Clare Griffiths

‘Red Tape Farm’? Visions of a Socialist Agriculture in 1920s and 1930s Britain

One morning in 1927, in a farmhouse somewhere in England, John Barleycorn was wading through his post over breakfast. Most of the mail came from the government’s agricultural department, and one of these letters angered him more than usual. It informed him that an inspector would soon be visiting his farm to check that he was farming it properly. Barleycorn had scarcely finished reading this letter when the inspector arrived. Mr Nosey Parker from the Agricultural Authority was not a figure to inspire immediate confidence as to his rural expertise. He appeared in top hat and pristine spats. Worse still, he was carrying an umbrella in the countryside – the sure sign of a townie. But he quickly set to work, and showed just how much he really knew about agriculture, pausing only to warn Barleycorn that he would be turned out if his farming did not come up to scratch. Parker made his way around the farm, finding many matters to engage his attention. He observed that the pigs were too fat – so he put them through exercises until they were skin and bones. He cautioned the cocks for fighting – since cock-fighting is an illegal activity. He attempted to milk a cow – by working her tail like a water pump. Taking a break from his labours, he then wandered into a field with a bull in it – and proceeded to sing ‘The Red Flag’ …

G.D.H. Cole and William Cobbett

William Cobbett was, during his own lifetime, a highly controversial figure who often found it necessary to defend himself against supposed misrepresentation. His historical persona remains no less controversial. The complexities of Cobbetts career and character have supported a variety of interpretations, and many writers this century have felt the need to define ‘the real Cobbett’. Modern misrepresentations have arisen less from false stories invented to damn him than from the misleading emphases employed to praise him, with both Left and Right seeking in their different ways to appropriate what they see as his legacy. For conservatives, he has been an essentially timeless figure, standing for Old England and all that may have made such a place great. Writers on the Left have treated him rather as a figure of the past, rationalised to fit into the rise of working-class consciousness and organisation, and divested of some aspects unseemly in an early representative of ‘the cause’. Cobbett has been adopted as an important figure for the Left, but readings based on the assumptions about working-class radicalism held by the modern British Labour movement have often found it necessary to exclude aspects of his writings as inconsistent, or at least idiosyncratic.

Socialism and the Land Question: Public Ownership and Control in Labour Party Policy, 1918–1950s

The shade of Keir Hardie acted as the conscience of the British Left, summoned up when old socialist shibboleths seemed in danger of being abandoned in favour of reformism. By the early 1950s, however, the Labour party had acquired another set of sacred reference points to cling to: a newer definition of what Labour stood for, based on what it had done, rather than what its founding fathers believed in. The achievements of Labour’s first majority administration (1945–51) in nationalisation and welfare provision addressed some of the Labour movement’s most enduring concerns. Such unprecedented peacetime intervention in the economy, and the establishment of a new ambitious ‘welfare state’ centred on the National Health Service, came to be identified as embodying the purposes and principles of the Labour party: the achievement of its defining historical commitments. Yet, when the delegate from Altrincham and Sale dragged Keir Hardie’s name into a debate on the party programme at the 1953 party conference, it was a reminder that some of the oldest radical causes remained as unfinished business. One notable absence from the agenda of the Attlee governments was the old socialist commitment to the public ownership of land.