On my way to writing the article “Servants, not Masters”, I needed to check my material and links about Emanuelle Avril’s unfinished white paper called, “The (Unintended) Consequences of New Labour: Party Leadership vs Party Management in the British Labour Party”. and was presented to the Political Studies Association 2015 conference, in March so before the 2015 election and consequent Labour leadership election. Eaton’s source identified a failure of the New Labour leadership to renew itself as a cause of it’s failure and Avril’s paper explains why they were always going to be incapable of it.
…. it is true to say that internal consensus and cohesion, as they manifested themselves in New Labour, constituted obstacles to innovation and therefore endangered the survival of the party …
and the ambitions of their successors. (This post continues overleaf/below.) …
ooOOOoo
I created a wiki page to host the paper and posted a mirror copy of the paper there. I also made a blog post of my storify story, the Death Agony of Social Democracy., which includes a number of quotes from the paper. The paper is available on open access at https://www.cogitatiopress.com/politicsandgovernance/article/view/534.