of how we use economic tools to make policy (and again notice the mechanical metaphor of ‘tools’). We weigh up a policy’s Return on Investment, or we calculate a policy’s Net Present Value, and we act like these tools give a rounded way to make a policy. Meanwhile with other economic ideas we go even further. We reify an idea like GDP, for example, which is to say we forget it’s an idea at all.

Again we lack equivalents for other disciplines. What tool should a civil servant reach for if they want to sum up the historical lessons of using similar policies? How do we boil down for a Minister the sociological context for a policy? And at what moments do we shine our collective attention on public policy not through a lens of economics/budgets, but through a lens of design/user experience or psychology?

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not beating up on economics. But what makes this all more peculiar is that just as we came to rely more on economics, we also decided to draw from an ever narrower subset of this rich discipline. By the late 20th century we had come to downplay, or even actively dismiss, whole chunks of economics that had historically been important, from moral economic philosophy to political economy.

As I wrote in a previous post, the result of all this was a kind of “double stretching” of the intellectual source material that we use to make policy:

We trimmed back the cloth of economics to discard all but the most orthodox ideas and then we stretched that small cloth over an ever broader domain of our social and economic lives.

So again my point isn’t to critique the paradigm we ended up with. Economics adds lots of value to policy. Arguably we have economic ideas, institutions, and tools to thank for much of the policy progress we’ve made in the last 150 years. And a lot of the thanks for this progress should go to economists themselves, who are actually quite good — despite all the jokes — at making their discipline useful. Which isn’t something we could say for, I don’t know, academic sociology.

But still, isn’t the narrowness just a bit odd? Why would we use only one part of one discipline when there’s so much insight on offer? And when policy problems are so varied and complex.

So again I think we can bank the same two insights.

1. The 1990s/2000s policy paradigm was a highly particular and yet unconscious way of seeing. So it was as if we’d donned a pair of glasses that were colourfully tinted and then immediately forgot we were wearing them.
2. Those tinted glasses determined how we behaved, and therefore guided the policy choices we made. The economic tint of the glasses, for example, meant that Labour saw the state’s relationship to the market in a certain way, and this guided their approach to an issue like inequality. (I wrote about this in this earlier essay, exploring how this 1990s/2000s approach to inequality is now outdated.)

I hope this characterises more fully what I have in mind when I talk about the ‘policy paradigm’ that underpinned Labour’s last time in office.

Of course this all comes with caveats. I’m being reductive and no doubt unfair in places. The institutions I’m talking about — the Labour Party, the civil service — are big and varied, so there will be lots of people and policies from this time that don’t fit these descriptions neatly.

Still, I do think those three words — industrial, technocratic, economic — describe the core orthodoxy of this time, at least in power centres like the Treasury. Or at least they describe Labour’s gut instincts on core policy domains like tax-benefit policy, skills policy, economic regulation, and on issues like globalisation and inequality.

So now that we’ve got a better sense of the paradigm, let’s see if we can say anything sensible about how useful it was. What was helpful/unhelpful about these ways of seeing? And how does the centre-left in 2023 relate to this 1990s/2000s paradigm? Have they moved on? And should they?

PART 2: Evaluating the paradigm

Maybe I’m just getting old, but lately I keep getting little pangs of nostalgia for the 1990s. It happens each time I hear it’s the birthday of some iconic 1990s album, like the 30th anniversary of Modern Life is Rubbish. Or when I receive a job application from someone born after the year 2000 and think for a second it’s a typo. Or when I find myself referring to the 1990s as ‘the late 1900s’, as if it’s just a period in history, which of course it now is.

What really got me thinking, though, was a conference I attended late last year run by the Tony Blair Institute. In fact this whole series of posts started life as a note for Blair after chatting to his team, until I realised it was just a bit weird to write Tony Blair a note on the moribundity of the thought system that gave rise to Blairism.

Anyway, what was funny about the TBI conference was the up/down mood it left me in. On the one hand, it was the best thing of its type I’d been to in ages in terms of the calibre and thoughtfulness of discussion and the way it foregrounded technology. Given the state of policy discourse/governance in Britain today, this was more than a bit refreshing.

On the other hand, the conference left me feeling one of those pangs of nostalgia. Not in a sad way so much as in a sad-cosy way, a bit like that feeling you get after an afternoon watching reruns of an old TV show like Friends.

I thought about this a lot afterwards. How could a conversation about governance/public policy feel at the same time fresh and passé?

I guess it was partly just the obvious nostalgia that clings to the iconic figures of New Labour, giving even a conversation about the future a late-1990s stylistic tinge.

Less flattering to Blair and co — and to the centre-left generally — I think the datedness also comes from a lack of diversity. It’s just so jarring to hear progressives talk a good game on the future in a room of people that looks like the cast of a 1990s sitcom. My guess is that this homogeneity accounts for a lot of why the centre-left feels so retro. And no doubt it also helps to explain the centre-left’s lack of intellectual vitality. If you breathe the same air year after year, you’re going to get sleepy.

