Stuart Hall - New Labour's Double-Shuffle.pdf - Kulturoznawstwo - Stuart Hall - gorylicolandia

The Review of Education, Pedagogy,

and Cultural Studies, 27:319–335, 2005

ISSN: 1071-4413 print = 1556-3022 online

DOI: 10.1080/10714410500338907

New Labour’s Double-shuffle

Stuart Hall

The Labour election victory in 1997 took place at a moment of great

political opportunity. Thatcherism had been decisively rejected by

the electorate. But eighteen years of Thatcherite rule had radically

altered the social, economic, and political terrain in British society.

There was therefore a fundamental choice of directions for the

incoming government.

One was to offer an alternative radical strategy to Thatcherism,

attuned to the shifts which had occurred in the ’70s and ’80s, with

equal social and political depth, but based on radically different

principles. Two basic calculations supported this view. What

Thatcherism seemed to have ruled out was both another bout of

Keynesian welfare-state social democracy, Wilsonian-style, and

another 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’ had

deep philosophical foundations as well as an effective popular strat-

egy. It was grounded in a radical remodeling of state and economy

and the ‘colonizing’ of civil society by a new neo-liberal common

sense. 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 Left

required bold, imaginative thinking and decisive action in the early

stages of taking power, boldly signaling a new direction. Critical to

this was a transitional programme—a few critical examples, popu-

lar but radical, like raising taxes to repair the destruction of the

social fabric, a re-invention of the state education system, and the

reversal of the very unpopular privatization of rail—to be

introduced at once, chosen for its indicative significance.

As one of Thatcherism’s critics, and a regular contributor

to Marxism Today during the ’80s, I had concentrated on this

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320 S. Hall

Thatcherite reconstruction of the political = ideological terrain. On

this—despite what was criticized at the time as an overemphasis

on ‘the ideological’ dimension—I believe we were fundamentally

right. But we may have underestimated the degree to which all this

was itself related to much deeper global shifts—the emerging new

post-industrial society, the struggle by capital to restore its ‘right to

manage,’ the ‘globalization’ of the international economy (which

was capital’s way out of that impasse), the technological revolution

and the rise of a new individualism, and the hegemony of neo-

liberal free-market ideas. This was the sea change which overtook

the world in the 1970’s. It still constitutes the ‘horizon’ which

everybody—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 be

New Labour’s preferred direction: Peter Mandelson’s (2002) book,

for example, and the revisionist ideas peddled in this triumphalist

phase by the New Labour intelligenisa—differences between Left

and 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-thinking

in progress’ in inner New Labour circles. Certainly one had no

delusions about what ‘taking power as New Labour and governing

as New Labour’ implied. Martin Jacques and I wrote an article for

The Observer called ‘‘Thatcherism with a Human Face?’’ on the

Sunday before the 1997 election which cast us irrevocably into outer

political darkness. We knew then that, once squandered, such an

opportunity would be lost for many years, perhaps forever. We

had a strong premonition that New Labour had already made

strategic choices which put it irrevocably on the second track.

And so it turned out. In a profound sense, New Labour has

adapted to neo-liberal terrain—but in a significant and distinctive

way. Its critics are still not sufficiently clear about what the nature

of that adaptation is. Its novelty—if not in terms of what it consists

of, then in how the elements are combined—is still not well under-

stood. However, it took only a few weeks (in 1997) for the basic

direction to become crystal clear: the fatal decision to follow

Conservative spending priorities and commitments, the sneering

renunciation of wealth redistribution (‘‘tax and spend!’’), the demo-

nization of its critics (‘‘Old Labour!’’), the new ethos of managerial

authoritarianism (‘‘We know that we are right’’), the quasi-religious

air of righteous conviction (‘‘Either for us or against us’’), the

New Labour’s Double-shuffle 321

reversal of the historic commitment to equality, universality, and

collective social provision (instead, ‘reform,’ ‘fairness,’ ‘choice’).

The welfare state had been Labour’s greatest achievement. It had

been savaged and weakened under Mrs. Thatcher. But its whole-

sale deconstruction was to be New Labour’s historic mission. The

two-tier society, corporate greed, and the privatization of need were

inevitable 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 audience

was being addressed—was critical to the whole venture.

The Prime Minister’s recent claims that the reform of schools and

hospitals (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 Nye

Bevan to create a universal NHS which would de-commodify health

care, and are really designed to ‘give power back to local communi-

ties’ rather than to open the door to private investment, are only the

most 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 in

the practice of endless manipulation have gone far to corrupt the

whole political culture. Cynicism and political apathy have inevi-

tably followed—being then mourned by liberal commentators in a

further act of bad faith. (New Labour ‘spin’ has it that falling elec-

toral participation is a sign of mass contentment. But what is the

point of voting, if the result is a Tory administration which agrees

with New Labour on fundamentals, only with bells on?)

