The Blair Supremacy: A study in the politics of Labour's party management

By Lewis Minkin

Lewis Minkin has immense experience of the Labour Party and has acted as adviser to two major internal reviews of the internal party organisation. As the author of two widely acclaimed and original studies on the Labour Party, The Labour Party Conference and The Contentious Alliance, he possesses an unrivalled grasp of the subtleties and nuances of Labour’s internal relationships. The Blair Supremacy is groundbreaking in its investigation of the processes, methods, character and politics of party management, during a period when Blair strengthened his own position as he and his allies and managers drove the party through a ferment of new developments under the name ‘New Labour’. For this book Minkin has been able to draw on a wealth of sources unavailable to other scholars. What is uncovered here is revealing and at times startling. It includes an extensive covert internal organisation, a culture which facilitated manipulation and what can be described as a rolling coup. These developments are rigorously and critically examined with a strong focus on three fundamental questions: How were these changes achieved? Was it, as it was often represented, a complete supremacy? Why did it end so badly with Blair being forced, in effect, to step down? The study challenges many misconceptions and sheds new light on the Blair legacy and on the intense controversies surrounding him. It also adds greatly to our understanding of some acute contemporary problems in British political life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jun 16, 2014
• ISBN: 9781847799012

Lewis Minkin

Lewis Minkin is Visiting Honorary Professor in the School of Politics and International Studies at the University of Leeds

Book preview

The Blair Supremacy

The Blair Supremacy

A study in the politics of Labour’s party management

LEWIS MINKIN

Copyright © Lewis Minkin 2014

The right of Lewis Minkin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK

and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

Distributed in the United States exclusively by

Palgrave Macmillan, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York,

NY 10010, USA

Distributed in Canada exclusively by

UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall,

Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN      978 0 7190 7379 3 hardback

ISBN      978 0 7190 7380 9 paperback

First published 2014

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset in 10/12pt Sabon

by Graphicraft Limited, Hong Kong

Printed in Great Britain

by TJ International Ltd, Padstow

By the strength of our common endeavour we achieve more than we achieve alone.

Clause IV, Labour Party Rulebook, 1995.

When we created New Labour it was about taking the Labour Party out of smoke-filled rooms and away from machine politics.

James Purnell, Minister for Culture, BBC Newsnight, September 2006.

I’ve never led this party by calculation.

Tony Blair, Labour Party Conference, 30 September 2003.

Oh what scoundrels we would be if we did for ourselves what we stand ready to do for Italy.

Cavour.

Contents

Preface: Origins, roles, methods and sources

Abbreviations

Introduction

Part I: Antecedents

1 The tradition of party management and the road to destabilisation

2 Revolt and restoration

3 Contentious alliance, OMOV and the management of democratic renewal

Part II: Forging ‘New Labour’ management

4 ‘New Labour’ and the culture of party management

5 The Leader, the machine and party management

6 Transforming fundamentals and laying new foundations

7 Creating ‘the Party into Power’ project

8 Managing the changing NEC: partnership and shifting power

9 Managing policy relations with business and unions

10 Managing new policy institutions

11 Managing the party conference

12 Managing candidate selection

13 Managing the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP)

14 Employment relations, representation and party management

Part III: Crisis and control

15 The crisis of party management

16 Distrust, management and the long road to Iraq

17 New challenges and management on the road to Warwick

18 Managing for legacy

Part IV: Appraisal

19 Summary: analysis and characterisation

20 Evaluation and perspectives

21 Epilogue: Brown, management inheritance and new moves to reform

Index

Preface: Origins, roles, methods and sources

This study is highly unusual, not only in its content but in its origins and in the mixture of roles, working methods and procedural values from which it grew. These built up in continuation of the combination of academic and advisory roles, which deepened following my writing Neil Kinnock’s 1983 speech on the organisational reform of the defeated Labour Party. That marked one starting point in the history of this book. But I now date the origins of the present study from a long interview with Tony Blair in 1989 at his home. I sought then to understand his views on the future of the party and the unions and I also gained a glimpse of a major difference between us over the conduct of Labour’s internal politics (disclosed in Chapter 2, p. 77 and n. 76).

The very favourable academic and party reception for The Contentious Alliance, published in 1991,¹ led to my appointment in 1992 as advisor to the National Executive Committee (NEC) review group on relations between the party and the trade unions. Blair and I had some strong and open disagreements there. In 1996, I also became an advisor to the NEC Party into Power discussions, which reviewed relations between the party and a future government. Some of my critical perspective on leadership, manipulation and distrust under Blair’s leadership, which are further developed here, were vigorously argued and contested at times in those discussions.

What happened next said something healthy about Blair and the fluidity of relations around him, and tells something about my own role-playing and the rules I developed for myself over time. I had turned down a shadow ministerial post under Kinnock in 1983 and subsequently did not ask for or encourage positions, favours or honours. I did not want to be drawn too deeply into implicit obligations, seductions and dangers to the trust of others. As advisor on the two controversial major review committees I had worked without any public comment. I became known as somebody whose discretion could be trusted, and whose independent and creative judgement was expressed from a deep understanding of Labour politics.

Perhaps because of this, in spite of the battles over the Party into Power, I was asked by Jon Cruddas, Blair’s Deputy Political Secretary in 1997, to act in independent liaison between Cruddas and the unions whilst preserving my own position on the union-party relationship. Later, in 2000–1, with what became Blair’s tacit approval, following what I had thought (mistakenly, see Chapter 15, particularly p. 472) was the beginning of his more sensitive relationship with the party, I became involved in a similar dialogue with other Political Office aides, covering a wider Labour Party procedural agenda, again in line with the values I had pursued as advisor to the two major reviews. In 2005–6 that dialogue with No. 10 eventually petered out over, amongst other things, disagreement about the management of the implementation of what became known as the Warwick Agreement with the unions.

