The difficulties the Labour party is having in managing the succession to Tony Blair are symptomatic of a fundamental feature of the entire New Labour project. The proclamation of this project following Blair's accession to the party leadership in 1994 simultaneously defined and condemned everything that went before it as "old Labour." This manoeuvre not only disqualified and disfranchised all other points of view, but made radical amnesia the mandatory medium of political argument within the party. It thereby disabled the party from thinking purposefully about the origins and nature of its own internal problems, which can only be understood in a historical perspective that goes back to well before 1994. For if, as seems likely, New Labour continues to make a meal of the leadership succession and is driven to allow a genuine political contest, it will at last be forced to subject one of the constitutional changes made in 1981 to a real test in broad daylight.
The decision in 1981 to take the election of the leader out of the hands of the parliamentary party and to entrust it to an electoral college composed of weighted voting blocks representing MPs, trade unions and ordinary members was a fatal watershed in the history of the Labour party. The full implications of that decision have been obscured for the last 25 years by the fact that the logic of this constitutional change has been regularly subverted up until now. The reality of the succession in 1983 was a shoo-in for Neil Kinnock based on trade union fixing. John Smith's succession in 1992 was also a shoo-in and, thanks to Gordon Brown, so was Tony Blair's in 1994. In other words, the form of a democratic election masked the substance of an informal decision within a magic circle, and the constitutional framework born of the new electoral procedure was not put under serious pressure by a real contest.
Given this tradition, it was entirely reasonable of Gordon Brown to want his own succession to be a shoo-in. He has only wanted what all Labour's leaders since 1983 have enjoyed and what he himself made possible for Blair. But, since the 1981 changes were acts of collective lunacy, and are at the heart of the existential crisis of the Labour party which the Blair-Mandelson "project" has only masked, not resolved, it is probably as well that Brown be denied his customary rights in the matter.
There is, of course, no guarantee whatever that a genuine contest, in which the rival candidates are obliged to canvass support in all sections of the party, will entail the kind of debate that can lead the party out of its current diseased condition. It would merely offer an opportunity for such a debate. For that opportunity to be grasped, it is vital that the party begin to wake up to the true nature of its leadership problem.
The decision to allow ordinary members and the trade unions to participate formally alongside MPs in the election of the party leader, while motivated by a desire to democratise the party, has actually had the opposite effect. It has instead ensured that the leader is in reality representative of nobody in particular. The electoral college is a purely virtual body. It has no corporate existence and cannot in any way call the leader it elects to account. The result has been the emergence of an extraordinarily autocratic form of leadership in which the party leader is answerable to nobody in the party and can do as he pleases. That this is the case has been explicitly acknowledged by none other than Gordon Brown in his recent remark that the question of Blair's departure is "a decision for him" and by implication, no one else, as if Blair is leader by divine right.
The 1981 constitutional change deprived Labour MPs of a major element of their collective power. Because they could no longer choose or dismiss their leader, they could no longer exert much influence on the leader's future choices as regards either policy or ministerial personnel. The result has been the collapse of cabinet government on the one hand, and the tendency, more marked, indeed flagrant, with every passing year, for an all-powerful No 10 to make policy on the hoof in response to pressures emanating from the media or the White House—but rarely if ever from the Labour party. A corollary of this state of affairs has been the disappearance of the party's organisational and intellectual capacity to formulate policy, which is why, among numerous other omissions, it had no thought-out view of what was to be done about Iraq to propose as an alternative to Dick Cheney's view of this question when matters came to a head in 2002.
A related consequence has been the profound demoralisation of the party at every level. The original intention of the 1981 changes was to empower the party's activists in the constituencies. The other major change, the introduction of mandatory reselection, profoundly undermined the position and self-confidence of Labour MPs by making them permanently vulnerable to destabilisation by an activist minority of their constituency party memberships. But the rise of the unaccountable leadership, which began with Neil Kinnock, soon put paid to the activists' pretensions. The assertion of the leadership's total control over annual conferences at the expense of the constituency parties' traditional rights was accompanied by a massive expansion of the prerogatives of the central party apparatus (Walworth Road, then Millbank) under the leader's personal control, and under Blair this apparatus has extended its prerogatives to the business of choosing the party's candidates, with the inevitable result that MPs have tended more and more to be the leader's personal clients and protégés—Blair's boys and babes—whether they have liked it or not. And many if not most independent-minded Labour people have long ago abandoned whatever political ambitions they may once have had.
The long term outcome has thus disempowered both MPs and grassroots activists to the benefit of an autocratic and irresponsible leadership that has inevitably taken its policy bearings from centres of power external to the party. At the same time, these processes have destroyed the Labour party's capacity to provide proper political representation either to the range of opinion on the democratic left of the national political spectrum or to the range of social interests that have traditionally supported the party and looked to it to articulate and address their concerns. The trade unions in particular have suffered. What has it profited them to have a formal share in the electoral college when the true result is a parliamentary party that is incapable of representing them to any effect and a Labour party leader who treats them with brazen contempt?
But it would be wrong to blame this state of affairs exclusively on Tony Blair and to suppose that Labour's problems will disappear with him. On the contrary, for all the hyping of 1994 as year one of the New Labour revolution, Blair's project merely built on Kinnock's foundations. Fundamental to Kinnock's strategy, as a leader chosen by an extra-parliamentary caucus, was the decision not to reverse the 1981 constitutional changes but to exploit them in order to render himself indispensable. And what this involved was a strategy that consisted of playing to the media gallery by relentlessly counterposing his own leadership to the unreasonable proclivities of the party's activists. In this way, Kinnockism sought to exploit the perception that Labour was inherently unfit to govern and simultaneously to compensate for this by stressing his own role as a safe pair of hands.
For Kinnock, the problem with this was that the British electorate could never quite take him seriously. For the rest of us, the problem was that Kinnock's strategy kept the bath water of the misconceived constitutional changes and threw out the baby—the party's principles, its sense of purpose and its collective belief in itself. Had John Smith lived, things might have been different. It was not to be. And so Blair took over where Kinnock left off and perfected Kinnock's formula of artfully packaged emptiness by supplying the missing ingredient—plausibility. But that is pretty well all Blairism did, and beyond media circles this plausibility was as much a function of the implausibility of the Conservative party between 1994 and 2005 as of anything else. Like Kinnock, Blair has done nothing to address the roots of Labour's protracted malaise. And by relentlessly counterposing himself and his outlook to the rest of the party, he has ensured that the Labour's fundamental problem, which is existential, has not been remedied but aggravated.
Now the plausibility is gone. Blair has every reason for anxiety that his New Labour project will not survive him. It was never much more than a logo or a marketing gambit. We are left with a party that is an empty shell, hollowed out, disoriented, compromised, corrupted, abandoned in despair and disgust by many of its best members and longstanding supporters—in short, at death's door. If these realities are not addressed by Blair's would-be successors in the weeks and months to come, it will be necessary to re-establish a proper Labour party outside the debris of the New Labour project.
