From Blair and Brown to Starmer and Reeves
As the general election get closer, those of us who worked for the last Labour government often get asked how different we think the next one will be, if the polls are right and Keir Starmer goes into Number Ten.
Normally I start by trying to get out of giving a direct answer. For a start, our evidence base for the two sets of politicians is completely different. We have an historical record of a full thirteen years of the Blair and Brown governments – of their challenges, successes and failures – but Labour under Starmer has not yet entered office. There is no straightforward way to compare the two.
We can compare their initial policy agendas, by looking at Labour’s manifesto in 1997 alongside Labour’s policy agenda today, but that is not especially instructive because the inheritances are so different. In 1997, Labour faced challenges such as underinvestment in public services and high rates of long-term unemployment, but it took office at a time of strong economic growth and low public debt. By contrast, if Labour wins the next election, it will confront an unprecedented legacy combining low growth, high debt, poor public services, political instability domestically and diminished diplomatic capital internationally. Keir Starmer is in line for a very different job from the one that Tony Blair took on.
But there is one level on which I think we can make a useful comparison. One thing that struck me at Number Ten more than almost anything else is that governments spend a relatively small proportion of their time implementing their pre-prepared policy agendas. Instead, they spend far more of their time dealing with unexpected events. Often that is the stream of day-to-day snafus and scandals that attract the attention of lobby journalists and therefore dominate the time of staffers. But it can also be premiership-defining events. In my lifetime, governments have been defined by how they responded to events that they had no idea they would face, from the Falklands War to 9/11, the financial crisis to Covid.
Rather than look at a party’s list of promises in its manifesto – the things it says it will do in advance – it is more instructive to look at the guiding principles that will shape its response to the problems it does not yet know it will face.
Prime Ministers and Chancellors spend much of their time reconciling the often competing pressures of politics and economics. After all, there is not much point getting elected if you cannot then drive the policy change that you want to see, and there is also not much point driving policy change if in doing so you scupper your chances of re-election.
That is why, if you want to understand a government’s likely approach to economic policy, you need to understand both its political strategy and its economic thinking, and how the two interact.
Here, there are some points of significant continuity between the approach of Labour in 1997 and 2024 – and some significant differences.
The political origins of New Labour
Looking back on the New Labour years, the key to understanding its political strategy is the trauma of the general election of 1992.
That vote took place while Labour was in opposition, during a recession and when household incomes were falling, so the economic fundamentals were on Labour’s side. But the party was not taking victory for granted. After a heavy defeat in 1983, when its left-wing manifesto had been described by Gerald Kaufman as ‘the longest suicide note in history’, Labour under Neil Kinnock had moved towards the political centre, coming to accept policies including the sale of council houses, Britain’s membership of the European Community, lower rates of direct taxation and that there could be no return to old-style public ownership of industry. It abandoned targets for reducing unemployment, instead making the reduction of inflation a priority; it limited spending commitments in line with the goal of stabilising public expenditure as a percentage of GDP; and it promised there would be no return to the pre-1979 privileges of the trade unions. These were big changes, carried through in the face of internal controversy, and they gave confidence to the Labour leadership that the party could once again be taken seriously as a potential party of government.
But was it enough? The Conservatives’ private polling found that taxation was a highly salient issue for voters and that sixty per cent of people thought that Labour would put direct taxes up. The Tories costed Labour’s spending plans at £35 billion and used that to mount a highly effective attack that voters would face a £1,000 a year ‘tax bombshell’ under a Labour government. Even though voters were being hit by falling incomes during the recession, the Conservatives were still able to fight a winning campaign on the basis that Labour would make them even worse off. (1)
That is why the election defeat of 1992 left Labour in a state of profound psychological trauma. The fundamentals were on their side. They thought they had done so much to change. But it had not worked.
