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- Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
The British Labour Party has at times been a force for radical change in the UK, but one critical aspect of its makeup has been consistently misunderstood and underplayed: its Britishness. Throughout the party's history, its Britishness has been an integral part of how it has done politics, acted in government and opposition, and understood the UK and its nations and regions. The People's Flag and the Union Jack is the first comprehensive account of how Labour has tried to understand Britain and Britishness and to compete in a political landscape defined by conservative notions of nation, patriotism and tradition. At a time when many of the party faithful regard national identity as a toxic subject, academics Gerry Hassan and Eric Shaw argue that Labour's Britishness and its ambiguous relationship with issues of nationalism matter more today than ever before, and will continue to matter for the foreseeable future, when the UK is in fundamental crisis. As debate rages about Brexit, and the prospect of Scottish independence remains live, this timely intervention, featuring contributions from a wealth of pioneering thinkers, offers an illuminating and perceptive insight into Labour's past, present and future.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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To Emile Shaw
* * *
And to dear Auntie Betty of Dundee, who has always provided such political insight and inspiration as well as spirit of life
‘What is the Flag of England? Ye have but my breath to dare,
Ye have but my waves to conquer. Go forth, for it is there!’
RUDYARD KIPLING, ‘THE ENGLISH FLAG’
‘The people’s flag is deepest red
It shrouded oft our martyred dead’
‘THE RED FLAG’
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
A book like this, which draws from many disciplines to discuss the Labour Party and its history, British politics, the stories of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, territorial politics, and nationality and national identities, inevitably has many influences and debts. Besides that, there is also the social democratic and socialist tradition, and its relationship to the Labour Party, to map and understand.
All of the above have been shaped by the conversations, support and insights we have gained from numerous people who spoke to us during the genesis and creation of this book. Another dimension that has played an enormous factor in our thinking has been the state of contemporary British politics, with, most notably, the convolutions and crises relating to Brexit following the UK’s decision to leave the European Union in the 2016 referendum. This has made our book a dynamic and continuously evolving thesis, with the future direction of the UK and its politics unlikely to be anything like we have previously seen.
In personal thanks, we owe an enormous amount to the professionalism and encouragement of Olivia Beattie and the team at Biteback Publishing, who have been a calm source of advice and insight from the word go. Olivia in particular displayed great diligence and a meticulous attention to detail, making numerous suggestions which we invariably found hugely helpful.
Secondly, we would like to thank our families and friends – in particular David Shaw, Douglas Fraser, Isabel Fraser, Eileen Reid, Nigel Smith, Carol Craig and Jim McCormick. Rosie Ilett and Sue Shaw have yet again been unstinting sources of support and encouragement.
Thirdly, we are indebted to the scholarship and ideas of numerous writers, academics and thinkers who have explored the nature of the UK, territorial politics and, on occasion, the relationship of this to the Labour Party. In particular, we have been influenced by the work of Arthur Aughey and Michael Keating in developing the idea of ‘the Labour nation’ and, alongside this, Andrew Gamble’s concept of ‘the conservative nation’. James Mitchell’s exploration of the UK as a union state, challenging the once dominant notion of the UK as a unitary state, has also been pivotal. Then there is the long-term pioneering work of Richard Rose, who, when it was unfashionable, reclaimed the idea of the UK as a ‘multinational state’; at the same time, Jim Bulpitt’s work on territory and power across the UK reconfigured how British politics and government was understood. The emerging interest about England has been aided by the work of Michael Kenny and Krishan Kumar, which has now spawned a whole literature and terrain of debate, including recently Jeremy Black on English nationalism.
Fourthly, there is the intellectual advice and encouragement we owe to a host of pioneering voices, including Madeleine Bunting, Michael Gardiner, Tom Holland and Fintan O’Toole; similarly, in a longer timeframe, the late Bernard Crick along with Neal Ascherson and Tom Nairn have provided an enormous intellectual set of provocations by which all of us are still being influenced.
An eternal acknowledgement is also due to John Curtice, who assisted on numerous electoral enquiries. A word on our electoral data: all UK election figures as well as Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish national elections are taken from Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher’s magnum opus of facts, British Electoral Facts 1832–2012, a book no serious political project nor any home should be without.
A strand running through parts of this book is the conversations we have had with a range of public figures – writers, commentators, journalists, intellectuals, campaigners and some who defy easy categorisation. We asked them a series of simple but complex questions: what is Britishness, what is the future of Britishness, and how would they like it to evolve? This opened up a treasure trove of ideas and commentary about past, present and future Britain, and though we have space for only a small cross-section of the material they provided, their contributions form the spine of the book.
We would like to thank the following for giving us their time and thoughts: David Andress; Arthur Aughey; Anthony Barnett; Rafael Behr; Henry Bell; Melissa Benn; Madeleine Bunting; Stephen Bush; Aditya Chakrabortty; Jason Cowley; Philip Cowley; Sally Davison; Danny Dorling; David Edgerton; Alison Elliot; Steven Fielding; Kathy Galloway; Andrew Gamble; Doug Gay; Peter Geoghegan; David Goodhart; John Harris; Tom Holland; Richard Holloway; Ian Jack; Ben Jackson; Kathleen Jamie; Sunder Katwala; Michael Kenny; Martin Kettle; Colin Kidd; Neal Lawson; Paul Lay; Helen Lewis; Ruth Lister; Jim Livesey; Joyce McMillan; Margaret MacMillan; Graeme Morton; Geoff Mulgan; Onora O’Neill; Nick Pearce; Mark Perryman; Henry Porter; James Robertson; Emily Robinson; Jean Seaton; Nigel Smith; Polly Toynbee; Gary Younge; Ed West; Richard Wyn Jones and Hilary Wainwright. Even when we have not directly cited someone in the pages that follow, their views have assisted and influenced us throughout.
