What has happened to our party system? Part 2 - Labour
‘The Labour Party is a democratic socialist party’
Statement on Labour party membership cards.
The Labour Party, as can be seen above, defines itself as a democratic socialist party. It does not define itself as a social democratic party. This is an important difference. Rather than being a party which believes in liberal democracy seasoned with a dash of socialism, it claims to be a party which aims to build socialism by democratic means. Is that really the case? (spoiler alert - no).
Labour, contrary to frothing red top tabloid diatribes, was never a Marxist party. It was never revolutionary. Its original constitution, at the time it merged socialist societies with the trade union movement, was written by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, who were Fabians. Fabianism was the main strand of democratic socialism in the UK and it believed in ‘The inevitability of gradualism’. Essentially, this was the belief that, with universal suffrage, the workers would be in the majority and would elect socialist governments. Consequently, the UK would incrementally move towards socialism by constitutional and parliamentary means rather than going through the bloodshed of revolution. Considering the terrible struggles which raged across the former Russian empire following the Bolshevik revolution, one can see the appeal of this approach. Though the presumption that the majority would vote for socialism if given the chance proved somewhat off the mark, Labour did replace the Liberals as the main opposition to the Conservatives between the wars. The Webbs were members of socialist societies of the time, being from the educated middle class rather than horny handed proletarians. This element were geared towards science, progress, planning, management and technocracy. The other element of the Labour party, the trades unions, were less concerned with socialist theory and ideology than with getting a better life for their members. A more grass roots element than the socialist societies, they were less concerned with socialist scientific progress than practical improvements to their day to day lives. More influenced by methodism than Marx, these were the sort of people he dismissed as utopians. Consequently, Labour was never truly ideologically socialist and has generally taken a broad church approach to advancing social justice. Some have talked about Labourism as an ideology in itself, more pragmatic, less ideological.
The driving force behind labourism, its emotional heart, came form the working classes. The great prophets of Labour, those who provided its passion, were Kier Hardie and Nye Bevin; both came from mining backgrounds. They had a keen appreciation that the strength of labour came from its solidarity and therefore the trades union movement was at the heart of the Labour Party. Indeed, one of the key reasons for setting up the party in the first place was to strengthen the unions' hand by getting sympathetic representation in Parliament to make laws that would break the shackles on the unions’ bargaining power.
Kier, as a founder of the party, played a role in ensuring that it was structured to promote a unified approach, with the Parliamentary Labour Party and the trades unions dominating its direction. A bureaucracy was set up that could help streamline and channel decision making, preventing the usual herd of cats phenomenon that plagues socialist movements. For Keir, electoral success was at the heart of everything, and unity was key to this. This has been a dominant theme in Labour ever since, as has the centralising tendency, sometimes to the detriment of internal party democracy. Those who have struggled for more democracy, despite what you might expect from media coverage of the party, have generally come from the left of the party; Tony Benn and Jeremy Corbyn for example.
If the heart came from the working classes, the head has generally been claimed by the party’s more privileged elements, starting with the Fabians. Whilst Kier Hardy subscribed to Fabian ideas, he wasn’t one of their key theorists and indeed, had originally been a Georgist. At the heart of Fabianism were the Webbs, who came from a very different background and whose worldview was influenced accordingly.
‘The cleverest member of one of the cleverest families in the cleverest class of the cleverest nation of the world’
This is how Beatrice Webb described herself. Notice the reference to the cleverest class. She had a pretty low opinion of the poorest in society, subscribing to eugenic theories and arguing in favour of intervention to improve the human stock of society, though she never went as far as her fellow Fabien, George Bernard Shaw, who advocated ‘lethal chambers’ for those the Nazis would go on to refer to as ‘useless eaters’. So much for ‘From each according to his ability to each according to his needs.
Notice too the reference to the cleverest nation. Socialism is supposed to be internationalist in nature, ‘workers of the world’ and all that, but the Labour party has often privileged Britain (understandable if your path to victory is through persuading the British public to elect you, but this wasn't just pragmatism; there is an underlying sense of national, later more broadly ‘western’ entitlement.) Just as the likes of Beatrice Webb felt she knew best what should be done for and about the plebs, Labour governments have often felt it was their prerogative to interfere in the affairs of those considered less capable. Progress was everything and that meant getting the best people (well educated of course) to oversee the planning and management of the society for its own good. Technocracy has always been a key element of labourism. Whereas Kier Hardy’s vision of society was one based in old fashioned ideas of morality and brotherhood (seeing excessive wealth as being due to moral failings like greed on the part of the rich, rather than the systemic drivers of Marxian scientific socialism) Fabianism took on the bloodless nature of technocratic progress. Such an outlook would over time enable a smooth transition from opposition to capitalism to accommodation and finally promotion.
