ABSTRACT

In October 1998, Tony Blair suffered an embarrassing electoral defeat when four activists from the Centre-Left Grassroots Alliance (CLGA) were elected to the Labour Party’s National Executive Committee. Despite Blair’s attempts to ‘modernise’ the Labour Party and abandon the ideological baggage of ‘Old Labour’, the election demonstrated the continued electoral competitiveness of the Labour Left among the party membership, and hostility towards New Labour’s trajectory. This article explores the CLGA’s foundation and electoral success as an illustrative case study of how the Labour Left altered its political strategy and rhetoric in the New Labour years. This helps to fill a significant gap in the existing literature, where organised dissent to New Labour has often been overlooked. The CLGA saw the Labour Left form broad cross-factional alliances previously thought impossible, as well as oversee a shift in rhetoric from criticising to passionately defending post-war social democracy and the political culture of ‘labourism’. Alongside the changing political strategies deployed by the Labour Left after the 1980s, this article also demonstrates how New Labour’s iconoclasm and the creation of the pejorative label of ‘Old Labour’ had the unintended consequences of erasing complex factional divides among opponents and facilitating a cross-factional activist opposition.

摘要

1998 年 10 月，中左翼草根联盟 (CLGA) 的四名积极分子被选入工党全国执行委员会，托尼·布莱尔遭遇了一场令人尴尬的选举失败。尽管布莱尔试图使工党“现代化”并放弃“旧工党”的意识形态包袱，但这次选举表明工党左翼在党员中的持续选举竞争力，以及对新工党发展轨迹的敌意。本文探讨了 CLGA 的成立和选举成功，作为工党左派如何在新工党时代改变其政治策略和言论的说明性案例研究。这有助于填补现有文献中的一个重大空白，在现有文献中，对新工党的有组织的异议经常被忽视。CLGA 见证了工党左翼结成广泛的跨派系联盟，这些联盟以前被认为是不可能的，并且监督了言论从批评到热情捍卫战后社会民主和“劳工主义”政治文化的转变。除了 1980 年代后工党左派所采用的不断变化的政治策略外，本文还展示了新工党的偶像破坏和“老工党”贬义标签的创造如何产生了意想不到的后果，即消除了对手之间复杂的派系分歧，并促进了跨-派系积极分子反对派。