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It is very pleasant and easy, and also very safe, to use any mode of transport you wish in the Netherlands. Amsterdam was rated easier to drive in than London UK. Hope this helps!
Waze has a Global Driver Satisfaction Index,Netherlands are in 1st place. Might be worth looking up if you’re interested in the driver experience. Buses don’t have bike racks. Only folding bikes can be taken on a bus, if it’s not too busy on the bus. The bus usually will take people near their destination, walking distance. For most people buses are not long distance, that’s what trains are for. Even in trains, bikes aren’t allowed during rush hour, just folding bikes. I commute to Amsterdam daily for work, I take my bike to the train station, take the train to Amsterdam, there I have another bike parked to cycle to work with.
I am a Dutchie living in Australia and can tell you from comparison that the Dutch system is leading in the world.
Getting on a bike here is close to suicide and I therefor never do. Getting in a car is almost as dangerous as the system puts the onus on the drivers, which I have found is never a good idea. It throws up challenges rather than guidance and near misses are pretty much guaranteed every time you hit the road.
The consistent use of recogniseable situations, bus bays, seperation of different modes of traffic, rulers (yes, I mean that seriously – straight lines are a blessing), proper signage, professional driver education and other aspects Dutchies consider normal make driving in the Netherlands a LOT easier and a LOT less frustrating, despite the masses if cyclists.
Dutch drivers learn to take cyclists into account (position on the road – lesson #1), cyclists often have their own seperate lanes. It is only on smaller roads where things can go slowly but these roads are only used for short stretches anyway as a means to get to the larger roads.
I have discovered the Dutch “just act normal” approach has meant that our stellar achievements in this area have not received the kudos and attention it is worthy off. Perhaps even more so nationally than internationally!
Can you tell I miss Dutch urban planning?
So this is that extension of the Maximacanaal path, the surveillance path you mentioned last year?
In an upcoming post I will show you how the two connect (via the bridge at the 7:34 mark in the double speed video).
Hallo Mark, hoe het met ye? Ik learnen nederlands.
I was wondering about how you avoid that painful feeling in your ear when you ride a bicycle in colder or windy weather. I wear a tuque (which in Canadian English and French is a knit cap) when I ride during these conditions and still it can be a problem. In fact I had the whole day in pain because of this as a result of an early morning bicycle ride (on my new omafiets). Any ideas anyone about how to fix this?
And also, I was wondering whether it is worth wearing a helmet if the fine for not wearing one is not much and fines are uncommon? I’ve tried it both ways, but still it can feel weird that I don’t wear one if I don’t also wear my tuque.
I have no trouble in wind and in colder weather I also wear a knit cap, that also covers my ears. We never think about plastic head gear here.
Thanks for the good encouragement. This morning I asked a prorail telephone operator to be connected to the department that deals with potential train speed limit (the Dutch way of saying this, snelheinden, amusingly literally translates to speed hinderer) upgrades due to signalling upgrades, what my name is, that I hoped that she was having a nice day and that I normally speak English, all in Dutch!
The only thing that would make you wear a bicycle helmet is if a (non Dutch) car driver threw one at you and announced that they were going to “accidentally” hit you if you didn’t. Of course that would be a crime. Punished by the worst of Dutch law, making the driver wear a bicycle helmet and high viz while riding, gasp, a normal bicycle. What a preclude to being ostracized 🙂 !
wearing a helmet to protect against an aggressive car driver is a concept that is entirely alien (notice I’m not using ‘foreign’ here?) to us.
Police, you need to go and arrest Mark. He ran a stop sign! He clearly needs a few thousand euro fine and a few decades in prison, he’s clearly a reckless cycling who is going to run elderly women down and toddlers!
On a more serious note, stop signs are somewhat rare in NL, with yield signs being the preferred method of indicating right of way. I am mildly curious why that stop sign exists at all.
I think they exist because of occassional problems with visibility. But in the US and Canada they are often used instead of yield signs despite both assigning priority to a particular road and all way stop signs just being a stopping version of an uncontrolled junction with no signs or signals.
This entry was posted on 12 April 2016 by Bicycle Dutch in Original posts and tagged ’s-Hertogenbosch (Den Bosch), canal, long distance cycle paths, market to market, ride, Veghel.
The Labour Party is a centre-left political party in the United Kingdom.Growing out of the trade union movement and socialist parties of the nineteenth century, the Labour Party has been described as a “broad church“, encompassing a diversity of ideological trends from strongly socialist to moderately social democratic.
Founded in 1900, the Labour Party overtook the Liberal Party as the main opposition to the Conservative Party in the early 1920s, forming minority governments under Ramsay MacDonald in 1924 and from 1929 to 1931. Labour later served in the wartime coalition from 1940 to 1945, after which it formed a majority government under Clement Attlee. Labour was also in government from 1964 to 1970 under Harold Wilson and from 1974 to 1979, first under Wilson and then James Callaghan.