All the way through it was my practice to interweave into the advisory and liaison work the role of lone scholar, digging away at the existing literature, documentation and cuttings, interviewing and discussing, seeking my own interpretation, noticing features that others did not and observing patterns or their absence. I could feed in and draw upon an understanding of, and contrasts with, past Labour procedures, practices and politics, and decades of observational pattern-making.

Since 1967, I have been an investigator and private discussant in innumerable Labour Party meetings of different kinds and at different levels, and interviewed most major managerial figures and many leading politicians in connection with my studies.

It was around 2002, I think, when the idea that I was preparing a future book took clearer shape. Though a continuing critic, I disclosed that aim to No. 10 and to any other regular interviewees who asked. I persevered with the interviews and multiple selective follow-up discussions over long periods with party officials, union leaders and officials, ministers and their aides, MPs’ internal party representatives, and key activists. Some of this continued during 2005–6 but with much weaker contact with No. 10, and more spasmodically with others after 2007. From June 1990 when the last interview took place for The Contentious Alliance, until October 2012, I had interviewed and often taken part in repeated follow-up sessions with 133 different people, and discussed with many hundreds more.

All the digging, the talking, the observations and the comparisons convinced me of the importance, for the party and the public, of pulling together, analysing and presenting what had emerged. I renewed the view that the academic in politics, especially one playing dual and triple roles, has the responsibility to assist in seeking to ensure that people in politics act with their eyes open. As Goethe said, ‘Unless you use your eyes to see, you end up using them to cry with’.

Sources and acknowledgements

I have followed here the normal practice of stipulating printed sources in what became over 2,000 Notes, but ideas and information in the many verbal sources in the dialogue and interviews which often enabled me to give meaning to printed sources had problems of attribution. This has always been the case with the evidence used in my work, an element of which derived from or was supported by information from confidential sources. In this study these sources were more pervasive because the project involved a much greater intrusion at a higher level into a wide range of normally undisclosed behaviour. Without that confidentiality this study could never have been satisfactorily attempted.

To a lesser degree, the problems of attribution arose also from my personal method of conducting interviews and conversations, especially those repeated many times over the years. I regard research as both a rigorous investigation and a creative art. Some interviewing and discussions had long developed into a mixed form: formal interrogative but also opening up, comparing and sharing elements of interpretation useful to both of us.² This was often followed later by my attempts to connect the information to other past and present developments. Confirmation or adjustment was constantly assessed in the light of other evidence and, where necessary, led to further investigation and many discussions. The insight and authenticity of the product of this combination of methods have been attested to in the past reception for my work both within the party and in the academic community.³

The long-term sharing involved in co-creative interviewing meant I owe a huge debt to the very many people who have, over forty years, enhanced my education and understanding. And it has also meant that on occasions there was a lack of clarity about who introduced what information, and what obligations were involved in recognising their contribution in part or in whole. Confidentiality was a dominating general consideration. For all these reasons, although with permission I have named some limited exceptional assistance below, and, again with permission, some, on rare occasions, are cited in the Notes, I have heavily restricted the naming of sources. Having made these points here I have also dispensed with the occasional academic practice of giving in Notes long lists of unspecified ‘private sources’.

I would particularly like to thank the many people around the Leader and central party organisation, in official and ex-official positions, who took part. There were repetitive discussions with some whose trust and willingness to talk deepened over the years, despite some strong differences of opinion. I hope that I have done them, their work and the important subject, justice. I am noting here, with permission, some special debts incurred over a very long period drawing from the knowledge, understanding and insight of particular veteran senior party and ex-party officials, namely: Alan Haworth, Secretary of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) from 1992 to 2005, Andrew Sharp, Regional Director, North and Yorkshire Labour Party from 1993 to 1999 then Group Head of Party Services at Millbank to 2002, Mike Watts, Labour Party Director of Personnel and Finance, 1987 to 1993, and Larry Whitty, Labour Party General Secretary from 1985 to 1994. I must also make special mention of two very senior Labour Party politicians and ex-Secretaries of State after 1997, David Blunkett MP and Clare Short MP, and my veteran local councillor, MP and ex-minister John Battle; they did not always agree with me or each other but over the years they provided (within discreet limits) a knowledgeable and stimulating discussion of the party and the practice of politics.

Staff of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) have always given scrupulous assistance over many years of my research and continue to do so. Close cooperation also came from the changing staff of the Trade Union and Labour Party Liaison Organisation (TULO), which became an increasingly significant entity in the party. Byron Taylor, the National Officer of TULO after 2002, provided a valuable new input by drawing from his experience of the culture of party management as a party official and fusing it with his understanding of the difficult union experience of being on the receiving end of managerial behaviour.

I am grateful for years of high-level academic analysis of the Labour Party and for comments on this study by David Howell and Eric Shaw. I also thank Cesca Gaines for helpful comments on early chapters and Arthur Lipow for his provocative encouragement. Thanks are also due to Kevin Theakston who gave me an improved understanding of some relevant aspects of British government, and Peter Nolan who corrected some economic misconceptions. Keith Ewing did the same for some sections on labour law. There was at times also private assistance from the staff of polling agencies IpsosMORI, YouGov, PoliticsHome, Populus and ICM. Tony Mason from Manchester University Press showed praiseworthy patience and gave much good advice and editorial assistance.

Family assistance in some of the tasks along the way came in various forms from Daniel and Natalie Minkin, and Tom and Stella St David Smith, in administration from Daniel Furniss, in comments on public attitudes to honesty by Judge Chris Furniss and in computing operation from Andy Wood. I thank profusely Paul McHale-Webster who helped me in years of dealing with recalcitrant technology and other problems covered by his multiple expertises. Liz Minkin edited my English, questioned my explanations and deserves a medal for putting up with me and this huge work.

None of the individuals or organisations named in this preface is personally responsible for any of the judgements in this study and, MUP aside near completion, none knew what they all were.

