New Labour’s Double-shuffle

Stuart Hall

The Labour election victory in 1997 took place at a moment of greatpolitical opportunity. Thatcherism had been decisively rejected bythe electorate. But eighteen years of Thatcherite rule had radicallyaltered the social, economic, and political terrain in British society.There was therefore a fundamental choice of directions for theincoming government.

One was to offer an alternative radical strategy to Thatcherism,attuned to the shifts which had occurred in the ’70s and ’80s, withequal social and political depth, but based on radically differentprinciples. Two basic calculations supported this view. WhatThatcherism seemed to have ruled out was both another bout ofKeynesian welfare-state social democracy, Wilsonian-style, andanother 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’ haddeep philosophical foundations as well as an effective popular strat-egy. It was grounded in a radical remodeling of state and economyand the ‘colonizing’ of civil society by a new neo-liberal commonsense. Its effects were ‘epochal’ (i.e., defined a new political stage).

This was not likely to be reversed by a mere rotation of the elec-toral wheel of fortune. The historic opportunities for the Leftrequired bold, imaginative thinking and decisive action in the earlystages of taking power, boldly signaling a new direction. Critical tothis was a transitional programme—a few critical examples, popu-lar but radical, like raising taxes to repair the destruction of thesocial fabric, a re-invention of the state education system, and thereversal of the very unpopular privatization of rail—to beintroduced at once, chosen for its indicative significance.

As one of Thatcherism’s critics, and a regular contributorto Marxism Today during the ’80s, I had concentrated on this

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The Review of Education, Pedagogy,

and Cultural Studies, 27:319–335, 2005

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ISSN: 1071-4413 print=1556-3022 online

DOI: 10.1080/10714410500338907

Thatcherite reconstruction of the political=ideological terrain. Onthis—despite what was criticized at the time as an overemphasison ‘the ideological’ dimension—I believe we were fundamentallyright. But we may have underestimated the degree to which all thiswas itself related to much deeper global shifts—the emerging newpost-industrial society, the struggle by capital to restore its ‘right tomanage,’ the ‘globalization’ of the international economy (whichwas capital’s way out of that impasse), the technological revolutionand the rise of a new individualism, and the hegemony of neo-liberal free-market ideas. This was the sea change which overtookthe world in the 1970’s. It still constitutes the ‘horizon’ whicheverybody—including the Left—is now required to address.

The other choice was, of course, to adapt to Thatcherite=neo-liberal terrain. There were plenty of indications that this would beNew Labour’s preferred direction: Peter Mandelson’s (2002) book,for example, and the revisionist ideas peddled in this triumphalistphase by the New Labour intelligenisa—differences between Leftand Right are obsolete, ‘‘there is no alternative’’ (to neo-liberal glo-balization); ‘‘we have no objection to people becoming filthy rich’’and all the rest—provided clear evidence of the kind of ‘re-thinkingin progress’ in inner New Labour circles. Certainly one had nodelusions about what ‘taking power as New Labour and governingas New Labour’ implied. Martin Jacques and I wrote an article forThe Observer called ‘‘Thatcherism with a Human Face?’’ on theSunday before the 1997 election which cast us irrevocably into outerpolitical darkness. We knew then that, once squandered, such anopportunity would be lost for many years, perhaps forever. Wehad a strong premonition that New Labour had already madestrategic choices which put it irrevocably on the second track.

And so it turned out. In a profound sense, New Labour hasadapted to neo-liberal terrain—but in a significant and distinctiveway. Its critics are still not sufficiently clear about what the natureof that adaptation is. Its novelty—if not in terms of what it consistsof, then in how the elements are combined—is still not well under-stood. However, it took only a few weeks (in 1997) for the basicdirection to become crystal clear: the fatal decision to followConservative spending priorities and commitments, the sneeringrenunciation of wealth redistribution (‘‘tax and spend!’’), the demo-nization of its critics (‘‘Old Labour!’’), the new ethos of managerialauthoritarianism (‘‘We know that we are right’’), the quasi-religiousair of righteous conviction (‘‘Either for us or against us’’), the

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reversal of the historic commitment to equality, universality, andcollective social provision (instead, ‘reform,’ ‘fairness,’ ‘choice’).

The welfare state had been Labour’s greatest achievement. It hadbeen savaged and weakened under Mrs. Thatcher. But its whole-sale deconstruction was to be New Labour’s historic mission. Thetwo-tier society, corporate greed, and the privatization of need wereinevitable corollaries of this process—glossed positively as ‘moder-nization!’ who could possibly be against it? The linguistic oper-ation—generating a veritable flowering of Third Way waffle,double-talk, evasions, and ‘spin,’ depending on which audiencewas being addressed—was critical to the whole venture.

