ARTIKEL /ARTICLES The Future of New Labour: a View From Inside DAVID MILIBAND I t is an irony of modern politics that Britain’s Labour Party, for the 20th century one of the least successful social democratic parties in Western Europe, should at the beginning of the 21st century, suddenly look like one of the most successful. As social democratic governments have fallen in Italy, Denmark and France, and face a tough re-election fight in Ger­many, Labour seems to be defying the laws of political gravity. My purpose in this article is to explain the dynamics of New Labour’s current political dominance in Britain; examine its record in government – locate its strengths, weaknesses and challenges ahead; set out in tenta­tive form what might be some of the next steps for the party come the end of this Parliament and the beginning of the next; and then leave the reader to draw some conclusions about the implications for other parties of the left in Europe. Five Strategic Ambitions In 1992, election analysts queried whether the election defeat represented »Labour’s Last Chance«. Changing class formation, the gender gap, the electoral system, all seemed to point to permanent Conservative hege­mony. Yet ten years on, people are saying the same things about Labour dominance, and asking whether the Conservatives are in terminal decline. Certainly the electoral record is remarkable: the two biggest consecutive electoral landslides this century eclipse the performance of Thatcher, At­tlee and Baldwin. Perhaps the only, tenuous, parallel is with Conservative dominance after the age of Gladstone. The argument put by Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and others after John Smith died in 1994 was in essence quite simple. They believed that eco­nomic and social change meant that Labour could not be elected and Britain’s problems could not be tackled by the tried and trusted methods of post-war social democracy – the happy synthesis that was the Keyne­ipg 3/2002 Miliband, New Labour 15