2025/03/01 by Jim Phillips · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Political and Economic history of UK and US
paper · doi:10.1215/15476715-11521342
openalex publication_date 2025/03/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/03/04
New Labour was the restyled British Labour Party project for electoral success and economic, social, and constitutional reforms led by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown from 1994 to 2010. Colm Murphy examines its political and intellectual origins in Labour Party and broader British left debates from 1973 to 1997. These discussions were framed, Murphy argues, by contested interpretations of “modernization.”The boundaries of Murphy’s period are important. It was in 1973 that Britain joined the European Economic Community (EEC), forerunner to the European Union (EU). This was also an important year for the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system for managing international currency exchanges, which coincided with another major economic shock: the escalation of global oil prices. The left in all maturing industrial economies were now grappling with the difficulties of securing socially progressive policy outcomes at the level of individual nation-state. How could stable employment and moderate wealth redistribution be maintained in the face of inflationary pressures, lost industrial jobs through multinational capital flight, and International Monetary Fund interventions designed to “correct” public expenditure on social solidarity measures? Various progressive and social democratic parties struggled to secure election and govern effectively in Western Europe and North America in this environment. After 1974 Labour did not win a general election in the United Kingdom until 1997, when Blair as prime minister, with Brown as Chancellor of the Exchequer, took office with an agenda to match what they saw as the realities of globalization. Murphy pithily summarizes this agenda as “welfare to work, human capital, constitutional reform, the minimum wage” (183). This plan was narrower if more achievable than alternative pre-1997 modernization imaginaries, although Murphy himself avoids detailed evaluation of New Labour’s record in office.Murphy applies a modernization framework to three areas of post-1973 policy debate: economic management and challenges to the nation-state; identities of class, gender, and race; and constitutional reforms counterpoised with enabling citizens to participate in a “modern” economy. Post-Keynesian economists questioned the continued relevance of demand management and the capacity of nation-states to protect working-class jobs and living standards without supranational cooperation. Here there was a strong emphasis on the value of closer integration with the EEC and then the EU. Then there were revisionist Marxist historians and intellectuals, influenced by a “Eurocommunist” Gramscian understanding of power and its cultural as well as economic dimensions. In an important intervention, Eric Hobsbawm wrote “The Forward March of Labour Halted” in 1978. Looking back, we can see the value of this observation in Britain’s conflictual sphere of industrial relations. Union activists and officials called in modernizing terms for industrial democracy, in part to arrest the phenomena of corporate disinvestment and capital flight from the United Kingdom. Proposals for worker directors on the boards of major manufacturing companies were blocked in 1977–78. Murphy arguably underestimates the significance of this major demonstration of business power.Post-Fordist social theorists also focused on deindustrialization along with other employment-cum-labor-market changes, arguing about their implications for identities and interpretations of class. Feminists likewise invested heavily in debates about employment and identity, highlighting the divisive effects of the labor movement’s preoccupation with male workers. Black and Asian activists articulated a parallel critique about the labor movement’s inability to recognize and confront racial inequalities, although “modernization” language was less prominent here, given the term’s historic association with Enlightenment-era colonialism and its profound racial injustices.Murphy explores future debates in very thick detail, integrating hundreds of political and intellectual texts from myriad sources: unpublished in the collected and archived papers of public figures; published in Labour and left periodicals, plus newspapers and other print media; and from memoirs, biographies, and academic literature. No fault can be found here in Murphy’s application, but I did ask myself about the added value and diminishing returns of some of these details. I also wondered about perspective and method. Futures of Socialism is published in Cambridge’s Modern British Histories series, the goal of which “is to keep metropolitan and national histories of Britain fresh and vital in an intellectual atmosphere increasingly attuned to, and enriched by, the transnational, the international, and the comparative” (ii). Murphy’s history is indeed metropolitan, focusing on elite actors who mainly viewed the world from Britain’s political center in London.Perhaps this is limiting. In discussing constitutional change, Murphy fleetingly visits the campaign for a Scottish Parliament, with devolved powers within the United Kingdom in selected policy areas. “Up in Edinburgh,” he writes, “1988–1989 witnessed the birth of the cross-party Scottish Constitutional Convention” (210). Edinburgh can be seen as “up” from London. In Scotland it is viewed as “down” from Aberdeen, “across” or “over” (the Forth) from Fife, and “through” from Glasgow. Place and perspective matter, particularly when centralized political authority is being contested. The Scottish Trades Union Congress (STUC) played a key role in the Scottish Constitutional Convention. Michael McGahey, president of the National Union of Mineworkers Scottish Area, persuaded the STUC to adopt support for a devolved Scottish Parliament in the late 1960s and early 1970s. McGahey and his union highlighted the economic insecurities in mining communities in Scotland arising from the policies of a Labour government. Devolution therefore originated in the nonmetropolitan and nonelite perspective of miners and their labor movement supporters, who looked “down” on London. The Labour government’s modernizing fuel policy, substituting coal with more oil, gas, and nuclear power, arguably met a competing modernizing constitutional policy response, with trade unionists in Scotland mobilizing for greater economic security through enhanced Scottish autonomy. This, to reiterate, was two decades before the “birth” of the Scottish Constitutional Convention. Pressure from below surely influenced the other policy debates examined in Futures of Socialism. Future Metropolitan Histories of Britain will attain greater vitality by incorporating analysis of social movements as well as social problems.