The Prime Minister’s recent claims that the reform of schools andhospitals (i.e., the reintroduction of selectivity and creeping privati-zation) are ‘‘firmly within Labour’s historic battle for social justice’’or that foundation hospitals are fully in line with the efforts of NyeBevan to create a universal NHS which would de-commodify healthcare, and are really designed to ‘give power back to local communi-ties’ rather than to open the door to private investment, are only themost recent, blatant examples. The shamelessness of the evasive-ness—being economical with the truth as a principle of govern-ment—and the profound contempt for the electorate implied inthe practice of endless manipulation have gone far to corrupt thewhole political culture. Cynicism and political apathy have inevi-tably followed—being then mourned by liberal commentators in afurther act of bad faith. (New Labour ‘spin’ has it that falling elec-toral participation is a sign of mass contentment. But what is thepoint of voting, if the result is a Tory administration which agreeswith New Labour on fundamentals, only with bells on?)

New Labour does have a long-term strategy, ‘a project’: whatAntonio Gramsci (1971) called the ‘transformism’ of social democ-racy into a particular variant of free-market neo-liberalism. How-ever, it remains fashionable to deny that anything like a project isat work here. Even the disenchanted cling desperately to the hopethat English pragmatism will prevail. New Labour’s reasonedcritics—Roy Hattersley, Fran Dobson, Chris Smith, Bill Morris, evenPolly Toynbee—remain ‘loyal’ (but to what?). They look hopefullyfor signs that New Labour will of its own accord—now the secondterm is spinning out of control, perhaps in the third?—refashionitself into something different. The key thing to say about NewLabour is that its so-called ‘pragmatism’ is the English face it isobliged to wear in order to ‘govern’ in one set of interests while

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maintaining electoral support in another. It isn’t fundamentallypragmatic, any more than Thatcherism was—which doesn’t meanthat it isn’t constantly making things up on the run. In relation tothe NHS, Mrs. Thatcher too was pragmatic in the short run (‘‘TheNHS is safe in our hands!’’), yet strategically an anti-pragmatist(the internal market). As with the miners, she knew when to with-draw in order to fight again, more effectively, another day.

Pragmatism is the crafty, incremental implementation of astrategic programme—being flexible about the way you push itthrough, giving ground when the opposition is hot, tacticallyrevising your formulations when necessary (having given us ‘theenabling state’ and the celebration of ‘risk,’ the distinguished ThirdWay guru, Anthony Giddens (2002), now effortlessly slips us on tothe forgotten problem of equality (!!) and ‘the ensuring state’—asmore businesses absolve themselves of their pensions obligations).Pragmatism requires modestly shifting the emphases to catch thecurrent political wind, saying what will keep traditional ‘heartland’supporters happy (‘‘It can come across a bit technocratic, a bitmanagerial’’—the P.M.), whilst always returning to an inflexibleideological baseline (‘‘. . . the fundamental direction in which weare leading the country is correct’’—the P.M.). Of course, there willbe a thousand scams and devices dreamed up by New Labour’sblue-skies policy-wonks, as ‘‘government is re-invented’’—themission of the policy-advisers-turned-civil-servants in the No. 10policy, strategy, and innovation units and the New Labour-inclined‘think-tanks’ (the IPPR, Demos). But unerringly, at the strategiclevel, the project returns to its watchwords: ‘wealth creation,’‘reform,’ and ‘modernization.’

There is a dominant strategy or logic at work here, and fundamen-tally it is neo-liberal in character—a characterization which is not tobe confused with either the old Reaganite ‘minimal government’ orthe new American, right-wing, revivalist neo-conservatism. Itsunderlying market fundamentalism is not to be doubted. ThusNew Labour has worked, both domestically and globally, throughthe institutions of ‘global governance’ such as the IMF, the WTO, theWorld Bank, etc. It set the corporate economy free, securing theconditions necessary for its effective operation at home andglobally. It has renounced the attempts to graft wider social goalsonto the corporate world (Will Hutton’s project of ‘stake-holderpower’ lasted all of five minutes). It has deregulated labour andother markets, maintained restrictive trade union legislation, and

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established a whole new tier of relatively weak and compliantregulatory regimes. The rail regulator, for example, cuts trainservices and raises fares in order to make the rail more ‘efficient’ (!)while serving as the conduit for substantial public subsidies to inef-ficient private firms, taking the risk out of investment, while still notfinding a public alternative to the railway’s fragmented privatizedstructure. The new broadcasting regulator’s main purpose seems tobe to dismantle the barriers which currently prevent global interestslike Murdoch from buying into and monopolizing at will Britishpress and media channels.

