2 - A World of Challenge and Opportunity

Summary

In attempting to establish itself as the defining political project of late British capitalism, New Labour anchored its own novelty and necessity in what Hall and Jacques termed the ‘new times’ that Britain faced as it approached the twenty-first century. Prior to New Labour's emergence, the end of the Cold War and the concomitant triumph of liberalism had all but sealed the neoliberal hegemony established in Britain by Margaret Thatcher's Conservative Party. Between 1979 and 1990, Thatcher presided over a social and economic revolution that altered, almost beyond recognition, the country's industrial landscape and the traditional class cleavages that had sustained ‘old’ Labour.

The transition from the Fordism that had defined the experience of modernity in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, to ‘post-Fordism’ saw Britain's own manufacturing sector hollowed out and its historic commitment to banking and the City restated and renewed. Cutting adrift many of Labour's traditional heartlands, this process of deindustrialisation tipped the balance of the British economy firmly in favour of an increasingly global financial services sector. The wealth that it created fuelled the expansion of a new, salaried, home-owning middle class, one concentrated in London and the surrounding South East of England but one which was also appearing in the suburban provinces of Britain's towns and cities.

The ‘new times’ that Britain inhabited and New Labour inherited are crucial to our understanding of the terms upon which Gordon Brown and Tony Blair would begin their own renewal of both the Labour Party and the country as a whole. Central to these ‘new times’, however, and what, by extension, was fundamental to the political economy designed by Gordon Brown, was globalisation. A key driver behind the financialisation of the British state, globalisation quickly became accepted as the leitmotif amongst Brown and his colleagues. It provided New Labour with not only an understanding of contemporary economic and social life, but also the lens through which its officials were able to survey the qualitatively new terrain upon which they found themselves. It would lead to Brown, Blair and many other New Labour ministers displaying an unprecedented degree of sensitivity and awareness as to the global pressures now faced by national governments.