Labours old and new

The parliamentary right of the British Labour Party 1970–79 and the roots of New Labour

Stephen Meredith

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780719073229
• eBook ISBN: 9781847796486
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

This study is concerned with the 'Old' Labour right at a critical juncture of social democratic and Labour politics. It attempts to understand the complex transition from so-called 'Old Right' to 'New Right' or 'New Labour', and locates at least some of the roots of the latter in the complexity, tensions and fragmentation of the former during the 'lean' years of social democracy in the 1970s. The analysis addresses both the short and long-term implications of the emerging ideological, organisational and political complexity and divisions of the parliamentary Labour right and Labour revisionism, previously concealed within the loosely adhesive post-war framework of Keynesian reformist social democracy. It establishes the extent to which 'New' Labour is a legatee of at least some elements of the disparate and discordant Labour right and tensions of social democratic revisionism in the 1970s. In so doing, it advances our understanding of a key moment in the development of social democracy and the making of the contemporary British Labour Party.

1
Introduction

So much public attention has been riveted upon the dilemmas of the Labour Left by journalists and scholars that the layman may be forgiven for believing that the Left-wing represents more than a minor faction of the Party as a whole. At certain periods the Left has played a crucial role in Labour’s development, but normally the Party is governed and controlled by the Right. To understand the contemporary Labour Party one must first understand its Right-wing.¹

The Labour Right in the 1970s and early 1980s was too fragmented, and politically and intellectually ill-equipped to take the Party on a revisionist course.²

The Labour right: Labours old and new

A welcome recent study of the variety of Labour Party political thought since 1945 has identified five broad core positions and strands of ideas. These include the ‘Old Left’, the ‘New Left’, the ‘Centre’, the ‘Old Right’ and the ‘New Right’ or ‘New Labour’. As the collection suggests, the precise ‘timing of the transition from “Old Right” to “New Right” – the creation of New Labour – is hard to pinpoint’, but undoubtedly a Labour right contribution, predominantly in its parliamentary manifestation, has been critical to the post-war ideological and political experience and development of the Labour Party.³ Among many diverse attempts to explain the ideological and political configuration of the contemporary Labour Party, the problems of such an exercise notwithstanding, some commentators present the New Labour leadership in direct descent to Labour’s historic post-war revisionist social democratic tradition. Some further point to the influence of what has been termed ‘neo-revisionist’ attempts to respond to the crisis of Keynesian revisionist social democracy and the break-down of the post-war British political (social democratic) settlement in the 1970s.⁴ This study is concerned with the ‘Old’ Labour right at a critical juncture of British and Labour Party politics and attempts to understand, at least in part, the complex transition from ‘Old Right’ to ‘New Right’ or ‘New Labour’. It attempts to locate at least some of the roots of the latter in the complexity and divisions of the former in the 1970s. Particularly, the analysis addresses the short-term and long-term implications of the emerging ideological, organisational and policy tensions, divisions and eventual fragmentation of the parliamentary Labour right and Labour Party revisionism in the late 1960s and 1970s, a period in which the particular economic and political configuration represented a fundamental challenge to the prevailing norms of both British government and British social democracy.⁵

The study adopts a methodology that attempts to disaggregate conventional interpretations of a monolithic and homogeneous Labour right or revisionist leadership tendency. Alternatively, it suggests that the Labour right has been a heterogeneous, complex coalition of traditions and political tendencies, divided over a range of key policy themes and even the relative priority of fundamental concepts in social democratic thought and practice. It argues that substantive ideological and policy differences were previously concealed within the loose cohesive framework of Keynesian revisionist social democracy. As this framework unravelled in the problematic economic and political context of the 1970s, it was the inability of this complex body to unite in the face of adverse events and developments that is a neglected factor in explanations of the trajectory of the Labour Party and British social democracy: in explanations of Labour’s subsequent shift leftwards, the longer and more complex evolution of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) and the extent to which ‘New’ Labour is a legatee of at least certain elements of the disparate and discordant Labour right of the 1970s. In doing so, it contributes to the understanding of a key moment in the development and transition of social democracy and the making of the contemporary British Labour Party.