The more I thought about it, though, the more I felt the retro vibe traced back to that old 1990s/2000s paradigm, and to its enduring influence.

In fact I find it hard now to picture a centrist shindig like that TBI conference without seeing a room of people — me included, to be fair— wearing tinted glasses: industrial, technocratic, economic.

Actually, the image that comes to mind is of a cinema full of people wearing those funny cardboard 3D specs that were a thing for a while in the ’90s. Specs with lenses that don’t exactly hide things, but that make us see the world in a certain way, and react accordingly. And specs that look — with hindsight — just a bit silly.

Still, we’re not here to pass aesthetic judgements. Repeat after me: there’s nothing wrong with growing up in the 1990s. The question we’re interested in isn’t one of style but of substance. Were the glasses helpful?

Maybe now that we’ve got enough distance on the 1990s-2000s, we can sum up Labour’s time in office with a sentence that runs something like this:

Labour did well on social problems that lent themselves to industrial, technocratic, and economic solutions — and badly on ones that didn’t

Labour did well, for example — and really well, in a way people on the left still seem oddly reluctant to admit — on policy challenges like unemployment, and more generally on many classical indicators of labour market policy.

Labour also did well on issues like low pay, especially once the Conservatives came to love the minimum wage. And Labour made meaningful progress — while they were in office — on technical measures of child poverty and NHS operational metrics like waiting times.

Labour did badly, though — and not just badly but surprisingly badly, in a way that should really prompt deeper reflection — on problems that don’t lend themselves to technocratic solutions. So badly that at the height of their powers, with the tailwind of a fast growing economy, and a tight labour market, and a whopping great majority, some things got worse.

What kind of things? I’m thinking, for example, of the crisis of loneliness, which aside from being just about the saddest indictment of our contemporary social settlement has — if we must instrumentalise such a thing — unsustainable costs for social care and the NHS.

And I’m thinking about care itself. By which I don’t mean the cost of social care, which we talk about a lot, but the actual human sentiment of care. As in: when people get very old and die, do they typically feel cared for and treated with compassion and dignity? [7]

I’m also thinking about work. And again not work seen through those technocratic glasses — glasses through which work only seems to show up as real wages or employment rates — but work seen through human eyes. Work as in: do most people have the chance to spend their lives doing work that is meaningful and fulfilling, and that builds a sense of pride and belonging, and that feels just plain doable, and not utterly frazzling, while actually living a life/raising a family?

Or think back to Labour’s priorities; the things that got better. Because surely the right period over which to judge success on issues like child poverty and the NHS — assuming that the goal is to make Britain progressively better — isn’t half a political cycle, when Labour held office, but a full cycle, including a subsequent period of coalition/Conservative government.

And over this period, isn’t the record on these issues also now clear? Namely that things got better from 1997–2010 — although more slowly than anyone would have liked— and the gains have since been almost entirely reversed.

So would it be fair to say that Labour’s work on these priorities was effective on its own terms. In that when Labour pulled levers, the metrics they were targetting moved in the right direction.

But could we also say that this progress turned out to be synthetic? Or inorganic? In that it didn’t take root in Britain’s political culture or political economy, and so it didn’t flourish, and sometimes didn’t even survive, beyond Labour’s time in office.

And so do we see a pattern here? That when Labour policy-makers looked at the world through those 1990s/2000s tinted glasses — industrial, technocratic, economic — their decisions drove progress, for a while, on measures like unemployment, real wages, NHS waiting lists, and family incomes.

But in many cases that progres didn’t hold. And meanwhile in more human domains of our lives— on issues like loneliness, care, dignified work, or belonging—progress stalled, and sometimes even went backwards.

So let me say straightaway: I don’t entirely buy this argument.

Or it might be more accurate to say I think it’s onto something but overreaches; it goes in the right direction, but it goes too far.

Here’s my issue with this summary of Labour’s record: I think it misses out a lot of 1997–2010 successes that don’t really fit the paradigm I’ve described. Times when Labour didn’t work in a narrowly technocratic mode.

Take, for example, the work that was done by the Social Exclusion Unit/Taskforce (about which I’m biassed, having worked there). The SEU/SETF achieved real progress on issues like homelessness. And this progress was achieved partly because the work wasn’t coldly mechanistic or lever-pulling, but patient; it recognised and worked with the human complexity of entrenched social problems.

Or think about the remarkable turnaround in inner city schools that played out from 1997–2010, especially in poor parts of London. Sure, some of this was about the Treasury pulling levers through funding settlements. But it was also about building thriving local institutions, cultures, and capabilities. Brilliant schools, basically. And many of those schools are still thriving today, and changing kids’ lives — kids that were born after Labour left office — even as their school buildings crumble.

Or think about legislation like the Equality Act, which continues to empower people against discrimination. It reflects a conception of justice that isn’t narrowly materialist/utilitarian and a role for the state that isn’t just about redistribution/compensation.

Or think back to the minimum wage. On the surface, the minimum wage looks like the perfect example of a mechanical policy; pull a lever, raise people’s pay. But really the policy owes its success not to the legal wage floor itself but to the decision to establish the tripartite Low Pay Commission, which was an act of creative political economy.

