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The Labour Party and the Idea of Citizenship, C. 193 1-1951

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The Labour Party and the Idea of Citizenship, C. 193 1-1951 The Labour Party and the Idea of Citizenship, c. 193 1-1951 ABIGAIL LOUISA BEACH University College London Thesis presented for the degree of PhD University of London June 1996 I. ABSTRACT This thesis examines the development and articulation of ideas of citizenship by the Labour Party and its sympathizers in academia and the professions. Setting this analysis within the context of key policy debates the study explores how ideas of citizenship shaped critiques of the relationships between central government and local government, voluntary groups and the individual. Present historiographical orthodoxy has skewed our understanding of Labour's attitude to society and the state, overemphasising the collectivist nature and centralising intentions of the Labour party, while underplaying other important ideological trends within the party. In particular, historical analyses which stress the party's commitment from the 1930s to achieving the transition to socialism through a strategy of planning, (of industrial development, production, investment, and so on), have generally concluded that the party based its programme on a centralised, expert-driven state, with control removed from the grasp of the ordinary people. The re-evaluation developed here questions this analysis and, fundamentally, seeks to loosen the almost overwhelming concentration on the mechanisms chosen by the Labour for the implementation of policy. It focuses instead on the discussion of ideas that lay behind these policies and points to the variety of opinions on the meaning and implications of social and economic planning that surfaced in the mid-twentieth century Labour party. In particular, it reveals considerable interest in the development of an active and participatory citizenship among socialist thinkers and politicians, themes which have hitherto largely been seen as missing elements in the ideas of the interwar and immediate postwar Labour party. The chief problem for the interwar and postwar Labour party, the thesis argues, was not blindness to the issue of participation in an age characterised by increasingly complex and large-scale social organisation: on the contrary, this feature of modern living was recognised and policies were framed to address its consequences. The difficulty in achieving the participatory ideal lay more in the complicated interplay of interests in society, in the established structures of government, and in the fact that citizens showed themselves to be more interested in affluence and consumption than in active participation in the civic process, than in a straightforward ideological indifference or antipathy towards wide and decentralised social participation. CONTENTS List of Illustrations page 4 Notes on Abbreviations 5 Acknowledgements 6 Chapter 1: Introduction 7 PART 1: THE SEARCH FOR THE INTEGRATED COMMUNITY Chapter 2: Building an Organic Community 41 Chapter 3: Potential for Participation 86 Part II: PLANNING FOR PARTICIPATION Chapter 4: Local Government, the Indispensable Partner 130 Chapter 5: Redistribution and Regeneration: Town Planning and the Community 169 PART III: BRIDGING THE GAP IN THE DEMOCRATIC MACHINE Chapter 6: Voluntary action: 'The Very Lifeblood of Democracy' 210 Chapter 7: Informing, Understanding, and Activating the Citizen 245 Chapter 8: Conclusion: The Democratic Dilemma 278 Bibliography 290 ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 1 Diagram of the Garden City. Page 45 E. Howard, Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, (1898). Figure 2. Schematic illustration of 'The Vanishing Point of the Landlord's Rent' 49 E. Howard, Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, (1898). Figure 3. London Underground poster of Golders Green, 64 showing Hampstead Garden Suburb housing. Figure 4. 'Your Britain - Fight For it Now' - A.B.C.A. poster of 114 Finsbury Health Centre, by Abram Games. Figure 5 'If the Government Goes into the Holiday Camp Business' 233 Moon cartoon from the Sunday Dispatch. 4 ABBREVIATIONS ABCA Army Bureau of Current Affairs AEC Association for Education in Citizenship BMA British Medical Association CU' Central Office of Information EMB Empire Marketing Board FOA Frederic Osborn Archive, Weiwyn Garden City Library GCTPA Garden Cities and Town Planning Association GLRO Greater London Record Office GPO General Post Office ILP Independent Labour Party LCC London County Council LLP London Labour Party LPA Labour Party Archives, Museum of Labour History, Manchester MOI Ministry of Information NALGO National Association of Local Government Officers NCSS National Council of Social Service NEC National Executive Committee of the Labour Party NFRB New Fabian Research Bureau PEP Political and Economic Planning PPs Parliamentary