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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Britain’s first Labour government took office on 22 January 1924. Its centenary provides an opportunity to reassess the party's performance over the last 100 years, and with an election pending, the character and purpose of the modern party.
Labour defined the dominant political settlement of much of the Twentieth Century: the welfare state. It has achieved much in pursuit of material change, social reform and equality. It has challenged patriarchy, racism and the legacy of imperialism, promoted human rights and delivered democratic and constitutional renewal. Yet any honest assessment must acknowledge a century littered with failures and missed opportunities.
In this compelling book, Jon Cruddas, one of the country's foremost experts on Labour politics, details the vivid personalities and epic factional battles, the immense achievements and profound disappointments that define a century of Labour. Uniquely framed around competing visions of socialist justice within the Party, he provides a way to rethink Labour history, the divisions and factions on the left and to reassess key figures at the helm of the movement from Keir Hardie through to Keir Starmer.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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Table of Contents
Cover
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright Page
Epigraph
Acknowledgements
Preface
Notes
Chapter 1 History
Origin, Death, Purpose
Justice
Admissions
Notes
Chapter 2 Justice
Justice and the Left
Three Visions of Justice
Welfare
Freedom
Virtue
Labour and Socialism Revisited
Notes
Chapter 3 Origins
The Labour Representation Committee
Taff Vale
Labour and Liberalism
Keir Hardie
1906–1914
The First World War
Clause IV
Notes
Chapter 4 Minorities (1924–1931)
Ramsay MacDonald
Path to Victory
The First Labour Government
Interregnum
The Second Labour Government
Mythology
R.H. Tawney
Notes
Chapter 5 Thirties (1931–1939)
Lansbury and Attlee
Complications: Labour and Patriotism
Intellectual Reorientation
Years of Consolidation
Notes
Chapter 6 Jerusalem (1939–1951)
Wartime Coalition
Building Jerusalem
Questions of Economic and Social Progress
Liberty and Human Rights
Endnote
Notes
Chapter 7 Waste (1951–1964)
Factionalism
Shades of Revisionism
Industrial Pluralism
Post-war Sociology
The New Left
Notes
Chapter 8 Strife (1964–1979)
Upswing and Second Landslide
In Place of Strife
Who Governs Britain?
Return to Power
Notes
Chapter 9 Wilderness (1979–1987)
Thatcherism
The Darkness
Consolidation
Notes
Chapter 10 Revival (1987–1997)
Policy Review
The Quiet Radical
1994–1997
Notes
Chapter 11 Landslides (1997–2010)
The New Labour Triptych
New Labour: From Boom to Bust
1997–2001: Radicalism
2001–2005: Turbulence
2005–2007: Trauma
2007–2010: Descent
Diminishment
Notes
Chapter 12 Isolation (2010–2024)
Escaping Thatcher
Ed Miliband 2010–2015
Jeremy Corbyn
The Corbyn Years: 2015–2017
The Corbyn Years: 2017–2019
Keir Starmer
Starmer: The Candidate
Starmer: The Leader
Four Pivots
Upturn
Notes
Chapter 13 Purpose
Vivid History
Inevitability and Contingency
Purpose
Notes
Appendices
Appendix: A
Appendix B
Appendix C
Further reading
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 12
Table 12.1 Labour leadership election, 2010
Table 12.2 Labour leadership election, 2015
Table 12.3 Labour leadership election, 2020
Appendices
Table A.1 Labour Party Individual Membership
Table A.2 Governments Formed Following General Elections since 1900
Table A.3a General Election Results, 1918–2019: UK – Seats Won
Table A.3b General Election Results, 1918–2019: UK – Share of Vote (%)
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Dedication
To Anna
A CENTURY OF LABOUR
Jon Cruddas
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Jon Cruddas 2024
The right of Jon Cruddas to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2024 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
111 River Street
Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5834-6
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023938517
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Epigraph
‘The Cause of Labour is the Hope of the World’
W. Crane, The Workers Maypole, Justice: The Organ of Social Democracy, Social Democratic Federation, 1894.
Acknowledgements
Many people have helped with this book. In particular I would like to thank Adrian Pabst and Patrick Diamond for supplying detailed comments on sections of the draft. I must also acknowledge a debt of appreciation to the two anonymous readers of the draft for their detailed criticism and very helpful guidance. I wish to also thank Peter Nolan and Michael Sandel for conversations ranging over several years on key economic and philosophical themes covered in the book, and to Kenneth O. Morgan and John Shepherd for their guidance in relation to labour history as well as Eric Shaw and Emmanuelle Avril. I am also indebted to Francesca Klug for educating me on the history of human rights.
I also wish to thank Anne-Marie Green for her advice on understanding decades of Labour’s equalities legislation, as well as to David Evans, Matthew Jackson, Angela Cartwright, Helen Pearce and Fraser Welsh from Labour’s Head Office for their help over membership data. Throughout the project, Sarah Hadden has been a brilliant help in working through the empirical data.
At Polity I would like to thank Louise Knight for initially suggesting the project and her continued support alongside Inès Boxman.
I wish to thank my staff and local party for their patience while I worked on this project – and the extraordinary support they have shown me since I was first selected as a candidate some 25 years ago. I have been active in the trade union and labour movement for 44 years and have worked for and represented the Labour Party for 35 years. During that time, I have been privileged to work alongside many thousands of members, activists, staff and Labour representatives. This book is my attempt to honour their commitment to the cause of Labour. I still believe it to be the hope of the world.
Finally, as my time as MP for Dagenham and Rainham comes to an end, I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to my constituents across Dagenham and Rainham for allowing me to be their political representative.
