Ten Years of New Labour
Matt Beech and Simon Lee (ed)
Palgrave Macmillan, 248pp, £60.00

Even though a political legacy will take a generation to settle, the verdict begins at once. Already, only a few months after the fact, the view back towards the Blair years is more favourable than we might have thought.

The second volume of Antony Seldon’s comprehensive courts and all biography entered what, in the end, will be the final verdict: that a prime minister who took a while to climb clear of a wrong beginning had gained clarity and momentum by the end – exactly the opposite of the journalistic orthodoxy, in other words.

Matt Beech and Simon Lee have assembled an impressive cast of authors and a very catholic set they are too. Indeed, that is both the strength and the weakness of this book. The point of view switches from chapter to chapter and so, as the editors concede in their opening, there is not much chance of the book having a thesis. Thus it dramatises, rather than resolves, the central questions of the Blair years.

This is best illustrated in the disagreement between the two editors themselves. Matt Beech suggests that the Blair years included policies that only a Labour government would have enacted – state intervention of a kind anathema to the Conservative party; increased expenditure on public services; an active labour market policy and a target to eradicate child poverty.

Simon Lee, by great contrast, expounds the misleading thesis also offered recently by Simon Jenkins that Blair (and Brown for that matter) are simply completing an integrated project begun by Margaret Thatcher.

I don’t need to declare an interest as a former employee to say I take Beech’s side in the argument. It seems to me obvious that the questions that now define British politics have been set by the Labour party.

And, further, that the most remarkable thing about this book is its title. Ten Years of New Labour. That’s twice as many as normal, even when it is any years of Labour at all. The best contributors to this volume keep that basic fact in mind. The worst allow the best to be, as it so often is on the left, the enemy of the good.