But first, the Labour 
Party spent a decade persuading the country that it could be trusted not 
to turn Britain into some sort of socialist state. The pillars of Old Labour 
were demolished and replaced with the New Labour project. Out went any 
notion of trade union domination. Out went old-style nationalisation. Out 
went the old tax and spend policies and out went unilateralism. No more 
being soft on defence. But all that had been effectively achieved by 1997 
and Labour had a new edifice... a new set of policies. And the voters liked 
them.  But now it's beginning to look as though the new structure is getting 
a little shaky. The trade unions want to bring back some of those old policies. 
I'll be talking about that to the Northern Ireland Secretary John Reid 
after this report from Paul Wilenius.
            
PAUL WILENIUS:                   Tony Blair brought the 
Labour Party out of the political darkness.  He created New Labour, to 
show to the British voters that Old Labour was gone.  Out went its negative 
image as a high tax, anti-war, union-dominated party - never to return. 
 That's what he hoped.  Now that highly successful political brand of New 
Labour may be in danger from its very own party.

CONSERVATIVE PARTY
 ELECTION BROADCAST:            New taxes, new job losses, 
new strikes, new mortgage rises, new lighter sentences and the break-up 
of the United Kingdom.   New Labour - New danger. 

WILENIUS:                    In 1997 the Tories tried 
to demonise Tony Blair. Their controversial campaign implied that behind 
his appealing smile and image, was the red glow of Old Labour. Although 
the Demon Eyes' message didn't succeed then,  now it may start to resonate 
as any drift to the Left in the party poses a growing and gathering danger 
to New Labour.

DAVE PRENTIS:                I think the Labour Party 
itself and the government have realised that the New Labour experiment 
that has gone on now for six years hasn't delivered everything that they 
thought it would do, and that perhaps they've got to come back to traditional 
values as well.

PHIL WOOLAS MP:                If we pretend to ourselves 
that we've converted the English public to being full blooded socialists 
then we are deluding ourselves. Slowly and surely, the values in this country's 
politics are changing, but we haven't got there yet.

DENIS HEALEY:                 I warn you there are going 
to be howls of anguish from the eighty-thousand rich people. 

WILENIUS:                    There were squeals of 
delight from the party when Labour Chancellor Denis Healey said he would 
tax the rich until the pips squeak in the nineteen-seventies. It helped 
create the image of Labour as a party of high taxes, which contributed 
to four humiliating election defeats. It took nearly twenty years to persuade 
the electorate it could once again be trusted on tax and the economy.

                        However, this year, Labour's 
old-style tax policies began emerging from the shadows.  There was less 
stealth and more openness.  Chancellor Gordon Brown slapped a penny on 
tax, through higher National Insurance Contributions, to pay for a better 
Health Service. And it's not just Gordon who's opening up this political 
Pandora's box. Even Tony Blair's talking about redistribution of wealth.

                        Here in North Durham Labour 
Party activists are gathering in the local working men's club to discuss 
the Labour Party Conference in Blackpool.   But their mood is markedly 
different from in previous years, as they now want the Labour leadership 
to start listening to their views. 

                        So what do you all feel 
when you heard Tony Blair use the "R" word - redistribution of wealth? 


UNNAMED MAN:                I'd certainly have no problem 
with paying more tax. I mean I feel we earn a living, we demand the services, 
it's part of our remit to pay for the services and if I can get better 
education for my children, better services, you know from health care, 
better anything, I am more than happy to pay my way.  
  
WILENIUS:                    On The Record asked two 
hundred and two of the four hundred and eleven Chairs in Labour held constituencies 
if they support further rises in taxes to fund better public services. 
 One hundred and eighty-nine said yes, only six said no. 

PRENTIS:                    I think we've definitely 
won the argument that taxation should pay for public services.    And I 
think the way in which the Labour Party won the last election, on a platform 
of improving our public services and also paying for it through public 
expenditure, I think that was accepted by the electorate.  

