Nothing is certain except death, taxes, English World Cup agony, and that whenever Labour picks a new leader, Tony Blair will loom into view behind them, clutching his pearls of wisdom.
For Keir Starmer, the legacy of New Labour and its way of thinking was not exactly an unambiguous help, as anyone caught up in the Mandelson calamity might tell you. And yet there are many useful lessons our newest ex-prime minister could have taken from Labour’s last spell in power. If Starmer learned all the wrong lessons from New Labour, Andy Burnham now needs to learn the right ones.
In 1997, after four defeats, New Labour achieved an astonishingly efficient victory, taking 418 seats on 43.2 per cent of the vote. In 2024, Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s former Chief of Staff, pulled off an even more efficient win, taking 411 seats on just 33.7 per cent. As in 1997, victory vindicated the party high command’s ruthless centralisation of power.
Starmer’s team drew even harsher lessons from this than Blair’s, often treating MPs as irksome lobby cattle from whom the whip could be removed if they did not comply. The party membership felt no more empowered than they had under New Labour. Party conferences were tightly controlled and corporate-friendly. Cabinet meetings, once a genuine forum for thrashing out a collective position, remained largely a formality, with power concentrated around the prime minister and chancellor.
As with Blair, this excessive focus on asserting power inside the party went hand-in-hand with too little focus on asserting power beyond it. New Labour introduced Sure Start and the minimum wage, but relatively little of its reforming energy was directed at the structure of the economy. It did not re-empower working people by transforming battered post-industrial regions, or challenge extractive private vested interests, or repeal the excesses of Thatcherite trade union law.
Rather, New Labour became increasingly convinced that business simply runs things better (when in reality it has simpler goals). Blair’s government duly threw open the doors of the public sector to the consultants, and embraced the joys of outsourcing, privatisation and private finance initiative. It leaned heavily on the booming City – rather than, say, industrial strategy – to sustain growth, while redistributing the tax receipts. It worked very well until suddenly, in 2008, it didn’t.
Starmer’s Labour did often sound as though it recognised the imbalance of economic power which had been exposed by the crash then exacerbated by austerity, and did push through stronger employment rights in the teeth of business resistance, while returning railways and steel-making to public ownership.
But nearly 20 years on, New Labour’s uncritical attitude to business has proved harder to kill than an unusually persistent zombie. Witness the wide-eyed enthusiasm for extractive American AI companies (cheered on by Blair himself), and the excessive influence of “public affairs” lobbyists. Plenty of consultants and outsourcing companies are still on government contracts. The government has kept letting brilliant British companies be bought up by their American rivals. And Rachel Reeves turned from talk of “securonomics” to trying to coax the economy back to growth by wooing the City, as her hero Gordon Brown once did.
Underpinning this approach was the Blairish notion that government is not about taking on entrenched economic power but just delivering smart administration. In 1997, with growth ticking up, it made sense for Blair to offer improvement to public services and individual rights within the existing economic orthodoxy. Pitching some kind of fundamental upheaval would have seemed weird. But now, after years of stagnant pay, decaying services and crisis after crisis, radical change is exactly what the public seems to want – as Starmer accepted only far too late.
This is where Blair’s former health minister Andy Burnham – with Blair’s former pensions minister James Purnell beside him – could take some lessons from New Labour that are still useful today. If Burnham really wants to overturn “40 years of neoliberalism”, New Labour may not be much help ideologically. But it offers a set of object lessons in how to govern effectively in pursuit of a clear goal – several of which the incoming leadership already seem to be embracing.
The first lesson is to see working people for who they really are – not who they might have once been, or who expensively-shod columnists imagine them to be – and to act accordingly. Burnham seems to get this.
Second, actually prepare for office, then hit the ground running with a policy that noisily proclaims how you’re going to change things – and which shows that you’re in charge. On arriving at the Treasury, Gordon Brown unexpectedly declared the Bank of England independent. Ideologically, this was pretty orthodox, but as a taa-dah! declaration of decisiveness and command, it worked spectacularly. Better to kick off with the media racing to catch up rather than leaving them to write about who paid for your trousers.
Third, keep running in the same direction – and make sure everyone can see where you’re headed, and why. Even in a TikTok world, New Labour’s aggressive messaging clarity and relentless repetition (“education, education, education”) has its uses. Only when everyone in SW1 is sick of hearing the same thing is it beginning, maybe, to cut through with the public.
Fourth, keep a close eye on whether your government is coming with you. Productive centralisation of power to give direction is not the same as flailing, panicky micromanagement. Here, Blair’s No 10 Delivery Unit remains the model. Burnham reportedly remembers checking in with it as a New Labour minister. Purnell is now planning a powerful new prime minister’s department from which to steer Whitehall.
Fifth, “triangulating” above and between traditional left and right positions – as in slogans like “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” or “social justice on the foundation of a strong economy” – is not just cynical 1990s difference-splitting. Its structural logic offers a way to avoid both sounding too gloomy (as Starmer and Reeves did on taking office), and cheerily making promises you can’t keep (as Burnham risks doing now). Triangulate these apparent opposites into one message, and you can start to tell the story all transformative governments need to get across: things are bad now, but difficult, hard-won reform will make them better.
Sixth, a little left populism shows who you’re fighting for. Pick battles with the people you’re against. Early on, Blair relished doing this, especially at Labour conferences, as with his “tally-ho” mockery of pro-hunting protesters in 1999, and his 1994 denunciation of “greedy bankers” and the “power elite of money-shifters, middlemen and speculators”. Likewise, when worried officials warn that a policy risks provoking judicial reviews, consider doing as Andrew Adonis did over academy schools, and keep going.
Seventh, entrench the changes you’re driving through by appointing your allies – or neutral figures you can trust – to run public bodies. New Labour never built an institution as durable as Nye Bevan’s NHS, or even Harold Wilson’s Open University. But it was much better at appointing strategically than Starmer’s government has been.
And finally, crucially, if what you’re doing isn’t enough, go further. A couple of years after sweeping to power, Blair twigged that the public was getting sick of waiting for the NHS to improve. Suddenly, in the middle of a TV interview, he declared a huge hike in health spending, galvanising his government into action.
In jettisoning Starmer and bringing in Burnham, this lesson is one Labour appears to have grasped. It won’t be able to magic up money as Blair did, but that is where all those other lessons come in. If Burnham’s government can deliver the radicalism Starmer once promised by reviving the ruthless effectiveness of New Labour, it might finally start to show what a Labour government can do.
[Further reading: Andy Burnham: This is the biggest political change in 40 years]
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