New Labour does have a long-term strategy, ‘a project’: what

Antonio 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 is

at work here. Even the disenchanted cling desperately to the hope

that English pragmatism will prevail. New Labour’s reasoned

critics—Roy Hattersley, Fran Dobson, Chris Smith, Bill Morris, even

Polly Toynbee—remain ‘loyal’ (but to what?). They look hopefully

for signs that New Labour will of its own accord—now the second

term is spinning out of control, perhaps in the third?—refashion

itself into something different. The key thing to say about New

Labour is that its so-called ‘pragmatism’ is the English face it is

obliged to wear in order to ‘govern’ in one set of interests while

322 S. Hall

maintaining electoral support in another. It isn’t fundamentally

pragmatic, any more than Thatcherism was—which doesn’t mean

that it isn’t constantly making things up on the run. In relation to

the NHS, Mrs. Thatcher too was pragmatic in the short run (‘‘The

NHS 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 a

strategic programme—being flexible about the way you push it

through, giving ground when the opposition is hot, tactically

revising your formulations when necessary (having given us ‘the

enabling state’ and the celebration of ‘risk,’ the distinguished Third

Way guru, Anthony Giddens (2002), now effortlessly slips us on to

the forgotten problem of equality (!!) and ‘the ensuring state’—as

more businesses absolve themselves of their pensions obligations).

Pragmatism requires modestly shifting the emphases to catch the

current political wind, saying what will keep traditional ‘heartland’

supporters happy (‘‘It can come across a bit technocratic, a bit

managerial’’—the P.M.), whilst always returning to an inflexible

ideological baseline (‘‘...the fundamental direction in which we

are leading the country is correct’’—the P.M.). Of course, there will

be a thousand scams and devices dreamed up by New Labour’s

blue-skies policy-wonks, as ‘‘government is re-invented’’—the

mission of the policy-advisers-turned-civil-servants in the No. 10

policy, strategy, and innovation units and the New Labour-inclined

‘think-tanks’ (the IPPR, Demos). But unerringly, at the strategic

level, 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 to

be confused with either the old Reaganite ‘minimal government’ or

the new American, right-wing, revivalist neo-conservatism. Its

underlying market fundamentalism is not to be doubted. Thus

New Labour has worked, both domestically and globally, through

the institutions of ‘global governance’ such as the IMF, the WTO, the

World Bank, etc. It set the corporate economy free, securing the

conditions necessary for its effective operation at home and

globally. It has renounced the attempts to graft wider social goals

onto the corporate world (Will Hutton’s project of ‘stake-holder

power’ lasted all of five minutes). It has deregulated labour and

other markets, maintained restrictive trade union legislation, and

New Labour’s Double-shuffle 323

established a whole new tier of relatively weak and compliant

regulatory regimes. The rail regulator, for example, cuts train

services 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 not

finding a public alternative to the railway’s fragmented privatized

structure. The new broadcasting regulator’s main purpose seems to

be to dismantle the barriers which currently prevent global interests

like Murdoch from buying into and monopolizing at will British

press and media channels.

New Labour has spread the gospel of ‘market fundamentalism’—

markets and market criteria as the true measure of value—far and

wide. It has ‘cosied up to business,’ favouring its interests in mul-

tiple public and private ways (from the Formula One cigarette

advertising scandal on). The trend to inequality has grown exponen-

tially, escalating towards American proportions. ‘‘The rich now

have a bigger share of the nation’s post-tax income than at any time

under Mrs. Thatcher’’ (Michael Meacher, 2003). It has protected

corporate boardroom greed and promoted business influence in

shaping social agendas favourable to private interests at the heart

of government (the connections of those advising the government

on GM and environmental issues with pharmaceutical and

biotechnology 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’) through

the 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 forensic

service), forcing the public sector to ‘mimic’ the market in its internal

operations, fatally blurring the public = private distinction (Public

Finance Initiatives, public–private ‘partnerships’), and, stealthily

opening doors for private investment in, and the corporate

penetration of, parts of the public sector (the prison service, schools,

the NHS). Every media debate as to whether the latest creeping

privatization is ‘really privatization’ is a form of trivial pursuit.

However, New Labour has adapted the fundamental new-liberal

programme to suit its conditions of governance—that of a social

democratic government trying to govern in a neo-liberal direction,

while maintaining its traditional working-class and public sector

middle-class support, with all the compromises and confusions that

Stuart Hall - New Labour's Double-Shuffle.pdf

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