The Labour Party - Professor Vernon Bogdanor FBA CBE

ladies and gentlemen in February 1918 was held at the congregational Memorial Hall in Farringdon Street a building not very far from here but demolished in 1968 and this meeting was held in response to a motion passed by the tea you see in 1899 calling for a special Congress of representatives of labor organizations to devise ways and means for securing the return of an increased number of labor members in the next parliament the conference decided to establish a labor representation committee whose purpose would be the formation of a distinct labor group in Parliament who shall have their own whips and agree upon their policy after the conference a socialist newspaper declared at last there is a United Labor Party or perhaps it would be safer to say a little cloud no bigger than a man's hand which may grow into you a united Labor Party and this date February 1900 is commonly held to mark the birth of the Labor Party though the labor representation committee did not alter its name to Labor Party until 1906 and it was for some years uncertain whether the new party could survive the idea of a specific representation of labour in Parliament was by no means new it had first been put forward by John Stuart Mill who had been a Liberal MP from 1865 to 1868 and in 1881 Friedrich Engels marks his collaborator had argued for a Labour Party independent of what he called the ruling class parties but early attempt at securing independent labour representation proved ineffective and of course the first past the post electoral system meant that an independent Labour candidate would by splitting the left-wing vote helped the Conservatives there were it is true a few working men in the Commons by the end of the 19th century but all the liberals they were known as Lib labs and were concentrated predominantly in close-knit mining constituencies the Liberal leadership wanted to encourage working-class MPs but all too many liberal constituencies were unwilling to adopt working-class candidates who would prove a drain on constituency funds in an era before MPs were paid three of the early leaders of the Labour Party Keir Hardie Ramsay MacDonald and Arthur Henderson they began as liberals but failed to secure nomination as liberal candidates we didn't leave the Liberals MacDonald told one prominent liberal they kicked us out and slammed the door in our faces Arthur Henderson who was returned as lrc MP for the Barnard Castle constituency at a by-election in nineteen three had actually been the electoral agent of the very Liberal MP whose death had precipitated the by-election so the breach between labour and the Liberals was not over ideology but over representation and hardly any of the early Labour MPs held views which could not have been accommodated within the Liberal Party it was only after the Labour Party was formed that its leaders developed a distinctive ideology and ethos now the first man to stand as a working candidate a working-class candidate entirely independent of the two main parties was James Kerr Hardy in a by-election in middlin aksha in 1888 and in 1892 standing as an independent but without Liberal opposition he won the seat of West Ham south Hardy was careful not to alienate liberal voters generally speaking his manifesto declared I am an agreement with a present program of the Liberal Party so far as it goes Keir Hardie had a good understanding of what today would be called image and when he turned up at the Commons instead of the customary formal outfit at the times he arrived in a tweed jacket and deerstalker hat not a cloth cap as is sometimes said he was mistaken by a policeman on duty for a workman and was asked if he was working on the roof of the House of Commons no he replied on the floor in 1893 various socialist and radical organizations combined to fall under Hardy's leadership an independent Labour Party ILP the ILP was a Socialist Party dedicated to what it called the collective and common ownership of the means of production distribution and exchange but a motion to include the word socialist in the title of the party was heavily defeated because hardly appreciated that the few workers were actually socialists to build a mass party hardy believed entailed cooperation with trade unionists and others who were not socialists for that reason the word labour was included in the title of a party but not socialist the emphasis of the new party was as was to be the case with the early labour party not so much socialism as independence from the other two parties but the ILP unlike the Labour Party never became a mass party its membership was only rarely higher than 10,000 people and in the general election of 1895 he failed completely and all of its 28 candidates were heavily defeated and this confirmed Keir Hardie in his view that socialism could not be achieved by an independent party alone it needed in addition the support of a mass working-class organisation to trade unions accordingly hardly thought to persuade the TU C to support a new independent party the Labour Party representing the working class and the key to the formation of a Labour Party is to be found less in the beliefs or the faith of the Socialists than in the evolution of trade union opinion the interwar trade union leader Ernest Bevin said that the labor party grew out of the bowels of the trade union movement an unfortunate metaphor perhaps many writers on the labour party have concentrated more on the Socialists than on the trade unions perhaps the Socialists were much more interesting people but it was the trade union leaders who were crucial in the formation of a mast party now the trade unions in the 1890s had what they thought was an established legal position and they had achieved recognition by the state but during the 1890s they became concerned that this position was under threat from judicial decisions which declared peaceful picketing illegal and allowed trade unions to be sued for damages incurred during strikes this was a threat to trade union funds characteristically the Union sought representation in Parliament less to secure advances than to defend a position they thought had already been won and the Labor Party was formed as much for defensive reasons as for radical ones and it may well be that had it not been for the judicial attack on the trade unions there would not have been a labor party at all the formation of the Labour Party seems to me a contingent matter and in no way