The Labour Party was last in government from 1997 to 2010 under Tony Blairand Gordon Brown, beginning with a landslide majority of 179, reduced to 167 in 2001 and 66 in 2005. Having won 232 seats in the 2015 general election, the party is the Official Opposition in the Parliament of the United Kingdom.
Labour is the largest party in the Welsh Assembly, the third largest party in theScottish Parliament and has twenty MEPs in the European Parliament, sitting in the Socialists and Democrats Group. The party also organises in Northern Ireland, but does not contest elections to the Northern Ireland Assembly. The Labour Party is a full member of the Party of European Socialists andProgressive Alliance, and holds observer status in the Socialist International. In September 2015, Jeremy Corbyn was elected Leader of the Labour Party.
The Labour Party’s origins lie in the late 19th century, when it became apparent that there was a need for a new political party to represent the interests and needs of the urban proletariat, a demographic which had increased in number and had recently been given franchise. Some members of the trades union movement became interested in moving into the political field, and after further extensions of the voting franchise in 1867 and 1885, the Liberal Party endorsed some trade-union sponsored candidates. The first Lib–Lab candidate to stand was George Odger in the Southwark by-election of 1870. In addition, several small socialist groups had formed around this time, with the intention of linking the movement to political policies. Among these were the Independent Labour Party, the intellectual and largely middle-class Fabian Society, the Marxist Social Democratic Federation and the Scottish Labour Party.
In the 1895 general election, the Independent Labour Party put up 28 candidates but won only 44,325 votes. Keir Hardie, the leader of the party, believed that to obtain success in parliamentary elections, it would be necessary to join with other left-wing groups. Hardie’s roots as a lay preacher contributed to an ethos in the party which led to the comment by 1950s General Secretary Morgan Phillips that “Socialism in Britain owed more to Methodism than Marx”.
After a debate, the 129 delegates passed Hardie’s motion to establish “a distinct Labour group in Parliament, who shall have their own whips, and agree upon their policy, which must embrace a readiness to cooperate with any party which for the time being may be engaged in promoting legislation in the direct interests of labour.” This created an association called the Labour Representation Committee (LRC), meant to coordinate attempts to support MPs sponsored by trade unions and represent the working-class population. It had no single leader, and in the absence of one, the Independent Labour Party nominee Ramsay MacDonald was elected as Secretary. He had the difficult task of keeping the various strands of opinions in the LRC united. The October 1900 “Khaki election” came too soon for the new party to campaign effectively; total expenses for the election only came to £33. Only 15 candidatures were sponsored, but two were successful; Keir Hardie in Merthyr Tydfil and Richard Bell in Derby.
Support for the LRC was boosted by the 1901 Taff Vale Case, a dispute between strikers and a railway company that ended with the union being ordered to pay £23,000 damages for a strike. The judgement effectively made strikes illegal since employers could recoup the cost of lost business from the unions. The apparent acquiescence of the Conservative Government of Arthur Balfour to industrial and business interests (traditionally the allies of the Liberal Party in opposition to the Conservative’s landed interests) intensified support for the LRC against a government that appeared to have little concern for the industrial proletariat and its problems.
In the 1906 election, the LRC won 29 seats—helped by a secret 1903 pact betweenRamsay MacDonald and Liberal Chief Whip Herbert Gladstone that aimed to avoid splitting the opposition vote between Labour and Liberal candidates in the interest of removing the Conservatives from office.
In their first meeting after the election the group’s Members of Parliament decided to adopt the name “The Labour Party” formally (15 February 1906). Keir Hardie, who had taken a leading role in getting the party established, was elected as Chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party (in effect, the Leader), although only by one vote over David Shackleton after several ballots. In the party’s early years the Independent Labour Party (ILP) provided much of its activist base as the party did not have individual membership until 1918 but operated as a conglomerate of affiliated bodies. The Fabian Society provided much of the intellectual stimulus for the party. One of the first acts of the new Liberal Government was to reverse the Taff Vale judgement.
The People’s History Museum in Manchester holds the minutes of the first Labour Party meeting in 1906 and has them on display in the Main Galleries. Also within the museum is the Labour History Archive and Study Centre, which holds the collection of the Labour Party, with material ranging from 1900 to the present day.
During the First World War the Labour Party split between supporters and opponents of the conflict but opposition to the war grew within the party as time went on. Ramsay MacDonald, a notable anti-war campaigner, resigned as leader of the Parliamentary Labour Party and Arthur Henderson became the main figure of authority within the party. He was soon accepted into Prime Minister Asquith‘s war cabinet, becoming the first Labour Party member to serve in government.
