Reassessing New Labour: Market, State and Society under Blair and Brown

The Political Quarterly’s Reassessing New Labour: Market, State and Society under Blair and Brown is an authoritative evaluation of the long–term legacy of New Labour. It embraces thinkers and commentators from across the progressive and liberal centre–left including Baroness Shirley Williams, John Denham MP, Vernon Bogdanor, John Curtice, Dan Corry, Tim Horton, Paul Gregg, Kitty Ussher, Guy Lodge and Alan Finlayson. The collection is a foretaste of the realigned, plural politics that Labour will need to create if it is to challenge the Coalition Government four years from now.

Since the election there have been numerous ideologically–inspired accounts of where it all went wrong; as yet there has been little insightful engagement with the complex history of New Labour. As a result key lessons have yet to be learned, and the central dilemma of whether the strategic assumptions that informed the centre–left’s modernising project in the mid–1990s are relevant now, has not been confronted. This book aims to fill that void. 

 

Notes on Contributors

Preface: James Purnell

Introduction: Reviewing New Labour in Government: Progressive Dilemmas?: Patrick Diamond and Mike Kenny

Section 1
1. New Labour and Inequality: Paul Gregg
2. Solidarity Lost? Labour and the Politics of the Welfare State: Tim Horton
3. Reappraising New Labour′s Political Economy: John Denham

Section 2
4. An Era of Constitutional Reform: Vernon Bogdanor
5. Rebuilding the Bonds of Trust and Confidence? Labour′s Constitutional Reform Programme: John Curtice
6. New Labour and the Distribution of Power: Constitutional Reform, Human Rights and Civil Liberties: Francesca Klug
7. Localism under New Labour: Guy Lodge and Rick Muir

Section 3
8. Labour′s Record on the Economy: Kitty Ussher
9. Labour and the Economy, 1997–2010: More than a Faustian Pact: Dan Corry
10. New Labour and the Politics of Ownership: Stuart White

Section 4
11. The Death of Class–based Politics: Peter Kellner
12. Back to Class: Lessons for the Labour Party: Alan Finlayson
13. Why did Labour′s Public Sector Reforms Fail to Transform Communities?: Jessica Asato

Section 5
14. Shirley Williams in Conversation with Tony Wright
15. The New Labour Government′s Place in History: Brian Brivati
16. Afterword: Future Directions for Labour: Patrick Diamond and Mike Kenny

Index



Patrick Diamond is a Doctoral Student at Sheffield University, Gwilym Gibbon Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, and a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Politics at the University of Oxford. Patrick is also an elected member of Southwark Council.  He was previously Head of Policy Planning in 10 Downing Street and Senior Policy Adviser to the Prime Minister. Patrick has spent ten years as a Special Adviser in various roles at the heart of British Government, including No.10 Downing Street, the Cabinet Office, the Northern Ireland Office, and the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) where he served as Group Director of Strategy.  

Michael Kenny is Professor of Politics at the University of Sheffield. He has published widely in the fields of political thought, British politics and public policy. In 2010 he was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Research into the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Cambridge, and is an Associate at the Institute for Public Policy Research and Demos think–tanks. He is currently writing a book on the politics of English nationhood.

"Most of the contributors to Reassessing New Labour exhibit an admirable ability to deal with the issues of the moment without appearing to be more interested in fashion than in feasibility . . .It is this sort of clear and bold analysis – not influenced by attempts to justify the unjustifiable or the unthinking acceptance of Third Way shibboleths – that makes Reassessing New Labour much the superior book of these two. " (New Statesman, 26 September 2011)