Notes

1 Lewis Minkin, The Contentious Alliance, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 1991, and 1992 pbk edn with epilogue.

2 See on this ‘The Interview as Joint Enquiry’ and ‘The Interview as Creative Dialogue’, in Lewis Minkin, Political Research as a Creative Art, SHU Press, Sheffield, 1997, Chapter 5, pp. 144–50. This study, reviewed in the Times Higher Educational Supplement, 3 October 1997, as a ‘godsend to a generation of research scholars’, led to a government commission, The National Council for Creative and Cultural Education, and I became its Vice-Chair.

3 See particularly Eric Shaw, ‘Lewis Minkin and the Party-Union Link’, in John T. Callaghan, Steven Fielding, and Steve Ludlam, Interpreting the Labour Party: Approaches to Labour Politics and History, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2003, pp. 166–81.

Abbreviations

Introduction

The dynamic leader

There can be no doubt about the huge impact that Tony Blair had on the Labour Party. A dynamic Leader, he piloted and drove the organisation through a ferment of new developments. At every annual party conference, he was the recipient of huge acclaim, reflecting what appeared to be not just a pre-eminence but an unusual and unshakeable supremacy over the party that he and his allies Gordon Brown, Peter Mandelson, Alastair Campbell and Philip Gould now renamed ‘New Labour’.* As the process and his methods of producing change and consolidating power are examined and reassessed here, the major focus is on three fundamental questions around which a wide range of other issues are raised. How was it all achieved? Was it really, as projected, a supremacy? Why did it end in the controversial way that it did? The answers to these and many other questions are sought in a probing interrogation of the distinctive character, mechanisms and development of Blair’s party management.

Party management

By party management I clarify here that I do not mean the administration of the party’s organisational apparatus as it carried out its various functions, although, where relevant, that will be an element in the study. I mean what the managers, past and present, themselves often talked of as ‘management’: the attempt to control problem-causing activities, issues and developments in order to ensure that outcomes were produced which the managers considered to be in the party’s best interests. How the best interests were understood was usually closely related to advancing the aims and objectives established by the party leadership. Management of this kind was and is not a specific office. It was and remains an important function, carried out, either regularly or spasmodically, and often covertly, by usually a coalition of officials and internally elected representatives alongside their other work.

Anybody familiar with my work over the years will become aware that this focus on illuminating party management and its methods is a development of elements of my past studies. The Labour Party Conference revealed for the first time the covert liaison, agenda-setting and procedural devices in the old management of Labour Party policy-making.¹ The Contentious Alliance explored for the first time the largely unwritten regulation of relations between the union and parliamentary leaderships, and its effects on party management.² But party management has been moved to a central position here because that was what happened in the party. The organisation and culture of its operation under Blair had some important and distinctive new features. It became a greatly expanded yet hitherto under-examined dimension of activity. Here I have focused on many (although, of necessity, not all) of the major tasks and controversial changes of the ‘New Labour’ era. And though this study is not primarily biographical, consequences will be drawn from the fact that party management was Blair’s academy of higher education and his regular training ground in practising the arts and crafts of politics.

Investigation of this activity, in an attempt to put together a new understanding, takes us at times into subterranean processes, and into a multi-faceted and interwoven analysis across time and the different dimensions and forums of party activity. The examination here includes features that were often hidden and unacknowledged. It unveils many new discoveries and insights and not a few surprises. What will become apparent is that without a detailed examination of this management, its origins, form and distinctiveness, much that is significant about key developments in the Labour Party’s internal politics during the Blair years would be missed. It gives a new view of the building and maintenance of ‘New Labour’.

‘New Labour’ and the history of party management

A satisfactory analysis has to begin before Blair became Leader, setting out important historical features of Labour’s organisation and the traditional model of management of the party. Through this examination can be found various mechanisms which later influenced Blair’s own management, but also experiences under Kinnock and Smith against which Blair and his allies strongly reacted in ways that later shaped their distinctiveness. There is an important detailed focus on the battle over one-member-one-vote (OMOV) under the leadership of Smith where Blair was heavily involved, and his agenda of organisational separation from the unions came to the fore. The analysis challenges common views of the origins and process of that battle and suggests that the victory was not what it seemed to be. Some consequences for him as Leader were helpful but also, as will be shown, others were deeply problematic for his management aspirations.

After he became Leader, Blair and his allies brought with them a new pessimism about the electoral predicament, linked with a comprehensive critique of the deficiencies of the party which was diagnosed as in need of a party revolution.³ That presented considerable and urgent management problems. The analysis explores what these problems were, and what attitudes and organisation were brought to bear in managerial behaviour. What emerged as the culture of Blair’s party management was at the heart of party life and its development. The questions that begin here in examining the culture and organisation of party management continue throughout the study, and involve not only asking what the managerial skills and assets were but what were the vulnerabilities and limitations that arose in and from the managerial process and behaviour. The values, perspectives and codes of conduct within this management culture tell us much that is important about the character of ‘New Labour’ and its Leader. Important portents of the future, including the later remarkable change in Blair’s reputation and the developing intensity of the battles within the leadership, are revealed here.

Blair’s attempt to manage the reform of fundamentals and foundations of the party was a continuing feature, and over the reform of Clause IV was presented as a complete leadership triumph, with the NEC circumvented, the union opposition crushed and the radical purposes secured. But like so much else of Blairite management it had another face. This involved a more important union role than has been presented hitherto. It included a mysterious change in the union-related content of the new clause, an important and welcomed but hidden NEC and union input into the change, and a major limitation of the triumph. How these happened points to some important features of ‘New Labour’ management and also some problematic side effects. The Road to the Manifesto plebiscite was held to be another triumph, with all purposes secured, but here there were some major unanticipated misadventures, with purposes not achieved. And the crucial backdoor politics around the initiative involved an episode extraordinarily telling about Blair’s attitude towards winning, even though generating distrust.

