Alastair J. Reid

Other Worlds of Labour: Liberal-Pluralism in Twentieth-Century British Labour History

The authors challenge the conventional wisdom that dominates much of twentieth-century British labour history. They show that even recent historians, such as Selina Todd, Mike Savage and Ross McKibbin, still work from the Fabian and Marxist assumption that a united working class has been marching towards a state-socialist future. They uncover an alternative tradition of liberal-pluralism, found not only in the work of industrial relations academics, such as Hugh Clegg and Allan Flanders, but also in that of libertarian and educationalist thinkers, such as G.D.H. Cole, Michael Young and Colin Ward. They argue that labour history needs to broaden its scope from an old left obsession with state-socialism, to include a range of movements and ideas that was both more diverse and more popular than the conventional wisdom allows.

Convalescence: The General Council’s Party (1931–40)

On 25th August 1931 the T.U.C. and the extra-parliamentary party took control of the parliamentary party and disavowed the leadership of MacDonald. The main political crisis was over, so far as the Labour Party was concerned: but its consequences still had to be worked out. The parliamentary party’s Consultative Committee, which had been its liaison committee with the Labour Cabinet, held two meetings with the National Executive and the General Council of the T.U.C. before, on 28th August, a full meeting of the parliamentary party took place. And when the parliamentary party did meet, it met at Transport House, with the members of the General Council of the T.U.C. present. According to Dalton, this was ‘an innovation, suggested by Uncle [Henderson] to mark unity’.1 One may suspect, however, that it was an innovation designed to preserve unity — by intimidating the waverers. Only one of the four Labour members of MacDonald’s new Cabinet attended: this was Lord Sankey, who was heard out respectfully but who won no support. Henderson was elected leader of the parliamentary party by an overwhelming majority.

Looking Forward: Civil Society After State-Socialism and Beyond Neo-liberalism

The authors consider what can be learned from the opening up of British labour history in the contributions to this collection, and taken forward to inform debates about the future of society and politics. They distinguish between three spheres: the market economy, the state and civil society. They argue that neo-liberals threaten to allow the market economy to squeeze out communal values; but equally state-socialists threaten to expand the state as a substitute for voluntary association. A misplaced nostalgia for a mythical state-socialist past will only consolidate the current worship of large-scale, centralised solutions. A better appreciation of British labour’s real history could release resources for the revival of human-scale, diverse, civil society experiments.

Office and Power under Attlee and Bevin (1940–50)

The period of the 1940’s includes both the full five years of the war-time Coalition and the only slightly shorter length of the 1945 Parliament, which provided for the first time a Labour Government with a Commons majority. Like the earlier periods which we have considered, this one has a certain unity about it, in spite of the great changes effected by the end of the war and by the general election. So far as the Labour Party was concerned, its parliamentary leaders were in office throughout, and gained power within the movement as a result. The extra-parliamentary party and the trade-union movement were consequently under constant restraint, sometimes critical of government policy but always anxious to avoid the embarrassment that would follow if they carried their protests beyond the limits of friendly admonishment.

Revival under Kinnock, Smith and Blair (1985–95)

The late 1980s saw a marked recovery of the party’s standing in the country, giving it in late 1989 a lead of 10 per cent in the opinion polls. This was due to four interlocking factors, and it is difficult to distinguish which was most important. There was, first of all, a determination on the part of the new leadership of the party to secure unity of purpose. Secondly, the Liberal-Social Democrat Alliance disintegrated after the 1987 general election, in which it had lost some ground. Thirdly, the government’s economic policy led at the end of the decade to a return of inflation, high mortgage rates and the prospect of renewed recession. And fourthly, the government introduced a highly unpopular uniform ‘poll tax’ in place of rates. But when the new general election took place in April 1992, Thatcher had gone, there was a new Conservative leader, and a fourth consecutive Conservative victory.

Division and Defeat (1979–84)

The general election of May 1979 was followed a few weeks later, in June, by the first election of members of the European Parliament. For this purpose, the country was divided into only eighty-one seats, or seventy-eight excluding Northern Ireland. So far as Labour was concerned, the results were very disappointing. Many supporters took the view that the European Parliament should be boycotted, and so there were widespread abstentions. The average poll was light, and Labour with only 33 per cent of the total took only seventeen of the seventy-eight British seats. Of the remainder, sixty were won by the Conservatives and one by a Scottish Nationalist. In these large constituencies the Liberals were unable to obtain a single seat. Barbara Castle was elected leader of the Labour Group, which devoted itself to opposing increases in agricultural prices and to pressing for greater expenditure on regional and social policies.

The Wilson Era: Social Advance and Economic Insolvency (1966–70)

The general election of 1966 had given the Wilson government a good deal more than the ample parliamentary majority that it required for a normal term of office. It also increased the authority of the prime minister, for it seemed that it was his personal qualities, as compared with those of the new Conservative leader, Edward Heath, that had won for the government its vote of confidence. The old suspicion of leadership in the party, which was a legacy of 1931, was now fading away as the parliamentary party changed in composition. The trade-union element was weaker than before: only six of the sixty-five new MPs were of the traditional tradeunion type, and over half of the Labour MPs were now university graduates. While some people might regret the changes, nobody could deny that there was plenty of talent on the government benches.

The New Party: Ideals and Reality (to 1906)

The Labour Party is as old as the twentieth century, in fact if not in name. Its foundation took place at a conference in London in February 1900, and its later annual conferences are numbered from this date forward. But until just after the general election of January 1906, the party’s activities were conducted under the more modest title of the ‘Labour Representation Committee’.

The Rise of the Left (1970–9)

In the five years after the election defeat of June 1970, the Labour Party managed to avoid the fate that had befallen it after its earlier spell of power in the 1940s, of remaining in the wilderness for more than a decade. But it returned to office in March 1974 only as a minority government, and in the second election of October of that year it improved its position no more than marginally, so as to have an overall majority of just three seats — soon to be whittled away by lost by-elections and defections to a minority again.

Conclusion: The Past and the Future

Although political parties possess a certain organic character, it is not easy to analyse their structure in precise biological terms, or to predict their processes of adaptation or decay. The Labour Party, although unique in many ways, is no exception in this respect. Many of the generalisations that may be attempted to describe its effective working and development soon come to need qualification; and forecasts of its future behaviour must be tentative in character.