‘Keep the party Labour’: the Grassroots Alliance and activist opposition to New Labour, 1994-2007

Abstract

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.