Safety First: the Making of New Labour

This is a collective portrait of the people who have formed a new regime for Britain in the Spring of 1997. The Labour Party under Tony Blair is electable and professional. It is single-minded in the pursuit of power, which has eluded the British centre-left for a generation. The party has purged itself of anything that makes Middle-England uneasy. It avoids even the rhetoric of the historic Labour Party, and is unsentimental about the sacred cows of Labour tradition: nationalization, support for trade unions and a belief in redistribution. New Labour is a smiling, teflon party, and its hour has come. The authors have had access to completely unauthorized information about how New Labour reached decisions about Europe, taxation and crime, and how the Party's "big four" - Blair, Brown, Prescott and Cook - compromise over economic policy. They show how dissenters in the Party are silenced on such issues as Ireland, the relationship with trade unions and constitutional reform.
They present the personalities of the leaders and the atmosphere of the famous dinner parties where alliances are made and friendships brokered, and are alert to the strange mixture of optimism and paranoia that marks Blair's circle.