JAMES PURNELL MP:            The danger of talking about redistribution 
is that it could be misunderstood on both sides. It could be misunderstood 
on the Left of the Labour Party, as a green light to go back to tax and 
spend or on the right, as a return, as a way of attacking the Labour Party 
on the sort of grounds they used to in the eighties. But actually the challenge 
and I think the reason that the Prime Minister has done it, is it gives 
us an opportunity to have that argument, to convince people on the left 
of the Labour Party that the New Labour agenda is the way of delivering 
on those values, but also to convince the British country as a whole that 
the progressive agenda which the Prime Minister is pursuing is the one 
that they want.  

WILENIUS:                    Union leaders filing 
in to Number Ten for beer and sandwiches with a Labour Prime Minister. 
 Public sector workers on the picket line.  The image of unions running 
the country did Labour terrible damage in the nineteen-seventies.  The 
Winter of Discontent threw Labour ambition on to the political scrapheap 
for twenty years.    New Labour shed that image, but today it's making 
a comeback.   Britain is facing a rash of strikes on the Underground, the 
railways and even the fire service. Union leaders were feted by Tony Blair 
at the Trades Union Congress and the Labour Party is increasingly dependent 
on union cash. Now the unions are demanding new laws to improve employment 
rights and they have the backing of many in the party.   

                        When asked - should British 
trade unions be given employment rights to match other European countries? 
 - one hundred and seventy-six constituency chairs said yes, six said no. 
  

PRENTIS:                    There's no justification 
whatsoever that our counterparts in the rest of Europe should have better 
rights and we do really believe that the government should move on employment 
rights and I will be really surprised, very surprised if the....we don't 
get approaches from the government to actually rectify some of the anomalies, 
that we've lived with for many years.

WOOLAS:                I'm also very conscious that the 
role of the Labour government and of the New Labour creed is to say to 
the trade unions, you have your seat at the table, you have a legitimate 
point of view and we will and have to listen.  But if we say you determine 
the policies, you decide what the law on employment rights is going to 
be, then we will be throwing the baby out with the bath water and we will 
go back to the days if we were to go down that course where the electorate 
said, who's running this country, the people I elected or the trade unions 
and that's a big, the biggest danger of that lies there for the trade unions.

WILENIUS:                    A defining moment for 
Tony Blair was the ditching of Clause Four, which committed the party to 
State ownership of industry.  Instead he embraced pro-market philosophy 
and eventually endorsed the privatisation policies driven through by Lady 
Thatcher. His controversial move gained critical support from the electorate 
and traditionalists in the Labour Party accepted it too. 

                        But now support for privatisation 
has been derailed. Railtrack hit the buffers and was reclaimed by the State. 
 There have been renewed calls for re-nationalisation of other privatised 
industries. And now there are union demands for a moratorium on the use 
of private companies in the provision of public services, such as health 
and education.    In fact, the Labour leadership faces defeat this week 
on the use of PFI, or Private Finance Initiatives, to deliver public services 
through the private sector.
 
UNNAMED MAN:                I'm very against PFIs, I think 
we are building up a problem for the future because they are built for 
profit. If someone is going to put money in, they want a good return out 
of it and in future generations this will go on for perhaps sixty years, 
paying for a hospital at a much higher rate than we would by providing 
the funding now. 

UNNAMED WOMAN:            I don't fully support everything 
that Dave was saying, you know being totally opposed to all private finance 
initiatives because a lot of things that are happening, certainly within 
the County Durham, could not be happening at all if we weren't using Private 
Finance Initiative. 

WILENIUS:                    When asked should the 
government call a halt to any further Private Finance Initiative contracts, 
seventy-nine constituency Chairs said yes, ninety-two said no.  And when 
asked if privatisation had reached its limit, a hundred and forty-three 
constituency Chairs said yes, forty-one said no. 

PRENTIS:                    In our motion we're highly 
critical of the government policy of using the private companies. We're 
highly critical of what's happening around PFI and we're very critical 
about what is happening to our members. Many low paid workers, mainly women 
workers, are being pushed into private companies so that they can make 
profits from them. And we'll take that argument into the Conference, we 
will be pushing our motion to a vote and we expect the Labour Party Conference 
to go along with the proposal that we're putting forward, that there has 
to be a major investigation into the use of PFI.                    

