the only real differences in Blairite New Labour and Brownite New Labour seemed to be mild economic policy differences, many of which never got introduced anyway.

The general climate was favourable towards banker-bashing from 2008 and it is probably still the case. So I doubt whether that done them much harm. What Blair does not seem to grasp is from the summer of 2008 the government were no longer in control of their own destiny. Possibly because he had been Prime Minister for ten years controlling events he finds it difficult to appreciate how everything changed in 2008. The government was being buffeted by global events that they had no control over.

‘…identifying banks as the malfeasants…’ A strange thing for him to say when the government did more for the British banks in 2008/09 than any government since Churchill in 1925.

The 50p tax rate was a significant policy shift from the Blair years. However, intervention from Mandelson never amounted to much more than words.

The government were doomed from 2008 onwards no matter what they did and if Blair had been Prime Minister he would have been doomed too. Even though they got an initial boost in the polls in the autumn of 2008 the public always blames whoever is in charge regardless whether they are to blame.

Like Blair, Brown’s politics turned out to be shaped primarily by the experience of the 1992 election defeat. (Brown largely rejected advice – from people like me, arguing that New Labour, having begun to shift the Tories at last, would not maintain its own electoral coalition if it relied almost exclusively on a “keep the Tories out” argument).

This is spot on, and one of the reasons why it was impossible for many lefties including myself to support that government. There was little said about what Labour’s vision of the future was – it was just all about how nasty the Tories were. The Tories played to the stereotype, but that electoral strategy was never going to get the votes out. It was bizarre that New Labour apparatchiks thought it would.

I am glad to hear Blair saying this. The recent efforts of Ed Miliband supporters to suggest that 2010 was a judgement on Blair, New Labour and the Iraq war have been staggering in their revisionism.

From the point of view of the left, Labour went wrong in 1994, the election victory in 1997 had nothing to do with New Labour, but everything that happened since then was New Labour’s fault for failing to be leftwing enough or liberal enough and a swing to the left will rebuild the 1997 majority.

From the point of view of the country New Labour was popular enough to win three elections but by 2010 it was no more. Two of Blair’s most distinctive selling points had been abandoned: “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” had given way to the early release of prisoners and “standards not structures” had given way to the dumbing down of the curriculum. Most significantly, economic prudence seemed to have been abandoned.

Two different accounts of what happened in 2010. Much of the debate in the Labour leadersip contest has assumed that the first account is accurate, which is a recipe for keeping the Tories in power for 15 years. Any attempt to bring the second account to the fore has to be welcomed.

I love the sound of spinning in the morning. You should try and look at politics through the eyes of the average voter and not a left-wing activist. You may not, by the standards of the Judean People’s Front, consider the Labour Party left-wing but in the overall spectrum of electoral choices most people would see it as being on the left. Blair is absolutely right – under Brown Labour moved leftwards from its position under Blair. Labour got elected when it moderated its left wing instincts and lost when it indulged them. Face it. The UK population is not, hasn’t been and will never be particularly left wing so lurching to the Left as Ed Miliband wants to do and Liberal Conspiracy seems to fantasise about will be electoral suicide. Blair, as so often, was right.

It’s the economy, stupid.

Biffy@5

Evidence please?

We can look at how the public see it. Pollsters occasionally ask voters to place themselves, and the major parties on a left-right scale. I blogged about one such poll in Sept 2008 (If anyone has a more recent example from the election campaign period, please shout).

That Populus poll was reported in The Times under the headline “Left-wing Brown grows away from voters”, despite the report saying “”Mr Brown is narrowly nearer both to the Centre and to the average voter than David Cameron, who is seen as shifting to the right”.

The scale is 0 (left) to 10 (right). In September 2009, Labour was seen as 4.82 (which is 3% along the left-hand scale from the centre), having been seen as 5.2 (just as marginally to the centre-right). Brown was seen as placed at 4.58 (8% along the left scale), having been seen as slightly centre-right.

The median voter was at 5.16, very marginally to the right of centre, having inched leftwards from 5.29 since 2006.

