The Labour Party’s Trajectory

If there is one book I would recommend to people trying to understand the British Labour party, it is Interpreting the Labour Party (2003) which explores the hidden assumptions of the leading interpreters of the party – authors such as Anderson, Coates, Giddens, Marquand, Miliband, Minkin, Morgan, Nairn, Pantich and Pelling,

The opening chapter of the book Understanding Labour’s ideological trajectory probably offers the best overview of the struggle for the party’s soul which has characterised the party in the post-war period.

The party suffered in the 1970s when a mixture of inflation and public debt caused it to seek damaging assistance from the IMF – and even Mitterands’s France was forced to a shameful reversal of economic strategy. The irony is that it is the Conservative party which generally makes a mess of the economy with the role of the Labour party often being to recue the country from the damage austerity has inflicted on the country. Political Economy and the Labour Party by Noel Thompson (2003) throws a very helpful light on the different strands and phases which the party has been through in the past century – at least until 2003.

1 Marxism, state socialism and anarcho-communism

2 Fabian political economy

3 Guild socialism

4 Liberal socialism and the challenge to Fabianism

5 R. H. Tawney and the political economy of ethical socialism

1970–2005

14 Rethinking socialism: left-wing revisionism in the 1970s

15 Liberal socialism revised: the 1970s

16 The alternative economic strategy and after, 1972–86

17 Liberal socialism rejuvenated: the 1980s

18 Supply-side socialism: the 1990s

19 From stakeholderism to the Third Way

The Moral Economists by Tim Rogan (2017) is a rare book which does justice to a neglected aspect in analyses of the party – namely the moral considerations. I became an act -ive member of the Labour party when I was 16 or so – in 1958. Indeed I became, at University, in the early 1960s chairman of the local Young Socialist branch which led me to being invited to a session at Hugh Gaitskell’s house, then the leader of the Labour party and hung on his words at my home when he gave a couple of hostile speeches to Labour party conferences about the Common Market and unilateral disarmament. It was the moral arguments which persuaded me at the time – expressed, for example, in Tony Crosland’s “The Conservative Enemy” (1962) which, unfortunately, I can’t download and readers will have to do with a New Left riposte. “The Moral Economists” was nicely reviewed by the LRB. . 

From 1903 to 1906, Tawney lived at Toynbee Hall, where well-meaning graduates undertook 

social work in the East End of London. But, as he quickly realised, he had no aptitude for doling out ‘soup and blankets’ to the ‘demoralised’ poor of Whitechapel. Charity wasn’t a solution to the crisis of capitalism. Tawney looked instead to the newly formed Workers’ Educational Association. He moved to Manchester in 1909 and worked as a tutor in Rochdale and other places in the North-West, becoming the WEA’s president from 1929 to 1945. The WEA was distinctive in its highly decentralised organisation, supported by trade unions, the co-operative movement and the Labour Party. Tawney supported its paternalistic aim of neutralising class conflict, a mission resented by Marxist critics. Many of its students, however, found the experience politically energising. Tawney’s admiration for the working-class solidarity he found in these Northern industrial towns was so great that during the First World War he joined up as a private in a Pals battalion, returning to Manchester after being wounded at the Somme. His reflections in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism on the discrepancy between the medieval social order and atomised modernity were informed by his experience of the differences between Lancashire and London.
In 1948, Thompson moved to Halifax with his wife, Dorothy, to work as a tutor in history and English for the extramural department at the University of Leeds. The subject and approach of “The Making of the English Working Class” reflect the time he spent there. 
Its opening chapter on the London Corresponding Society of the 1790s described a radical working-class coterie of the sort Thompson admired. But the majority of the book is about the wool croppers and artisan craftsmen of the towns and villages of the West Riding of Yorkshire. In the culture, idioms and, most important, the solidarity of his students, Thompson detected the legacy of their ancestors, those who became class conscious as a result of the Industrial and French Revolutions.
Polanyi also taught for the WEA in London and for the Oxford extramural department in 
the 1930s, but according to Rogan, Polanyi’s Damascene conversion occurred when he fled Hungary for Austria following the failed revolution of 1919. He arrived in ‘Red Vienna’, where a new autonomous municipal government run by the Social Democratic Workers’ Party was pioneering reforms in health and education. Polanyi saw this as a truly democratic form of socialism. Living with his new wife in a rundown area and teaching economics, he began to believe that ‘an alternative to Wilsonian and Leninist principles of social order was conceivable’. 
Postwar Austria was flooded with British relief workers, interested in the latest trends in social thought. Because of them, Polanyi read and admired Tawney and other British critics of capitalism. The admiration became mutual. Tawney wrote an article for the New Statesman in November 1935 in which he cited Polanyi as a thinker who linked Christianity and popular communism through ‘an idea of human personality’.

The three books offered different chronologies of the rise of capitalism.

In Tawney’s version, the process took place in the period 1540-1640. The Protestant 

Reformation displaced a medieval society in which ‘economics is still a branch of ethics

 … the appeal of theorists is to natural law, not to utility; the legitimacy of economic 

transactions is tried by reference, less to the movements of the market, than to moral standards derived from the traditional teaching of the Christian church.’ The dissolution of the monasteries created a market for land and employment. It was every man for himself (and this was a male world; family ties were also increasingly separated from economic life). The individualising ethos of Calvinism and Puritanism secularised economics, resulting in ‘the new science of Political Arithmetic’, which ignored or eroded the social bonds that had been upheld by religious and moral obligations.

Polanyi and Thompson located the origins of free-market economics much later
, during the Enlightenment.
In Polanyi’s view, laissez-faire peaked in England with the introduction in 1834 of the New Poor Law, a punitive welfare system influenced by utilitarian ideas of efficiency and Malthus’s theories of population control. 
In Thompson’s account, English society had originally been governed predominantly by a 
‘moral economy’ based on age-old ideas of a just price and a fair wage, enacted through 
negotiation, customary regulations and tradition. During the French wars, however, economic elites became increasingly enamoured of the laissez-faire political philosophy of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776). Landowners enclosed common land, and employers took on unskilled labour and introduced machinery, transforming skilled workers into ‘hands’, subject to the whims of the free market. This process was intensified by government withdrawal from regulation of the new industrial economy, including the repeal of the Elizabethan legislation which controlled the number of apprentices and set piece rates for cloth. During the Napoleonic Wars, Thompson complained, ‘almost the entire paternalist code was swept away.’

One book remains to which I will try to do justice in the next post

A superb 4 hour video about Labour - the wilderness years can be viewed here