to current Labour ideology.
From 1997 onwards, Tony Blair
succeeded in rebranding the Labour Party
as ‘New Labour’, a party much more
focused on Third Way policies that benefit
white-collar middle class individuals,
rather than the working class. Blair even
amended the Labour Party Manifesto’s
Clause IV, which originally referred to
“common ownership of the means of
production, distribution and exchange”,
an undeniably socialist concept. Blair’s
amendment attempted to reconcile this
socialist concept with mentions of “the
enterprise of the market and the rigour of
competition”, and, in doing so, straddled
the left and right wing approaches to
market economy most prominent in the
UK. It is important to note that the current
Labour leader since 2015, Jeremy Corbyn,
has suggested a reinstitution or reform of
Clause IV, implying the Labour Party’s
return to a more significantly left wing
party. Corbyn has not gone unopposed, to
put things mildly, and the state of Labour
in 2016 has strongly implied a fracturing
of the party and its values. Furthermore,
whilst the Labour Party had undoubtedly
adopted a more centrist-image,
particularly under Blair’s leadership, the
current politics of the party suggest a
movement away from populist ideology
and, potentially, a splintering of the
extreme left from the party.
The EU Referendum implies a deep-set
dissatisfaction with the centrist two-party
system, and more recent electoral
successes have demonstrated the
growing pertinence and necessity for
more individualist parties such as the
UKIP and the SNP. Between the 2010 and
2015 election, the SNP went from 6 to 56
seats, severely damaging Labour’s
support base in Scotland. As the SNP gains
momentum, it is likely that the landscape
of UK politics will destabilise
considerably, as Scotland attempts to
break away from the policy ‘consensus’
agreed in Westminster and even strive
towards another independence
referendum in the coming years. ‘Brexit’
implies an increasingly polarised political
landscape, as issues (such as EU
membership) are simplified to the extent
that policy stances must in turn be
reduced to stark black-and-white
positions. The referendum has only
highlighted and deepened cultural divides
between the socially liberal and the
socially conservative, as well as the
“outward-looking big cities” and the
“homogeneous and introspective small
towns”, according to Britain after Brexit in
the Journal of Democracy. In this way, as
our electorate develops and divides, the
political consensus must adapt to this
demand for choice and change, and thus
one can suspect a decline in the relative
consensus achieved from the mid-1990s
to the early 2000s.
There has certainly been a movement
towards policy consensus since the late
1990s with Blair’s New Labour and David
Cameron’s Conservative party, both
attempts to reconcile a free-market
economy with social justice. This has
largely been a result of the changing
electorate, with class divides diminishing
and education becoming more accessible,
meaning that policies must satisfy the
needs of the wide majority middle-class
and in turn refrain from radical change. In
recent times, however, the demand for
and reality of policy consensus is dubious,
as the two major parties are beginning to
differ once more in core ideology, with
Theresa May’s ‘Brexit’ tactics and Jeremy
Corbyn’s left Labour. The recent EU
Referendum has revealed a cultural rather
than class divide that has incited the need
for parties to declare policies on
nationality, citizenship and immigration,
the last of which seems to be the most
debated issue at the moment. In this way,
one can argue that the UK is moving away
from a policy consensus as current events
are forcing parties to offer more of a
choice to the unsatisfied electorate, a
phenomenon that is apparent in the
recent successes of secondary parties
such as the SNP and the UKIP.
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