Review of Glen O'Hara, New Labour, New Britain?: How the Blair Governments Reshaped the Country, Manchester University Press, 2026.
This review was written in February of this year, as the Mandelson scandal raged, Burnham was blocked from selection in Gorton and Denton, and Keir Starmer was busy beating back any assertions that he, perhaps, would not lead the party to the next election. The fast pace of the events on which it comments was part of why it wasn’t published at the time; as things moved on, I put it aside and didn’t pick it up again.
Now, however, we are to get a Prime Minister who is truly a product of the New Labour era, and the time I spent thinking about the influences of New Labour earlier in the year has surfaced in my mind again. While one of the central thrusts of my argument below is that the predominant New Labour influence on Starmerism is not a positive one (despite much positive influence there for the drawing, as O’Hara’s book so diligently documents), I think it seems unlikely that we are to see history repeat itself. When I caveated that “Not all New Labour returnees and acolytes thereof are alike, of course. Some of those who have re-entered government have spent the interim decade and a half at think tanks writing reports about poverty and the state of the country; some of them, however, have been coining it in public affairs (and perhaps dabbling in brutal internecine faction fighting on the side)”, Graeme Cooke was one of the people I had in mind as an example of the former. Cooke is now reported to be the Burnham’s pick as director of the No 10 Policy Unit, alongside James Purnell as Downing Street Chief of Staff and surely others to come. Undoubtedly there will be patterns of mind (and of error) recognisable as New Labour handmedowns when we begin to be able to properly assess what Burnhamism is in practice. The process of identifying them will be interesting, but I would be surprised if it yielded the same results as the process applied to Starmerism.
I have also been thinking again about the arguments likely to be made as we leave the Starmer era. Personally – and this is likely tied to a close interest in party management throughout the period, which I think has been poor, as is discussed below – my assessments are not hugely favourable. My view to one side, I think it’s quite likely we will see revisionism around the merits of the soon to be ex-Prime Minister, as distance causes the unhappiness with him to dim. I think this dimming is somewhat inevitable – the passage of time, the lack of a single, easy to understand smoking gun – but it isn’t something I want to hasten in my own thought or otherwise, hence publishing this now. Unwillingness to make normative judgements about the behaviours and profits of actors within the party for barely more reason than that they are within the party is part of what has led Starmerism to its end. The lesson is that you either make these judgements or have a series of investigative journalists make them for you. What lessons Burnhamism takes from New Labour and from Starmerism will be core to its success or lack thereof, but layering another level of refracted assessment on top of what is discussed here is unlikely to make “on its own terms” any easier.
In his new book New Labour, New Britain, the historian Glen O’Hara has a simple and basically impossible mission. He wants to turn New Labour from “news to history” and to stop debates about the era amounting to nothing more than “tedious back and forth depending on the observer’s prior views”. We should, he thinks, assess those governments by what they wanted to do in relation to what they did.
This approach to an era fast slipping into the historical day before yesterday makes, on the face of it, perfect sense. Tony Blair moved into Downing Street 29 years ago, and Gordon Brown left it 16 years ago, and in the time between those events the country, the Labour Party, and the country’s perception of the Labour Party were all much changed. O’Hara provides a neat guide to the actual efforts and impacts of the domestic policy of the Blair and Brown years, one segmented by policy areas and tracing ideas into plans, plans into white papers, white papers into legislation and legislation into delivery (or attempted delivery). This farm to table approach to New Labour shows a series of governments that made impressive strides in many areas. Child poverty dropped precipitously, as did class sizes; early years spending jumped from £1.2bn in 1997/98 to £4.2bn in 2005/06; in the NHS, staffing jumped by more than a quarter in the decade to 2008 while waiting lists fell alongside cancer mortality rates (O’Hara provides a graph showing a particularly striking fall in these rates for women). The book’s “end to end” policy analysis shows exactly how the country got to Labour Party conference in 2009, when, in a speech that remains internally totemic, Gordon Brown listed myriad impressive achievements in government.
Despite coming from a supportive perspective (this book can trace some of its origins back to a paper O’Hara wrote for the Tony Blair Institute in 2018), the author is also clear on what didn’t work, or what didn’t work anywhere near as well as it should have. New Labour’s famous “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” approach is ruled basically a dud. Contradictory policy directions led to many useless or actively bad outcomes. The country was left blanketed with CCTV cameras; ASBOs often reinforced rather than broke the link between “low level incivility and crime”; a desire for harsher punishments brought forth what is now acknowledged as one of the great shames of 21st century policy making, imprisonment for public protection (IPP) orders. On housing, too, the legacy comes in for much criticism. Despite a sharp fall in rough sleeping (by one count in 2010, there were only 440 people sleeping on the streets in England) and homelessness more generally, New Labour did little to address the problems that have now grown into today’s generationally defining housing crisis. Some curbs on right to buy aside, in general New Labour’s housing policy “gave further encouragement to owner occupation, which was”, O’Hara notes, “probably not entirely wise”. House prices continued to go up; “affordability for first time buyers continuously deteriorated”.