New Labour has spread the gospel of ‘market fundamentalism’—markets and market criteria as the true measure of value—far andwide. It has ‘cosied up to business,’ favouring its interests in mul-tiple public and private ways (from the Formula One cigaretteadvertising scandal on). The trend to inequality has grown exponen-tially, escalating towards American proportions. ‘‘The rich nowhave a bigger share of the nation’s post-tax income than at any timeunder Mrs. Thatcher’’ (Michael Meacher, 2003). It has protectedcorporate boardroom greed and promoted business influence inshaping social agendas favourable to private interests at the heartof government (the connections of those advising the governmenton GM and environmental issues with pharmaceutical andbiotechnology corporate interests have only recently come to light).It has promoted the image of ‘the businessman’ and ‘the entrepre-neur’ as the principal social role models, spreading the gospel of‘entrepreneurial values’ (‘efficiency,’ ‘choice,’ ‘selectivity’) throughthe land. It has pursued a splendidly variable range of privati-zations—sustaining the sell-off of critical public assets (transport,the London tube, air traffic control, the postal services, the forensicservice), forcing the public sector to ‘mimic’ the market in its internaloperations, fatally blurring the public=private distinction (PublicFinance Initiatives, public–private ‘partnerships’), and, stealthilyopening doors for private investment in, and the corporatepenetration of, parts of the public sector (the prison service, schools,the NHS). Every media debate as to whether the latest creepingprivatization is ‘really privatization’ is a form of trivial pursuit.

However, New Labour has adapted the fundamental new-liberalprogramme to suit its conditions of governance—that of a socialdemocratic government trying to govern in a neo-liberal direction,while maintaining its traditional working-class and public sectormiddle-class support, with all the compromises and confusions that

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entails. It has modified the classic anti-statist stance of American-style neo-liberalism by a ‘re-invention of active government,’adapted from the so-called Public Choice approach. This is not areturn to government as we have known it, but a revolution in‘governance’ (see, for example, the 1999 Modernizing GovernmentWhite Paper). The term ‘governance’ is itself another shifty NewLabour concept: not a synonym for ‘government’ but the signifierof ‘‘a new process of governing, a changed condition of orderedrule’’ specifically designed to blur the difference between stateand civil society (Rhodes, 1996). As Paul Du Gay (2002) argues,this involves ‘‘a new rationality of rule’’ in which ‘‘political govern-ment has been re-structured in the name of an economizinglogic’’ (p. 17).

‘Entrepreneurial governance,’ its advocates advise, promotescompetition between service providers, favours the shift frombureaucracy to ‘community,’ focuses not on inputs but on outcomes[delivery], redefines clients as consumers, decentralizes authoritythrough ‘participatorymanagement,’ and prefersmarketmechanismsto administrative ones (Osborn and Gaebler, in Du Gay 2002,pp. 17–18). It is the basis of the ‘re-invention of government’which has become the hallmark of New Labour. Indeed, the Blair‘revolution’ is principally directed, not at the modernization of theeconomy, which is largely left to corporate initiative and the newmanagerialism to accomplish, but at the modernization of societyand government via the ‘re-invention’ of the state. The neo-liberal originsof ‘entrepreneurial governance’ are hard to disguise. Far from break-ing with neo-liberalism, ‘entrepreneurial governance’ constitutes itscontinuation—but in a transformed way. ‘‘To govern better, the stateis to govern less but more ‘entrepreneurially’’’ (Du Gay, 2002).

The entrenched New Labour orthodoxy is that only the privatesector is ‘efficient’ in a measurable way. The public sector is, bydefinition, ‘inefficient’ and out of date, partly because it has socialobjectives beyond economic efficiency and value-for-money. Itcan only save itself by becoming more like the market. This is thetrue meaning of ‘modernization.’ As Alan Finlayson (2003) argues,‘Modernization’ is a loosely performative speech-act in the sensethat it ‘‘acquires meaning and force only in the moment of itsusage. . . . It is an ‘up’ word, that makes things sound exciting, pro-gressive and positive. [Its] usage helps generate an appearance ofstructured and unified thinking. . . . It helps to render ‘natural’and un-contestable that which is not necessarily so’’ (p. 67).