Preface
‘Lenin Dead (official). Ramsay MacDonald Premier’1
Following an inconclusive December election and six weeks of confusion, speculation and negotiation, Britain’s first Labour government took office a century ago, on 22 January 1924. Yet there have only been six Labour Prime Ministers: Ramsay MacDonald, Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson, Jim Callaghan, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Only three, Attlee, Wilson and Blair, won a majority at a general election. Despite many extraordinary achievements, including the introduction of a welfare state and the National Health Service (NHS), Labour has only held power for a total of 33 years. Why has Labour underperformed in British politics? Why has the party often struggled to win elections and then hold on to power? The centenary of the first Labour government provides an opportunity to try to answer these questions, reassess the party’s performance over the last 100 years and inspect the character and purpose of the modern party.
The first Labour government was led by Ramsay MacDonald, having been elected leader from the left of the party two years earlier. MacDonald was a magnetic force, arguably the most significant political figure of the 1920s. In the 15 years from 1914 to the election of the second Labour government in 1929, the party had successfully replaced the Liberals as the main opposition to the Conservatives. Few would have anticipated such events; there was no inevitability this would occur despite social and economic changes that undoubtedly helped a party of labour. That history unfolded in this way was in no small part due to the organizational skills and strategic genius, the agitation and struggle of a generation of Labour leaders, chief among them MacDonald. Yet in Labour mythology, MacDonald remains a traitor to the cause. For many of the party faithful so too does Blair, electorally Labour’s most successful leader. Labour history is complicated; a deeply contested terrain.
It is unknown what the current Labour leader Keir Starmer will say or do to celebrate the centenary of the first Labour government. It was a short, arguably unremarkable government, although there haven’t been that many to celebrate since then. How a leader addresses their party’s history helps to reveal their own political character. This will be especially true for Starmer.
Even after four years in post, Keir Starmer remains an elusive leader, difficult to find. He is clearly an honest, decent man engaged in politics for principled reasons. Yet there are few contributions to help reveal an essential political identity and little in the way of an intellectual paper trail. He travels light compared to ideologues such as MacDonald. Apart from Brexit, there have been few interventions in the key internal party debates of the last 30 years. Notwithstanding vague associations with the ‘soft left’ of the party, he appears detached from the deeper intellectual traditions that have shaped the history of Labour. This book focuses on three of these traditions: the first, the ethical socialist tradition, seeks to nurture human virtue; the second attempts to expand human welfare; the third aims to promote liberty and human rights. Yet apart from his actual name, little ties Starmer to the ethical and spiritual concerns of Labour’s early founders, figures such as Keir Hardie and George Lansbury. His approach to economics does not appear to be grounded in any specific theoretical understanding of inequality, material justice and welfare distribution. Despite a successful career as a human rights lawyer, as Labour leader Starmer appears disinterested in questions of liberty and freedom.
Starmer often seems detached from his own party and uncomfortable in communion with fellow MPs. In his immediate circle he appears to value the familiar and unchallenging. It is difficult to identify the purpose of a future Starmer government – what he seeks to accomplish beyond achieving office. Labour appears content for the coming election to amount to a referendum on the performance of the governing Conservatives, rather than a choice between competing visions of politics and justice. This book seeks to reassess Labour’s history and the present condition of the party by returning to questions of justice. We explore competing visions of how society should be organized and how this has helped define a century of Labour. The argument of the book is that Labour’s successes and failures can be understood in terms of its ability to unite and cohere three competing approaches to justice within an overall political organization and agenda for government.
The book is published a few months before, hopefully, a new period of Labour in power. Keir Starmer will have a troubled inheritance. Labour’s history is a resource to be excavated to help inform the present. In one sense it is surprising that Labour might once more be on the verge of holding office given the industrial and demographic changes of the past century. Over the years we have regularly been told that the party’s over, that Labour will never again hold power as it lies on the wrong side of history. Labour’s very existence and current popularity might well reflect an enduring demand for the type of political change that the party represents and its ability to evolve with the times informed by a restless desire to serve. This book revisits Labour’s history to aid the future of the party. Labour has a proud record and has altered the life opportunities of many millions of British people, and hopefully will do so again over the coming months.
Notes
1
Newspaper Placard, 22 January 1924, quoted in J. Shepherd and K. Laybourn,
Britain’s First Labour Government
, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, p. 1.
1History
The Labour Party grew out of the late nineteenth-century trade union movement and the expansion of the franchise. It was initially formed in 1900 as the Labour Representation Committee (LRC) with the cooperation of unions and three key organizations: the Independent Labour Party (ILP), the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) and the Fabian Society. In February 1906, having secured 29 MPs at that month’s election, it reformed as the Labour Party. By the late 1920s it had successfully replaced the Liberal Party as the main opposition to the Conservatives.
Following two brief periods of minority government, in 1924 and between 1929 and 1931, the party split. Although imperilled, it survived. In 1940 Labour emerged as a junior partner in the wartime coalition and helped resist calls advocating a negotiated settlement with the Nazis. After a landslide victory in 1945, the Attlee government established the welfare state, created the NHS and, informed by Clause IV of the 1918 party constitution, nationalized a fifth of the economy.1 It also embarked on a programme of decolonization and nuclear armament and helped to establish NATO.
Defeat in 1951 was followed by ‘thirteen wasted years’ in opposition and significant internal factional tension. In 1964 a programme of economic modernization was offered by the newly elected government of Harold Wilson. At a snap election 17 months later, Wilson’s narrow majority turned into another landslide victory. Despite liberalizing social reforms and significant policy achievements, the parliament was overshadowed by a humiliating 1967 devaluation, ongoing economic difficulties and tensions over industrial relations reform. Yet defeat in 1970 and a Tory majority of 312 was considered by many commentators a surprise result. The oil price shocks of 1973, the three-day week and escalating industrial strife led to a minority Labour administration following the February 1974 election. A second October election saw Wilson again returned, this time with a four-seat majority. It was to be Labour’s last election victory until 1997.