As the Times report said: “The Tory party has moved to the right, by 0.15 over the past year, to 5.91. This is 0.74 away from the average voter, more than double the gap with Labour, now on 4.82, despite a 0.38 leftward position shift in the past year. The poll therefore shows that, despite the shift away from the average voter by Mr Brown and Labour, Mr Cameron and his party still have a long way to go to be where the average voter is. On a five-year comparison, the Tories have, however, moved 0.30 nearer the Centre, Labour 0.12 farther away. Nick Clegg is seen as fractionally to the left of Sir Menzies Campbell, who stepped down as Liberal Democrat leader last October. Mr Clegg is now on 4.62, against 4.66″

http://www.nextleft.org/2008/09/lurch-to-left-not.html

Blair took personal pride when polls like these placed him precisely where the median voter was in 2006 (5.29). This did inform his political strategy, which involved tracking the median voter and pushing the Tories right. It is the politics of the offside trap, modelled on Arsenal of the Tony Adams era. However, the Tories finally twigged this after 2005, and starting rhetorically adopting Labour language and pushing into the left’s part of the field. Pushing them right from the halfway line doesn’t then work, and New Labour struggled to adapt in political rhetoric and electoral strategy to its own (semi-)success in shifting the terms of political debate, shifting the policy ground somewhat centre-leftwards.

If you look at the 2008 US election, it can be seen that shadowing precisely the median voter is not the only possible election winning strategy. Pew graph of primary candidates here.
http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/giuliani_mccain_closest_to_voters/

Blair claiming he had nothing to do with Labour losing. Big fucking surprise.

Coincidentally, is this Tony Blair (who thinks banks weren’t to blame) the same Tony Blair who holds a number of lucrative positions with, er, banks?

Biffy, that’s a load of piffle you just wrote. Hope someone’s paying you.

thanks for cross-posting

not so sure about double negatives (headline)

What about “We ran as New Labour, we lost as New Labour” (!)

Don’t mention the war!

Any mention of the facts that the total vote cast for New Labour went down by 4 million between the elections of 1997 and 2005 or that turnout at the 2001 election was the lowest since 1918, while turnout at the 2005 election was the second lowest? Try this graph of general election turnouts since 1945:
http://www.ukpolitical.info/Turnout45.htm

In all, hardly a ringing endorsement of New Labour. It got re-elected to government in 2001 and 2005 not because of Blair and New Labour but because the Conservatives lacked credibility. A chunk of the electorate was already alert to Blair.

William Hague, Conservative leader in 2001, was clear about being against bogus asylum seekers, joining the Eurozone and higher taxes. His trouble was that he was never clear on what he was for.

For the 2005 election, the Conservatives first had the problem of getting rid of IDS. Michael Howard, his successor, then had that amazing idea about importing an Australian election guru, Lynton Crosby, who had some weird ideas about how dog whistles could attract votes because it had worked in Australia.

The main trouble with New Labour government is not that it was too “right-wing” or too “left-wing” but that it was much too incompetent. The fact is that good intentions are nowhere nearly enough for good government. Ted Honderich was right about Blair:

“Honderich is also a consequentialist, which partly explains his hatred towards Tony Blair. ‘He is always asking to be judged by the morality of his intentions,’ he spits. ‘He doesn’t understand that no one cares about his fucking morality. We judge him by the consequences of his actions. In any case, his morality is so muddy and ill-considered, I’m increasingly coming to the opinion that Blair’s main problem is that he’s not very bright.’”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2005/mar/22/academicexperts.highereducationprofile

Ted Honderich was Grote professor of mind and logic at UCL before he retired. Roy Jenkins, once Blair’s mentor, also remarked on his second class mind.

I’ve encountered a surprisingly large number of people over the past couple of months who tell me they voted Labour in 2005 but switched all the way to Cameron this time, bypassing the Lib Dems.

I meet most of these types in a work context, so I don’t claim they are typical of the general population (I work in a pretty weird niche area!).

There are probably slightly older versions of the same type who had voted Labour in 1997 and 2001, who are now in the Tory camp. Given Tony Blair’s statements in his postscript, I must say I wonder how he would have voted himself in 2010 if he didn’t actually have a compelling reason to stay loyal to Labour arising out of his having been a politician.

There must be loads of Tony Blair types who went into other careers: non-tribal, generally centreist and so on who are backing the Tories now. Such people may well have been put off by banker-bashing and may well have been alienated by rhetoric along the lines of “the end of capitalism” and “the state is back”. The question is: are there enough of them to swing an election? And – how are they distributed?