The influential but neglected parliamentary Labour right

Royden Harrison has written of the relative paucity of studies of the parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) and Labour Party factions in general.⁶ Moreover, in spite of its significant position and role in Labour’s post-war development, the Labour right, perhaps because of its traditional position close to the parliamentary leadership and less explicit dissenting or factional behaviour, has received comparatively less attention than the Labour left. There is a substantial body of literature devoted explicitly to the various traditions, ideas, groups, dissent and frequent conflict of the Labour left. Studies of the Labour right are limited to those of intra-party left–right conflict, in which it has been presented as a largely homogeneous unit loyal to the parliamentary leadership,⁷ and particular studies of the so-called Gaitskellite revisionist tradition⁸ and its relative contribution to, first, the SDP⁹ and, more recently, to the emergence of New Labour.¹⁰

Perhaps before going further, the study should briefly consider two (of the few) related works that directly address the decline and subsequent recovery of the Labour right either side of the intra-party developments that surrounded the formation of the SDP in 1981. Dianne Hayter, in this series, has recently written of the attempts of the ‘traditional right’ in the wake of the defections to the SDP to reclaim a more moderate organisation and course for the Labour Party.¹¹ In doing so, she argues that after the SDP split ‘Labour’s “traditional right” exhibited … different characteristics from those of its predecessor elements’. The post-Limehouse Labour right determined to review the nature of its response and to put policy differences aside to work and organise assiduously in conjunction with sympathetic trade union leaders to resist the advance of the left inside the party. She relates the story of how ‘Labour’s traditional right, weakened and tested by defections to the … SDP in 1981 … set about its objective of reclaiming the Labour Party to make it electable’.¹² The present study offers a ‘prequel’ to Hayter’s story. It surveys the implications of the complex character, tensions and fragmentation of the pre-1981 parliamentary Labour right that contributed to the need for the strategic re-evaluation and organisational effort of the ‘traditional right’ of Hayter’s study. Hayter concerns herself with the specifically ‘anti-left groups’ of ‘moderate trade unionists and parliamentarians’ of the ‘traditional right’ after 1981. This study concerns itself with the reasons why a diminished Labour right arrived in this situation. It addresses the inherent tensions and divisions of a more broadly constituted, diverse and fractious ‘pre-split’ Labour right involved with a broader range of issues and concerns.¹³ Hayter’s study emphasises the need to explain the inability of the Labour right to unite in the intra-party and wider context of the 1970s and why it was politically and organisationally ill-equipped to stem the flow of the party’s subsequent shift leftwards.

Giles Radice, writing on the period immediately prior to that of Hayter’s study, also identifies the emerging intellectual, organisational and leadership vacuum of the parliamentary Labour right in the intra-party and wider context of the 1970s. He attributes the tensions and lack of cohesion of the parliamentary Labour right largely to the personal ambitions and antipathy between three of the major figures of post-war Labour revisionism: Anthony Crosland, Roy Jenkins and Denis Healey (who can broadly be said to have embodied the dimensions of the emerging divisions of Labour Party revisionism and the parliamentary Labour right in the 1970s).¹⁴ While undoubtedly true that they were influential and ambitious politicians, often in competition for major government and Labour Party offices, this study attempts to address the diversity, tensions and conflict of Labour Party revisionism and the parliamentary Labour right in wider intellectual, ideological and policy terms. It suggests that the fracture and shortcomings of the Labour right in the 1970s had deeper, more complex roots than mere personal ambitions and antagonisms.