Despite mainstream Labour Party’s support for the coalition the Independent Labour Party was instrumental in opposing conscription through organisations such as the Non-Conscription Fellowship while a Labour Party affiliate, the British Socialist Party, organised a number of unofficial strikes.
Arthur Henderson resigned from the Cabinet in 1917 amid calls for party unity to be replaced by George Barnes. The growth in Labour’s local activist base and organisation was reflected in the elections following the war, the co-operativemovement now providing its own resources to the Co-operative Party after the armistice. The Co-operative Party later reached an electoral agreement with the Labour Party.
With the Representation of the People Act 1918, almost all adult men (excepting only peers, criminals and lunatics) and most women over the age of thirty were given the right to vote, almost tripling the British electorate at a stroke, from 7.7 million in 1912 to 21.4 million in 1918. This set the scene for a surge in Labour representation in parliament.
The Communist Party of Great Britain was refused affiliation to the Labour Party between 1921 and 1923. Meanwhile, the Liberal Party declined rapidly, and the party also suffered a catastrophic split which allowed the Labour Party to gain much of the Liberals’ support. With the Liberals thus in disarray, Labour won 142 seats in 1922, making it the second largest political group in the House of Commons and the official opposition to the Conservative government. After the election the now-rehabilitated Ramsay MacDonald was voted the first official leader of the Labour Party.
The 1923 general election was fought on the Conservatives’ protectionist proposals but, although they got the most votes and remained the largest party, they lost their majority in parliament, necessitating the formation of a government supporting free trade. Thus, with the acquiescence of Asquith’s Liberals, Ramsay MacDonald became the first ever Labour Prime Minister in January 1924, forming the first Labour government, despite Labour only having 191 MPs (less than a third of the House of Commons).
Because the government had to rely on the support of the Liberals it was unable to get any socialist legislation passed by the House of Commons. The only significant measure was the Wheatley Housing Act, which began a building programme of 500,000 homes for rental to working-class families. Legislation on education, unemployment and social insurance were also passed.
The government collapsed after only nine months when the Liberals voted for a Select Committee inquiry into the Campbell Case, a vote which MacDonald had declared to be a vote of confidence. The ensuing 1924 general election saw the publication, four days before polling day, of the Zinoviev letter, in which Moscow talked about a Communist revolution in Britain. The letter had little impact on the Labour vote—which held up. It was the collapse of the Liberal party that led to the Conservative landslide. The Conservatives were returned to power although Labour increased its vote from 30.7% to a third of the popular vote, most Conservative gains being at the expense of the Liberals. However many Labourites for years blamed their defeat on foul play (the Zinoviev Letter), thereby according to A. J. P. Taylor misunderstanding the political forces at work and delaying needed reforms in the party.
In the 1929 general election, the Labour Party became the largest in the House of Commons for the first time, with 287 seats and 37.1% of the popular vote. However MacDonald was still reliant on Liberal support to form a minority government. MacDonald went on to appoint Britain’s first female cabinet minister, Margaret Bondfield, who was appointed Minister of Labour.
The government, however, soon found itself engulfed in crisis: the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and eventual Great Depression occurred soon after the government came to power, and the crisis hit Britain hard. By the end of 1930 unemployment had doubled to over two and a half million. The government had no effective answers to the crisis. By the summer of 1931 a dispute over whether or not to reduce public spending had split the government.
As the economic situation worsened MacDonald agreed to form a “National Government” with the Conservatives and theLiberals. On 24 August 1931 MacDonald submitted the resignation of his ministers and led a small number of his senior colleagues in forming the National Government together with the other parties. This caused great anger among those within the Labour Party who felt betrayed by MacDonald’s actions: he and his supporters were promptly expelled from the Labour Party and formed a separate National Labour Organisation. The remaining Labour Party MPs (led again by Arthur Henderson) and a few Liberals went into opposition. The ensuing 1931 general election resulted in overwhelming victory for the National Government and disaster for the Labour Party which won only 52 seats, 225 fewer than in 1929.
As the threat from Nazi Germany increased, in the late 1930s the Labour Party gradually abandoned its pacifist stance and supported re-armament, largely due to the efforts of Ernest Bevin and Hugh Dalton who by 1937 had also persuaded the party to oppose Neville Chamberlain‘s policy of appeasement.
The party returned to government in 1940 as part of the wartime coalition. When Neville Chamberlain resigned in the spring of 1940, incoming Prime Minister Winston Churchill decided to bring the other main parties into a coalition similar to that of the First World War. Clement Attlee was appointed Lord Privy Seal and a member of the war cabinet, eventually becoming the United Kingdom’s first Deputy Prime Minister.