11,

Almost a perfect example of picking the facts to meet the conclusion in the way I described earlier. The proof of whether a government is popular or not is whether people bother to kick it out at the next election, not whether it maintains the absolute number of votes it had when first elected.

Tony Blair remains the only man alive to have led Labour to a general election victory, and the only Labour leader in history to have won a sizeable majority in every general election they contested. This is even more of achievement in that this began in an era where it was widely thought Labour could never win again. The revisionism that turns Blair into a vote-losing idiot is the preserve of self-righteous ideologues and cannot be considered a serious analysis of events.

@5 Biffy Dunderdale

Biffy Dunderhead more like…. it only goes to show that there really ARE enough Blairite ultras out there who believe that Tony was right. Horrifying on so many levels. New Labour was and is an aberration: a bunch of jumped up, oily, spin obsessed wonks who (sadly) managed to corrupt the progressive left from within.

The victory in 1997 went to their heads, and that hubris never really left them. Only a “true believer” would recognise Biffy’s characterisation of history as anything other than an airbrushing of 13 wasted years…. and sadly many others who should have known better at least acquiesced in the New Labour experiment, even if they didn’t actively collaborate.

Blair wasn’t right then, and he isn’t right now. He’s a trimmer, who will say and do anything to cast himself and his tawdry conscience in a good light. New Labour got elected by such a huge margin in 1997 because the opposition was so hopeless, and people wanted a change. They didn’t want an illiberal, crypto-Tory collection of second hand car salesmen. New Labour were, and are, about as far away from being progressive as Nick Griffin is from being a one nation Conservative.

It’s actually rather comical that anyone really believes that the reason New Labour lost was that they weren’t New Labour enough. They lost because people finally saw them for the clueless bunch of hypocrites and principle voids they are.

I’m not going to comment about why nulab lost the election or why over the past 13 years it has lost its’ core support, because I’ve already posted on that many times.
Looking at the above extracts just confirms Blair’s lack of analytical skills, from taking the party away from its’ roots to entering into an illegal war on the basis of absolutely no evidence that WMD existed.
5 Are you an average voter or are you speculating about what the average voter thinks, probably the latter as you are posting on LC. IMO,the average voter doesn’t think in terms of ‘left, right or centre’ but what political parties say and what they do, nulab sounded like the tories and libdems and the election results suggest that most voters were unable to discern the difference, the tories probably polled more votes because nulab had been in power for 13 years But since 2001, the percentage voter turn-out has been less than 65%, the drop in nulab support almost correlates with the drop in voting turn-out.
F…, now I’ve commented about why they lost the election.

oldandrew,

The proof of whether a government is popular or not is whether people bother to kick it out at the next election, not whether it maintains the absolute number of votes it had when first elected.

So if a party won with 20m votes in a first election and won with 10m votes at the next election, you think it remains popular? I dare say it’s less popular in the second election than the first, while remaining more popular than the losers. It’s hardly a ringing endorsement from the electorate.

Gould,

If you check, you’ll find that in many places the norm is for floating voters to move between the two main parties (or one of those parties and the Liberal Democrats), rather than between all three. This is because left/right tribalism is not actually a major consideration for many voters.

I think that much left-wing thinking seems to regard people leaving Labour as likely to vote for alternative ‘left’ parties (Liberal Democrats, Greens) and ignores the fact that if Labour vactates the policy areas where it can attract support (which Mr Blair occupied nicely) then the people who supported it whilst it had those policies will not meekly go alternative ‘left’ but seek an alternative full stop. The logic of the centreground is that there is a generally centralist body of voters (as Sunder points out above, probably slightly right-of-centre, although that depends how you centre the scale) who will not vote for scary alternatives, especially from the left (sorry – but I think the ability of radical Conservatives to get re-elected in the 1980s suggests this may be possible from the right). Mr Blair understood this, but whether others do is a difficult question – I am pretty certain from his economic policies that Mr Brown (and I presume Mr Balls and Ed Milliband) did not.