inevitable it is possible that the labor interest could have been accommodated within the Liberal Party just as in the United States it has been accommodated in the Democrats and in Canada accommodating broadly within the Liberal Party because the political culture in Britain seems to me to have much more in common with Canada and to some extent in the United States than it does with the countries of the continent now the trade unions have always played a dominant role in the labour party they have been and remain the largest single group on Labour's National Executive through the block vote they dominate the Labour Party conference and they have always provided the bulk of the farm for the party and that perhaps is inevitable in a party which has so few wealthy members Tony Blair sought to remove trade union dominance by trying to secure large donations from wealthy individuals but that seemed to move the party from the frying pan into the fire because it was never clear why a left-wing party should depend upon handouts from millionaires now the trade unions have been generally supportive of the Labour Party but they will not support a Labour government when they feel that their interests are directly threatened in 1931 they refused to accept the proposals of Ramsay MacDonald to lower unemployment benefit in 1969 they refused to accept proposals for trade union reform presented by Harold Wilson which they believed would weaken their power and in 1978 nine they refused to accept the Callaghan government's incomes policy which they saw as undermining their role in collective bargaining and undermining working-class living standards in each case labour had to back down and in each case the union's were acting defensively we often see the Labour Party as a radical movement seeking social change but might it not also be seen as a somewhat conservative movement seeking to maintain gains that have already been achieved by the trade unions and the wider labour movement now much is said and written about working class and trade union consciousness in the Labor Party and Labour Party leaders where the Ramsay MacDonald Harold Wilson or Tony Blair who have often been accused of betraying the working class and the implication is that there was a militant or even revolutionary working class which its leaders have betrayed but there is little real evidence of that in history such working-class consciousness as exists has been defensive rather than militant and both the Labour Party and the trade unions have got into trouble when they have ignored this those who were closest to the working classes were well aware that it was not militant Ernest Bevin once said the most conservative man in the world is the British trade unionist when you want to change him you can make a great speech on unity but when you are finished he will say what about the funeral benefits the historian Robert Roberts who grew up in a slum in Salford said the class struggle as manual workers knew it was a political and took place entirely within their own society all in all it was a struggle against the fates and each family fought it out as best it could Marxist ranchers from the whole paid fleeting visits to our street and insisted that we the proletariat stood locked in a titanic struggle with some wicked master class most people passed by at the same time there was a distrust of the state which was seen as run by an alien class and a distrust of politicians include new times those in the labour party the social commentator Richard Hoggart writing of his childhood in Leeds remembered a phrase often used about someone he's a bit of a politician it was not intended as a compliment I have so far given the impression that the LRC and the Labour Party was simply an electoral machine from the start there was a further element in the party indeed labour saw itself is quite different from the older parties the Labour Party's seemed to have a dual character which was inherited from the ILP and which was sustained by its early leaders particularly Keir Hardie the early Labour Party certainly sought the representation of labour so as to secure practical improvements in working-class conditions but it also sought as the ILP had done a transformation of society from one based on competition to a society based on cooperation and fellowship the Labour Party Keir Hardie used to say made war not on a class but on a system and that is why the Socialists though there were so few of them enjoyed an influence quite out of proportion to their numbers they had a faith like the early Christians to whom they sometimes compared themselves they had an emotional commitment and crusading zeal which was to sustain them through hard times their fundamental belief was an ethical one they believed that a society based on competition and individual self-interest could be transformed into one based on human fellowship fellowship is life William Morris had said in his novel a dream of johnboll and lack of fellowship is dead Ruth Glaser one of kir Hardy's ILP colleagues wrote a tract in 1919 called the meaning of socialism we said that socialism means not only the socializing socialization of wealth but of our lives our hearts ourselves and that socialism consisted not in getting at all but in giving that fundamentally socialism is a question of right human relationship and is essentially a spiritual principle socialism therefore is religion that part the all essential practical part of it that concerns the right state of our present lives the right state of our relation to our fellows the right moral health of our souls and that is why many people speak not only of the labor party but also the labor movement or even talk in terms of a crusade as Jeremy Corbyn certainly does and that serves to differentiate labour from the other parties who cannot imagine people speaking of a conservative or liberal movement or crusade and it was this ethical quasi religious appeal which gave the early Labour Party its dynamic and sustained its leaders in what must have seemed at times like a thankless task and it also gave labour a tribal loyalty which held it together in times of trouble so that break aways from the party have always failed where the Ramsay MacDonald's National Labour Party in the 1930s or the SDP in the 1980s but of course there has always been a tension between these two aspects of the party the practical and the religious there's tension however was hardly relevant to Labour's early years for before 1914 the