Our final roll call of honour has to rightly give central place to Rosie Ilett, who read and proofed the text and made numerous suggestions and observations, both in grammar and style, but also in political and historical intelligence, for which we are enormously grateful and humbled.
We hope that people will enjoy the book and find it stimulating and, even though readers may disagree with some of its arguments, that they will find that it offers fresh and challenging perspectives on Labour and Britain’s past, the present and the future choices which face the country that is the United Kingdom.
Gerry Hassan and Eric Shaw March 2019
INTRODUCTION
THE IDEA OF ‘THE LABOUR NATION’
British Labour has its roots deep in our national history. Its spirit goes back to the days of Wat Tyler and later of Cromwell. It remembers Peterloo and the Luddites over a century ago. The greatest of its leaders were deeply religious men, nurtured in the Nonconformist faith. Men and women of spirit, whatever their views on the ebb and flow of current political events, if they believe in the fundamentals of individual righteousness, must realise the strength of Labour’s human and moral appeal.
ARTHUR GREENWOOD, WHY WE FIGHT: LABOUR’S CASE
The Labour Party has a long, proud history, of which numerous accounts and histories have been written. These interpretations, however, have told a partial and selective story of Labour – what it is and what it has represented politically.
Too many accounts of Labour have concentrated on a very narrow slither of the party and its politics. They have addressed the party machine and its elites without accounting for people or place beyond what occurs in the citadels of political power in London. This is as true of left-wing accounts and critiques of the party’s traditions as it is of those of the Labour right, and of conventional political science. Studies from as wide a variety of sources as Ralph Miliband and David Coates from the left and more conventional accounts such as Henry Pelling and others have reinforced this tendency. In so doing, they have missed a much wider canvas that is critical to a true understanding of the party; of its past, its present and its future choices.
Alternative studies of Labour that have used place and local politics have been few, though the work of Lewis Minkin has offered profound insights into the arcane practices of the party. This situation has remained static despite the change engulfing British politics. It has become more problematic as our politics have become more fragmented, divided on issues of nation and region, while identity politics have become more salient, and respect for government and the British state weaker and more qualified.
This book offers an alternative history of both Labour and Britain, providing an interpretation of both in one study. It addresses a history of the Labour Party and its understanding of Britain and Britishness (and, in the most recent years, of Englishness), but it also explores a history of Britain and Britishness through Labour, examining the relationship between the two. In this new perspective, we are not claiming to offer a fixed, definitive interpretation of either Labour or the idea of Britain, but instead aim to shed fresh light and offer an opening for further debate and reflection.
During this journey, we examine the highs and lows of British Labour and the moments when the party caught and shaped the political wind and climate of the country, as well as the times when it has failed to do so. We explore contested notions of Britain and Britishness, and Labour’s interpretation of and relationship with these ideas; we look at how the party has understood government, state and the British state specifically, and how it has seen the UK domestically and internationally. Of course, all this relates to the composition and changing dynamics of the UK, from the interests and relationships of the four nations of the UK to how Scotland and Wales have been viewed within British and Labour politics, alongside the English dimension and regions.
All of the above has to be contextualised in how the UK has sat internationally, and how Labour has articulated its interests in government. The rise and fall of the British Empire and its legacy of colonialism and imperial rule is but one factor, along with the emergence of the Commonwealth, the so-called special relationship with the US, and the European dimension, from membership of the European Economic Community/European Union to Brexit. There has always been a relationship between the domestic statecraft of the UK and its global connections and place in the world; this has been seen in the party’s attitude to immigration, race and black and ethnic minorities. These have been sensitive areas for the party throughout its history, from the Smethwick election of 1964 to the emergence of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) in the early twenty-first century, but these should also be seen in the context of how Labour has thought about citizenship, ideas of rights and the public, which go to the core of centre-left politics and the ideas of community and solidarity.
A WORD ON TERMINOLOGY AND THE IDEA OF BRITAIN
In this book we talk at times about the United Kingdom and at other times about Britain. We are aware of obvious differences between the UK and Great Britain – the former covering England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and the latter covering the first three but not the last. Over the course of Labour’s existence, the territory described as Britain has changed dramatically: in 1914, the UK and Empire went to war as one entity, whereas by 1939, there was the UK, Dominions and the Empire, and then, after the Empire, just the UK.
In this book we invoke the idea of Britain as a construct, community, place and polity that relates to ‘the conservative nation’ and alternative ‘Labour nation’, even when its relationship to the formal boundaries of the actually existing UK might not be completely clear. Then again, the borders and end points of the UK have always been fairly ambiguous for most of its history, this being used to the UK’s advantage at times. Hence, the UK officially takes part in the Olympics as Great Britain, and Northern Ireland participants can choose whether to do so under the Team GB banner or that of the Republic of Ireland. This ambiguity about borders was reflected too in Labour’s decision not to compete electorally in Northern Ireland, preferring instead to emphasise its links with sister parties such as the Northern Ireland Labour Party, which operated until 1987, and, subsequently, the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP).
