Most of the commentary on the 25th anniversary of Tony Blair’s election victory in 1997 failed to mention one salient fact: nearly half of the 25 years since have been spent under Conservative governments. And even now, the polls do not point decisively to a Tory reversal, although Labour is likely to do fairly well in the mid-term local elections on Thursday.
The main legacy of New Labour is therefore what it immediately achieved in government, not how it changed the political landscape at large. At least, this is the case in England. In Scotland and Wales, tellingly the least Tory parts of Britain, devolution has left a lasting imprint in the creation of parliaments and governments in Edinburgh and Cardiff.
In England, by contrast, there has been no significant devolution outside London, and the Conservatives were back in government at Westminster within 13 years of losing power in 1997. They have since won four successive elections over Labour—one more than the three Tony Blair won over them.
So in terms of lasting policies, New Labour’s success consists in reforms and policies which post-2010 Tory governments accepted or were unable to reverse. This is an unusual list. One could have predicted that the NHS—“the nearest thing the English have to a religion,” as Nigel Lawson called it—would survive, albeit with far less substantial year-on-year funding increases than it received under Labour. So too the Blair education reforms, to give state schools more autonomy and introduce tuition fees to help pay for the expansion of higher education.
But harder to predict would have been the steady increase in the minimum wage since 2010—a strongly contested policy in 1997. Meanwhile Brexit was almost impossible to have anticipated. It is amazing to reflect that the debate in the Blair government 20 years ago was whether to hold a referendum to join the euro, not one to leave the EU entirely.
The obvious points are that New Labour barely outlived Tony Blair, and proved unable to win an election even under his decade-long chancellor, Gordon Brown. The personal element to this is endlessly debated. I suspect Blair himself might have won a fourth election victory, so superior a leader and campaigner was he to David Cameron. But there was no obvious leader thereafter who could have kept the electoral show on the road.
For at a deeper level, the New Labour electoral coalition of old working class and new metropolitan middle class fractured beyond repair in 2010. The Tories found themselves enjoying a populist appeal to large parts of the old working (and non-working) class, especially on hostility to immigration and EU freedom of movement. This new popularity, together with their Home Counties base, has so far proved unassailable.
The divided opposition to the Tories is another deep political fracture which Blair only overcame temporarily. Lib-Labbery was all the rage in the 1990s, after more than a decade of Thatcher/Major, and tactical voting against the Tories contributed to his landslide majorities in 1997 and 2001. But as the Lib Dems turned against Blair on the Iraq War after 2003, it soon became two-against-one the other way, paving the way for the Cameron-Clegg coalition of 2010-2015.
Tory governments are the norm in England; Labour governments the exception. That was the rule before Blair. It has been the rule since Blair. In the electoral sphere, New Labour’s achievement was highly personal and much of it transient.
