The UK discourages new entrants onto the political market and prefers to see the two main political parties slugging it out. Although there have been calls recently for a change to an electoral system which better reflects citizen preferences, expecting change is equivalent to encouraging Turkeys to vote for an earlier Christmas.
This has been a series on books about the Labour party and I’m pleased to report that one of the most recent Rethinking Labour’s Past edited by Matt Yeowell (2022) is very readable, indeed journalistic (in the best sense). Nothing annoys me more than the style of academic writing which ends each sentence with a bracket and several names, which – if you want to follow up, require you to interrupt your reading and go what is usually a long bibliography at the end of the book.
But this book is different – not only is it beautifully written but each page is extensively footnoted, giving you all the references you need
In the last two great turning points in British political history, in the late 1970s and in the immediate wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Labour – and progressives more widely – were unable to prevent their political opponents from framing events in ways that contributed to major rightward shifts in British politics
Unlike earlier books in this series, this book showcases younger historians such as Ben Jackson whose chapter
investigates how Labour leaders have interpreted the party’s past, comparing the rhetoric used by the three postwar, election-winning Labour prime ministers – Attlee, Wilson and Blair – in order to identify what was distinctive about Blair’s understanding of Labour history. However, the aim of this comparison is not to castigate Blair as a regrettable anomaly but rather to understand why the more traditional historical self-understanding of the Labour Party lost its allure in the late twentieth century. The chapter will conclude by considering, as the party looks to the future, how we might …..seek to reinject into Labour’s account of the past the idealism that the architects of New Labour so scrupulously removed. Weber acknowledged that ‘disenchantment’ risked leaving the modern world adrift from meaning or purpose in the absence of agreed ethical and spiritual values. The task for the Labour Party today is to reconnect with the inspiring aspects of its past without sliding back into the self-congratulatory and uncritical historical ambience that was dispelled by the political ruptures of the late twentieth century.
Another chapter I enjoyed was the one on “social democracy and community”
We can crudely identify four stages in Labour’s twentieth-century history in which a community-oriented critique of social democracy came to the fore.
Firstly, the immediate period following the high watermark of 1945, through to the late 1950s: as the party struggled to come to terms with ‘affluence’ and the apparent disappearance of a wartime spirit of community and social solidarity, the decay of working-class community became a prominent concern for writers and thinkers, such as Richard Hoggart and Michael Young. The apparent erosion of localized working-class cultures by the ‘massification’ of culture, rise of new towns and suburbs, and physical decline or dismantling of ‘traditional working-class neighbourhoods’ featured prominently in such accounts.
Secondly, by the late 1960s, ‘community’ was increasingly invoked by activists practising grassroots politics within Britain’s ‘crisis’-hit inner cities. Labour politicians saw the rise of community action in this period both as a challenge to the party’s political primacy and to the central priorities of social democracy, yet also as an opportunity to align the party to new concerns and new constituencies.
Thirdly, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, revisionist social democrats (including key founding figures of the SDP) and ‘new urban left’ councils would both try to channel these energies, drawing on related critiques of Labourism and its reliance on centralized state power.
Finally, the 1990s would see the communitarian critique of social democracy take centre stage within the party, as New Labour sought to centre the concept of ‘community’ within its politics, and to distance itself from many of the perceived shortcomings of past Labour governments and the cultural politics of the left. However, this engagement would wane in government. By the 2010s, Blue Labour was levelling a similar critique at the Blair–Brown governments.
Many on the Left were beginning to question whether Labour could successfully reconnect with people’s everyday lives’. Sociologists – like Young himself – and cultural critics such as Hoggart and Raymond Williams showed an increasing interest in popular culture and in the everyday lives of working-class people. The emergence of the First New Left after 1956 saw a deeper engagement with culture and an emphasis on nonstate forms of socialism from the Marxist left. Meanwhile, a debate played out amongst social democrats about the apparent ‘embourgeoisement’ of parts of Labour’s electoral base
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