The party constitution devised in 1918 has been the source of a ‘socialist myth’ about Labourism. The call uttered in Clause IV for comprehensive public ownership and the recovery for workers of the fruits of their labour, much eulogised by Labour Leftists once the Blairites decided to overturn it, was never to be actualised in practice. The trade union leadership had accepted Clause IV to placate the Fabians and perhaps lend some ideological coherence to their own limited collectivist objectives, but they were only prepared to do so because it didn’t make much difference to policymaking.12 Indeed, the organisation of the party developed through this document was almost designed to ensure that the clause would not have to be realised. The sovereignty of the party conference was a piece of legal fiction, effectively guarded against by the block votes handed to the union leaderships who would tend to preserve a politically cautious orientation. At any rate, the binding force of conference was only to apply ‘as far as may be practicable’. What emerged was an organisation that depended upon the mobilisation of socialists to achieve political power, but which ensured their sidelining in effective decision-making, the better to enable a potential governing elite to emerge. As Gregory Elliott acidly observes, ‘The “iron law of oligarchy” announced by Robert Michels in Political Parties (1911) did not inexorably and imperceptibly assert itself in the post-war Labour Party. It was enacted at birth.’13
Nevertheless, here at last was a mass party of labour, fusing socialists and trade unionists, ready to displace the Liberals and become a party of government. The war had been, in one sense, a shattering blow to European socialism, elevating its nationalist and pro-colonial elements and marginalising its internationalists. The Russian Revolution had introduced a decisive cleavage in the socialist movement, as the left-wing of social democracy largely split to form communist parties. Yet, for Labour, the war had resolved a number of problems, allowing them to decisively break with the Liberals and allowing the leadership to reorganise itself as a potential governing stratum. It had also promoted trade unions to potential helpmeets of the state in its imperial capacities, since the industrial working class was essential to the state’s ability to wage war on a modern scale.14 Finally, with a distinctive mobilising ideology of social reform and public ownership, Labour was ready to take office.
From Zero to Less than Zero: The First Labour Governments
The sociologist Frank Parkin, looking at the problem of working-class conservatism, suggested that an emphasis on conservatism as a puzzle to be explained was misleading. The real question, given the conservative nature of the dominant institutions – from the church to the military to parliament – was how anyone turned out to be a socialist.
Something similar can be said about the Labour Party. To the familiar Leftist complaint ‘Why is Labour so conservative?’ we might respond, ‘How could we expect them to be anything else?’ It is futile to speak of ‘betrayal’; this is nothing more than the distress call of the disappointed utopian. Indeed, given Labour’s fundamental strategic orientations, its institutional context, and the nature of the system that it seeks to manage, nothing is so utopian as to expect this party to bring about radical transformation. The exception of the Attlee administration is hardly negligible, but that highly unusual moment is not given its due, hardly taken seriously enough at all, unless it is contrasted with Labour’s broader record in office.
By the turn of the twenties Labour had converted itself into a party of administration, its leadership integrated into the state and ready to govern. Yet the party of labour, on the brink of taking office, had still not proven to actually be a party of labour. In fact, Labour’s command of the working-class vote continued to be severely limited. By 1922, with just short of 30 per cent of the vote, it had ‘failed to break through’ in Birmingham, Liverpool, Bristol, Hull and Cardiff, and won only nine seats in London. It was a party of urban workers in mining and certain textile areas.15 The failure to hegemonise even the industrial working-class vote, let alone the votes of rural workers or the middle class, led Labour to moderate its appeal, and stress its longstanding ‘national’, inter-class thematics.
So it was that in 1923, when Labour finally achieved enough seats to form a minority government with Liberal support, MacDonald reassured both the King and the wider public that Labour would ‘not be influenced … by any consideration other than national well-being’.16 This had both domestic and colonial aspects. As colonial minister, former railway union leader J. H. Thomas offered assurances that he was there ‘to see there is no mucking about with the British Empire’, and duly proved his mettle in this regard by sending RAF bombers to Iraq.17 On the home agenda, MacDonald’s ministry kept its sights low, noting that a minority government could not be expected to achieve all that much. Such nugatory reforms as it did offer included improvements to housing and welfare provision, and some tax cuts paid for by a budget surplus – including cutting taxes on corporate profits. Given the scale of the problems a Labour government might have been expected to address, such as mass unemployment and deprivation, the rich would have had every reason to expect an attack on their class privileges. Chancellor Philip Snowden, however, was pleased to note that his budget was received warmly by the rich ‘who had feared that there might be drastic impositions on their class’.18 Indeed, Labour ministers seemed to enjoy greatly their chance to mingle with those whom MacDonald called ‘kings and rulers of the earth’, on ‘terms of equality’.19
This first, exceptionally brief, spell in office ended after just over nine months in the squalid scandal of the ‘Zinoviev Letter’, a forgery sent to the Foreign Office and the Daily Mail purporting to describe a Bolshevik policy of subversion in Britain. Labour, already under pressure from the Liberals and Conservatives over their supposed softness on Bolshevism, supported publication of the document – but this, and their consistent opposition to Communism, did nothing to lessen the attacks of their rivals. The chief result of this was not to damage Labour’s electoral standing – indeed, while losing seats, it increased its share of the vote – but to finally finish off the Liberals by frightening their anti-socialist voters into the camp of the Conservatives.
