Politics

Wednesday, 23rd July 2008

Steve Richards reviews the week in politics

Beyond the deceptively heady days of 1997, New Labour has never got the relationship right between its core constituents and the broader electorate any more than so-called Old Labour managed to do. A few years ago its leaders claimed preposterously that the ‘entire country is our core constituency’, suggesting that there were no significant dividing lines anywhere. Now it is negotiating with a few trade union leaders over a set of policies that appear to be a closed matter within the narrow confines of Warwick university.

Tony Blair told me in 1995 that he would never lose interest in reforming and modernising Labour and that if he got too busy as Prime Minister he would ‘get others to reform the party’. It never happened. Britain still lacks a modern progressive party that has moved away from formal connections with trade union bases or old bastions of sadly decaying local government. Ironically, the lack of such a liberated vehicle makes it harder to win broader support for reforms that are on the unions’ wish list at Warwick.

Yet changing the structures of a party is almost impossible, especially when there is a big debate to be had on the future pol-icy direction after the next election. If Mr Blair failed to make much headway in the sunny uplands of the mid-1990s, it is hard to imagine who will be able to do so in the near future. Stand by for Warwick Three in a few years’ time.