Wilson resigned in March 1976, replaced by James Callaghan. A financial crisis and IMF-imposed austerity had, by late 1978, been transformed into economic growth and falling inflation. However, a failure to go to the country, the effect of a so-called ‘Winter of Discontent’, the return of inflationary pressures and the loss of a no-confidence vote produced a Conservative majority of 44 in 1979. Tensions over internal party democracy and wider policy disputes, including over Europe and economic strategy, resulted in a breakaway party – the Social Democratic Party (SDP) – and another 18 years in opposition, often referred to as ‘the wilderness years’.
Tony Blair and New Labour provided the party with its longest sustained period in office. It returned a 178-seat majority at the 1997 election, reduced to 166 in 2001, then to 65 in 2005, and brought forward a substantial package of economic, social and constitutional reforms. Yet the government was undermined by the Iraq War and the failure to find weapons of mass destruction and by its approach to economic regulation, which culminated in recession and austerity. Under Gordon Brown, Labour was defeated in 2010 following the effects of the global economic crisis and forced into opposition against a Conservative/Liberal Democratic coalition, after Labour’s own negotiations with Nick Clegg’s party stalled. Despite the effects of austerity, a collapse in support for the Lib Dems and the rise of UKIP, Labour suffered a further loss in 2015. Ed Miliband quickly resigned as leader and was replaced by Jeremy Corbyn with the party now facing a majority Conservative government. The Prime Minister David Cameron subsequently resigned following the 2016 vote to leave the European Union. In 2017 the Conservatives led by Theresa May lost their majority but remained in power, despite significant gains made by a radical Labour leadership. The 2019 election would be Labour’s fourth defeat in less than a decade and produce an 81-strong majority for Boris Johnson, triggering an end to Corbyn and the ascent of Keir Starmer. Labour has now been in opposition for 14 years.
A basic history can be told through assembling and chronologically ordering the facts. But to explain how and why they occurred requires scrutiny of the people involved, their thinking, relationships and actions. It needs to investigate the context and motivations behind decisions. History needs to study the personal battles, ideological differences, the successes and failures, the tragedies and triumphs that shape the dramatic arc of Labour’s story. There is no single way to draw out this drama; we must choose a method to navigate Labour history.
One is through biography.3 We could study the six Labour Prime Ministers or the biographies of every party leader from Keir Hardie to Keir Starmer, 23 if we include acting leaders, or other key figures. The danger with such a biographical lens is a focus on individual agency and personality at the expense of ideology or the structural difficulties leaders face in managing the party and in government decision making. Alternatively we might detail and evaluate Labour’s achievements over the last century given the constraints of office.4 Or rather than search for an overall party history, we might instead favour a more detailed study of specific Labour administrations or periods out of office, or significant years that stand out within this history, such as 1900, 1924, 1945 or 1997.5 Another way might be to pinpoint key events and assess how the party dealt with them, for instance significant economic shocks. Or we could instead dissect key election victories and losses or route Labour’s history through a prism of party factionalism.
Another variation could be to inspect how a specific constitutional feature of the party has helped shape its history. An obvious example is the trade union link, or battles over Clause IV of the original party constitution. Or we could instead scrutinize how war and conflict have shaped Labour’s history, from the Boer War and 1900 ‘Khaki’ election, through two world wars and the recent Iraq conflict. Alternatively, we could investigate the history of political thought within Labour and the changing ideological character of the party or through its shifting policy priorities. Or we might even rethink Labour’s story through a counterfactual method; providing alternatives that are counter to the facts to explore events from a variety of angles. For instance, what if Keir Hardie had failed to be elected the first chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) in February 1906, in effect party leader, as Hardie won by only one vote over David Shackleton after several ballots? Or if Attlee had failed to survive any of the three times he was carried off First World War battlefields? What might have happened if both Hugh Gaitskell and John Smith had not died prematurely but instead faced the country as Labour leaders in 1964 and 1997? Or Callaghan and Brown had decided in favour of early elections in 1978 and 2008 rather than suffer what came later? What if Blair had decided not to actively support George W. Bush over Iraq or David Miliband had been the victor over his brother Ed in September 2010?
There are numerous ways to navigate Labour history. Yet whatever the method, a number of themes continue to reappear. I will focus on just three and label them the origin question, the death question and the purpose question.
Origin, Death, Purpose
Whatever route is chosen through Labour history, three questions frequently recur.6 The first we have already touched on: was the rise of a party of labour inevitable given the evolving nature of industrial capitalism? Or to rephrase this, given the social and economic changes brought about by the speed and timing of British industrialization, was a party of the organized working class always going to rise and crowd out the Liberal Party in the first quarter of the last century? Labour’s rise to power was remarkably swift for a new political party. Whether it was inevitable that Labour would replace the Liberals is the source of much debate within labour history.7 This is the origin question. The second question, the death question, complements the first by inverting it for a different era. Given the effects of deindustrialization and recent technological revolutions, is the party just painting over the cracks and managing its own decline? Is the party on the wrong side of history? Is the party over? Has the forward march of Labour halted?8
These two questions bookend party history and between them capture significant intellectual influences on the party. In the formative period these include Darwinian and secular Enlightenment influences, utopianism, various religious strands, especially dissenting traditions, and orthodox Marxism. All share some sense that Labour’s political history can be understood because of evolving economic and social forces; they retain an essential determinism in assessing the way history unfolds and progresses. The obvious challenge is to suggest that history might not be that straightforward, and instead stress complexity and contingency. This is a familiar tension at the heart of much of the social sciences. In Labour’s origins story, it was often assumed that political change approximated that of the natural sciences. Such thinking has remained influential throughout party history, for instance, through eugenics or post-war attempts to harness the expansion of sociology toward a science of social progress in aid of the party. It represents an ongoing belief in social and scientific progress, in human evolution and maturity, one consistently attached to the role of the party, its intellectual reasoning and policy formation.9
This optimistic vision surrounding Labour inverted into a fatalism following the defeat of the Attlee government, again driven by a certain class essentialism and view of economic and technological change which implied the potential eclipse of the party.10 Such an approach informed the electoral pessimism of 1950s revisionism given widespread assumptions of the inevitable decline of Labour as a representative party of an organized working class. From a different perspective it also influenced the famous contribution of Eric Hobsbawm questioning the forward march of Labour, and debates surrounding the ‘New Times’ the party must adapt to. Such thinking also underpinned the arguments of ‘modernizers’ in the 1980s, as well as the diagnosis supplied later by New Labour. Such thinking has regularly inspired proposals to change the party name or constitution or policy priorities, or all three at once. Such intellectual and political concerns do not belong to one party faction. For instance, such an approach recently reappeared within the Corbyn project with the contributions of what is sometimes labelled the ‘post-work’ left in their understanding of automation and prophecy of a world without work or workers and advocation of a Universal Basic Income.
