Labour and the destructive hand of History

Jonathan Downing
Jul 22, 2017 · 9 min read

“While we reshape our future, we must be careful not to misrepresent our past… Denigrating our past denies those achievements, strengthens the position of our opponents and pushes further into the future the day when Labour gets into office again.”
Harriet Harman, “A Woman’s Work”, p.329.

“ Blairism, New Labour, whatever you want to call it, is dead. It owed its hegemony to, frankly, despair: the idea that socialist policies were electoral poison, and offering them to the British people would invite only landslide Tory victories.”
Owen Jones, “New Labour is dead. Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet must stay as it is”, The Guardian, 13 June 2017

Beneath the loud and sterile debates over who controls the chains and relays of the Labour Party’s machinery is a subjugated, but no less violent, intellectual war. The most pernicious divide in the Labour Party lies not in the reductive binaries of “Progress vs Momentum”, not even “left vs right”. Labour’s membership — and significant parts of its new electoral coalition — are increasingly divided over how, and whether, to accommodate the party’s present situation with its (recent) history.

Our inability to reach a settlement over that rapprochement with history is creating a vortex which draws in all around it. Through the making and remaking of myth and counter myth – the spectre of history that slowly suffocates Labour is sustained and emboldened. And the reduction of Labour’s history to an appraisal of individual actors – most notably (but not exclusively) Tony Blair – shores up the real shibboleth keeping the party divided. The task of how, and whether, to overcome this divide is one which will determine the future identity of the Labour Party: from its leadership right down to its smallest constituent branches.


Harriet Harman’s comments on the need to put the New Labour government’s achievements into their proper perspective are themselves an historical comment. Her remarks are about the Labour leadership contest of 2010, in which each candidate sought – in her eyes – to distance themselves from the legacies of the New Labour government of which many had so recently been a part (with Diane Abbott being the key exception).

Harman’s memoirs are an important testament to the achievements of that government. She writes eloquently of the incredible progress made on the reform of domestic and intimate partner violence legislation. She writes about the impact that the minimum wage had on families in her constituency. She writes about the struggle to change Parliament’s culture of hostility to women and anti-social sittings which acted as an unjust barrier to participation especially for would-be women MPs. And she writes generously of the contributions that many many Labour women made to the development of New Labour’s policy platform, which she (and I, incidentally, to be upfront about my authorial bias) saw as primarily progressive, liberative and transformative.

Most compellingly, Harman’s memoirs offer a challenge to a dominant myth in the history of the Labour Party. Namely, that the agenda of New Labour was set – and implemented – almost exclusively by the two men who would be it’s only Prime Ministers: Blair and Brown. So central has the myth of New Labour’s Romulus and Remus been, that the achievements and campaigning of Labour’s women during that period has been criminally overlooked. Harman’s memoir rightly puts her – and her then-researcher Liz Kendall – at the forefront of the battle for the National Minimum Wage within the Labour Party’s labyrinthine network of unions, members, and elected politicians. One of the key contributions that Harman’s autobiography makes is to rescue the historical memory of New Labour as solely two men squabbling. It celebrates the feminism, the egalitarianism, and the tenacity of so many whom history has risked erasing from Labour’s record.

For Harman, New Labour’s contributions live – or should live – through the visible improvements made in the lives of her constituents. The proper perspective in which to put New Labour is not in a fixation on its leading men – and especially Blair. Rather, it is in an analysis of the lives of the communities it governed. And, in particular, in drawing a comparison with life under the Tory government’s which preceded and succeeded it. This analysis should never be uncritical. There is always more work to do, and every government inflicts harm which needs to be unlocked.

Reading Harman’s memoirs allows one way of reconciling Labour with a history that for some is unbearably dominated by one man. It encourages us to widen our cast of characters under consideration, and to resist reducing Labour’s story to its exclusively male elected leaders. In doing so it encourages analysis of the multifaceted political alliances, perspectives and Network that contributed to – and coalesced around – New Labour’s policy agenda.

Labour’s present battle for the control of history, however, has left its indelible mark on Harman’s own legacy, and is currently preventing this possible way forward from getting its proper hearing. It is a reading of history which demands the mummification of New Labour, for its legacy and key players to be seen as troubling, but inert, relics useful only as a teaching tool. Of what not to do with power.


The cry to kill off New Labour’s memory is a powerful one in the present-day Labour Party. And in the light of the General Election, in which Jeremy Corbyn appeared to trump New Labour’s signature card of electability, this cry has intensified and deepened. From prominent commentators such as Owen Jones declaring New Labour (or Blairism, or centrism) to be dead, to local constituency Labour parties demanding new executives, and the dismantling of the party’s campaigning and policy development infrastructures. In all cases, New Labour is remembered above all as a stain on the party’s memory – at its most extreme, it is an hubristic aberration never again to be replicated.

These cries, despite the novelty of their current intensity, are not new. In fact Jones belongs to a deep and rich tradition of Labour’s “left”. He stands in a tradition that is far better (though not completely) at collapsing the retelling of its history into the celebration of lone individuals. Though yesterday’s men similarly loom large (though not always accurately) in the history of Labour’s left – Tony Benn, Aneurin Bevan and Clement Attlee – many prominent voices in the ascendency in the modern-day party are fastidious cheerleaders of Labour’s contemporary broad cast. Diane Abbott, Emily Thornberry, Angela Rayner and Barry Gardiner are all celebrated for the roles they play in Jeremy Corbyn’s top team. Within this tradition, a more diverse range of voices are celebrated and thereby a focus on the flaws of the individual is more deftly avoided. Whether Jeremy Corbyn can avoid that fate, and the left can continue to keep their historical perspective broader, remains to be seen.

