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The Shadow Communications Agency (SCA) was set up as a unit that would ‘draft
strategy, conduct and interpret research, produce advertising and campaign themes,
and provide communications support as necessary’ (Gould, 1998, p. 55). The research –
both qualitative and quantitative – was fed into the campaigning process and into the
party as it embarked on the process of modernising itself and of making itself more
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relevant to the Britain of the 1980s and 1990s. It was ‘largely a volunteer team of
advertisers, headed by Philip Gould and Chris Powell, and was essentially an addendum
to the Director, to whom it reported’ (Butler & Kavanagh, 1992, p. 46). At its first formal
meeting were members of advertising agencies, advisers from the MORI polling
agency, market researchers, political consultants, party officers/employees (Peter
Mandelson, Patricia Hewitt from the leader’s office) and politicians (Gould, 1998, p. 57).
In the run-up to the 1987 election the American political consultant Joe Napolitan also
‘started to help Neil Kinnock (the Labour leader)’(Gould,1998,p.162).

Although the SCA provided research and advice, did it initiate policies or merely
implement policies decided elsewhere? Did the experts and professionals, in other
words, play a critical role in policy development? Butler and Kavanagh suggest that ‘the
policy review was initiated from the top of the party’ rather than in response to grass
roots demands, and that the SCA was a unit that provided the ammunition that party
modernisers could then use to initiate change (1992, pp. 53–4; see also Shaw, 1994,
pp. 54–5; and Gould, 1998, pp. 88–89). And the modernisers did change the party: from
the 1980s through to the mid 1990s, old policies and positions were abandoned in
favour of new ones as the (New) Labour Party re-positioned itself.With the Conservative
government entering a period of crisis after its return to power in 1992, the Labour
Party began to move ahead in the polls.

The organisational changes introduced in the 1980s and carried through into the
1990s,alongside the major review of policies,transformed the Labour Party and made it
electable once again. Its organisational structure allowed it to focus its activities of
converting disenchanted Conservative voters, on targeting key and marginal seats (e.g.
Operation Victory, Operation Turnout), using new techniques to target voters and
opinion leaders (e.g. phone banks, rapid rebuttal, the internet) and, more generally,
adopting strategies that would enable it to get its message across to voters in a clear Professionalisation in the British Electoral and Political Context
and simple way.Success in 1997 was repeated in 2001 aided,in part,by the weakness of
any opposition. With no credible opposition in 2001, it was highly unlikely that New
Labour was ever going to lose the general election. And, in both these elections,
research for the purpose of electoral advantage was integrated into the party
organisation (see Cook,2002).

In many ways, the campaigns fought by New Labour in 1997 and 2001 can be seen as
the templates for contemporary elections. They created a structure that achieved
success and delivered a style of politics that suited New Labour’s condition and its need
to recreate itself as a trusted party. It allowed for a centralisation of power under the 55