Labour Teleology

The Labour Party has always historicised itself. If Conservatives incline towards biography (as do Liberals, which tells you a lot), Labourites have preferred to situate their story within the broad sweep of British narrative history, though in practice this has tended to be largely English history of the sort made famous by RH Tawney and EP Thompson: somewhat sanctimonious and proudly parochial. This is partly the product of insecurity - a recognition that the Conservatives and Liberals long defined official English history so an alternative story needed to be told - and partly a recognition that the individual should not be elevated above the collective - something that became an article of faith after Ramsay MacDonald let high office go to his head. Whereas the Conservative Party is rooted in a belief that the old regime will persist, Labour is committed to the idea that, to coin a phrase, "Things can only get better". While in reality often less optimistic (Fabian gradualism), even downright pessimistic ("the forward march of Labour halted"), there is still the sense that Labour is on the right side of history and should therefore embrace the future.

In its earliest days this commitment went beyond vague progressivism to a concrete teleology: the labour movement had a social and economic goal and the party had a legislative programme to achieve it that could feasibly be enacted one day. Of course, there were differences of opinion about what that goal was, hence the ambiguity of the terms socialism and social democracy in Labour Party discourse, though these tended to be presented as debates on means rather than ends: essentially bureaucratic gradualism versus state activism. In contrast, conservatism is by definition anti-teleological. Preservation of the past is necessarily the deferral of the future. Modern conservatism, since the late 1970s, has employed the trope of progress and even revolution but in the context of a regressive movement in time: back to basics, it's morning in America again. The current appetite among Tories for a Thatcherite revival is a decadent example of this: an insistence that supply-side stimulus can once more work its magic despite the blunt rejection by reality when Liz Truss attempted it. 

Postwar Labour revisionism was essentially the claim that the party's goal had been achieved by the 1950s and that the future would simply be a matter of efficient management of the social gains. In other words, bureaucratic gradualism won the day. Progress was still possible, but this would be the organic product of growing enlightenment rather than the engineering of social relations. This was a rejection of socialism in favour of the early twentieth century welfare liberalism that Labour had superseded when it supplanted the old Liberal Party. The debate in Labour in the 1960s and 70s was characterised by the revisionists refusal to admit this truth until the breakaway SDP. Even then, the claim to be the inheritors of the tradition of "social democracy" was a denial. Reality eventually obliged the SDP to fold into the Liberal Party. This surprisingly tortuous process took some years due to the egos involved, notably those of Roy Jenkins and David Owen, which emphasised how much the politics were essentially biographical (Jenkins, who had already written a life of Asquith, became a serial biographer once his political career ended).

The important point to note here is that welfare liberalism was still recognisably progressive. While it might advocate a different economic path - less nationalisation, more free trade (in the EEC) - it was congruent with the social goals of the labour movement in terms of improved rights and more extensive social goods. In the event, the reinvented conservative movement took over that economic path and married it with a regressive social agenda in the 1980s, which marginalised not only the socialist strand of Labour but the liberal strand as well. The emergence of New Labour (the very name redolent of progress and novelty) marked not only the formal acceptance of the Conservative Party's economic dispensation but its social prejudices too, hence the focus on welfare reform, antisocial behaviour and school discipline. This produced a government that regularly regretted its own liberal impulses (e.g. over the Freedom of Information Act) but this was offset by an optimism that made it confident enough to renounce its own past in the service of the future (e.g. Clause IV). The current Labour leadership represents not so much a return to the New Labour mix of light and dark as a bias towards that underlying strain of pessimism. The demand by Blairites for another "Clause IV moment" is telling inasmuch as Keir Starmer shows no appetite for it. What he appears to prefer are purges and disciplinary sanctions. Lacking the optimism of 1997, all we are left with is the authoritarianism.

Shorn of hope, all Labour can now offer is a permanently deferred future: "if the fiscal rules allow". It has become the party of no future, even if that designation is being widely applied to the Conservatives as they continue to poll badly. Tony Blair was obsessed with the future, even if it was one constructed out of mangement consultancy hype and his own credulity. In contrast, Keir Starmer seems permanently discomfited by the idea that tomorrow may be different from today, while Rachel Reeves, desperately trying to cultivate an intellectual hinterland, appears to have never had an original thought in her life: everthing is second-hand or shop-worn. The prospect for the general election later this year is of two parties painting a bleak future. The Tories will inevitably resort to "Don't let Labour ruin it" and point to the weak shoots of growth, if only because they simply haven't got an alternative, but the future they envisage will therefore be one that is fragile and anxious. Labour will say all the right things about getting a grip, restoring trust and boosting the economy, but on every substantive issue they will equivocate or urge "realism" about how much (i.e how little) can be done. The future they envisage will be equally underwhelming.

The parallel for the 2024 general election may turn out to be 1983 rather than 1997. Not in its outcome, of course - a Conservative landslide that depended on the Falklands War and the SDP - but in the bleakness of the main parties' offerings as mediated by the press and TV. The Thatcher government might have been buoyed by victory in the South Atlantic, but its message wasn't an echo of 1945's New Jerusalem but a promise to continue the policies that had led to recession and deindustrialisation. While the economy had improved, there was no promise of sunny uplands. Instead there was an emphasis on the intractability of unemployment and the threats of lawlessness, the USSR and trade unions. For Labour, the most famous speech of the campaign was by the then Shadow Education Secretary, Neil Kinnock: "If Margaret Thatcher wins on Thursday, I warn you not to be ordinary. I warn you not to be young. I warn you not to fall ill. I warn you not to get old". For partisan reasons, there was an unwillingness at the time and later to acknowledge the progressive temper of the 1983 manifesto, which was notoriously described by Gerald Kaufman as "the longest suicide note in history", hence the prominence given to Kinnock which all but sealed his elevation as the next party leader.

The chief dynamic of UK politics since 2019 has been the Labour Party's shift to the right. The Conservatives are out of ideas, but still able to set the agenda in the confident expectation that Labour will follow where they lead. Thus debate centres on whether tax cuts are feasible, not on whether we should change the balance of taxation between wages and wealth, while the NHS is portrayed as in dire need of reform rather than just the resources necessary to do its job. Liberal opinion is fretful over the adoption of centre-right policies and the next government's room for fiscal manoeuvre, but it isn't about to urge that we revisit the arguments of the socialist left. That's because British liberals long ago made peace with their conservative instincts. As was made painfully clear during the EU referendum and the ensuing campaign against Corbyn, and most recently in the response to the war in Gaza, they are in the business of preserving the old regime. Progress is to be welcomed, but at a snail's pace. This liberal-conservatism has now hegemonised Labour, with the result that the party of progress has lost confidence in the future. One symptom of this is a revival of biography, even if masquerading as narrative history, which is ironic given the dearth of personalities in the current leadership. Labour's teleology is at an end.