In the aftermath of the defeat, a small group of modernisers recognised the key task of widening the coalition of Labour’s supporters. As Gordon Brown has put it, the party “had yet to persuade potential supporters that Labour reflected their values in a way that was relevant to their everyday lives” (2) Tony Blair argued that “we needed to separate conceptually a commitment to our values (timeless) from their application (time-bound). So, of course, we should and always would fight for social justice; but in today’s world that didn’t mean more state control.” (3)
He also argued that as well as a change of policy, it would require a change of mindset. Under Neil Kinnock, Blair felt “the unspoken argument was this: look, guys, we’ve lost elections, the electorate won’t wear our policies, so I’m sorry, but we’re going to have to change them.” For Blair, on the other hand, “the voters are right and we should change not because we have to, but because we want to. It may sound a subtle difference but it is fundamental.”
This led to the decision to change the Labour party’s constitution, including Clause 4 which set out the party’s core purpose and which had – from 1918 until 1995 – had public ownership at its heart. For New Labour, public ownership was not the end goal but a means that had been appropriate for a particular time in the party’s history. The end goal was a fairer society; the means to achieve it could change over time.
For the strategist Philip Gould, the abandonment of old shibboleths like Clause 4 served two purposes. It helped to reassure the voters that Blair meant what he said. And in the longer term, its flexibility would make it easier to build a sustainable voting coalition which could finally resolve the ‘progressive dilemma’ identified by David Marquand: “how to construct a broad-based and enduring social coalition capable of not just giving it a temporary majority in the House of Commons, but of sustaining a reforming government thereafter.” (4)
Changing economic thought and New Labour
But the policy agenda of New Labour was not simply a political strategy in response to election defeats. In that period there were also major shifts in economic thought across the western world. On three major questions of economic debate, the intellectual battle appeared to have been won decisively by what could be termed the neoliberals. This meant the centre-left was engaged not only in a process of accommodating unwelcome political realities. It was reevaluating what was intellectually and economically the right approach.
Macroeconomic stabilisation
The first big question was on the role of government in macroeconomic stabilisation. How, if at all, should government seek to smooth the economic cycle? In the 1960s and 1970s this could be seen as a debate between Keynesians and monetarists. To simplify, Keynesians thought that government could use fiscal policy – tax, spending and borrowing – to manage the level of demand in the economy, making recessions less likely and helping to ameliorate them when they did occur. Monetarists thought such efforts were futile and would only lead to higher inflation and that, instead, macroeconomic policy should focus on controlling the money supply as this would create the economic stability that would be conducive to growth.
As early as the mid-1970s it looked as though the Keynesians were losing the argument. As Prime Minister, Jim Callaghan told the Labour party conference in 1976, “We used to think that you could just spend your way out of recession…I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists, and that in so far as it ever did exist, it only worked…by injecting a bigger dose of inflation into the economy, followed by a higher level of unemployment…That is the history of the last twenty years.” (5)
It took a long time for that uncomfortable message to gain traction among the left more generally. Besides, it was not as if their opponents, the monetarists, were united. They themselves could not agree on how to go about controlling the money supply or what measure to target. But by the 1990s a broad economic consensus had developed that independent central banks should pursue a target rate of inflation and that they should use interest rates to meet it. The other plank of the emerging consensus was that elected governments should have firm fiscal rules limiting the government deficit and debt as a proportion of national income, and that although this would significantly constrain their freedom of action it would promote economic stability. This was the basis of the macroeconomic framework put in place by Gordon Brown as Chancellor from 1997, including giving operational independence to the Bank of England. It was so widely supported that in 2003 the American economist and Nobel laureate Robert Lucas could confidently assert that macroeconomics “has succeeded: Its central problem of depression prevention has been solved, for all practical purposes, and has in fact been solved for many decades.” (6)
Microeconomic intervention
A similar degree of pre-crisis agreement emerged on the second big economic question, around microeconomic intervention. This could be seen as really a debate between laissez-faire and intervention. Labour’s 1918 constitution had included, in Clause 4, an ideological commitment to public ownership of the means of production; and the Depression and the Second World War had led to a much wider cross-party acceptance of a bigger role for the state, prompting a feeling amongst free marketeers such as Friedrich Hayek that they were on the back foot. But by the late 1970s the relatively poor performance of the nationalised industries and the multiple failures of government in ‘picking winners’, from the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders to British Leyland, led to a rethinking. Even on the centre-left, there was an increasing acceptance that markets were a much more efficient way than central planning to process information about supply and demand, provide incentives and encourage innovation. Under this new approach, the role of government in microeconomic policy would therefore be limited to addressing well-defined market failures: externalities such as the costs of polluting industries, information asymmetries and monopolies. (7)
This was reflected in the microeconomic approach of New Labour, with its focus on promoting competition and flexible labour markets. There was to be “no escape from uncompetitiveness by resorting to loss-making subsidies, artificial barriers or protectionist shelters.” And there was an acceptance that this approach would lead to job losses. “Instead of thinking of employment policy as maintaining people in old jobs even when technological and other change is inevitable, it is by combining flexibility – helping people move from one job to another – with active intervention to provide skills, information and financial support that is the best route to full employment.” (8)
Globalisation
The third major economic question that appeared to have been settled, at least among economic policymaking elites, was on globalisation. How open or closed should the economy be to flows of trade, capital and people?
