By Tom Costello, Socialist Alternative Merseyside
In 2002, Margaret Thatcher was asked what her greatest life achievement was. She replied with “Tony Blair and New Labour”. If she were alive today, she would likely add Keir Starmer to that list.
With a newly-elected Labour government in office, it is more important than ever that we study the Blair era. How did New Labour come about? What is its real legacy? And what can socialists and workers take away from these years as lessons for today?
Where did Blairism come from?
Blair rose to power at a time of setbacks for socialists. Despite being brought down by the mass movement against her hated Poll Tax in 1990, Thatcher managed to impose a series of defeats on the workers’ movement – most famously in the 1984-85 miners’ strike. By the end of the decade, trade union membership had more than halved from a peak of 13 million to just 6 million and Britain’s powerful industrial unions were weakened. By the early 1990s, the Labour left was in retreat. The organised voice of Marxism in the party around the Militant newspaper had been effectively purged by the right-wing Neil Kinnock leadership.
Meanwhile the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 laid the basis for an ideological offensive against socialist ideas. Genuine Marxists had never defended the Stalinist dictatorships, but this did not stop the ideologists of the ruling class from presenting it as a victory for ‘their side’. The political scientist Francis Fukuyama famously described this as the “end of history”.
The established right wing in the unions seized on these events to try to transform their unions, ushering in a period of partnership unionism, which was based on an outlook of ‘cooperation’ with the bosses. Blair was portrayed as a so-called ‘moderniser’, representing a middle-class layer of career politicians who sought to fundamentally transform Labour into an outright capitalist party.
“I want a situation more like the Democrats and Republicans in the US”, said Blair at the time. “People don’t even question for a single moment that the Democrats are a pro-business party. They should not be asking the question about New Labour”.
Of course Labour had always had a hostile right wing contained within it. It had been what Marxists referred to as a “capitalist workers party” – torn between a pro-capitalist leadership and an overwhelmingly working-class base tied to the trade union movement.
But what was unique to Blair was his success in remaking Labour from top to bottom in his image, largely because of the hollowing out of the party’s workingclass elements. All vestiges of party democracy were eliminated. Clause IV, the ‘socialist clause’ committing Labour to public ownership was scrapped.
But in contrast to Starmer, Blair’s landslide victory in 1997 was genuinely based on widespread support, and was met with optimism after 18 years of Tory rule. The theme song of New Labour’s election campaign – “Things Can Only Get Better” – reflected a widespread mood in society that British society was going to improve. The neoliberal era was unchallenged, global trade was at a record high, and the opening up of new markets in the former Stalinist countries created a temporary boom, however shallow. Gordon Brown famously based his economic outlook on the idea that capitalism’s ‘boom and bust’ cycle had been overcome – which was of course shown to be utterly false by the end of Labour’s time in power.
Privatisation, privatisation and privatisation
After a brief honeymoon period, using the government surplus from the ‘boom years’, Blair introduced the minimum wage, built children’s centres and invested in the NHS and education. However, New Labour eventually showed its true colours. Blair famously promised on the campaign trail to prioritise three things: “education, education and education”. He should have actually said “privatisation, privatisation and privatisation”. New Labour was first to introduce tuition fees in 1999, and oversaw a massive level of market intrusion into the public sector more generally.
In health, Blair lifted policies directly from the playbook of Thatcher, such as the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) policy. This involved the state contracting private companies to build hospitals and schools, which would be then leased back with money from the public purse. The negative impacts of PFI are well-documented today. Dozens of NHS Trusts are still seriously struggling to pay off enormous debts to private companies at taxpayers’ expense.
Welfare for single mothers, as well as tens of thousands of skilled industrial jobs were slashed and offshored during the New Labour era. Many of the areas where these policies caused the greatest damage are unsurprisingly the breeding ground for the base of Reform and the populist right today.
Blood for oil
Blair took on the role of US imperialism’s lapdog. This was an era where the US acted as the dominant imperialist power on the world stage. The ‘neocons’ – allies of US President George Bush – had crafted the doctrine of ‘humanitarian intervention’ – in which US imperialism would act as a policeman of the world and ‘spread democracy’ through military action. All of this was happily repeated by New Labour.
To drum up as much support as he could for war in the aftermath of the the attack on the World Trade Centre on 9/11, Blair began a campaign of blatant lies and fabrication. Claims were made in Blair’s so-called ‘Dodgy Dossier’ of Saddam Hussein’s regime sitting on “weapons of mass destruction” (WMDs) which could be deployed within 45 minutes. There was no doubt that Saddam was a bloodthirsty, anti-working class dictator who socialists had no business supporting, but the claims of WMDs were shown to be completely made up.
The ensuing War on Terror was never about spreading ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were primarily about securing US imperialism’s dominant status, strengthening its strategic position in the Middle East and installing regimes which would act in a friendly way towards US and British oil companies. Iraq’s natural wealth was handed over to corporations, and some estimates have placed the death toll of Blair and Bush’s war at anywhere up to one million, although a precise figure will most likely never be known.
Far from ‘ending terrorism’, the war also fed into a growing spiral of conflict and violence, with consequences far beyond Iraq’s borders, as seen during the 7/7 bombings in London in 2005, which was followed up by Blair with a brutal cycle of state racism against Muslims and draconian ‘anti-terror’ legislation, which remain in place today.
