Sixty Glorious Years

A paradox of British politics is that the nominally conservative party pays little heed to its history while the progressive party seems incapable of not constantly looking over its shoulder at the past. The Tories lack of respect for their own political ancestors and long-cherished principles ("Fuck business" being a recent example) simply points to the callous nature of their opportunism. What remains constant is their defence of privilege and property, the rewards of that opportunism. In contrast, the Labour Party seems constitutionally incapable of not raking over past ideological struggles. This is partly because the media, taking their lead from the opportunist Tories, sees value is digging up the dead, but it also reflects the personalisation of the party's history, particularly in the office of the Leader. The tendency towards ancestor-worship is as strong as that towards damnatio memoriae. This can currently be seen in both the continuing anathema of Jeremy Corbyn (and his hagiography by supporters) and in the attempts to rehabilitate Tony Blair (and his critics' refusal to forget about the Iraq War dead). Contrast this with the way that ex-Tory leaders are promptly consigned to the oubliette of history (Churchill and Thatcher being the exceptions that prove the rule).

The consequence of these competing tendencies is that every era is defined through the party leader, and they in turn are judged in comparison to previous incumbents. This, as much as the sentimentality and anti-intellectual bias of Labourism, explains the conservatism of the party. As Keir Starmer steadily pushed Labour's policy to the right after 2019, to the point where it became barely distinguishable in many areas from that of the Tories, there was a flurry of commentary to the effect that he was the true heir to Blair. Roy Jenkins' phrase about carrying a Ming vase was widely recirculated to explain the party's caution, the implication being that once in power Labour would spread its wings and do some good. But it soon became clear that the benign economic circumstances that Labour inherited in 1997, which allowed it to first maintain Tory spending plans and then steadily increase investment in public services on the back of an expanding economy and City tax receipts, are not going to be repeated. For all the mantras about higher growth and productivity, Labour clearly has no idea how to deliver either beyond trusting business and tinkering with planning reform.

With Blair offering a poor parallel, despite his very public anointing of Starmer, there has been a recent increase in the stock of Harold Wilson, who won a general election in 1964 after thirteen years of Conservative government (snap!) and then won two more elections before losing in 1970 and staging a comeback in 1974. That the last of these periods in power would result in Margaret Thatcher's victory in 1979 and a further eighteen years of Conservative government isn't generally mentioned. The parallels have tended to focus exclusively on the 1964-1970 period instead. In an amusing coincidence, the New Left Review has just published a number of articles from 1963 by leading lights on the left - Raymond Williams, Peter Wollen, Ralph Miliband and Eric Hobsbawm - that were originally published in Italian in the journal Il Contemporaneo. Miliband's contribution, titled "If Labour Wins ...", is helpful in understanding the suggested parallel between 1964 and 2024. It opens: "There are countries where the looming defeat of the government gives rise to complex judgements concerning the identity of its successor. Britain is not one of them. The decline of the present Conservative government, which has recently assumed spectacular proportions, and its ever-more-likely defeat at the approaching general election, can have only one beneficiary: the Labour Party."

The contemporary parallels between next year's general election and the one sixty years ago stretch beyond the coincidence of what Wilson described as "thirteen wasted years" to the hope recently expressed by the New Statesman that  "Labour’s caution could turn to radicalism in office". No evidence if offered for this claim beyond fan-fiction: "You can already picture Reeves standing at the despatch box, brow furrowed, proclaiming that action is required because the situation is worse than she understood." For this to be plausible, you'd have to assume either that the Shadow Chancellor hasn't been reading her briefs or that she's slow on the uptake, neither of which inspires confidence. There is nothing in Labour's history to suggest that faced with a financial crisis it will favour "radicalism" or that it will reject Treasury orthodoxy (Reeves is a former Bank of England economist). 1931 is the paradigmatic case but much the same can be said for Wilson's handling of the sterling crisis in 1966 when he chose to cut public expenditure rather than devalue the pound. Likewise, Gordon Brown's "saving the world" in 2008 was a triumph of coordination within the limits of fiscal orthodoxy, not a radical departure.