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Part of its ideological purpose is to establish a permanent div-ide between new sheep and old goats. Public sector workers, whooppose this drift, are represented as immured in the past, ser-iously ‘out of date’ and therefore ‘‘the enemy within.’’ They toomust be ‘modernized.’ Of course, in fact, they are often grosslyunder-rewarded in relation to the private sector, and deeplyexcluded as partners in the drive to improve the services theyactually deliver—the objects, but never the subjects, of ‘reform.’The Prime Minister, however, advised them to think of themselvesmore as ‘social entrepreneurs’! Meanwhile, the whole concept of‘the public interest’ and ‘the public good’ has collapsed. It toohas been declared obsolete. New Labour’s critics on the Left ormedia commentators are embarrassed to invoke it. The prop-osition that markets are the only measure of ‘the social good’—advanced by Hayek, adopted by Mrs. Thatcher, and reinventedby New Labour—has been swallowed, hook, line, and sinker.Marketization in this deeper sense is now installed in everysphere of government. This silent revolution in ‘governance’seamlessly connects Thatcherism to New Labour. It is the codewhich underpins the ‘jargon’ which New Labour Ministers spoutin their sleep. It is uttered as ‘truth’ by New Labour’s welfareintellectuals from the hallowed walls of places like the LondonSchool of Economics.

During the 80s, sceptical critics used to ask how the analysisof Thatcherite ideology affected ‘the real world.’ One answer,then, and more relevant now, is through the practices of manage-ment. Apparently simply a neutral social technology, ‘The NewManagerialism’ is really the vehicle by means of which neo-liberal ideas actually inform institutional practices. In NewLabour’s case, in the public sector, this is via the so-calledNew Public Management approach. This involves the marketiza-tion of the state’s governing and administrative practices, thetransformation of public service individuals into ‘entrepreneurialsubjects,’ and the adaptation of the machinery of state to the‘mission’ of ‘entrepreneurial governance.’ Central to this recon-struction of governance and the state, is the enthusiastic adoptionof a ‘Public Choice’ approach to the public sector. This ‘‘shift[s]the balance of incentives [from input to delivery, and] . . . inBritain in the 1980’s led to the contracting out of services, thespread of internal markets and outright privatization’’ (Finlayson,2003, p. 111). It is the main source of the drive to reconstitute

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citizens as consumers. (For a critique, see Catherine Needham’s2003 Catalyst pamphlet, Citizen-Consumers).

To its influence we now owe the now-boring, repetitive insist-ence on ‘choice’ as one of New Labour’s cardinal ‘modern values’in Tony Blair’s discourse. The present Minister of Health, JohnReid, one of the most authoritarian figures in the present Cabinet,mouths the word endlessly. It seems to be beyond New Labourto appreciate that you need greater freedom for individuals toexercise ‘choice’ between better and worse public facilities becauseNew Labour either cannot or does not wish to guarantee everybody areasonably high standard of provision. Actually, there is noidentified groundswell of public demand for more ‘choice’ in theabstract. Undoubtedly, many people would quite like to be ableto choose a good secondary school for their children and anefficient hospital to be ill in, wherever they live and however richor poor they may be—a quite different matter. However, repeatingthat ‘choice’ is a widespread demand is a way of affirming as afact what is really only an aspiration, self-fulfilling, on the prin-ciple that those things which people can be made to believe aretrue, will be ‘true’ (i.e., ‘real’) in their effects. As the Prime Minister(2002) said, in a classic instance of Third Way gobble-degook,‘‘Choice enhances quality of provision for the poorest, helping totackle inequalities while it also strengthens middle-class commit-ment to collective provision’’ (p. 28). He added that the purposeof public service reform was ‘‘to serve in a modern, consumer-focussed fashion.’’ As Catherine Needham (2003) observes,recently ‘‘ministers have begun to step back from the explicit lan-guage of consumerism and competition, while still continuing toendorse the principles behind them’’ (p. 25). It seems naive to haveto remind readers that to re-describe the relationship between citi-zens and the state as that of a weekend shopper at Tesco’s is not toupdate but to torpedo and reverse the underlying principles of polit-ical democracy.

The New Public Management ‘empowers’ civil servants to aban-don the principles of political impartiality and, like private sectorCEO’s, ‘take ownership’ of their sectors, in a more ‘agency-driven’style (the doctrine embodied in the famous ‘‘Next Steps’’ policydocument). It replaces professional judgement, ethics, and controlby swallowing wholesale the micromanagement practices of audit,inspection, monitoring, efficiency, and value-for-money, despite thefact that neither a public role nor public interest objectives can be

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adequately reframed or assessed in this way. Yet, for this limitedpurpose, we require an army of managers, who know little of thecontent of a particular field, but everything about strategies ofmanagerial control—and a regiment of consultants to adviseclients how to creatively fudge audits and deceive monitors. Morewidely, it fosters the concerted drive to introduce corporate busi-ness leaders into every sector of public life in order to spread aclimate favourable to ‘entrepreneurialism’—a value as sacred toGordon Brown as it is to Tony Blair. As the private corporateadvisers on loan from business become more and more practicallyentrenched at the center of government, and their representativesare actively ‘volunteered’ at more local levels, so ‘the corporateenterprise’ itself becomes progressively the new model of the state.