This had been a periodic topic of political controversy ever since the extension of the franchise in the 1830s, from the fight over the Corn Laws to Tariff Reform and the UK’s entry into the Common Market, and each of these had been a source of major disunity within at least one of Britain’s major political parties. Although the political project of the European Union remained controversial within the Conservative party, the economics of globalisation were less so in the 1990s and 2000s. The end of the Cold War encouraged a significant sense of optimism about the potential for the global market economy and this was accompanied by widespread political support for the enlargement of the EU and the creation of the World Trade Organisation, including the entry of China into it. Globalisation attracted protests but before the financial crisis the economic policy mainstream was broadly supportive of the free movement of goods, capital and labour. New Labour vigorously embraced this including, portentously, the decision to allow the peoples of the ten EU accession countries in 2004 to have the immediate right to live and work in the UK.
For New Labour, globalisation could not be stopped. Instead, the task was to equip people with the skills to enable them to thrive in a globalised economy, and this lay behind the Blair and Brown governments’ ambitious programme of investment in education, from early years to university and beyond.
Redistribution
There remained at least one area of economic policy debate that clearly separated the New Labour from the neoliberals. This was redistribution, where there continued to be a battle between what I would characterise as libertarians and egalitarians. For libertarians, private property was sacrosanct and anyway redistribution would undermine economic incentives both for the provider and the recipient. For egalitarians – including, crucially, Gordon Brown – a determination to tackle poverty and unemployment was why they entered politics and it substantially influenced the policy agenda of New Labour.
In opposition, New Labour prepared to introduce a national minimum wage, which was vigorously opposed by the Conservatives. The party also studied the U.S. earned income tax credit, which provided a tax break to low-income workers and which was expanded significantly under President Clinton. In office, New Labour would go on to take an even more extensive approach to the use of tax credits as a key plank of its redistributive approach; and because the economy was growing strongly and tax revenues were rising, it was able to spend money in this area without imposing higher marginal tax rates on the rich or cutting spending elsewhere.
Overall, therefore, the Labour government that was elected in 1997 found that its political strategy and the advice of economists were pointing in the same direction. The politics and the economics had come together, and the fiscal backdrop was favourable.
Labour in 2024: a centrist political strategy
If we fast forward to 2024, we can see some similarities with 1997 in Labour’s political strategy but also some differences when it comes to the economic debates we are having.
The outlook of Labour political strategists today, like that of their counterparts in the mid-1990s, is influenced by the experience of over a decade in opposition and some of the hard lessons learned in that period.
For many supporters of Ed Miliband and then of Jeremy Corbyn, there had been a hope that the election defeat of 2010 could be reversed while moving the party to the left. A number of arguments were put forward to support the thesis. First, five million fewer people had voted Labour in 2010 than in 1997, and this suggested to many on the left that Labour’s centrist approach in government had cost it support, particularly amongst the party’s traditional voter base. Second, the financial crisis of 2007-2009 had upended the ‘neoliberal orthodoxy’ and could make voters more sceptical of the virtues of markets and more open to government intervention. Third, demographic change would also favour the left over time, as older voters in Labour’s traditional post-industrial heartlands and younger voters shut out of the housing market in the cities would all be likely to favour left-wing redistributive policies. Fourth, all this seemed to be reflected in polling which showed widespread support for such policies, including renationalisation of utilities and price caps.