Questions of inevitability and contingency recur throughout the book. They reveal tensions at the heart of Labour history, first really exposed on coming to power between the wars. Two brief periods of minority Labour government were defined by the contingencies of conflict and economic crisis, bringing with them epic dilemmas for a party motivated by a spiritual sense of purpose. Throughout its early years Labour remained highly conflicted; consumed by the responsibilities of office and national duty, yet psychologically shaped by a crusading belief in inevitable socialist transformation. The drama is revealed in the lives of the key personalities and within the factions and traditions they helped create. Their political biographies vividly expose these tensions, often concluding in personal tragedy and defeat despite having helped sculpt Labour’s remarkable early history. We draw out these tensions with a focus on the characters of Hardie, Ramsay MacDonald and George Lansbury, and demonstrate how they inform the Labour drama throughout the last century and still do today.
The book begins with the first two brief Labour governments. Unremarkable in terms of their achievements, constrained electorally by both a global pandemic and austerity, by the so-called ‘Geddes Axe’ and later the proposals of the May committee, contingencies which by the early 1930s threatened the very existence of the party. In 1931 MacDonald privately remarked his government was ‘too much of the onlooker oppressed by circumstances’.
In 2024, after 14 years of opposition, and waves of pandemic, recession and austerity, this historic tension shadows Labour’s contemporary existence. Structural hostility confronts the party, especially acute amongst the media. Such a climate engineers a psychology of appeasement to navigate any viable routes to office, but in turn dilutes any mandate for change and room to manoeuvre once in power. Offering efficient management and reassurance suggest the prospect of renewed austerity and will be unlikely to satisfy the demand for change amongst the membership and in the country. The politics of austerity has bedevilled Labour throughout its entire history.
Both the origin and death stories are driven by the composition of British class politics, long-term changes in the demand and supply of labour and Labour’s understanding of capitalism. These concerns are shared by present-day historians and commentators preoccupied by who represents and what exists of the working class, especially given the modern political binaries of age, education, geography, of Brexit, and the collapse of the Red Wall. Yet the danger with both questions is an over-reliance on assumptions of inevitability regarding destiny and decline. They also foreshadow an additional problem, a certainty about the role of the party; a political essentialism. This leads to the third question, the purpose question.
R.H. Tawney’s 1934 essay The Choice before the Labour Party is a famous expression of the purpose question, highly relevant in any analysis of the position facing Labour today.11 It was written in response to Labour’s first real crisis as a party. Ramsay Macdonald, the first secretary of the ILP and Labour’s first Prime Minister, the man whose contribution stands second only to Hardie in the party’s formation, led a National Government from 1931. Tawney highlights the dilemma at the heart of the party; its tense relationship between orthodoxy and radicalism. He identifies the problem as being driven by a lack of creed. As the hopes attached to that government died, he describes how the government ‘did not fall with a crash, in a tornado from the blue. But crawled slowly to its doom.’
Despite the sense of destiny infecting much of the party’s origins story, throughout history Labour’s difficulties have often been blamed on external events, generally economic ones. But Tawney argues this is to deny socialist agency and responsibility. His words and diagnosis of Labour’s inability to shape events echo down through the decades. ‘The gravest weakness of British Labour is … its lack of creed. The Labour Party is hesitant in action, because divided in mind. It does not achieve what it could, because it does not know what it wants.’ He doesn’t pull his punches. There is, he says, a ‘void in the mind of the Labour Party’ which leads us into ‘intellectual timidity, conservatism, conventionality, which keeps policy trailing tardily in the rear of realities’.
Tawney implies the existence of a definitive party creed to shape socialist agency and inoculate against the dilemmas of office. Is he right to do so? Again, questions of certainty and essentialism reappear. Yet from the very beginning there was little certainty regarding the purpose of Labour. An early distinction was clear between those who saw its role as representing certain interests in distributional contests over resources, and others who considered it a vehicle to achieve a different type of society. Another question quickly followed: whether Labour was primarily a parliamentary party or anchored within wider movements. Questions of purpose have always remained unresolved because of Labour’s hybrid quality. From its creation, the LRC was a coalition of different organizations and philosophies regarding questions of purpose. Labour has remained a brittle coalition of sectional interests, societies and, after 1918, members. These have aligned as factions, drawing from assorted political traditions in forming alternative programmes. Labour has always contained various liberal, Marxist, socialist, religious, national, regional and assorted municipal elements.12 It has offered a home to thinkers and theories, those more concerned with factional battles and position, others with cold electoral calculation. Each has retained their own sense of political purpose in a party without a formal ideology or identity.
Lacking any overarching official ideology can bring strengths and weakness. It offers political agility and creativity in adapting to changing environments. Yet, as Sidney Webb suggested in 1894, without an essential purpose the movement might head in ‘spurious’ directions in search of instant solutions.13 The elusive question of purpose creates clear dangers when interpreting history through factional alignment, however. It can lead to combatants erecting and inserting a formal ideological architecture and coherence back into a fluid party history filled with wide-ranging influences. Such tendencies are what psychologists might call ‘the presenting problem’, one we must move beyond to achieve historical understanding.