In essence what Mr Blair has written is that by abandoning the central ground, Mr Brown made it easier for Mr Cameron and Mr Clegg to gather the voters who float there. Whilst this is clearly not all the story, it is a useful analysis – what it perhaps misses is any consideration of whether there was an attempt to shift the centre ground, which is what Mr Blair never seems to have managed, whereas Mrs Thatcher before him clearly did so (the Major government was pretty centralist viewed from 1995, but from 1975 would look quite right wing).

If Labour had been more “New Labour” in this election they would have suffered a far greater defeat than they did. The limited concessions to social democracy Brown begrudgingly started to reintroduce is the only reason I, and many people I know started to vote for them again. No chance in hell would I have voted for them if the despicable Blair was still in charge.

Blair’s argument is self-justifying garbage from a truly odious human being.

@13: “The revisionism that turns Blair into a vote-losing idiot is the preserve of self-righteous ideologues and cannot be considered a serious analysis of events.”

However you spin it, the plain fact is that Blair-led New Labour not only lost 4 million votes between the 1997 and 2005 elections, the party also lost at least half its membership – which in one reason the party is now carrying borrowings of £20 millions.

And the turnouts at the elections in 2001 and 2005 were, respectively, the lowest and second lowest since 1918. This can hardly be construed as enthusiastic endorsement of Blair and New Labour. As mentioned before, IMO Labour needs to disown Blair to move on.

Try Sir Kenneth Macdonald QC, previously Director of Public Prosecutions 2003-08 and subsequently visiting prof at the LSE:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/article6955241.ece

“The degree of deceit involved in our decision to go to war on Iraq becomes steadily clearer. This was a foreign policy disgrace of epic proportions and playing footsie on Sunday morning television does nothing to repair the damage. It is now very difficult to avoid the conclusion that Tony Blair engaged in an alarming subterfuge with his partner George Bush and went on to mislead and cajole the British people into a deadly war they had made perfectly clear they didn’t want, and on a basis that it’s increasingly hard to believe even he found truly credible.”

In his law practice, Sir Kenneth Macdonald QC works out of Matrix Chambers, as does Cherie (Booth) Blair QC and Professor Philippe Sands QC, author of: Lawless World – Making and Breaking Global Rules (Penguin, 2006).

@17

Don’t worry about oldandrew, judging by his blog he’s slowly coming round to the idea of birching 5-year-olds for giving him cheek. Here’s a hint, Andrew – “tough on the causes of crime” does not simply mean “locking more people up”. I know you’ve developed a relentlessly negative view of human nature since becoming a teacher, but honestly…

It’s nice to see that Blair’s delusional defence mechanism is starting to make him contradict himself several times in the same article these days. I suspect his detractors on the left and the right would probably have a lot more respect if he just came clean and admitted that he sold us all out for an extremely high price.

Wow – how were you guys ever taken in by that (three time never before achieved election winning) idiot?

I don’t think it’s just TB who’s rewriting history!

@17 Watchman

“In essence what Mr Blair has written is that by abandoning the central ground, Mr Brown made it easier for Mr Cameron and Mr Clegg to gather the voters who float there.”

How can you believe that NuLabour were in the central ground?! The reasons so many people deserted them was not some for of collective false cousciousness on their part, not knowing what was good for them according to Uncle Tony and Big Gordie!

If you beleive that, no doubt you’d also swallow the argument that “everyone” in 1979 was clamouring for the Thatcherite revolution, or similarly that the reason the Scots deserted the Tories was not because of their crass policies and approach, but the fact that the libertarian message wasn’t shouted at them loudly enough?

The millions who abandoned NuLabour did so because they (eventually) saw the whole nauseating experiment for what it was: a desperate attempt to have power for power’s sake, as devoid of progressive ideas as it was (and still is) of charismatic leadership.

Labour lost because I wasn’t leader … shock.

I’m amazed how fast the media forget recent history. In fact, Blair was losing the 2005 election according to the polls, because he was already discredited. There was a change of strategy half way through the campaign, after which Brown was umbilically tied to Blair in public, with a tacit “vote Blair get Brown”. Only then did the polls turn.

Brown has his problems, but not being Blair, or not being New Labour, is not one of them.

@23

Indeed, and also GBs polling was especially high around the 2007 election-that-never-was time. If he’d had the balls (no pun intended) to have called it history would be v different I suspect.

