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REVIEW ESSAY Ideology and the Making of New Labours REVIEW ESSAY Ideology and the Making of New Labours Eugenio F. Biagini Robinson College, Cambridge Martin Francis, Ideas and Policies Under Labour, 1945–1951: Building a New Britain. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997. x 1 269 pp. Peter Jones, America and the British Labour Party: The Special Relationship at Work. London: Tauris, 1997. 252 pp. Daniel Weinbren, ed., Generating Socialism: Recollections of Life in the Labour Party. Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 1997. vi 1 250 pp. Steven Fielding, ed., The Labour Party: “Socialism” and Society Since 1951. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997. xii 1 171 pp. Mark Wickham-Jones, Economic Strategy and the Labour Party. London: Macmillan, 1996. x 1 294 pp. Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, The End of Parliamentary Socialism: From New Left to New Labour. London: Verso, 1997. ix 1 341 pp. Geoffrey Foote, The Labour Party’s Political Thought: A History. Third edi- tion. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. x 1 387 pp. In 1935 George Dangerfield published The Strange Death of Liberal England. This book, which soon became a classic of sorts, claimed to explain the pass- ing away of a political tradition allegedly unable to thrive in the postwar climate. Nationalism, class politics, and militant trade unionism were the char- acteristics of the mature twentieth century. However, Dangerfield’s condo- lences were premature. In April 1992, almost sixty years after the publication of this famous obituary, issue No. 7755 of The Economist appeared with a sur- prising cover illustration: It represented William Ewart Gladstone, the Victo- rian statesman, wearing a flowery (postmodern?) waistcoat and surrounded by the microphones of journalists obviously eager to pick his brain on the current political situation. The caption was: “A prophet for the left.” The leading ar- ticle presented Gladstone not as a historical figure but as a model for the Labour party. This was certainly remarkable, especially after twelve years of Conservative governments which claimed to be intent on restoring some of the traditional values and policies associated with Gladstonian liberalism.1 After a century of political oblivion, old Gladstone had suddenly become fashion- International Labor and Working-Class History No. 56, Fall 1999, pp. 93–105 © 1999 International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 94 ILWCH, 56, Fall 1999 able again, and his mantle was apparently being fought over by the three main parties. However, what is even more remarkable is that in 1997 a general election was won by a “new” Labour party whose ideology was apparently shaped along lines no different from those suggested by The Economist five years earlier. Not only had Labour given up Clause 4, but its rhetoric and ideological outlook were closer to liberalism than to any recognizable branch of socialism. Significantly, New Labour was on unusually good terms with the Liberal Democrats, and its manifesto was remarkable for a novel emphasis on constitutional, rather than social, reform. This included Home Rule for both Wales and Scotland, reform of the House of Lords—first demanded by Gladstone in 1894 and partially im- plemented by Herbert Henry Asquith in 1911—and even electoral reform. I Should we then conclude that 1997 was the year of the “strange rebirth of Lib- eral England”? It is at present too early to say. However, many believed that the 1990s saw The Strange Death of Socialist Britain (London, 1992), as Patrick Cos- grave put it. Not everyone agreed. Peter Mandelson and Roger Liddle preferred to think in terms of The Blair Revolution (London, 1996) and argued that Blairism stood for a revival of one of the oldest traditions of the Labour party, that of ethical socialism. They claimed that this tradition was genuinely socialist and tried to present Blair as a new James Keir Hardie, “the Founder.” Mean- while, less benevolent critics suggested that he should rather be compared to a new James Ramsay MacDonald, “the Betrayer.” Perhaps neither comparison is fair, although neither is totally unjust. After all, Keir Hardie and Ramsay MacDonald had much in common: Both were Scots, a significant consideration in view of the composition of the Blair gov- ernment; both were inspired by Christian values; both were Europhiles after a fashion, at least in the sense of being quite sympathetic to Continental European social democracy; and both started their careers as Gladstonian Liberals. Moreover, the history of Labour is a history of “new Labours,” as the par- ty has periodically reinvented itself in order to meet fresh challenges or recov- er from schisms and electoral disasters. When the Independent Labour Party (ILP) was founded in 1893, the liberal tradition and that of “ethical socialism” were not clearly separated from each other. Radical land reform, free trade, and Home Rule for Ireland were the three pillars of a radical platform on which the