A number of other senior Labour figures also took up senior positions: the trade union leader Ernest Bevin, as Minister of Labour, directed Britain’s wartime economy and allocation of manpower, the veteran Labour statesman Herbert Morrisonbecame Home Secretary, Hugh Dalton was Minister of Economic Warfare and later President of the Board of Trade, whileA. V. Alexander resumed the role he had held in the previous Labour Government as First Lord of the Admiralty.
At the end of the war in Europe, in May 1945, Labour resolved not to repeat the Liberals’ error of 1918, and promptly withdrew from government, on trade union insistence, to contest the 1945 general election in opposition to Churchill’s Conservatives. Surprising many observers, Labour won a formidable victory, winning just under 50% of the vote with a majority of 159 seats.
Although Clement Attlee was no great radical himself, Attlee’s government proved one of the most radical British governments of the 20th century, enacting Keynesian economic policies, presiding over a policy of nationalising major industries and utilities including theBank of England, coal mining, the steel industry, electricity, gas, and inland transport (including railways, road haulage and canals). It developed and implemented the “cradle to grave” welfare state conceived by the economist William Beveridge. To this day, most people in the United Kingdom see the 1948 creation of Britain’s publicly fundedNational Health Service (NHS) under health minister Aneurin Bevan as Labour’s proudest achievement. Attlee’s government also began the process of dismantling the British Empire when it granted independence to India and Pakistan in 1947, followed by Burma (Myanmar) and Ceylon (Sri Lanka) the following year. At a secret meeting in January 1947, Attlee and six cabinet ministers, including Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, decided to proceed with the development of Britain’s nuclear weapons programme, in opposition to the pacifist and anti-nuclear stances of a large element inside the Labour Party.
In the 1951 general election, Labour narrowly lost to Churchill’s Conservatives, despite receiving the larger share of the popular vote – its highest ever vote numerically. Most of the changes introduced by the 1945–51 Labour government were accepted by the Conservatives and became part of the “post-war consensus” that lasted until the late 1970s. Food and clothing rationing, however, still in place since the war, were swiftly relaxed, then abandoned from about 1953.
Following the defeat of 1951 the party spent 13 years in opposition. The party suffered an ideological split, while the postwar economic recovery and the social effects of Attlee’s reforms made the public broadly content with the Conservative governments of the time. Attlee remained as leader until his retirement in 1955.
His replacement, Hugh Gaitskell, associated with the right wing of the party, struggled in dealing with internal party divisions (particularly over Clause IV of the Labour Party Constitution, which was viewed as Labour’s commitment to nationalisationand Gaitskell wanted scrapped) in the late 1950s and early 1960s and Labour lost the 1959 general election. In 1963, Gaitskell’s sudden death from a heart attack made way for Harold Wilson to lead the party.
Wilson’s government was responsible for a number of sweeping social and educational reforms under the leadership of Home Secretary Roy Jenkins such as the abolishment of the death penalty in 1964, the legalisation of abortion and homosexuality (initially only for men aged 21 or over, and only in England and Wales) in 1967 and the abolition of theatre censorship in 1968. Comprehensive education was expanded and the Open Universitycreated. However Wilson’s government had inherited a large trade deficit that led to a currency crisis and ultimately a doomed attempt to stave off devaluation of the pound. Labour went on to lose the 1970 general election to the Conservatives under Edward Heath.
After losing the 1970 general election, Labour returned to opposition, but retained Harold Wilson as Leader. Heath’s government soon ran into trouble over Northern Ireland and a dispute with miners in 1973 which led to the “three-day week“. The 1970s proved a difficult time to be in government for both the Conservatives and Labour due to the 1973 oil crisis which caused high inflation and a global recession.
For much of its time in office the Labour government struggled with serious economic problems and a precarious majority in the Commons, while the party’s internal dissent over Britain’s membership of the European Economic Community (EEC), which Britain had entered under Edward Heath in 1972, led in 1975 to a national referendum on the issue in which two thirds of the public supported continued membership.
Harold Wilson’s personal popularity remained reasonably high but he unexpectedly resigned as Prime Minister in 1976 citing health reasons, and was replaced by James Callaghan. The Wilson and Callaghan governments of the 1970s tried to control inflation (which reached 23.7% in 1975) by a policy of wage restraint. This was fairly successful, reducing inflation to 7.4% by 1978. However it led to increasingly strained relations between the government and the trade unions.
Fear of advances by the nationalist parties, particularly in Scotland, led to the suppression of a report from Scottish Office economist Gavin McCrone that suggested that an independent Scotland would be ‘chronically in surplus’. By 1977 by-election losses and defections to the breakaway Scottish Labour Party left Callaghan heading a minority government, forced to trade with smaller parties in order to govern. An arrangement negotiated in 1977 with Liberal leader David Steel, known as the Lib-Lab Pact, ended after one year. Deals were then forged with various small parties including the Scottish National Party and the Welsh nationalist Plaid Cymru, prolonging the life of the government.
