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Labours road to 1945

The road from 1931 Labour the programmatic party

Let Us Face the Future: concepts & values Labourism in office 1945-51

Labours road from 1931

1931: debacle barely 50 MPs


1945: landslide nearly 400 MPs Lays to rest ghosts of 1931: a defining moment for British labourism?

much the most successful exponent of the British variant of democratic socialism (KO Morgan)

Labours road from 1931: verdicts


Labour's second period of office shattered the illusion of the inevitability of gradualness, and ended an inglorious era of Party history in which electoral success had outpaced ability and effectiveness Pimlott, Labour and the Left in the 1930s The gravest weakness of British Labour is its lack of a creed It does not achieve what it could, because it does not know what it wants Being without clear convictions as to its own meaning and purpose, it is deprived of the dynamic which only convictions supply Tawney, Political Quarterly, 1932

Labours road from 1931


Labour 1929-31 in office but no realisable programme, unable to deliver on its own ideals and commitments

Labour 1945-51 a classic example of a programmatic party in office (Howell)


the programmatic party the reaction to 1931 & translation of ideology into programme

a rejection of inevitabilism (or its concomitant permeation) for a clearer articulation of principle?

Labours road from 1931: prosopographical dimension


Decimation of Labours political class alternative political vehicles & career paths incl non- or extra-parliamentary forms of politics
National government (MacDonald) Fascism (Mosley) Left alternatives (Webbs, Strachey, ILP)

But Labour confirmed as only electable alternative to Baldwins conservatism needinga strategy & programme for effective use of power A riot of research, policy-making and propaganda (Thorpe)

Making Labour policy in the 1930s


Labour Party Policy Committee est. Dec. 1931 official party body
Socialist League est. 1932 left-wing socialists; initially orientated to research & policy

XYZ Club est. early1932 Labour supporters in City & academia; concerns w. financial policy
New Fabian Research Bureau est. March 1931 explicit rescusitation of Fabian tradition key figures G.D.H. and Margaret Cole; Gaitskell (in charge of `Economic Section')

Making Labour policy in 1930s: Fabianism recidivus?


Extensive publishing activitities e.g. 42 `Research Pamphlets' 1930s membership never reaches 1000

1939 merges with Fabian Soc. w. B. Webb as president `the NFRB would not aim at a large membership but bring together bright young men and sympathetic experts to conduct serious, high-powered, up-to-date research work on the problems confronting the present or any future Labour Government M. Cole, Story of Fabian Socialism
The Socialist League was intellectuals and nothing else, all leaders and no followers its programme of ideas was all that mattered. It claimed to be thinking for the Labour party AJP Taylor, English History 1914-1945

Fabianism recidivus: persisting issues


Revived Fabian tradition now wholly orientated to Labour Party as vehicle of permeation Does Fabianism disappear into the Labour Party (Hobsbawm)?
Or is the entire Labour Party fabianised (Strachey)? Does the development of policy-making expertise and apparatus signify elitism or necessary specialisation by function? Does the development of Labour policy-making mean the ascendancy of the Fabian tradition?

Four Labour programmes 1918-45


Labour and the New Social Order (1918) Labour and the Nation (1928) For Socialism and Peace (1934) Labour's Immediate Programme (1937) Let Us Face the Future (election programme, 1945)

Labour programmes 1918-31: less programmes than miscellanies?

The characteristic vice of the programmes of the Party is that too often they are not programmes. They sweep together great things and small and, by touching on everything, commit ministers to nothing. the Party possesses in its own mind nothing analogous to a Scheme of Priorities it has no stable standard of political values, such as would teach it to discriminate between the relative urgencies of different objectives. Tawney, Choice Before the Labour Party

Labour programmes 1918-31: miscellanies and the mob?


Tawney also criticises prioritisation of immediate electoral success over education of a mature electorate :
The characteristic defect is its tendency to rely for success on the mass support of societies, and constituencies, of whom neither have been genuinely converted to its principles. It requires an army. It collects a mob. The mob disperses. That is the nature of mobs.

