It was around 2014 that I started to notice tracts warning about the dangers of populism from organisations with a close affiliation to New Labour. Over the decade since, little has changed: injected with the rocket fuel that was Brexit and Trump, it remains uncanny how many of those denouncing “populism” here in the UK have close links to Tony Blair. As for Blair himself, his new Institute for Global Change has a whole work-stream dedicated to confronting Populism, with one of its papers reflecting on “Populism in Power, 1990 to 2020”. Yet among its examples of populism of the period, there is a glaring omission: that led by Blair himself.
In 1993, the political consultant Philip Gould wrote a paper for internal Labour Party consumption advocating a “new populism”, based on the time he had just had working on the successful Democratic Party campaign for Bill Clinton. In his later book, The Unfinished Revolution (a bible for New Labourites), Gould said his memo went down “like a lead balloon” with the party machine. However, it proved influential with the young modernisers rising through the ranks, including Blair, Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson. Gould went on to work on Blair’s leadership campaign the following year and then served as a pollster and trusted communications adviser in opposition and government. He died of cancer in 2011.
The day after Blair was selected as leader, Gould wrote another of his lengthy memos, its message eerily prescient as Starmer sets out his pitch to the Labour Party faithful today:
“I argued that the real political agenda was a combination of Right and Left. It was Right-wing on crime, welfare, immigration, discipline, tax and individualism, but Left-wing on the NHS, investment, social integration, opposition to privatisation and unemployment. People wanted change, but they didn’t yet want Labour… There is still a lurking fear about unions and the loony Left; there is potential concern about Labour because of its liberal social positions; there is anxiety about tax; there is almost no idea what Labour stands for.”
In 1999, after Blair’s first landslide, Gould wrote once more of this “new populism always seeking to hear the voices of those not often heard”. Crucially for him, this did not mean the unions and minorities, who Labour already paid a lot of attention to, but “working-class achievers and the middle class under pressure”. These were the people he had grown up around; he saw them as natural Labour voters who the party had repeatedly betrayed. “I came from the land that Labour forgot,” he wrote.
To get to these people, reassure them and to make them vote for you requires a lot of work: part of what Clinton referred to as the “head game” of politics. In his foreword to the revised edition of Gould’s book, Blair himself acknowledged this: “Politics is far more intellectual exercise than people ever think… You will always end up with a strategic definition of your overall political position. The question is therefore: do you impose it on yourself or do your opponents do it for you?”
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