New Labour's Pasts

The Labour Party and Its Discontents

James E. Cronin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138146846
• eBook ISBN: 9781317873914
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Where other books are either highly partisan dismissals or appreciations of the Third Way, or dull sociological accounts, this book gets behind the clichés in order to show just what is left of Labour party ideology and what the future may hold.

New Labour has changed the face of Britain. Culture, class, education, health, the arts, leisure, the economy have all seen seismic shifts since the 1997 election that raised Blair to power. The Labour that rules has distanced itself from the failed Labour of the 70s and 80s, but the core remains. Labour remains gripped by its own past - unable and unwilling to shed its ties to the old Labour party, but determined to avoid the mistakes of which lead to four electoral defeats between 1979 and 1992. Cronin covers the full history of the party from its post war triumph through decades of shambolic leadership against ruthless and organised opposition to the resurgent New Labour of the 90s that finally took Britain into the new millennium.

Chapter 1 The burden of Labour's legacy

DOI: 10.4324/9781315837451-1

Labour was never just a political party. It was a movement, a way of thinking and feeling, and an intense set of loyalties and antipathies. Its evolution therefore refused to obey the logic of a mere political party and the party acted, at least on occasion, as if the winning and holding of office was a distinctly secondary, perhaps even unworthy, objective. Again and again it did not behave as other parties, which typically renew themselves in response to shifting social and economic realities, to electoral defeats or to the regular succession of one generation of leaders by another. For much of its history, by contrast, the British Labour Party proved fiercely resistant to critique and renewal. This has been particularly the case when criticism was deemed to come from those hostile to the unions and when new policies were regarded as pulling the party towards the centre, away from socialism and away from its roots and attachments in the working class. Its inertia was especially marked in the post-war period: during its 13 years of opposition from 1951 to 1964, for example, the party responded with very little in the way of new thinking, new policy or even new rhetoric. This prolonged era of stasis would establish a pattern that ensured that future innovation, if and when it came, would have to be drastic and thoroughgoing, and that it would necessarily entail a decisive break with the party's past. The 'new' in 'New Labour' was to this extent an inevitable product of what went before, or rather, of what did not happen before.

The party's reluctance to embrace the new during the 1950s and early 1960s was deeply embedded in its unique past and anchored in its unusual structure, but it was reinforced by the circumstances in which Labour found itself in opposition. Most important was the powerful legacy of achievement bequeathed to the party by the governments of 1945–51. By almost any standard, the Attlee governments were a resounding success. Labour had been elected in 1945 on a series of pledges that were fulfilled almost to the letter. The party promised to create a genuine welfare state by reorganising existing social services, by adding programmes for those previously left out, and by the establishment of the National Health Service. All this they did. The party also promised to implement policies that would maintain a 'high and stable' level of employment. This, too, came to pass, even if it is difficult to know precisely whom, or what, to credit for the achievement. The party also committed itself to keeping in place a variety of policies – in terms of taxation, price controls, controls over land and rents, regional policy –aimed at making Britain a fairer and more egalitarian society. These promises were also kept, even at the cost of some popular resentment and loud opposition from the Tories, from business and from the self-appointed spokesmen of the middle classes.

Not only did Labour deliver on its promises. The Labour governments of 1945–51 also presided successfully over a difficult transition from war to peace and proved beyond doubt the party's capacity to govern. There were bad moments, of course: the fuel and exchange crises of 1947 were the worst; and the devaluation of the pound in 1949 was a wise move that nonetheless was often portrayed as a failure. And there were divisions and unseemly squabbles as well: over NHS charges, over foreign policy and over rearmament. But for the most part, Labour governed in a reasonably unified fashion over a recovering Britain in which things were steadily and visibly improving. The Attlee governments thus left a record of which the party could be justly proud and around which there quickly grew up a memory that undoubtedly exaggerated the successes, minimised the weaknesses, and put a retrospective shine on activities whose lustre might well not have elicited praise from contemporary observers. Historians have understandably sought to right the balance and to restore the nuances to the picture of Labour's achievement, but it remains the case that at the core of the heroic memory was a solid set of accomplishments.¹

Electoral defeat of 1951 was thus not interpreted as a sign of any fundamental problem in Labour's programme or practice. After all, the party won the popular vote and there was no evidence that the Tory victory augured a prolonged absence from government. That victory itself was won on terms that seemed to confirm the beliefs of many in the Labour Party that their victories had a permanent, or semi-permanent, status. The Conservatives did not question the commitment to full employment or the need to maintain the welfare state. They promised to relax controls and to free up the market, to push back the frontier of nationalisation, and to build more houses. But they did not campaign on a plan to reverse what Labour had done or to return to the policies of the 1930s. 'Consensus' is clearly too strong a word to describe the convergence of opinion in the early 1950s, but there was sufficient common ground for Labour to think that its legacy was not in any way in jeopardy.

