The “Blue Labour” project seems to have captured the interest of Ed Miliband and other senior Labour politicians. There’s much in it that is relevant to Labour’s renewal as a radical and democratic force. Certainly, it is right to reconnect with Labour’s heritage and highlight some of the radical traditions which have been lost or forgotten. Equally, there is a risk of selective interpretation of Labour and socialist history that ignores the rich and diverse socialist heritage across Britain, and risks missing out on opportunities for a regional revival within England in particular.
Blue Labour is silent on the crucial importance of the trade unions in creating a mass base for the party when it was established in 1900. Rather than growing out of a disparate network of mutual societies and co-operatives, it was a result of some clever politicking by the ethical socialist leaders of the Independent Labour Party – above all, Keir Hardie and Ramsay Macdonald.
The alliance between the socialists of the ILP and the unions, many of whom were reluctant converts from Liberalism, and in some cases Toryism, was what ultimately allowed Labour to eclipse the Liberals as the political expression of the working class after the First World War. The alternative – a socialist alliance between the ILP and the rigid Marxism of the Social Democratic Federation – would have consigned socialism in Britain to the status of a modest-sized cult.
This uneasy cohabitation between the ILP, the unions and a number of smaller socialist societies (and later the Co-operative Party) has actually been a strong and enduring model, although not without its problems. It has always had an element of the community building and the sort of values-based socialism advocated by Blue Labour. Some of this was part of the inheritance from radical Liberalism, which the Chartist movement of the 1840s fed into.
It’s a sad commentary on socialist historians, with the notable exception of academics such as EP Thompson, that the influence of the London-based Fabians and even, to an extent, William Morris, has been exaggerated. Thompson, in his Homage to Tom Maguire (a working-class Leeds socialist active in the 1880s), wrote that: “The national historian still tends to have a curiously distorted view of goings-on ‘in the provinces’. Provincial events are seen as shadowy incidents or unaccountable spontaneous upheavals on the periphery of the national scene, which the London wire-pullers try to cope with and put into their correct historical pattern.”
The foundations of the modern Labour Party were laid in the textile, mining and railway communities of the north England, Scotland and Wales. Labour owes much more to the ethical, values-driven socialists such as Edward Carpenter, Katharine Bruce Glasier and Robert Blatchford than to the likes of Sidney Webb or Henry Hyndman of the SDF.
The socialist revival of the 1880s was very much a regional phenomenon, with a different style and content in the north of England compared to London. In 1895, Robert Blatchford wrote: “If you asked a London socialist for the origin of the new movement, he would refer you to Karl Marx and other German socialists. But, so far as our northern people are concerned, I am convinced that beyond the mere outline of state socialism, Karl Marx and his countrymen have had but little influence. No, the new movement here – the new religion, which is socialism and something more than socialism – is the result of the labours of Darwin, Carlyle, Ruskin, Dickens, Thoreau and Walt Whitman.”
Blatchford’s Clarion newspaper, initially published in Manchester, had a huge circulation and converted far more working-class men and women to socialism than any number of Fabian tracts. His pamphlet Merrie England sold more than a million copies. A remarkable socialist culture of cycling and walking clubs, choirs and debating societies grew up around his newspaper.
The movement was, thankfully, more than the man. Blatchford’s racism and jingoism was not matched by most of the Clarion activists. The socialist tradition which grew up around the ILP and the Clarion was democratic, community-based and internationalist. It put down strong roots in some of the unions, and it was the railway workers who moved the crucial motion to the 1899 TUC conference which led to the formation of the Labour Party.
It is easy to ignore the remarkable contribution made at the local level by ILP activists. Fred Jowett, one of the founders of the ILP in Bradford, helped to make the city council a Labour stronghold committed to good housing, health and social care. Women councillors, such as Sarah Reddish in Bolton and Hannah Mitchell in Manchester, did an outstanding job in providing better facilities for working-class mothers and their children.
These are the people whom a renewed Labour Party should be celebrating, not metropolitan intellectuals whose role has been greatly over-emphasised. There are similar pioneers, many of whose stories have yet to be told, in every other region and nation in Britain.
But we should not look at history with rose-tinted spectacles. There is no rigid distinction between the post-1945 Labour Party and what went before. The Labour Party, which was formed in 1900 as the Labour Representation Committee, was not socialist, and the ILP influence had to fight against the liberalism of many of the unions. The inter-war Labour governments pursued essentially liberal economic policies, with Labour Chancellor Philip Snowden outdoing George Osborne in his parsimony.
The ILP finally left the Labour Party in 1932, disgusted by its right-wing direction. With hindsight, this was a mistake – but understandable at the time. The post-1945 Labour Party actually recaptured some of the vitality of the early socialist period, with an enormous surge of activity in many localities, reflected in a plethora of local party newspapers, such as Labour’s Northern Voice, aimed at a broad local readership. The association with the co-operative movement, established some years after the formation of the Labour Party, probably reached its peak in the post-war years.
We should avoid retreating into a sterile north versus south argument. The important thing is to recognise the diverse traditions which make up the modern British Labour Party. A genuinely popular Labour Party should be able to set out a wider vision of socialism with a distinctive local feel that could revive the lost impetus for regionalism. We already have what is essentially regional government doing a pretty good job in Scotland, Wales, London and Northern Ireland. Some of that for the English regions, rather than the silly idea of an English parliament, would be a good idea.
People’s identities work on several different levels – from the local community, through to county, region and nation. I’m proud of my community, my town, my region and – for all its faults – my country. But I also see myself as a European and internationalist. There’s nothing confusing about this. The challenge for Labour is not to get a “blue rinse”, but to rediscover some of its radical traditions and interpret them in ways that make sense to a highly sophisticated electorate.
People value their communities and their distinctiveness. They don’t want to live in towns and villages that have lost their identities to modern corporate capitalism and the brand culture. Let’s go for socialism with a local accent.
For more on socialism and regionalism, and the embryonic Northern Socialist Network, please visit www.paulsalveson.org.uk
