The Nation in Labour Party Politics #1
Why has the Labour Party historically been a national party? How have class and nation separated the party's right and left wings?
It is clear that this year’s Labour conference was primarily aimed at providing a reason for voting for the party, as opposed to just against the Conservatives, the latter being the reason many have ascribed to their current polling lead. Keir Starmer did not announce a slew of new policies in his speech. He did, however, tie together existing policy commitments, such as on housing and energy, into a cohesive vision – that of National Renewal. But why National Renewal? Why have Labour shifted from ‘for the many not the few’ under Corbyn, to a unifying national message? Why, for that matter, has Labour ever invoked the nation as a socialist party?
These are broad questions, but they can be answered by a smaller one: what are the means for a left-wing government to achieve change? TPI has written a lot about freedom and security, and how they define broad trends in politics, particularly that these are the two ideas that make up the ‘ends’ of policy ‘means’. Take energy policy, for instance: Oil and gas licences in the North Sea? Providing security from volatile international markets and the freedom cheaper bills provide. Great British Energy, Labour’s nationalised renewable energy company? Exactly the same justification.
That latter policy is indicative of how successful iterations of Labour have always made political arguments. The nation is a vital concept because it is how politics and government works in this country: as a means of winning power, of national identity, and of economic strategy. In this first of two parts, I will detail how the idea of ‘nation’ has historically been used by the modern Labour party, especially its governments, as well as how and why the left deviated from this nationalist norm.
From the 1940s to the 2000s
As David Edgerton has argued in Rise and Fall Of the British Nation, Clement Attlee’s governments of 1945-1951 defined themselves by rebuilding the nation, whether that be through the National Health Service, nationalisations of key industries or strident moves towards national self-sufficiency in food, industry and energy. One nation was to be built: from the universalisation of welfare coverage , down to the linguistics, ‘nation’ was espoused over ‘class’ in the rhetoric and policies of even this most cited of left-wing Labour governments. As Edgerton argues, radical Socialist policies were advocated through a conservative style: the nation. This reflected the origins of the party - in Fabianism, which rejected the Marxist analysis of international capitalist collapse, in trade unions that were more concerned with wages and working conditions than worldwide revolution, and, most importantly, in religious humanitarianism. Harold Wilson is often cited as saying that ‘the Labour Party owes more to Methodism than to Marxism’. This goes some way to explaining the national approach of even radical leftists like Chancellor Stafford Cripps, who was so far to the left that today he wouldn’t be touched with a 10-foot pole - or even, considering the history of the current leadership, be a member.
The demise of the Attlee government in 1951 created one of the great dividing lines in the party’s identity. To revisionists towards the political centre, like Anthony Crosland, author of The Future of Socialism, the Attlee government had sufficiently ameliorated capitalism’s vices to the point that economic class was no longer the dominant force in British politics. Moreover, trade unions and the Labour government had achieved policy successes to the point that the working class actively benefited from capitalism in its reformed state, a far cry from Marxist theories of ‘pauperisation’, that workers would always be made poorer under capitalists systems. As such, they argued, class was no longer a vote winner or even an indicator of voting intention. To followers of Aneurin Bevan, however, deviation from the course of nationalisations and greater taxation represented betrayal of the cause of the working class, defining their socialism, in part, by these policies. Crosland and others believed this to be outdated in their pursuit of social equality. In other words, that the party’s policy means had become disconnected from increasingly unclear end goals for the Labour movement.
Wilson, the next Labour PM after Attlee, espoused his reinterpretation of a national Britain with his famous ‘white heat’ of British industry and science that would bring forth a new age, a ‘new Britain’, spurred on by a unity of science and state planning. Indeed, this has even been called ‘techno-nationalism’ by Edgerton, association of state-led technological development with the nation’s identity and prestige. This was, however, a fudge between revisionist and Bevanite. Rather than decisively siding with one faction or the other, Wilson bridged the gap and appealed to party unity through his message of state-planned scientific revolution. Yes, Wilson used the linguistics of ‘nation’, but his diagnosis of Britain was class-based. The 1964 campaign strongly criticised Alec Douglas-Home (Prime Minister 1963-1964) as a typecast of the old-school Tory aristocrats failing to embrace modernity and contributing to Britain’s decline as a result, appealing to the left’s sense of class struggle.