The nationalist parties, in turn, demanded devolution to their respective constituent countries in return for their supporting the government. When referendums for Scottish and Welsh devolution were held in March 1979 Welsh devolution was rejected outright while theScottish referendum returned a narrow majority in favour without reaching the required threshold of 40% support. When the Labour government duly refused to push ahead with setting up the proposed Scottish Assembly, the SNP withdrew its support for the government: this finally brought the government down as it triggered a vote of confidence in Callaghan’s government that was lost by a single vote on 28 March 1979, necessitating a general election.
Callaghan had been widely expected to call a general election in the autumn of 1978 when most opinion polls showed Labour to have a narrow lead. However he decided to extend his wage restraint policy for another year hoping that the economy would be in a better shape for a 1979 election. But during the winter of 1978–79 there were widespread strikes among lorry drivers, railway workers, car workers and local government and hospital workers in favour of higher pay-rises that caused significant disruption to everyday life. These events came to be dubbed the “Winter of Discontent“.
In the 1979 general election Labour was heavily defeated by the Conservatives now led by Margaret Thatcher. The number of people voting Labour hardly changed between February 1974 and 1979 but the Conservative Party achieved big increases in support in the Midlands and South of England, benefiting from both a surge in turnout and votes lost by the ailing Liberals.
After its defeat in the 1979 general election the Labour Party underwent a period of internal rivalry between the left represented by Tony Benn, and the right represented by Denis Healey. The election of Michael Foot as leader in 1980, and the leftist policies he espoused, such as unilateral nuclear disarmament, leaving the European Economic Community (EEC) and NATO, closer governmental influence in the banking system, the creation of a national minimum wage and a ban on fox hunting led in 1981 to four former cabinet ministers from the right of the Labour Party (Shirley Williams, William Rodgers,Roy Jenkins and David Owen) forming the Social Democratic Party. Benn was only narrowly defeated by Healey in a bitterly fought deputy leadership election in 1981 after the introduction of an electoral college intended to widen the voting franchise to elect the leader and their deputy. By 1982, the National Executive Committee had concluded that the entryistMilitant tendency group were in contravention of the party’s constitution. The Militant newspaper’s five member editorial board were expelled on 22 February 1983.
The Labour Party was defeated heavily in the 1983 general election, winning only 27.6% of the vote, its lowest share since1918, and receiving only half a million votes more than the SDP-Liberal Alliance who leader Michael Foot condemned for “siphoning” Labour support and enabling the Conservatives to greatly increase their majority of parliamentary seats.
Neil Kinnock, leader of the party in opposition, 1983–92.
Foot resigned and was replaced as leader by Neil Kinnock, with Roy Hattersley as his deputy. The new leadership progressively dropped unpopular policies. The miners strike of 1984–85 over coal mine closures, for which miners’ leader Arthur Scargill was blamed, and the Wapping dispute led to clashes with the left of the party, and negative coverage in most of the press. Tabloid vilification of the so-called loony left continued to taint the parliamentary party by association from the activities of ‘extra-parliamentary’ militants in local government.
Labour improved its performance in 1987, gaining 20 seats and so reducing the Conservative majority from 143 to 102. They were now firmly re-established as the second political party in Britain as the Alliance had once again failed to make a breakthrough with seats. A merger of the SDP and Liberals formed the Liberal Democrats. Following the 1987 election, the National Executive Committee resumed disciplinary action against members of Militant, who remained in the party, leading to further expulsions of their activists and the two MPs who supported the group.
In November 1990 following a contested leadership election, Margaret Thatcher resigned as leader of the Conservative Party and was succeeded as leader and Prime Minister by John Major. Most opinion polls had shown Labour comfortably ahead of the Tories for more than a year before Mrs Thatcher’s resignation, with the fall in Tory support blamed largely on her introduction of the unpopular poll tax, combined with the fact that the economy was sliding into recession at the time.
The “yo yo” in the opinion polls continued into 1992, though after November 1990 any Labour lead in the polls was rarely sufficient for a majority. Major resisted Kinnock’s calls for a general election throughout 1991. Kinnock campaigned on the theme “It’s Time for a Change”, urging voters to elect a new government after more than a decade of unbroken Conservative rule. However, the Conservatives themselves had undergone a dramatic change in the change of leader from Thatcher to Major, at least in terms of style if not substance. From the outset, it was clearly a well-received change, as Labour’s 14-point lead in the November 1990 “Poll of Polls” was replaced by an 8% Tory lead a month later.