ILP and the left wing of the Liberal party were in substantial agreement. As is well known, in 1899–1900 the Trades Union Congress (TUC) decided to set up its own parliamentary political organization, initially called the Labour Repre- sentation Committee and then, from 1906, the Labour party. Significantly, both in 1893 and in 1906, labels such as “socialist” and “social-democratic” were found to be unacceptable by the founders of the new party. There were, of course, socialist groups in Britain, including the (Marxist) Social Democratic Review Essay 95 Federation and the Fabian Society. But the bulk of the new party’s strength came from the affiliated trade unions, whose leaders were still more or less ex- plicitly committed to political and economic liberalism. The Labour party’s first electoral victory, in 1906, came in the wake of a Liberal landslide in more than mere electoral terms: As George Bernard Shaw pointed out at the time, the then “new” Labour was “a mere cork” in the Liberal tide. This situation con- tinued throughout the next decade. According to Duncan Tanner,2 early Labour and Asquithian Liberals are best seen not only as partners in a pro- gressive alliance, but also as competitors for the same anti-Conservative con- stituency. It was the First World War which created what must then have been per- ceived as an altogether “new” Labour. Liberal dissidents from the Union of Dem- ocratic Control, anti-Bolshevik trade unionists, and Fabian socialists of various description were mobilized around Arthur Henderson and Sidney Webb’s fa- mous 1918 Constitution. The carefully worded socialist Clause 4 meant all things to all men, although in reality its application was defined by the party’s Nation- al Executive, which was itself controlled by the trade unions’ bloc vote.3 Not surprisingly, in the 1920s the party was dominated by a moderate lead- ership that implicitly rejected socialism, but demanded the consolidation of Lloyd George’s wartime collectivism into a new post-laissez-faire settlement. In practice, however, the party leaders did not dare to go beyond a continuation of the prewar policies of progressivism, as became evident in 1923, when Labour was given its first chance to form a government. Far from becoming the harbin- ger of the New Jerusalem, Ramsay MacDonald’s “new” Labour stood for con- tinuity with previous Liberal and even Conservative administrations. If Asquith’s party had been killed in the trenches on the Somme, Ramsay MacDonald’s party fell victim to the 1929 Depression. MacDonald had formed his second government in 1929—at the onset of the Great Slump. By 1931, as the European economies collapsed, he decided to opt for a deflationary policy in order to save the value of the pound. Most of his party found his proposed cuts to public expenditures and unemployment benefits unacceptable and aban- doned him. However, he went on to lead a Conservative-dominated coalition to a landslide electoral victory, which decimated Labour and consigned socialism to hopeless opposition. It is remarkable that this result was achieved under full universal suffrage (introduced in 1928). For the Labour party, the years from 1931 to 1940 were years of convales- cence and reconstruction. Then emerged another “new” Labour and a new gen- eration of leaders, including Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin, leader of the Transport and General Workers’ Union. Their real apprenticeship came with Winston Churchill’s wartime coalition government (1940–1945) and involved the adoption of central government planning in both economic management and the provision of welfare. Thus if MacDonald’s Labour had been shaped by the First World War and the British response to the Bolshevik Revolution, Attlee’s Labour emerged from the Second World War and the move toward Soviet-style planning. 96 ILWCH, 56, Fall 1999 II Understandably, many look back at the 1945–1951 governments as the “golden age” of British socialism. For Martin Francis, who has produced a methodolog- ically innovative analysis of the ideology behind the policies, Attlee’s Labour party showed considerable intellectual vigor in seeking a “third way” between socialism and capitalism (2–5). In a rather daring comparison, we are told that, like Tony Blair, Attlee tried to establish “a whole new way of living” by insist- ing that “social justice can be pursued in tandem with economic modernisation” (viii). While such a verdict may be accurate in the case of Attlee, it is surely too early to decide whether it is applicable to Blair. Francis argues that in two cru- cial areas—economic planning and the creation of the National Health Ser- vice—Labour offered a distinctive socialist contribution to postwar reconstruc- tion. This view, popular with scholars who have criticized the notion of a postwar “consensus,”4 is tempered by Francis’s realistic account of the party’s internal di- vision on most issues involving the relationship between the state and society, and its declining enthusiasm for further nationalizations after 1950.
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