Ten years ago this month, as it looked certain that Labour would win the forthcoming election, a group of academics and commentators met to examine what past Labour governments might tell us about the future. On Monday, many of the same group and some new voices meet again, this time to think about what the last ten years have meant.
Summing up an era is not easy, especially when the outcome of the next general election is much less predictable than it was ten years ago. The New Labour era has been both much as we thought it was going to be and so very different. Broadly, domestic policy in most areas has gone pretty much in the direction that was anticipated by the original contributors.
Economic competence, mild constitutional reform and a shift in welfare provision away from universalism have all been delivered in the context of much greater economic stability than I think we would have imagined possible. The minimum wage, family tax credits and a consistently low unemployment have produced significant changes in social and economic status for millions of people, and the strength of the performance in areas like youth unemployment is now rather taken for granted.
We noted then that it is impossible to satisfy people in some areas of policy. There can never be a health service which is good enough for every conceivable need and there can never be an education system that delivers everything that every parent wants. However, on balance, both sectors have improved in their delivery of frontline services and though the challenge of public sector management has not yet been solved, the public sector is now at the centre of the new political consensus which governs what is possible in British politics.
A mainstream social democratic government with a stronger market orientation than previous Labour administrations has buried the issue of Labour’s economic competence and re-established Labour as a party of government. Contemporary views of Labour’s record here have been broadly positive.
All of this was fairly predictable. What none of us saw coming was Labour’s foreign policy. The cause of humanitarian intervention, the response to 9/11 and the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, gradually came to dominate British politics. Contemporary views of Labour’s performance here have been broadly negative.
My current instinct is that history will judge the New Labour era in exactly the reverse way.
In domestic policy, especially in reform of political structures, it will come to be seen that timidity in progressive ambition led to many missed opportunities for bolder change; an era in which large majorities were wasted in the support of minor tinkering with the structures of power and inequality.
By contrast, the rediscovery by the left of cause of humanitarian intervention, the work of Gordon Brown on Third War debt and the projection of militant democratic power against tyranny, will come to be seen as a defining era in the recovery of post-war Britain. The reassertion of Britain’s place in the world as a beacon of liberal internationalism and the articulation of an ethical foreign policy which shames the standard positions of most other major European players, will come with time to be seen as the core of Blair’s legacy.