With the Labour Party back in dry dock, it’s a good moment to ponder the party’s origins. We should, however, put the rose-tinted spectacles back in their case. Labour has often suffered from the “if Keir Hardie were alive today” syndrome, imagining a golden age of socialist rectitude before the grubby compromises of government took over.
Such myths sustain the left, but it should be said that New Labour, for all its disdain of the past, was based on a particular reading of the party’s history that Labour was not originally a socialist party but was founded in 1900 to do what it said on the tin, represent organised labour. It was intended to be part of a progressive alliance that included the Liberal Party. Socialists played a leading role, but it was only with the party constitution of 1918 that Labour fully committed itself to socialism. New Labour offered to create a new Lib-Lab world which, after some flirting with Paddy Ashdown, never happened.
This collection of essays, edited by one of the leading historians of inter-war Labour, reminds us, though, of the importance of socialism in the party’s foundation. Labour stood not only for a new form of politics but a new way of living as well. It shows how the Labour Church movement provided a singular expression of the religion of socialism in the party’s early years, offering an egalitarian, working-class religion. But surely Labour was anti-intellectual, untheoretical and divorced from continental socialism? Not according to this book. Labour, we discover, prided itself on its internationalism, evident in its promotion of May Day events. And the idea that it was theory-lite would have dumbfounded the Independent Labour Party who produced a series of worthy volumes spelling out the philosophy of socialism, drawing on European thinkers such as Edward Bernstein.
There was a time when reading Labour history meant encountering a bewildering number of acronyms – NEC, LRC, etc – which jostled turgidly together on the page, testimony to the numerous organisations, unions and committees that made up the party. For a while it became fashionable to reject this kind of institutional history in favour of an approach that reconstructed the experiences of ordinary working people. Matthew Worley’s book recognises, however, that a range of institutions helped shape the party’s culture. We have excellent chapters on the mining and railway unions as well as the Co-operative Party and the constituency parties. What emerged in the inter-war period was a political machine embodied by figures such as Herbert Morrison but also, as June Hannam shows, numerous women activists who began to play an important part even if they were not rewarded with leading roles.
The other institution that defined Labour was the Conservative Party, subject of a magnificent chapter by Laura Beers. The Tories, especially in the 1920s, whipped up anti-Labour hysteria, representing the party as a Bolshevik conspiracy against the public (readers won’t be surprised to learn this was the stock in trade of the Daily Mail). Rancid propaganda of this kind pushed Labour into emphasising its respectability and committed the party to parliamentary socialism and financial orthodoxy (laying the seeds for the divisions in 1931). The party barely used the word socialism in the 1920s; it only featured once in the 1924 manifesto.
If Keir Hardie were alive today, I’m not sure he would have a lot to tell us. The Labour Party became more than a sect of the Liberal Party; it was an exercise in grassroots democracy. Ed Miliband argues the party needs to recover its missionary zeal by empowering communities. His task will be to create a new version of Lib-Lab progressivism. Maybe we still have something to learn from Labour’s founding fathers and mothers.
