Abstract
New Labour went to its moment of electoral glory in 1997 behind a manifesto that carried the title New Labour: Because Britain Deserves Better. It went to its moment of power armed with what its leader defied anyone to say was ‘anything other than a radical programme’. But it was a programme that stood, he told the opening press conference of the election campaign, ‘in the radical centre of politics: modern, forward-looking, utterly in tune with the times and instincts of today’s Britain’.1 And in electoral terms, it clearly was. For by any standards, Labour’s electoral performance in May 1997 must stand as one of the most remarkable of the democratic age.
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Notes
On this, see A. King, The night itself, in A. King et al., New Labour Triumphs: Britain at the Polls, London, Chatham House, 1998, pp. 7–9.
S. Fielding, ‘Labour’s path to power’, in A. Geddes and J. Tonge (eds), Labour’s Landslide, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1997, p. 33.
On this, see S. Hall, ‘The great moving right show’, reproduced in his The Hard Road to Renewal, London, Verso, 1988.
P. Toynbee and D. Walker, Did Things Get Better? An Audit of Labour’s Successes and Failures, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 2001, p. 232.
Tony Blair, The Third Way: A New Politics for the New Century, London, Fabian Society, 1998, p. 7.
David Miliband, ‘The new politics of economics’, in C. Crouch and D. Marquand (eds), Ethics and Markets, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993, p. 26. Miliband was initially head of Blair’s Policy Unit, later Schools Minister and now Minister for the Cabinet Office.
Quoted in D. Coates, ‘Placing New Labour’, in B. Jones (ed.), Political Issues in Britain Today, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1999, p. 357.
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© 2005 David Coates
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Coates, D. (2005). The Moment of Power. In: Prolonged Labour. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230509085_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230509085_3
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