ABSTRACT
The very phrase 'New Labour' announces a dual ambition: to distance the present Labour Party from the record and image of its predecessors and simultaneously to capture what is useful in its legacy. The party clearly hopes that the label will allow it to inherit what remains of the constituencies of 'old Labour' by laying claim to Labour's achievements while also garnering the votes of those who do not identify either with the party's heritage or with the interests that it has aspired to represent. The ambition is not unique to New Labour. Parties rejected by voters have been forced repeatedly to reinvent themselves, to readjust their policies, programmes and appeals, and are regularly confronted with the difficult question of how much to innovate and how much of their party's inheritance to embrace. What makes the story of New Labour distinctive are the depths to which the party's fortunes sank before it began to rebuild; the initial response to its gathering crisis – a move to the left rather than a more predictable tacking towards the political centre; the intensity of the subsequent battle over the party's future; and the enormous success of the transformation from the 'old' to the new party. The renewal and rebranding of parties is a routine phenomenon in the advanced democracies; and the tendency for social-democratic parties to traverse a path from the left to the centre, or centre-left, is common as well. But Labour in Britain did it differently, with unusual twists and turns and an uncommon degree of internal conflict and bloodletting. 1 And this atypical process produced a party, and in short order a government, in which the balance was sharply skewed towards innovation and away from the past.
