Labour's electoral college chose Ed Miliband as the party's new leader on the basis of votes that were influenced by trade union activities. Some trade unions made a number of decisive interventions in the 2010 leadership election contest: they coordinated their nominations, canvassed intensely for their nominees (channelling considerable resources into their campaigns), and distributed ballots with strong recommendations in the same package as the voting slips. Such was the closeness of the election that, we argue, these interventions determined the result. This conclusion is all the more surprising since commentators and academics alike had maintained that the introduction of 'one member, one vote' had fundamentally reduced the role of trade unions in Labour party politics. In contrast, our opinion is that having been apparently deprived of control by the introduction of one member one vote, trade union elites developed a strategy to mould the outcome of the Labour leadership contest and so reassert their traditional influence over the party. Such was the extent of the role played by the trade unions that, we believe, the normative legitimacy of the electoral process by which Ed Miliband was elected can be called into question although the rules of the contest were not broken.

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This chapter assesses the role played by nostalgia during the New Labour era. Building on the analysis presented in this book’s introduction, it outlines how Tony Blair and other leading New Labour figures were overtly hostile to nostalgia and attempted to overturn the party’s attachment to the past. Yet, whilst symbolic modernising changes were made (most notably to Clause IV of the party’s constitution in 1995), this chapter questions the totality of the anti-nostalgic reorientation that took place. It argues that, during this period, nostalgia was suppressed rather than eradicated. An underlying nostalgia continued to inform the party’s identity (particularly at a rank-and-file level where activists were unencumbered by the wider political and electoral considerations of the party’s leadership). Furthermore, when interacting with their party, New Labour élites were often forced to deploy nostalgia instrumentally in order both to increase their political capital and to secure their goals and objectives.

This chapter identifies and analyses the ways in which Harold Wilson’s New Britain programme, frequently identified as the apex of modernity, was held back by the nostalgic opposition marshalled against it within the party. It argues that existing historical interpretations of the Labour Party between 1963 and 1970 as ‘progressive’ and ‘modernising’ require reconsideration and revaluation. From the outset, Labour’s rank- and-file members were generally suspicious of the ‘new’ scientific and technological age that Wilson outlined in his ‘White heat’ speech at Labour’s 1963 annual conference. A nostalgic attachment to the traditional industries of the past informed the party’s hostility to notions of change and modernity. As the 1960s wore on, the party membership’s nostalgic backlash against the 1964-70 Labour Governments’ domestic policies intensified. Nostalgia dictated the parameters within which the Labour leadership could operate. It shaped the options that were available to Wilson and his allies and forced them to make both rhetorical and substantive nostalgic concessions.

This chapter examines the ways in which nostalgia shaped the political development of Neil Kinnock’s Labour Party between 1983 and 1992. It scrutinises claims, often made retrospectively by members of the New Labour project, that the Kinnock era was a period of limited modernisation. Moreover, it argues that Kinnock and his allies successfully negotiated Labour’s nostalgia in a manner that enabled them to reorient the party’s programmatic commitments away from the past. In this regard, the key turning point was the 1985-6 Jobs and Industry Campaign. When viewed through the lens of party nostalgia, other events, including Kinnock’s famous attack on the Militant Tendency at Labour’s annual conference in 1985, do not represent the kind of pivotal moments that academics have previously indicated they were. Furthermore, in 1992, despite significant policy reorientations, the party’s nostalgically imbued identity remained intact and unreformed.

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