The state’s ‘educative’ function combines intensive micro-management and centralization of targets with more strategic inter-ventions exercised ‘culturally’ and ‘at a distance.’ The latter is aneo-Foucauldean, ‘governmentality’ approach—controlling behav-iour and outcomes, not by direct constraints, but through the activeenlistment of the consent and ‘freedom’ of individuals (which mayexplain why neo-Foucauldeans like Nicholas Rose regard it sofavourably!) It does not require a mass conversion to entrepreneurialvalues (another error made by our critics in the 80’s). Knowing thatindividuals can occupy various subject positions, the NewManageri-alism aims to reproduce all of us in the new position of practicing‘entrepreneurial subjects,’ by fostering certain capacities whiledowngrading others, shifting individual behaviour (whatever ourconsciences tell us) indirectly by altering the environment in whichpeople work, and operationalizing new values by ‘modernizing’old practices. You change what individuals do, not by changingtheir minds but by shifting their practices and thus the ‘culture’as well.

The wider ambition is to inculcate in the population at large anew habitus (‘culture-change’), making into a new kind of commonsense those habits and practices required by the new ‘free-market,’consumer-focussed conceptions of ‘governance’ and the publicinterest. This approach is effective well outside the machinery ofstate. Slowly but surely, everybody—kicking and screaming tothe end—becomes his=her own kind of ‘manager.’ The marketand market criteria become entrenched as the modus operandi of‘governance’ and institutional life. One of the side effects of thistransformation is to bring into existence what the late Hugo Young

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perceptively called ‘‘one-party government.’’ Media commentatorsand the press now appear to know no other language with whichto address public issues. They may object to this or that piece ofNew Labour overcentralised ‘managerialism,’ but seem unable toplace the logic from which it arises. Democracy, in this context,has long since faded as a practical ideal. Except in the banal formof ‘liberal democracy,’ Tony Blair has not had a single significantthought on the subject for over two terms in government. Thegeneral public seems to have swallowed this managerialistdiscourse whole.

The passing-off of market fundamentalism as ‘the new commonsense’ has helped to drive home the critical lesson which underpinsthe ‘reform’ of the welfare state: the role of the state ‘nowadays’ isnot to support the less fortunate or less powerful in a society which‘naturally’ produces huge inequalities of wealth, power, andopportunity, but to help individuals themselves to provide for all theirsocial needs—health, education, environmental, safe transport,housing, parenting, security in unemployment, pensions in oldage, etc.; or to put it more simply, to bring into effect the privatiza-tion of social needs. Those who can—the new middle-classmajority—must. The rest—the residuum—must be ‘targeted,’means-tested, and kept to a minimum of provision lest the burdenthreaten ‘wealth creation.’ This is what we used to call ‘‘the onethird=two third strategy,’’ which has now reemerged as ‘the two-tier society.’ New Labour, of course, says it cannot recognize thephenomenon. However, it is manifestly the lynchpin of public sec-tor ‘modernization.’ It sounds the death-knell to the old notion of‘the public realm,’ the social conception of the individual (‘‘Thereis no such thing as society’’), and the basic social democratic ideaof collective provision. This represents New Labour’s decisivemovement towards what Philip Bobbit calls ‘‘the market state.’’

New Labour is therefore confusing in the signals it gives off, anddifficult to characterize as a regime. It constantly speaks with aforked tongue. It combines economic neo-liberalism with a commit-ment to ‘active government.’ More significantly, its grim alignmentwith the broad, global interests and values of corporate capital andpower—the neo-liberal project, which is in the leading position in itspolitical repertoire—is paralleled by another subaltern programme,of a more social-democratic kind, running alongside. This is whatpeople invoke when they insist, defensively, that New Labour isnot, after all, ‘neo-liberal’ and has brought about a certain measure

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of redistribution. As to the latter, it has: though much less than itclaims, and always in an atmosphere of deathly stealth, in caseanyone notices. The fact is that New Labour is a hybrid regime, com-posed of two strands. However, one strand—the neo-liberal—is inthe dominant position. The other strand—the social democratic—issubordinate. What’s more, it isn’t the hybrid character of theensemble as a static formation but the process, which actively inthe ongoing course of governance combines the two elementsthat matters. The process of slow but sure transformation fromone thing into another is what Gramsci called ‘transformism.’ Thelatter social democratic part always remains subordinate to anddependent on the former dominant one and is constantly being‘transformed’ into it.

