New Labour's Double-shuffle

The Labour election victory in 1997 took place at a moment of great political opportunity. Thatcherism had been decisively rejected by the electorate. But eighteen years of Thatcherite rule had radically altered the social, economic, and political terrain in British society. There was therefore a fundamental choice of directions for the incoming government. One was to offer an alternative radical strategy to Thatcherism, attuned to the shifts which had occurred in the ’70s and ’80s, with equal social and political depth, but based on radically different principles. Two basic calculations supported this view. What Thatcherism seemed to have ruled out was both another bout of Keynesian welfare-state social democracy, Wilsonian-style, and another instalment of old-style nationalization. More significantly, Thatcherism had evolved, not just an effective occupancy of power, but a broad hegemonic basis for its authority. This ‘revolution’ had deep philosophical foundations as well as an effective popular strategy. It was grounded in a radical remodeling of state and economy and the ‘colonizing’ of civil society by a new neo-liberal common sense. Its effects were ‘epochal’ (i.e., defined a new political stage). This was not likely to be reversed by a mere rotation of the electoral wheel of fortune. The historic opportunities for the Left required bold, imaginative thinking and decisive action in the early stages of taking power, boldly signaling a new direction. Critical to this was a transitional programme—a few critical examples, popular but radical, like raising taxes to repair the destruction of the social fabric, a re-invention of the state education system, and the reversal of the very unpopular privatization of rail—to be introduced at once, chosen for its indicative significance. As one of Thatcherism’s critics, and a regular contributor to Marxism Today during the ’80s, I had concentrated on this