Dialectics of New Labourism: the Blair-Brown contradiction

Posted on Thursday 31 July, 2008
Filed Under New Labour

 

It can’t have been easy being the son of Ralph Miliband; I wouldn’t be at all surprised to hear that the adolescent David had to sit through lectures on dialectical materialism instead of getting the standard dad talk on the birds and the bees.

At any rate, given his Oxford first in PPE, Britain’s next prime minister will of course be familiar with the concept. The basic argument is that movement and change result from the internal contradictions within all things, which are in their nature a unity of opposites, bound together in a relation of mutual dependence.

I’m not sure how much I buy that argument these days – the more I study philosophy, the more I lean towards Analytical Marxism – but it would seem to have a certain plausibility as a description of the development of New Labourism.

It’s worth remembering that when the doctrine first emerged in the early 1990s, it had to fight hard to gain ascendancy inside the Labour Party. The working assumption of those of us who unsuccessfully tried to oppose it was that Blair and Brown were in political terms a single indivisible unit.

Sure, each obviously had political ambitions. But after the death of John Smith, it fell to Blair to carry to act as New Labourism’s Middle England-friendly standard bearer. Surely Brown could live with number two status, in the interest of the greater good of the project?

For outsiders, perhaps first hint of just how deep the rivalry ran between the two was the mysterious mention of a certain ‘Bobby’ in Blair’s victory speech. Bobby – short for Bobby Shaftoe, hero of a Geordie folk song – was a reference to Peter Mandelson. This not-particularly-funny joke was at Brown’s expense; the other half of New Labourism had been shafted.

That was in 1994; all developments within the Labour Party since that date have essentially been shaped by the dialectical interaction between Blair and Brown. Despite there being no substantial difference in what they represent in political terms, in a personal sense the rupture has been all the deeper for the proximity.

Even after Blair’s departure, irreconcilable has-beens of the Clarke/Milburn stripe have continued fighting the war, much like stranded Japanese soldiers in the jungles of Borneo.

Dialectics are never static, and are said to be constantly in the process of working themselves out. Miliband, as the apostolic successor to Blair, should at one level by able to resolve the contradiction in a new synthesis.

After all, what would be the purpose of continued conflict between acolytes of Blair and Brown in a new dispensation in which one of them is out of parliament and the other is brooding on the sidelines?

New internal contradictions would instead emerge. The most likely possibility is a face-off between a unified post-New Labourism led by Miliband and Cruddasite social democracy, arguing from within the obscurity of opposition.

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