party could win seats only if it cooperated with the Liberals with whom in nineteen three it made an electoral pact in nineteen six the year of a liberal landslide labour won just 29 seats but in almost all of them they faced no liberal opposition the same was true in the two general elections of 1910 in which labour one forty and forty two seats labour was tied to the Liberals who could at any time have crushed the new party by running candidates against it and this clearly limited Labour's possibilities of becoming a vehicle for socialism and until 1914 it appeared as little more than a pressure group upon the Liberals it depended upon persuading the Liberals to legislate on matters which would benefit the working class indeed before 1914 some argued the formation of the Labour Party had been a mistake and that the needs of the working class could be met by the great reforming government of Asquith and Lloyd George which had introduced old-age pensions steeply graduated and progressive taxation and health and unemployment insurance and was preparing further major reforms when the war broke out in 1914 the war however altered everything ruining the Liberals and helping labour the Liberals were split between the followers of Asquith and those of Lloyd George and never really recovered their governing spirit but the war led to a doubling of trade union membership from just over three and a half million in 1913 to six and a half million in 1919 and most of these trade unionists would see their interests as being met by the Labour Party rather than liberals all lists gave a new confidence the Labour Party and it was reflected in organization and ideological change symbolized by the adoption of a constitution in 1918 this new constitution provided for the establishment of constituency labor parties and indeed membership it also adopted for the first time a definite statement of party aims it's only domestic policy aim was the commitment to nationalization in Clause 4 of the Constitution and this declared the aim of a Labour Party to be to secure for the producers by hand or brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production distribution and exchange and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry and service and this commitment remained until removed by Tony Blair in 1995 now Labour's confidence was increased by the first post-war general election in 1918 in which it won 63 seats as compared with the 28 won by the other main opposition party the independent Asquith and Liberals so labour became the second largest grouping in the Commons and since the coalition between the Lord George Liberals and the Conservatives won 478 seats securing a landslide victory and labour was to win more votes than the Liberals in every future general election it became the official opposition in 1924 it formed its first minority government its second minority government in 1929 its vote increased in every election between the wars except that of 1931 the speed of its advance seems in retrospect astonishing now labour believed that the war had dealt capitalism its deathblow its program labour and the new social order in 1918 declared the war was the culmination and collapse of our distinctive industrial civilisation which the workers will not seek to reconstruct the individualistic system of capitis production may we hope indeed have received a deathblow with it Moscow the vertical system and ideas in which it naturally found expression we of the Labour Party will certainly net lend no hand to its revival on the contrary we shall do our utmost to see that it is buried with the millions it has done to death but the interwar years were a period of historic defeat for the left there were three defeats the first was the general strike of 1926 which showed that the trade unions could not force their view upon the government the second was 1931 which showed that a Labour government could not preserve working-class living standards in the middle of a slump the third was in the 1930s when it was shown that the labor movement was powerless to prevent another war labour did not recover until 1940 when it joined the Churchill coalition ironically a coalition led by the man who was seen by most in the Labour Party as the great enemy of the labour movement between the walls but the central theme of the interwar years seems to me the death of socialism in the form in which the founding fathers had understood it and one reason for this was that the labor movement exaggerated its strength in particular the trade unions exaggerated their strength and some believed that they could achieve a shortcut to socialism through industrial action and in 1926 they believed they could force the Conservative government to back down the general strike was not intended to be revolutionary but rather to extend the scope of collective bargaining a trade union says if you want to seek improvement in your working conditions you have a better chance of achieving this if you act collectively if you say we want rather than I want why not extend this principle so that it covers not just one particular industry that every industry in other words general strike but once the strike becomes general it seems to take on a different character does it not seem a threat to the state in 1919 the miners were in a kind of rehearsal for the general strike again threatening a general strike and Lloyd George said this to the president the miners Union he said I feel bound to tell you that in our opinion we are at your mercy if you carry out your threat and strike you will defeat us but if you do so have you weighed the consequences the strike will be in defiance of the government of the country and by its very success will precipitate a constitutional crisis of the first importance for if a force arises in the state which is stronger than the state itself then it must be ready to take on the functions of the state or to withdraw and accept the authority of the state gentlemen have you considered and if you are are you ready now Lloyd George's comment was in a sense misleading because neither he nor any other prime minister would have been willing to accept defeat from organized labor but even more important organized labor was simply not prepared to make the kind of challenge that Lloyd George was describing they did not wish to challenge the state they were constitutionalist but miscalculated and anyone who understands the formation and nature of the labor party can see why this is