Conclusions

Abstract

Today the moral and mental world of the 1950s left — even of the then modernizers — seems distant. The Lost World’ of British Communism looks set to be joined by the remnants of Old Labour’ as its characteristic codes are supplanted by New Labour.¹ Mind, New Labour might not be quite so new as it is fond of believing. Its present-mindedness, what critics see as forgetting anything before yesterday, certainly distinguishes it from the left in the 1950s, which was notably historically-minded and reverential towards tradition. Yet echoing this, a pretext for New Labour remains a critical reading of the party’s recent history. In the late 1970s and early 1980s’, Blair has contended, Labour’s ideology and organisation became out of date’ and it lost touch with the people.’ New Labour has then (effectively) deployed history as a political resource and device by which to construct a distinction between ‘old’ and ‘hew’. ²