TERRY DIGNAN:                A hundred years ago a party 
for working class trade unionists was formed. Today it seeks to represent 
all classes. It's leader has built a coalition of support the like of which 
the party's founders could only have dreamed of. But at what cost to its 
original purpose?

                        Labour came into existence 
in towns like Swindon to create a more equal society. New Labour makes 
a fairer society, not equality, its aim. It rejects the old Labour idea 
of making the poor richer by making the rich poorer. It wants to be the 
party of the affluent as well as the poor, a one-nation party, or as some 
would put it, a party without enemies. 

                        Julia Drown won Swindon 
South for Labour at the last election. Although it's a Southern boom town, 
Swindon contains deep-rooted poverty. Failure to win elections has meant 
Labour has only rarely in its history been able to help society's less 
well-off. 

JULIE DROWN:                Well the Labour Party's always 
existed to help the most disadvantaged people, many of whom live on estates 
like this but also to increase the prosperity of the country as a whole. 
 But we haven't in many elections convinced people that that is what we're 
about  and so we needed to change to prove that.  I think people did think 
oh yes they might help the unemployed, they might help lone parents, but 
they'll ignore the rest of us.   I think we just never really convinced 
them. We never got the message across that we were for the many, for everybody. 


DIGNAN:                    Indeed it took the party 
nearly half a century to win an election. The 1945 Labour Government nationalised 
industries like coal, created a National Health Service and sought to eradicate 
poverty. This was a party which believed in fighting inequality by redistributing 
wealth and intervening in the economy.

BRIAN BRIVATI:                It believed there were answers 
to economic questions which involved State intervention to promote greater 
equality. It's a bit of a mouthful but using the State, using government 
to promote equality of outcome, that's what made it different from other 
political parties.

DIGNAN:                    1976 was a watershed for 
the Labour movement. Cutting spending at a time of high unemployment, Labour 
was accused of betrayal by public sector unions. Strikes in the Winter 
of Discontent led to defeat for Jim Callaghan in 1979. The party split. 
In 1983, committed to high taxation and public ownership, Labour under 
Michael Foot lost disastrously.

                        Swindon went Tory. We 
asked one of the town's ad agencies, Emery Mclaven Orr, to show how they 
would have illustrated Labour's unpopularity in the '80s. 

ACTUALITY:                Left-wing, Communism, the Red 
Flag, Red Ken..........."

DIGNAN:                    But back in the eighties, 
Labour's new young leadership had already got the message. If it was ever 
to win power again Labour would have to accept that many voters no longer 
felt attached to nationalised industries and the welfare state. That was 
the advice from those closest to Neil Kinnock.  

CHARLES CLARKE:            It was necessary to look, in a 
managerial way, I suppose, much more ruthlessly at the way in which some 
of the great collective institutions had actually built up and whether 
they were really serving the interests of the individual citizen rather 
than those who simply were working for them.  Over the thirty-five or forty 
years since 1945 there was a need to look again at the way that the great 
organisations which had been established - the nationalised railways, the 
nationalised health service and so on, were they really working in the 
most effective way or had they become sclerotic in some respects.

DIGNAN:                    Kinnock abandoned the red 
flag for a red rose, and started the long haul to making Labour electable. 
It meant rejecting state intervention in the economy and allowing the public 
sector to contract out services to private companies. 

CLARKE:                    What did arise I think, 
was a sense that the market could play a more effective role in some areas 
of public activity where traditionally many, many had thought the market 
had no role whatsoever to play. So there was a reassessment of the role 
of the market, an acknowledgement of the positive contribution the market 
could make.

DIGNAN:                    But Kinnock still lost. 
The union block vote was ditched by his successor John Smith. To the irritation 
of Labour modernisers, Smith rejected further radical change. Following 
his death came Blair and New Labour. Eager to attract affluent voters, 
Blair reformed the party's Clause Four commitment to public ownership and 
promised not to raise income tax. But what did this mean for the poor? 


                        This self-help shop is 
in one of Julia Drown's poorest estates. It's a place to get advice on 
how to get out of welfare dependency and into work. That's also New Labour's 
approach to tackling poverty. Gone is the idea of raising the living standards 
of the least well-off by redistributing wealth from the better-off. 

DROWN:                    Well what the Government 
is wanting to do is to make it very clear that the route out of poverty 
is to get into work - for everybody who can work. And it has actually been 
a successful policy already. I mean here are things like the New Deal for 
Lone Parents, enabling them to get into work and the New Deal for the Young 
Unemployed, for the long-term unemployed, really is equipping people with 
the skills they need to be able to get into work.

BENJAMIN WEGG-PROSSER:        What we have is a party which has 
changed and which has modernised. It's brought in new policies but it's 
values have remained, the values of social justice, of fairness, of equal 
opportunity exist.  What has changed is the way in which you get those 
things.

DIGNAN:                    But those who know the 
party's history disagree. They argue that New Labour's attitude to the 
poor has changed quite fundamentally. Even the red rose now seems to belong 
to another age.  

BRIVATI:                    Blair doesn't believe, 
and Brown doesn't believe in equality of outcome. They believe in equality 
of opportunity. Now that can make huge differences to millions of people's 
lives, but it's different. It's fundamentally different.