In the past two decades, debates about Britishness, its character and form have become more common, grounded in discussion (sometimes very heated) about devolution, multiculturalism and, indeed, the very nature of British identity. However, the innate fuzziness of Britishness means that these debates have tended to seem disconnected from political practice and difficult to translate into policy.
This book addresses issues of national identities, nationalisms at different territorial levels, and their interaction and understanding (or not) of each other. One important divide, not unique to the UK, is that of the majority nationalism (British nationalism) and that of the minority nationalisms (Scottish, Welsh and Irish). The 2014 Scottish independence referendum was in part about two competing versions of nationalism – Scottish and British – and their different claims, but it was not in the interest of either side to frame it that way, both camps trying to see their argument as about more than nationalisms.
By the second decade of the new millennium, Britishness increasingly faced another, rival, source of national identity: Englishness. Their growing distinctiveness was reflected in two UK-wide ballots – the EU referendum of 2016 and the general election of 2017 – where a British identity significantly correlated with voting Remain and Labour, and an English one with voting Leave and Conservative. There are indeed (as we argue) indications that the two represent conflicting belief systems held by sections of the British population which differ in terms of age, education, class and values.
Labour has never been prone to self-examination – to exploring the underlying ideas and concepts that govern its attitudes, policies and behaviour. Neal Ascherson grasped this when in 1986 he posed the question, ‘In whose name should a mass party of the left speak?’ He continued, ‘Not in the name of the nation, but not in the name of one class either. How about in the name of the people? It is not a nation or a class which demands Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, but the living – all the living – inhabitants of a definite country at a definite moment: now.’ These are issues that Labour has systematically failed to address, perhaps with the exception of during the 1940s, and, partly in consequence, the party has enabled ‘the conservative nation’ to operate as the vantage point from which political discourse, both at mass and elite level, has understood Britain, its present and its past.
In these pages our intention is not to offer a comprehensive guide to everything that has happened to British Labour over the course of nearly 120 years. We have had to be selective and to concentrate on the key themes and events while putting these in context. In our historical examination, this has meant focusing on the post-war experience of Labour in government, and how it has coped with opposition in recent decades, as British politics have become more fragmented and less homogeneous. This has meant, for example, giving only passing reference and study to the 1924 and 1929–31 Labour governments and the experience of Labour in coalition in the two world wars.
We have written this book at a time of widespread doubt about the future of the UK – from Brexit to the continuing debate on Scottish independence; the prolonged uncertainty about Northern Ireland’s relationship with the rest of the UK and the Republic of Ireland; and the emerging English dimension. We offer this book at such a time of transition with some small hesitancy. The future is being decided every day in new and unpredictable ways that illustrate the follies of conventional wisdom. We also note that no systematic analysis of the history of British Labour and Britishness has ever been undertaken, and that we have ventured into uncharted waters, where we may equally annoy scholars and readers in both subjects. Despite this, we are of the view that the volatile world of modern politics makes such an alternative history and account even more needed, in the spirit of the times, to kick-start long-overdue debates.
Recent years have seen the foundations of the United Kingdom shaken to their core, buffeted by economic, social and political headwinds, both global and domestic. The foreseeable future looks likely to have a similar political environment, and perhaps as the UK and its different nations, regions and parts navigate the future, those in Labour and other reforming and progressive circles might find this study of some use in charting a course that departs from ‘the conservative nation’ which has had such a vice-like grip on the political debate. Attempting to better understand the Labour Party and its relationship with Britain and Britishness can, we think, offer a few small but important steps in mapping out where we are, how we got here, and some guidance to future debates.
CHAPTER ONE
LABOUR’S FIVE STORIES OF BRITAIN
Labour must learn how to champion Britishness, as an expression that encompasses the whole UK. Patriotism is a fine sentiment, a love of the country in all its nations and regions, a sentiment Labour needs to welcome and embrace. Pride and pleasure in your homeland is entirely human: we love what we know, its familiar history and geography which we belong to, however long or short our family’s habitation here. But once that love of country starts to claim superiority over others, that tips into dangerous nationalism, hostile to others. Self-deprecation used to be a British form of wit, protecting us from the absurd strutting of fascistic nationalistic politics. Labour needs to lay claim to an all-nation encompassing patriotism.
POLLY TOYNBEE, SEPTEMBER 2018
DIFFERENT BRITISHNESS
A central tenet that runs through Labour’s history – and this book – is different concepts of Britishness. This introduction sets out to explore the context and parameters in which the debate over Britishness occurred, focusing as much on its unarticulated assumptions and unspoken premises as on the arguments overtly deployed.
To aid this understanding at a time of fluidity, uncertainty and high-octane debates around Brexit and the future political direction of the UK, in the summer of 2018 we asked fifty public figures – from academics, writers and intellectuals to activists and campaigners – for their assessment of where we are, and we have included extracts from their comments at key points in the text. We make no claim that this group is representative or speaks for anyone bar the individuals involved, but they offer a fascinating range of perspectives on the nature of the UK and Britishness, where both are now, and what possible future paths may emerge – of state, nations, identities and politics.