Kinnock then resigned as leader and was replaced by John Smith. Once again the battle erupted between the old guard on the party’s left and those identified as “modernisers”. The old guard argued that trends showed they were regaining strength under Smith’s strong leadership. Meanwhile, the breakaway SDP merged with the Liberal Party. The new Liberal Democrats seemed to pose a major threat to the Labour base. Tony Blair (the Shadow Home Secretary) had an entirely different vision. Blair, the leader of the “modernizing” faction (Blairites), argued that the long-term trends had to be reversed, arguing that the party was too locked into a base that was shrinking, since it was based on the working-class, on trade unions, and on residents of subsidized council housing. Blairites argued that the rapidly growing middle class was largely ignored, as well as more ambitious working-class families. It was said that they aspired to become middle-class, but accepted the Conservative argument that Labour was holding ambitious people back, with its leveling down policies.[clarification needed] They increasingly saw Labour in a negative light, regarding higher taxes and higher interest rates. In order to present a fresh face and new policies to the electorate, New Labour needed more than fresh leaders; it had to jettison outdated policies, argued the modernizers. The first step was procedural, but essential. Calling on the slogan, “One Member, One Vote” Blair (with some help from Smith) defeated the union element and ended block voting by leaders of labour unions. Blair and the modernizers called for radical adjustment of Party goals by repealing “Clause IV,” the historic commitment to nationalization of industry. This was achieved in 1995.
The Black Wednesday economic disaster in September 1992 left the Conservative government’s reputation for monetary excellence in tatters, and by the end of that year Labour had a comfortable lead over the Tories in the opinion polls. Although the recession was declared over in April 1993 and a period of strong and sustained economic growth followed, coupled with a relatively swift fall in unemployment, the Labour lead in the opinion polls remained strong. However, Smith died from a heart attack in May 1994.
Tony Blair continued to move the party further to the centre, abandoning the largely symbolic Clause Four at the 1995 mini-conference in a strategy to increase the party’s appeal to “middle England“. More than a simple re-branding, however, the project would draw upon the Third Way strategy, informed by the thoughts of the British sociologist Anthony Giddens.
“New Labour” was first termed as an alternative branding for the Labour Party, dating from a conference slogan first used by the Labour Party in 1994, which was later seen in a draft manifesto published by the party in 1996, called New Labour, New Life For Britain. It was a continuation of the trend that had begun under the leadership of Neil Kinnock. “New Labour” as a name has no official status, but remains in common use to distinguish modernisers from those holding to more traditional positions, normally referred to as “Old Labour”.
The Labour Party won the 1997 general election with a landslide majority of 179; it was the largest Labour majority ever, and the largest swing to a political party achieved since 1945. Over the next decade, a wide range of progressive social reforms were enacted, with millions lifted out of poverty during Labour’s time in office largely as a result of various tax and benefit reforms.
Among the early acts of Blair’s government were the establishment of the national minimum wage, the devolution of power to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, major changes to the regulation of the banking system, and the re-creation of a city-wide government body for London, the Greater London Authority, with its own elected-Mayor.
Combined with a Conservative opposition that had yet to organise effectively under William Hague, and the continuing popularity of Blair, Labour went on to win the 2001 election with a similar majority, dubbed the “quiet landslide” by the media. In 2003 Labour introduced tax credits, government top-ups to the pay of low-wage workers.
A perceived turning point was when Blair controversially allied himself with US President George W. Bush in supporting theIraq War, which caused him to lose much of his political support. The UN Secretary-General, among many, considered the war illegal and a violation of the UN Charter. The Iraq War was deeply unpopular in most western countries, with Western governments divided in their support and under pressure from worldwide popular protests. The decisions that led up to the Iraq war and its subsequent conduct are currently the subject of Sir John Chilcot‘s Iraq Inquiry.
In the 2005 general election, Labour was re-elected for a third term, but with a reduced majority of 66.
Blair announced in September 2006 that he would quit as leader within the year, though he had been under pressure to quit earlier than May 2007 in order to get a new leader in place before the May elections which were expected to be disastrous for Labour. In the event, the party did lose power in Scotland to a minority Scottish National Party government at the 2007 elections and, shortly after this, Blair resigned as Prime Minister and was replaced by his Chancellor, Gordon Brown. Although the party experienced a brief rise in the polls after this, its popularity soon slumped to its lowest level since the days of Michael Foot. During May 2008, Labour suffered heavy defeats in the London mayoral election, local electionsand the loss in the Crewe and Nantwich by-election, culminating in the party registering its worst ever opinion poll result since records began in 1943, of 23%, with many citing Brown’s leadership as a key factor. Membership of the party also reached a low ebb, falling to 156,205 by the end of 2009: over 40 per cent of the 405,000 peak reached in 1997 and thought to be the lowest total since the party was founded.
