Labour parties, ideas transfer and ideological positioning: Australia and Britain compared

Abstract

As part of this special issue examining policy transfer between the Labour Parties in Australia and Britain, this paper seeks to explore the relationship between the two on ideological positioning. In the 1990s there was substantial ideas transfer from the Australian Hawke-Keating government to Blair 'New Labour' in Britain, as both parties made a lunge towards the economic centre. This paper analyses how the inheritors of that shift, the Rudd/Gillard government in Australia and the Milliband and Corbyn leaderships in Britain, are seeking to define the role and purpose of labour parties in its wake. It examines the extent to which they are learning and borrowing from one another, and finds that a combination of divergent economic and political contexts have led to strikingly limited contemporary policy transfer.

Policy transfer routes: an evidence-based conceptual model to explain policy adoption

“…Edwards and Beech 2016) conditions. For example, the British and Australian Labour parties operated in similar neo-liberal systems but economic adversity required British Labour to adopt a dramatically different political position (Edwards and Beech 2016). The table shows how many times the factor is mentioned in total and how many different items mention the factor.…”

The British Labour Party: back to the wilderness

“…Miliband tried to connect his ideas of the 'squeezed middle' to the struggles of the employed strivers outside of the wealthy classes (BBC News, 2010). Yet he could not adapt his metropolitanism; grasping the depth of concern from Labour-inclined voters towards mass immigration from Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, and gay marriage, was a cultural bridge too far for him to cross (Edwards and Beech, 2016). Corbyn, like Miliband, is London Labour.…”

Brexit and the Labour Party: Europe, cosmopolitanism and the narrowing of traditions

“…After all, the Parliamentary Conservative Party has been riven by the effects of the outcome of the referendum vote on 23 rd June 2016 and it has cost two Conservative Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers their careers. Nonetheless it is evident from data from the two notable national polls taken in the build up to the EU referendum -the 2014 EU Parliament election and the 2015 UK general election -and in the three notable national polls taken since -the 2017 UK general election, the 2019 EU Parliament election and the 2019 general election -that the second great party of state has experienced the culmination of a 'values gap' (Edwards and Beech, 2016;Beech, 2018). This gap is the outcome of a process of decentring of the Labour Party.…”