Labour since 1994

Soundings After Thatcher John Callaghan Blair argued in 1995 that Labour's exclusion from office for much of the twentieth century derived from the narrowing of ideological focus represented by the party's adoption of Clause 4 in 1918. The project of making the most of the non-Conservative vote led him to consider various practical ways of working with the Liberal Democrats to create a new left-of-center consensus. At the same time he sought to distance himself ideologically from all that had made the Labour Party a 'loser'.