Seeking to subordinate the unions, and introducing an unprecedented attempt to move closer to the increasingly valued business community, whilst still expecting the unions to play a traditional supportive role, was an extraordinary task. Probing how this was managed within the party and in relations with the Trades Union Congress (TUC) leads to major questions of whether or not this was now ‘more or less a business party’⁴ or ‘Labour Party PLC.’⁵ A more interesting, complicated and changing reality is revealed though various chapters. At different points, the enquiry also moves into union responses to their treatment and their relations with party management. In the patterns of their behaviour did they still play to the circumscribed roles and mainly conventional ‘rules’ which constrained their behaviour in the traditional relationship? Did the new relations mean – as so often predicted – that there was a movement apart towards the ending of the party’s structural link with affiliated organisations? There is a very big surprise here, explored and explained.

The Party into Power

Through the procedure known as The Party into Power came the formulation of new arrangements covering relations between the party and a Labour government. The internal politics of arriving at a conception of a new ‘partnership’ is investigated to question what influences were brought into play by the Leader, his managers, the unions and other actors. How did they operate and at what stage? Were the limitations on partnership in practice an unanticipated product of its complexity and problematic operation or was it a continuation of the original managerial perspective?

In subsequent chapters, the implementation of these plans for partnership will then be followed through in detail, integrated into a study of the managerial role in all the major institutions and processes at national level of the party, new and old, keeping an eye on resistances, reactions and constraints as well as managerial successes. All the institutions incited new managerial concerns about control. What remained of the significance of the party conference and the National Executive Committee (NEC) and new institutions, the National Policy Forum (NPF) and the Joint Policy Committee (JPC)? Myths and common misconceptions are cleared up. A significant element of the partnership understanding was that the general election manifesto would be the consensual means by which the party would participate in establishing the policy for the second and possibly third terms. In that light, what happened in practice to the gestation of the manifesto? How was that managed and with what consequences?

Backstairs in the Parliamentary Labour Party

Alongside examining the different institutional managements, and noting the new managerial powers, highlighted here is the generally unexpected response to managing the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP). The PLP was often characterised in this first term as in various states of docility – a view already qualified by Cowley’s studies of parliamentary revolts.⁶ But when the focus moves away from voting behaviour in the Commons to a broader canvas of behaviour within the party, much more is revealed. Attention is drawn to the extraordinarily prickly secret backstairs relations between the PLP management and the management at the party centre, and the differences between the management cultures. This examination allows us to delve into an often unexplored question: how was it was that the PLP, an institution where dissent was, apparently, threatened with a severe disciplinary regime under Blair, secured so much freedom from sanctions?

Coupled with this, there is a case study of the politics of government implementation of the policy on union recognition and employment relations. Here, what can be seen is the highly unusual role of some of Blair’s managers linking in unexpected ways with a new union assertiveness and a new role for the PLP. Seen also is the way that different government managers played in relations with the Confederation of British Industry (CBI). More than is generally understood this had an effect on implementation and the changing balance of forces around the unions and business, with some lasting political consequences.

Managerial vulnerability and ‘the end of control freakery’

By the turn of the millennium, the managerial solutions to the problems met by ‘New Labour’ in 1994 had become themselves seen to be deeply problematic in ways that confounded managerial expectations. Candidate selection became subject to new arrangements and more heavily pressurised management. The special concern here, as elsewhere, is with the role and methods of the Leader and his managers in influencing the procedures and outcomes. But what emerged also were the problems that this management caused for the party’s public reputation as addicted to ‘control freakery’ and the pressure this then produced for a reform of management on the one hand and the defence of Blair on the other.

In this situation, ‘Can you adapt and change?’, a question hurled regularly at the party by its leadership since 1994, now became posed for the Leader himself in dealing with its own management and control. Could they and did they? The questions became all the more pressing in the light of increasingly hostile public attitudes towards ‘control freakery’ and political manipulation. It was all the more difficult because the drive to overcome the reputation for ‘control freakery’ also coincided in practice with a new attempt by Blair to win more freedom of action for his own bold leadership. How the difficult conjunction of problems was dealt with is uncovered, revealing a series of developments, actions and reactions, some of them very clever indeed in a politics of the misleading and the surreptitious. It even tells us something generally unrecognised about the link between party management and the intensifying battle between Blair and Brown.

The extensive managerial operations will continue to be examined in each of the major institutions, enabling a comparison of management across time frames and contexts. What differences developed, what continuities remained, and why? In the light of the evidence here but also in other spheres of the study, a very quizzical eye will be cast on what was said to be ‘the end of control freakery’ as it was presented to the party and the public. Here as elsewhere the fine academic analysis by Russell which concludes that ‘the building of New Labour’ was ‘of necessity negotiated’⁷ will be strongly challenged. With that in mind, there will be a focus on the way that management of the build-up of the wider party and union voice over Iraq was conducted and then what happened to party accountability over it. Contrasting with this experience a peculiarity in the second term needs delving into: why was a leadership, obsessed from the first with control and managed party unity, involved in a pattern of ministerial public deviance from collective cabinet responsibility?

New pressures and new union leaders

In the second term the management and its behaviour became a further test for the management of the unions and a test of traditional union obedience to the priority of their industrial role, their supportive solidarity in the party and their refusal to use sanctions against the party leadership. One not untypical view offered was that ‘union money no longer buys votes that make a difference so it is used by being made contingent on policy delivery’.⁸ The reality will be explored through various sensitive developments including a crisis over party finance where two of the unions adopted, it seemed, a new threatening position in relation to finance. It was a crisis that appeared about to shake the Labour Party but ended with the unions supporting an unpublicised union rescue plan without policy implications. Why?