After a shaky start, the Labour party finally started to deliver in the wake of the Second World War. Anti communist propaganda had been suspended during the war years, as the Soviet Union broke the back of our common enemy, the Nazis. Furthermore, state planning had helped win the war and British industry, which needed investment if it was to compete in the post war economy, was much more open to nationalisation. It was in this context that Clement Attlee won Labour’s first majority in Parliament and implemented a radical program to create a mixed economy. The benefits for British workers were genuine and substantial, as Labour set out to slay the Five Giants identified by the liberal, Beveridge. Idleness was tackled by a Keynesian economic strategy of state intervention with an aim to eradicate unemployment. Ignorance was tackled by boosting the scope of state education. Disease was targeted with the creation of a national health service, with treatment free at the point of use. Squalor was addressed by an expansion of good quality council housing and the welfare state was created to alleviate want. More indirectly, such changes strengthened the bargaining position of the trade unions, who were able to push for better pay and conditions. Inequality shrank as progressive taxation shifted money from the rich to addressing the needs of the poor. Social mobility increased as the welfare state and high rates of employment gave the aspirational working classes the safety next and confidence to grab opportunities to better themselves.
As far as the UK was concerned, Labour’s reforms were delivering the social democratic settlement they had long promised. The issue was how much further should the reforms go? Anthony Crosland argued that the nationalising aims of Clause 4 of the Labour constitution were no longer valid. The strategic industries, the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy had already been nationalised and there was no need to go further. This dispute over nationalisation was to become one of the big splits in the party. Whilst he felt that the state needn’t get involved in running industrial engineering, he did point the way for a new direction - social engineering. His big idea, comprehensive schools, was aimed at eradicating class through the state education system. It was an interesting idea but it never had a chance of working as Labour never got rid of private schools. Also, ability to afford a house in the catchment of the best state schools replaced the eleven plus exam as the criterion for entry.
Another split in the party concerned foreign policy. Socialism had a proud history of internationalism and objection to the repression or exploitation of the people of other nations. Labour was never truly socialist in this sense but there were elements in the party whose patriotism drew from a very different well from that of nationalism. It drew inspiration from movements of resistance and solidarity; Diggers, Chartists, the Tolpuddle Martyrs. Rather than celebrating Empire, it celebrated Levellers like Walwyn urging the New Model Army to refuse Cromwell’s orders to subjugate the Irish, it celebrated Manchester cotton workers supporting the fight against slavery. But Labour leaders in power tended to take a Britain first approach, perhaps due to the need to win electoral majorities or the pressure from unions who felt their members were well served by colonialism and military spending. The Atlee government brutally suppressed anti colonial movements in West Africa and Malaya. Japanese troops were re-armed after the war to help keep down independence movements in Indo China. Britain joined NATO and developed a nuclear program to keep hold of its big power status. It undermined democracy in Iran in the interests of British Petroleum. It helped the far right crush socialists who had fought alongside us against the Nazis in Greece. It got involved in the Korean War and doubled military spending at the cost of social programs. This became too much for the likes of Nye Bevan, who resigned from government as prescription charges were introduced into the NHS (the thin end of the fat wedge we see today).
It was clear that in the Cold War, Labour was not going to join the non aligned movement but was going to take the side of capitalism and its neo colonialism. Though the Soviet Union was a gulag ridden authoritarian bureaucracy, its very existence benefited the British working class. It helped to keep capitalism honest, the plutocrats had to give the workers in the key strategic arena of western Europe something to ensure it retained their loyalty. Social Democracy was a way of keeping the workers sweet in the US and its partners, whilst workers continued to be exploited in the periphery. Even in opposition, Labour offered less criticism of Britain's brutal handling of the so-called ‘Mau Mau revolt’ in Kenya than Enoch Powell! The pattern of acting as henchmen to US capitalist global domination continued during the Harold Wilson government, with its support (if not involvement) for the war in Vietnam, a bloody anti socialist coup in Indonesia and betrayal of the inhabitants of Diego Garcia. It is often imagined, in The West, that social democracy tamed capitalism. It didn’t. It simply kept its worst excesses out of the domestic arena. There continued to be voices crying in the wilderness against this; Tony Benn took over from Bevan as the figurehead of Labour left, but such figures were characterised as fringe extremists.
