This chapter examines how ideas about class, community, and individualism figured in the modernization of the Labour Party in the 1980s and 1990s. It examines the development, under Kinnock and Blair, of a new imagined constituency for Labour—a ‘new working class’ or, as Blair put it, ‘new middle class’. The sources of this vision lay partly in academic theorizing, but also in the backgrounds of key modernizers, and in new polling and focus group techniques for researching social attitudes. Modernizers understood the new majoritarian constituency in society as united by aspirations, and reoriented socialism to emphasize the use of community action—through the state—to secure a wide distribution of opportunity and security throughout society, in order to enable individuals to achieve those aspirations. The chapter concludes by examining the impact of these beliefs on policy relating to poverty, inequality, trade unionism, and community.