Problems intensified when major changes taking place at leadership level in the unions brought to office a new generation from the left of the unions who had deep reservations about playing along with the old managerial game at all. In the final stages of the second term it looked as though there would be an open and cataclysmic pre-election confrontation. Yet, to general surprise, out of the struggle came the Warwick Agreement of 2004, an agreement which, for a while, took on iconic significance as a ‘peace in our time’. How did this unexpected agreement come about and was it linked, as diagnosed, to union finance? What role did party management play in all this? And what happened to the new peace?

Centralism uniformity and pluralism

This analysis links us to another enquiry. Labour has always been a party which embodied a high degree of internal pluralism, based on its internal factions and tendencies, its federal relations with affiliated organisations, its divided central authority, and its changing amalgam of leadership and democratic internal arrangements. Under Blair, however, there was a new centralising managerial impetus behind the search to make ‘New Labour’ a united and effective political force and in doing so to undermine other centres of internal power. It was generally expected, therefore, that in creating and reinforcing the leader’s supremacy there would be a uniformity and homogeneity to managerial activities on his behalf. Did that happen? The strong leadership of Kinnock had obscured a subdued dissent and a pluralism with a variety of sources.⁹ That forewarns the observer to question what happened to Labour’s internal dissent and pluralism under Blair and how management dealt with them. This is another area where what is discovered challenges some widely accepted assumptions. All here was also not what it was presented to be.

Culmination and departure

The General Election result of 2005 left Blair with a reduced majority still seeking to push through controversial legacy legislation which was to the right of the Labour Party mainstream, and still attempting also to change party and union representation. In September 2006 there occurred what was described by Peter Mandelson as a ‘moment of madness’,¹⁰ as Blair became the first Labour Prime Minister to be forced into a time-limited notice by a revolt in his own party. It was a fascinating and instructive period in Labour history which requires a broad analysis of problems, discontents and revolts proliferating across the party. From examining the Blair style of leadership and party management, there are good reasons to doubt whether ‘the moment of madness’ was such an irrational outburst. And what has been found here drives a reassessment of why it was that what had often been regarded as an unshakable supremacy, bolstered, as shown, by extensive management, was overcome by the party giving him his notice.

Appraisal

In the final section of this study there are two interrelated chapters of appraisal. In the Summary and Analysis, the many detailed new findings are summarised in differentiated time frames noting patterns of management, major variabilities and exceptions, interspersed with analytical comment. This facilitates assessment in relation to challenging common assumptions and various empirical and theoretical positions. Various characterisations of the mode of politics and the power relations between leader, party and government are examined in the light of the complex and often cloaked realities, uncovered by the study. The Evaluation and Perspectives then engages critically with the narrative of managerial success bringing into the evaluation a range of events and developments often unnoticed but uncovered in this study. In this, critical evaluation is made of the major consequences of party management for party democracy, trust, ethical renewal, ‘the contentious alliance’ with the unions, party cohesion, party reputation and, more generally, British political life. ‘The Blair supremacy’, such as it was, is presented as an important example of highly motivated and focused political skills but it is also evaluated as an education in broader and longer term collateral and consequential damage.

The study ends with an epilogue where the party management of the new Leader, Brown is examined in the light of the inheritance from Blair, including the problems exacerbated before an election result that became recognised as ‘the end of New Labour’. The concluding section covers the movement of the Labour Party into the deep political trouble which had to be faced after the 2010 general election. It offers a final view of the development of problems and party management under Miliband and briefly raises questions over the developing and future character of Labour Party politics.

Notes

1 Lewis Minkin, The Labour Party Conference: a Study in the Politics of Intra-party Democracy, Allen Lane, London, 1978 and Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1980.

2 Lewis Minkin, The Contentious Alliance, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 1991, particularly Part 1, Foundations, pp. 1–104.

3 Philip Gould, The Unfinished Revolution: How the Modernisers Saved the Labour Party, Little Brown, London, 1998.

4 Colin Crouch, ‘Coping with Post-democracy’, Fabian Ideas 598, Fabian Society, London, 2000.

5 David Osler, Labour Party PLC: New Labour as a Party of Business, Mainstream Publishing, London 2002.

6 Philip Cowley, Revolts and Rebellions: Parliamentary Voting under Blair, Politicos, London, 2002; and Philip Cowley, The Rebels: How Blair Mislaid his Majority, Politicos, London, 2005.

7 Meg Russell, Building New Labour: the Politics of Party Organisation, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2005, p. 8.

8 Thomas Quinn, Modernising the Labour Party: Organisational Change since 1983, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2004, p. 189.

9 Minkin, Contentious Alliance, p. 630 and p. 643, note 30.

10 BBC News Channel, 7 September 2006.

PART I

Antecedents

1

The tradition of party management and the road to destabilisation

The distinctiveness of what happened in the governance of the Labour Party under Blair can only be fully understood in relation to the heritage of the party’s organisational form, its democratic culture and the traditional pattern of party management. Blair, his allies and his managers were politically born into this heritage and they drew from its character, attitudes and practices some useful lessons for the future but they also noted what they regarded as its inadequacies and unacceptable obligations. This, as will be shown, was to lead Blair into some crucially important organisational and cultural departures. The foundations of the original managerial tradition and its history are presented here as a compressed, complex but essential historical analysis, preliminary to the developments leading eventually to the Blair experience itself.

Party history, the pattern of organisation and the culture of management

The party was created in 1900 as a confederal alliance of affiliated independent organisations – mainly trade unions but also socialist societies, the Independent Labour Party, briefly the Social Democratic Federation, and then the Fabian Society. On to this was built after 1918 a unitary structure of individual membership. These different extra-parliamentary organisations were the basic units of what was, by convention, a conference-delegate democracy with multiple chains of mandated democratic representation stretching upwards to the annual party conference – recognised as the sovereign body.* From the party in parliament came the leadership of the party as whole. This had special discretion through various formulae but it was a natural extension of the principles of conference delegate democracy that the parliamentary arm of the Labour Party should have an obligation to implement party policy based on the decisions of the conference and the general election manifesto.

