11 - Digital TV and the New Labour

Summary

If the architects of the British transition strategy belonged to the Major administration, the task of carrying along the plan fell to the Labour government elected in May 1997. On the one hand, the new administration had the unenviable task of pushing forward a plan created by the previous administration that many considered unviable. On the other, the transition fit nicely with several of New Labour's goals for the communications sector. In general terms, the elections did not represent a fundamental turn in Britain's transition path. Tony Blair was elected on a platform that by and large emphasized continuity with the regulatory reforms introduced during the Conservative years, and there was little support to reverse course on the issue of digital TV. The new administration, however, did bring a new emphasis on the development of the information society in the United Kingdom that digital TV policies had to accommodate. This theme would pervade Labour's media policies for much of the first Blair period (1997–2001). The new administration also brought to bear a more skeptical attitude about the capacity for communication markets to work effectively in the absence of procompetitive regulation. For the Tories, ex ante rules were necessary only in the initial stages of reforms as traditionally closed markets evolved toward self-sustaining competition; for Labour officials, many of these rules were not temporary remedies but rather essential pillars of competition in markets that would otherwise tend toward monopolization (see DTI, 1998; 2000).