Reinventing the Labour Party, 1983–92

Abstract

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.