New Labour | British Politics and Government Since 1900 | Oxford Finals Summary Notes
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Course
BPG - British Politics And Government
Institution
University Of Oxford
Wide-ranging, concise and neatly-formatted finals notes for BPG since 1900. Includes historical background, secondary reading summaries, policy summaries and timelines. Subheadings include 'ideology and the Third Way', 'did Labour lose its soul?', 'policy themes', 'governance themes' and 'why was N...
Ideology
2021: Did New Labour find a ‘Third Way’?
2020: Did New Labour leave Labour’s traditional voters and values behind?
2014: Did New Labour dispense with ideology?
2017: Is ‘New Labour’ better understood as an electoral project or an ideological project?
Policy
2019: ‘New Labour was cautious in economic policy, but radical in social policy.’ Do you agree?
Remain distinctive?
2016: Did New Labour remain distinctive in office?
2010: Was the ‘New Labour’ of 1997 still recognisable by 2010?
2012: ‘Labour won when it was New Labour. It lost because it stopped being New Labour’ [Tony Blair].
Discuss.
General
2018: Why did Labour win three full terms of office after 1997?
2015: In whose interests did New Labour govern?
2011: What lessons should the Labour Party learn from its time in office, 1997- 2010?
2013: What were the causes, and the consequences for New Labour, of the Blair-Brown rivalry?
Tips from examiners’ reports:
1. Be strong on Labour legislation to support claims.
2. Candidates often write nothing whatsoever about Gordon Brown, which
is always highlighted as a serious omission → should talk about
financial crash.
3. Be precise about what ‘traditional’ Labour values are and now they contrast with ‘new’.
, Labour before 1997
Abandoning Clause IV
1. Blair stripped Clause IV of its commitment to nationalisation. It had formerly promised ‘To secure for
the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry’. It now commits itself to a ‘dynamic
economy’.
Ideology and the ‘Third W ay’
Debate has raged over the extent to which New Labour can be seen as ‘neoliberal’ or Thatcherite, as a renewed
form of social democracy or as a genuine ‘Third Way’.
Is New Labour an ideology?
1. Often answered ‘no’ because of NL stress on pragmatism → ‘what
matters is what works’, best exemplified in PFI.
2. Buckler and Dolowitz: the ‘third way’ has an ideological core → uses
Rawls’ liberal theory of justice to identify NL as 'social-
liberalism’.
a. Not an uncritical adoption of Thatcherite neoliberalism (which assumed markets to be neutral
in the way they distribute opportunities).
b. New Labour instead believed that markets operate in a morally
arbitrary way (often to the disadvantage of low-income groups)
and must be mediated by fairness, i.e. public spending →
securing of the widest possible spread of opportunity for all in
society.
c. Embraces fundamental liberal individualist assumptions, but also retains a commitment to
redistributive social justice.
3. Michael Freeden: New Labour is a non-doctrinaire eclectic ideology that invokes an assemblage of
values from different sources and traditions.
a. Ideologies are ‘recurrent, action-oriented patterns of political argument’ based around core
and adjacent concepts. They do not have to be doctrinaire/rigid grand narratives.
b. New Labour’s ideology is located somewhere between three major Western traditions:
i. Conservatism:
1. Individual duties to society, the denunciation of crime, the importance of
directive political leadership, the reconstruction of stable family values.
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