John Callaghan

Your Britain. Media and the making of the Labour Party

Understanding the rise of the Labour Party, from its foundation in 1900 as the humble Labour Representation Committee to its landslide general election victory in 1945, is one of the most significant, and most taxing, challenges for historians of 20th-century Britain. A variety of different explanations have been offered in what has become a very extensive literature on the subject: the emergence of class politics, the spectacular decline and fall of the Liberal party, the impact of the world wars, the local activism of the Labour movement. In this stimulating and very readable book, Laura Beers offers a fruitful new line of enquiry: the party’s use of the mass media. Labour would not have been able to build an election-winning coalition of voters, Beers argues, without shrewdly employing the technologies of mass communication – above all, national newspapers, BBC radio, and cinema newsreels – to construct an appealing image of the party. ‘The party’s ability to compete successfully in the new arena of mass media politics’ she concludes, ‘played a crucial role’ in sustaining it after the catastrophic split in 1931 and enabling it to win power after Hitler was defeated (p. 202).

Socialism in Britain since 1884

The Marxists Fabianism independent labour representation forming the labour party the democratic challenge - syndicalism and guild socialism the impact of the Bolshevik revolution labour in power the 1930s the Second World War welfare and cold war revisionism pragmatism and modernization the rise and fall of the left.

Social democracy and globalisation: the limits of social democracy in historical perspective

This article argues that social democratic governments throughout the 20th century faced internal and international constraints arising from the operation of capitalist economies and that the evidence for a qualitative deepening of such constraints since the collapse of the Bretton Woods system is far from unequivocal. Financial markets were already big enough and fast enough to deter such governments from the pursuit of egalitarian policies in the interwar years or to destabilise them if they ignored the warning signs. This article also shows that the efficacy of Keynesian macroeconomic policy in the Golden Age has been exaggerated and that the problem of short-term movements of speculative capital persisted throughout this era in a country such as Britain. Keynesianism never worked in the face of mass unemployment and it is misleading to suggest that its breakdown in the 1970s somehow robbed social democracy of the policy tools that had maintained full employment in the 1950s and 1960s. A host of additional problems have indeed beset social democratic governments since 1973, but the analysis of such problems is hindered rather than helped by much of the literature which invokes economic globalisation. Globalisation theory is in need of further specification before it can be useful and arguments about the economic consequences of globalisation since 1973 need to distinguish its effects from those of the many conjunctural problems of the period as well as the policies that important agencies have pursued in search of solutions to them.

The Left and the 'Unfinished Revolution': Bevanites and Soviet Russia in the 1950s

This article looks at the Labour Lefts perceptions of the Soviet Union in the 1950s and examines one of the most important sources of hope about its future evolution. It shows that for many socialists the Soviet Union was a contradictory phenomenon, at once profoundly repellent and yet capable of exercising an immense attractive force throughout the decade. For the progressive features of the system to finally dominate and overcome the many-sided backwardness of Russia, the argument was heard that the Soviet Union needed time and above all peace. This contention was taken seriously because the dynamic, modernising forces in Russian society were considered to be rooted in the socialist bases of its economy. It was an economy characterised by planning and nationalised property, and in the factional struggle which divided the Labour party in the 1950s, these were the key components of the Lefts faith. By the end of the decade and the beginning of the 1960s both the old Bevanite Left and the technocratic centre-left drew inspiration from the progress of the Soviet economy.

Rise and fall of the alternative economic strategy: From internationalisation of capital to ‘globalisation’

The Alternative Economic Strategy (AES) was the focus of the British lefts thinking for more than a decade and formed the basis of the Labour partys plans for the economic renewal of Britain as recently as the general election of 1983. It originated both as a response to the crisis of the British economy, which deepened in the 1970s, and to the perception of its growing porousness as economic activity became increasingly internationalised. The demise of the AES is undoubtedly related to the fragmentation of the Labour left after 1981, especially in the wake of the general election defeat of 1983. But some of its earliest advocates began to see that the AES was in need of major revision in the light of considerations that became evident well before 9 June 1983. The fact that these doubts were expressed by some of the more radical and creative contributors to the AES is evidence of a serious reappraisal of what the programme could achieve in the changing circumstances of the early 1980s. But while the radicals turned to the advocacy of a trans‐European strategy, the Labour party did not.

THE OPEN CONSPIRACY OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY AND THE CASE OF W. N. EWER, COMMUNIST AND ANTI-COMMUNIST

This article is a response to an account of a communist espionage circle which appeared in this journal in 2003. It argues that the original article is seriously misleading because of its apparently exclusive reliance on previously classified intelligence documents and the interpretations found within them. Combined with a failure to provide an appropriate historical context, particularly concerning the politics of the dramas central figure – the Daily Herald journalist W. N. Ewer – and a tendency to import questionable value judgements into the narrative, the original piece substitutes the secret policemans opinions for a real history of its subject-matter.

