Old Labour Redivivus - Britain Longs For Old Labour, Even If It Is Not Ready To Admit It

Following Labour’s November budget, much of the commentariat mourned the supposed death of New Labour. The Times’s Danny Finkelstein, for instance, suggested the fiscal event marked the end of the ‘New Labour dream’, while The Independent’s John Rentoul suggested the faction laid buried beneath the budget.

Much of the country will, however, have, even if quietly, been uttering the following sentiment subsequent to reading of its passing: ‘phew’. Seen as a necessary evil by many, no one truly longed for New Labour’s endurance. The country, in fact, hopes that an ‘Old Labour’ – a faction that, I want to suggest, was, historically, recognised as the ‘Labour right’ – redivivus, which we are supposedly witnessing, truly happens.

This may seem an odd thing to say given that one of the few things Britons agree on is that Labour is not working. Having been elected with a large majority in July 2024, the party now polls at less than 20%. Further, its leader, Keir Starmer, is consistently regarded as the most unpopular prime minister in history. With a favourability rating of -51 (according to YouGov), many expect 2026 to be his last year in office.

Nonetheless, I want to argue that the country remains wedded to the Old Labour attitudes that Starmer has indulged and that, provided he and his party recognise this, Labour could win re-election come 2029.

It is a mistake to view the Labour left as representative of ‘Old Labour’ values. Taking its lead from Tony Benn, the contemporary left owes more to social movements of the 1960s than it does Labour history.

The same cannot be said of the pre-1997 Labour right. Traditionalist to its core, the faction, embodied by the likes of Hugh Gaitskell, Anthony Crosland, Peter Shore, and Denis Healey, sought to govern as Clement Attlee had. It respected the monarchy and the sovereignty of parliament; it maintained NATO membership and a nuclear deterrent while actively unravelling Britain’s imperial footprint, and remained wary of profit-makers and close to a bullish trade union movement. Lastly, it fought for the maintenance of a mixed economy, not the utter socialisation of the means of production, that flowered post-war.

This is why it is also wrong to assume that the ascent of New Labour was the point at which the Labour right reached its apogee. New Labour was, in fact, never compatible with the Labour right. While its leader, Tony Blair, suggested his job was to ‘build on some of the things she [Margaret Thatcher] had done’, and his closest ally Peter Mandelson told executives Labour’s new leadership was ‘intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich’, Healey and Roy Hattersley rued their failure to defeat Thatcher’s Conservative Party in the 1980s.

To the left of many of the pre-1997 Labour parliamentarians on immigration, New Labourites were also obsessed with a European Union that the giants of the right had always viewed with scepticism. Focused on Britain’s sovereignty, Gaitskell rejected the idea of membership, warning it would mean ‘the end of a thousand years of history’. Similarly, Shore later led the campaign against entry into the common market and Healey, before his passing, leant his support to the Brexit campaign.

The two figures to live to witness New Labour’s nadir in Iraq, Healey and Hattersley had each opposed what they considered to be the illegal invasion of Iraq. Fundamentally different to the Falklands War, which, due to its being waged in order to protect British interests, both had steadfastly supported, each bemoaned Blair’s imperial blunder for years to come and insisted he hand power over to Gordon Brown – a man whose ideas were viewed by many Blairites as a relic from a time passed.

The influence of Brown, and Old Labour, over the last budget was evident given one of its flagship measures, the lifting of the two-child benefit cap, had been something he had campaigned in favour of for years. In spite of its unpopularity (59% of the public, when polled, supported keeping it), much of the rest of the measures in the budget were popular. According to YouGov, voters overwhelmingly supported increasing taxes on gambling (82%), the freezing of rail fares (82%), the rise in the minimum wage (71%), the ‘mansion tax’ (67%), and the extension of the sugar tax (50%).

Likewise, each of the workers’ rights reforms Labour is set to implement, having devised them in lock step with a union movement Blair and Mandelson remain suspicious of, are to voters’ tastes, with a majority of those polled (once again, according to YouGov) supporting the banning of zero hours contracts (68%), the expansion of rights to flexible working (65%), the extension of rights to sick pay (62%) and the right to protection from unfair dismissal (62%). 

A tougher stance on immigration, one spearheaded by the faction’s darling Shabana Mahmood, is too sought by much of the British public. In spite of its causing consternation amongst the liberal elite, a plurality of the British people (41%) strongly support her proposals to restrict visas to people from countries who fail to agree return deals for illegal immigrants and failed asylum, with a further 21% ‘somewhat supporting’ this change. Similarly, the centrist desire for a ‘Breturn’ has been ignored, just as a plurality of Britons (44%) wish.

All this is to say that, contrary to the conclusions of the commentariat, Labour’s appetite for the old in the stead of the new is not a problem. Should they continue to indulge tendencies that many see as representing the party’s true colours, the polls could just turn.

Image: Flickr/No 10 Downing Street (Simon Dawson) Licence.

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