Robinson, Emily. 2010. Our Historic Mission’ Party Political Pasts and Futures in Contemporary Britain. Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London [Thesis] https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/29014/ The version presented here may differ from the published, performed or presented work. Please go to the persistent GRO record above for more information. If you believe that any material held in the repository infringes copyright law, please contact the Repository Team at Goldsmiths, University of London via the following email address: [email protected]. The item will be removed from the repository while any claim is being investigated. For more information, please contact the GRO team: [email protected] 'Our Historic Mission' Party Political Pasts and Futures in Contemporary Britain Emily Robinson Goldsmiths College, University of London PhD 2010 ABSTRACf The temporal positioning of political parties is an important aspect of their philosophical stance. This cannot simply be characterised as forward-facing progressivism and backwards-looking conservatism; since at least the late nineteenth century both progressive and conservative positions have involved a complex combination of nostalgia, obligation and inheritance. But while conservatives have emphasised a filial duty towards the past as enduring tradition, progressives have stressed the need to bear memories of past injustice forward, in order to achieve a different future. The contention of this thesis is that since the late 1970s these temporal positions have begun to dissolve. Both Labour and the Conservatives now favour what might be termed an 'affirmative presentist' approach to political time, whereby the present is viewed as both the 'achievement' of the past and the 'creator' of the future. There are strong affinities with a whig approach to history, particularly in the way that parliamentary politics are conceived as necessarily 'historic'. This is a clear departure from progressivism, which positions the present on an historical trajectory running from past oppressions to an imagined future. It is Similarly removed from conservatism, which roots its pragmatic approach to the present in a sense of lived continuity with the past. Affirmative presentism is based in an eternal, liminal present. It is always becoming history, becoming historic. Moreover, I suggest that this temporal positioning is in tune with wider cultural trends. Since the late 1970s, commentators have noted a growth in public nostalgia, whereby historicity is coded as authenticity - from estate agents' brochures to vintage clothing boutiques. In this cultural context, a link with the past is a valuable political commodity but the taint of anachronism or being 'stuck in the past' is to be avoided at all costs. The temporal emphasis remains firmly rooted in the present. 2 DECLARATION I declare that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Emily Robinson 23.03.2010 3 CONTENTS Acknowledgements 5 Introduction 6 Ideology and Temporality 19 Structures of Memory: Parties and their Pasts 65 Against the Tide of History Conservatism in the 1980s and '90s 133 Breaking the Mould or Recapturing the Past? The SDP and New Labour in Negotiation with Labour's History 174 New Times, New Politics The Collapse of the CPGB's Historical Narrative 222 Conclusions 257 Bibliography 263 4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis could not have been written without the encouragement and expertise of my supervisor, Richard Grayson, who is always willing to read long sections at short notice. He has been exceptionally generous with his time and has made this process far easier than it might have been. Thank you also to Jim Martin for his sound advice and timely interventions. In addition, I would like to thank James Smith for his careful proofreading, Bernadette Buckley and Sanjay Seth for their thoughtful comments on my upgrade and Alun Munslow for his always generous suggestions. Lewis Baston, Duncan Brack and Greg Rosen all provided valuable advice in the early stages of the project and have continued to answer my requests for information and guidance. I am very grateful to the Politics Department at Goldsmiths College for awarding me a studentship and providing a stimulating environment in which to work. I would also like to thank everyone at Unlock Democracy (formerly the New Politics Network), who sparked my interest in political parties, and particularly Peter Facey, who not only gave me a job (twice), but also introduced me to the machinations of the SDP-Liberal merger and the dissolution of the CPGB. I am grateful to the staff at all the archives and libraries I have used, the British Library at St Pancras and Colindale, the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives at Kings College London, the London Metropolitan Archive and the Raphael Samuel Archive at the Bishopsgate Institute, but particular thanks must go to Darren Treadwell and Helen Roberts at the Labour History Archive and Study Centre, Jeremy McIlwaine at the Conservative Party Archive, Nigel Cochrane at the Albert Sloman Library and Andrew