How can we explain New Labour’s double character? The polit-ical scientist, Andrew Gamble, long ago pointed out that left-wingparties in government are often subject to contrary pulls—onetowards realizing their governmental programme, the othertowards doing what is necessary to win electoral support and holdonto power. These frequently conflict. New Labour’s subaltern pro-gramme is driven by the second of these imperatives. It is the neces-sary ‘cost’ of maintaining loyalty amongst its traditional supporterswhilst its governmental project favours a quite different set of inter-ests. This is not necessarily just opportunistic calculation. ManyLabour MP’s have persuaded themselves that New Labour is stillfundamentally attached to ‘old’ Labour values which will somehowreassert themselves; and the Blair government itself defends itsmassive departures from these old values by rhetorically ‘spinning’its verbal continuity with them! It must therefore find space in itsprogramme to address these subordinate pressures and consti-tuencies—provided they are not allowed to derail the progresstowards a more developed market state. Thus New Labour’s‘balancing act’ is its two-step shuffle—and the way it has becomemired in endless ‘spin’ in order to square the impossible circle.

There is another consideration. The full-blown neo-liberal driveto the market state we saw in Thatcherism had its costs. Its brutalityantagonized many in society, including some amongst its ownsupporters. People thought neo-liberalism ‘red in tooth and claw’had gone a step too far. Even many of Mrs. T’s most fervent con-verts eventually abandoned her for reasons of electoral calculation.Whereas moving to the full-blown market state via a subordinatedsocial democratic route has the advantage of addressing the

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problems of ‘the residuals’ and losers—those who are likely tobenefit least from the neo-liberal route—it also takes account ofsome of the ‘costs’ and the social upheavals which its ‘transform-ism’ will create. This is authentically a hegemonic strategy, eventhough it may not be capable of producing a stable hegemonic out-come. It aims to win enough consent as it goes, and to build subor-dinate demands back into its dominant logic. Forging a plausible orpragmatic pathway from Left to Right, carrying a proportion of itsold supporters with it on particular points, dividing and confusingthe opposition, and winning a measure of consent for the project,New Labour may establish neo-liberal society and the market stateon firmer, less contested foundations. Certainly, the confusionwhich its double-headed strategy sows in its own ranks obscuresthe long-term objective and prevents a coherent and organizedopposition from emerging. The social democratic route to neo-liber-alism may turn out in the end to be what, to parody Lenin, we maycall ‘‘the best political shell’’ for global capitalism.

The subordinate, social democratic part of the New Labourprogramme involves a certain measure of indirect taxation andredistribution, reforms like the minimum wage, family tax credits,inducements to return to work (the high visibility given to ‘skillsand training,’ however, is solidly in line with the neo-liberalemphasis on ‘the supply side’). To this we also owe, in the secondterm, the build up of concern about the delivery of public services,including a substantial injection of public funds into health andeducation. In a retrospective gloss, New Labour now suggests thatthe latter was always what it intended for its second term, but theevidence is not compelling. It systematically demonized the publicsector and redistribution, consigning ‘Old Labour’ to the dust-bin ofhistory, and was unapologetically ‘entrepreneurial.’ Failing publicservices surfaced as an issue, unannounced and unanticipated,towards the end of the first term, around the time of the resignationof Peter Kilfoyle, when the disillusionment amongst New Labour’s‘heartland’ or traditional supporters reached fever pitch, andwas clearly forced from outside onto New Labour’s politicalagenda.

Public service delivery in the second term is really the key tounderstanding how this hybrid New Labour regime functions.New Labour is committed to improving the delivery of publicservices. But its means of achieving this are impeccably ‘newmanageralist.’ Redistribution, where it occurs, must be by stealth,

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lest a more vocal and organized constituency develop around it.New Labour has set its stony face against enlisting public servicesworkers and professionals in the enterprise. It refuses to counten-ance a return to a more full-blooded ‘mixed’ public=private regime(hence the unrelenting vendetta against Ken Livingstone on theissue of funding the tube). Instead it has adopted the top-downmanagerialist approach of centralised control, supplemented bythe rich panoply of ‘the audit culture’—the exponential expansionof public service managers over professionals at the coal face,unachievable targets, socially uninformative league tables,perpetual monitoring, moralistic ‘shaming,’ the merciless prolifer-ation of pointless bureaucratic detail, the introduction of selectivityunder the guise of ‘diversity’ (another piece of New Labour linguis-tic expropriation), vulgar hectoring by public sector Ministersretrained in the new ‘bruiser school’ of New Labour leadership(Prescott, Blunkett, Charles Clarke, John Reid, earlier Milburn andByers), and the novel, contradictory strategy of ‘tough love.’