The point of departure is that, as Benedict Anderson it put in his acclaimed study, all national identities are ‘imagined communities’. Over time, and for different people, Britishness has had quite different connotations, ranging from, in the words of Scottish novelist James Robertson, ‘a positive, uniting idea’ to a ‘hangover from imperialism’ with ‘various shades in between. Its symbols (especially the monarchy) evoke strong feelings of love and admiration and inclusion as well as strong feelings of loathing, indifference and exclusion.’
Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan, looking at the UK from outside, reflected, ‘To be British is to be an islander – except at the moment if you come from Ireland – to remember some shared history – Roman invasions, William the Conqueror, the empire, Napoleonic Wars, two world wars – but even then there are different memories.’ The journalist and cultural commentator Joyce McMillan looked back at the canvas of post-war Britain to get a sense of where we are now and express her own feelings of personal and political loss:
I am old enough to remember the 1960s, when being welfare-state British was a source of pride – cool and fashionable, as well as generally a good thing. I don’t think you can overstate the importance of the 1945 settlement in redefining a positive Britishness after the war – it meant everything to my Labour-voting parents, all that they fought for in 1939–45.
Meanwhile, a different kind of Britain has arisen – one that sits for many at ease in a multifaceted world, as the Guardian writer John Harris commented: ‘My daughter is nine: England is where she lives, Wales is where she was born and where she roots her identity, and Scotland is that interesting place where they had the Yes/No referendum. Britain only comes up when there’s athletics on TV. I think this speaks volumes.’
Yet, such an evoking is not enough for many, clashing with difficult and uncomfortable realities – a view put by the New Statesman’s Stephen Bush: ‘The problem for Britishness’s future prospects is that it looks highly likely that we are headed for a period of intense economic dislocation that will be felt across all four of the United Kingdom’s constituent kingdoms but received majority support in just two – England and Wales.’ For others, the idea of Britain has the potential to rise above this turbulent period: ‘Great Britain is an island which has something of the Tardis about it: while it can seem small from the outside, it nevertheless contains multitudes within it.’
In this sense, as in many others, the idea of Britishness has deep roots in history. It can be understood as having multiple manifestations – political, institutional, historical, social and civic. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and even into the twentieth, the role of religion was also important, with one historian describing the UK as ‘a Protestant island’ as late as 1967. And indeed one of the defining characteristics of Britishness throughout most of its history has been that it has not been tied to one set of values, and that at its strongest it has had an adaptability and malleability which have allowed, for all its constraints and conservatisms (which we will explore), a flexibility and room for creativity. This has produced a tension in Britishness – between its dominant interpretation of the prevailing political order and its ability to innovate and change – but it has also been a strength.
Throughout the history of the British state, Britishness has also had a relationship with the presence of external threats: whether the French in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the rise of Germany in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the emergence of the Soviet Union and the Cold War. Since 1945, some Continental rivalries have continued to be played out in less critical ways, particularly through sport, with, for example, the English–German footballing rivalry at World Cups and European Championships becoming a part of national culture, aided by xenophobic posturing by the tabloid press.
Despite all this, throughout most of the party’s history, its attitude was to leave its assumptions on Britishness largely unexplored. Early pioneers, such as Labour’s first Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, or Keir Hardie, said next to nothing original about the nature of Britain or Britishness; and this when the party was in its formative years defining itself and what it stood for.
Instead, what Labour mostly did was buy into the idea of Britain and British history as a story of progress and evolution: the forward march of organised labour from outsiders to insiders and shapers of the future. This was a powerful, mobilising story and one that gave Labour (and labour) a central role and influence in society. But what it also did was gloss over many of the fault lines and fissures of Britain, of class, occupation, interest and identity. It allowed Labour to buy into what is called the Whig view of British history, which emphasises continuity and harmony but is also, importantly, someone else’s story. This view of history drew from Victorian historians such as Macaulay and Trevelyan, and their belief in progress, science and reason; it was critiqued in 1931 by Herbert Butterfield, who wrote that the Whig interpretation of history was ‘to emphasise certain principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present’.
Perhaps the most explicit embracing of this position in the party’s early years was when Sidney Webb, author of the party’s 1918 constitution, told the 1923 Labour conference of ‘the inevitability of gradualism’ – a perspective which became synonymous with Fabianism (after its association with the Fabian Society). And this notion of history contributed to a peculiar weakness on Labour’s part: namely, a certain complacency towards many of the UK’s most powerful institutions.
It is not an accident that as the idea of ‘Labour Britain’ has declined, under the influence of New Labour and constitutional reform, a host of senior Labour figures, of which Gordon Brown was only the most influential, attempted to develop a progressive credo of Britishness, based on shared values and institutions. This did not prove successful (or, at least, at the time of writing has yet to do so), but as an exercise it was a revealing project, trying to link up an ambitious programme of change with a conversation on values, the purpose of public bodies, civic society, and the popular stories people tell themselves and each other.
Is it possible that Britishness can be reinvented and reclaimed at this late hour, as the UK faces multiple challenges and crises? Could it even in its adaptability outlive the UK in its present form and find a new form in a looser multinational union? And, not least, can it accommodate the challenges of a multicultural society and the rise of an assertive Englishness? And for those who think such questions are diversions from dealing with core economic and social questions, these are fundamental issues that in different ways face centre-left parties across the developed world, such as the Spanish Socialists and Podemos in relation to Catalonia, or the Canadian Liberals in relation to Quebec.