70s Change and Its Legacies in the 2010s
Wilson’s leadership left the divide unresolved, therefore. As with all things in politics, however, a sea change would come in the 1970s. The Labour left had grown increasingly frustrated with the social democratic consensus. Figures like Tony Benn saw the nationalised industries created by Attlee’s government as corporatist, their running still too far from the ordinary worker which reduced accountability, and applied the same analysis to government and the trade unions. The left, then, began to advocate for more workers’ control through industrial democracy, seeking to radically alter industrial relations, make nationalised companies more attentive to the needs of its workers and force government to consider the needs of the working class above anything else. In other words, they rocked the boat on a Labour politics that, since the 1940s, had been defined by the nation. Indeed, it was for this that Benn was sacked as Industry Minister, Wilson fed up with his move to the left, foreshadowing the factionalism that epitomised Labour in the 1980s.
However, with the left’s defeat in the 1983 general election: the election of the famous ‘Longest Suicide Note in History’ that had been dominated by the left’s agenda for industrial democracy and further nationalisation (300 of the top companies!) Labour revisionism, and therefore the nation, came back stronger than ever. New Labour, under Tony Blair, accepted huge swathes of capitalism, abolishing Clause IV that committed to nationalisation and trumpeting a ‘new Britain’. This was envisioned as a classless society in which, enabled by both state spending and a greater role for the private sector, people could become more free, more prosperous, and more secure. But this vision of a free-wheeling, globalised ‘Cool Britannia’ came crashing down between the twin craters of the Iraq War in 2003 and the Great Financial Crash in 2008.
And, as in the 1970s, Labour’s reaction was to move left, discontented with the acceptance of the private sector despite the electoral success of the Blair-Brown governments. This included a pivot towards class. Corbyn’s famous slogan, ironically originally Blair’s, ‘for the many, not the few’ became a message of class struggle, and ‘workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains’ was a welcome rallying cry at the Labour Party conference. Corbyn’s Labour advocated for broad nationalisation of public services and industries, as in 1945. But the leader w as rooted in the politics of Benn and Bevan, advocating for workers on boards of companies and believing nationalisation in itself would ameliorate class difference. Corbyn’s euroscepticism and rejection of globalisation was also influenced by the left of the 1950s and 1970s, based on a belief that the EU was a closed shop of capitalists that didn’t do enough for the working class and that globalisation sold working-class jobs overseas and the communities that relied on them down the river. Corbyn may have used the linguistics of ‘nation’ but his diagnosis, like Wilson, was based on class. Unlike Wilson, however, his appeal to class politics was far more explicit and controversial, and the ideological links to the 1970s far too obvious for electoral appeal by 2019, to say nothing of the antisemitism that had become a stain on the party. Meanwhile, those on the right of the party had little to say, stuck on the question of how to be both national and progressive without embracing the anti-globalist politics of Corbyn.
National Labour - Then and Now
Labour has often swung between national politics and class politics – and it is clear which one Starmer’s Labour has gone to, epitomised in that message of ‘National Renewal’. It is also clear which politics is more successful electorally and, therefore, in government. To me, this is one of the fundamental reasons Labour governments get elected. I don’t accept that the Labour right is inherently more electorally attractive than the left (at least the soft left) – and history bears this out, with Attlee and Wilson having great electoral appeal despite being in the middle of the party and avowed socialists. So why are those iterations of the party that associate themselves with ‘nation’ so much more effective? The explanations put forward in this piece have detailed the more surface-level reasons like party unity, or specific contexts like national unity during and after WWII. It is to a more fundamental explanation that the second part of this series will turn to.
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