Angela McRobbie The_Uses_of_Cultural_Studies__A

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paved the way for New Labour s endeavours. This approach is effective
well outside the machinery of the state. Slowly but surely, everybody
kicking and screaming to the end becomes his/her own kind of mana-
ger (Hall, 2003).
Hall s article is a sombre account of the devastation of the social welfare
apparatus wrought by New Labour. Do not be deluded , he seems to be
saying to many of us who struggled hard to find some radical content in the
Giddens-inspired Third Way politics (Giddens, 1998). This, in the first term
of office, was heralded as a programme which could renew social democ-
racy, deliver resources to public services while also participating in the
global economy, and keep the conservatives out of office by maintaining
broad-based electoral support for New Labour. Hall now sees just how well
Blair et al. have indeed learnt the lessons from Thatcherism, including
some of those he himself argued for. There is a degree of uncanniness in
Hall s position vis-�-vis New Labour and in particular its modernising
wing . The connection is not with Gordon Brown s redistributive and social
justice corner of government (tackling child poverty as above). Nor is it with
the young men and women of the Treasury schooled in US economic theory
and looking to find ways to translate this into policies palatable to the UK
electorate. No, the connection is still at what we might describe as the
interface of media politics ideology . For media read spin , for politics
read modernisation and for ideology read Thatcherism re-invented for
New Labour . Stuart Hall s thinking haunts the contours of this govern-
ment s office. For those who were in the orbit of Marxism Today through the
1980s (Mandelson, policy advisor Geoff Mulgan and policy consultant
Charles Leadbeater) some of Hall s lessons have been learnt too well in that
they have provided a kind of template for doing what Thatcher did, but
only better, particularly in regard to the politics of meaning, the power of
language, the possibilities provided by processes of articulation, the moral
fervour, the hegemonic reaching into the inner recesses of the popular
psyche as shaped by the tabloid press, the stitching together of this with
that, in unlikely but effective combinations, and the great gains to be made
Uses Cultural Studies 10/3/05 11:52 am Page 36
36 The Uses of Cultural Studies
by trashing and demonising the old left, the feminists, the anti-racists, all of
whom, we are constantly reminded, made Labour unelectable during the
long Thatcher years. Simply because Hall has been New Labour s persistent
public critic and interlocutor prior to, and throughout, their years in office,
and because no one could mistake his left-wing voice as that of old (trade
union-dominated and largely white) Labour (that is, he has always been
modern ), and because his writing has also had a performative force of
bringing into being the left , which it seems merely to describe, Hall s writ-
ing occupies a truly significant place in British public life (see also Rose,
1999 for a Foucault-inspired analysis of New Labour, and for an account of
the decline of liberal democracy in the US, see Brown, 2004).
The crux of Hall s argument rests on the emphasis in New Labour rheto-
ric that only the private sector can deliver services efficiently. This single
claim, repeated mantra-like as it is applied across the whole range of what
once were public services, actively borrows from the language of tradi-
tional social democracy (for example, justice, equality and so on) in order
to push further forward with privatisation. (For example, the opting-out
Foundation Hospitals will provide a better range of facilities and care
delivered on a fairer basis for ordinary people than those remaining within
the traditional National Health Service (NHS) system.) If the political cul-
ture of New Labour is led by neo-liberal principles with a social
democratic underpinning, then this weak partner is also in the process of
being transformed according to the logic of the free market. But it also [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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