How Labour Lost Faith in the Creative Class

What happened to New Labour’s vision of Britain™?

A behind-the-scenes image from Crust, a British film from the early 2000s that – like many which benefitted from New Labour’s tax incentives – was never screened. (Image: BBC)

In the absence of some shocking, unforeseen event – Keir Starmer insulting the England football team, perhaps – the Labour Party will be governing the UK in two weeks’ time. What’s more, after fourteen years out of power, it will likely win a big majority. So what does this mean for design and related areas of life? I’ve already written about Labour endorsing traditional architecture for its house-building plans. This created a stir in certain quarters, but not because it marks any major change; in fact, it presents an obvious continuity with the current Conservative government. A similar lack of ambition characterises Labour’s design offering more generally, as seen in its extremely dull “Plan for the Creative Industries.” Forget strategy or vision; this document barely passes muster as a press release.

But sometimes the most unremarkable things are themselves worth remarking on. Labour’s lack of interest in the so-called creative industries presents a dramatic contrast with 1997, the last time it took power from the Conservatives in a landslide victory. Comparing the party’s attitude to design then and now suggests a world that has changed enormously in the intervening decades. 

It was Tony Blair’s New Labour project, taking office in 1997, that popularised the idea of “creative industries.” The term itself is not very useful, describing a mishmash of activities from writing software to acting, but it was not unique in that respect. Similar concepts at the time included “the knowledge economy” and Richard Florida’s influential notion of “the creative class.” All were indicative of where the Labour leadership, like so many elites in the western world, thought things were heading at the end of the twentieth century. In short: globalisation was rapidly shifting the old economy, and manufacturing especially, to poorer parts of the world; at the same time, information technology was providing the basis for a new one. The future belonged to services, ideas, branding, tech, entertainment – to the creation of intellectual property, not physical products. This entailed a major role for design, whose importance to Britain’s commercial prospects was being emphasised by government White Papers and think tanks even before New Labour took office.

Still, Blair’s government embraced this narrative of economic transformation with exceptional zeal. He was, after all, deeply committed to globalisation, and saw it as his job to make the country fit for that process. Moreover, as Jonathan Woodham noted at the time, Blair hardly needed convincing about the importance of activities like communication and branding. He had resurrected the Labour Party by these same means, changing its image from that of fossilised socialists to one that was youthful, liberal and competent. Now he was setting out to rebrand Britain itself in the global marketplace. It would no longer be the “workshop of the world,” but “the design workshop of the world, leading a creative revolution.” It was as though the UK could become a nation of creatives simply because the creatives themselves would portray it as such. The Design Council, very much on board with this programme, published two reports in 1997 with titles that speak volumes: “New Brand for a New Britain,” and “Britain™: Renewing Our Identity.” As Blair himself put it, writing of the country’s potential for “innovation, creativity and design,” “I believe it is time to show a fresh face to the world and reshape Britain as one of twenty-first century’s most forward thinking and modern nations.”

What a difference twenty-seven years can make. Labour’s recent creative industries plan, published in March, avoids any talk about new horizons or radical change, either in the country or the wider world. Rather, it presents arts and culture as an existing part of “our national story” and “our sense of national pride.” References to technology are always balanced with something more traditional, as in the sentence “Our remarkable architecture gives us a sense of place, heritage and history, just as our games industry immerses us in worlds of the future or the past through frontier technologies.” Mentions of the global economy are rare and muted; the section on “Cultural Britain in the World” does not come until page twenty-three.

These messages are very much of a piece with Labour’s promise to build new houses in familiar British styles. They are part of a wider effort to banish any lingering associations with Corbynite radicalism, and reassure a country that is craving security after a decade of upheaval. That means emphasising stability over change, the local over the cosmopolitan, and the broadly popular over the boldly progressive. And yet, as we are always hearing, Starmer’s populist pitch for the “centre ground” comes straight out of Blair’s own playbook. Why then does it look and feel so different from the original?

Well, the world is very different. In the nineties, New Labour could still present globalisation and technological revolution as opportunities; today, voters are more likely to see them as threats they need protection from. The decision to abandon major physical industries for trendy “creative” ones has not aged well either. It has made the country dependent on increasingly fragile supply chains for critical goods, while devastating many working-class areas by consigning their livelihoods to history. The rise of the creative class turned out to be more of a lifestyle phenomenon than a route to national prosperity. In fact, the New Labour economy was powered by financial services, not cultural ones, and that too was revealed as something of a mirage in the 2008 crash. The fate of Britain™ is best illustrated by a curious wave of films made in the 2000s, which attracted big budgets but were never screened. Some enterprising investors had worked out that policies designed to boost the film industry could be used to dodge tax.

Labour’s current leader, who downplays his metropolitan instincts and markets himself as the son of a toolmaker, is unlikely to argue that Britain’s future lies in Shoreditch. But Starmer’s cautious, small-c conservative image is still Blairite in the sense that it shows an obsession with managing perceptions and appearances. We can only hope he understands that this is not the same as addressing the country’s very substantial problems.