SE Academic Review 2023

37 ACADEMIC REVIEW 2023

“ The Labour Party under Blair undertook one of the most radical transformations any political party in the United Kingdom has ever undertake. ”

Modernisation of Labour The Labour Party under Blair undertook one of the most radical transformations any political party in the United Kingdom has ever made. As Blair was elected in 1983 and stayed in Parliament to witness the subsequent four electoral defeats, he started to develop ideas of what Labour would have to do to become an electable party. Blair soon became known as a ‘moderniser’ and was put in the same category as similarly-minded individuals: Philip Gould, Gordon Brown, Peter Mandelson, and many others. It is important to discuss whether this massive endeavour, undertaken solely to win elections, did contribute to the Labour’s eventual victory. Reinvention as New Labour Following the 1992 defeat, the fourth consecutive defeat for Labour, many in the party started to develop the belief that the Labour brand had become toxic and unelectable. Labour was viewed by many as the party of the ‘winter of discontent’, trade unions, inflation, nuclear disarmament, high taxes and anti-aspirational. Whilst much had been done to modernise the party’s policies and there had been campaigning under Neil Kinnock and John Smith, these perceptions persisted. The reinvention as New Labour took place with several symbolic moments that supplied a shock to the Labour Party and demonstrated to the public that Labour had in fact changed into a credible party of government. One of these defining moments came in the 1994 party conference in Blackpool. This conference holds significance for two reasons: it was the first time the ‘New Labour’ branding was seen by the public as it featured in the slogan “New Labour, New Britain” and Tony Blair suggested in his conference speech that Labour should replace Clause IV of Labour’s constitution (Gould, 2011, p. 218). Clause IV committed the Labour Party to ’common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange‘. A holdover from the original 1918 Labour constitution, it had not been seriously part of Labour policy for many years and

many leaders had attempted to change Clause IV, most notably Hugh Gaitskell in 1959 and Neil Kinnock in 1988, but had failed to convince the party to remove what many viewed as a defining document for Labour (Daunton, 1995). Although the 1994 conference narrowly rejected Blair’s proposal to scrap Clause IV, after nationwide campaigning a vote in a special conference resulted in a 65% vote in favour of replacing it (Seldon, 2005, p. 225). Blair’s battle with Clause IV was primarily symbolic, it did not alter any of his policies and the existence of the purely symbolic clause was never a major hurdle for the electorate voting Labour. However, it supplied Blair with an opportunity to firmly distance himself and the party from their previous failures, committing Labour to his developing ‘third way’ ideology and this central position allowed voters from the left and the right to vote for Labour. Furthermore, the projection that Blair was the one who forced this reform on his outdated party demonstrated that Blair had command over his party, especially when compared to John Major’s hold over the Conservatives and proved to the British public that this young barrister who had never held a government position was a credible leader.