O’Hara’s careful analysis of policy trajectories does provide genuine insight in what went right and what went wrong over 13 years of government; which instincts were vindicated (a focus on early years; simple funding hikes for public services coming out of Brown’s Treasury) and which weren’t. His broader aim, however, is not one that seems attainable through careful policy analysis. “Rudimentary, one dimensional attitudes [on New Labour] have prevailed so widely up to now”, he says. His book wants to move past all this, and to aim at “understanding [New Labour] on its own terms”.
I read O’Hara’s book and thought about the period that it discussed in February of 2026. In this time I was surely completely unexceptional in that most of the terms under which I thought about New Labour were set by Peter Mandelson. In the course of the writing of this piece, New Labour’s self styled third man resigned from the House of Lords and was arrested, nearly bringing down the government in the process, over his relationship with the paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein.
To be understood on one’s own terms is a rare courtesy, and one which implies that the judgements of others are slanted or deliberately unflattering, that records need to be set straight. O’Hara’s book might succeed on its own terms at judging New Labour’s domestic policy record (a large and acknowledged omission in the book is foreign policy, and more specifically the decision to enter into an illegal war in Iraq). However, in the current conditions, it seems that this approach is unlikely to become the foremost way in which those governments are understood. The attempt at pushing New Labour into history provides a fascinating and useful text for those keen to study public policy. O’Hara’s fight against “rudimentary attitudes”, however, will I fear prove unsuccessful for as long as New Labour’s key figures rove the headlines, still trying to set the terms.
One book which takes as its premise that this legacy has miles of contestation yet to go is Karl Pike’s “Getting Over New Labour”, which argues that many of the key threads of the last 15 years of Labour politics have their origins in critiques of or reactions to New Labour. “Different interpretations of New Labour – held by different people in the Labour Party – can explain much of the change in the party’s direction since 2010”, Pike reckons. Perhaps the foremost of these critiques – certainly one with a degree of cache on both the left and right of the party – was that New Labour was insufficiently interested in questions of equality and class. Ambivalence about equality is something O’Hara touches on when discussing New Labour’s commitments on poverty. In 2001, Blair was asked whether it was “acceptable for [the] gap between rich and poor to get bigger”, he answered that it was “not acceptable for poor people not to be given the chances they need in life”. Equality of opportunity was what mattered, and this was what animated New Labour’s focus on ‘social exclusion’ (as Geoff Mulgan, director of No 10’s policy unit under Tony Blair, puts it, “the socially excluded are those people – and areas – that lack the means, material and otherwise, to participate effectively in economic, social, cultural and political life”). With such an understanding of the world, bad schools are unacceptable; but one can be, in Mandelson’s now even-more-infamous-than-ever phrase, intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich.
The lack of interest in economic equality as a good both for its own sake and as a broader stabiliser on the financial system, Pike argues, was what much of Ed Miliband’s directly post-financial crash leadership, with its talk of “pre-distribution”, was reacting against. However, while Miliband’s background as a New Labour Spad and minister limited how much “trashing of the record” he could do, for Corbyn and Corbynism, the possibilities were endless. One particularly interesting way this manifested was within the party itself. New Labour began with some aspirations to be a “mass party”, Pike tells us, but ended up with “reduced membership, [and] a reputation for control freakery and ‘centralisation’”. Corbyn, the tribune of the Dererites in unexpected power, wanted his Labour Party to be a vehicle of member democracy and of movement politics, and also took a serious interest in community organising. While Obama’s victory in 2008 had spurred a flurry of interest in community organising in the early Miliband years, these ideas were largely (as Miliband himself recounted a decade on) “squeezed out by the demands of knocking on as many doors as possible”. Corbynism went further and established a community organising unit within the party, which would be a subject of enduring controversy in the wildly zero sum, electoralist world of party staffers (it also, controversially enough in itself, gave a start in Labour politics to Zarah Sultana).