Labour not only won the popular vote in 1951, but in doing so consolidated its base of support within the working class. The Labour Party was never merely a class party. It always needed middle-class votes to win. Nor, conversely, could the Conservatives prevail at the polls without significant working-class support. But over the life of the Labour governments of 1945–51, class loyalties had actually become firmer and more unambiguous; in the elections of 1951, therefore, Labour relied largely upon working-class support and probably received a higher share of working-class votes than ever before or since in its history. The Conservatives had likewise by 1951 recaptured many of those middle-class voters who had been moved to vote Labour in 1945 by an enthusiasm for reconstruction but who became increasingly restive in the later years of Labour rule. Class and party therefore fitted together especially closely in the early 1950s and Labour had little reason to doubt that it could rely on continued electoral support from workers and their families.

The prospect of enduring class loyalty meant that Labour's base was secure and that the party could contemplate a period in opposition confident in the assumption that the electoral tide would turn and, in the not too distant future, carry the party back into office. In power once more, it was assumed that Labour would press on with its agenda of social transformation with renewed enthusiasm and with a leadership tested, and now also rested, and ready to get on with the business of running the country. There were worries, of course: the factional strife that marked the last years of the Labour government needed to be overcome, the party would have to confront the problem of succession as an older generation left the scene, and there were genuine questions of policy that had to be resolved. But the problems were all manageable, or so it seemed, and the party itself seemed to stand on very solid foundations.

What were those foundations? Put very simply, Labour was the party of the working class and had as its aim the representation of working-class interests in British politics. But behind this clear formula and simple identity was much complexity: the working class itself was a historical construct, not a fact of nature or a sociological given; and the connections that linked the party and its supporters were forged over time out of particular experiences, needs and understandings. Both the nature of the class Labour sought to serve and the character of the linkages require interrogation.

The very phrase, 'working class', implies a common condition and shared interests among people who may in fact not see themselves as part of anything larger than their family or community. Nevertheless, a distinctive feature of social life in modern Britain has been the way in which all sorts of institutions – from the schools to the churches to the factory to the pub – and all variety of customs have conspired to create a sense of class and to reproduce it over generations. Despite the raw facts of social mobility and the evident diversity of local, working-class cultures, the replication of inequities from one setting to another, from one place to another, and in various spheres of life, regularly convinced most people in Britain that they lived in a class society. And thinking so, they acted so; and thus routinely defined their interests as distinct, and also as opposed. A signal consequence was a powerful tendency to organise: to establish institutions that informally reflected, and further embedded, social divisions while formally serving all sorts of more specific and practical purposes. Among working people these would include clubs and churches, friendly societies and, most important, trade unions. Reinforcing, perhaps also underpinning, this rich but class-infused, associational life were distinctive working-class cultures, ways of talking and playing and courting and saving and spending, with styles that varied locally and regionally but that were consistently different from the styles and behaviours of their 'betters'.²

The working class that Labour sought to represent was thus neither incoherent nor homogeneous. It was structured and organised internally, prior to and independent of its affiliation to any party. The connection to Labour, then, was mediated and indirect. The most visible linkage was through the trade unions, whose rights the original Labour Representation Committee was founded explicitly to defend. Indeed, prior to 1914 the party's growth was registered more accurately by the increasing affiliation of trade unions than by the rise in its voting strength. When the party's constitution was drafted in 1918, the unions were accorded a privileged position and it was subsequently the preferences of union leaders that largely determined party policy. The unions were not the only institutions formally represented in the party: there was also a place for the cooperative societies and, more significantly, for socialist societies like the Fabians, the Independent Labour Party and the Social Democratic Federation – organisations that often served as training grounds for future leaders and as sources of ideas and policies. And it was possible to belong to the party directly by joining a local, constituency party. But effective control was in the hands of the leaders of the largest unions, whose views were magnified many times over by their ability to cast 'block votes' on behalf of their membership.

The role accorded to the unions was for obvious reasons not given to the less formal social organisations that so marked working-class life in Britain, but it would seem that a diffuse class awareness and allegiance to the Labour Party permeated this dense network. The effect was often to naturalise support for Labour, to make it reflexive and customary rather than a matter for debate and choice. The attachment, though by no means universal, was nevertheless largely a matter of culture and disposition rather than ideology, a reflection of sentiment more than conviction, and it was wrapped in a rhetoric meant to inspire, to reassure and when necessary to obscure rather than to convince.³

Labour attached itself therefore to a working class that was already structured and organised within itself and the party became thoroughly imbricated with those pre-existing patterns. The associations that filled up and structured the more public spheres of working-class life were largely the preserve of adult men, with women engaged in more informal networks and young people consorting with each other before settling into the routines of the community. But the boundaries were often blurred, divisions more a matter of taste, temperament and locale than of exclusion, and the ethos largely collective. No doubt a facilitating factor was the absence of sharp and enduring cleavages of religion or ethnicity, but even where these existed and mattered, the highly local character of working-class cultures dampened the broader and potentially fragmenting impact for Labour on a national basis. Although Labour as a party would inevitably conform to the shapes, divisions, prejudices and exclusions embodied in the class it sought to represent, the net effect was nonetheless a broad sense of class awareness and political loyalty.

