violence to suppress the opposition Lenin had tried to buy off, that the NEP
was abolished.
New Labour
New Labour began as an unofficial label for Tony Blair’s attempt to modernize
the ideological appeal of the BritishLabour Partyin the 1990s, in order to
make it electorally competitive with the ThatcheriteConservative Party. It
rapidly became so popular that the leadership adopted it, and by the early 21st
century ‘New Labour’ had all but become the official name of the party. The
Labour Party had been distinctly moderate or centre-left throughout the 1960s
and 1970s, when it was in office for a total of 11 years. The defeat by the
Conservatives in 1979 encouraged the activists, always more politically
extreme, to drag the party considerably further to the left. From this position
it was defeated again both in 1983 and 1987. Newer generations of leaders
tried to remedy this by some movement back towards the centre, particularly
under Neil Kinnock in the prelude to the general election of 1992. However,
even this was not enough, with the electorate still seeing the party as too
extreme for office, even though Thatcher had now been replaced by a less
charismatic leader. After 1992 steady moves to radically transform the Party’s
constitution and official ideological goals were more successful, especially
when a young leader, Tony Blair, took over in 1994. He and his allies fought
an intense campaign to, in their own words, ‘modernize’ the party, and to
develop a new doctrine forsocial democraticparties, theThird Way, even
going so far as to abolish the party’s historic commitment to nationalization of
the means of production, hitherto enshrined in Clause IV of its constitution.
The result was a convincing defeat of a tired Conservative administration in
1997, and an historically unprecedented full, second parliamentary term at the
beginning of the 21st century.
The ‘new’ Labour party bears little resemblance to the old one. It has
entirely accepted the free market andmonetarismof its opponent, has
accepted the need for severe fiscal orthodoxy and low tax rates, and was, at
the beginning of the century, largely losing its ties to organized labour. It
competes now mainly on managerial competence, with only a slight prefer-
ential option for the poorer or, in the modern language, the ‘socially
excluded’.
There have been few such major transformations of what a party stands for,
at least without a split. A similar attempt after the 1979 defeat created a rival
Social Democratic Party, which was rapidly swallowed up by the Liberal
Party. What facilitated, as well as required, this later transformation was the
major sociological change that the country had undergone since the founding
of the Party. Effectively the old working class has diminished in size and new,
New Labour