Nothing illustrates Labour’s parliamentary dilemmas in this era more than the bitter general strike of 1926. The issue at stake was that the coal owners were determined to reduce wages and, while not agreeing to the full extent of the cuts, the Conservative Government was determined to assist them in doing so – even if it meant, as their own Commission suggested, reducing living standards to pre-war levels. To this end, extensive preparations had been made on the government’s side to ensure that coal supplies would continue in the event of a strike, while rhetoric against trade unions and ‘Bolshevism’ was ramped up. And while the union membership became more militant in the face of this, the General Council of the TUC panicked at the idea of such a giant confrontation. J. H. Thomas, acting as the TUC’s chief negotiator, ‘begged and pleaded’ for some form of compromise from the government – ‘give us some terms never mind what they are, no matter how bad they are’. But the Baldwin administration, well prepared and in a bullish mood, insisted that the looming strike threatened ‘the basis of ordered government’. ‘It is not wages that are imperiled,’ Baldwin charged, ‘it is the freedom of our very Constitution.’ MacDonald, though he had pledged to fight the corner of the miners from within parliament, assured the benches that ‘with the discussion of general strikes and Bolshevism and all that kind of thing, I have nothing to do at all’.
The Labour leadership thus saw the strike as ‘an unmitigated disaster, threatening Labour’s claim to be a constitutional party’. The strike, the largest in British history, was adroitly encircled and dismantled by a government having wide recourse to emergency measures, police and military crackdowns and a stentorian campaign of vilification. The Labour leadership may have been reluctant to support outright class warfare; the Conservative government, though invoking the language of the nation, was not. Nor was it above usi
ng subsequent legislation, the Trade Disputes Act of 1927, to attack Labour’s political levy. These developments, in toto, ‘helped to accelerate Labour’s rightward drift’.20
The Labour minority government that was elected in 1929 was in a much stronger position than the last. It finally had more seats than the Conservatives, and enjoyed the support of a Liberal Party that had radicalised around an agenda of reflationary measures and state intervention. It therefore had more chance of achieving some of its goals than ever. But what were Labour’s goals? Any hope that a Labour government would usher in radical change were squashed given Ramsay MacDonald’s conventional cabinet, which comprised ‘a familiar mix of moderate politician-trade unionists … middle-class former Liberals … intellectuals … and “mild” ILPers’.21 Only the appointment of George Lansbury, the left-wing former mayor of Poplar who had led a local rebellion against the payment of rates, edited the socialist Daily Herald, and was staunchly pacifist, could be seen as in any sense unconventional. The appointment of the economically orthodox Philip Snowden as chancellor, meanwhile, was the clearest possible signal that the new government would do little to tackle what it identified as its greatest issue, the problem of unemployment. Even before the October stock market crash, Labour had campaigned on this under the slogan, ‘The Works Are Closed, But The Ballot Box Is Open.’ Yet Labour had few specific policies to deal with it, and the absence of any serious strategy became clearer as capitalism began to enter its worst crisis yet.
This is not to say that the government lacked options. Oswald Mosley, then a Labour minister, proposed a ‘Memorandum’ endorsing measures to protect industries and support demand through the expansion of credit, increases in pensions and other allowances. There was also the option of a coalition with the Liberals on the basis of their stimulus proposals. The party leadership, desperate for respectability, struggled to form a cross-party consensus, appointing a council of intellectuals, businessmen and trade unionists to hammer out a policy. In the end, chancellor Snowden persuaded the party to endorse the Treasury’s orthodoxy that the only responsible economic policy was to allow markets to operate more or less unimpeded.22
As was often to be the case in Labour’s history, the abstract commitment to ‘socialism’ was invoked to justify this retreat. In principle, Labour would bring about the supersession of capitalism by winning a ‘socialist majority’ in parliament and then securing gradual social reform and transitional measures within the context of buoyant capitalist growth. Any policy with an object less far-reaching than said transformation – say, the defence of workers’ living standards during recession – could be, where convenient, denounced as mere tinkering. This meant that capitalism had to be allowed to succeed one way or another. Given the cabinet’s lack of confidence in any alternative growth formula, and its deference to the Treasury, this meant letting the City of London rule. Parliament, Chancellor Philip Snowden told the Labour Party conference, should not intervene in the financial matters of the nation, since ‘Parliament is not a competent body to deal with such highly delicate and intricate matters.’ Instead, as Treasury receipts tumbled, Snowden demanded ‘drastic and disagreeable measures’ to cut public spending.23 This early austerity project was justified by a familiar ‘all in it together’ sentiment, but most of the required ‘savings’ were found in unemployment insurance.