This becomes clear as we rehearse some of the historically specific philosophical influences on Labour. To name a few: Edwardian idealism, 1930s positivism, eugenics, the technological determinism of the Second International, later New Left reformulations, later still postmodernism, the concerns of the ‘Third Way’ and today’s hyperindividualized identity politics. Labour’s ever-changing ideological currents make it a difficult terrain to navigate. Suggesting a definitive purpose, or creed, might be the wrong path through such a history.
One obvious example of the dangers in such an approach to the purpose question is the regular attempt to encase an ‘authentic’ radical Labour tradition within a certain timeframe; specifically, in the years between 1918, with the adoption of Clause IV of the party constitution and publication of Labour and the New Social Order, and Labour’s first majority in 1945 and the manifesto Let Us Face the Future. This approach suggests between 1918 and 1945 we can identify Labour’s ‘authentic’ purpose defined by public ownership.14 In these terms attempts to revise Clause IV – by Gaitskell in 1960 or Blair in 1995 – are swiftly considered heretical; at odds with an essential purpose. As are those interpretations of the 1945 victory and the achievements of the Attlee government which reject such a reading of Labour’s purpose.
In 2024 there is an ever-present danger with such essentialism where the ideology and institutions of 70 years ago become the horizon of ambition, played out in a defensive backward-looking culture when confronted by, for instance, a revolution in liberal market economics. It might embed a language of institutional conservatism spoken by those who self-identify as egalitarians and reformers.
History is important to the labour movement. We take pride in it.15 A sense of history – that history is on the side of the party – has helped hold Labour together at moments of crisis. Yet it also constrains Labour through sentimental attachment and an idealized sense of its past, one that is prone to misrepresentation and historical myth making and that promotes widely held false beliefs about the purpose of the party. This has regularly fostered disunity, for instance with myths of a leadership betrayal of an essential Labour purpose such as over the events of 1931, or In Place of Strife in 1969 or the actions of the New Labour government after 1997.
In contrast, we might investigate ideas less in terms of an essential socialist purpose than as contributions within a broad range of Labour thought, and create a method to appreciate and interpret these interventions. Rather than gauge the work of party intellectuals such as Sidney Webb or Tawney, G.D.H. Cole or Harold Laski, Tony Crosland or Tony Giddens, relative to an essential purpose, we might instead ask how they have helped shape a crossbred Labour history and inspect how they themselves are anchored within deeper traditions of thought that compete for power and influence. In such an approach, political ideas remain part of the ongoing war of position. In this sense Tawney’s The Choice is seen as one contribution in the post 1931 battle to retrieve and reset the party, rather than seen as a definitive intervention regarding Labour’s purpose, or creed. In a similar way E.P. Thompson’s epic history of the English working class and biography of William Morris were both intimately connected to internal battles for supremacy within the Communist Party and remain significant interventions that helped shape post-war Labour politics. No one writing about Labour history does so from a position of absolute neutrality or objectivity. Crosland’s The Future of Socialism was not an isolated academic contribution in search of an essential truth but powered by an internal contest for 1950s factional supremacy. Today, from a similar perspective, Patrick Diamond is assembling an impressive body of work on Labour history to aid the latest generation of revisionist actors. In contrast, the classic text on Labour’s political thought provided by Geoffrey Foote comes from a more radical Bennite perspective.16 All these contributions help shape party history; they don’t simply reflect and delineate some true purpose.17 The question this book seeks to contribute towards is: How do we apply an intellectual coherence to Labour given its shape-shifting quality?
Justice
Addressing Labour’s fluid quality, over 30 years ago David Marquand diagnosed The Progressive Dilemma, an alternative entry point into our three questions of origin, death and purpose.18 Historically, how could progressive intellectuals secure durable economic, democratic and social change? When and where and through which political party could radicals help deliver enduring transformation given the forces of reaction and our democratic architecture – and at what collateral cost? For example, in the early part of the last century, what were the costs and benefits of supporting Labour – given its class composition and conservative ‘labourist’ traditions – at the expense of retaining support for liberalism? Alternatively, should the intellectual remain above the party-political fray, retaining independence and campaigning agility? This formed the basis of the Progressive Dilemma and the template for Marquand’s study of British political history. Amongst the many consequences of failing to successfully traverse this dilemma was the high probability that you might lock in Conservative rule. It allowed for the contingencies of alliance and the heterogeneity of political parties; their shifting structure and purpose. For example, it helps account for how different groups of actors within Labour history – politicians, union leaders and academics or intellectuals – have combined and the way political leadership has had to negotiate with significant institutional power brokers whilst also looking to intellectuals for ideas and inspiration.
The Progressive Dilemma provides a method to inspect both our origin and death questions. It offers a different route to study the emergence of the party and the decline of the Liberals early in the century and how, across the UK as a whole,19 there has only been one electorally successful centre-left political leader in the last 35 years. Tony Blair appeared to have subtly navigated the terrain of the Progressive Dilemma. His coalition held resilient and secured three major, unprecedented majorities. Today the dilemma remains intense given that Labour’s traditional class constituencies are in long-term decline and the influence of a variety of nationalist forces. Meanwhile across the south of England advances by the Liberals and Greens remain distinct possibilities.
Rather than treat labour history as the search for an essential creed or purpose, Marquand’s approach allows us to inspect the fluid nature of political formation. In this book we hope to achieve the same, but in a different way to Marquand. We suggest the inability to resolve the purpose question lies in the way that competing conceptions of justice have shaped the history of the party. We detail how three alternative visions of how society should be organized have shaped this past century of Labour, each grounded within different traditions of thought. These traditions operate behind the backs of the personalities, factions and movements within the political drama and offer an alternative understanding of Labour over the last century.