NEIL KINNOCK:                I really think that the trade 
unions ought to reconsider their position and say whether they don't want 
the immediacy of access to investment expenditure and say too, how long 
they're prepared to wait until these absolutely critically important improvements 
in hospital building for instance, and in education development, to take 
place. I'm certainly not willing to wait, I'd rather get on with it, using 
a combination of private investment and public resources, which is actually 
what is being done.

PRENTIS:                    Within unions and my union 
in particular and we are the biggest affiliates of the Labour Party, there 
are questions being raised about our link with the Labour Party. Questions 
along the lines of you know, how can you be funding a party which privatises 
your members?  How can you be funding a party and our members be adversely 
affected by the policies of the government and I think the, you know we 
do have a selling job within our own union over the, over the coming year 
to keep the links that we've got.  I believe that the union will stay with 
the Labour Party, but what has happened by the difficulties that we've 
had over the last six years, it has meant that we've had to review our 
link and to actually look at the reason for it and whether or not, you 
know, we ourselves get value for money from that link.

WILENIUS:                    The Ban the Bomb marches 
of the 1950s and '60s were a visible display of the pacifist streak running 
deep through the heart of the party. Even Tony Blair was a member of the 
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. But the policy of unilaterally scrapping 
nuclear weapons became an political millstone. It took three electoral 
defeats before the Labour leader Neil Kinnock was able to ditch the policy 
which made Labour look weak on defence.
  
Now the pacifist element inside Labour is getting more vocal, this time 
over the threat of war with Iraq. The anti war protesters were active outside 
Parliament last week preparing for yesterday's huge demonstration in London. 
Those calling for peace have the backing of many in the Labour Party. They've 
also got the support of Labour MPs, Ministers and even members of the Cabinet. 
The scale and depth of opposition to unilateral action is shown by our 
survey.
 
Asked if Britain should join the US in a military assault on Iraq, even 
if there is no clear sanction from the UN, only eighteen constituency chairs 
said yes, one hundred and sixty-seven said no. 

CHRIS SMITH MP:                If I am asked in Parliament 
to support the deployment of British troops in Iraq without a specific 
United Nations' mandate to do so, I would not be prepared to vote in favour 
of such a measure and I think there would be many others of my colleagues 
who would share that view.

WOOLAS:                    The biggest danger to any 
government in a situation which might involve military action in my view, 
is that if the belief were to take hold, that that government was being 
directed by the forces within its own political party, rather than what 
is right for the armed forces and for the country as a whole, then the 
electorate will punish that government very severely indeed. 

WILENIUS:                    The danger for Tony Blair 
is that the old image of Labour as an anti-war, high tax, union-run party 
is beginning to creep back. If he takes on the forces gathering behind 
him, he could end up in a damaging battle with his own party. But if he 
gives too much ground, he may prove to the voters that the Demon Eyes attack 
was right all along.

HELEN JACKSON MP:            I've been around in the party 
for a long time.  I joined in 1962 and helped in Harold Wilson's constituency. 
 And I never really liked the term New Labour, I didn't feel 'new' myself, 
and so far as I'm concerned, I'm a long standing member of the Labour Party. 
I think the important thing is that time moves on. 

KINNOCK:                    I never used the term 
New Labour, I just think that there's an eternity of values, which clearly 
have to be adapted in changing dynamic circumstances, a political party 
that doesn't adapt to change is a dead party, I think we are witnessing 
that with the Conservative Party at the present time. And there was a period 
when  the Labour Party, went through such a, a veil of tears, but I've 
never been bothered by the use of the term new, the adjective new, obviously 
it had a limited shelf life, as the word new always does. 

WILENIUS:                    There have always been 
those in the Labour Party who considered its re-branding as New Labour 
to be nothing more than a marketing ploy. But others wanted to abandon 
the Labour of the past completely and transform the party to its very soul. 
This week in Blackpool we might find out whether the ghost of Labour's 
past is about to resurface, and haunt the new face of Labour.