But if one can’t get over it, one can at least try to learn from it. Reading Servants of the People, the journalist Andrew Rawnsley’s book about the early years of New Labour (first published in 2000), as someone who has just lived though the early years of Starmer’s Labour government, the primary feeling is one of violent familiarity. The scandal over political donations (£1m from Bernie Eccelston, when it was Blair’s Labour that was meant to be clean after years of Tory sleaze) chasing deeply uncomfortable debates about arms licenses (in this instance, to Suharto’s Indonesia). A lot more Jonathan Powell, overall, than you realise at any one moment. A government its own MPs describe as being in the “dangerous” habit of being “gratuitously offensive to its own natural supporters”. The “knifing of cabinet members by shadowy briefers in corners”. Again and again, control freakery manifesting in a paranoid attitude to being seen as in any way left wing. Back then, the style was blocking an MP from standing to be mayor through internal stitch-up, as opposed to the more modern pose of blocking a mayor from standing to be an MP, through internal stitch up.
Reading the botched saga of how Blair blocked Ken Livingstone from the London mayoral candidacy, only for the then-Brent MP to win as an independent, felt like reading a variation on a story I have read or written about dozens of times in the last handful of years. There are, of course, plenty of points of differentiation (in the grander scale, the political economies of the two periods are quite different; at the more base, for all its issues, it is quite hard to imagine Starmer’s party being hit by a cabinet level sex-scandal), but when it comes to party management and navigating the relationship between the party and its supporters (desired, natural, and otherwise) it would seem that what we’re today getting is the same, but worse.
If we are to look at just why, as Philip Gould put it “at no point will the dust quietly settle over New Labour”, we need to look to the people involved. As Pike correctly argues, “The leading figures of New Labour never really left front line politics and their evolving legacies were and are felt by their successors”. I think you can go further than just “leading figures”, however, and look at the enduring presence of those a little lower down the food chain. In popular imagination, the SpAd is a New Labour era figure, a conception chivvied along by media representations like The Thick of It but grounded in reality: there were 38 SpAds at the end of the Major government in 1997 and 78 by January 2001. The 2010 leadership race offered the party four former New Labour era SpAds to choose from; today, Starmer’s No 10 has provided a seemingly endless font of people with CVs from the noughties and, one rung further down, the people they trained up and taught not to trash the record. Reaching the kind of neutral analytical perspective O’Hara seeks will not be possible while streams of New Labour era advisors tramp in and – as has been most recently operative – out of Downing Street, trailing people who owe them their careers. There is a reason why Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund’s account of the Starmer project spends time documenting dinners at the peer Roger Liddle’s house, where “around Liddle’s table sat New Labour’s past and future”. (Liddle threads the historical needle as the far rarer SpAd of the 1970s Labour governments who returned to advise New Labour, via a sojourn in the SDP). It is because much of the tone of this government has been set by these people and those very directly influenced by them.
Not all New Labour returnees and acolytes thereof are alike, of course. Some of those who have re-entered government have spent the interim decade and a half at think tanks writing reports about poverty and the state of the country; some of them, however, have been coining it in public affairs (and perhaps dabbling in brutal internecine faction fighting on the side). With respect to the former, it is the latter who have had the whip hand in this government, and it is they who have kept alive a culture of patronage and loyalty to which the Labour Party owes the most clanging recurrence of all: the most recent and most damning of Peter Mandelson’s resignations. The problem of Starmer’s Labour is not the reactionaries, the people who saw deficits in party management or economic view point in the last Labour government and sought to do differently, but the counter reactionaries: people who viewed Corbynism as an aberration, and fighting it the ultimate in just wars, victory in which left them ever more certain that New Labour’s party management choices cannot fail – they can only be failed.
Instead of learning from the internal mistakes of the New Labour years, or reckoning with what such a top down culture did to Labour’s ability to function as a party, it feels like Keir Starmer’s Labour Party has dedicated itself to ritualistically making the same mistakes (arguably, making them harder) and imagining that they will manifest the same successes, the ones outlined by O’Hara and visible on three successive election nights. The key difference, of course, is that people liked the New Labour government when it came into office and across its time in government felt positive changes in public services. The insulation of popularity meant that its internal psychodrama was less attended to, less front and centre; Starmer’s party is a bag of knives and elbows, all very visible through the thin, unforgiving skin of a consistently low popularity rating.