DAVID MARQUAND:            I think they see it like this. 
Here we are in this ferocious, savage, highly-competitive global economy. 
That's a fact of life, we didn't create this but we live in it, it's a 
jungle. It is not about, sort of, taking money away from the very successful 
to, to, to pour it back into the disadvantaged. It's is about giving the 
disadvantaged the tools with which they can themselves struggle and compete, 
if you like, in, in this new global marketplace."

DIGNAN:                    For most of its hundred 
years Labour has struggled to win over the aspiring voters of the suburbs 
and ever-expanding private housing estates. In towns like Swindon, New 
Labour has made keeping the trust of these voters its main objective. What 
that appears to mean is constantly re-assuring them about sensitive issues 
such as taxation..

DROWN:                    Well, they didn't completely 
trust the Labour Party - I think there was a particular issue on tax. The 
Tories' double whammy posters and so on did have a big effect and it was 
reinforcing some of their fears over the Labour Party. People here work, 
work hard and they want to be rewarded for, for being in work; and, and 
in previous elections they have been worried that, that Labour would just 
keep taxing them."

DIGNAN:                    So how would our Swindon 
advertising agency market today's Labour Party? By branding it as a party 
that appeals to rich and poor alike. Those who were pushing for change 
in the Nineteen Eighties believe Labour had to create this new coalition 
if it was ever to win power again.
  
CLARKE:                    The great mass enterprises 
of production which were characteristic of our economy and which were the 
basis, the core of Labour support, have gone -  as the economy has changed, 
technology's moved forward, and so on. So Labour has had to think, how 
can we build a coalition across a wide range of different types of people 
in different types of occupation which is different from our traditional 
coalition - but focused on the same goal, to achieve a just society which 
means those who are worst off get a better crack

DIGNAN:                    New Labour's greatest strength 
- it's ability to appeal to a wide coalition of voters - could, potentially, 
be its biggest weakness. Trying to please everyone, it's argued, may mean 
avoiding tough decisions.

ACTUALITY:                For you, for everybody. Both 
individual and inclusive of everyone else.         

BRIVATI:                    The New Labour Party in 
my view, is a very, very, broad church. It's so broad, it's almost meaningless 
the kinds of constituencies it's trying to represent. Much broader than 
it's ever tried to be in it's history before. What the Labour brand is 
trying to represent are really some very, very, diluted values. Compassion, 
maybe hope, maybe but, they're so diluted I mean no politician is gonna 
stand up and say, "I'm against compassion. I'm against hope."

TONY WRIGHT:                You can't just live in a world 
I think where you think you can, you can as it were please everybody. There 
comes a point where you have to be absolutely up front about what you are 
doing. It does occasionally say things, mean saying things to people that, 
that may seem difficult; that may on the face of it seem unpopular; that 
 some focus group may have told you might cause a bit of trouble - but, 
but I'm afraid political leadership involves that."

DIGNAN:                    The old Labour Party made 
the people living in council estates like this one their main priority. 
New Labour also wants to help the least well off but not it seems by asking 
the affluent to make sacrifices. Increasingly, this is seen as the biggest 
source of tension within the party.

DROWN:                    We got our fingers so burnt 
in, in '92 that you know you can't help thinking people - in one survey 
will say oh yes I'll pay a penny more on, on tax",  and they - it's as 
if somehow in their mind they think that it's just one pence, and then 
when it really gets to the ballot box and that paper they, they, they haven't 
voted for it - the British people haven't voted for those taxes and it 
is because they want to be rewarded for working hard.

WRIGHT:                    What that doesn't mean 
though is I think that you become immobilised because you're, you're, you're 
frightened of elements of that coalition fracturing if you move in a certain 
direction rather than another.  I mean I just don't think it's the case 
that middle class people, for example, are prepared to see basic public 
services run down, come under severe funding pressure, because we dare 
not confront an argument about taxation . I mean that's what political 
leadership is all about; we have this huge majority, we're doing awfully 
well, but I think a little bit more courage on that front is probably the 
key to our longer term success."

ACTUALITY: (MUSICIANS)        "One, two, three."

DIGNAN::                    The economy of Wiltshire 
is growing fast and tonight Julia Drown celebrates with the county's businessmen 
and women in a Swindon hotel. Regarded by Tony Blair as an essential component 
of the New Labour coalition there's no sign they're going to be asked to 
pay more for a fairer society.
       
WRIGHT:                    I'd like to see Tony Blair 
make some big speeches actually saying yes we're trying to tax people sensibly, 
we're trying to tax in new ways to, to raise the money that we need. But 
actually taxation is a kind of civic responsibility - because if you don't 
do that, you've got every party in the land simply following a tax cutting 
agenda. I think that's the end for a party of the, party of the Left."

DIGNAN:                    A hundred years ago Labour 
set out to create a more just society. Tony Blair says it failed largely 
because of its inability to succeed at the polls. Blair's created a coalition 
of society's winners and losers. But has it been at the expense of enfeebling 
the party's values and discarding its original purpose.