Galen 10,

I’d suggest that one of the key tensions of New Labour was the desire for statist control (wierdly the one way Old Labour could express itself was in its centralising tendencies) against the liberal (in every sense of the word) instincts of the party. Not a new struggle, but one that was key in defining the period.

The problem was that because Mr Blair managed such a landslide, he was able to push through the liberal agenda pretty well, and every compromise or concession to the statist idea after that started to alienate people (you can portray the New Labour period as a slow decline in support, but you can also identify the decisions that led to little bits of decline – not only Iraq but fox hunting; not only 28 days detention but ASBOs). I would like to see this as proof that increased statism is electorally a bad idea – and that Mr Brown was a statist at heart – but I am not sure the evidence allows that bald a statement. However, the difference between Labour in 1998 and Labour in 2009 was that the latter was a lot more aggresively statist, and in a more marked left-wing way. Hence my consideration that Mr Blair’s analysis has value.

It seems significant to me that right-wing commentators (i.e. those with no irons in this particular fire) generally seem to see more value to Mr Blair’s comments than those in his own party. Assuming some of us are not setting out to mislead you, I would advocate not dismissing what he says. Not repeating his actions (New Labour is in the past, being a reaction to problems half a lifetime ago), but not dismissing the ideas behind them.

“However you spin it, the plain fact is that Blair-led New Labour not only lost 4 million votes between the 1997 and 2005 elections, the party also lost at least half its membership – which in one reason the party is now carrying borrowings of £20 millions.”

More selective statistics. 1997 was a high point for Labour’s membership and share of the vote (which is surely more important than absolute number of votes). The fact that this level of popularity was unsustainable in government is not a shock. Judging Blair against this baseline is like the climate change deniers who measure everything against 1998. The idea that Tony Blair was a disaster because he never maintained his own record breaking popularity is just ridiculous. It doesn’t get round the fact that he was staggeringly popular at times and even when he was less popular he was still an election winner.

The Tories must be loving the sight of the left trying to disown the one period of sustained electoral success Labour ever had.

It was Murdoch, of course. Nothing else counts in British politics.

“Here’s a hint, Andrew – “tough on the causes of crime” does not simply mean “locking more people up”.”

No, but letting more people out early completely contradicts “tough on crime” and it was the dominant aspect of law and order coverage for a long period.

@26 oldandrew

“The idea that Tony Blair was a disaster because he never maintained his own record breaking popularity is just ridiculous. It doesn’t get round the fact that he was staggeringly popular at times and even when he was less popular he was still an election winner.”

He was a disaster due to the illiberal policies he and his cronies promoted and put in place. The fact that he was popular at times proves only that he often had little effective opposition either from the political right, from within his own party, or from a supine media. Many authoritarian leaders win elections, and those who voted for them can repent at leisure. The fact that so many fell for the nauseating NuLabour project simply proves that you can fool most of the time.

“The fact that he was popular at times proves only that he often
had little effective opposition either from the political right, from within his
own party, or from a supine media.”

To be fair, I am past caring what reasons people give to explain why he was so electorally successful, I’d just be happy to see an end to the revisionism that makes out that he was an electoral disaster who was responsible for the 2010 election defeat.

@28 – Well, if they were in prison at all it implies strongly that they were in fact, caught, tried, convicted and imprisoned – so they’d been pretty “tough on” that particular “crime”. The problem is that with limited places, plus the fact that sticking petty criminals in the same place as hardened sociopaths for longer probably isn’t going to help the former’s chances of rehabilitation, surely clearing the decks of those convicted of lesser crimes some time back to make space for those who’ve committed worse crimes more recently is a logical solution?

Unless you want us to end up like the US, where “the land of the free” has a higher percentage of its population imprisoned than any other Western nation – with a strong argument in more provincial states and counties that the criminal justice system is largely being abused to disenfranchise ethnic minorities.

Back on topic – Blair was not a disaster because he never maintained his own record-breaking popularity, he was a disaster because he started to believe his own bullshit, and rather than using the language of triangulation to advance progressive policies, as many of us hoped he would, he actually started to believe that the policy trend from 1979 on (more privatisation, less regulation, allowing workplace representation to die on the vine, complete dependence economically on the financial and banking sector) was a good thing.