How does the articulation of the subaltern ‘social democratic’part of the repertoire with the dominant, market-fundamentalistpart work in public service ‘reform’? Every change in the publicsector must be accompanied by a further tightening of the ‘moder-nizing’ screw as the unshakeable trade-off for a certain kind of‘reform.’ The public thinks the aim here is ‘better delivery.’ Thegovernment insists that the price which must be paid for this is‘more modernization.’ Nothing—however good or necessary—isallowed to happen which is not accompanied by another dose of‘reform.’ And the kind of ‘reform’ implied must meet the followingcriteria: (a) it must open the door to private investment or blur thepublic=private distinction; (b) it must meet the market criteria ofefficiency and value-for-money; (c) it must put managerial autho-rity in command; (d) it must reform working practices in a lesscollective, more individualised direction; (e) it must stimulate com-petition and divide workers by introducing incentive pay schemesand undermining collective bargaining; (f) it must weaken thebargaining power of the unions; (g) it must reduce the size of thework force and the cost of service; (h) it must hold public sectorpay in line with the well-being of the private sector; (i) the servicemust be remodelled along ‘two-tier’ lines by introducing selectivity.In short, marketisation and privatisation, whether frontally or incre-mentally introduced, is what ‘reform’ now means. This type of ‘mod-ernization’ is the New Labour ‘trade-off’ for any kind of change.

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Take the firefighters dispute. Of course, a modern fire serviceshould function efficiently. Firefighters deserve to be well paidfor the risks they take on our behalf, and in return should have theirparamedical skills and professional levels enhanced. ‘Spanishpractices,’ where they exist, serve no useful social purpose andshould be abandoned. Unions only confirmed the negative viewof themselves as an ‘outdated special interest’ by trying to defendantiquated privileges for their members instead of making abroader alliance with the many groups in society who are less wellprotected in the market. But New Labour is determined that theyshould not get a penny more unless and until they have first sub-mitted to new forms of managerial control imposed from above,and at the cost of cuts in the labour force and the number of firestations.

Of course, New Labour ‘hybridisation’ has its political antece-dents. Its immediate ancestor is Clintonian triangulation. Clintonborrowed from the Democrats, borrowed from the Republicans,and moved the whole wagon train further towards the globalmarket—a ‘Knight’s move’ or three-pronged shift which was veryinfluential in New Labour thinking in its early stages, and evenmore impressive when Clinton was able to bring off the much-envied prize of a second election victory. The essence of this‘transformism’ game depends on pulling selectively, and in anordered hierarchy, from opposing political repertoires, maintaininga double-address to different ‘publics,’ so that you can advance a‘radical’ [sic] overall strategy of governance, on the one hand, whilemaintaining electoral support and securing a third term on the other. Thesubordinate agenda—redistribution, belated public investment,public service ‘delivery,’ and so forth—has to do, essentially, withthis second goal. That is the crucial ‘double-shuffle’ or ‘triple play’involved in the New Labour project. Its ultimate goal is to deliverPhilip Bobbit’s ‘market state’ or, more simply, a ‘social democraticvariant of neo-liberalism’ (in exactly the same way that Thatcherismdelivered a ‘neo-liberal variant’ of classic Conservatism). No prizesfor identifying the common thread between these two projects!

This is the principal reason why ‘spin’ is an essential and organicpart of the New Labour project, not a surface excrescence, as manycritics fondly suppose. ‘Spin’ has the obvious purpose of putting afavourable gloss on everything. It turns every argument by arhetorical sleight-of-hand in New Labour’s favour. It is a sign ofthe reduction of politics to public relations and the manipulation

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of public opinion. But ‘spin’ also has the must deeper function of‘squaring circles’: representing a broadly neo-liberal project,favourable to the global interests of corporate capital and the rich,in such a way that it can mobilise the popular consent of Labourvoters and supporters, the trade unions, and the less-well-off insociety. This sleight-of-hand can only be done by continuouslysliding one agenda into or underneath another. The New Labourphenomenon of linguistic slippage is thus a function of itsdouble-pronged mode of address. It spins the word ‘reform,’ withits positive associations—the Reform Acts, the Factory Acts, thewelfare state, and the like—until it somehow becomes equivalentto its absolute opposite—marketization! It masks the consistentshift of direction from public to private, by exploiting the vagariesof words like ‘change’ or ‘radical,’ which can point in any direction(after all, even Mussolini made the trains run on time!). Choice,which is designed to introduce selectivity and the private sector,is represented as part of an anti-inequality strategy. ‘Spin’ mobilizesa concept’s positive resonances—and discursively transfers or‘trans-codes’ this positive charge to a very different, usuallycontrary, idea.

