11 - The New Right and New Labour
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2022
Summary
The New Right and New Labour’s inheritance
After 18 years of Conservative government there was:
• more poverty – one third of children living in families under half average income level;
• more inequality between rich and poor;
• more dependence on state benefits, particularly means-tested benefits;
• more homelessness and people living on the streets.
The changes had been driven by the philosophy of the New Right, seeking to roll back the state and rely on markets with only residual social welfare. This philosophy had powerful attractions. As Keynes wrote:
The Economists were teaching that wealth, commerce and machinery were the children of free competition.… But the Darwinians could go one better than that – free competition had built Man. The human eye was no longer the demonstration of (God’s) Design, miraculously contriving all things for the best; it was the supreme achievement of Chance, operating under conditions of free competition and laissez-faire. The principle of the Survival of the Fittest could be regarded as a vast generalisation of Ricardian economics. Socialistic interferences became, in the light of this grander synthesis, not merely inexpedient, but impious, as calculated to retard the onward movement of the mighty process by which we ourselves had risen like Aphrodite out of the primeval slime of Ocean. (Keynes, 1927, pp 13-14)
Yet as Keynes’ essay on the end of laissez-faire continued:
This is what the economists are supposed to have said. No such doctrine is really to be found in the writings of the greatest authorities … the popularity of the doctrine must be laid at the door of the political philosophers of the day, whom it happened to suit, rather than the political economists. (Keynes, 1927, pp 17-18)
The New Right’s espousal of individualism, and laissez-faire has been a failure. Social spending went up, not down. Numbers on social security went up, not down. Universal education and healthcare remain.
The New Right has lacked any effective ideas in response to social ills such as drug addiction, racial discrimination or environmental problems. Law and order cannot be left to the free market. The New Right’s assumption that private market provision was necessarily good was seen to be as dogmatic as the Old Left’s presumption that it was necessarily bad.
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- Ending Child PovertyPopular Welfare for the 21st Century?, pp. 85 - 92Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 1999