The democratic process also embodied what appeared to be complete union dominance. In 1918, after a reform of the constitution which established a national system of constituency parties (CLPs), at the party conference, the unions cast 2,471,000 votes, the CLPs 115,000, and the socialist societies 48,000. The unions controlled also a majority of the seats on the NEC elected from the extra-parliamentary units. In addition, the unions, by affiliation fees and donations, provided substantial finance for the upkeep of the organisation the party. They sponsored a substantial section of Labour MPs and provided extra financial resources for the expenses of fighting general elections. All of this created the possibility that working through these democratic and financial arrangements the parliamentary leadership would be subordinate to the extra-parliamentary party, and the unions through finance and votes would be the dominant power as they imposed themselves on the parliamentary public representatives.

Party leadership

In practice, to the repetitive disappointment of sections of the local parties, the unions, and some backbench MPs, neither the formal democratic arrangements nor the appearance of trade union dominance gave anything like an accurate characterisation of Labour’s internal power relations. When the party grew as an electoral force, becoming first the official opposition and then forming two short-lived minority governments in 1924 and 1929, a major change took place in the distribution of power. It became skewed towards the party’s parliamentary leadership with Ramsay MacDonald instituting the role of Leader as a pre-eminent figure. This was a pattern familiar to scholars of political parties after the study by Robert Michels,¹ and, later, in the British context Robert Mackenzie.²

Although the spirit of intra-party democracy continued to be an element in the elections and some internal procedures within the PLP, and at times led to attempts to revive party influence, acting as the Cabinet and Shadow Cabinet the leadership were not subject to policy control from below. Working within the historic grain of parliamentary and executive-dominated government, the normality was of a hierarchical relationship with the primary responsibility of the PLP being to support the policies formulated by a leadership. Added to the pressures of electoral competition and public representation, these influences contributed to the ascendancy of the party’s leading parliamentary figures.

The unions: roles, ‘rules’ and management relations

What was most unusual and consistently important about the cultural environment underpinning the ascendancy of the parliamentary leaders over the output of policies was a system of mainly unwritten regulation of relations with the unions. Often overlooked by observers, this system added a special element to the forces which sustained a high degree of influence by the leading politicians over the outcome of policy-making. The fundamental grounding was the mutual acceptance by the union and parliamentary leaders of different spheres and functions – the political and the industrial – each with its own roles, responsibilities and autonomy. On this basis, over time there evolved or was instituted a range of mainly unwritten ‘rules’ and protocols underwriting the mutuality and ethos of ‘the movement’ and dealing with its major potential conflicts. They were based on shared values of unity, solidarity, democracy and freedom, and a working principle of adherence to priorities; and in observance together they reinforced cohesion.

These roles ‘rules’ and protocols were later detailed in full in Minkin’s The Contentious Alliance³ and are too extensive to be fully laid down here, but the most important elements relative to party management are registered below. Although the regulation had a mutuality of restraint and protected the industrial freedom of the unions, the jealously guarded autonomy of individual unions and the independence of the Trades Union Congress – which continued to speak for all the unions regardless of party affiliation – and though the rule guaranteed political access, advance information and consultation to the unions, the most significant feature was the extent to which they restricted the unions. On the face of it union leaders with the backing of their organisations were free to use their formal position in terms of votes and finance to at least co-determine party policy and to control its political leaders in their implementation. Yet within the regulatory arrangements they were more constrained than the politicians and it was the political leadership which gained regular supportive mechanisms in party management. Since the Wertheimer analysis of 1929,⁴ which puzzled over the difference between government policy and that of the TUC, this difference of role and the rule-governed union restraint have frequently confused observers as well as being subject to continuous crude misrepresentation about the behaviour of ‘union barons’ and ‘party paymasters’.

Key to it was that within these mainly conventional arrangements, the union leaders and their representatives who formed a distinct group within the PLP and on Labour’s NEC were generally understanding of the need for party management. Their own internal union experience usually involved such activities and the factional alignment of the loyalist right in the party corresponded and overlapped with that in the unions. In addition, the rules and protocols reflected highly motivating allegiance and values. In spite of recurrent tensions (see below) there was a continuous and at times an emotional sense of solidarity of the unions with the Labour Party – ‘our party’ – and a Labour government – ‘our government’ – together in ‘this great movement of ours’. It was a protective loyalty that continued to operate in spite of disappointments. Protectiveness also extended to the party’s organisational health, its financial stability, its developing boundaries of membership and its changing electoral needs. Solidarity led the majority of unions to seek a supportive role acting as ballast to the parliamentary leadership in debates and votes within the various forums of the party. A collectivist view of party democracy and freedom also reinforced the management of party discipline. There was a strong emphasis on loyalty to majority decisions rather than furtherance of minority rights.

Union-favoured policies, as they emerged annually through their internal processes, could cover a wide range of territory, and each union had its own traditions and interests and a distinctive mix of policy positions, but normally the priority policy issues were on economic-industrial concerns, especially on union territorial areas, widened to welfare issues and exceptionally to major political issues judged as close to the immediate concerns of the members.⁵ These needs and the assertion of priority workers’ interests, whether general to unions or of an individual union, could also be pursued in terms of a justice which dovetailed into the party’s social values. They could also act as territorial shields of the industrial sphere against interference by the politicians. Nevertheless, the most striking feature was of a division of responsibilities whereby political initiative and detailed policy-making on the wide policy agenda was generally understood to be a matter for the politicians.

Leadership, the NEC and party management

The parliamentary leadership also became pre-eminent in influencing the NEC. Though it was accountable to the conference and obliged to carry out conference policy, the NEC had the constitutional authority to propose to the conference amendments to the constitution and resolutions and declarations affecting the programme, principles and policy of the party.⁶ At the annual conference it had important procedural rights and advantages including initiating major statements of policy and making a final judgement of the acceptability of resolutions initiated within the party before a vote was taken.† Through these facilities it became in effect a joint leading policy body as well as the ruling administrative authority.