The pages that follow navigate Labour history through theories of justice. This is not to say the participants endlessly study Bentham, Locke or Aristotle, but that the traditions, factions and ideas these political actors espouse or reject do not simply fall out of the sky. Often unbeknown to the political combatants, they are carriers of thought and remain embedded within traditions of justice. The practical application of these assorted theories – the praxis of politics – plays out in the way various political and economic interest groups, factions and personalities fight for power and influence within the party or wider movement. As will become apparent, different individuals and political movements can be influenced by more than one tradition at the same time. We suggest that such a framework helps account for Labour’s underperformance in British politics. Labour succeeds when it draws inspiration from all three competing traditions. Yet for this to occur requires extraordinary acts of leadership and a commitment to political pluralism and reconciliation within the party. These are elusive qualities. Hopefully the following discussion might contribute to developing a holistic Labour history. But it also requires some admissions on my part.
Admissions
I am not a trained historian. I have worked for or represented the Labour Party for 35 years. What follows is a contribution from within a political tradition. Although far from uncritical, it reflects my own background and political views. To give an example, I am writing this in my study in Ireland overlooked by various photographs and statues that reflect my outlook. On the wall in front of me is a Vanity Fair drawing of ‘Queer Hardie’, Labour’s first leader. Hanging close by is a wirephoto of Clement Attlee on the campaign trail in conversation across a garden gate. Behind me is a 1934 Daily Herald photo of George Lansbury unveiling the headstone of James Hammett, the Tolpuddle Martyr. All mementoes from events celebrating these great figures. The only other bits of political memorabilia on display are a copy of an oil painting of Mayo native Michael Davitt by William Orpen, a small marble statue of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, as well as his funeral mass card, and a photo of dockers’ leader Vic Turner being carried out of Pentonville Prison on the shoulders of my friend Brian Holmes. Apart from assorted books that’s it. These belongings reveal personal preferences and prejudices. Lloyd George once said of a politician, ‘he has sat on the fence so long that iron has entered his soul’. I admit I am not on the fence when it comes to the history of Labour.
What follows is an argument about party history. It is neither a neutral walk-through of dates, people and events, nor used to advance an essential political creed. I suggest that the history of the party is best understood by exploring how competing theories of justice have influenced Labour’s traditions and personalities and informed the drama of Labour politics over the last century. Labour history can be reassessed through the interplay between three competing theories of justice which seek to maximize human welfare, human freedom or human virtue.
I freely admit I identify with the latter tradition and in the pages that follow I seek to locate figures such as Hardie, Lansbury and Attlee firmly within this approach. It is often associated with ethical socialist elements and, especially from 1893, with the early pioneers of the ILP, although I will attempt to pinpoint its significance in more recent Labour politics, for example in leaders such as John Smith and Tony Blair. So, I begin by admitting this preference over certain party traditions, memories and allegiances because drafting such historical narratives involves judgement in the present when interpreting the past. Labour Party history drips with mythology and political distortion. We need to tread carefully as the past is often used in selective, subjective and deeply contestable ways. History is regularly deployed as political currency in ongoing internal contests, ones which increasingly involve a performative element aided by social media. But history is not memory, or parable or myth or spin; although Labour’s history is filled with numerous vivid characters and includes all these. Chesterton once famously said history and tradition remain ‘the democracy of the dead’ but, in the case of Labour’s history and tradition, these democratic stories are deeply contested.20
Notes
1
Revised in 1994, the original clause called for ‘common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service’.
2
Throughout this book the government majority is calculated as the number of seats held by the governing parties minus the number of seats held by all the other parties or independent Members. The Speaker is excluded when calculating the majority, but MPs who did not take their seats, for example Sinn Fein Members, are included (see Appendicies B and C).
3
Fortunately, this is a rich seam in Labour Party history, which includes, for instance, Kenneth O. Morgan’s various biographies of figures such as Hardie, Michael Foot and Callaghan, David Marquand’s work on Ramsay MacDonald, John Shepherd on George Lansbury, and John Bew on Attlee. K.O. Morgan,
Keir Hardie: Radical and Socialist
, Faber and Faber, 2011. K.O. Morgan,
Michael Foot: A Life
, HarperCollins, 2008. K.O. Morgan,
Callaghan: A Life
, Oxford University Press, 2007. D. Marquand,
Ramsay MacDonald: A Biography
, Jonathan Cape, 1977. J. Shepherd,
George Lansbury: At the Heart of Old Labour
, Oxford University Press, 2004. J. Bew,
Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee
, Riverrun, 2016.
4
For instance, the contributors in
Labour’s First Century
evaluate Labour not against the standards of people who wanted it to be a revolutionary party, but ‘against its own aims and values, and against what might reasonably have been achieved’. D. Tanner, P. Thane and N. Tiratsoo (eds)
Labour’s First Century
, Cambridge University Press, 2000.
5
Brilliant examples are John Shepherd and Keith Laybourn’s
Britain’s First Labour Government
and
The Second Labour Government: A Reappraisal
, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, edited by John Shepherd, Jonathan Davis and Chris Wrigley, and David Howell’s
MacDonald’s Party: Labour Identities and Crisis 1922–1931
, Manchester University Press, 2002.
6
On the origin and death question see Keith Laybourn, ‘The History of the Labour Party’,
History Today
, 66(1), January 2016.
7
R. McKibben,
The Evolution of the Labour Party 1910–1935
, Clarendon Press, 1983. K. Laybourn, ‘The Rise of Labour and the Decline of Liberalism: The State of the Debate’,
History
, 80, June 1995. P.F. Clarke,
Lancashire and the New Liberalism
, Cambridge University Press, 1971.
8
E. Hobsbawm, ‘Forward March of Labour Halted?’, Marx Memorial Lecture, 1978, reproduced in
Marxism Today
, September 1978.