WHAT ARE THE FIVE STORIES OF ‘LABOUR BRITAIN’?
This brings us to the idea of ‘Labour Britain’, or ‘the Labour nation’: a concept distinctive both from British Labour and its politics. Instead it has represented a set of ideas that amounted to, at their peak, a way of advancing Labour and a more humane, egalitarian, centre-left vision of society. In a previous study looking at the Scottish Labour Party and its rise and fall, we introduced the notion of ‘Labour Scotland’ – defined as a set of institutions and practices through which the party attempted to exercise influence and power. Though it never won a majority of the popular vote, the Scottish party constructed, in the decades after 1945, a sort of semi-detached hegemony, exercised through the three pillars of local government power, trade unionism and the prevalence of council houses. All three have since crumbled and the idea of ‘Labour Scotland’ is now no longer a viable proposition.
A party’s understanding of its own past is, almost invariably, part history and part mythology. Henry Tudor in Political Myth stated that myths are dramatic constructions whose purpose is ‘to come to grips with reality’. In this they are somewhat akin to what we call narratives, but they also have another function: to validate in a party’s own mind the value and legitimacy of its own project and, in so doing, to persuade others too. This has been a relatively unexplored area until recently in studies of Labour and wider politics, and one of the first pioneers in relation to the party was the American academic Henry Drucker, who in 1979 wrote:
The Labour Party has and needs a strong sense of its own past and of the past of the labour movement which produced and sustains it. This sense of its past is so central to its ethos that it plays a critical role in defining what the party is about to those in it. Labour’s sense of her past is, of course, an expression of the past experience of the various parts of the British working class. It is these pasts which dictate that Labour must be a party of the future and what kind of future policies it will tolerate.
Drucker, however, did not explore how Labour’s depiction of its own past, its ‘mythology’, extended to its understandings of nationhood, and it is here that we seek to make a contribution. We suggest, with due caution given the complexity of the matter, that five main tenets of ‘the Labour nation’ can be identified. First, ‘the Labour nation’ has been founded on parliamentarianism, Westminster as the central political authority of the UK, and parliamentary sovereignty. Parliament was seen as the protector of working people, liberty and freedom, and as a bulwark against tyranny and arbitrary power, both at home and abroad. This may seem uncontroversial, but Labour’s parliamentarianism held that power and legitimacy lay with elected MPs as representatives, whereas vast swathes of the party’s support base would hold that power is and should be located in the people – as articulated by its own rank and file. The left-wing critique of Labour’s parliamentarianism was most eloquently put by Ralph Miliband in his book Parliamentary Socialism, where he said, ‘Of political parties claiming socialism as their aim, the Labour Party has always been one of the most dogmatic – not about socialism, but about the parliamentary system.’
Parliamentarianism saw political change and progress advanced by Labour through Parliament, and such a perspective had wider consequences. One was a binary distinction between parliamentary and extra-parliamentary action; this tension arising significantly in the Bennite and Corbynite insurrections, particularly around the issue of mandatory reselection of Labour MPs by the local party members. The second consequence was the party’s attitude towards industrial conflict, which, as the party of organised labour, has often been ambivalent. During major periods of industrial action and strikes, such as the General Strike of 1926, victorious miners’ strikes of 1972 and 1974, and year-long miners’ strike of 1984–85, the party leadership’s attitude was ambiguous, hesitant and at times disapproving.
The reification of Parliament has also seen the party slow to embrace political reform of the institution and how authority is disseminated, and as Labour became a party of government it became more uncritical of the workings of Parliament. Hence, while the second Ramsay MacDonald administration attempted to pass a bill on electoral reform for the Commons, advancing a measure on the Alternative Vote (AV) in 1931 (eighty years before Lib Dem Nick Clegg), the party rapidly lost interest. Similarly, Scottish home rule, which had been a clarion issue for the likes of Keir Hardie, was quietly dropped once the 1945 government was elected. It was formally rejected in the 1950s, with the party only returning to it in 1974 under the duress of the electoral advance of the SNP. And for all the changing aspects of British politics and British Labour, parliamentarianism is the one strand to which the party has most consistently adhered.
The second characteristic of ‘the Labour nation’ was state expansion. Pivotal to the party’s pursuit of equality, social justice and the alleviation of poverty was the concept of a powerful central state. Dispensing with the party’s earlier decentralist origins, Labour became the advocate for active government and an interventionist state that pursued centralisation as a means to deliver the end of a more equal, fairer Britain.
This approach reached its zenith in the 1940s to 1960s, and particularly in the 1940–45 wartime coalition and 1945 government. Ultimately, as post-war economic growth faltered and debates about the UK’s relative decline became prominent, so the authority of the state, centralisation and redistribution came into question. But this was for the future.
Thirdly, Labour’s statism tended to take a constitutionally conservative form. Mainstream Labour’s sheer lack of curiosity about how power and elites worked in the UK reflected a deeply held belief that the power expressed through an election and a confident labour movement would be enough. Until recent times, the party had never showed sustained, serious interest in how the unwritten constitution of the UK worked. Tom Nairn spoke with truth of Labour’s ‘mystical faith in the superiority of British society and the British constitution’ as central to the tenets of labourism. This belief was rooted in the notion of ‘exceptionalism’, a recurrent motif of both historiography and popular culture in which the British state is seen as inspired by a higher moral idiom, by historical experience deemed of greater worth than that of comparable countries. Such exceptionalism fed a somewhat self-congratulatory mood in the Labour Party; with its roots in practical trade unionism, it was deemed to have built-in advantages not available to its sister parties in Continental Europe.
