Oh, dear, it's grave (and there is a touch of the flu around here, maybe?):
The post-mortems - the mot juste, I think - on New Labour have missed a point. The party is paying the price for the fact that the New Labour project was based upon profound, and now crippling, intellectual insecurity.
Put yourself in the shoes of New Labour’s founders in the 80s and early 90s. You see that traditional social democratic arguments for redistribution don’t work. You see Labour’s traditional support base, the manual working class, declining in numbers (pdf). And you see a managerial class winning what you want - wealth and power.
What do you do?
You abandon traditional Labourism, in favour of an appeal to Mondeo man and Worcester woman. You retain a vestigial belief in income redistribution but defend it only because it is the partner of economic efficiency, rather than a goal in its own right, and you pursue it through stealth taxes and complicated tax credits for working families. And you adopt a cringing deference towards the managerial class, believing it should be free of burdensome taxes whilst having the ability to deliver top-down reform of the public services.
What we’re now seeing is the collapse of this strategy.
Put yourself in the shoes of New Labour’s founders in the 80s and early 90s. You see that traditional social democratic arguments for redistribution don’t work. You see Labour’s traditional support base, the manual working class, declining in numbers (pdf). And you see a managerial class winning what you want - wealth and power.
What do you do?
You abandon traditional Labourism, in favour of an appeal to Mondeo man and Worcester woman. You retain a vestigial belief in income redistribution but defend it only because it is the partner of economic efficiency, rather than a goal in its own right, and you pursue it through stealth taxes and complicated tax credits for working families. And you adopt a cringing deference towards the managerial class, believing it should be free of burdensome taxes whilst having the ability to deliver top-down reform of the public services.
What we’re now seeing is the collapse of this strategy.