Amazing how hanging out almost exclusively with billionaires for a few years can do that to you…

@30 oldandrew

It’s hardly “revisionism” to hold Blair responsible (at least in part) for the 2010 defeat. I would suggest it is more difficult to maintain, as he and his apoligists seems to, that the reason they lost was that they weren’t NuLabour enough.

Just to clarify:

“The idea that Tony Blair was a disaster because he never maintained his own record breaking popularity is just ridiculous.”

is a way of saying:

“We can’t consider Tony Blair’s failure to maintain his record-breaking popularity as a disaster.”

It does not mean:

“I think that the only objection people have to Tony Blair is his declining popularity after 1997. Please correct me by ranting about all the issues you have with him”.

26
1997 was indeed a high point for nulab, Blair did initially appear to assimilate the interests of its’ core voters (loosly termed the working-class) and appeal to liberals (small l). His change of clause 4 started to ring warning bells with certain membership (myself included) but it actually referred to ‘socialism’, although terming socialism as ‘democratic’ incensed many as it suggested that ‘socialism’ per se was not democratic until the advent of nl.
By 2005, it was clear that nl was not the party of the working-class and the term ‘democratic socialism’ didn’t mean socialism at all, just a watered down Thatcherismcumcorporatism.
Nl’s declining support came mainly from the core vote and not those who had transferred their votes because of Blair’s Thatcheresque appearance, the Iraq war eventually turned many of the advant garde and liberals towards the lib-dems.

32,

I think everyone gets that this is what you believe. It just doesn’t fit the evidence we have of Labour losing 6.2% of voters between 2005 and 2010, and an electorate in 2010 with a low opinion of Brown’s leadership and Labour’s policies on the economy, immigration and crime. Blair might well be underestimating his own contribution to Labour’s eventual defeat, but the left are currently overestimating it to the point of delusion. We know from the 80s what happens when the left corroborates the Tory narrative of Labour failure in government: it helps keep Labour out for a generation.

What cost Blair his popularity and Labour a huge wedge of voters was Iraq, pure and simple. Nothing to do with his economic policies or the authoritarianism New Labour exhibited.

Sadly, civil liberties are a minority enthusiasm in this country and most voters are economically illiterate.

@oldandrew

So how do you explain Brown’s popularity around Autumn 2007 then? And how do you explain why the Tories dropped their “Vote Blair, Get Brown” tactics in 2005 because people thought “well that sounds alright, then”? Flowerpower has it about right. Blair’s foreign policy misadventure cost Labour not only votes but trust and it’s only starting to realise that (see: Ed Miliband). I’d still argue that the recession didn’t help Labour, mind.

@26: “The Tories must be loving the sight of the left trying to disown the one period of sustained electoral success Labour ever had.”

Most ordinary, normal folk have little insight into the special psyches of people who spin tales for financial gain or as part of a political strategy to win elections. Bernard Madoff is one among several recent example of a hugely successful fraudster who made off with $50 billion in a Ponzi scheme lasting years.

There’s no denying that Victor Lustig had a real talent for spinning credible tales:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Lustig

His most successful con was to “sell” the Eiffel Tower in Paris in 1925 for scrap metal:
http://www.fool.co.uk/news/investing/2009/05/05/famous-scams-the-man-who-sold-the-eiffel-tower.aspx

There was another recent case of a plausible character who tried to sell the Ritz Hotel in Piccadilly:

“A jobless lorry driver who pulled off an ‘elaborate and outrageous scam’ to sell London’s Ritz Hotel for £250m has been jailed for five years. . . ”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-10772814

As for Blair, try this Guardian report about his radio interview with Des O’Connor in 1996, the year before he became PM:

“The first sound of bats flapping in his belfry was heard even before the election, in December 1996, when he told Des O’Connor that as a 14-year-old he had run away to Newcastle airport and boarded a plane for the Bahamas: ‘I snuck onto the plane, and we were literally about to take off when the stewardess came up to me…’ Quite how he managed this without a boarding card or passport was not explained. It certainly came as a surprise to his father (‘The Bahamas? Who said that? Tony? Never’), and an even greater surprise to staff at the airport, who pointed out that there has never been a flight from Newcastle to the Bahamas.

