It’s now nearly 25 years since Tony Blair declared the 'class war is over' at the annual conference of the Labour Party in Bournemouth on 28 September 1999.

With the wind still in his sails after his May 1, 1997, general election landslide, Blair was looking forwards to the new millennium. He talked of a nation renewed and a political party reborn. ‘To every nation a purpose. To every party a cause’, he proclaimed.

In the ‘New Britain’, ‘new’ Labour was to be both architect and midwife of the progressive politics that were to permanently replace the forces of conservatism, best exemplified by the previous 18 years of Tory government. It was to be the dawn of not just a new era but of a new century that would span for decades into the future.

So, two years into this government of self-proclaimed ‘new radicals’, Blair claimed he was laying the foundations for a bright future, saying, ‘All around us [is] the challenge of change’.

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But these challenges could be overcome, he argued, by unleashing the talent of the populace because, he believed, ‘Talent is 21st century wealth’. This, when enabled by education and tied to knowledge, would create a modern meritocracy where social mobility and social justice would run hand-in-hand together.

So, the class war was over and ‘new’ Labour would liberate Britain from the old class divisions. Equality was now the new anti-elitist and anti-establishment ethos. No more was right versus left. No more socialism versus capitalism. The ‘Third Way’ was the way ahead.

Turn the clock forward 25 years and despite the dire differences over the states of the economy and public debt, there’s an awful lot that sounds surprisingly similar in Starmer’s statements.

The most obvious of these is the key overarching theme of partnership. Not between nations but between classes. In the crucial creation of wealth, Starmer, along with loyal lieutenant, Rachel Reeves, claims that Labour is, as Blair did before, simultaneously pro-worker and pro-business. Class divisions between capital and labour have dissipated, if not disappeared, in their worldview.

In the various iterations of the ‘New Deal for Working People’, now renamed ‘Labour’s Plan to Make Work Pay’, Starmer’s Labour says: ‘Workers, employers and government working in partnership will create a prosperous economy that works for everyone’ and ‘We will bring in a new partnership with business and trade unions to turn the page on 14 years of failure’.

Tony Blair promised a 'third way'Tony Blair promised a 'third way' (Image: Newsquest Media Group)

And, at the annual conference of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) last week in Brighton, Starmer told delegates: ‘Partnership is a more difficult way of doing politics. I know there’s clarity in the old ways, the zero-sum ways: business versus worker, management versus union … That kind of politics is not what the British people want. When I say to the public our policies will be pro-business and pro-worker, they don’t look at me as if I’m deluded, they see it as the most ordinary, sensible thing in the world’.

Yet there are some fundamental flaws with the agenda of partnership as a strategy for mutual gains. Gaining the consent and cooperation of capital in this project requires not coercion and compulsion but allowing capital to significantly set the terms of this concertation. That’s the price for its collaboration, whether it be tax breaks, government grants or a deregulated labour market. Otherwise, it’s not disinterest that is the prospect but, rather, disinvestment and disputation.

This is because capital has superior resources and power. It is from this basis that an idiom like ‘money begets money’ comes. Consequently, the compromise between capital and labour - between classes – is never an equal one. Capital is superordinate and labour is subordinate, as always. Labour’s ‘New Deal for Working People’ will not substantially alter this way of the world.

However, workers and their unions are not hopeless and helpless victims in this situation. Though many welcomed the election of Labour in 1997, it did not take too long until many unions leaders started becoming seen as the ‘awkward squad’. Some rejected the terms of the Blairite bargain. Some, like then RMT rail union leader, Bob Crow, rejected the notion of a bargain entirely. But bargains were struck over employment law reforms to further the enactment of the first flush of ‘Fairness at Work’ in 1999.

Already, there is disquiet over the terms of the push for partnership from present union leaders such as Sharon Graham, general secretary of the second biggest union, Unite. The likes of Graham fear delay in and dilution of the ‘New Deal for Working People’ as a result of the lobbying of business interests.

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The fear is this could spread from the issues of reneging upon introducing single worker status - to end bogus self-employment - and a total ban on zero-hour contracts to other aspects like completely ending ‘fire and rehire’.

Graham also wants part of the bigger bargain of partnership to be about reinstating the social wage of benefits to decent levels, hence the criticism over cutting winter fuel payments for pensioners and maintaining the cap on child benefit. The likes of Graham advocate a wealth tax on the very rich to pay for this.

Graham is joined in these calls by other union leaders like Matt Wrack of the Fire Brigades Union, Fran Heathcote of the PCS public servants’ union, and Mick Lynch of the RMT in trying to hold Starmer and Reeves’ ‘feet to the fire’.

What is noticeable this time around is that the union opposition to Starmer has begun much, much earlier than it did for Blair. The ‘awkward squad’ arrived in the early 2000s. Starmer does not seem to have been given any kind of honeymoon by most union leaders.

That the modern meritocracy that Blair promised never came to pass does not bode well for Starmer’s attempt to do the same, not least because Blair had the benefit of not just higher party and personal poll ratings but crucially a growing economy and low levels of public debt, certainly for a decade until the ‘credit crunch’ presaged the Global Financial Crisis.

Gregor Gall is a visiting professor of industrial relations at the University of Leeds and author of the ‘Bob Crow – socialist, leader, fighter’ (Manchester University Press, 2017) and ‘Mick Lynch: The making of a working-class hero’ (Manchester University Press, 2024).