British Election: A Commentary‪.‬

The 1997 election is being rightly celebrated as, above all, a huge relief. For the moment New Labour has the benefit of everybody's doubt. There is, after all, an alternative, and people are willing to wait and see what it looks like. And the size of the majority means that things can be done: over the next four or five years what the alternative means will become pretty clear. But this should not prevent us also recognizing that this election has closed a chapter in the history of socialism. For almost a century the Labour Party has been committed to "parliamentary socialism": in this election for the first time, that commitment was definitively abandoned. We need to reckon with this: to look back briefly over the past three decades and consider what "parliamentary socialism" was, and why it failed; and to reflect on what its termination in the Labour Party implies for the construction of a new socialist project.