However, each element of this case would prove to be flawed. If you are going to choose 1997 as your baseline year, you have to consider why Labour won so many votes in that election compared with 1983, 1987 or 1992, and it was not because voters thought Labour had suddenly moved to the left under Tony Blair’s leadership. And if the voters did then turn to the left after the financial crisis, it is not obvious that the outcome of the subsequent election would have been a Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition followed by a Conservative majority government. Indeed, the evidence suggests that Labour’s association in the minds of voters with high levels of public borrowing and debt weighed on its electoral performance in 2015; and that the voters it lost in 2019, including in the ‘Red Wall’ seats in the north of England, were more centrist than Labour on economic issues. (9)
Even if individual left-wing policies polled well, that did not automatically translate into support for Labour, because that would depend on the level of importance that voters assigned to those policies; the signals the voters took from the fact that the promise was being made; and the credibility of the party that was pledging to deliver it. It is true that Labour has been doing better in recent years with younger voters but it is also true that there is a decades-long trend of partisan dealignment, and as fewer people have strong identity-based attachments to political parties they are more likely to switch parties than voters in the past, so the young voters who appeared to flock to Jeremy Corbyn in 2017 – and even then not in big enough numbers to deliver victory – are unlikely to provide the basis of a stable voter coalition. (10)
If you put all these things together, it is clear that there is no sustainable election-winning coalition to be built around left-wing economic policies. For Labour to win in 2024, it needs to gain the support of large numbers of people who voted Conservative in 2019, and this can only come by moving closer to the political centre and continuing to strengthen its economic credibility.
Labour in 2024: new economic thinking
But if politics keeps pushing Labour today to the centre, in ways that would be recognisable to strategists of the Blair and Brown governments, the picture is more complicated when it comes to economics because the centre ground of economic thinking has shifted. If we take the four planes of economic policy that I considered earlier in respect of New Labour – macroeconomics, microeconomics, globalisation and redistribution – there have been a range of important developments since the last Labour government took office.
Macroeconomic policy
The global financial crisis triggered a recession across developed economies. The orthodoxy of the previous two decades had been that in such a situation governments should maintain firm fiscal rules and that it was the role of monetary policy to respond to recessions, with central banks cutting interest rates to spur economic activity. But what should governments do when interest rates had reached the zero lower bound and could be reduced no further? Gordon Brown had been strongly influenced by the work of Ben Bernanke on the depression in the 1930s and he was deeply worried that governments and central banks might prolong the recession by failing to take action. (11) Brown therefore pushed for fiscal stimulus.
Although Brown’s approach was controversial domestically, it won more support internationally. In 2009, the G20 summit agreed on “an unprecedented and concerted fiscal expansion, which will save or create millions of jobs which would otherwise have been destroyed.” In 2012, Olivier Blanchard, then chief economist at the IMF, convened a conference on the reassessment of economic policy in the wake of the crisis. When it was over, he concluded that in monetary policy “inflation stability alone is not enough; output stability and financial stability need to be added to the list”; and discussions of fiscal policy had become too reductive to focusing on “government spending minus taxes” with its concomitant focus on the size of the deficit (12)
There were some in the economics profession who went even further. The advocates of modern monetary theory won support from some on the left for their argument that a state with a sovereign currency (like the UK) cannot run out of money, because it can always meet its obligations insofar as they are denominated in its own currency, and therefore taxation does not limit the government’s capacity for spending. However, since the disastrous Liz Truss mini-budget of 2022 and the financial markets’ loss of confidence in the UK government, there are far fewer takers for this view.
As a result, mainstream Labour economic thinking on macroeconomic policy now recognises that there is not a simple choice between fiscal rectitude and Keynesian largesse. We have seen that Labour will not win voters’ support if it not trusted on public spending; and we saw from the Truss debacle that the markets can also lose confidence in a government that makes expensive promises with no credible plan to pay for them. Only a visible commitment to sound management of the public finances when the economy is growing will give the political and economic space for a government to use fiscal policy to ameliorate a downturn. That is why Rachel Reeves’ tough approach to tax and spending commitments is so important.