9
It is a long-standing criticism of the Enlightenment that it overestimated our search for reason and progress in pursuit of an apparently linear history – the arc that bends in favour of progressive forces. For example, John Gray has suggested: ‘The myth is that the progress achieved in science and technology can occur in ethics, politics or, more simply, civilisation. The myth is that the advances made in civilisation can be the basis for a continuing, cumulative improvement’.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/qbwqem/john-gray-interview-atheism
10
Although we could go further back and suggest Labour has throughout its history been aware of its potential demise given the near-death experience of 1931.
11
R.H. Tawney, ‘The Choice Before the Labour Party’, in R.H. Tawney,
The Attack and Other Papers
, George Allen and Unwin, 1981, pp. 52–71.
12
Such as a strong Labour tradition concerned with gas and water municipal socialism within local government.
13
Sidney Webb,
Socialism: True and False
, Fabian Tract no. 51, 1894.
14
Although, as we shall see, only in the 1930s did Labour begin to formulate precise and workable nationalization policies through the work of a generation of young revisionists.
15
‘TIGMOO’ is a faintly tongue-in-cheek piece of jargon, used affectionately by those on the inside to describe the UK labour movement, standing for ‘This Great Movement of Ours’.
16
E.P. Thompson,
The Making of the English Working Class
, Penguin Classics, 2013. E.P. Thompson,
William Morris, Romantic to Revolutionary
, Merlin, 2011. C.A.R. Crosland,
The Future of Socialism
, Vintage, 1956. P. Diamond,
New Labour’s Old Roots: Revisionist Thinkers in Labour’s History
, Imprint Academic, 2015. G. Foote,
The Labour Party’s Political Thought: A History
, Croom Helm, 1985.
17
Henry Pelling was a quiet devotee of the ILP as well as a famous Labour Party and union historian.
18
D. Marquand,
The Progressive Dilemma
, Heinemann, 1991.
19
Rather than in individual countries such as Scotland and Wales.
20
Chesterton actually said – in
Orthodoxy
, Chapter Four ‘The Ethics of Elfland’ – ‘Tradition means giving a vote to most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead’. G.K. Chesterton,
Orthodoxy
, Chump Change, 1908.
2Justice
The centenary of Britain’s first Labour government offers a moment to rethink the history of the party. Labour history is, however, deeply contested. Over the past century the party has regularly appeared trapped, caught between a doctrinaire left who claim ownership of an essential socialist creed and liberal perspectives for whom Labour’s historical class associations restrict the progressive cause. Today party ideology has truncated. State socialism is widely considered a historic failure, while social democracy appears a pale, hollow, technocratic project, offering limited resistance to the global rise of authoritarian populism, and when in power ill-equipped to achieve enduring change. Labour lacks definition and appears hollow.
Yet since first gaining power Labour has achieved many extraordinary successes in pursuit of material change, social reform and equality, in challenging patriarchy, racism and the legacy of imperialism, promoting human rights and delivering significant democratic and constitutional renewal. In comparison with other progressive movements, Labour has successfully forged a path shaped by unique national conditions given our early industrialization.1 Yet any honest assessment cannot fail to acknowledge a political century littered with failures and missed opportunities. Today we inhabit a country disfigured by escalating inequality, populist upheaval and democratic discontent. Navigating such a history is a challenge. How can we account for the achievements as well as the missed opportunities?
Assessing the record of the party is especially difficult given the changing nature of capitalism and British society over the last century. A fixed political ideology and policy prospectus would be ill-equipped for the complexities of such a journey. What was appropriate and necessary for a minor party emerging in the Edwardian era is not what was demanded in war time or when propelled into the minority governments of the 1920s. A very different party would re-emerge in the inter-war period. One that withstood both left- and right-wing authoritarian forces after Labour’s near fatal collapse following the Wall Street Crash; one which successfully transitioned into a wartime coalition in 1940. Post-war reconstruction bent into factional tension as the party sought to navigate the demands of a new social and economic order. Later still, the effect of oil shocks and heightened class struggle throughout the 1970s were difficult for the Labour Party as were the extra-parliamentary demands of radical liberation movements. Thatcherism, deindustrialization, and the collapse of the corporatist state further upended a party historically rooted within male trade unionism and manufacturing. How this culminated in the creation of New Labour remains unfinished business in the ongoing assessment of Labour’s purpose, its strengths and weaknesses; whether it has pushed the boundaries beyond anything recognizably part of the Labour tradition or travelled full circle and retrieved its historical purpose in reuniting with early liberal concerns. This shifting terrain has demanded organizational, political and ideological dexterity in maintaining electoral coalitions to gain and retain power whilst brokering factional tensions against a regular drumbeat asserting ‘betrayal’.
It is a highwire act for any party leader, especially such an unknown one as Keir Starmer. His elusiveness might prove to have been necessary to obtain the leader’s crown in 2019 and traverse from brutal defeat to victory barely five years later. We shall see. Even so, to gain and retain power and navigate the complexities of government, having ditched the commitments upon which he was first elected leader, guarantees a complicated future relationship with his party.
The journey would not be so difficult if not for the limited electoral successes of the party since first gaining power a century ago. Labour formed two brief minority administrations in 1924 and 1929. Its first overall majority wasn’t until 1945 following the unique demands of wartime planning and after having entered coalition. Even then, despite some extraordinary achievements, by 1951 it had been thrown from office and would remain in opposition for another 13 years. From then until 1997 there was only one significant Labour majority, in 1966. Despite appearing to buck the trend with landslides and significant majorities in 1997, 2001 and 2005, these wins were followed by major defeats in 2010 and 2015 and from which, despite a brief 2017 uplift, the party’s position deteriorated further in the winter of 2019.
Such an uncomfortable relationship with the electorate has produced tension between ideas and the sources of ideological innovation and renewal, and the practical policy concerns and the demands of leadership. The study of ideas and of the intellectual resources available to the party over the past century is limited. There is an extraordinarily rich and growing tradition of labour history to draw on yet little real evaluation of the political and social thought that has shaped a century of Labour. In its place is a growing scholarship surrounding Labour leaders. These excellent materials tend to focus on the dilemmas of power and personality, struggles within real and shadow cabinets, of factional tension and organization, revealed through diaries and testimonies to portray the characters at the heart of Labour. More elusive is a method of understanding the changing ideological influences at work behind this drama.
