Labour's electoral college chose Ed Miliband as the party's new leader on the basis of votes that were influenced by trade union activities. Some trade unions made a number of decisive interventions in the 2010 leadership election contest: they coordinated their nominations, canvassed intensely for their nominees (channelling considerable resources into their campaigns), and distributed ballots with strong recommendations in the same package as the voting slips. Such was the closeness of the election that, we argue, these interventions determined the result. This conclusion is all the more surprising since commentators and academics alike had maintained that the introduction of 'one member, one vote' had fundamentally reduced the role of trade unions in Labour party politics. In contrast, our opinion is that having been apparently deprived of control by the introduction of one member one vote, trade union elites developed a strategy to mould the outcome of the Labour leadership contest and so reassert their traditional influence over the party. Such was the extent of the role played by the trade unions that, we believe, the normative legitimacy of the electoral process by which Ed Miliband was elected can be called into question although the rules of the contest were not broken.

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This chapter assesses the role played by nostalgia during the New Labour era. Building on the analysis presented in this book’s introduction, it outlines how Tony Blair and other leading New Labour figures were overtly hostile to nostalgia and attempted to overturn the party’s attachment to the past. Yet, whilst symbolic modernising changes were made (most notably to Clause IV of the party’s constitution in 1995), this chapter questions the totality of the anti-nostalgic reorientation that took place. It argues that, during this period, nostalgia was suppressed rather than eradicated. An underlying nostalgia continued to inform the party’s identity (particularly at a rank-and-file level where activists were unencumbered by the wider political and electoral considerations of the party’s leadership). Furthermore, when interacting with their party, New Labour élites were often forced to deploy nostalgia instrumentally in order both to increase their political capital and to secure their goals and objectives.