Redistribution
Closely linked to this is the question of redistribution. Gavin Kelly and Nick Pearce have shown that the next Labour government cannot expect to enjoy the benign economic backdrop that existed for a decade from 1997 and which enabled the introduction and expansion of tax credits. The scope for Rachel Reeves to pursue redistribution through the tax system is going to be far more limited than that enjoyed by Brown.
But even in this situation, governments always have choices. Labour and the Conservatives have disagreed in the past couple of years on a range of tax policy questions with significant distributional impacts, from inheritance tax to carried interest in private equity and VAT on private school fees. We should expect the next Labour government to make choices which prioritise the interests of those on low and middle incomes.
Globalisation
On globalisation and trade, Labour is in a very different position from 1997. Partly that is about geopolitics. Instead of China being drawn more closely into the global economic system, there is a process of decoupling driven by national security concerns; and Britain is no longer in the European Union so there are far greater frictions in trade with the UK’s largest trading partner.
It is also about how global economic change impacts domestic politics. Free trade with a rising China may well have been a boon for consumers buying cheaper goods but it also led to high job losses in developed economies. In the US, it is estimated that trade with China led to the loss of a million manufacturing jobs and 2.4 million jobs overall. In the UK, immigration from the EU accession countries may have been good news for the consumers of services but less good news for those who had previously provided those services, both economically and in terms of social cohesion. The dispersed nature of the benefits and the concentrated nature of the losses meant that it has been the losers from these changes who have had the biggest impact on political debate. These factors will combine to make it challenging for an incoming government to make big changes in trade policy, at least in its first term.
Microeconomic policy
All this means that for a Labour government determined to promote broadly based growth, a lot is riding on microeconomic policy. And this the area on which economic thought has moved the most since the New Labour era.
New Labour generally had a high degree of confidence that the technological revolution would deliver greater prosperity as long as the government ensured macroeconomic stability, equipped people with the right skills and ensured the economy remained open. For most its time in office it was also sceptical of industrial strategy and the ability of government to ‘pick winners’, having been burned by the experience of the 1970s.
Looking back, I think we were excessively optimistic about trade and technology and excessively pessimistic about the role of the state. We have already seen from the work of David Autor how free trade created many losers as well as winners. Similarly, the work of Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson has shown that technological change will not automatically bring widespread prosperity. In the first industrial revolution, living standards for the poor actually fell until legislative changes helped to protect their interests; and today, even if technological change boosts productivity, the firms involved might not boost output if they enjoy a monopoly, and they might not boost wages if workers lack protection. (13) These insights have led many politicians on the centre-left, including Rachel Reeves in her Mais lecture, to reflect on the work of Karl Polanyi who reminded us that markets are not natural: markets are created by rules, which are made by governments, and governments cannot escape making choices over which rules should apply. (14) As Robert Reich has argued, this requires making decisions about property (what can be owned, including the law of patents and copyright); monopoly (what degree of market power is permissible); contract (what can be bought and sold and on what terms); bankruptcy (what happens when purchasers can’t pay up); and enforcement (how to make sure nobody cheats on the rules). (15)
Meanwhile, recent research has shown that there could in fact be a more positive role for industrial policy than previously thought. For a start, it is a nonsense to suggest that governments of the right did not bother with industrial policy. Mrs Thatcher gave financial incentives to Japanese automotive manufacturers, while Reagan protected US steel, auto and motorcycle industries from import competition to encourage them to invest in technological upgrading. Second, research has pointed to number of specific areas where the UK government or devolved administrations could take action in ways that would promote broadly-based economic growth, from transport infrastructure improvements in major non-London conurbations to regional distribution of public support for R&D.
Even more importantly, we have learned a lot about how to undertake industrial policy more successfully than in the past. For example, Mariana Mazzucato has argued that industrial policy should not be about choosing sectors to support e.g. automotive or defence, but rather identifying the overall policy objectives or missions to achieve and being agnostic as to sectors and policy tools, as in the EU’s Horizon R&D programme. Nagesh Kumar has pointed to the importance of building internationally competitive industries, pushing them into global markets rather than protecting domestic champions. And Réka Juhász and colleagues have shown how governance can make a difference to the success of industrial policy, for example as at the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), where the projects to support are selected by a program director who is not a career government official but a professional from academia or industry recruited for a 3 year term, and where grantees have to produce quarterly progress reports and are subject to intense scrutiny.