Private Secretary PRO Public Record Office SMA Socialist Medical Association TCPA Town and Country Planning Association WEA Workers' Educational Association 5 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the Department of History at University College London for giving me support far beyond the terms of the Departmental Teaching Studentship awarded to me in 1991. The generosity and kindness of my colleagues has contributed greatly to my enjoyment of this work. Thanks are also due to the Institute of Historical Research for awarding me the Isobel Thornley Fellowship in 1995-1996. My greatest debt is to my supervisor Professor Martin Daunton, whose perceptive comments and questioning have guided the writing of this thesis and who has been a constant source of encouragement. I would also like to thank Dr. Stephen Conway for his assistance and enthusiasm. I have benefitted from discussions with Professor Rodney Lowe, Dr. Nick Tiratsoo, Dr. Keir Waddington and particularly Dr. Richard Weight and I thank them. The research for this thesis has been drawn from a number of archives and libraries whose staff have been of enormous assistance, but particular thanks are due to Mr. Stephen Bird, the archivist of the Labour Party at the Museum of Labour History, Manchester, the archivists and librarians of the British Library of Political and Economic Science, Nuffield College, Oxford, the Frederic Osbom Archive at Weiwyn Garden City, the Greater London Record Office, and University College London. Finally, special gratitude is due to Simon Cornell for his unfailing friendship and support. 6 I INTRODUCTION In the transition to political democracy, this country...underwent...no inner conversion. She accepted it as a convenience, like an improved system of telephones; she did not dedicate herself to it as the expression of a moral idea of comradeship and equality, the avowal of which could leave nothing the same. She changed her political garments, but not her heart. She carried into the democratic era, not only the institutions, but the social habits and mentality of the oldest and toughest plutocracy in the world....She went into the ballot-box touching her hat. R.H.Tawney, 'The Realities of Democracy" Mass democracy after 1931 offered the potential for participation and citizen involvement to an unprecedented extent, but also carried the prospect of social conflict, widespread disillusionment, and the threat of totalitarianism. It advanced the prospect of greater individual opportunities but also the danger of citizen subordination, with long- protected freedoms curbed by an interventionist state. Social thought and social policy debates reflected these elements of hopefulness and concern. Awareness of both the opportunities and the liabilities of living in a characteristically 'modern' social and political environment aroused a complicated mixture of emotions and practical strategies among Britain's politicians and intellectuals. 2 While some commentators spoke of holding back the tide, others, though perhaps with one eye on a past golden age, looked for means of utilizing the multifarious advantages of modernity to build a stronger, less divided society. In an atmosphere characterised by an earnest endeavour to understand the forces of social organisation and cohesion, indeed, increasing numbers of people asserted the need for British society to adapt and emerge anew, to seize the opportunities of the modern world to foster a more integrated and vigorous society. For many politicians, academics, writers and professionals associated with the Labour party during 'R.H.Tawney, 'The Realities of Democracy', quoted in R.Terrill, R.H.Tawney and His Times. Socialism as Fellowship, (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), 173. 2 Jose Harris explores the notion of modernity and the 'widely diffused sense of living in a peculiarly modern age' that existed in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain in her Private Lives, Public Spirit: Britain 1870-1914, (Harmondsworth, 1994 ed.), 32-6. Recognition of the potentials and the problems of modern society continued beyond the Great War, a period when society itself appeared to be in what Lloyd George called a 'molten' state, pliable and open to change, quoted in Terrill, R.H.Tawney, 181. 7 this period, this search included the rectification of the remaining deficiencies of Britain's democracy, and the removal of social and economic barriers to full civic participation as well as those of a political or institutional nature. At the centre of these debates and, similarly, at the centre of our historical appreciation of them, lies the question of the boundaries between the state and civil society. Questions were posed: what was the role of ordinary men and women in twentieth-century society, how did they combine in terms of the nation and within their local communities? What were their needs, their
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