Gordon Brown’s departure from Downing Street and the Labour leadership marks the end of an era in the Labour party’s politics. It heralds a shift of generations. The closest historical parallel is probably Clement Attlee’s resignation in 1955 when the baton of leadership was finally passed from the giants of the 1945 government to the new generation of Hugh Gaitskell and Harold Wilson, figures who had already served in Labour cabinets, but had not up to then been dominating influences in the direction of the party.

We are witnessing the end of the era of long and successful New Labour hegemony – if also at times curiously unconfident and, in part, flawed. That is how I believe historians will see it, rather than through the lens of a factional ‘Blairite-Brownite’ discourse which is by comparison trivial, but has bedevilled Labour politics in the last decade. Many contributed to Labour’s renaissance after the party had almost tipped over into the abyss in the early 1980s: the troopers of the old right who prevented implosion; the courage of Neil Kinnock in facing down Militant; early and now forgotten modernisers like Bryan Gould.

But New Labour, born over two decades ago – sometime in the aftermath of the 1987 general election when Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson first started to work closely together – led the necessary process of social democratic revisionism, in time modernising the party far more radically than most of its serving shadow cabinet, and perhaps even they themselves, then anticipated. Let no one dare to take it away from
them: the result has been the most sustained and successful period of Labour government in our history.

This statement challenges, of course, the hallowed myths of 1945, but it is worth making the case that New Labour has achieved far more – and also remembering as we face opposition that in the 1950s many damaged the party with ritual abuse of the Attlee government for its lack of true socialism.

The Attlee government enjoyed the considerable advantage that it only had to build on an intellectual and political consensus established under the wartime coalition – in favour of William Beveridge, the creation of the welfare state and what became the NHS; in favour of John Maynard Keynes and economic planning; and in favour of the 1944 Education Act. Labour’s task was to implement the policies that consensus represented at a time when the Labour movement remained a major force throughout society. That it did so against huge odds and a background of four major economic crises in six-and-half years deserves enormous credit, but it squandered its huge majority in a single parliamentary term.

New Labour didn’t build on a consensus: it created a new one. From the ashes of Labour’s near self-destruction, it had to create a revisionist social democratic consensus anew and also build a modern political vehicle capable of winning and holding power. It had a clearcut mission: to construct a credible progressive project that was capable of setting aside the hegemony that the Conservative party had established in British politics since the end of the first world war against the background of a collapse of the traditional socialist ideology of state planning in the 1980s.

So New Labour forced the pace in coming to terms with the market in a way the German SDP had done long before at Bad Godesburg in 1960. But because New Labour had to do this in the wake of Margaret Thatcher’s neoliberal reforms, the conversion had of necessity to be brutal in order to convince the public that Labour had fundamentally changed. There was no space for a measured espousal of a social market economy. When Tony Blair flirted with Will Hutton’s ‘stakeholderism’, he quickly took fright and retreated. The trade unions seized on stakeholderism as their route back to the 1970s top table. Meanwhile Blair felt it necessary to appease the Murdoch press who took up the notion of globalisation as a dynamic force to which elected governments had no alternative but to bow the knee, and for whom the European social model was a passé idea with which it was their God-given mission to ensure Britain did not become entangled.

New Labour’s acceptance of firm anti-inflationary discipline and a tax regime favourable to enterprise, for which Brown battled at a great personal cost within the party in the first half of the 1990s, laid the foundations for sustained growth in New Labour’s first 10 years in office. It secured the party’s three successive general election victories. In retrospect, New Labour’s acceptance of the market proved too naive, as was shown in the 2008 banking crisis, which had its roots in an uncritical idolisation of financial speculation and unearned gross rewards, of which New Labour had been too tolerant.

New Labour had always recognised correctly that to achieve high value-added growth with decent jobs in a global economy, the market had to be supplemented by an enabling government role in promoting research, higher education, skills, infrastructure and an active regional policy. However, a more ‘developmental’ phase of much-needed industrial activism had to await the 2008 global crisis. Mandelson’s return to government was as belated as his radical efforts to promote ‘more real engineering, less financial engineering’.

However New Labour’s biggest achievement was to change the political consensus in the UK towards public services and social justice. When Blair claimed towards the end of the 1997 general election campaign that the electors had ‘seven days to save the NHS’, who can doubt that he was then right? The commitment made in 2000 to bring spending on health as a proportion of GDP up to the European average has transformed the NHS, so much so that in 2010 David Cameron fell over himself at every opportunity in his commitment to sustain it: we shall see. Similarly, while we may justifiably have doubts about the sincerity of Conservative claims to care about poverty and inequality, the Cameron Tories have adopted a compassionate language that was noticeable for its absence in 1980s and 1990s Britain. We may snigger at the ill formed and illusory nature of the Cameroon vision of the ‘Big Society’, but it is a long way from Mrs Thatcher’s ‘there is no such thing as society’. These are measures of how far Labour has changed the consensus.

Of course one can gripe about New Labour’s methods. There were too many national targets and too much top-down control freakery, but the public was perceived to be impatient for faster results than government can deliver. There was an unresolved confusion about whether ‘choice and diversity’ was about keeping the better off within the state system, which can lead to two-tier services, or bold reforms to challenge where centralised bureaucratic provision had let down the most deprived, which is a legitimate social democratic cause. Actually, by the time of the 2010 manifesto we had in my view reached very sensible positions on the relative weight of ‘choice and voice’. The difference I most notice in my political lifetime is the substantial progress we have made towards dignity in old age: again an oft-forgotten Brown personal commitment that counts for little in metropolitan circles, but was appreciated literally in the warmth of many housing estate homes.

All these are joint achievements of Brown and Blair. But where in my view New Labour fell short, on Europe and constitutional reform, they were also both responsible. Britain has become more of a modern European country with a more generous welfare state. British influence grew enormously in Brussels, but because of the malign influence of the Murdoch press, both on the Europe issue itself and in playing up Blair-Brown rivalries, we failed to take on the anti-Europeans in Britain.

On the constitution, Blair largely lost interest after implementing the radical John Smith programme. Brown was intellectually engaged but never willing to confront the conservative tribalism of some of his allies in the PLP – until the eve of the general election, when it proved too late. Yet after Iraq – which I supported at the time, but now think fatally divided and weakened the progressive consensus in Britain – a bold new initiative on constitutional reform should have been taken. Had that been done, and a change in the voting system made, it is likely the 2010 outcome would have been radically different.

New Labour was also slow to appreciate the social impact of the structural changes taking place in society as a result of globalisation, particularly immigration – but these eroded its broad coalition as much in Basildon as in Burnley. But let us not despair. Politics is always a cup half empty or half full. We have left a substantial legacy of social democratic achievement on which the new generation should now build.