A note on Emanuelle Averil’s “The (Unintended) Consequences of New Labour …”

I have been influenced by the white paper “ The (Unintended) Consequences of New Labour: Party Leadership vs Party Management in the British Labour Party…, a white paper to the PSA “ by Emanuelle Averil on New Labour, its managerialism and the destruction of its activist commitment and influence. It was published in 2015 before the General Election. I read it in 2017 and strangely ended up sitting next to her at Conference ’19. There follows a list of quotes and sources; what she said in 2015 is increasingly relevant in 2021 as Starmer tries to reimpose the controls established by New Labour. See below for a series of quotes from the paper, and remember that New Labour lost the 2010 election partly because it was unable to renew itself.

The sustained efforts to control the grassroots were based on a misconception of local parties and members, who were seen, in keeping with the old Duverger model, as dangerous radicals who would thwart the modernisers’ ambition to make the party more responsive to the voters. However, the rare empirical studies to investigate the supposed ideological gap between Labour members and Labour voters (Seyd and Whiteley, 2002) have shown it to be in fact very slight and a matter of degree rather than of a real divergence of opinions. … Therefore New Labour’s party management methods, which…