New Labour, Old Labour

by Anthony Seldon (editor), Kevin Hickson (Editor)

We are constantly told that New Labour forms an historic departure from the traditions of the Labour Party. This book, written by a distinguished selection of academics and commentators, provides the most detailed comparison yet of old and new Labour in power. It is also the first to offer a comprehensive analysis of the last Labour Government before the rise of Thatcher and the re-emergence of the Labour Party under Tony Blair's leadership. It reveals much about the history of the Labour Party as well as providing a much-needed context from which to judge the current government.

Genres: History, Politics

372 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Sir Anthony Francis Seldon, FRSA, FRHistS, FKC, is a British educator and contemporary historian. He was the 13th Master (headmaster) of Wellington College, one of Britain's co-educational independent boarding schools. In 2009, he set up The Wellington Academy, the first state school to carry the name of its founding independent school. He was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Buckingham from 2015 to 2020. Seldon was knighted in the 2014 Birthday Honours for services to education and modern political history.

Reviews

[Noah · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good set of essays on a very interesting time in histories. Some more interesting to me than others but that's naturally a matter of preference. Still a very varied overview of the time period.

[Gramarye · Rating 4 out of 5]

To make a fairly crude analogy, editing a book about the Labour governments of the 1970s is somewhat akin to performing an autopsy on a corpse that has been dragged about, kicked around, and otherwise mangled almost out of recognition. For the last two-and-a-half decades, politicians on both the left and the right have been pointing to the 1970s as an example of what they DON'T want to see happen again. Militant industrial action, a stagnating economy, rampant inflation, the humiliation of the 1976 IMF loan, and finally the so-called Winter of Discontent in 1978-79 all combined to a no-confidence vote in Jim Callaghan's leadership and the 1979 General Election that brought Margaret Thatcher into power. In the years that followed, Thatcher and her successors (both John Major and Tony Blair) sought to distance themselves from that particular time in British history. Blair even chose to rebrand the party as 'New Labour' specifically to assure the electorate that Labour had shaken off its past failures and flaws and was prepared to be a party capable of governing once again. Yet any number of questions still remain: To what extent is New Labour really a radical departure from the party of Keir Hardie, Ramsay MacDonald, Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson, and Jim Callaghan? Were the Wilson and Callaghan years really the string of disasters that today's politicians like to spend their time rabbiting on about? And if not, why have both the new left and the new right found the 1970s to be a surprisingly useful time period to denounce?

The essays and articles in New Labour, Old Labour are on the whole an excellent collection of analyses on different aspects of the Wilson and Callaghan governments. Well-known and respected historians and political scientists delve into the details of government in the latter half of the 1970s, such as industrial and social policy, Scottish and Welsh devolution, the crisis in Northern Ireland, the Labour Party's near-meltdown over relations with the EEC, and the ups and (mostly) downs of the economic cycle. Other articles take a more personal look at the mechanics of government, specifically with regard to Wilson and Callaghan's relationships with their Cabinet ministers, the Parliamentary Labour Party, and the Labour Party rank and file.

There were several articles I particularly enjoyed -- not surprisingly, they happened to be by authors whose writing styles appeal to me. Philip Norton's article about the Labour Party's struggles to keep control of Parliament was a personal favourite, though that might have something to do with the fact that thanks to Alec the Dissertation, I can practically cite chapter and verse out of some of Norton's other books about parliamentary dissent. Dennis Kavanagh also does a fine job looking at why it's so convenient for politicians today to misread and misinterpret Old Labour, finding in it a useful way to define themselves and their political platforms to the electorate ('this is what we're not' rather than 'this is what we are'). The one article that I wish had not been included was about social inequality under Old Labour, written jointly by Polly Toynbee and David Walker. I'm not overly fond of Polly Toynbee's writing style to begin with, so perhaps that was a mark against the article to start. However, in the midst of so many well-written scholarly articles on the time period, the work of two journalists simply doesn't feel like it belongs -- it feels lightweight, somehow. I suppose it was added in there to make the book more marketable to a nonscholarly audience, but I think I would've rather seen the article written by someone else (who doesn't set my teeth on edge to read him/her).