10 New Labour, New Liberalism and Revisionism's Second Wavel Simon Griffiths New Labour's statist roots? In the early summer of 2008, two influential 'progressive' thinkers launched a strongly worded attack on the direction in which the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, was leading the Labour Party. Phitip Collins, a former speech writer to Tony Blair, and Richard Reeves, now Direc- tor of the leftJeaning think-tank Demos, asserted 'a Labour tragedy is unfolding'.z The cause of this, they argued, was at least in part ideological: Labour is failing to win - or even to grasp - the big political argu- ment: how to ensure people are in control of their own lives. The government has tested, often to destruction, the idea that a bigger, higher-spending state can deliver a better society ... For New Labour to survive, it must become new liberal.3 The claim was made as Labour was heading down a steep slide in popu- lar support from a temporary high the previous Autumn. Labour's lead in the polls fell from +13 points over the Conservatives in September 2OO7 to -13 in May 2008 when the article was published, and the slide continued for months afterwards.a The article came out in the month of Labour's 'worst local election result for forty years'.s It created a minor media furore, which tended to reduce the story to an account of factional fighting, and fed increasing speculation about a leadership challenge to Brown. Away from the immediate furore was a more profound assertion: that Brown's Labour is intellectually over-reliant on an authoritarian, statist form of Fabian social democracy. 'Labour's faith in central government', New Labour, New Liberalism and Revisionism,s Second Wave 7l wrote collins and Reeves, 'draws from the deep, poisoned well of its Fabian_tradition'- a tradition that,Labour has been in thrall to ... for decades'.6 To the authors, Brown and his allies posses a benign view of the power of the central, expert state, which makes it deaf to the importance of individual liberty. They argue, for example, that'the gevernment ... has a tin ear on civil liberties'.7 In sum, government knows best and it will step in and tell citizens what this is. Labour's Fabian past, they argue, provides it with a patemalist - or even 'authoritarian'- framework that dominates its approach to contemporary challenges.8 The only way of avoiding this ,Labour tragedy,, the authors argue, is for a return to the New Liberalism of the early twentieth century. Their prognosis is blunt: 'Labour,s future, after three terms, looks bleak. The only hope for the party is to excavate its liberal treasure. The choice is stark: liberalise or die.'e For collins and Reeves, the social democratic and liberal traditions appear to be incompatible. They dismiss those, such as the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, who has argued that the future for the British left lies in a marriage of these two traditions.i0 Although collins and Reeves's article was largely a polemical case to move the Labour Party towards a more liberal, market-driven approach, I argue that their characterisation of the intellectual heritage of the ,mod- ernising' proiect, of which Brown is a part, is unfair. In particular, the authors overemphasise the Fabian heritage and neglect the contribution of 'second wave revisionists' in the 1980s and 1990s, who explicitty sought to revise social democracy on liberal grounds. There has been a considerable amount of discussion over New Labour's heritage: the influence of rhatcherism, New Liberalism or revisionism, for example.ll The aim of this chapter is not to lay claim to New Labour. Instead it examines the work of the Labour peer and academic, Raymond plant. It seeks to show, for those who have questioned it, a liberal strand in the Labour modernising proiect that began in the 1980s, the centrality of freedom in Plant's 'second wave revisionism,, and the closeness betlveen Plant's social democracy and New Liberal arguments. This'liberal, strand should not be neglected in discussing Brown and other contemporary 'New Labour'figures. Two waves of revisionism Social democracy was buffeted by two waves of revision in post-war Britain.lz The first, in the 1950s, is associated with Roy Jenkins, Denis Healey, Hugh Gaitskell and Anthony Crosland, among others.l3 This wave was largely a social democratic response to the left. The Labour