ABSTRACT
The New Labour project has often been portrayed as a straightforward rejection of Labour’s past, a disavowal of all that went before.1 However, as the battle between New Labour’s two key protagonists developed into a public spectacle, their alternative visions of Labour’s identity were evident. The Independent Labour Party (ILP) had a small but instructive part in these euphemistically played out debates. In 2002, as speculation was mounting about the leadership of the Labour Party, Gordon Brown re-released his biography of James Maxton, the leader of the ILP as it moved to the left in the late 1920s. Brown himself remained quiet about his motivations for doing so, but it was widely commented by those sympathetic to his cause that this indicated his greater understanding of and loyalty to Labour’s past and values.2 Tony Blair took a rather different approach. Along with rejecting ‘Old Labour’, he sought to situate himself with the ‘core values’ of carefully selected Labour predecessors, particularly Clement Attlee and Keir Hardie, ethical socialist and founder of the ILP.3 Both positions may be taken in important respects to be historically misleading. Numerous commentators have pointed out the apparent oddity of Blair claiming moral sympathy with the pacifist Hardie. Similarly, although rather less referred to, the relevance to loyalty to Labour Party institutions of Jimmy Maxton who, frustrated with Labour’s failure to promote socialism, led the ILP out of the Labour Party, is perhaps unclear except in a negative direction. It is, of course, important to note these tensions. However, to finish an argument by exposing the reliance of both accounts on myth rather than history would seem to miss most of the point, which might be taken to be that historical accuracy is but a small component in understanding the power of images of the past in political debate.