so the aim of the general strike was to force the government to intervene to secure a fair deal for the miners it seemed to the union's a further weapon of collective bargaining but the government refused to intervene and said the strike was a threat to constitutional government it insisted on an unconditional end to the general strike before it would negotiate with the miners shortly after the general strike began Beatrice Webb a leading figure in the Fabian Society and social investigator wrote for the British trade union movement I see a day of terrible disillusionment the of the general strike of 1926 will be one of the most significant landmarks in the history of the British working class future historians will I think regardless of the death gasp of that pernicious doctrine of workers control of public affairs through the trade unions and by the methods of direct action 1926 showed that you could not achieve socialism through the industrial power of the trade unions and the general strike was bound to raise a constitutional issue in 1919 the railway union leader and future Labour Minister JH Thomas said this I can't understand and do not subscribe to the policy that asks men to strike today for what they refused to put a cross on the ballot paper yesterday but the general election Labour made its appeal declaring our policy the other parties made their appeal and our people believed them and not us we ought clearly to recognize that if Labour is going to govern we can't have some outside body attempting to rebel against parliamentary institutions without it recoiling on our own heads the miners had gone on strike because they were in dispute with the owners the other unions on strike had no dispute with their owners their disputes was not with the owners but with the government if the government were to give way the trade unions as Lloyd George had pointed out would have become the government but the strike failed after nine days and the trade unions lost one third of their thumbs after the strike ended Beatrice Webb wrote the government has gained immense prestige in the world and the British labor movement has made itself ridiculous a strike which opens with a football match between the police and the strikers and ends in unconditional surrender after nine days with densely packed reconciliation services at all the chapels and churches of Great Britain attended by the strikers and their families will make the Continental socialists blaspheme let me add the failure of the general strike so what a sane people the British are if only our revolutionaries would realize the hopelessness of their attempt to turn the British workmen into a Russian red and the British businessman and Country Gentlemen into an Italian fascist the British are hopelessly good-natured and full of common sense to which the British workman adds pigheadedness jealousy and stupidity we are all of us just good-natured stupid folk the worst of it is that the governing class are as good-natured and stupid as the labor movement since 1926 the labor movement has been clearly committed to the parliamentary road to socialism who were Labour Party as a result of 1926 the trade unions became less an instrument of resistance to the state and more of a policymaking body they became an effect in his state of the realm consulted by governments of both left and right early as 1937 Ernest Bevin said that the tea you see has now virtually become an integral part of the state with the rise in dictatorships abroad which did away with the rights of free trade unions British trade unions came to appreciate the democracy even in the form of a capitalist state was worth defending but the position of trade unions as in a state of the realm was bound to end when they too began to exaggerate their power and the outcome was the advent of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 one commentator said it's the public sector trade unions who brought Margaret Thatcher to power in the winter of discontent and she subsequently proceeded to thank them in their her own peculiar individual way but labour in the 1930s was instead of seeking to transform the capitalist state in something different was coming to accept it and working within it for improvements 1926 symbolized the end of the class war in industry it was coming to an end in politics as well and under the post war at league of and Labor's no successful government labor would seek to administer the capitalist system through the new ideas of Keynes and beverage rather than to transform it until 1945 socialism was seen as something which still lay in the future but we now see the Atlee government as the climax of socialism and although it did to some extent transform society that society did remain a fundamentally capitalist with a large role for private enterprise it did not become as William Morris had hoped a society based on fellowship and cooperation the Atlee government transformed social conditions by helping to slay the five Giants noticed by William Beveridge in his famous 1942 report the first giant was wont and the Labour government helped to slay that through the National Insurance Act of 1946 providing for widows benefits and maternity benefits death grants and insurance against sickness unemployment and retirement the Act established the labor principle of a national minimum no one was to fall below subsistence level it led to a drastic reduction in poverty in York for example it had been found that in 1936 31 percent of the working class were living in conditions of poverty by 1950 a figure was just three percent the second giant to slay was disease or Noren Bevin helped to slay that with his National Health Service Act enacted in 1946 the third giant to slay was ignorance labour helped to slay that by implementing the 1944 act that had written passed by the wartime coalition government which had abolished fees in secondary education and raised the school-leaving age to 15 the 4th giant to slay was squalor labour did something to slay that through its housing program and new proposals for Town Planning the fifth and possibly most important giant sleigh was idleness under labor Britain had full employment for the first time ever in peacetime when a full employment white paper was published by the coalition government proposing an unemployment level of 3% the great economist John Maynard Keynes said no harm in aiming at 3% unemployment but I shall be surprised if we succeed labour did even better by 1951 