Since the mid-1960s crisis of post-war social democracy, constitutional reform has risen in salience in the UK, with Labour’s faltering efforts in the 1970s followed by a far-reaching programme of constitutional renovation post-1997. This not only incorporated devolution in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and London, but also saw the introduction of the Human Rights Act and the Supreme Court, the abolition of most of the hereditary peers in the House of Lords, and the establishment of a commission on electoral reform chaired by Roy Jenkins. But in this impressive list of what changed and how the framework of UK politics was altered, what was striking was what did not change. As Labour engaged in a quasi-codification of what passes for the British constitution, so Tony Blair and others clung to the idea that parliamentary sovereignty and the omnipotent centre remained; this was another motivation for Gordon Brown’s restless exercise trying to define a progressive Britishness.
Fourthly, ‘the Labour nation’ had a technocratic aspect. The socialism of the Webbs, which had such a profound effect on Labour’s ideological formation, envisaged training an ‘elite of unassuming experts’ capable of running the machinery of state efficiently and judiciously. This Fabian ethos imagined the deployment of technocratic expertise to resolve a host of social problems ranging from slum clearance to town planning, from clean air to the great public health drives of the early years of the NHS; expert authority would transcend and overcome the failures of unbridled capitalism. This is the political mindset that saw Harold Wilson in 1963 invoke ‘the white heat of the technological revolution’ and the rise of the Ministry of Technology (‘MinTech’) under that unapologetic technocrat of the 1960s, Tony Benn.
Fifthly, ‘the Labour nation’ saw the country as potentially a powerful force for good in the world. This perspective was given huge impetus by the experience of Labour in the wartime coalition of 1940–45 that contributed to defeating Nazism and fascism. This crucial period of the party’s history is often glossed over, but it changed the party, reinforcing its perspectives on the state and centralisation, and furthered the incorporation of Labour into the political order. Not least, it reinforced its belief in the moral character of Britain and how it could be a beacon of hope for others.
This belief was manifested in a number of ways. One was what was seen as the UK’s peculiarly benign role in the Commonwealth, helping to organise collective security in the face of the Soviet threat and in the construction of a global rules-based order. Another strand was that of left-wing advocacy of nuclear disarmament, which from the 1950s crystallised around support for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). By renouncing Britain’s supposedly independent nuclear deterrent, it was argued, the UK would provide moral leadership and set a moral example to the rest of the world. Similarly, in some of Tony Blair’s near-evangelical arguments for liberal intervention pre-Iraq War, there was a distinctive echo of this belief that Britain was somehow singularly placed to provide a principled leadership that no one else could offer.
‘The Labour nation’ became a story of a specific historical period of the country, state and society. Namely, this was an account of the kind of society and Britain that Labour wanted to bring into existence, how it saw it being advanced and who it saw the principal actors being. Its halcyon period was the peak Labour era of the 1940s to 1960s, which would cover Labour entering office in wartime coalition in 1940, the 1945 victory, and Wilson’s 1964 and 1966 triumphs. This specific articulation of peak ‘Labour Britain’ saw the party become part of the British political system, a pillar of the constitutional order, and a force that incorporated into the established order the wider interests of organised labour and the trade union movement.
‘The Labour nation’ was at its zenith in the immediate post-war decades, defined as they were by security, stability and order. This was the capitalist settlement of managed domestic economies, Keynesian economics, fixed currencies and capital controls: the age of Bretton Woods and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Trade Organization (WTO) attempting to maintain an organised, ordered capitalism in domestic economies and internationally. And for the period 1945–70, this broadly worked, with the US dollar acting as the reserve currency of the world. In 1971–73, this order fell apart, as the US floated the dollar and the Arab nations of OPEC (the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) forced a huge price rise in oil, resulting in a global shock to the economies of the West. The retreat of ‘the Labour nation’ is linked to the passing of this version of international capitalism upon which the post-war welfare settlement was built, and the advent of a turbo-charged, finance-driven and destructive form of capitalism, which proved as challenging to progressive political vision in the UK as it has elsewhere in the developed world.
LABOUR, PLACE AND COMMUNITY
For a party of radical change, the British Labour Party has been significantly influenced by mythology, or by what Henry Drucker has called ‘ethos’: that is, the informal understandings and unwritten, unsaid ways in which the party understood itself and politics.
Fundamental to Labour’s ethos has been a party culture and worldview that as well as emphasising radical change has also championed conservation. Conservation represents a distinct strand in working-class culture, containing memories of fighting to preserve existing rights; remembering past struggles, victories and defeats; and resisting the onslaught on working people and the gains they have made, many aided by the achievements of Labour governments. Conservation, in this sense, has articulated itself often in Labour and working-class defensiveness about social change, particularly at times of economic and social upheaval and mass unemployment such as the 1930s and 1980s.