Tawney, Choice Before the Labour Party Compare with Labours preference for the forward march metaphor

Labours Immediate Programme: Daltons role


Labours Immediate Programme adopted 1937 when Hugh Dalton party chairman
Pre-1914: Cambridge educated Fabian

Economics lecturer (LSE) Key figure Lab Pty Policy Committee, XYZ Club, NFRB
1932: visits USSR and Italy 1935: Practical Socialism for Britain Chancellor of Exchequer 1945-7 Mentor to revisionists like Gaitskell

Labours Immediate Programme: rationale


a programme of measures of Socialism and Social Amelioration, which a Labour Government would carry out during a full term of office
Regarded by Durbin as the basis of Attlee governments achievement : by the outbreak of war, the Labour party had worked out all the legislative proposals necessary to carry out its programme and had developed a set of unofficial positions on a number of other issues

Labours Immediate Programme: Four vital measures of reconstruction


1. Finance. nationalisation of Bank of England (not clearing banks) creation of National Investment Board redistributive taxation for social services (no details); investment in scientific research. The Land. Control of land in public interest. Transport. National Transport Board, nationalisation of railways and other suitable transport services Coal and power. Public ownership of coal, electricity, gas supply.

2. 3. 4.

Labours Immediate Programme: Four great benefits


1. Food
protection of home producer; control of imports end to profiteering

2. 3.

Wages Leisure

Better wage standards; no details holidays with pay shorter working week

4. Security
school-leaving age to 15, then 16; maintenance allowances better pensions health services extended

Labours Immediate Programme and the road to 1945


Programme lacks precision in a number of key areas particularly in respect of welfare
Planning: national plan lacks detail Housing: not a major issue in 1937 Social security: Attlee govts depend on Beveridge report 1942

Health: Attlee govts again depend on wartime policy devts

The road to 1945: forward march or middle way?


1940-5: all-party coalition Addisons Road to 1945 (1975) ascribes primary significance to coalition politics & non-party middle opinion Next Five Years Group
Notably The Next Five Years (1935) also a far-reaching but attainable Programme of Action for a single parliament Addison stresses its Liberal character Did Labours achievements derive from Labours forward march or cross-party progressivism?

The road to 1945: Labours claim, the programmatic party


All parties may declare that in principle they agree with [our aims]. But the test of a political programme is whether it is sufficiently in earnest about the objectives to adopt the means needed to realise them. It is very easy to set out a list of aims. What matters is whether it is backed up by a genuine workmanlike plan
Let Us Face the Future

Let Us Face the Future: concepts and values


Reaffirms Labours nationalisation commitments adds commitments to NHS, social insurance against the rainy day and public housing
Explicit language of socialism but specifically in context of nationalisation, as if this is what socialism means? Also the idea of a limited & specific programme as the mark of electoral maturity

Let Us Face the Future: socialism


The Labour Party is a Socialist Party, and proud of it. Its ultimate purpose at home is the establishment of the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain free, democratic, efficient, progressive, public-spirited, its material resources organised in the service of the British people. But Socialism cannot overcome overnight, as the product of a weekend revolution. The members of the Labour Party, like the British people, are practical-minded men and women

Let Us Face the Future: freedom


Does freedom for the profiteer mean freedom for the ordinary man and woman ?
Freedom is not abstract thing The Labour Party stands for freedom of worship, freedom of speech, freedom of the Press The freedom of the Trade Unions must also be restored. But there are certain so-called freedoms that Labour will not tolerate; freedom to exploit other people; freedom to pay poor wages and push up prices for selfish profit; freedom to deprive the people of the means of living full, happy, healthy lives

Let Us Face the Future: efficiency

Each industry must have applied to it the test of national service. If it serves the nation, well and good; if it is inefficient and falls down on its job, the nation must see that things are put right.

Let Us Face the Future

Let Us Face the Future: (economic) democracy against the market


The great inter-war slumps were not acts of God or of blind forces. They were the sure and certain result of the concentration of too much economic power in the hands of too few men. These men had only learned how to act in their interest of their own bureaucratically run private monopolies which may be likened to totalitarian oligarchies within our democratic State. They had and the felt no responsibility to the nation

Let Us Face the Future: the nation (or people or community)


if they [these national aims] are to be turned into realities the nation and its post-War Governments will be called upon to put the nation above any sectional interest, above any cheap slogan about so-called free enterprise. We need the spirit of Dunkirk and of the Blitz sustained over a period of years
Labour will plan from the ground up giving an appropriate place to constructive enterprise and private endeavour in the national plan, but dealing decisively with those interests which would use highsounding talk about economic freedom to cloak their determination to put themselves and their wishes above those of the whole nation

Let Us Face the Future: education and self-development


above all, let us remember that the great purpose of education is to give us individual citizens capable of thinking for themselves. National and local authorities should co-operate to enable people to enjoy their leisure to the full, to have opportunities for healthy recreation. By the provision of concert halls, modern libraries, theatres and suitable civic centres, we desire to assure to our people full access to the great heritage of culture in this nation

Labours record in office: the achievement of party unity?


