New Labour

New Labour

a label applied to the British Labour Party after 1994/5. The term was deliberately coined to distance the Labour Party, under the leadership of Tony Blair, from the Party's postwar past and demonstrate that the Party had broken with Keynesian social democracy (see also KEYNESIAN ECONOMICS), abandoned collectivism and accepted the overall supremacy of the market economy The deletion from Clause Four of the Party's constitution of the commitment to public ownership was a key stage in Labour's ideological transformation. Whilst Clause Four had exerted little effective influence over Party policy for generations, its revision in 1995 symbolized Labour's ideological shift.

The political values emphasised by New Labour include personal responsibility and partnership as well as the importance of community values and the SOCIAL INVESTMENT STATE. Although New Labour must be seen as a revisionist response to the British, and indeed the global, political landscape of the 1990s, the values New Labour identifies with are often depicted as a return to the ethical socialism held by the Party's founders. There are parallels especially with Clinton's Democratic Party in the US (in some respects employed as a direct model), and in recent years an ‘ideological’ gloss on new labour or new democratic has been provided by the concept of the THIRD WAY. During the 1990s changes to the Party's organisational structure strengthened the authority of the leadership and limited the capacity of constituency activists and affiliated trade unions to challenge the New Labour project.