AFTER NEW LABOUR: BRITAIN IN SOCIAL EUROPE Whoever wins the next election in the UK (Prime Minister Gordon Brown must call one by mid-2010 at the latest), Britain’s relationship with the idea of social Europe is set to change. The Conservative Party, who are ahead in the polls, remain deeply ideologically sceptical about the EU project. A British Conservative government would be as likely to reinvigorate the idea of social Europe as the Obama administration in the US advocating the continuation of George W. Bush’s foreign policy. But the Labour Party that emerges from the next election will also be very different from the one that has formed the government since 1997. The most electorally successful political settlement in the party’s history – the New Labour project – will be reshaped. What will this mean for the Labour Party’s, and therefore Britain’s, future engagement with social Europe?
New Labour’s secret affair New Labour has had at best an ambivalent relationship with the idea of social Europe, but the signs are that in the context of unprecedented economic hardship in the EU, Britain’s next Left may think rather differently. On the economy, the New Labour mantra has always been one of openness. Open to global trade and open to inward migration, whether from Polish plumbers, high-flying hedgefund managers or millionaire Russian oligarchs. All were welcomed, and the tax receipts they generated plowed into massively increased spending on health and education.
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It was an agenda that fitted quite easily with that half of the European project that is about liberalisation of markets and the four freedoms. But it always had rather less to say about the other, less-developed half: Delors’ “social dimension” to EU integration. This is somewhat ironic, since it was Delors’ speech on social Europe to the British Trades Union Congress in 1988, that was key to the pro-European shift in Labour thinking – a major element in the party’s modernisation in the early 1990s.
European of British prime ministers, felt unable to trumpet these advances as successes delivered by a social European agenda for British citizens.
Tomorrow will be too late But there is a sense within elements of the party that that attitude now needs to change. Roger Liddle, Europe advisor to Blair and later economic adviser to European Commission President Barroso, has undergone what the European Trades Union Congress General Secretary John Monks has called a ”Damascan conversion” in this
Indeed New Labour’s approach has always been and continues to be rather more compatible with the agenda of those wanting a genuine social Europe than the party dared to admit. There was a tendency amongst the New Labour hierarchy to keep the social question of Europe deliberately quiet. A fear that an embrace of social Europe might threaten the party’s careful new pro-enterprise, pro-market political positioning. But there was also a genuine economic policy concern that a strong social Europe would stifle the flexible British labour market deemed essential to driving growth, and thereby providing the funds needed for social investment. At times, this meant popular progressive reforms resulting from EU directives – such as rights to maternity and paternity pay or anti-discrimination in employment legislation – went by almost unnoticed by the British public. Even Tony Blair, perhaps the most pro-
regard. Liddle now makes a compelling case for why Britain and the Labour Party must work for a more overt social dimension to Europe, if the EU is to maintain the public legitimacy it needs to play the global role in the 21st century both would like it to. That argument has only been strengthened in recent weeks with the outbreak of wildcat strikes in the UK over the employment of Italian migrant workers in the context of local unemployment. Creeping protectionist sentiment across Europe threatens to fatally undermine the open and global Europe that New Labour, and most on the Left in the UK, still want to see. Unless something about the politics of the EU changes in Britain as in other member states, it risks appearing as the
© AFP PHOTO/GERARD CERLES
CAN EUROPE BE SOCIAL?