Supposedly, this is the Croslandite revisionist tradition as it lives on within the party, doggedly separating ends and means. However, both in its own house and more widely, New Labour’s means did not always achieve desirable ends. Even Blair, speaking to Rawnsley, conceded that his handling of the Livingstone situation had been suboptimal. “Sometimes I think the experiences in the early 80s scarred me too much, in terms of the Labour Party and how it had to be”, he says, referring to Michael Foot’s leadership and the subsequent battles with Militant. Man hands on misery to man, and sometimes that man is Tony Blair. What the Blair class has handed to the current government in this regard was warped by the experience of Corbynism, something regarded by the party’s moderate ruling classes with, by and large, holy terror, as a biblical fable of tribulation and vindication for a certain way of doing business. When Starmer suspended four MPs following the welfare rebellion last summer, that Tony Blair had never suspended Jeremy Corbyn became a minor talking point, with various bits of pro-government comment answering this refrain with: well, maybe he should have.
Even when Starmer’s party is trying to achieve very recognisably Old Labour ends, it is in the round using means recognisable from the New Labour years (and sharpened in the decade after). It has to be possible to have the kind of genuine domestic policy successes New Labour had without completely tearing up the ground of one’s own party. But tearing up the ground of one’s own party is not a necessary precondition for electoral and policy success, not a mean that guarantees any particular end.
The balance between the experience, institutional memory, and trying to actively learn from a previous period in government, and the need to have a genuinely new political project with an up to date assessment of the country and a something of an institutional clean slate is always difficult to strike. That the Starmer government has struggled with the latter (and to an extent as a result defaulted to the former) is, in part, dispositional, relating to Starmer’s uncertain footing in politics.
Tony Blair – among whose many flaws few would list timidity – said every time he had “ever introduced a reform in government” he wished “in retrospect that I’d been bolder”. Blair displayed boldness in a positive sense – the huge achievement, and huge gamble, that was securing the Good Friday Agreement less than a year into office – and in the negative sense, of for example committing to an illegal war in Iraq. Boldness and lack thereof is a perennial question in politics (critics of Miliband also characterised him as hesitant and over-cautious), but it’s certainly advice Starmer could stand to take on board.
Questions of boldness relate to the overwhelming lack of confidence that runs through Keir Starmer’s party, which in turn relates to why, exactly, so many of these New Labour era advisors are there in the first place. Blair, if not always at the very heart of the action, is a presence in Rawnsley’s book, while Starmer is an absence in our nearest equivalent, Pogrund and Maguire’s Get In (where infamously the now-Prime Minister is described as “not driving the train. He thinks he’s driving the train, but we’ve sat him at the front of the DLR.”), a figure whose flaws filter down. The fish hesitates from the head: a palpable feeling of self-distrust – in capacity, in instinct – pervaded Labour in the run up to the last election and after the victory, and the New Labour era advisors were there to hold hands. If you are terminally underconfident in your own project, some back of the sofa magic dust from the last successful project you remember seems like mana.
What it is to be a moderniser is naturally contingent on what is modern; successful modernisers of one era, attuned to one media world and set of public norms and attitudes, will have little in common with the successful modernisers of thirty years later. Will someone who was head of broadcast in the 1990s have what it takes to be director of communications in the 2020s? When they leave, should that person then be replaced by 1997’s deputy communications director? Looking at a Prime Minister less popular than Hamas, the answer would seem to be “no”.
One part of the reaction that Starmerism has taken on board is a greater desire to talk about class, something that can be seen in (among other areas) its approaches to private education and to universities, where this government displays a more Old Labour sensibility. But even at its most obvious point of differentiation – even rebuke, as Starmer’s conference broadside on New Labour’s commitment that half of young people enter higher education – there is a repetition of the process failures of New Labour. “Overall the calculation that Labour could move off in search of middle class votes without suffering among less prosperous communities was shown in the long run to be flawed”, O’Hara notes, highlighting something today’s Labour Party with its focus on Reform-curious votes has clearly been keen to remedy. While the inputs might be different in terms of which constituencies this Labour Party now values above others, the mechanism – and the outcome – are the same, an electoralist over balance which leaves core supporters alienated. Starmer’s Labour has been practicing the politics of “they have nowhere else to go”; while Peter Mandelson was talking about the white working class when he said that in 1999, it’s exactly the kind of thing one could imagine a ‘senior labour source’ saying about younger and ethnic minority voters in 2024 or 25.
A more nuanced reaction to New Labour (and indeed to the party’s recent past wholesale) is needed. The two years of Labour governance indicate that while on the policy front some positive lessons have been learned, when it comes to how the party manages itself and talks to the electorate, it seems Labour is not yet ready for O’Hara’s approach, in the way one is not quite ready to dissect a carcass whose least pleasant extremities are still twitching. There are, however, reasons to be optimistic that in the wake of the Gorton and Denton by-election loss and the cleansing fire of the Mandelson scandal, Labour might just be able to learn from important elements of its recent history.
Morgan Jones is co-editor of Renewal - a journal of social democracy.