unemployment was under 1% the contrast was most striking perhaps in the Northeast where unemployment in 1938 had been 38% by 1951 it was 1% by 1988 under Margaret Thatcher it had grown to 13% so the Atty government presided over the greatest social advance of the 20th century it was successful in economic policy also output rose by a third in 1945 and real GDP from 1947 to 51 rose by 3 percent the highest four-year rise in GDP in the 20th century although it was not noticed by the ordinary consumer since much of the increase in output was steered in investment and exports so that most people real standard of living remained virtually stationary abroad labour played its part in establishing a system of collective security with NATO and decolonized India freeing one-sixth of the human race and enabling Britain to avoid getting bogged down in futile correct colonial wars as occurred with the French in Indochina and Algeria and Belgium in the Congo but paradoxically the least successful part of Labour's program was the most socialist part the nationalization of public utilities that never achieved widespread public support and its failure to transform industrial conditions led to a doctrinal crisis in the party in 1937 Atlee wrote a book called the Labour Party in perspective in which he said the evils that capitalism brings differ in intensity in different countries but the root cause of the trouble once discerned the remedies seemed to be the same the cause is the private ownership of the means of life the remedy is public ownership all the major industries will be owned and controlled by the community and neither he nor other leading members of the Labour Party believed but by 1921 they would have become committed to the mixed economy now because nationalization had failed to transform society the Atlee government left a legacy of disillusion despite its tremendous successes for the achievement of full employment a welfare state a National Health Service friut source and decolonization in India massive reforms though they were did not seem who brought about utopia indeed Britain in 1951 did not seem very like utopia it was most certainly not a class to society and nationalization seemed to many a dead end he did not seem to possess the sort of magic properties that earlier socialists had predicted in addition the achievements of the athlete's government did not lead to electoral success in the 1950s instead labour lost three general elections in a row and its vote fell continuously in the 1950s this surprised many in the labour party who had seen the general election of 1945 as beginning a period of socialist advance what the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm was to call the forward march of labour but in retrospect the ATLA government seems a culmination of socialist advance an ending rather than a beginning socialists were bewildered in the 1950s when the tide of history seemed to be going against them what was happening was that in a consumer society of growing affluence working class solidarity was coming to be undermined by a new individualism one conservative journalists said that Marx and Engels were being replaced by Marks and Spencer in addition technological developments were reducing the size of the working class one study concluded ominously but labor is thought of as a predominantly class party and that class which it presents is objectively and subjectively on the wane how is labor to respond to this challenge the first leader to respond was Hugh gates Gill Labour's leader between 1955 and 1963 and at Labour's 1959 conference after the party's third successive electoral defeat the Labour leader Hugh gates Co declared we assumed to readily an instinctive loyalty to labour which was all the time slowly being gradually eroded so the @ly government seemed for all its achievements to mark the end of a dream the dream of a socialist society but not all labour party members were willing to accept this when gates kil sought to remove Clause 4 from the party's Constitution he failed and had to back down then in the 1980s Neil Kinnock tried to modernize the Labour Party but it was left to Tony Blair in 1995 finally to remove Clause 4 and make way for the creation of new labour now it was in response to the disillusion following the Atlee government that in 1956 Anthony Crosland later to be a Labour cabinet minister published an important book called the future of socialism in which he argued that the reforms of the Atlee government even though there had not created a socialist society had fundamentally transformed capitalism and that socialists needed to come to terms with the mixed economy which was very different from a form of capitalism red in tooth and claw socialism he said had to be adapted to modern conditions it remained fundamentally about equality but that equality could not be achieved by national which should no longer be the central aim of socialists the ownership of industry was no longer the key factor in determining the structure of society instead socialism should be achieved he said by fiscal means by redistributed taxation and by educational reform in particular by the establishment of comprehensive school now many labour supporters resisted Crossland arguments but in practice future labor governments were to act according to his precepts rather than those of more traditional socialists no future labour government was to give nationalization the same importance that it had been given by the Atlee government and one can see in the future of socialism the germs of Tony Blair's new labor 1997 was to be the first general election since the Labour Party had been founded in which the labor manifesto did not include a single proposal for nationalization indeed that question that people were asking about labor in 1997 was not what industries were labor nationalize but what industries will labor privatize social democracy was coming to replace traditional socialism recently of course the nationalization has been making a comeback under Jeremy Corbyn but it is of course too early to say whether it marks the beginning of a trend or is merely a temporary aberration now in the 1960s electoral developments seemed to belie the pessimism of Gaitskell and Crossland because during the 15 years from 1964 to 1979 labour was in power for all but three and a half years and it won four of the five elections of the period all of them under the leadership of Harold Wilson but then there were four successive electoral