Through immediate programme Labour achieves cohesion and unity of purpose despite heterodox origins and the ambiguities of British social democracy
Clement Attlee: Christian Socialist, settlement worker, former ILPer Ernest Bevin: trade union leader Herbert Morrison: municipal socialist, the very quintessence of Fabianism' (Beatrice Webb, 1934) Hugh Dalton: technocratic Fabian Stafford Cripps: Christian Socialist, figurehead of 1930s left Aneurin Bevan: former miner, strong marxist influence, briefly follows Mosley

Labours record in office (i) nationalisation


Labour's nationalisation programme closely follows pre-war programmes
Bank of England* Civil aviation** Cable & Wireless Coal* Railways/road haulage* Electricity* Gas* Iron & steel 1945 1946 1946 1946 1947 1947 1948 1949

A commitment (*) or implied commitment (**) in Labour's Immediate Programme, 1937, indicated by asterisks.

Labours record in office (ii) welfare and social reform


Social Security: National Insurance Act 1946; National Assistance Act 1948 Health: NHS July 1948 Housing: commitment to public housing only partly realised Education; school leaving age raised, but only to 15 Equal rights: Labour makes no commitment to equal pay; resists pressure to introduce it Nothing accomplished by the Labour government of 1945 would have shocked Hobhouse or failed to receive his approval on Liberal grounds (P. Weiler)

Labours record in office: values


Morrisonian public corporation with boards largely drawn from private industry, generous terms of compensation, no provision for workers' control or codetermination

a pragmatic, quasi-technical device to correct the failings of industry, rather than an ideological objective linked to control over industry (Tomlinson, 1997, 17) This is not Socialism; it is State capitalism. There is not too much participation by the mineworkers in the affairs of the industry; there is far too little . (H. Macmillan, cited N. Fishman in Fyrth, ed., Labour's High Noon)

Labours record in office: values


Case for public ownership based on efficiency rather than democracy or self-government; both (i) choice of industries and (ii) structures adopted Case for social expenditure does stress fairness and social justice But Tomlinson (1997, ch. 12) suggests that efficiency wins out over equality in welfare and tax policy Stress on (national) community and entitlement means adoption of universalist principles even where technically regressive Labour mostly does not appear as a vehicle of class or a sectional labour interest; speaks of the nation or the people Its constitutionalism reflected in failure to attempt any major reform of institutions or rights of citizenship

Labours record in office: (iii) provenance


Addison and Marwick stress the development of a consensual, middleway, cross-party approach But writers like Fielding suggest that Labour articulated a distinctly socialist moral vision deeply grounded in liberalism; combining ideas of inevitability, moral improvement and gradualism
Can we identify the Attlee governments core values? Does that help us locate it ideologically?

Labourism in the 1940s?


Labour's vision of socialism encompassed the transformation of society as a whole. (and) attempted to reconcile the beliefs that, while socialism was economically inevitable, its prerequisite was the moral transformation of each and every member of society. If, in some of its crude materialist assumptions, Labourism gestured towards Karl Marx behind its emphasis on education and the need for moral improvement stood the figure of John Stuart Mill
Fielding, Labourism in the 1940s

Labourism in the 1940s: a contemporary American view


The British Labour leaders see themselves as modest fulfillers of past trends rooted both in British history and [the] Western European Enlightenment. In this self-portrait they are the residuary legatees of Ricardo, Bentham and John Stuart Mill and of William Morris, Hyndman, Keir Hardie, George Bernard Shaw and the Webbs.
They see Socialism as nothing more than the permeation of tried-and-true democratic ideas and practices through the whole of the power structures of modern society playing in all this merely the role of midwives in the accouchement of an old society giving birth, by wholly natural processes, to a new

Robert A Brady, Crisis in Britain, 1950, pp. ix-x

Postscript: what next?


Achievement of Labours immediate programme poses issue of what next
Having rectified the worst abuses of capitalism, what did Labour stand for in conditions of post-war affluence?

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