Both the unions and the party, for example, were more eager and effective spokesmen for the skilled than the unskilled and for those in powerfully organised industries than for those in unskilled, unorganised employment. They tended likewise to identify spontaneously and intuitively with the interests of male workers and to regard the interests of female workers, or working-class women more generally, as less pressing, or to subsume them under the needs of the family headed by a male breadwinner. Nevertheless, the differences that fragmented working-class existence in Britain were fluid and inconsistent and they were often overcome by the recognition that ordinary men and women shared a common fate, a common exclusion from the world of the middle and upper classes, and a common set of vulnerabilities. Perhaps more important, the predisposition to organise was pervasive and it was never regarded as the province of a distinct and privileged section of the working class. Indeed, the assumption within the world of labour was that trade unions were good for all workers and that, if possible, all workers should join. Unions were active, therefore, throughout the economy and enrolled the unskilled as well as the skilled and semi-skilled, and rather large numbers of women were also organised. The preference for organisation was so widely accepted, among working people but also on the part of the state, that it was considered the natural condition of relations at work. Thus when and where it proved difficult to establish stable unions and employers' associations, as in the so-called sweated trades, the government stepped in with formal, legal provision for setting wages and conditions through the Trade Boards. But such action was always considered a departure from the norm and less effective than setting wages and conditions through collective bargaining.

Even if employers were frequently reluctant to acquiesce to the role of trade unions and to abandon what they saw as their rightful managerial prerogatives, and even if it took a very long time for the reach of union organisation to approximate the aspirations of its advocates, the principle that everyone should be represented by a trade union became deeply entrenched in working-class life, in industrial relations and ultimately in politics as well. In its uneven progress, the growth of the unions paralleled, and was reinforced by, the waxing and waning of the Labour Party as an electoral force. The weakness of the unions during the inter-war era, especially after the defeat of the General Strike in 1926, was matched by the inability of the party even to come close to winning a parliamentary majority. Labour's participation in the wartime coalition inevitably marked a decisive breakthrough on both fronts. The party was finally brought within the political mainstream and it was rewarded with a pre-eminent role in running the home front, a position Labour used to encourage unionisation. The power of the state was now deployed to sponsor organisation both by workers and employers and to insist that employers bargain in good faith. The process was taken further after the war: with the coming to power of the first majority Labour government in 1945, the unions became virtual partners in government and used their new-found access to insert themselves widely into the apparatus of policy-making and consultation. In turn, the unions used their clout with ordinary workers to secure support for the party's aims in government, particularly the effort to control prices and wages. The link between Labour and the unions was thus very firmly established, and understood as a critical resource for a Labour government, by the early 1950s.

The working class upon which Labour relied was thus a very solid, rooted and well-organised social force whose political preferences, once registered, would be diffused, replicated and passed down through generations. Resting on such a stable foundation, however, Labour as a party was not very amenable to change, and a tendency to stasis was a corollary of the party's very strength and identity. And the fact that the stability of working-class life and organisation was achieved in opposition to the insecurities of daily existence meant that it was highly prized and vigorously defended, and what might be criticised from without or in hindsight as stasis or complacency appeared from within and at the moment as loyalty and pride.

Loyalty was indeed central to the ethos of the Labour Party at mid-century and had served the party especially well during difficult moments between the wars. The lore of the party was replete with stories of manifest disloyalty that were regularly held up as examplars of what not to do and of how not to behave. The most compelling case was the defection of the leadership in 1931, when Ramsay MacDonald, Philip Snowden and J.H. Thomas broke with the rest of the Cabinet to join with the opposition in the 'National Government'. Whatever the circumstances behind the split, it was a history that could easily be told using the familiar class-inflected discourse of the labour movement. The former leaders were guilty of political treason and of disloyalty to their class. They were 'class traitors' whose desertion followed a familiar trajectory and confirmed a reading of British politics a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: New Labour and its pasts
• 1 The burden of Labour's legacy
• 2 The Labour Party, planning and growth
• 3 Interests, conflict and the party of progress, 1964–70
• 4 Wilson, Heath and Benn remake the Labour Party
• 5 The overwhelming burden of office, 1974–79
• 6 Defeat, divisions and defections, 1979–83
• 7 Labour in the shadow of Thatcher, 1983–87
• 8 'Modernise' and lose, 1987–92
• 9 The fitful progress of 'New Labour'
• 10 'New Labour's' moment
• 11 The New Labour project in practice
• Postscript: Bournemouth 2003
• Appendix: British Election Results, 1945–2001
• Index