This volume probes the record of Britain's Labour Party governments from 1997 through 2006, asking what a series of Tony Blair–led political executives did and did not accomplish for women. The table of contents features 10 substantive chapters, plus introductory and concluding essays, all written in 2005 or later by members of the Social Science Gender Research Network at the University of Manchester. Their core empirical focus involves domestic public policy, including employment, child care, and machinery-of-government questions, with one chapter each devoted to international development policy and internal Labour Party politics.
Given the pent-up expectations that built to a crescendo throughout 18 years of Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher and then John Major, the question of what Blair and his team contributed is of far more than simply academic significance. From the time he became opposition leader in 1984, Blair spoke at length about the importance of restoring civic democracy, renewing the public sector, and enhancing social cohesion in the wake of a corrosive us/them fragmentation during the Tory years. Moreover, Blair's wife (well-known barrister Cherie Booth) and many modernizers in the New Labour stream identified themselves as feminists; the 101 party women who won seats in 1997 seemed likely to be far more influential than the much-maligned patriarchs of Old Labour who preceded them. If politics could be reduced to a matter of binary lifestyle choices, then here was a case of Britain's youthful, wine-swirling salad eaters challenging the crusty old beer-and-sandwiches types. In short, participants in the project that underpins this book identified a crucial real-world task, which was to chart whether New Labour's performance measured up to its widely hyped promise and potential.
Their verdict? New Labour fell considerably short by the standards of feminist public policy, even though Blair's regimes created a national minimum wage (NMW), overhauled welfare and pension policies, improved parental leave provisions, enhanced access to child care, and, in the words of Angelia Wilson, offered “the most lesbian- and gay-friendly government in our history” (p. 193). The point of many discussions in this book, including Wilson's, is not only that the historic comparisons were weak relative to what scholars and activists in this area would have preferred, but also that many steps taken forward after 1997 were halting ones. As Karen Clarke writes, “despite … increases in provision, the availability of childcare remains an issue for a substantial proportion of families” (p. 165). Damian Grimshaw's conclusion with respect to the gender pay gap echoes this view: The NMW “was initially pitched far too low to make a significant impact. …Too many women workers in the UK remain trapped below the international definition of a low-wage threshold, despite two and half terms of a Labour government” (pp. 143, 150).
As a Third Way stream that relied heavily on performance indicators and other tools of technocratic managerialism, New Labour also came up short of its own stated targets. For example, in the field of employment policy, Blair and his colleagues pressed hard to drive down the percentage of what they termed “workless households,” meaning those in which no adults held above-ground paid jobs. Even as the level of lone parents in full- or part-time work rested at 21% in 1994, Labour set a goal of 70% by 2010 and had reached just under 57% by 2005. Clarke observes that this “rate of increase is unlikely to be sufficient to allow the government to reach its target” (p. 164).
British feminists did not necessarily share much enthusiasm over the goal of placing 70% of single mothers in paid work; they tended to elevate the social value of lone mothers' caring for their children above that of engaging in menial paid labor. In fact, the tenor of this volume is consistent with the critiques of Ruth Lister, Ruth Levitas, and others on the limits of New Labour's work-obsessed social policy. According to this view, Blairite rhetoric and action celebrated paid labor to such a point as to effectively denigrate or deny the importance of equality, caring, or other norms. Post-1997 governments thus pursued a highly opportunistic focus on doing just enough to keep women voters on board to win reelection, but not so much as to risk alienating New Labour's affluent allies who benefited from outsourcing and privatization initiatives—which, in turn, punished those same women by weakening wage, benefit, and hours-of-work protections.
This volume's primary contribution rests in its detailed diagnosis of what went right and wrong. The summaries are thorough and compelling, but the study as a whole would have been far more useful had the participants engaged in a systematic dialogue with the existing British and comparative literatures. How do these studies of the gendering of domestic policy either reinforce or contradict the material contained in standard texts about the Blair years? In assessing the impact of femocratic policy machinery, how did the limited resources, constrained influence, and “variable success” of the Women's Equality Unit after 1997 measure up against patterns in other Westminster systems (p. 108)? Were the consequences of what Wilson describes as “the lethargy of feminism as a social movement” (p. 39) parallel with what we have seen elsewhere?
From the perspective of both research and real-world politics, arguably the gravest lacuna in this volume concerns British foreign policy. Although Blair's role in taking the country into the Iraq war is ignored, it is hard to underestimate the opportunities such a focus would have provided for scholars to probe the gendered dynamics of security in insecure times—particularly in a once-powerful imperial context full of immigrants from the ex-colonies. One possible model for a follow-up project in this area can be found in the U.S. literature, notably the recent edited study by Michaele Ferguson and Lori Jo Marso (2007) on the George W. Bush years. Lamentably, much like the series of New Labour governments it examined, this book's reach in many respects exceeded its grasp.