defeats by the Conservatives and a Margaret Thatcher and John Major in Eric Hobsbawm words the forward march of labour had come to be halted now for most of the 20th century labour had been sustained by the leaf belief that its advance was in some sense guaranteed by history by what Sidney Webb had called the inevitability of gradualness society so it was believed was moving inexorably in a collectivist direction no doubt conservative governments would continue to be elected from time to time but their role would be confined to their administering a dispensation shaped by labor as the Churchill and Macmillan government's in the 1950s had done if conservatives tried to go further if they try to roll back to state they would it was thought be repudiated by the let road because the gains secured by the athlete's government it was thought could only be maintained through state action and voters would punish any government which sought to undermine them and cross them believe that these gains full-employment the welfare state sharply progressive taxation and recognition of the claims of organized labor that all these were permanent and immune to challenge from the right but of course the advent of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 changed all that for she saw her task not merely as one of containing the advances made by labour but of reversing them so labour had to adopt it stopped adapt its doctrines to conditions that had never before envisaged it now seemed that social democracy far from being guaranteed by history was being repudiated by it the future of socialism had been based on a belief that the state could through intelligent macroeconomic policy secure both full employment and price stability using Keynesian methods the state should in cross and view use its ability to control the economy to redistribute income and secure full employment that belief was now under threat indeed it had been under threat even during Labour's peer to office at the time of the IMF crisis of 1976 Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan spoke at the Labour Party conference of the cosy world we were told would go on forever we're full employment would be guaranteed by a stroke of the Chancellor's pen we used to think you could just spend your way out of a recession I tell you in all candor that that option no longer exists and that insofar as it ever did exist it only worked by injecting a bigger dose of inflation into the economy followed by a higher level of unemployment that is the history of the last 20 years so the first of Crossland presuppositions that the economy could be brought under control by the state had been subverted now secondly Crossland believed that social democracy could be achieved by fiscal means that too was under threat some labor leaders were coming to believe that the limits of tax ooh taxable capacity were being reached it's seen in particular but some of labour supporters better-off members of the working class whose votes were crucial in marginal seats were also coming to be hostile to high taxation preferring to retain more of their wages in their pockets at the time of the IMF crisis of 1976 therefore the argument the economic crisis should be met by rising taxation rather than by rakaats in public expenditure was rapidly dismissed by Prime Minister Callaghan and Chancellor Healy and pressed even on the left in a rather lukewarm manner now the undermining of these two propositions that the state could control the economy and that beneficent state could be trusted to redistribute income meant that during the long period of conservative rule from 17 1979 to 1997 the prospects for social democracy receded into the distance many other things that Crossland insisted could not happen a return to high unemployment regressive use of the taxation system drastic cuts in the public services and the marginalization of the trade union movement did in fact happen under Margaret Thatcher and proved no barrier to conservative electoral success by the 1990s if not earlier it had become clear that Social Democrats faced a completely changed landscape one dominated by new techniques of economic management accompanied by considerable skepticism as of the value of government intervention and even of expenditure on the public's services after its unexpected defeat in the 1992 general election the Labour Party drew the lesson were the rightly or wrongly that electors whatever they told the opinion pollsters would not in the privacy of the voting booths support a party which proposed higher taxes to finance the public services so in 1997 Tony Blair and Gordon Brown proposed a policy of fiscal prudence with no increases in public spending as early as 1975 according to Tony Ben's Diaries Labour Chancellor Denis Healey told the cabinet at the labor clubs you'll find there's an awful lot of support for this policy of cutting public expenditure they will all tell you about Paddy Murphy up the street who's got 18 children has not worked for years lives on unemployment benefit has a colour television and goes to New Yorker for his holidays there was a third presupposition which lay at the heart of crossings analysis it was that social democracy could be achieved in one country but was that possible when Britain had become subject to forces which lay completely outside the country the market forces of globalization and the rules of the European Union Crossland had believed that Social Democrats could pursue whatever policies they liked largely unchallenged sense Britain remained a sheltered economy protected by tariffs and exchange controls under the athlete government Britain had appeared to be an island beacon of social democratic hope in an otherwise unsympathetic world by the 1990s however it seemed clear that social democracy in one country was no longer a feasible option the progress of national economies was becoming inextricably bound up with the International economy and the pressures of the global market governments could no longer adopt national macroeconomic policies aimed at boosting demand without risking punishment by the markets in the form of higher interest rates and falling currencies Tony Blair showed he understood this when in a lecture in 1995 he said we must recognize that the UK is situated in the middle of a global market for capital a market which is less subject to regulation today than for several decades an expansion or a fiscal or monetary policy that is at odds with other economies