In any event, the historical memory of New Labour is to be navigated from the perspective of the outsider. So the narrative may go: it was a period in the party’s history which the left were either excluded – or absented themselves – from. The progress that New Labour made could be judged to be insufficiently radical, insufficiently emancipatory, or insufficiently protective of the communities and culture that make up Labour’s historical base. Its economic and social settlement was built upon an unacceptable marriage of convenience with the worst excesses of capitalism – brought home to roost in the global financial crisis of 2008. Hospitals that were built have the albatross of private finance initiatives hanging around their neck. An NHS left open to predatory private profiteering. But most compellingly, the history of New Labour, is seen as a moral failure in its foreign policy interventions. In particular, the war in Iraq represents a cynical and unforgivable moment of moral hubris – where the dissenting cries of Benn, Cook, Corbyn and McDonnell went unheeded, only to leave a generation of death, political instability, and emboldened global terrorism in its wake.

In this reading of Labour’s history, the government of which Harriet Harman was an important – if often overlooked part – is an economic, political and moral failed experiment. And as Corbyn’s Labour defied expectations and deprived the Conservatives of their majority on an ostensibly unabashed left-wing platform, so too New Labour’s claims to electability went up in smoke. The 97–2010 Labour government becomes a period which stands primarily as a warning to future generations: of what not to do with power, and how not to attain it.

Harman, as an unabashed defender of that government’s achievements, is thus part of the party’s history which Jones argues should be considered extinct. As a (not uncritical) defender of Blairism, Harman’s own political contribution risks being rewritten and similarly ossified. Her tenure as caretaker leader of the party immediately prior to Jeremy Corbyn’s election provides – for some – a totemic example of New Labour’s moral failings. Where John McDonnell claimed he would rather swim through vomit than endorse the Conservatives’ proposals to limit child benefit to only two children, and to enforce a cap on the amount that any family could receive from the state – Harriet Harman whipped Labour MP’s to abstain on the bill’s second reading. Nothing so summed up the need for a complete break from New Labour’s legacy – so the argument goes – than the Labour Party not actively resisting and fighting such a pernicious assault on the welfare state (however futile such a fight may be from parliamentary opposition). The defence of “better to try and curb the excesses of the bill through amendments” was unconvincing, and the fact that Labour was whipped to vote against the bill’s final reading was too little, too late. And with it, Harman’s voice within the modern Labour Party has been, perhaps temporarily, quietened. To those of us who don’t wholly accept this reading of Labour Party history, this silencing is too high a price to tolerate.


Nuance is the enemy of simple analysis. Harman and Jones, in reality, don’t fit at all neatly into a binary of New Labour apologist or cremator. But their respective comments on the need to keep the memory of New Labour alive or dead reflect an argument that is playing out at every level of the party – often dressed up as a debate over democracy and process. For as long as neither “side” has completely won the battle for supremacy within the Labour Party, the conundrum of how to “write” the history of the modern Labour Party and its most recent tenure in government will continue to loom over its membership and leadership.

For those who feel that New Labour has to be declared “dead” in order for the party to once again be a party of power, a wholesale revision of the party’s policy, campaigning technology and messaging is required. New Labour has no answers for the challenges of the modern era and the political visions of its proponents do not have the moral clarity required to construct a new political offer to an electorate which so comprehensively shunned its political vision on June 8th. If Corbyn’s Labour is to stand for anything, it must radically break from the failed philosophies and strategies of New Labour.

For those who feel New Labour’s achievements should endure and need to be properly written into the party’s history if it is to be remembered and seen again as a party of government, such a wholesale rejection is impossible. Attachment to New Labour’s achievements and recognition of its errors and shortcomings are emotional. Aberrations like Iraq, however painful, should be seen in the light of Labour’s long tradition of internationalism and of successful foreign intervention (Sierra Leone, Kosovo). And its economic policy should always be seen as clearly and positively distinct from the damaging Tory ideas which held communities back. And it’s achievements should, nay must, be celebrated. There can be no question of Harriet Harman’s contribution to the reform of domestic violence legislation or her drafting of the Equality Act being buried by the memory of the Welfare Bill. Labour under Corbyn must stand in continuity with New Labour, or it will not stand as a viable political project in Britain’s parliamentary democracy.

Whether one side is correct or not, whether New Labour’s contribution should be seen as dead or alive, is to an extent neither here nor there. The ongoing debate over New Labour’s legacy only serves to make it loom larger in the party’s consciousness. And for as long as a settlement can’t be reached, the party will continue to be beset by binaries of “left” and “right”, of “Corbynite” and “Blairite”. And there is danger here too for Corbyn’s own project and whatever legacy it may have. That memory of Labour under Corbyn starts to erase the contributions of Abbott, Thornberry and Rayner, just as the memory of Blair and Brown has eroded the impact of Harman, Beckett and Hewitt.

The Labour Party is a party built on its manifold and intertwining traditions. And the lauding of its historical achievements is an integral part of our identity as a political movement. The party wrestles with how to write the history of its time in government because it must. Narrative and tradition are as key to Labour’s identity as the interplay of Methodism and Marxism. Yet for as long as New Labour’s place in the party’s memory remains unsettled, the hand of history will retain its grip on Labour’s shoulder. And for as long as we remain unable to decide between holding on to New Labour’s contributions or consigning them firmly to the past, the war at the heart of Labour will continue to rage. And co-existence will continue to be uneasy for those who find themselves confronted with the other side of the binary. It remains to be seen whether that divide will ever be breached.

Jonathan Downing

Recovering academic; Labour member; Girls Aloud enthusiast.

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