This is why, as Rachel Reeves again explained in her Mais lecture, a bigger strategic role is needed for government, shaping markets that are essential for resilience and future prosperity. It is what Janet Yellen has called ‘modern supply side economics’. This is not simply about borrowing to invest in industries of the future. It is also about greater certainty and stability in decision-making after the dysfunction in the years since the Brexit referendum, including respecting and strengthening the remit of independent economic institutions such as the OBR. In some cases it will mean removing regulatory barriers where doing so could promote growth, particularly in areas like planning where the Conservatives have struggled to build a strong enough political constituency for reform and where the benefits of change would be felt by those on modest incomes. It is also about unlocking institutional investment and patient capital, for example making it easier for institutions and ISA investors to invest in high-growth firms, as recommended by Jim O’Neill’s start-up review.
This does not mean, of course, that there will be no tensions or trade-offs. An obvious possible one is between the interests of businesses and workers. The lack of scope for greater redistribution through the tax system means the next Labour government will have to achieve more of its social policy objectives through regulation, including greater protection for workers through its New Deal for Working People, which has generated some concern in the business community and led to recent speculation that some of the proposals may be watered down. In practice, I suspect that the trade-off might not be as great as is sometimes suggested. A lesson of the past decade is that if working people do not share in prosperity it can contribute to the growth of populism, so if stronger protections lead to greater social cohesion and reduced political stability, it is likely to be positive for business in the long run. And in the short run, though I think it is unlikely that Labour will row back significantly on its substantive proposals, it is suggesting an openness to consultation on implementation that should ease the adjustment process.
Another possible area of tension is between industrial policy and competition policy. The Labour leadership knows that competitive markets – not monopolies or oligopolies – are the best route to economic growth and, importantly, to economic growth whose benefits are widely distributed. But at the same time, Labour is rightly committed to partnership with business leaders, including through a revived Industrial Strategy Council. This is vital after the experience of recent years in which business leaders and investors lost confidence in the stability of the UK as an investment environment. What happens, then, when these objectives come into conflict, for example when a small group of businesses lobbies for protection or subsidies that might harm competitors or customers?
This is where Labour’s commitment to a stable framework and the role of independent institutions comes in. Businesses, trade unions, consumer groups and others will sometimes agree and sometimes disagree with individual decisions coming from a Labour government or from regulators. Where the next Labour government wants to intervene, it will do so in a way that is in line with a clear statutory framework. Where there is a case for changing that statutory framework, that debate should be had openly, and if necessary the law should be updated. But political intervention should not take place arbitrarily or in a way that undermines the interests of consumers or the confidence of investors.
Conclusion
When I compare Labour in 1997 and Labour in 2024, I am struck by important similarities in political strategy and some differences in economic thinking. On the face of it, the former might seem surprising. Politics has changed enormously since the nineties with the decline in traditional party loyalties, the growth in volatility, and shocks such as the financial crisis and Brexit changing the contours of political debate. However, the past decade has also shown that there is no stable election-winning coalition that can be built around left-wing policies. Labour’s current leadership recognises it must be resolutely in the centre ground, building and keeping a strong reputation for economic credibility.
While all this has been happening, the centre of gravity in economic thought has shifted, and Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have learned from the areas where New Labour did not get it all right. In particular, I think we were too naïve in our trade- and techno-optimism and in our industrial strategy pessimism. Since that time, economists have spent plenty of time analysing the mistakes that governments made across the developed world; and the next Labour government has an opportunity to learn from them. What is sometimes called securonomics or modern supply-side economics is an important attempt to do so.
If Labour wins the coming election, it will face an inheritance far worse than in 1997 but it will also have an updated framework for thinking about how the economy works and how government can influence it. It will face trade-offs – for example between the short-run interests of businesses and workers, and between industrial policy and competition policy – but its commitment to stability and institutions can offer a way to help it manage them. Through this strategy it hopes to achieve its goal of higher long-run growth, with the benefits being felt through good jobs and rising productivity in all the nations and regions of the UK.
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