ABSTRACT
Labour was never just a political party. It was a movement, a way of thinking and feeling, and an intense set of loyalties and antipathies. Its evolution therefore refused to obey the logic of a mere political party and the party acted, at least on occasion, as if the winning and holding of office was a distinctly secondary, perhaps even unworthy, objective. Again and again it did not behave as other parties, which typically renew themselves in response to shifting social and economic realities, to electoral defeats or to the regular succession of one generation of leaders by another. For much of its history, by contrast, the British Labour Party proved fiercely resistant to critique and renewal. This has been particularly the case when criticism was deemed to come from those hostile to the unions and when new policies were regarded as pulling the party towards the centre, away from socialism and away from its roots and attachments in the working class. Its inertia was especially marked in the post-war period: during its 13 years of opposition from 1951 to 1964, for example, the party responded with very little in the way of new thinking, new policy or even new rhetoric. This prolonged era of stasis would establish a pattern that ensured that future innovation, if and when it came, would have to be drastic and thoroughgoing, and that it would necessarily entail a decisive break with the party's past. The 'new' in 'New Labour' was to this extent an inevitable product of what went before, or rather, of what did not happen before.
