‘Interpreting’ New Labour: The Confines of Social Democracy’

Abstract

Anyone familiar with the academic literature of ‘New’ Labour will know that
much of it takes the form of arguments over its relative ideological grounding and/or ideological and political novelty.
Accounts of New Labour’s ideas tend to focus on the extent to which they owe their roots and character to
the philosophies of the New Right, revisionist social democracy or even a
much earlier tradition of New Liberalism. There have been further attempts
to combine elements of these analytical perspectives into a more eclectic
evaluation of the principled and practical politics of New Labour that
perhaps go further in their explanatory potential to establish the real empirical intricacies of New Labour.