Riley at the Churchill Archives Centre who all provided advice and suggestions in addition to files and folders. Another debt is owed to the individuals who gave up their time to be interviewed for this project: Bill Barritt, Tony Belton, Stephen Bird, Duncan Brack, Nigel Cochrane, Penelope J. Corfield, lain Dale, Sue Donnelly, Jim Garretts, Dianne Hayter, Graham Lippiatt, Jeremy McIlwaine, Joan O'Pray, Tessa and Derek Phillips, Jeanne and Dave Rathbone, Anne Reyersbach, Andrew Riley, Helen Roberts, Greg Rosen, Rachel Shawcross and Sheridan Westlake. Also to Marcus Vickers, with whom I corresponded by email. In addition, the directors and committees of the three party history groups provided much-needed assistance in sending out my survey (especially Duncan Brack), and I am grateful to all the members who took the time to complete and return them. Finally, a huge thank you to my parents for all their help, support and love over the years; without them I would not be doing this. Also to Jon who has been a constant source of encouragement and inspiration. He not only listened with (apparent) interest as I struggled to articulate my thoughts but also read a draft and asked all the right questions. 5 INTRODUCTION In 1979 Henry Drucker set out his analysis of the ethos of the Labour Party (as distinct from its doctrine) under the chapter heading 'The Uses of the Past'.1 This choice of words is significant and indicates the importance of the past to political positioning. It is generally accepted that Labour Party activists have, in the words of a more recent scholar, 'always had an especially strong sense of their party as a historic "movement", which must know its past in order to envisage its future.,2 Their use of the past as a political resource is frequently set against Conservatives' veneration of the past for its own sake. This distinction was recently re-stated by Peter Oborne in a radio programme entitled Conserving What? Looking at the question from the opposite end of the political spectrum, he characterised 'progressives' as 'contemptuous of tradition, which they see as prejudice' and 'indifferent to history, which they understand as injustice'. In contrast, Oborne explained, Conservatives have 'an overriding sense of history and tradition' and value continuity above al1. 3 It is the intention of this dissertation to explore the political implications of these divergent attitudes towards the past and also to indicate the ways in which they have altered since Drucker's analysis. Although it remains common to distinguish between political traditions with regard to their approaches to the past, this is often based on instinct rather than sustained and comparative analysis. The contention of this thesis is that since Drucker was writing in 1979, we have seen a temporal convergence between the parties, with both Labour and the Conservatives favouring what might be termed a 'presentist' approach to political time. 'History' is no longer viewed as a political force - providing deliverance, conveying inheritance - instead, 1 H.M. Drucker, Doctrine and Ethos in the Labour Party (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1979) 2 Jon Lawrence, 'Labour: The Myths it Has Lived By', in Duncan Tanner et al (eds) Labour's First CentU/y(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 341-366, (342) 3 Peter Oborne, Conserving What?BBC Radio 4, Wednesday 7 October 2009 6 it is a tool to be mastered, used to demonstrate legitimacy or to provide lessons. This is not an attitude which is limited to party politics. Analyses of changing public attitudes towards history proliferated in the 1980s and '90s. On one hand, as Raphael Samuel noted, this was a period of increasing public interest in the past - from 'retrochic' to the Heritage Industry.4 On the other, this very interest was seen to be a symptom of decreasing 'connection' with the past. These arguments were particularly explicit in France, around the bicentenary of the 1789 Revolution and the seven-volume discussion of public memory organised by the historian Pierre Nora.5 In Britain, they coalesced around questions of the conservation of historic buildings and the consequent growth of a commercialised 'heritage industry', which commentators such as Robert Hewison saw as a desperate and disingenuous search for meaning in a seemingly meaningless postmodern world. Desperate because associated with the sense that the past as a living memory was disappearing and must be caught and fixed before it did; disingenuous because this was a sanitised past of quaint interiors and supposedly traditional values, in which hardship, poverty and misery became little more than tourist attractions.6 The fear was that memory was becoming 'historicised' and the living past was becoming 'heritage' - closed off from the present and of interest only as a reminder of 'the way we were'. British political parties provide a particularly interesting study in this respect because although, as we will see, they are unusually interested in the means by which they will become HistOly(emphatically with a capital H), they are also relatively stable as mnemonic groups.