Take the NHS. It remains ‘free at the point of delivery’ (actually,it isn’t, but let that pass for a moment). Of course some publichospitals will now be built by private construction companies onPFI terms, whose real costs will only become clear two or three gen-erations ahead; and some of its services will be delivered by privateAmerican or British pharmaceutical or health service companies tofoundation hospitals which have been ‘freed’ to raise funds andcompete for staff. Who cares that this is all at the expense of thegeneral social provision of health care and the founding principleof universality, and will create a two-tier service? The pragmaticpracticalities of ‘delivery’ are foregrounded in order to silence theseother awkward questions about principle and purpose. What‘delivery’ presumes is that no one any longer cares who owns, runs,controls, or profits from healthcare, providing the possessively-individual consumer’s personal need is satisfied. The reduction ofthe citizen to consumer and the ‘privatization of need’ at the centerof the market model are thus the absolutely crucial but unspokenfoundations to this strategy. New Labour not only banks on the factthat this shift has occurred, but is actively ‘spinning’ to bring itabout. It is not a passive victim of sociological change but an activeagent in its unraveling. If people think of themselves as having a

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stake in the NHS, then of course it matters to them who owns it andwhat principles inform its operation. But if they can be induced byrelentless ‘spin’ to think of the NHS only in the individualist termsof ‘I need to move faster up the waiting list,’ then they won’t mindwho produces it or whether health becomes a lucrative site of priv-ate sector investment. It’s simply one more ‘market’ response to onemore individual consumer’s demand. As Mrs. Thatcher was fond ofsaying, ‘‘There is no such thing as society. There is only the individ-ual and his [sic] family. . .’’.

At the moment, the resistance to the New Labour project iscoming mainly from the backwash of the invasion of Iraq andBlair’s decision to commit Britain, wholesale and without qualifi-cation, as an ancillary support to the U.S. drive to global hegemony.No account of the New Labour project would be complete withouttaking into account New Labour’s silent conversion to the doctrineof preemptive strike or how its cosmetic programme fits into itsmission to push through a global neo-liberal agenda, which hasproduced an abject dependency on the U.S. and the project for an‘‘American century’’ and a military interventionist and geopoliticalforeign policy. The account offered here is therefore incomplete.However, it does have a political purpose. The New Labour‘project’ is a complex political initiative and we need to understandits complexities better than we do now. The idea that it has simply,like Topsy, grown higgledy-piggledy by its own accord, is non-sense. Now that there are serious forces wishing to distance them-selves from its overall goals, we need to build the different,particular points of opposition (the war, the U.S. alliance, foun-dation hospitals, selectivity in education, private–public initiatives,the reconstruction of the NHS, the trade union opposition to priva-tization, the resistance to the collapse of the public good, etc.) into amore substantive and integrated critique, in order that a more con-certed and coherent vision—and the political forces to make itpopular and put it into effect—can emerge. The two years betweennow and the next election are just enough time to construct an alter-native political project for=from the Left. Beyond that awaits a thirdinstallation of New Labour’s double-shuffle, or—heaven forfend—Michael Howard, the new leader of the Tory Party, and anothereighteen years of neo-liberal Conservative rule!

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REFERENCES

Blair, Tony. (2002). The Courage of Our Convictions. Fabian Society.Du Gay, Paul (2002). A Common Power to Keep Them All in Awe: A Comment on

Governance. Cultural Values, 6(1&2), 11–27.Finlayson, Alan. (2003). Making Sense of New Labour. London: Lawrence and Wishart

Ltd.Giddens, Anthony. (2002). The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy. Polity

Press.Gramsci, Antonio. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks. London: Lawrence &

Wishart.Meacher, Michael. (2003). ‘‘Worse than under Thatcher.’’ The Guardian, 14 July.Mandelson, Peter. (2002). Blair Revolution Revisited. Politicos Pub.Needham, Catherine. (2003). ‘‘Citizen Consumers: New Labour’s Marketplace

Democracy.’’ Catalyst (Working Paper).Rhodes, R. (1996). ‘‘The New Goverance: Governing without Government.’’ Political

Studies. Vol. 44.

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