Last Friday I took advantage of my new-found flexibility over my time (to recap: if you know anyone who has a policy-type project that needs doing, please point them my way) to head over to Cambridge, where Anand Menon was delivering Selwyn College’s annual Ramsay Murray lecture, this year titled “Britain After Brexit”.
Among the many strands of argument in the lecture, which I recommend, Menon argued the Brexit vote was an expression of dissatisfaction by many, that it has put ideas around “levelling up” and redressing long-standing imbalances in public policy on the political agenda, and that in fact this is a good thing and overdue: awareness of inequalities in our country, and how some parts of it have been left behind while others have prospered, is higher than before. (Whether it will lead to meaningful improvements for people, and how best to achieve that, are of course live political debates.)
Implicitly, this is a critique of the policy and politics that led to a situation in which people and communities were getting left behind. What he didn’t say, and what’s entirely my surmise, is that to a large extent this must be a critique New Labour. This article therefore looks at the deficiencies in New Labour’s policy legacy, and how they manifested themselves in the outcome of the Brexit referendum.
In order to consider whether New Labour’s policy legacy might be partly responsible for the existence of a group of dissatisfied voters, who expressed that dissatisfaction by voting against the status quo in 2016, we need to consider whether that narrative about why people voted as they did holds good. And while it can certainly be stood up, it’s not the whole story of the referendum result: as Menon acknowledged in his lecture, a substantial bloc group of Brexit voters was affluent, right-leaning southerners. Then again, (and this is my addition), that’s a group whose interests generally have long been well represented by the Conservative Party, not people who were dissatisfied and left behind.
There were other, much more contingent, factors at play in the result as well: there was no path to a leave vote that did not go through Labour voters, so was the Labour Party’s half-hearted and haphazard campaigning under Jeremy Corbyn decisive in the outcome? Given the tightness of the result, it might just have been. But ultimately, one vote counted the same as another in the referendum: the existence of a group of voters who were disaffected with politics, felt (rightly) left behind, and turned out to vote in the referendum despite having given up doing so in elections, was decisive to the outcome.
The correlation between wages and Brexit vote points towards lower income voters, not higher, being more likely to vote to leave, so there is a clear economic dimension to the vote. But wages are not the only thing that the Brexit vote correlates with, as the lecture also succinctly covers: it aligns closely with whether people hold liberal (more pro-remain) or authoritarian (more pro-leave) values. It also matches closely with the distribution of Pret A Manger shops across the country (almost entirely in remain-voting areas), and a person’s liking for the BBC comedy series Mrs Brown’s Boys (more keen on Agnes = more likely to have voted leave).
This is not coincidence or spurious correlation, but speaks directly to the way the referendum played out. The other famously strong correlation is with university attendance, and it’s not hard to see how that might make someone less authoritarian and more liberal in their outlook: almost certainly it’s not to do with the education on offer at university, which varies widely in type and quality, but with the experience of (usually) moving away from home at a formative age, and meeting a lot of people from a range of different backgrounds. Nor is the Pret correlation a coincidence: Pret’s market is affluent professionals in cities and large towns, and therefore skewed towards graduates. And Mrs Brown’s Boys is not an arch, irony-laden comedy with the appeal to educated audiences of, say, Fleabag, but a broad comedy, arguably in some ways a descendant of traditional working class staples like the Carry On films or On the Buses, appealing to traditional values and attitudes. (As an aside, Mrs Brown’s Boys actually preaches a rather more liberal message than this might suggest, but as with shows like Til Death Us Do Part, perhaps a segment of the audience takes it at face value rather than taking away the message intended by the writers.) So, we’re talking here about voters who have personally lived their lives untouched by universities, or who live in areas that have not been shaped by the presence of universities and/or substantial numbers of graduates; this plays into the cultural and social outlooks of the people who live there, as well as being directly related to the nature of the local economy.
We can therefore identify a fairly coherent segment of leave-favouring voters. And we can indeed also identify that they might feel with some justice that they were left behind as the rest of the country progressed and flourished. What I want to explore now is the policy roots of this, or at least a substantial chunk of those roots. The fact that a group of voters perceived that they were left behind can be put another way: the country had not been governed in their interests; policy choices had been made that consistently did not benefit them. And this group did not spring up in the six years between 2010 and 2016 (although austerity policy choices during that time undoubtedly will have punched their bruises very considerably – that’s a real and important phenomenon, but ultimately one for a different article): they were left behind not just by the Coalition, but over the longer term by New Labour, and the Conservative governments prior to that. But given the medium to long term nature of the consequences of social and economic policy, and the avowed policy missions of the Labour and Conservative parties respectively, it’s the New Labour failure that particularly stands out.
