Well, this is a refreshing dose of common sense. In the Guardian, no less. From Glen O'Hara:
It has become a commonplace of leftwing thought that the New Labour governments were “neoliberal”. The word is thrown around like confetti. But not only has the word itself now become so widely used as to have become almost meaningless, that analysis of Labour’s recent past doesn’t even make sense in its own terms.
A great deal of what Tony Blair did in power was not neoliberal at all, or had neoliberal elements but was aimed in a quite different direction, or was better thought of as social democratic or even socialist. Inexpert and ersatz commentators fill far too much of our airtime and news pages with simplistic nonsense that fails to understand just how complex governing and all governments are, and which has no grasp of scale and scope – only of unconvincing and overheated rhetoric.
Unfortunately the main purveyors of this "simplistic nonsense" are the current Labour leaders. Corbyn himself spent the Blair years as a perpetually disgruntled outlier on the Labour backbenches, opposing everything in the name of a simplistic hard-left analysis which did little but polish his sense of his own virtue.
New Labour in power was a party with a powerful analysis of state and society: that globalisation was inevitable, and the British people had to be educated enough, healthy enough and informed enough to stand up to it. Its kaleidoscopic array of responses was therefore Rooseveltian in its “do what works” experimentation. It deserves a rather more sensitive characterisation than just repeating the one word “neoliberalism”.
That range of policies has allowed the right to say that Blair got Britain into far too much debt, and the left to say that he went too easy on modern capitalism’s concentration of wealth and power. But, in truth, that attack from both directions means that Labour’s attempt to get away from the easy dichotomies of “more” versus “less” was successfully executed while in office, and was more popular than its opponents want to admit.
“Neoliberalism” is a useful boo word, but its use in this context is both crude and unhelpful. No government that rebuilt the public sphere, radically improved the state healthcare system, improved maintained schools and took on homelessness can possibly be painted only in those terms. Labour in its present shape appears to be struggling to convert the extra voters it needs to be sure of victory next time. One reason is that it is engaged in a war against its own history: if it took a more nuanced and more truthful view of Labour’s recent record, it would have a much better chance of success.
Comments