“A couple of years later, he told an interviewer that his ‘teenage hero’ was the footballer Jackie Milburn, whom he would watch from the seats behind the goal at St James’s Park. In fact, Milburn played his last game for Newcastle United when Blair was just four years old, and there were no seats behind the goal at the time.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,230340,00.html

Don’t blame me – I didn’t vote for New Labour.

“So how do you explain Brown’s popularity around Autumn 2007 then?”

What’s to explain? Surely, the fact that Brown’s personal popularity fell so far while he was prime minister makes it even less likely that 2010 was a delayed reaction to Blair, rather than a rejection of Brown?

@39

See my comment here. And as you’re a teacher, copy it out 1000 times until you understand that the recession caused a wee bit of a shake up in ol’ politics land.

@38

Who did you vote for Bob? Can’t see you as SWP

oldandrew,

1997 was a high point for Labour’s membership …

Well, a high point since ’79 – it’s historically poor. Of course, without a study it’s a guess as to the proportion that can be attributed to Blair and how much to the party being in opposition. But after the ’97 election was won, party membership declined to an all-time low (well, my figures go back to 1928. Again, difficult to attribute to Blair or something else, but it’s not great, is it?

… and share of the vote (which is surely more important than absolute number of votes).

Well it depends, doesn’t it? Getting 40% of the vote looks great until you view it in the context of 70% turnout. Better than 2001 though, where again Labour won about 40% of the vote but with a turnout of 59%, and 2005 where the vote and turnout were 35% and 61% respectively.

Also look at his approval ratings.

All this doesn’t scream “popular” to me, but YMMV.

But after the ’97 election was won, party membership declined to an all-time low (well, my figures go back to 1928. Again, difficult to attribute to Blair or something else, but it’s not great, is it?

To be fair, this should be seen in the context of dramatic falls in party membership across the board since the war. Who joins a political party these days? Much easier just to buy a little rubber bracelet that shows how much you care.

Oh, I agree Tim J. Half my point is that it’s difficult to judge popularity. The other half is that he doesn’t look particularly popular.

It’s all relative.

@35 oldandrew

“We know from the 80s what happens when the left corroborates the Tory narrative of Labour failure in government: it helps keep Labour out for a generation.”

It’s not the same thing at all. If Labour is kept out of office for a generation, it will be largely as a result of the New Labour experiment. New Labour’s failures in government were hardly a result of being too left wing or too progressive: they were a result of being authoritarian.

The “left” aren’t overestimating Blair’s role in the defeat to the point of delusion. Rather it is the rump of Blairite and New Labour ultras who refuse to see that they were and are the problem, not the solution.

In the course of a mild bout of clearing out, I came across a print out of Tony Blair’s personal election manifesto for his Sedgefield Constituency in the general election on 9 June 1983, when he was first elected to Parliament. It makes instructive reading now, for instance:

- We’ll negotiate a withdrawal from the EEC which has drained out national resources and destroyed jobs

- An immediate 50% increase in house building

- We’ll link pensions to average earnings

- Labour believes in defence and in NATO membership but we don’t need dangerous and costly Trident and Cruise missiles, which just escalate the nuclear arms race

Presumably, Blair now regards all that from the 1983 manifesto as “Old Labour”. Some of it seems a good idea to me, especially the bits about increasing house building, linking pensions to average earnings and cutting out the dangerous and costly Trident missile system – which did nothing to deter the 7/7 attack on the London Tube in 2005.

Now a few points;

Labour won in 1997 against an incredibly incompetent unpopular Tory government. Which was hardly an incredible achievement. A small fact which is often forgotten by Blairite apologists is that Labour were already well ahead of the conservatives in the opinion polls before Tony Blair became leader. Suggesting that Labourt would have won the 97 election comfortably if John Smith had still been leader.

Labour also won the 2001 and 2005 elections against an incredibly weak opposition.

At the 2005 election Labour only won 35% of the vote, and ironically, in numerical terms New Labour won fewer votes than Neil Kinnock did in 1987.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labour_Party_(UK)#Electoral_performance

That hardly suggests that after the innitial euphoria of 1997, New Labour was wildly popular with the publc. By 2001 I suspect that most progressive voters who had innitially been taken in by Blair had seen through him.