Much other recent scholarship on the Labour Party has focused on analyses of the nature of its recent transformation, particularly the origins, character and (likely) trajectory of New Labour. Labour’s ‘modernisation’ through the 1980s and the subsequent emergence of New Labour have prompted a variety of explanations as to the influences and nature of this process: as a capitulation to Thatcherite-style capitalism;¹⁵ as a return to, or the culmination of, an earlier revisionist tradition and approach in the Labour Party;¹⁶ or as something qualitatively new, a ‘post-Thatcherite’, modernised social democracy, ‘ideologically’ underpinned by the Third Way.¹⁷ Some recent attempts to ‘historicise’ New Labour have pointed to its revisionist social democratic antecedents (among other ‘progressive’ influences).¹⁸ This has included looking for New Labour’s roots not just in the relatively homogeneous Gaitskellite revisionism of the 1950s, but also in the emergent ‘neo-revisionist’ social democratic response to social democratic problems and dilemmas of the 1970s, so much so that the evolution of New Labour has been a ‘staged transformation’ that began in the 1970s. The developments of the 1970s are very important to understanding New Labour, at least as important perhaps as Thatcherism in the 1980s.¹⁹ In this sense, the emergence of New Labour represents neither a simple capitulation to, or accommodation of, neo-liberalism and a largely Thatcherite agenda, nor a largely new, ‘post-Thatcherite’, modernised or Third Way social democracy, nor even the culmination of a constant, uniform revisionist tradition in the Labour Party. Rather, it could be interpreted (at least in part) as concomitant with certain themes and ideas that emerged in the complexity and divisions of the ‘old’ parliamentary Labour right in the 1970s, which were temporarily diverted through the formation of the SDP.

The focus of this study, then, is the Labour right at the parliamentary level in the 1970s, drawing upon other organs of the party structure in the constituencies, trade unions and National Executive Committee (NEC) and earlier periods such as the 1950s and 1960–64 as wider context and historical background, and as far as they illustrate ideas, traditions, strategies, policies or groups on the parliamentary Labour right. Of course, in a number of controversial and divisive key policy contexts, such as Common Market membership and industrial relations and trade union reform, it is difficult to understand the debates of the 1970s without reference to the 1960s.²⁰ The parliamentary Labour right is an obviously important (and neglected) subject of analysis. It has embodied the principles and politics of the emergent (revisionist) social democratic politics of the Labour Party and Labour Governments of the post-war period, and provided the core membership of Labour’s post-war ‘dominant coalition’ and ‘governing elite’. The remainder of the chapter sets out the wider context and core methodology of the study. It takes the form of a rationalisation and discussion of central themes and issues of the selected periodisation and case studies. The former includes consideration of the general economic and political context of the 1970s. It also addresses the relevance of the study to related wider themes and debates: the apparent break-down of the post-war British political (social democratic) ‘consensus’ and the broader crisis of European social democracy. The case studies consist of an analysis of the character (and limitations) of parliamentary Labour right group and factional activity in the 1970s, the European dimension of intra-party divisions, attitudes to industrial relations policy and trade union reform, and public expenditure debates and problems of social democratic political economy in the context of emerging tensions of Labour Party revisionism over the balance and priority of underlying philosophical concepts of social democratic thought and practice.

Context and case studies

The fat years and the lean ones are, of course, interconnected … Lines of cleavage may develop, along with ambitions and hopes, points of possible conflict, and areas of disagreement. The good times will thus produce their own challenges over new ways of organizing society, new values, and rising aspirations. And they create fault lines that may emerge in the next downturn. But more obviously, it is the crisis years that put systems under stress. Hard times expose strengths and weaknesses to scrutiny, allowing observers to see relationships that are often blurred in prosperous periods, when good times slake the propensity to contest and challenge. The lean years are times when old relationships crumble and new ones have to be constructe...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series editors’ foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The parliamentary Labour right: views and perspectives
• 3 Parliamentary Labour right factionalism and organisational fragmentation in the 1970s
• 4 A prelude to secession? The parliamentary Labour right and Europe
• 5 In Place of Strife? The parliamentary Labour right and the ‘trade union question’
• 6 The ‘frontiers of social democracy’: public expenditure, redistribution and divisions of social democratic political economy
• 7 The parliamentary Labour right, Labour Party revisionism(s) and the roots of New Labour
• 8 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index