On the NEC, a majority of seats were held or controlled by the unions, but members of the TUC General Council were prohibited from membership. These NEC members were heavily committed to a politics of what was seen as moderation and common sense rooted in practicalities of working-class life. Operating as the NEC trade union group, their role definition emphasised their limited involvement in strategy and policy and acceptance that the politicians should be ‘left to get on with their job’.⁷ There developed a crucial prohibition against the use of organisational or financial measures on the committee against deviant actions of the Labour governments or in pursuit of policy claims. ‘Rules’ of reciprocity governed union voting for membership of the NEC, ensuring representation by size and various other criteria. These reinforced the continuity of the NEC role and behaviour. A similar pattern governed the operation of the elected Conference Arrangements Committee (CAC), also at times known as the standing orders committee, the body formally responsible for organising the party conference. It had a loyalist majority drawn by size and tradition from the unions and was in practice very responsive to the leadership and the collective party interest.

Management intervention

Adding to the resources of loyal support, anticipating the potential for political problems and finding ways of producing outcomes that were in the party’s best interest became a regular managerial activity in party forums. With the resources of party organisation and the growing authority and skills of those playing leading roles, especially the long-serving Party Secretary (later termed the General Secretary) Arthur Henderson, the extra-parliamentary party was managed in a way which was conducive to producing outcomes which the leadership considered to be in the party’s best interests. By 1914 ‘leading performers were turning conference management into a fine art’.⁸

As the party grew in its public representation, it became a permanent priority for the senior party officials in alliance with the NEC and especially those who played leading roles, to manage procedures in various ways which dealt with the potential clash between the responsibilities and practicalities of this public representation and the conduct and outcomes of internal party democracy. This had a formal character through the powers of the NEC to initiate rule-making and lead in ensuring policy coherence. Successful party management also drew from the NEC’s general supervision of a party organisation and the rules under which it operated. It drew also from the increasing authority of the leader represented on the committee and from the general prestige, expertise, charisma and communicational skills of leading figures. Management could organise support for the leader preparing the ground for his performances. In turn, backing from the leader and the NEC reinforced the authority of management.

Where sometimes the conference management arrangements failed to produce a policy outcome which suited the parliamentary leadership, the parliamentary leaders had considerable discretion in implementation. Various historic discretionary procedural formulae, including giving effect ‘as far as may be practicable’,⁹ could on occasions legitimately be used to filter, delay or even partially reconstruct the decisions of the conference without openly flouting its authority. The PLP remained an autonomous body with its own internal rules and its own managers, and the conference could not interfere in those arrangements. Under Clause V of the constitution, a joint committee of the NEC and the Parliamentary Committee (usually read to mean the Shadow Cabinet or the Cabinet when Labour was in office) decided what items should go into the manifesto. And when it formed the government, the parliamentary leadership had a high degree of autonomy in carrying out the manifesto and in pursuit of what it defined as the national interest.

Interests, ideology and factions

Growing individual membership and activism in the CLPs was encouraged as a sign of the health of the party, and a major organisational advantage in connecting with the Labour electorate. But at the same time they, like the affiliated socialist organisations, were also thought of as a management problem. The normal assumption was that whilst the unions were practical, loyalist and dependable – strong holds of the loyalist Labour right – the CLPs and the socialist organisations were idealistic, unrealistic and unreliable – middle-class strongholds of the critical Labour left. It was a clash of stereotypes which distorted the extent of the working-class composition of the individual membership and the strength of left-wing currents amongst them. But it had enough accuracy to influence management views for many years. The unions with their clear sense of priorities and their normally right-wing moderate majority were seen as the natural safe base.

Making for particular management problems was that the left in the unions was a highly active and organised minority, and with the backing of the Communist Party was able to gather wider union support on some priority policy issues. In the period of industrial militancy leading to the General Strike of 1926, there was left-wing push for industrial action for political purposes. The left in the unions were also more sceptical of ‘rules’ and protocols which limited union policy influence. They held a more open view of the boundaries of party membership and were more critical of disciplinary codes. In their support for more radical socialist positions this left were often regarded by the leadership and on the right as ‘vanguardist’ rather than democratic, seeking not to represent the people and particularly the working class as they were but as the left hoped that they would be with their socialist consciousness raised.

Union policy-making, block votes and management

In formal terms union members made policy through elected delegates to sovereign union conferences held annually or biennially. Their mandates bound the union’s executive committee, its officials and delegates to the party conference. Federated unions – the mineworkers and the textile workers – occasionally split their votes, and the Amalgamated Society of Woodworkers did regularly. But the normality was that each union’s votes were cast as blocks which did not register minority opinion. Ironically the historic origins of this block voting had been as a management coup at the 1894 TUC by Lib-Labs in an attempt to forestall the birth of a Labour Party.¹⁰ In the party, it continued to be an important management device.

The concentration of blocks of votes amongst a small number of large unions and a concentration of power at the senior levels of those unions were arrangements which had the advantage of presenting a limited set of relationships with which to liaise in order to manage party requirements. This offered to the majority of union leaders aligned with the traditional right of the party, the assistance of party managers in the choices offered at the party conference. From this perspective, for the leadership and managers the more concentrated the block vote the better.

Within the unions, although the senior official – usually but not always the General Secretary – and the central executive committee had much greater authority and power than formal arrangements suggested, it was by no means all managed control from above. The input of the unions had a long-term impact on domestic policy development. Mandating of the union representatives, on the basis of prior organisational policy decisions, helped produce a culture of responsiveness and accountability within those organisations especially on issues of immediate priority concern to the members. But it was at times a clumsy and constricting procedure.

