Stuart Hall, & Labour’s Great Moving Right ShowTop of Form
Stuart Hall was the first Editor of New Left Review way back in 1960 and did much of his work at the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies. He was also associated with Marxism Today’s New Times project.
His view of the New Labour Project and where it took a wrong turn seems relevant for Labour in 2025. Starmer has backed the Supreme Court’s decision on the Equality Act. Whatever one makes of the ruling its clear that the person in charge of the EHRC, appointed by Liz Truss, is determined to use it to restrict trans rights.
At the same time Yvette Cooper has announced that league tables of which country foreign nationals who have committed crimes come from. The impact of course will be to stir up racism. Cooper is a right-wing Labour Home Secretary, a time honoured thing, with the brief exception of Roy Jenkins.
In both these cases Labour is copying the political agenda of the right instead of looking to build an alternative project. It might be argued that the Labour right never really has a project which might I suppose suggest a degree of New Labour exceptionalism, but that is another discussion.
Stuart Hall was interviewed by the New Statesman in 2012 and in it he touched on the New Times project of Marxism Today.
Stuart Hall’s corrective to what he thought New Times was meant to be and should be about remains interesting:
The analysis, and his account of “new times” (the changes in the so-called post-Fordist economy brought about by globalisation), had some influence on the early intellectual outriders of New Labour, but Hall insists that his insights were vulgarised by the Blairites. “There is a tiny kernel of truth in the assertion that [Marxism Today] created Blairism, in the sense that the ‘new times’ stuff was addressing the change of the whole terrain. But what we recommended was that you needed a project on the left of the same breadth and depth as Thatcherism. New Labour understood it as meaning that you needed the same project!”
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