New Labour, New Britain? How the Blair governments reshaped the country

The New Labour governments of the 1990s and 2000s seem a long time ago, but now it might be time for a reassessment.

They were very unpopular by the time they came to an end; for a long time, Tony Blair in particular was persona non grata across much of the labour movement, and New Labour's legacy was reduced to a footnote in history by both Left and Right. But now, nearly thirty years after Blair came to power, it might be time for a reassessment.

Just as Harold Wilson was once denounced as the ultimate tactician, a calculating technocrat with no real views of this own, Blair's politics were long painted as without principle or true direction. But his time in office saw child poverty chut in half; pensioner poverty fall precipitously; crime plunge; inflation and unemployment stay low; the wages of the lowest-paid raise and rise.

The talk will therefore ask three questions. What were Blair's most successful policies, and which failed? How can we explain the strange silence in our recent history about New Labour? And what could the Labour government now learn from the Blair years?

Neither praise nor condemnation now seems appropriate: a historian's approach, akin to those we would apply to any other government across the nineteeth and twentieth century, might reveal at least some of the answers.

Following the talk, please join us for a wine reception where Professor O'Hara will be signing copies of his book.

 

About the speaker

Glen O'Hara is Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Oxford Brookes University. He is the author of a string of books on modern British politics and policy, including The Politics of Water in post-War Britain (2017).

He is a regular commentator and writer in the press about current events, including in The Financial Times, The Guardian, Prospect Magazine and The Telegraph.

He is now writing his next book, Kingdom Come: Visions of the Future in Modern Britain, to be published by Penguin in 2029.