in Europe will not be sustained for very long to that extent the room for manoeuvre of any government in Britain is already heavily circumscribed in addition to the constraints of the global economy Britain as a member of the European Union who is subject to its trading rules and the provisions of the internal market the European Economic Community for one of the European Union had not yet come into existence in 1956 when Crossland wrote the future of socialism and heyou Gaitskell Labor's then leader was together with some of his leading colleagues positively hostile to it partly on the grounds that membership would inhibit the policies of economic planning to which a social democratic government ought to be committed that may be also the reason for jeremy corbyn's reported skepticism but by the time that Blair became Labour leader labour was more pro-european than the Conservatives and this would make it more difficult to implement Social Democrat policies because the EU imposed restrictions on the policy instruments such as state aid available to a social democratic government globalization moreover had the consequence of increasing inequalities even within a single state let alone between states it seemed to allow few to acquire massive financial rewards while making life more difficult for those without marketable skills globalization while increasing inequality had also removed from national states those policy instruments which it would need to address them the instruments would now be forbidden by the rules of the European Union the World Trade Organization and similar international bodies the transformation of social democracy into new labor followed in ex ibly from Blair's acceptance of the contrary of globalization which was in the words of one American commentator a golden straitjackets who that was written before 2008 perhaps it's not so golden anymore but perhaps even more important the alliance between the industrial working class and socialism seemed to have come to an end not only will the traditional working class in decline its views seem to have little in common with that of middle-class labor leaders working-class voters which has been discovered are not sympathetic to the international ethos of labour and II thought would welcoming immigration and multiculturalism and championed the rights of ethnic and sexual minorities indeed as early as 1864 when Karl Marx helped union leaders in London to form the first workers international the union leaders first demand was a British employers should stop importing cheap French labor which held down wages towards the end of the 20th century that was becoming increasingly difficult to believe that the working class could be the means by which socialism could be constructed labor seemed to have two conflicting constituencies it's working-class constituency and its middle-class constituency it faced what might be called a cultural conflict between Hartlepool and Hampstead now the Blair and brown governments had notable successes but these successes were not welcomed by many activists in the party who resented what they saw as the abandonment of socialism in addition some had been happy with the purity of opposition which they prefer to the compromises of government at the last Labour conference which he addressed as Prime Minister in 2006 Tony Blair said there was one Labour tradition he did not like the tradition of losing elections many labor activists could not forgive him for actually winning elections for winning three in a row something no left-wing leader ever done before and winning the largest landslide by the left in British history twice in 1997 and 2001 were unforgivable sins and this resentment together with resentment at austerity which had been a consequence of the credit crunch of 2008 was that lead to the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader in 2015 he was chosen by the individual members and the trade unions but against the wishes of Labour MPs who in June 2016 passed a motion of no confidence in him 172 votes to 40 but by 9 2018 for the first time in Labour's history the left controlled three of the key power centres of the party the constituency membership the trade unions and Labour's National Executive the only power sense of the left did not control was a parliamentary party and appears that steps may be taken to remedy that by deselecting MP's opposed to the Corbin leadership the Corbin leadership was a reversion to an older style of left-wing politics from the time of the Russian Revolution in 1917 there had been socialists who were opposed to the Social Democrats who they thought of as feeble compromises but were not prepared to accept the iron discipline and intolerance of the communists but although they were not themselves revolutionaries they had no qualms in accepting the support of those who were believing there could be no enemies on the Left there had been dominant in the labour movement only during the period of militant trade union leadership in the early 1920s culminating in the general strike by men who had used the rhetoric of the class war without calculating its consequences once their bluff had been called in a general strike they shrank into insignificance that stream of thought is now once again dominant in the labour party with what consequences we shall see when I draw up the programme for these lectures I wrote of labour like other social democratic parties in Europe the Labour Party finds itself in retreat that of course was written before the 2017 election and shows the dangers of prediction because in the 2017 election this is a prize of many labour secured a massive swing in its favor the largest swing indeed by any party in any general election since the swing to act is Labour Party in 1945 I would however have been more accurate had I said that Social Democrats in the Labour Party find themselves in retreat for in my view the election represented a personal victory for Jeremy Corbyn but not for social democracy indeed the election seems to me a defeat for the Social Democrats in the Labour Party and the values which they held it was defeat indeed for the vast majority of Labour MPs who welcomed the early election because they hoped and believed it would be a chance to get rid of Jeremy Colvin indeed the strongest bind uniting strongest bond I beg your pardon uniting Labour MPs the the main focus of unity in the parliamentary party was that corbin was incompetent and that his policy proposals were