So what do these examples tell us? They tell us partly that Labour worked in other modes, beyond the narrow technocratic orthodoxy I described above. (And for what it’s worth I do still think those three words describe the orthodoxy/gut instinct that prevailed in places like the Treasury from 1997–2010, at least on core policy domains like tax-benefit policy/economic regulation and issues like globalisation and inequality.)

But when we read these examples we also see something more interesting.

We see that actually a disproportionate number of Labour’s biggest successes — and especially Labour’s more enduring successes — came precisely when they worked in these less orthodox modes.

So I think this all takes us to a conclusion that feels more rounded and fairer than the one I floated above. Something like this:

Labour’s biggest successes, and especially their most enduring successes, came when they pushed beyond a mechanistic technocracy to work in other modes. When they engaged in creative political economy; or built local institutions/capabilities; or created space for people to work patiently on social issues, recognising their human complexity.

As ever I’m conscious of word count, so let’s wrap up there.

Zooming out to the series as a whole, I’m inclined to say that after four posts (1, 2, 3, 4) we’ve got more than enough material to work with. So in the last part of the series I’ll move into reflection mode.

I’ll sum what we’ve heard so far, so that we’ve got all those post-1997 changes front of mind. And I’ll ask: what have we learned from all this? And what does this mean we should do?

What I’d like to get ultimately is a clearer sense of the shape of the progressive project for this next generation, and of the work to be done.

I’d also like to address two counter-arguments. First that this whole idea of a broader, more human approach to government would be an untimely relaxation of our commitment to empiricism in policy-making. And second that all this waffle about paradigms is indulgent when we have a cost of living crisis/broken NHS/crumbling schools to fix. I’ll try to explain why I used to think those things too, and changed my mind.

That’s it for now, though. As always I’ve tried to state my views more strongly than I hold them, in the hope of testing them out. And so as always I’d welcome thoughts, builds, and critiques.

To stay in touch with my writing you can follow me on Medium or Blue Sky or support my writing on Substack. Here are links to the first, second, and third posts in the current series. And here are two posts I wrote recently on similar lines: How to govern human and How to solve wicked problems. Or a more philosophical treatment, exploring how we lost our political imagination.

And if what you’re after is a big, optimistic story about the future and how we can make it better, there’s always my book, End State.

Footnotes

1. For more on paradigms and ways of seeing, I’d recommend Mary Douglas’ How institutions Think. She surveys writers like Durkhiem and Fleck on the concept of a thought system, and makes the case for why cognition itself is a social act. She does a great job of showing how institutions give rise to, or embody, our shared ways of seeing, and explains the nature of their hold over us.
2. One thing I find really interesting here is the way we saw/see policy as a noun — i.e. we ‘make a policy’. This speaks to Lou Downe’s insight that good services are verbs, not nouns. i.e. if 20th century government conceived of policies as nouns (as things that we make), then maybe 21st century government should think of policies as verbs, or as services (as things we do).
3. I’ve long thought that this aspect of the New Labour compromise deserves more attention than it gets. Relative to what are, IMHO, the shallower ideological compromises of third way Blairism. Sure, the third way entailed a compromise over means, for example by pursuing a liberal approach to economic regulation/inequality. But surely the bigger compromise related to the ends of government/public policy. i.e. the decision to retreat to a technocratic conception of social democracy, giving up more transcendent/liberatory conceptions. Which whatever you think of it, is surely a bigger concession of ground.
4. Notice also how these technocracy-friendly philosophies also feel just so on brand for the 1990s. They fit nicely with the hubris of the ’90s moment — the sense that all the big political questions had been answered, or had been defused/domesticated into frameworks like the one put forward by Rawls. They also fit the managerialism of that 1990s moment; the idea that all the really big political contests were over and the task now was to manage/distribute the proceeds, e.g. of globalisation. And this in turn fits the whole idea of a convergence on liberal democracy / the victory of the west / the end of history. Which let’s just say in 2023 isn’t quite so much the vibe.
5. Polly Mckenzie put it well when she wrote that over this period politicians seemed to start sorting themselves into two camps: technocrats and ideologues. Hence leaving us with the unsatisfactory choice between the radical left/right and the bland centrist.
6. One of the most interesting dynamics in government today is the way policy-making is slowly broadening beyond economics. One interesting example is the rise of design, which to my mind is the discipline that’s gone furthest in aping economics by codifying its own set of institutions and tools (e.g. service standards, techniques of user-centred policy-making, agile operating models that allow iteration, the emerging professional discipline of policy design). Another example is the way other disciplines have snuck back into policy-making under the legitimating cover of economics. e.g. see the way psychology reentered policy-making via behavioural economics and the way sociology is now doing the same via a revival of political economy / behavioural theories of institutions.
7. One book I can’t recommend highly enough is Madeleine Bunting’s Labours of Love. It’s a timely reminder of what ‘care’ really means and of how far we’ve drifted from that meaning when we talk about care in the context of policy.