Except, it wasn’t a failure, was it? New Labour presided over a period of considerable economic growth, and positive scores on all sorts of metrics, including reducing child poverty by around a third and bringing overall levels of inequality down. Yes, they enjoyed relatively benign economic circumstances up to 2007, but they also made some sure-footed calls, for instance with the independence of the Bank of England, and a range of social policies that drove those social improvements. All of that is true, but only in aggregate: New Labour’s failure was its failure to recognise the unevenness of this success, and its complacency in either assuming the benefits were reaching more parts of society than they were, or indifference about the places they did not reach. You’ve probably heard the anecdote of the politician campaigning in the North East in the mid-2010s (on Brexit or at a general election, I can’t remember), who extolled the long period of economic growth in the UK, only to be greeted with the heckle: “your growth!” Annoyingly I haven’t been able to find a citation for it, but it has stuck with me: the heckler clearly perceived that growth and its associated benefits went to other people, and not to them.
But we can see these phenomena in measurable terms now, not just anecdote. Partly they have been more widely investigated thanks to the Brexit vote, but also as part of efforts to understand the consequences of the late 2000s economic crisis. So it’s now uncontroversial to observe that there has been a form of wage decoupling, with economic growth not feeding through into wage growth, and that this is associated closely with poor productivity growth, which has a strong regional dimension. Certainly the detail of much of this can be argued over at length: for instance, while it has been said that nine of the ten most deprived areas in Europe are in the UK, those calculations are a black art and somewhat contested. But overall it seems hard to argue that the spread between better-off and worse-off regions and localities in the UK isn’t strikingly wide in relation to countries we might wish to compare ourselves to, and that most regions in the country (outside London and the South East) aren’t economically rather weak. And for all that this might be better recognised and understood now as a result of events of the last 15 years, ultimately good governments don’t get caught out by not understanding what’s going on in the country: these ongoing social and economic difficulties speak to fundamental weaknesses of New Labour as a party of government.
These problems – or at least, the failure to remedy them – arose from Labour’s active policy choices under Blair and Brown, not merely from oversights or omissions. New Labour’s “third way” approach was defined by letting the market do its thing and grow the economy, without intervening in how it operated. Redistributing the proceeds of that growth was in line with long tradition on the Labour right, but New Labour certainly went further than earlier generations in fighting shy of economic intervention, and embracing market approaches towards public services as well (the Clause 4 change, after all, was not merely symbolic).
Criticism of this approach at the time could easily seem shrill and left-wing, but at this greater distance now seems well justified. Speaking on the Blair edition of the New Statesman’s Prime Ministerial podcast series, the LSE’s Kitty Stewart highlights New Labour’s assumption that the market would provide in terms of employment, and the absence of any regional industrial strategy guiding job development in different regions. Certainly social policy such as the minimum wage and tax credits papered over some of the cracks, but the economy ultimately did not generate the jobs that would pay enough to uphold standards of living, and therefore uphold the quality of life available in, particularly, recently deindustrialised towns. This wasn’t a problem for younger people able to get degrees and move to cities, but it was a problem for everyone else left behind in multiple senses.
Unfortunately, New Labour’s social policies and allied approaches to public services had similar, and closely related, central flaws. Redistributing the proceeds of growth meant redistribution to a large extent by stealth: Stewart argues that although Labour increased investment in public services up to internationally average levels, it didn’t overtly make the case for doing so, even though that would surely have been possible in the politically benign conditions of the early 2000s. Not only that, but Labour didn’t increase taxes by quite enough to fund the spending increases, and started to lean a bit on borrowing: therefore (and this is my surmise), Labour both failed to get electoral consent for its spending approach as a lasting settlement, and didn’t do enough to entrench it structurally. Skip forward to 2007, and the public finances were in reasonable shape but could have been healthier; and beyond that point, Brown did not want to turn off the spending taps for public services. This left Labour wide open to an attack on its spending record, without having laid the groundwork to make it publicly unthinkable to cut spending at scale. So, from 2010, unpicking Labour’s legacy was an easy matter of just cutting the spending, and these spending policies had in turn been compensating for the failure to get the economy to deliver benefit more equitably across the population: as Stephen Bush puts it in the same podcast, Blair’s legacy “has had a hole in the middle in terms of its durability” – a striking contrast with, say, Thatcher or Attlee.