Finance proved a major problem for the Labour Party during this period; a “cash for peerages” scandal under Blair resulted in the drying up of many major sources of donations. Declining party membership, partially due to the reduction of activists’ influence upon policy-making under the reforms of Neil Kinnock and Blair, also contributed to financial problems. Between January and March 2008, the Labour Party received just over £3 million in donations and were £17 million in debt; compared to the Conservatives’ £6 million in donations and £12 million in debt.
Harriet Harman became the Leader of the Opposition and acting Leader of the Labour Party following the resignation ofGordon Brown on 11 May 2010, pending a leadership election subsequently won by Ed Miliband. Miliband emphasised “responsible capitalism” and greater state intervention to change the balance of the UK economy away from financial services. Tackling vested interests and opening up closed circles in British society were also themes he returned to a number of times. Miliband also argued for greater regulation on banks and the energy companies.
The party’s performance held up in local elections in 2012 with Labour consolidating its position in the North and Midlands, while also regaining some ground in Southern England. In Wales the party enjoyed good successes, regaining control of most Welsh Councils lost in 2008, including the capital city, Cardiff. In Scotland, Labour’s held overall control of Glasgow City Council despite some predictions to the contrary, and also enjoyed a +3.26 swing across Scotland. In London, results were mixed for the party; Ken Livingstone lost the election for Mayor of London, but the party gained its highest ever representation in the Greater London Authority in the concurrent assembly election.
On 1 March 2014, at a special conference the party reformed internal Labour election procedures, including replacing the electoral college system for selecting new leaders with a “one member, one vote” system following the recommendation of a review by former general-secretary Ray Collins. Mass membership would be encouraged by allowing “registered supporters” to join at a low cost, as well as full membership. Members from the trade unions would also have to explicitly “opt in” rather than “opt out” of paying a political levy to Labour.
The party edged out the Conservatives in the May 2014 European parliamentary electionswinning 20 seats versus the Conservatives 19. However the UK Independence Party won 24 seats. Labour also won a majority of seats in the local council elections of 2014, gaining 324 more councillors than they had before the election.
In September 2014, Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls outlined his plans to cut the government’scurrent account deficit, and the party carried these plans into the 2015 general election. Whereas Conservatives campaigned for a surplus on all government spending, including investment, by 2018/19, Labour stated it would balance the budget, excluding investment, by 2020.
The 2015 General Election resulted in a net loss of seats throughout Great Britain, with Labour representation falling to 232 seats in the House of Commons. The Party lost 40 of its 41 seats in Scotland in the face of record breaking swings to the Scottish National Party. The scale of the decline in Labour’s support was much greater than what had occurred at the 2011 elections for the Scottish parliament. Though Labour gained more than 20 seats in England and Wales, mostly from the Liberal Democrats but also from the Conservative Party, it lost more seats to Conservative challengers, including that of Ed Balls, for net losses overall.
The day after the 7 May 2015 election, Miliband resigned as party leader. Harriet Harman again took charge as interim leader. On 12 September 2015, Jeremy Corbyn was announced as the new party leader as result of the 2015 Labour leadership election.
The Labour Party is considered to be left of centre. It was initially formed as a means for the trade union movement to establish political representation for itself at Westminster. It only gained a ‘socialist’ commitment with the original party constitution of 1918. That ‘socialist’ element, the original Clause IV, was seen by its strongest advocates as a straightforward commitment to the “common ownership”, or nationalisation, of the “means of production, distribution and exchange”. Although about a third of British industry was taken into public ownership after the Second World War, and remained so until the 1980s, the right of the party were questioning the validity of expanding on this objective by the late 1950s. Influenced by Anthony Crosland‘s book, The Future of Socialism (1956), the circle around party leader Hugh Gaitskell felt that the commitment was no longer necessary. While an attempt to remove Clause IV from the party constitution in 1959 failed, Tony Blair, and the ‘modernisers’ saw the issue as putting off potential voters, and were successful thirty-five years later, with only limited opposition from senior figures in the party.
Historically, influenced by Keynesian economics, the party favoured government intervention in the economy, and the redistribution of wealth. Taxation was seen as a means to achieve a “major redistribution of wealth and income” in the October 1974 election manifesto. The party also desired increased rights for workers, and awelfare state including publicly funded healthcare.
From the late-1980s onwards, the party adopted free market policies, leading many observers to describe the Labour Party as social democratic or the Third Way, rather than democratic socialist. Other commentators go further and argue that traditional social democratic parties across Europe, including the British Labour Party, have been so deeply transformed in recent years that it is no longer possible to describe them ideologically as ‘social democratic’, and claim that this ideological shift has put new strains on the party’s traditional relationship with the trade unions.