Tied to sometimes dated policies which bound delegates and union officials, it could constrain the dialogue. At other times it was a flexible and sensitive process that carried union leaders with movements of opinion which ran counter to that desired by the party leadership. In both cases that limited the role of party managerial influence. The politics of successful conference management was often about using the procedures to try to create choices in a way which best fitted the favourable alignment of mandates, or, if the mandates were undesirably critical or constraining, finding the choice of wording which gave sympathetic union leaders an opportunity to get off the hook and in that way help produce the desired voting outcome.

Government crisis and the union response

The solidarity role of unions in managerial support and the dominance of the loyalist majority against the left were never strong enough to overcome completely the points of substantial conflict in the unions’ relationship with Labour’s political leaders. The changing composition of the PLP with the rise of new professionals produced new tensions with the manual worker unions. More immediately, the need to make a broader socio-political appeal to the electorate and the pursuit of a national interest by the 1924 and 1929 Labour governments sometime brought conflict with both general and particular union claims – especially when industrial disputes were involved. Tension reached crisis point in 1931 over the attempt to cut unemployment benefit when the Labour Prime Minister MacDonald together with four other Labour Cabinet members formed a National Government with the party’s opponents and was expelled.

This became a major test of the relationship and of its traditions of behaviour. The unions following the lead of Ernest Bevin who, working with Walter Citrine of the TUC and carrying arguments from the TUC research department, now moved for a period to a more assertive general supervision of Labour politics and economic policy but still playing the role with restraint. He and the unions did not attempt a new constitutional imposition of their own power over the parliamentary leadership nor did they seek to give the party conference more detailed control, or interfere with the PLP autonomy. These were considered impractical and unwise arrangements. There were, however, continuing tensions over the ILP’s assertion of its autonomy and in 1932 that organisation disaffiliated. The left made some attempts to strengthen CLP representation and reform the union block vote. But these were fought off and no significant constitutional changes affected party democracy with the exception that in 1937 a rank-and-file reform movement forced the formation of a section of the NEC elected by the CLPs. The unions chose another way of managing the movement’s problems. They re-launched a forum of regular dialogue between the party and the TUC, the National Joint Council (later National Council of Labour).

This built coordination of the political and industrial leaderships with close links so as to avoid major divisions over policy, yet the unions still treated the relationship with the political leadership as a partnership that protected the different roles and responsibilities. Within the party there was a renewal of the obligation by the parliamentary leadership to ensure regular consultation in opposition or in government, to refrain from compromising the party’s independence and more generally not to offend the basic concerns and priorities of the Labour movement. This was integrated without a binding rule change, through a renewed leadership commitment to a majoritarian intra-party democracy expressed within conference sovereignty.

Only indirectly connected with this came new obligations on the union side. Conscious of the proprieties involved in parliamentary democracy they came to accept further constraint in the use of finance in political influence in candidate selection. The Hastings Agreement of 1933 restricted the level of union financial sponsorship and, in the Memorandum on the Selection of Candidates, unions were not allowed to mention finance in selections. Increasingly also in term of sponsorship there was a tendency to respect the norms of parliamentary life with regard to the rights and freedoms of members, guarded by the House authorities. All these reinforced the growing prohibition against any threat of sanctions in pursuit of union policy interests within the party.¹¹

As the TUC and party leadership moved closer together by the mid-1930s they consolidated their agreement over policy after the pacifist Lansbury had resigned as Labour Leader in 1935. Increased internal management over CLPs was deepened in dealing with various movements on the left seeking unity with the Communists in the fight against fascism. They were met by new attempts to defend Labour boundaries with a conference decision in 1936 which prohibited activity with the Communists. A series of disciplinary measures included proscription of the left-wing Socialist League in 1937 and the expulsion of, amongst others, Aneurin Bevan and Stafford Cripps in 1939 over advocacy of a popular front.

The political alliance and management unity at leadership level grew stronger but at the same time, alongside union affiliation to the party, there developed further a duality of union representation which would become a central and complicating element in future union politics. The TUC had since the General Strike increasingly also sought a better relationship with employers and independent regularised access to government whichever party was in power. It played a central role in relations with the wartime coalition over national economic, industrial and social policy-making and in building new tripartite corporate relationships with subsequent governments and employers’ organisations.

Party management consolidation and control

Consolidation and management

In 1945, as Samuel Beer pointed out, ‘to an extent unprecedented in British political history the legislation of a Government was dictated by a party programme’.¹² The Labour government carried into office in 1945 a manifesto drafted initially by a NEC campaign committee.¹³ It drew heavily from long-term policy commitments agreed by the party. It then implemented the bulk of the policies. Relations of the party and the unions with the government generally worked in accordance with the understandings reached in the early 1930s. Although there were tensions with the unions over wage regulation and wage restraint, what is striking about this period – even more so in the light of what was to follow under subsequent Labour governments – was the deep loyalty which this government evoked from the union majority. Across the party but particularly on the right there was a sense of achievement in the government’s respect for the movement’s priorities and that evoked a deep commitment in return. This was commensurate with support amongst the party’s working class supporters and reflected in the huge rise in individual membership which had risen from 487,000 in 1945 to 629,000 in 1948. It then leaped to over a million by 1952.

Gratitude felt towards the government and a Cold War fever which reinforced factional alignment of right and left, together with a shared perception of the need for political consolidation, united the senior ministerial figures, the leaders of the major trade unions and their representatives on the NEC. The new cohesion of the traditional right factions of party and unions became also a consolidation of the party management process, affecting all the major national party forums as well as the regions. After 1948, with the exception of one minor defeat in 1950 which was covered by discretionary formulae, not one defeat was suffered by the leadership at the party conference until 1960. With the political leadership operating in accordance with ‘not only the moral responsibility but the concrete responsibility of implementing Labour Party policy as determined by Annual Conference’,¹⁴