This aspect of Labour culture has been offset by the party’s impetus to create a new kind of society and in so doing to embrace change and the future. It was not an accident that the party’s most famous manifesto – that of 1945 – was called ‘Let Us Face the Future’, nor that the most memorable party poster of that campaign was of a V for Victory sign (until then most closely associated with Winston Churchill) with the slogan ‘And Now Win The Peace: Vote Labour’. The party was not only reclaiming the future, but giving voice to the progressive and radical patriotism that had come to the fore in ‘the people’s war’.
At other times in the party’s history, notably Harold Wilson’s ‘New Britain’ of 1963–64 and Tony Blair’s ‘New Labour, New Britain’ of 1994–97, there was an identification of the Tories and forces of conservatism with the past, failure and being out of touch, whereas Labour was the party of an adaptive, confident future. Whereas the 1945 government did remake the political environment and culture, neither the Wilson nor the Blair modernisation approaches succeeded to the extent of their hopes and rhetoric: one was weakened by economic crisis; the other by the asymmetrical relationship with the US and war in Iraq.
Another dimension of Labour’s advocacy of social change has been its use of religious, evangelical, missionary and semi-mystical language to articulate its mission, particularly in the pre-1945 period. Influenced in the early days by the ethical socialism of the Independent Labour Party and socialist figures such as Keir Hardie and Ramsay MacDonald, this tendency continued under the likes of R. H. Tawney and George Lansbury. Such was its strength that, post-1945, as Christian religious belief declined in the UK, some of the language remained. Hence the regular appearances of ‘New Jerusalem’ and ‘new society’ in the socialist credo.
Thus, the 1945 manifesto proudly proclaimed of Labour: ‘Its ultimate purpose at home is the establishment of a Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain – free, democratic, efficient, progressive, public-spirited…’ Labour had already published documents with grand titles such as ‘Labour and the New Social Order’ (1918), ‘The Old World and the New Society’ (1942) and ‘Labour and the Nation’ (1928), though they were unspecific about the contours of either the ‘new social order’ or the Labour nation. Instead, these were mobilising stories and tropes to give a very sketchy sense of the grand ambitions and mission that Labour was called forth to achieve.
If Labour’s vision often lacked specifics, it was grounded in a recognition of the importance of place and community. Labour began its origins as a party of those outside the system and far removed from power, in both a practical and a geographic sense. Critical to this was place, whether it was regional centres such as South Yorkshire, South Wales or Clydeside, or the individual working-class communities that made up their rich mosaic.
This is a strand that has offered a tantalising alternative history of Labour – about the lived experiences and memories of working men and women, from labourers to trade unionists and elected Labour politicians. A whole tranche of Labour figures, both in their actions and in their reflections, have championed and embodied the politics of place. This can be seen in the way numerous Labour politicians’ accounts give credence to the importance of the local community, recall past working-class struggles and in this way contribute to the maintenance of collective memories.
There are numerous examples. Take Nye Bevan’s evocation of the solidarity and hardship that defined much of South Wales in the earlier part of the twentieth century; these were the same folk memories drawn upon by Neil Kinnock in his 1987 celebration of Welsh culture and intelligence, in which he asked why his predecessors had not gone to university, ‘those people who could sing, and play, and recite and write poetry…’ Or Roy Hattersley’s lively tapestry of South Yorkshire memories and pride, celebrating its distinctive identity, from cricket to football and his love for Sheffield Wednesday. What these accounts wind together is geography, memory and generational stories, often giving centre stage to the experience of the depression, unemployment and poverty in the 1930s, thus making the moral case for a labour movement.
Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson represented Jarrow, synonymous with 1930s hardship and the Jarrow march, and her memoir, The Town That Was Murdered, is a statement of anger and resistance: ‘Jarrow’s plight is not a local problem. It is the symptom of a national evil.’ Jim Sillars, recalling when he was Labour MP for South Ayrshire in the 1970s, wrote of a rich, varied working class, made up of men and women who were self-taught and questioning of traditional authority and who knew how to organise. Two decades later, Sillars (now in the SNP) could evoke the spirit of that camaraderie and how it gave sustenance to Labour, writing, ‘Even although it is a twentieth-century creation, it is in direct descent from the poor … and their sacrifices of previous times. The heartbreak, the sense of solidarity, and the stepping-stone victories of that struggle are in its genes.’
There is a complex relationship between this Labour articulation and championing of community, place and memory on the one hand and its translation into practical national politics on the other. The political connections between national politics and ideas of nation, state and country are not straightforward. Indeed, a major political paradox emerged. Labour’s memory of the local community in the party’s early days informed a mindset that was decentralist and questioning of state power and remote authority. However, as the party’s fortunes rose, this perspective – reinforced by the impotence of the 1924 and 1929–31 Labour governments, the 1931 slump and the subsequent depression – contributed to the ascendancy of a Labour statism.
In a curious reflection of this centralist bias, it is striking that in Ralph Miliband’s classic deconstruction of ‘parliamentary socialism’ all references to the various regions and nations of the UK are conspicuously absent; even more markedly, there is not one mention of Scotland or Wales as political entities; nor even of Northern Ireland and the Irish issue. These omissions are not atypical: they are so prevalent within the literature that they are rarely noted, but what they point to is the dominant construction of a version of centralised ‘British Labour’. It reflects a view of government that focuses on Westminster and Whitehall, elite bargaining and narrow parliamentary transactions, neglecting what is happening outside this narrow circle. It is the politics of the court, not the country.
