The reputation of Labour MPs has reached a nadir. But, as Robert Taylor recalls, it wasn’t always like that
THE young Denis Healey entered the House of Commons after winning a parliamentary by-election in 1952 for Leeds East. He provides a vivid portrait of what he found in the Palace of Westminster in his autobiography.
“‘The House of Commons was still run on the assumption that politics was something which rich gentlemen did in their spare time; Parliament was simply the best club in London. There were some MPs who never spoke in the chamber and never asked a question, turning up only to vote on three-line whips, if then.
“My salary in 1952 was only £1,000 a year and was expected to cover all my expenses as an MP. I had no allowances for a secretary and had to pay for all my letters and telephone calls. I did not have any office or even a desk to myself; if I was not able to grab a seat at one of the tables in the library, I had to work on a bench in the corridor with my papers on my knees.”
Healey noted that, in those days, many Conservative MPs were company directors whose firms provided them with secretaries, cars and offices. While trade union-sponsored Labour MPs might expect to receive some financial assistance from their unions, the rest had to seek out lines of income outside Parliament to support their families which did not involve them straying far from Westminster. According to Healey, this was the reason why Labour MPs were often lawyers or journalists when not carrying out their parliamentary duties.
He might have added that MPs had no pension either. Nor did they receive any compensation if they lost their seats at general elections. There was a strict and austere attitude in Parliament to transport costs for MPs as they travelled by rail to and from their constituencies to London or to where their families lived. In their memoirs, many Labour MPs have recalled their often-miserable time, sharing dingy rented flats or living in cheap hotels around Euston station. The Conservative MP, William Deedes, wrote sympathetically of some Labour MPs who could not even afford to eat in the House of Commons’ dining rooms and crossed the road to a café that existed on what is now the site of Portcullis House with its comfortable offices for MPs. In those days, they ate poached eggs on toast, swilled down with tea for their evening meal. It is no wonder that Labour MPs spent much of their time in the Commons bars or the tearoom. Their working lives were often lonely, harsh and impecunious.
The political world at Westminster related by Denis Healey is similar to those remembered by other Labour MPs, from their first entry into the Commons in 1906 until the last quarter of the 20th century. Over the years, pay, benefits and conditions improved. However, progress was slow and contested along most of the way. The contrast with the moral corruption, possible criminality and sleaze of today’s exposures is painful to observe.
What is also evident from the Parliamentary Labour Party, at least until well after the end of the Second World War, is that a substantial number of their members came from the manual working class, who had often already given an invaluable public service as local councillors, justices of the peace and trade union officials before going to Westminster. These days, far too many Labour MPs enter Parliament after a cosseted short time as policy advisors and consultants and student politicians. They constitute a professional class who are in politics as a career. They do not harbour any strongly-held moral or ethical reasons to improve society. And they are hardly on a crusade for democratic socialism.
Until recently, the majority of PLP members were content to serve the labour movement from the backbenches. They were proud of the class they came from. They believed that they sat in the Commons to represent and protect their people from the cruelties and inequalities of the capitalist system. They were not deferential and they were class conscious. But they were also loyal to the wider party. Middle-class Labour MPs and intellectuals might patronise and despise them in the privacy of their diaries. But those whom Hugh Dalton called the “loyal lump” and Jennie Lee, who ought to have known better, described as “a load of wet cement” were the necessary ballast that kept Labour in Parliament true to its principles and values.
I am currently writing a history of the PLP. It is taking longer than I envisaged, not least because, the more research I do, the more I am impressed by the character and integrity, the dedication to public service and the sense of duty that so many of those working-class MPs displayed behind the self-serving glitter and ambition of too many of their senior colleagues. Their individual stories reveal a diversity and richness of talent and wisdom that lies hidden inside the pages of Hansard parliamentary debates or records of PLP meetings.
What Labour brought into the Commons in the past was the world of manual worker and working-class life. Poorly-paid and without much back-up support, they spoke out with an attention to detail and a personal knowledge of the plight of the unemployed between the wars, the horrors of private healthcare and inadequacies of the educational system, the brutality of social security with its emphasis on means testing and the separation of the socially “undeserving” from the “deserving” poor.
In the 1929 Parliament, during Labour’s second minority government, labour minister Margaret Bondfield – with her unsympathetic and bureaucratic attitude to the poor – was challenged by union-sponsored MPs such as Arthur Hayday on the details of unemployment insurance. Where are the modern equivalents of Hayday to castigate the likes of James Purnell, the smug Work and Pensions Secretary, on the outrage of his campaign to force single mothers into work under threat of a cut in their inadequate benefits?
No one would suggest we go back to the relative penury that MPs had to endure
30 years ago. However, the doomed “new” Labour project’s creation of a privileged elite at Westminster has had dire consequences following from the abandonment of any sense of integrity or restraint.
George Orwell’s classic novel Animal Farm should be re-read in the light of what has happened to Labour since it was taken over by a small group of well-heeled careerists after John Smith’s death. As the local farmers cavorted with the pigs, so they each became indistinguishable from the other. The full horror of the corruption was apparent.
A return to the decencies and sense of proportion of the PLP of the past is long overdue. Is it going to take the utter destruction of the whole Labour Party at next year’s general election to start the painful task of renewal?
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