Morgan: New Labour is dead
New Labour will end when Tony Blair leaves office next year, the Welsh first minister has suggested.
Rhodri Morgan told an audience in Swansea last night that New Labour had been the “most successful electoral project in the history of the party”.
But he suggested it was a “product of its own time, 1994 to 2007, and its own circumstances. Time moves on, and circumstances change”.
Mr Morgan’s speech, entitled 21st century socialism, comes just six months before the Welsh assembly elections in May and his comments will be seen as an attempt to distance himself from the Labour party in Westminster.
Ahead of the 2003 assembly elections, he made a similar break with the UK party with a speech setting out the “clear red waters” of Welsh Labour, compared to New Labour’s market-driven reforms of health and education.
“Today, New Labour strikes me a little bit like the Venus de Milo [statue] – you have to gawp with admiration at its quality and brilliance but it is indisputably incomplete and showing more than a few signs of its age,” Mr Morgan said.
“Whither new Labour? Or even wither New Labour might be the text for tonight’s sermon with or without that second ‘h’.”
However, Nick Bourne, leader of the Welsh assembly Conservatives, said: “Rhodri Morgan is trying to sail on clear red water in a rapidly-sinking Labour ship.
“He knows that it doesn’t matter whether it’s New Labour, old Labour, or any other form of Labour – his party faces being submerged in a tide of anti-Labour sentiment next May.”
A Plaid Cymru spokesman also questioned how Mr Morgan could say New Labour was over when he was a “cheerleader” for one of its architects, Gordon Brown. He added: “To claim New Labour is dead is as believable as a Labour election promise.”
The first minister said Welsh Labour must renew its thinking to face the new challenges in politics, and set out ten points on which these should focus.
Among these was a greater emphasis on the distinctiveness of Wales from the rest of the UK and Mr Morgan said: “We need to demonstrate the alignments which exist between the issues which motivate people and the politics which we represent.”
He added: “In an era of globalisation our physical environment here in Wales, our cultural assets and our language all represent ways of securing that sense of distinctiveness and identity which provides an essential anchor in times of such rapid change.”
Mr Morgan added: “As well as we are doing, it seems completely clear to me that wealth creation and its distribution have to be joint preoccupations of 21st century socialism.”