The Plan to Capture the British Labour Party and its Paradoxical Results, 1947-91

The Communist Party of Great Britain consistently supported a trade union strategy after the second world war designed to eliminate the Labour Party. Yet by the 1990s leading members of the Party claimed that the organization’s last major contribution to British politics, before it dissolved itself in 1991, was to help rescue Labour from the left-wing ghetto into which it had been consigned during the 1980s. This article explains communist strategy in the postwar decades and the paradoxical outcomes to which it led.

Prospects for social democracy: A critical review of the arguments and evidence

In the latter part of the twentieth century, particularly since the collapse of the eastern European regimes, a new common sense has developed. This consensus states that: `the point has to be made unequivocally that socialism is dead, and that none of its variants can be revived’. 1 In other words, that far from merely facing any number of conjunctural problems, the left project is now ®rmly residing, and is ever to remain, in that notorious dustbin of history. Indeed, as Bobbio has noted, the very classi®cation of the left as opposed to the right has been discarded by many. He says that there is `an assertion which has been made repeatedly in recent years, to the point of becoming a clicheÂ’ that `there is no longer any relevance to the distinction between left and right which, over the two centuries since the French Revolution, has been used to divide the political universe into opposing camps’. He adds of the two political categories: `They are no longer supposed to have any heuristic or classi®catory value, and emphatically no evaluative application. Often they are referred to with a certain irritation, as though they represent one of the many linguistic traps which political debate can fall into.’ Many reasons have been given to support this `death of socialism’ thesisÐ more than can be covered here. However, those that can be considered most fundamental point to secular trends that have transformed social structures and the capacities of nation-states to manage their economic affairs. We shall question the emphasis of this argument, not to suggest that there will be any automatic revival of left prospectsÐthe purpose of this piece is not to deal with subjective possibilities. Nor will we seek to hide deep-seated dif®cultiesÐwhat will be discussed is whether there is a irrevocable decay. We will focus on social democracy. This is because parties in this tradition have for many decades provided most of the principal political forces for the movement towards a socialist conception of society in western European countries. So, for instance, we can see that self-avowed socialists have existed in all of them and even `revisionists’ de®ned their objectives in terms of equality. Thus, when it became apparent in the seventies that multinational capital ̄ows were undermining domestic macroeconomic policyÐthe principle instrument of social democratic governmentÐthe attempt was made to go beyond Keynesianism, in parties such as the Parti Socialiste and British Labour. Similarly in Sweden, where the social democrats enjoyed unbroken rule since 1938 and the most successful reformist model was supposed to prevail, the party (SAP)Ðfar from complacently announcing `the end of history’Ðembarked on a programme

Intellectuals of the Left and the Atomic Dilemma in the Age of the US Atomic Monopoly, 1945-1949

Given its close association with the formation of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, it is tempting to assume that the response of Left intellectuals to the advent of atomic weapons was rooted in consistent opposition. This article demonstrates that the reality was much more complex. During the period of the US atomic monopoly (1945–1949), British Left intellectuals wrestled with the implications of this new destructive force and arrived at widely different understandings and prognoses. However, many shared a pessimism rooted in the belief that the atomic monopoly could not be maintained for long, that beyond this point the atomic future was unmanageable and that it would result in future war and annihilation. Drawing on a range of British left-wing responses, and focusing in particular on those of Bertrand Russell and George Orwell, this article emphasises the shifting nature and complexity of Left responses to the advent of the US atomic monopoly and analyses the circumstances in which these were arrived at. It shows that it is inaccurate to think in terms of a single or coherent left-wing position on atomic weapons at a time when many on the left believed further war to be inevitable and some believed that the only way to prevent it might lie in launching, or threatening, a preventive atomic attack on the Soviet Union.

Pivotal powers: The British Labour Party and European unity since 1945

This article examines the roots of European unity and Britains relationship to it, primarily in terms of foreign policy and the failed alternative political economy of the empire/Commonwealth. Continuity of policy emerges as the dominant theme. The strong Atlanticist orientation of the state and its attempts to maintain a special relationship with the USA were objects of a bipartisan approach, as was the commitment to Britains world role. Membership of the ‘European’ club in the 1970s did not constitute a break with this tradition so much as an adaptation in circumstances of prolonged relative decline. The article shows how the British left attempted to comprehend European unity in terms of the prospects for socialism and left reform in Britain itself.