This I’m alright Jackery of the social democrats was given a rude awakening by the fall of the Soviet Union. With no countervailing force acting against them, the forces of capital felt free to ride roughshod over Labour anywhere and everywhere. Just as Ralph Milliband had predicted at a time when Social Democracy seemed the way forward for workers (at least in the west), the seeming gains of the post war years were relentlessly rolled back as capital used globalisation to reimpose its dominance over Western society.
But there was something more insidious going on too. Neo liberalism had contrived a way to turn the large state systems created during the social democratic era into just another wealth pump for the rich.
The state could be used to create and maintain markets. It could be used to guarantee revenues through tax payers money. It could be used to bail out too big to fail banks, to privatise profit and subsidise loss, for public private partnerships locking government into extortionate contracts and giving corporations rentier control over natural monopolies. Labour had grown so attached to the role of the state that it fell easy prey to this form of capitalism. Take the NHS for example. The emotional attachment to the NHS is so great that Labour supporters continue to extol it and call for more money for it, even as it has become merely a brand name useful to corporate health providers as they hide behind it and make huge profits from the increasingly privatised system. With the internal market also came hugely increased bureaucratic overheads but this did not concern the increasingly dominant constituency that had begun to elbow aside the unions as the core of the Labour party's support; the professional managerial class (PMC).
With the decline of the traditional working class, Labour increasingly drew its support from, and reflected the interests of this growing constituency. It was more middle class, liberal, well educated and credentialled, as it had to be to get the jobs that increasingly came to dominate the employment market in the neo liberal world. As it drifted from its socialist roots it lost Scotland to an opportunistic SNP that jumped into the gap it had vacated before itself falling prey to the PMC. PMC jobs were not productive, the sort of jobs that had to continue during lockdowns because the country would seize up without them. They were often government funded, or their services were purchased by government departments from management consultancy firms who increasingly parasitised said government departments budgets with their land and expand approach. All the while jobs for front line workers like nurses were slashed or suffered wage repression in the name of the ‘efficiencies’ urged by this bloated bureaucracy.
Meanwhile, the party itself became hollowed out, its own bureaucracy losing touch with the grassroots and the workers, and the Parliamentary party, lobbied by the corporations who had an increasingly cosy relationship with the state in the neo liberal era, lost touch with those they were supposed to represent. New Labour moved to distance itself from the unions, with whom it was increasingly at odds, and moved to downgrade their role in internal party democracy. This did not go entirely to plan as it became evident that the unions were actually a moderating force on a seething grassroots that was angry and frustrated at the unwillingness for the party that was supposed to represent them to fight their corner. The result was the election of Corbyn to the leadership as the public jumped at the chance to reclaim the party and get an opposition to the Tories that stood ‘For the many, not the few’. Corbyn was one of the most left wing leaders in Labour’s history, but not because of his domestic policy, which was pretty much standard social democracy. What really terrified the establishment was that Corbyn wanted justice on a global scale, he was a genuine internationalist, more socialist than social democrat in that respect. While much of the centre left was entirely happy to support neo liberal wars to discipline those who rejected the capitalist ‘rules based international order’ under the guise of humanitarian intervention, Corbyn called it out. He opposed NATO as the military enforcer of corporate exploitation; like ‘Those who walk away from Omelas’, he was not prepared to turn a blind eye to corporate global power’s savagery just because some of its proceeds could be used to keep growing the UK economy. He showed solidarity with the wretched of the earth. This could not be tolerated by the Atlanticist establishment; generals muttered about mutiny if the people of Britain chose him as their democratically elected leader. In the words of Lisa Nandy, they decided to ‘break him as a man’.
And so they did. Corbyn, a dyed in the wool Labour traditionalist, like Kier Hardy before him, put Labour unity before all else. Unlike a George Galloway, he had no stomach for the fighting and division it would take to wrest control of the party away from the neo liberals. Time and again he was conciliatory when he needed to be confrontational, and in giving way to Starmer on Europe he cost Labour the 2019 election. With Starmer’s election to the leadership, the PLP and party bureaucracy moved fast and ruthlessly to ensure that nothing that could threaten Atlanticist corporate power could ever rear its head in Labour again. Aside from some token identity politics and culture wars differences to create the impression of political difference from the Tories, there was no substantive difference.
"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which"
George Orwell.