Justice and the Left
In their interpretations of Labour politics, historians often rely on a left/right factional fault line to assess the actions of individuals, their achievements and failures, and the movements that battle for internal supremacy. This is an important route through the Labour story, but is it sufficient? The book will offer a different perspective because, despite appearances, different factions regularly share certain political characteristics as they emerge from similar traditions of thought. Instead, we introduce a three-part justice schema to reassess Labour history.
The basic argument is that political debate is grounded within alternative philosophical approaches to questions of justice; competing conceptions of how society should be organized. In general, these are concerned with maximizing human welfare, human freedom or human virtue.2 The first tends to consider the material wellbeing of the people as the measure of justice. The second is concerned with a respect for, and the extension of, personal rights and freedoms. The third is the promotion of human virtue. This schema helps establish an alternative historical framework to rethink the often-impenetrable divisions and factions on the left and how competing visions of socialism have shaped the Labour Party over the last 100 years. Such a lens helps us account for both the successes and failures of Labour over the last century.
Three Visions of Justice
Welfare
The first approach shaping Labour history seeks to maximize questions of human welfare. The political philosophy of utilitarianism, the series of theories that argue an intervention should be assessed by its ability to promote the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people, can be traced back to the work of Jeremy Bentham and philosophers such as John Stuart Mill and Henry Sidgwick.3 Bentham was heavily influenced by David Hume and other thinkers of the Enlightenment, with deep roots in Scottish Calvinist traditions, which endeavoured, especially between the 1740s and 1790s, to establish a framework to consider historical progress.4 Unlike its French counterpart, it lacked any fundamental attack on established systems of political and economic order.
Utilitarianism focuses on questions of aggregative happiness and the application of philosophy to make people better off. Jeremy Bentham sought pleasure in the absence of pain and proposed you could calculate this and in so doing establish a science of society, whereby ethics would become a branch of the natural sciences. Actions would be judged in terms of rational outcomes; the amount of utility derived from any action to promote happiness.
Several philosophical concerns emerge from this, most notably what constitutes pleasure and is it a measurable good? For instance, G.E. Moore’s famous attack on utilitarianism argued that it could not cater for questions of friendship and beauty in accounting for our happiness. John Stuart Mill consequently rejected the pure quantitative calculation of utility, and instead distinguished between higher and lower pleasures in human development. Other questions remain, however, regarding human motivations and intentions, such as do we have a desire to be kind for reasons other than self-interest?
Less abstract concerns relating to the practical application of the philosophy regularly appear, such as how our desire to maximize the good might collide with how it is distributed. This might lead us to question the morality, in rational terms, of doing the most good in terms of aggregate pleasure. Subsequent variations on classical utilitarianism introduced criteria for deciding the quality of the outcome, including questions of distributive justice. However, the question of motivation persists. For instance, are there duties and responsibilities to our immediate family or community which challenge the idea of the aggregate maximization of outcomes? Does such a science withdraw from other specific duties and obligations that define our humanity and how we live and what we cherish? Moreover, strictly speaking, acts of stealing, or killing of the innocent could be justified in terms of aggregate utility, so too other inequalities which might under certain conditions boost overall happiness. Such ethical approaches can endanger life.
Utilitarian thinking has retained an extraordinarily powerful influence, arguably the dominant influence, on political philosophy and public policy, especially in welfare economics and politics. Its attractiveness for politicians and policy makers lies in its focus on the rules required to organize society to maximize the welfare of others.5 Questions of utility dominate politics.
The appeal of this philosophy for Labour is obvious for a party concerned with the allocation of resources and questions of material inequality. Welfare models of justice tend to rely on utilitarian philosophical assumptions to craft interventions which seek to maximize the happiness of the maximum number of people. This is generally translated to mean their material wellbeing, their welfare, and tends to be primarily interested in the allocation of economic resources. Within the UK left, this approach has historically been associated with the work and policies of the Fabian Society and a generation of economists and planners that took hold of the top strata of the Labour Party throughout the 1930s under the sponsorship of the great economist, politician and eventual Chancellor Hugh Dalton. It is often described as ‘labourist’, a term associated with modest economic reform and redistribution executed by a central government aided by strong institutional union support.
In the pages that follow we identify three basic inter-related utilitarian approaches that have influenced Labour history. First, the idea of labourism that relates to Labour’s relationship to its affiliated unions. Although this relationship tends to be defined by rules and customs rather than through ideology, it rests on the enhancement of material living standards through political action. Its political concerns are primarily distributional and material. In 1900 the LRC was founded both ‘to promote legislation in the direct interests of labour’ through higher wages, reduced hours and improved working conditions and to defend these material working-class interests. The second utilitarian tradition we identify within Labour history we describe as welfarism. This seeks to maximize the economic wellbeing of the people through the distribution of economic resources. The third tradition we describe as statism has been linked primarily to debates around nationalization. This approach promotes the view that the state has a major, necessary and legitimate role in directing critical aspects of the economy to enhance the overall wellbeing of the people, either directly through state ownership and state planning or indirectly through economic interventions and macroeconomic regulation.
Questions of power and democracy tend to be downplayed within this tradition – consequently it can be labelled ‘economistic’ or economically ‘deterministic’. This approach tends to envision the task of left politics as one of state capture to redistribute and maximize the welfare of the people. As such, it attracts criticism for technocratic forms of administration and a centralizing, bureaucratic statecraft. Crucially it is not the preserve of any one faction on the left as it remains the hallmark of both the traditional Labour ‘right’ and ‘left’. A ‘left/right’ framework to interpret party history obscures this reality.
