Peter Mandelson, the Broad Church & the future of Labour(from 1998)
Peter Mandelson has been a very public presence at Labour’s 2023 Conference in Liverpool
He held various Ministerial positions in the early New Labour years from 1997. He was and remains a controversial figure for various reasons but I’m concerned here about his political perspectives.
He has no formal role in the Labour Party of 2023 but Lord Mandelson is widely though to advise Keir Starmer on strategy. He has spoken out in 2022 claiming that while he accepts that Labour is a ‘broad church’ if left-wing Labour MPs don’t stick to the Manifesto at the next Election they’ll no longer be welcome:
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/mandelson-tells-left-wing-mps-26196431
This is, as might be expected, somewhat hypocritical from someone who spent a good deal of time rubbishing the Manifestos on which Labour fought the 2017 and 2019 General Elections.
Thanks to Government papers released by the National Archives at the start of 2022 we do have a record of Mandelson’s vision for Labour at the time he was Minister Without Portfolio (May 1997-July 1998). Effectively this meant he was policy advisor to Blair and the papers contain a note he sent to him about what he thought New Labour should be. It read in part:
Its political genesis is a synthesis between the historical position of left and right. It is too simplistic to say it adopts ‘left’ values but is rightward in how to achieve them. It is probably more accurate to say that it has left values but is open about to achieve them and recognises that it was the right, not the left, that up to the end of the 80s was prepared to think more freely. Privatisation of certain industries or the sale of council homes or greater autonomy for schools could have been left ideas
National Archives File PREM 49/244
It might be called triangulation or it might be building the wrong hegemonic project
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