Lessons of the anti-war movement
Bush and Blair’s war triggered the biggest anti-war movement since Vietnam, with around 1.5 million marching on the streets of London in February 2003. A youth revolt broke out in the schools and colleges as thousands of young people staged walkouts. However, despite its huge size, this movement did not succeed in stopping the invasion.
The only way this could have happened would have been if it had ultimately been based on a more powerful way of crippling the ruling class’s power, in particular through workers’ strike action. With a determined lead and organisation, this would have been possible. Train drivers in Motherwell in Scotland gained headlines for refusing to transport weapons to Iraq that same year, while left-wing RMT leader Bob Crow spoke of the possibility of a one-day transport workers’ strike on the day of the invasion.
Of course, the established leaders of the Trades Union Congress were never going to agree to this without gigantic pressure, but the leaders of Stop the War Coalition (the main anti-war campaign) unfortunately failed to apply any. Stop the War had been first established by a mixture of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), Communist Party of Britain and anti-war Labour MPs such as Jeremy Corbyn. Their strategy was to ‘broaden’ the campaign to also include bosses’ parties and politicians such as Lib Dem leader Charles Kennedy, as well as middle class and even capitalist religious leaders. This ultimately placed a brake on the movement. The key lesson of this experience is that the working class can only rely on its own organised power and strength to stop imperialist wars.
New political formations
Blair’s pro-big business agenda triggered some important class struggles during this period. Reflecting a desire to fight from the ranks of the unions, a number of Blair’s lackeys were voted out and replaced by a generation of left-wing leaders, nicknamed the “Awkward Squad” by the media.
2002 in particular saw significant strikes of fire fighters, rail workers, postal workers, teachers and civil servants. One million council workers – overwhelmingly women – took Blair on with industrial action, who he described as “wreckers” during the 2002 Labour conference. These events made it clear to thousands that it was fruitless trying to reclaim Labour from the inside, and a new party for the working class was needed. As is also the case now, millions were being paid to Labour by the unions, and in return all they were getting in return were cuts and antiunion propaganda.
The rise of the far-right only made the task of building a working-class, left party more urgent. The disillusionment generated by Blair’s policies was being seized on by the racist British National Party, which had a history as a neo-fascist and Nazi organisation, but had rebranded by putting on suits and making populist appeals. After all, if the left doesn’t have a fighting, anti-establishment alternative to unite the multi-racial working class, the far-right will fill that vacuum instead.
Since the mid-1990s, Militant Labour (the predecessor organisation of Socialist Alternative) had been calling for a new working-class party. Arthur Scargill, the former miners’ leader, stepped up to the plate for a time and set up the Socialist Labour Party in 1996. But despite Scargill’s deserved reputation as a heroic class fighter in the 80s, the SLP eventually stalled, largely due to the sectarian methods of Scargill himself, who took a top-down, Stalinist approach to leadership.
Later came the example of the Respect Party, which was based on a coalition between the SWP and George Galloway. Galloway had been expelled from Labour for supporting resistance to the invasion of Iraq. However, despite his principled stance on the war, he was (and still is) a political opportunist, who twinned some left-wing policies with toxic reactionary right-wing ideas, such as opposition to abortion and LGBTQ+ rights.
Respect based itself on the mass anti-war movement, but it did so in an unprincipled way. It correctly fought against Blair’s racist war on Muslims at home and abroad. But rather than fighting to organise workers of all communities and winning working-class Muslims to socialism, it based itself on a cross-class ‘communalist’ approach, watering down its politics to try and appeal to middle-class community leaders. This acted to blur the class differences within Muslim communities. It represented a departure from the basic socialist idea that, while challenging every manifestation of oppression in society, the job of socialists is also to bring out the common interests that have the potential to unite working class people of all backgrounds. Workers have more in common with fellow workers from a different background than with a boss in their own community. Respect ultimately broke apart and fragmented, which had more to do with its unprincipled politics than anything else
Despite the weaknesses of these failed attempts to set up new parties, they still reflected the desire of hundreds of thousands for a left alternative. Starmer’s betrayals in government today will yet again force many more to draw the same conclusion.
Where now?
The New Labour project eventually caved in on itself. The 2007-8 Great Recession acted as the final nail of the coffin, but it was already clear where events were heading. Between the 1997 and 2005 general elections, Labour lost four million votes. Growing numbers of people abandoned what they correctly saw as a morally corrupt, sleazy government acting in service to big business.
But the failure to build a viable, fighting mass left party during these years also had lasting repercussions. Following the defeat of Blair’s successor Gordon Brown in 2010, the Con-Dem coalition simply carried on where Labour left off, using the crisis to ramp up privatisation and anti-worker austerity policies. In 2015, anger against Labour’s lack of opposition finally found an outlet in the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader. While the Corbyn project played a huge role in raising the expectations of a new generation of activists, it was ultimately defeated because of its conciliatory approach to the Blairite wing of the party, paving the way for the election of Starmer as leader.
Having crushed the left within the Labour Party, Starmer is now determined to follow in Blair’s footsteps in government and to repeat his record once again. However, this period is completely different to 1997 and any room for manoeuvre is massively constrained by unparalleled crises on all fronts. Capitalism in the 2020s is plagued by economic turbulence, inter-imperialist war and an escalating climate crisis. We are also seeing mass movements breaking out on multiple issues. From almost day one, this has been and will be a government of crisis. We need a socialist alternative to give direction to these movements and to face up to the task of transforming society.
