New Labour: An Obituary

You lose an election with your second worst performance ever, and 20,000 people join the party in the aftermath. Then the leadership contenders—all but one prominent ministers in the last government—compete with each other to distance themselves from that government's policies. There is a simple explanation for these seemingly strange behaviors—a lurch to the Left, similar to what (disastrously) happened after the 1979 defeat to Thatcher. But the people joining the party and joining in the critique are not, by and large, rabid leftists. What these events do mark is a palpable and pervasive sense of relief at the formal end of the New Labour project. I say formal because the project has been politically dead for quite some time. Hollow election victories allowed it to stumble on, zombie-like, across the political landscape, and only an actual defeat could lay the body to rest.