Mandelson helped sever New Labour from its roots – moral decay was the result
Peter Mandelson, Labour MP for Hartlepool in November 1994 (Credit: Mirrorpix / Alamy)
4 min read
It’s hard to recall now the wave of optimism that swept through the country in 1997 when Labour defeated the discredited Tory government.
Many thought the new government could make a real difference. There were progressive moments: the minimum wage, devolution, anti-poverty measures and refinancing the NHS. But as the months passed it became clear that big structural change would not be delivered.
I vividly recall a private moment in early 1998 when I asked Peter Mandelson at what point – after having won the election – we would become a real Labour government. His answer was clear. “This is as good as it gets,” he told me.
Before long, the government pursued public sector reforms that were designed to woo big business. Marketisation and privatisation became a central pillar of New Labour, under Mandelson’s influence. Of course, we must never forget the criminal decision to go to war in Iraq, much to the delight of oil and arms companies.
New Labour had decided, in Mandelson’s phrase, that working-class voters had nowhere else to go. By this logic, the government didn’t need to use the power of government to secure their votes. It has become clear that this was a fundamental miscalculation, however, as was obvious to some of us at the time.
Mandelson’s career was often celebrated in the media as a story of brilliance. He was supposedly a supreme strategist and master of the dark arts who made Labour “electable”. But in truth his project was to hollow out the Labour Party, sever it from its social base and replace our democratic socialism with technocratic elitism.
The New Labour clique did not see Labour as a vehicle for working-class agency. Rather, their primary task was sucking up to corporate power. The famous line that Mandelson was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich” was a core declaration.
Mandelson solidified the idea that ideology was an embarrassment and class politics was obsolete. Party members became largely impotent foot soldiers, sent door-knocking by a leadership that neither trusted nor listened to them. Over time, this drained Labour of its activist energy. Above all, our moral clarity as a movement built on the principles of social justice was blunted.
Spin doctors became the key agents, not shop stewards. Disengaged from working communities, Labour politics became about message discipline. Debate and dissent were treated as disloyalty rather than the lifeblood of democratic politics. New Labour was ultimately to be less a movement for renewal and more a reorientation towards elite networks of global capital.
It was not surprising to those of us on the left that by the time of the 2005 election there had been a deep rupture between Labour and our traditional voters. I wrote a series of interventions in 2005, pointing out that millions of working-class people had stopped voting Labour. We have never fully reconnected with these “missing millions”.
Under Gordon Brown’s leadership, Mandelson made a comeback in the wake of the banking crash. Of course, the crash was a failure of financialised capitalism, but we now know that the ‘Prince of Darkness’ saw it as a moment to benefit himself. He betrayed our party, our government and our country by allegedly leaking private information to the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. More importantly, he betrayed the countless young women who suffered unspeakable abuse at Epstein’s hands.
A party founded to give political voice to the working class was transformed by Mandelson into a machine run by professionals who believed they knew better than the people they claimed to represent. The damage ought not to be counted simply in the numbers of people who stopped voting, though that is bad enough. For the labour movement, what we saw was a cultural and ideological assault that produced an existential crisis. Many of the problems the government faces today, as public trust evaporates, can be traced back to Mandelson’s enduring influence.
Jon Trickett is Labour MP for Normanton and Hemsworth, and was PPS to Peter Mandelson 1997-98