LABOUR AND ‘THE CONSERVATIVE NATION’
One of Labour’s characteristics has been that it has gone with the grain of British society and culture. The idea of ‘Labour Britain’ can be seen as an articulation of an imagined ‘Labour nation’ that sat in accommodation with what Andrew Gamble called ‘the conservative nation’. By this we mean more than the politics of the Conservative Party, conservatism and its alignment with Britishness. Instead, we mean how the ideas of conservatism and the nation – which predominantly meant an imagined England – have become synonymous. In the nineteenth century, as the Tory Party found its identity, it became the party of Empire, of an all-British union, the Crown and patriotism.
The Tories learned a careful language and balancing act which allowed them to be both English and British at the same: an achievement that lasted well into the twentieth century. There was, further, a constitutional propensity to defer to tradition, precedent and the established way of doing things – parliamentary sovereignty, the unwritten constitution and authority of the Crown and the transfer of its powers to the executive – all of which influenced Labour. This ‘conservative nation’ went beyond the Tories and represented a conservativism of the imagination, using the past as an obstacle to fundamental change; and all of this was put to the service of defending, maintaining and reproducing systems of privilege, exclusion and inequality.
EMPIRE STATE BRITAIN
The experience of the British Empire changed Britain both domestically and internationally, and we are still living in its legacy. One way in which this matters to this day is in the continued existence of the Empire State, defined as a state which became pre-eminent and associated with the rise of Empire, military conquest, interventions and expeditions. The state earned legitimacy from its world role and global influence as much as, if not more than, from its domestic role. The Empire State was shaped by values antithetical to socialist or progressive ideals. Labour was reluctant to recognise this. George Orwell was a rare voice in boldly – arguably too starkly – confronting the dilemmas of Empire. In a 1947 essay, ‘Towards European Unity’, he wrote:
The European peoples, and especially the British, have long owed their standard of life to direct or indirect exploitation of the coloured peoples. This relationship has never been made clear by official socialist propaganda, and the British worker, instead of being told that, by world standards, he is living above his income, has been taught to think of himself as an overworked, down-trodden slave.
Orwell argued that British socialism had not only avoided such hard truths, but sold its doctrine in a narrow materialist frame, and lacked a clear moral dimension about the nature of the UK and Empire.
BRITAIN’S WARFARE STATE
Finally, we come to the notion of the UK as a warfare state, building on ‘the conservative nation’ and Empire State. By a warfare state, what we mean is not just a state defined by Empire, but one that has actively engaged in the art of war and conquest to win status and power.
To many observers, such an overview seems to be rooted in the past – a UK state that fought a succession of wars between the late eighteenth century and middle of the nineteenth century, followed by two world wars to prevent one power, first France and then Germany, from dominating the European continent. However, as Britain’s Empire and global role diminished in scale, the UK continued to be a country defined by both heavy military spending and active involvement in warfare. A study by The Guardian showed that UK armed forces have been involved in war in every single year from 1914 to 2014 – a record unmatched by any other state. As we speak, UK forces (along with the US) are deployed in Afghanistan, where they have been since 2001 – in what for both counties is their longest continuous post-war deployment (and several years longer than the Soviet occupation of the country).
The historian David Edgerton has called Britain a ‘warfare state’ between 1920 and 1970 in which the resources of government, science, technology and innovation were gathered for military purposes. Individual elements of this warfare state came to the fore: for example, that in the post-war period the UK spent more on defence as a proportion of GDP than their European neighbours, or that a larger portion of research and development was spent on defence and the military in the UK than in other comparable states, all of which held back UK economic growth. Another dimension of the warfare state was the determination of successive British post-war governments to hold on to the ‘independent nuclear deterrent’, irrespective of the elusive rationale and the changing international environment. Labour critics have been aware of these facts, which came to prominence in the 1964–70 and 1974–79 Labour governments, alongside the intellectual underpinnings of the Bennite Alternative Economic Strategy (AES), but what was missing was an understanding of the warfare state.
The above triptych – ‘the conservative nation’, Empire State Britain and the warfare state – have together provided an environment of state, government and politics not exactly conducive to Labour or progressive change. This has meant that Labour has had to swim against the flow to make political headway. That it has managed to do so at several points in British history is testament to its popular support, leadership, ideas and determination, but it has been operating in a hostile environment for nearly all of its existence. Labour had to operate and compete in a politics – domestically and internationally, in institutions, ideas and practices at home – that was antagonistic and ill-disposed to a project of a different, more democratic, egalitarian and open Britain.
A more recent argument from the historian David Andress has made the case that the UK along with France, as the two largest European global empires of recent times, and the USA, an empire in all but name today, all suffer from what he rather loosely calls ‘cultural dementia’. This refers to the selective recreation of the past based on notions of greatness, dominance and race that are evoked today by elements of the right to recall simpler times and singularities of nation, state and people. This is over-generalised, but Andress has a point that invoking such a fantasy dystopian past poses difficulties for Labour and the left.
From this exploration of ‘the Labour nation’, its character, contradictions and capacity, we will address the party’s principles, practices and personalities in relation to the ideas above over the course of its history. Before we do that, we will look at the often uneasy relationships between socialism, patriotism and the Empire State, before traversing Labour’s history, with a focus on the past seventy years, and an assessment of future challenges and possibilities.