Historically within the party, differentiation was made between the “soft left” and the “hard left“, with the former embracing more moderately social democratic views while the hard left subscribed to a strongly socialist, even Marxist, ideology. Members on the hard left were often disparaged as the “loony left,” particularly in the popular media.The term “hard left” was sometimes used in the 1980s to describe Trotskyist groups such as the Militant tendency, Socialist Organiser and Socialist Action. In more recent times, Members of Parliament in the Socialist Campaign Group and theLabour Representation Committee are seen as constituting a hard left in contrast to a soft left represented by organisations such as Compass and the magazine Tribune.
Labour has long been identified with red, a political colour traditionally affiliated with socialism and the labour movement. The party conference in 1931 passed a motion “That this conference adopts Party Colours, which should be uniform throughout the country, colours to be red and gold”. Since the party’s inception, the red flag has been Labour’s official symbol; the flag has been associated with socialism and revolution ever since the 1789 French Revolution and therevolutions of 1848. The red rose, a symbol of social democracy, was adopted as the party symbol in 1986 as part of a rebranding exercise and is now incorporated into the party logo.
The red flag became an inspiration which resulted in the composition of “The Red Flag“, the official party anthem since its inception, being sung at the end of party conferences and on various occasions such as in parliament on February 2006 to mark the centenary of the Labour Party’s founding. During New Labour attempts were made to play down the role of the song, however it still remains in use.
The Labour Party is a membership organisation consisting of Constituency Labour Parties, affiliated trade unions, socialist societies and the Co-operative Party, with which it has an electoral agreement. Members who are elected to parliamentary positions take part in the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) and European Parliamentary Labour Party (EPLP).
The party’s decision-making bodies on a national level formally include the National Executive Committee (NEC), Labour Party Conference and National Policy Forum (NPF)—although in practice the Parliamentary leadership has the final say on policy. The 2008 Labour Party Conference was the first at which affiliated trade unions and Constituency Labour Parties did not have the right to submit motions on contemporary issues that would previously have been debated. Labour Party conferences now include more “keynote” addresses, guest speakers and question-and-answer sessions, while specific discussion of policy now takes place in the National Policy Forum.
The Labour Party is an unincorporated association without a separate legal personality, and the Labour Party Rule Booklegally regulates the organisation and the relationship with members. The General Secretary represents the party on behalf of the other members of the Labour Party in any legal matters or actions.
In August 2015, prior to the 2015 leadership election, the Labour Party reported 292,505 full members, 147,134 affiliated supporters (mostly from affiliated trade unions and socialist societies) and 110,827 registered supporters; a total of about 550,000 members and supporters. As of November 2015 the party has approximately 380,000 members.
For many years Labour held to a policy of not allowing residents ofNorthern Ireland to apply for membership, instead supporting the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) which informally takes the Labour whip in the House of Commons. The 2003 Labour Party Conference accepted legal advice that the party could not continue to prohibit residents of the province joining,and whilst the National Executive has established a regional constituency party it has not yet agreed to contest elections there. In December 2015 a meeting of the members of the Labour Party in Northern Ireland decided unanimously to contest the elections for the Northern Ireland Assembly held in May 2016.
Unite the Union showing their support for the Labour party on their Leeds offices during the 2015 general election.
TULO (The Trade Union & Labour Party Liaison Organisation) is the coordinating structure that supports the policy and campaign activities of affiliated union members within the Labour Party at the national, regional and local level.
As it was founded by the unions to represent the interests of working-class people, Labour’s link with the unions has always been a defining characteristic of the party. In recent years this link has come under increasing strain, with the RMT being expelled from the party in 2004 for allowing its branches in Scotland to affiliate to the left-wing Scottish Socialist Party. Other unions have also faced calls from members to reduce financial support for the Party and seek more effective political representation for their views onprivatisation, public spending cuts and the anti-trade union laws. Unison and GMBhave both threatened to withdraw funding from constituency MPs and Dave Prentis ofUNISON has warned that the union will write “no more blank cheques” and is dissatisfied with “feeding the hand that bites us”. Union funding was redesigned in 2013 after the Falkirk candidate-selection controversy.
The Labour Party is a founder member of the Party of European Socialists (PES). The European Parliamentary Labour Party’s 20 MEPs are part of the Socialists and Democrats (S&D), the second largest group in the European Parliament. The Labour Party is represented by Emma Reynolds in the PES Presidency.
The party was a member of the Labour and Socialist International between 1923 and 1940. Since 1951 the party has been a member of the Socialist International, which was founded thanks to the efforts of the Clement Attlee leadership. However, in February 2013, the Labour Party NEC decided to downgrade participation to observer membership status, “in view of ethical concerns, and to develop international co-operation through new networks”. Labour was a founding member of the Progressive Alliance international founded in co-operation with the Social Democratic Party of Germany and other social-democratic parties on 22 May 2013.

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