No New Labour

[rivers10]

Hi everyone new here and when I saw the alternate political history section my mind literally exploded, I honestly though I was the only person geeky enough to ever wonder about stuff like this XD

But anywho I've wondered about a certain scenario a lot lately and when I discovered there was no thread on it I figured I'd start it myself. The scenario being what state would politics be in if there had been (as the title of the thread states) no New Labour, that for whatever reason in the mid 90's Blair wasn't elected leader and the modernisation program that Kinnock and Smith began went no further than it did under their leadership and Lab remained a broadly left wing party.

Obviously no Blair means many things would be different (probably no Iraq war for one) but instead I'd like to focus on the general state of UK politics. As far as I see it (and I admit this might be somewhat partisan on my behalf hence I welcome those that disagree) not morphing into New Labour would result in the Labour party being in a much better state than they are at present and by that I mean united, potentially in government as of today and in a broadly more left-wing nation.

I think its fair to say that no matter who Lab had as leader and what manifesto they stood on Lab were going to win in 97. Major eked out a tiny victory in 92, the Tories had been in power for 18 years and the public were sick of them, the divisions over Europe, the issue with sleaze, the ERM fiasco etc etc Its also fair to say that while Labour would have won it probably would not have been by the huge majority Blair attained since they perhaps couldn't have convinced many of the solidly Tory voters Blair did but still a comfortable win nonetheless.

And this is where things get interesting, for one a Labour government that tried to reverse certain aspects of Thatcherism would have thus prevented the Overton window shifting rightwards which it did when Lab adopted much of Thatcher's reforms. But also if they had a smaller majority it would be very likely that Lab would have been ejected in 2005/06. This may seem bad on the face of it but then the full blame of the 08 crash would have fell on the incumbent Tories shoulders potentially destroying their main electoral trump card these days which is economic competence, one could imagine Labour's attack line already that "the cons tanked the economy the last time they were in power and now they've tanked it again" Could we have seen the Tories defeated after just one term and Lab back in power in 2011?

And where do the Lib Dems fit in this? Without Blair shifting to the right Charles Kennedy's approach of turning the Lib Dems into the more radical party would have likely not been attempted and thus the subsequent collapse upon coalition with the Tories would never have happened, could the Lib Dems have remained a major electoral force? Could they even have continued to grow and become the official opposition? 

What do you guys think?

[neilm]

I find the ERM issue puzzling. Leaving it was actually a good thing, although it destroyed the Conservatives reputation for economic competence. I don't understand why more people didn't (and haven't, even now) latched on to it being beneficial.

[mondialito]

An interesting question is what happens to the Labour Right? Without Blair as leader, there probably won't be 'Blairites', unless he loudly argues for the policies he pursues in OTL within government. Perhaps the 'Old Labour Right' are more influential in the party in this scenario without the presence of Progress?

[neilm]

Aug 19, 2016 22:11:36 GMT mondialito said:

An interesting question is what happens to the Labour Right? Without Blair as leader, there probably won't be 'Blairites', unless he loudly argues for the policies he pursues in OTL within government. Perhaps the 'Old Labour Right' are more influential in the party in this scenario without the presence of Progress?

Weren't the Old Labour Right just a bunch of social authoritarians, rather than economic moderates?

[Davıd Boothroyd]

Aug 21, 2016 10:37:30 GMT neilm said:

Aug 19, 2016 22:11:36 GMT mondialito said:

An interesting question is what happens to the Labour Right? Without Blair as leader, there probably won't be 'Blairites', unless he loudly argues for the policies he pursues in OTL within government. Perhaps the 'Old Labour Right' are more influential in the party in this scenario without the presence of Progress?

Weren't the Old Labour Right just a bunch of social authoritarians, rather than economic moderates?

No, not specially. A small section on the old right were from the Liverpool/West of Scotland RC school who were social conservatives, favouring government-led programmes to keep communities but not if they dampened individual morality. But the largest part were the TU-influenced group who knew that it wasn't enough to demand fairer shares of the economy, it also had to be made to grow. This group was also strongly anti-communist so cleaved to an Atlanticist foreign policy. They mostly didn't care about social conservatism v social liberalism.

[Deleted]

Guess who was a Blairite in 1999?

link

[Scroll to bottom of article]

[BossMan]

Supposing Gordon Brown had stood for Labour leader in 1994 instead of Tony Blair; I wonder if he would have "invented" New Labour, or perhaps his own version of it.
Incidentally, there's also a thread named "If John Smith had lived" which I suppose sort of overlaps with this one.

[Merseymike]

Aug 21, 2016 16:51:41 GMT joe said:

Guess who was a Blairite in 1999?

link

[Scroll to bottom of article]

I think all of us recognised the need to try and increase participation in policy making and the limitations of the resolution approach.

Unfortunately the alternative hasn't proved to be very much better.... The policy forum system hasn't achieved anything of what it claimed to want to do. Being sceptical it could be argued that this was never the case anyway.

I was certainly a lot more supportive of New Labour then than I was by 2003 but then I am definitely much more left wing now than I was then.

[The Bishop]

The party might not have been in power for as long after 1997 (and yes, I refuse to believe that election was anything other than totally unlosable for Labour) but it might have achieved as much in a shorter time. And would almost certainly be in a happier state now.

[greenchristian]

Sept 1, 2016 11:29:47 GMT The Bishop said:

The party might not have been in power for as long after 1997 (and yes, I refuse to believe that election was anything other than totally unlosable for Labour) but it might have achieved as much in a shorter time. And would almost certainly be in a happier state now.

Almost all of the Blair/Brown actual achievements were in the first term. It's not hard to imagine an Old Labour victory in 1997 leading to two terms of the kind of progress made from 1997 to 2001, followed by a defeat that left the country a lot better off (at least from a left-wing point of view) than it was in reality.