ABSTRACT
During Labour’s conference week in October 2002, Tony Benn chose to write a denunciation of his party’s leaders in the columns of the newspaper that published the Zinoviev letter.1 Perhaps we should not be too hard on the memory lapses of an ageing sansculotte; after all, the history of the left is full of instances of true believers hating their comrades more than the class enemy. But Benn’s career is worth bearing in mind in judging how far New Labour did adopt ‘New Right’ positions. The revision of Labour commitments and attitudes was carried through in the 1990s with surprisingly little reverence to Labour’s ‘Old Right’ associated with Anthony Crosland and the Gaitskellites but in strongly conscious rejection of the ‘New Left’ which had come to the fore without quite dominating the Labour Party in the later 1970s and the early 1980s.
