The (Unintended) Consequences of New Labour: Party Leadership vs Party Management in the British Labour Party

Abstract

This article draws from the fields of political science and of organisational studies to explore the short-term and longterm impact of New Labour's party management on the quality of party processes as well as on party reputation. It is based on the long-term ethnographic participant observation of the Labour Party at local and regional levels, as well as national events such as annual conferences. The article starts by identifying the distinctive features of New Labour's party management. It then examines the "unintended consequences" of this brand of party management, showing this model to be mainly self-defeating. The final section provides a general assessment of the impact of New Labour's party management from the perspective of organisational learning and innovation. Overall the article stresses the long-term poisonous effects of this brand of leadership and management on political organisations and on politics in general.

Editorial: New Approaches to Political Leadership

“…Party leadership studies have largely concentrated on either the impact on party organisation or the role of leadership effects on electoral performance. Emmanuelle Avril (2016) here takes a firmly organisational approach, indeed borrowing from organisational theory and utilising participant observation, to analyse the impact of the UK Labour party's leadership under Tony Blair. The 'unintended consequences' can be seen in the subsequent leadership of Jeremy Corbyn.…”

‘Wilful Blindness’: Effects and Perceptions of New Labour’s Party Management

“…Indeed, the disregard for the importance of local party activists and the local campaign resulted in diminishing organisational vitality (Minkin, 2014: 718). Therefore, such party management methods, focused as they were on electoral gain, paradoxically made the party less attuned to the electorate (Avril, in press).…”

“…It results in a dysfunctional decision-making process reminiscent of Irving Janis’s Groupthink (Janis, 1972) where an in-group overrates their ability to make decisions and is in denial of any gap or inconsistencies. A key aspect of the analysis provided by The Blair Supremacy is how the New Labour managers were trapped in a self-protective mindset which ran counter to the requirements of organisational learning – or what Minkin calls ‘mutual education’ – a process of detection and correction of errors derived from a willingness to examine success and failure (Avril, in press).…”

“…The approach adopted in this review article – focused on getting an understanding of organisational change and culture – consists in combining analytical tools borrowed from the fields of political science and organisational studies (the benefits of this as yet little developed methodological outlook have been demonstrated in Lapalombara (2003) and Avril (2013, in press)). Several of the concepts deployed here (such as ‘toxicity’, ‘organisational learning’ and ‘management’ itself) have now been integrated into the study of political organisations.…”

The 2017 Labour General Election Campaign: Ushering in a ‘New Politics’?

“…Such trends were exacerbated under Blair's leadership with the conference effectively side-lined as a policy-making body in favour of the National Policy Forum, the main body responsible for overseeing policy development in the party, made up of representatives from constituency parties and regions, affiliated trade unions and socialist societies. The declared intention of this reform was to establish a direct relationship between the leadership and party members and to bring about a more " consensual approach" to decision-making 47 . The party leadership believed that such processes would more accurately reflect the views of voters which they thought were at odds with the more radical views of the trade unions and the Constituency Labour Parties 48 .…”