As Phil Burton-Cartledge noted, "Radicalism has to do more than upset: it has to fundamentally threaten the power relationships that structure and are upheld by a political settlement, and does so in a way that opens up opportunities for more democracy". Viewed in this light, the Wilson administration of 1964-70 was certainly radical in intent in some areas, even if many of its departures from orthodoxy proved short-lived or would eventually be stymied, such as the Department of Economic Affairs and the Open University. There was also the government's support for social reform, notably the Race Relations Act 1965, the abolition of capital punishment, the legalisation of homosexuality and the liberalisation of abortion and divorce, none of which could be said to be congruent with Labourism, albeit not necesarily in conflict either. It's worth noting that Wilson allowed legislative time for many of these reforms (i.e. via backbench bills) but refused to publicly commit his support. He was himself a social conservative, not the liberal other centrists have subsequently claimed. What that record hightlighted was the extent to which Labour in the 1960s was a mass movement that combined both organised labour and the liberal middle classes (personified in Roy Jenkins), not simply an anti-Tory coalition of convenience.

Starmer's Labour has shown no comparable intent and has gone out of its way to reassure the media and reactionary voters that it is conservative in all but name: that it will preserve most of the Tory dispensation of the last 13 years but simply manage it better. If Wilson was a half-hearted reformer, Starmer shows no inclination to pursue any sort of reform outside of the further marketisation and privatisation of public services, an abuse of the word. Far from framing Labour as a mass political movement, Starmer has decided to reduce it to a supportive claque for a Westminster-centric cartel. The anti-democratic moves against the left are not just factionalism, they represent a wholesale rejection of political activism. This has arguably been the lasting legacy of the People's Vote campaign, with its romantic parliamentarianism and rejection of provocative demands (e.g. soft Brexit) in favour of condescending maximalism. Today's equivalent of Herbert Morrison's "Socialism is what a Labour government does" is "Politics is what the PLP does". The one elevated government over extra-parliamentary activism, but the other simply rejects the idea that there is any political legitimacy beyond Parliament.

As you would expect from the author of Parliamentary Socialism, Miliband emphasises the continutiy of Labourism, which underpins the pessimism of his thoughts in 1963, something that we lose sight of with the focus on leaders and their supposed ability to "change the party" by force of will (that Clause IV moment etc). As he says of the revisionist turn against nationalisation in the 1950s, "These views did not represent a major departure from Labour’s traditional economic philosophy. The ‘revisionists’ merely wanted to give programmatic status to what has been the objective of Labour’s leadership (as distinct from its activists) from the moment the Party was founded. Other ‘revisionist’ demands were scarcely newer: the insistence on Labour’s ‘classless’ character and aims, the active discouragement of trade-union militancy, flattery of middle-class voters, the general weakening of Labour’s political message—this had always been part of the party’s approach. But such demands acquired a new significance in the late 1950s, when the ‘affluence’ in which workers were supposedly wallowing was used to reinforce the need for a new image, appropriate to a ‘post-capitalist’ society of an increasingly petty-bourgeois character."

One point Miliband made about Wilson as a political personality was his ambiguity: "Wilson’s whole career since 1951 has been built on ambiguity and a careful avoidance of too specific a commitment in the various disputes that have agitated Labour since that time." The charge against Starmer isn't one of ambiguity but straightforward inconsistency (Brexit) and even bald deceit (pretty much everything else). Ultimately, these styles are an expression less of an individual psychology than of the material and institutional conditions of the time. Or, to put it another way, the environment selects for these personality types. Wilson's ambiguity was a necessary talent in the service of maintaining unity both within a large and fractious party and across a wider labour movement that represented half the workforce, not to mention ensuring that Labour remained in pole position to lead the progressive coalition that emerged in the 1960s. In contrast, Starmer is the product of a countermovement: the attempt to re-establish the auctoritas and dignitas of the state after the twin shocks of Brexit and Corbynism. This calls forth a pious conservatism (the religious dimension is substituted by its secular equivalent: patriotism) and a performative authoritarianism. The idea that we can expect "radicalism" from this quarter is laughable.