Thoughts on Andrew Rawnsley's "The End of the Party"

The End of the Party: The Rise and Fall of New Labour by Andrew Rawnsley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This book certainly isn't short at 800-odd pages, so it is just as well that all blurb on the cover to the effect that it is a real page-turner is justified. Rawnsley creates a real sense of drama, and even tragedy, out of the story of Britain's Labour Government from its re-election in 2001 to its final defeat in 2010.

This book doesn't pretend in the slightest to be a general, or even a political, history of Britain in those years. Its focus is rather on the personal relations and political infighting at the very top of government - in a nutshell, the notorious "TB-GBs". Rawnsley's choice of emphasis is perhaps inevitable given the fame of his weekly political column in the London Observer based on similar material. But do the rest of us need to bother with these old squabbles, or can we safely leave their memory to political nerds?

One reason for making the effort is provided by the contrast between what was supposed to be going on in government according to the Party line swallowed by most UK media at the time, and what actually went on as revealed here (my assumption that the account is essentially accuracy can be justified by the thoroughness of the referencing, the impressive size of Rawnsley's contact book, and the "ring of truth" his story has throughout). Labour's leaders spent extraordinary amounts of their time, energy and politcal and emotional capital not on efforts to improve the public services they professed to love, but in an a secret, bitter struggle with each other for control of the government. In particular, whilst public Health and Education services were boosted by being given more money, efforts to reform the way they were delivered foundered on the factional infighting.

So what matters here is not just that the public's right to know about all this was partly frustrated, but also that the effectiveness of public service delivery was affected (this last point depends on another assumption - viz., that constructive high-level political input into things generally makes them better - but without this assumption I do not see how politics can matter at all).

Some important conclusions are suggested by these concerns. One line of argument might be that the toxic culture of infighting detailed here is stronger in the Labour Party than in its rivals, and so a reason why they should be preferred over Labour. Another line might be that the squalidness of the political process is a reason to minimize the extent to which politics impacts our lives, and hence a reason to reduce the role government plays in our society. Personally I am not persuaded by either of these lines, although I think a serious case could be mounted for either.

My own view is that the sad history of New Labour best supports the conclusion that Britain needs a radical rethink of its political system. Democracy is available in different flavours, and in Britain we have the more adversarial. The first-past-the-post voting system encourages the politically engaged to congregate into two opposing tribes who play up their inter-tribal rivalry whilst each suppressing any internal differences, because open discussion of the latter would undermine the contrast with the enemy that is supposed to motivate one's own side on to the effort needed to win power. The results are brilliantly documented in this book: Labour's heavyweights spent years slugging it out with each other in private about what should be the "dividing lines" between them and the Conservatives without ever coming to a clear conclusion. The policies that actually resulted showed a middle-way caution that, whilst not reprehensible in itself, belies the supposed advantages of the adversarial system (decisive government based on a clear contrast between binary alternatives). The more damning point is that the ability of the politicians to supply constructive input into policy was, if this history is to be believed, seriously limited by the intensity of their struggle with each other - an intensity that might (plausibly) be lessened if political differences were generally out in the open, as they tend to be in countries with more consensual political systems.


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