I’d add that New Labour’s reliance on market mechanisms in public services was also a failure that has relevance to the appetite of some voters for kicking the status quo when given the chance in 2016. Utilities and public transport remained in private hands, relying on orchestrated market-style arrangements to try to drive levels of service and price competition. Firstly, we’ve seen this was not at all successful: it led to low levels of investment, dysfunctional non-markets in energy, water companies burdened with debt but their shareholders profiting, and railways and buses such an appalling mess that even the Conservatives have since had to acknowledge their errors in privatising and deregulating them in the 1980s and 90s. I’d add another problem with this approach: it excluded people from having a say in how any of these services worked, because the competitive forces that was supposed to shape their behaviour simply didn’t do so. And while it might have been a valid criticism of the publicly owned services of the 1960s and 70s that they were unresponsive to people’s needs, it’s even worse if the service that’s unresponsive to your needs, that you can’t influence and that simply does whatever it likes to you, is also creaming off a profit for the benefit of its shareholders. It’s yet another ingredient in the recipe for alienating a section of your voters.
So I think this is a coherent critique: the existence of a cohort of voters who expressed their dissatisfaction with a status quo that they felt left them behind can be linked directly to New Labour’s approach to policy, which too often failed to address economic challenges that caused the benefits of overall growth to be felt highly inequitably. But I could well be wrong. If I have a concern about this argument, it’s not that it is being wise after the event, but rather that it completely reinforces my priors. I’m a product of the New Labour period: it’s when I became an adult, and while we all have our blind spots I’m aware that New Labour might well be one of mine. I was sceptical of Labour in office for exactly the same reasons as I was grumpy and unconvinced during the 2012 Olympics: it seemed to me that we were a country with major problems that we just weren’t fixing, and the orgy of self-congratulation in 2012 sat badly with me. I mention 2012 because of the post-Brexit resonance: there have been plenty of people who have lamented since 2016 that we no longer appear to live in the country depicted in Danny Boyle’s famous opening ceremony; some have still yet to realise that actually they never did. For liberally-minded, city-dwelling graduates, that depiction of the UK seemed on the money; but it must have jarred with many of those who went on to vote to leave the EU.
There are others who will make a much more positive case for the successes of New Labour’s domestic policy agenda than I do here. Glen O’Hara, with whom I only ever disagree with great trepidation, is writing a book on exactly that subject, and I look forward to seeing whether an authoritative case can be made for the New Labour policy approach actually having been successful, and to having my assumptions challenged. I do feel that any such appraisal has to follow the story right up to the present day however, including not just Brexit but the Covid-19 pandemic as well (and that’s a general comment; I’ve no idea what the exact scope of Glen’s book is).
It would be easy, for instance, to point to improved investment in, and the consequent improved performance of, the NHS: but the failure to deliver Derek Wanless’s “fully engaged” scenario, with improved public health, greater responsibility taken by many citizens, and of course a proper adult social care system, also needs to be considered. As the NHS Five Year Forward View noted back in 2014: “Twelve years ago, Derek Wanless’ health review warned that unless the country took prevention seriously we would be faced with a sharply rising burden of avoidable illness. That warning has not been heeded - and the NHS is on the hook for the consequences.” We might also add that poor public health and high levels of health inequalities appear to have been important factors in driving excess mortality during the Covid-19 pandemic. On Covid, there is easily enough blame to go around for everyone, but I do think it’s fair to say that public health outcomes and the socio-economic inequalities that in turn fuel health inequalities are things that play out over decades, and that decisions taken 20 or more years ago have had a bearing on what’s happened recently. And this approach to health – good up-front investment in the NHS that was liable to cuts once the Tories got back in, but not backed up by deeper structural changes in society and the economy – was absolutely of a piece with the shortcomings in New Labour’s policy approach identified above.
In conclusion, New Labour looks great compared to what’s come since: it made a sincere, good faith attempt to govern the country. But it had fundamental flaws in its policy approach that were distinct to itself (not shared by past or, one hopes, future Labour governments). Many of the people who voted for Brexit were people whose lot should have been improved by the New Labour governments, but who instead got left behind. New Labour’s failure was both in central aspects of its policy approach, and a complacency in not recognising that there were areas and aspects of the country that they were not reaching. The cultural dimensions of politics since then – the make-up of the leave vote, Labour’s post-90s pivot to being a party of urban-dwelling graduates, and the electoral shifts in the “Red Wall” – have not been a coincidence. Rather, they can be understood, albeit partly and on one level, as a both a final electoral repudiation, and evidence of the policy failures, of New Labour.
Thanks for reading
Please share this article if you’ve enjoyed it, and subscribe for free if you’re not already getting Policy Pulse to your inbox. I’ll see you next week, probably for something focusing firmly on policy and steering a bit clearer of politics.