New Labour, New Narrative? Political Strategy and the Discourse of Globalisation

Abstract

Research Highlights and Abstract Contrary to conventional analyses, the British Labour Party most closely pursued a ‘median voter’ strategy before 1994, to little success. ‘Globalisation-as-inevitability’ was a key organising trope of ‘New Labour’ discourse across the subsequent Blair and Brown eras. Globalisation was represented in public texts in a way that buttressed New Labour's new strategic agenda of emphasising economic competence and pragmatism over ideology. The globalisation discourse also changed over time, containing greater emphases on the constraining effect of globalisation after Labour came to power in 1997. New Labour's risky rhetorical support for the EU was linked to globalisation claims and further served to distinguish Labour modernisation from Tory dogmatism. At the Labour Party conference in 2005, Tony Blair declared that debating globalisation would be like debating ‘whether autumn should follow summer’. This articulation of the imperatives of a newly-globalised world was central to the creation of ‘New’ Labour. How should we understand this turn from the autonomous socialism promised a generation earlier? In this article, I propose that Labour's discourse was produced in response to strategic demands of political competition. Synthesising Riker's concept of heresthetics with insights from discourse analysis, the article proposes parties as discursive-herestheticians who constructively use rhetorical tropes to achieve concrete ends. This approach is applied to Labour through qualitative textual analysis of speeches and documents, read in the context of electoral strategy. The analysis produces an alternative interpretation of New Labour strategy that serves as a corrective to the ‘cartel party’ account of Labour having abandoned real political competition in favour of the centre ground.