unrealistic the 2017 election was the first in British history in which a major party leader fought an election despite having been repudiated by the vast majority of his parliamentary supporters it was also sadly the first in British history in which the leader of party was accused by at least two and possibly more of his backbench MPs of failing to combat racism in the form of anti-semitism a sentiment hitherto absent from British politics since the time of Oswald Mosley the fascist leader in the 1930s won Labour MP Jess Phillips MP for Birmingham Yardley who is not Jewish told the Times in September 2016 there is definitely anti-semitism and Corbin needs to clamp down on it labour is my home but it's become a hostile living arrangement Ruth Smith a Jewish Labour MP for stoke-on-trent north told the Evening Standard in September 2016 she had received over 25,000 incidents of racial abuse and required security protection at the Labour Party conference she said I've never seen anti-semitism in labor on this scale she has on numerous occasions raised issues of racism privately with Corbin and said my biggest issue that he knows it's happening and it's still happening she has concluded they are abysmal about racism now paradoxically the electoral success of the most left-wing leader in labor history came not from an increase in working-class support but from an increase in middle-class support labor success was greatest amongst university students the bulk of whom come from middle-class families the party proposed to abolish student fees and indeed to pay off student debt and amongst labor support strongest among pensioners who objected to means testing of their winter fuel payments and the ending of the triple lock on pensions at the time when pensioners are disproportionately unlikely to be in poverty and when the typical pensioner household is now around 20 pounds a week better off than the typical working age household and labor gained support amongst homeowners who did not wish to pay for domiciliary social care as a political philosopher John Gray put it in an article in the New Statesman the election result means that the property tycoons of Chelsea must be congratulating themselves on having seen off a threat to their children inheritances interestingly labor did not propose to unfreeze welfare benefits which Emily Thornbury the shadow foreign secretary declared was unaffordable in consequence the higher the proportion of professional and managerial classes in a constituency the larger the swing to labor for lower the proportion of routine in manual workers in the constituency the larger the swing to labor the larger the number with qualifications or degrees the larger the swing to labor indeed in constituencies where over 27% had no qualifications there was a small swing to the Conservatives as there was in constituencies were under 21 percent had a degree labour also gained from the European issue it was not as the Liberal Democrats were a remain party the labor manifesto declared that the Labour government would leave the EU it would Institute a policy of managed immigration but seek to remain in the single market it did not explain how it could achieve these benefits since remaining in the single market requires acceptance of free movement but that did not matter remain as came to conclusion no doubt that a vote for liberal Democrats was a wasted vote and the best way to reverse or at least mitigate the outcome of the referendum was to vote labour in seats with 60% or more leave voters there was a small swing of around 0.8 percent of the Conservatives but where the leave vote was under 45 percent the labor vote increased by 10 by 12 percent and the Conservatives fell back 2 percent but leave us also voted labour and much of the 2015 you could vote return to labour perhaps one motivation for you could vote in 2015 had been anti-establishment feeling and perhaps that feeling was transferred to Jeremy Corbyn in 2017 the parties that have been most successful since the European issue came to dominate British politics have been those that were able to finesse it as David Cameron did in 2015 with the promise of a referendum and Jeremy Corbyn in 2017 who could appeal to both sides in the remain leave debate and in finessing that issue Jeremy Corbyn was also able to finesse the culture war which threatened to divide the party the division between his professional middle class and its working class supporters the Hampstead Hartlepool division but it is paradoxical that so many remain errs not primarily to korban to come out in favour of mitigating brexit or even of reversing it since corbin has been a lifelong euro skeptic on the ground that it yields control the economy to international institutions and so inhibits the policies needed to combat austerity and create a socialist society the 2017 elections seemed to put socialism back on the political agenda nevertheless socialists can no longer have the assurance they had at the beginning of the 20th century that socialism was a wave of the future that it was in the words of the philosopher Bernard Williams cheered on by the universe toward the end of the 20th century the American Socialist Daniel Bell wrote the death of socialism is the most tragic political fact of the 20th century and its most extreme and violent form of communism socialism has led to horrible tyrannies as in Russia and China in its milder form it has led to Venezuela where people queue in the street for food the only form in which it has proved at all viable and successful have been that of social democracy the governing philosophy for many years in Norway and Sweden the form which Tony Blair tried to adapt to British conditions with New Labour but the Corbyn leadership and its electoral success in 2017 raises a new the question of a viability of older forms of socialism and whether they can be made to work in an advanced industrial society such as Britain perhaps socialists would do well to remember the words of perhaps its greatest British exponent in the 20th century an iron Bevin who wrote that the philosophy of democratic socialism is essentially cool in temper democratic socialism is a child of modern society and so of a relativist philosophy it seeks the truth in any given situation knowing all the time that if this be pushed too far it falls into error [Applause] you

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Length: 61min 41sec (3701 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 05 2018