ABSTRACT
On Thursday 1 May 1997, the British electorate returned a Labour government for the first time in over twenty years. Labour’s electoral triumph brought to an end the dismal series of defeats at the hands of the Conservatives in 1979, 1982, 1987, and 1992. Labour’s return from the electoral wilderness was, it seemed, the long-awaited reward for years spent transforming the Party – a transformation that had begun in the 1980s with the launch of the Policy Review and had reached its symbolic peak when the Party revised Clause IV in order to remove the commitment to nationalisation from its constitution. 1 On the morning of Friday 2 May, Tony Blair, the new Prime Minister, explicitly declared that his government had been elected as New Labour and it would govern as New Labour. Social democracy had been refashioned as an ideology and we would see the results in public policy. Out went state ownership, a collectivist welfare state, and Keynesianism. In came public–private partnerships, joined-up governance, and supply-side reforms.
