Has British Labour lost its Moral Sense?

I served as a Labour councillor from 1968 to 1990 – that’s 22 years and all of them in an official position as the secretary to the entire group of Labour councillors, first in a Clydeside town and then on Strathclyde Region which covered half of Scotland. This required surviving, every two years, an election of office-bearers which I managed no fewer than 8 times since I offended neither the right or the left. But, thanks to the example of my parents and to the community activists who taught me so much in my early years of council service, I knew where my accountabilities lay – to ordinary working folk – and certainly not to the big battalions. Hence Social Strategy for the Eighties (SRC 1982) on which I tried to throw some light in the recent article Some Dilemmas of Social Reform

My last decade in Scotland was during Thatcher’s reign which gave me the 

incentive to leave the country to become an adviser to central European and 

central Asian governments as they clawed their ways out of communism to 

various forms of kleptocracy which I called “impervious regimes” for the simple 

reason that they were generally impervious to the voices of their citizens 

(the Baltic countries were perhaps the only exceptions).

From a distance I was no fan of New Labour, so obviously the inheritor of 

Thatcher’s neoliberalism. But I did respect Jeremy Corbyn and was appalled 

by the way he was treated by the right-wing of the party which revealed itself 

in all its hideous colours. And Keir Starmer was part of that.
I am totally ashamed of this latest Labour governmen – I understand it inherits 

an economic mess but cannot accept its flaunting of privilege, freebies and 

support for welfare cuts, privatisation and Israel.  

Useful Background Reading – with the exception of the third book, these are texts 

I have just come across which I need to skim
Imagining the Neoliberal state – Assar Lindbeck and the genealogy of Swedish neo-liberalism 

Victor Pressfeldt (2024) Lindbeck chaired the Swedish Nobel prize committee for more 

than a decade when it offered the prize to several neoliberals
Progressive Proposals for Turbulent Times (Foundation for European Progressive Studies 

2022). Strange how the left now pretends it’s otherwise by the use of the “progressive” 

label. That was actually the descriptor used by my conservative father when he stood for 

election in our home town in the 1960s
The Neoliberal Age? Britain since the 1970s ed B Jackson et al (2021) A powerful critique
Beyond Digital Capitalism – new ways of living ed Albo 2021 (Socialist Register)
Corbynism and Democracy Yerrell thesis (2020)
State Transformations – class, strategy, socialism G Albo et al (2020)
Leftism Reinvented – western parties from socialism to neoliberalism Stephanie Mudge 

(2018)
The Moral Economists – RHTawney, Karl Polanyi, EP Thompson and the Critique of Capitalism 

Tim Rogan (2017)
“Progressives, Pluralists and the problems of the State” Marc Stears (2002) - 

a book about progressive political optimism written at a time of progressive 

political disillusion. It traces the relationship between two movements of 

political thinkers – one British and one American – who were joined together 

by their collective sense that the political, social and economic mould of their 

countries was about to be recast. 

As the book demonstrates, these were thinkers who produced detailed plans 

of new democratic institutions and far-reaching social and economic reforms 

and who lived in the continual expectation that these programmes would soon 

be enacted. They were activist intellectuals who believed in the power of 

their own ideas and who had faith in the agents of political change. 

They were political theorists, then, who wrote not only for each other, 

but for political leaders, party members,campaigners, trade unionists, 

and for society at large. They were convinced that they lived in nations that 

were about to be remade, and they wanted to do all that they could to ensure 

that those nations became fairer, freer, more communal societies than they 

had been hitherto.

The contrast with our own new century is, of course, remarkably stark. Few British and American progressive political theorists today share such expectations, or such faith. The political theory of our own times is characterized more by a sense of limitation than of possibility. We inhabit societies which have become dramatically less equal in the last few decades, where civil liberties are continually under siege, and where democratic political institutions are increasingly either dominated by money and special interests or superseded entirely by executive agencies staffed by unelected officials. Political theorists themselves understandably appear to have responded to these tendencies by abandoning the world of politics altogether. The specialized discourses of our leading journals are, then, more often captivated by philosophical speculation and theoretical models than by programmes of political action; their readership is restricted to those who share a concern with abstract ideals of justice rather than with immediate proposals for change.

There are, of course, notable exceptions to this tendency. Both Britain and the United States have traditions of dissent that have not been dimmed by the general pessimism of our times, but those loyal to those traditions are now less frequently to be found at the apex of authority either in academia or in politics at large. My aim in writing this book, however, was to remind us of the spirit that lay behind those earlier aspirations. I wanted to try to recall a time when it was possible to believe that the mechanisms of mainstream politics in Britain and the United States could be used to attain greater freedom, equality, and communality. And I wanted to recapture a sense of political theory as a profession that requires its practitioners to talk to audiences far beyond the confines of the university. I do not believe that either the American nationalist progressives or the British socialist pluralists of the early twentieth century could solve the problems that we now face. I do believe, however, that we might still learn something from their sense of vocation. That is why this book tells their story.