In order to implement these cuts more effectively, MacDonald tendered the resignation of the cabinet and entered into a ‘National’ government in coalition with the Conservatives and Liberals. The new administration immediately implemented stringent austerity measures, balancing the budget and thereby ‘restoring confidence’ – that, inevitably, of investors. Having implemented this policy, the government dissolved itself and called a general election. The 1931 general election destroyed all participants in this coalition except for the Tories, who gained an unprecedented 55 per cent of the vote. The Liberals broke up into three factions for the election, whose total vote was barely above 10 per cent. And Ramsay MacDonald’s faction, standing as ‘National Labour’, polled a mere 1.5 per cent. In the wider arc of history, it is clear that the Tories had been on a long upward electoral curve since the late 1800s, a trend that peaked in the 1930s. Baldwin, one of the more astute Conservative leaders, had understood the elements of this shift well; although a growing layer of British society had been moving to the left since the turn of the century, much of the remainder was available to be corralled into an anti-socialist electoral bloc led by the most combative defenders of private property. As such, the subtlety of the Conservatives in this period had been to allow just so much reform – be it pensions or the extension of the franchise to female voters – as would take the edge off any radicalising tendencies, while also banging the anti-communist drum louder than anyone else. Despite the Conservatives’ political dominance of the interwar period, for example, there is some evidence that the growing welfare consensus which Baldwin felt compelled to accept was having some mildly redistributive effects.24 The Liberals, torn between Victorian nostrums of ‘free trade’ and fiscal abstinence on the one hand, and a ‘new liberalism’ enjoining welfarism and state intervention on the other, were unable to lead this bloc, and their period in ‘National’ government was just as fatal, in its way, as the more recent rose garden nuptials between David Cameron and Nick Clegg. The electoral system produced a clear division between a savvy Conservative Party and a Labour Party that was as yet electorally underdeveloped, strategically vapid and tactically timid.
In coalescing with the Conservatives on an austerity platform, MacDonald’s wing of the Labour leadership believed that – against the ‘sectional’ purposes of trade unionists but consistent with their particular ethical socialist tradition – they were putting ‘nation’ above ‘class’, something their critics decried as class treachery. However, the pall of MacDonald’s ostensible ‘betrayal’ may obscure something important here: as if, by putting the problem in moral terms, we can sidestep the strategic problems raised, not just by parliamentary socialism, but even by the limited goal of welfare capitalism in an era of economic depression.
Those of us living through the era of many ‘grand coalitions’ between social democratic and conservative parties, often in the interests of implementing spending cuts (Greece 2011, Ireland 2011 and 2016, Italy 2013, though not Spain 2016), are in an advantageous position to understand this. Social democratic parties that have funded their welfare commitments on the basis of booming capitalism, or in some cases on the basis of future growth (the Greek state’s borrowing in the boom years being a case in point), have found themselves compelled in leaner years to pursue austerity policies identical to those of their traditional electoral rivals – even at the cost of losing their electoral base and becoming a mere caste of state managers. The rise of radical-Left parties, from Syriza to Podemos, is at least in part a result of this realignment of social democracy to the neoliberal centre.
For the managers of social democracy, the attempt to resist these cutbacks and gross transfers of wealth to the private sector was hopelessly utopian. Even if they felt the depth and speed of austerity driven by Angela Merkel and conservative technocrats was too severe, there was no working alternative model of growth on the horizon. And even if the private sector was sluggish and investment pitifully low, there was no question of any other sector leading a new round of growth. Certainly, any government which involved the state in taking over the means of investment and attempting to create new growth through public works would face the risk of stiff resistance from business, banks, civil servants, media, and of course European institutions. The legality and constitutionality of their actions could be challenged, and they might face continual crises and challenges from within. They would risk even lower rates of investment, downgrading by the ratings agencies such that borrowing would become impossible, and speculative attacks. It should not be so surprising, therefore, if we repeatedly find social democratic leaders, egged on by establishment media, capit
ulating to the agenda of their opponents with an air of heroic self-sacrifice.
So, if the second Labour government in British history had ended once again in a debacle from which the Conservatives were the primary beneficiaries, it is rather too convenient to castigate the renegacy of a few short-sighted or corrupt leaders. It is neither an aberration nor an accident that Labour, from being the ‘advanced wing of liberalism’, became the rearguard of reaction: their means could have no other yield. Nor did the Labour Party, freed from such renegades, demonstrate renewed efficacy in opposition. The election as leader of Lansbury, a figure comparable in many ways to Jeremy Corbyn, confirmed a turn to the left in the trade unions and party grass roots. But his period in charge lasted only three years, in large part because his pacifism and commitment to disarmament brought him into conflict with the party establishment. Under neither Lansbury nor his successor, Clement Attlee – a monarchist from the party’s Right – did Labour play a significant role in organising or supporting the rebellions of the unemployed. The Jarrow March has entered into labour movement legend, and it is for this reason generally forgotten that the Attlee leadership disowned the protest. And while much of the criticism of Lansbury’s pacifism was justified by the need to defend Europe against fascism, Labour cheerfully supported the mendacious policy of ‘non-intervention’ in Spain, where the democracies quietly endorsed extensive fascist intervention on Franco’s side. Labour in the 1930s did little either to defend its constituencies, to slow the advance of fascism or, concomitantly, the drift to war: and deviated not one iota from the narrow electoral path upon which its strategic purview had always been staked.
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