I have been trying to interest an academic journal in publishing an article about the development and management of a local political strategy in the mid 1970s – namely Social Strategy for the Eighties (SRC 1982) This was a very rare thing to attempt - the Greater London Council, Liverpool, Sheffield and some London boroughs may have been flaunting their left-wing credentials at the same time but the Strathclyde strategy was rather different - a serious and considered response to the "Born to Fail" report of 1973 which had exposed the scale of multiple deprivation in the West of Scotland and demanded some sort of official recognition.
The English local authorities had pursued a deliberate strategy of confrontation with central government - but Strathclyde Region was at pains to seek (and gain) the support of the delegated central government in our country – namely the Scottish Office. A draft of the article can be read here It’s hardly surprising that the last few years have seen a revival of interest in
the 1980s experience of local government. The Thatcherite stifling of local government had started shortly after her first election victory in 1979 and was full in swing – first with budgetary limits and then increasingly savage cuts.But local government still had some autonomy in those days – whereas they have since undergone more than a halving of their income. What has been developing in recent years is a new “municipalism” which is
receiving extensive coverage – some of which I list below Stuart Hall has one of the best things I have ever read about THE STATE in
a chapter of The Hard Road to Renewal – Thatcherism and the crisis of the Left ( 1988)
Instead of progressively withering away, the state has become a gigantic, swollen, bureaucratic and directive force, swallowing up almost the whole of civil society, and imposing itself (sometimes with tanks), in the name of the people, on the backs of the people. Who, now, can swallow without a gigantic gulp the so-called temporary, passing nature of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’? On the other hand, the very same period, since the end of the Second World War, has witnessed a parallel, gigantic expansion of the state complex within modern capitalism, especially in Western Europe, with the state playing an increasingly interventionist or regulative role in more and more areas of social life. It has become far and away the largest single employer of labour and acquired a dominant presence in every sector of daily existence. What are we to make of that unexpected development, never adequately predicted in the classical Marxist literature?
Even more difficult to work out is our attitude towards this development. On the one hand, we not only defend the welfare side of the state, we believe it should be massively expanded. And yet, on the other hand, we feel there is something deeply anti-socialist about how this welfare state functions. We know, indeed, that it is experienced by masses of ordinary people, in the very moment that they are benefiting from it, as an intrusive, managerial and bureaucratic force in their lives.
However, if we go too far down that particular road, whom do we discover keeping us company but – of course – the Thatcherites, the new right, the free market ‘hot gospellers’, who seem (whisper it not too loud) to be saying rather similar things about the state. Only they are busy making capital against us on this very point, treating widespread popular dissatisfactions with the modes in which the beneficiary parts of the state function as fuel for an anti-left, ‘roll back the state’ crusade.
And where, to be honest, do we stand on the issue? Are we for ‘rolling back the state’ – including the welfare state? Are we for or against the management of the whole of society by the state? Not for the first time, Thatcherism here catches the left on the hop –hopping from one uncertain position to the next, unsure of our ground. Perhaps it might help if we knew how we got into this dilemma. This is a vast topic in its own right, and I propose to look at only four aspects here.
First, how did the British left become so wedded to a particular conception of socialism through state management, the essence of what I want to call ‘statism’ or a ‘statist’ conception of socialism?
Second, I want to sketch some of the reasons why the very expansion of the state, for which so many on the left worked so hard, turned out in practice to be a very contradictory experience.
Third, I want to confront head on the confusion caused on the left by the ‘libertarianism’ of the right – the way Thatcherism has exploited the experience of welfare statism and turned it to the advantage of the new right.
Finally, I want to consider some aspects of the changing social and economic relationships today which have influenced spontaneous attitudes on the left – what I call the growth of a left libertarianism. In conclusion, I can only roughly indicate some directions in which our thinking needs to be developed.
The chapter then goes on to track the history of the british understanding of the role of the state – with a collectivism coming into view in the the 1920s – particularly on the right.
It was precisely in this critical period, between the 1880s and the 1920s, when the parameters of British politics for the following fifty years were set for the first time – that statism took root in British political culture. In those days, what we now call ‘statism’ went under the title of ‘collectivism’. What is crucial for our analysis is the fact that there were many collectivisms. ‘Collectivism’ was a highly contradictory formation, composed of different strands supported in different ways by the right, the centre and the left – if, for convenience, we can use those somewhat anachronistic labels. Collectivism was regarded by many sections on the right, and by some influential sectors of the leading classes, as the answer to Britain’s declining fortunes. The country – the new collectivists believed – required a programme of ‘national regeneration’. This could only be undertaken if the old shibboleths of laissez faire were finally abandoned and the state came to assume a far greater role of organic leadership in society.
They believed a ‘populist’ bloc of support could be won amongst the
dominated classes for such a project, provided the latter were ‘squared’ by
state pensions and other Bismarck-type benefits. This was the programme
of both the ‘social imperialist’ and the ‘national efficiency’ schools, and of
the highly authoritarian populist politics associated with them. And though
they did not carry their programme in detail, they were extremely influential in pioneering the shift in the allegiance of British capital from its former commitment to laissez faire, to its newer link with a certain type of capitalist state interventionism.
Recommended ARTICLES on the new municipalism Exploring the Potential of the Local State - Sheffield and the local state
Beveridge and Cochrane (Antipode 2023) The Uses and Abuses of municipalism by the british left (Minim 2022) Prefiguring the local state D Cooper 2017 Whatever happened to local government? Symposium on 1993 Cochrane book
by Ward, Newman et al (2015)
Whether the Local State? Neil Barnett 2013 Book
Reclaiming Local Democracy – a progressive future for local government Ines Newman
(2014) A very clearly written celebration of the ethical importance of this body which
contains a useful glossary
