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Policymaking in the Pub: New Labour’s European Policy Failure

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Political Mistakes and Policy Failures in International Relations

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Abstract

This chapter recollects how an overheard phone call in the Red Lion Public House in 1997 threw New Labour’s European policy into disarray. The chapter investigates criticisms and defences of New Labour’s European policy, showing that the notion of failure is itself a construction, born out of political contestation and blame allocation when groups with a vested interest in policy processes deem things to have ‘gone wrong’. The chapter finds that the balance of commentary on the pro-European side depicts New Labour’s European policy as a programme failure born out of decisional failure. In the search for culprits, the Red Lion episode has been alighted upon as symptomatic of both New Labour’s over-reliance on closed decision-making and its over-reliance on ‘spin’.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK

    Oliver Daddow

Authors
  1. Oliver Daddow
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Geschwister-Scholl-Institute of Political Science, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Munich, Germany

    Andreas Kruck

  2. Department of Politics, University of Sussex, Brighton, East Sussex, United Kingdom

    Kai Oppermann

  3. Institute of Social Sciences and History, Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg, Magdeburg, Germany

    Alexander Spencer

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Daddow, O. (2018). Policymaking in the Pub: New Labour’s European Policy Failure. In: Kruck, A., Oppermann, K., Spencer, A. (eds) Political Mistakes and Policy Failures in International Relations. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68173-3_5

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