When I was getting interested in working class history, back in the early 1970s, I was fascinated by a book called The Hard Way Up. It was written by a Northern working class woman called Hannah Mitchell. She was born in rural North Derbyshire and moved as a young girl to what must have seemed like the thriving metropolis of Bolton, where I was brought up. She became involved in the embryonic socialist movement and read Blatchford’s Clarion newspaper.

One of her earliest influences was Katherine St John Conway, herself a recent recruit to ‘the cause’ but from a very different class background. She heard her speak at a packed meeting in Bolton about the new gospel of socialism. She was fascinated by this articulate young woman and went away “with an inspiration which later sent me out to the street corners with the same message.”

Hannah Mitchell went on to become an accomplished speaker and activist for the fledgling Independent Labour Party. She got involved in the women’s suffrage movement which was particularly active in the Lancashire mill towns and campaigned across the North of England. Her socialism was of the ethical, humanistic kind which became so popular across the North where the ILP was strongest.

This kind of politics, in her words, “attracted a type of socialist who was not satisfied with the stark materialism of the Marxist school, desiring warmth and colour in human lives: not just bread, but bread and roses, too. Perhaps we were not quite sound on economics as our Marxian friends took care to remind us, but we realised the injustice and ugliness of the present system. We had enough imagination to visualise the greater possibility for beauty and culture in a more justly ordered state. If our conception of Socialism owed more to Morris than to Marx, we were none the less sincere, and many found their belief strengthened by the help and inspiration of the weekly meetings held in these Northern towns.” (The Hard Way Up, p 116).

This sums up Hannah’s politics, and the beliefs of thousands like her in the years before the First World War. But as well as having this romantic vision of socialism Hannah was a very practical activist. She became involved in local politics in Ashton-under-Lyne where she was elected onto the local ‘Board of Guardians’ responsible for poor relief.

A further move, to Manchester, led to her adoption as a council candidate in the face of some opposition from her male Labour colleagues. She was elected for the working class ward of Newton Heath, which she served with dedication for many years. In The Hard Way Up she mentions one of her proudest achievements being the public wash house which she struggled to get built to make working class women’s lives that bit easier. Her desire for ‘beauty in civic life’ blossomed in her work on public libraries, parks and gardens.

During the 1920s she became a regular correspondent for the ILP paper Labour’s Northern Voice. She wrote dialect sketches as ‘Daisy Nook’, poking fun at petty injustice and arguing the case for socialism in a light, accessible style which was quintessentially ‘Northern’.

Hannah’s life and work has been one of the main inspirations behind the formation of an organisation to promote the continuing relevance of ethical socialism and the need for a new debate on the importance of devolution for the North of England. A small group of socialists from across the North met on November 11^th in the station pub at Sowerby Bridge, near to the Lancashire/Yorkshire border, and agreed to go form a Northern ‘think tank’ and to name it in honour of Hannah.

The Hannah Mitchell Foundation – “an ethical socialist campaign for regional government for the North” has as its main purpose to be “a forum for the development of a distinctive democratic socialism in the North, rooted in our ethical socialist traditions of mutuality, co-operation, community and internationalism. Its prime focus will be to develop the case for directly-elected regional government for the North of England – either as a whole or for the three regions which make up ‘the North’.

“Creating a devolved structure of governance for the North would be based on the key principles of democracy and subsidiarity, social equity and justice, and sustainable development in its social, environmental and economic senses. The foundation is named in memory of an outstanding Northern socialist, feminist and co-operator who was proud of her working class roots and had a cultural as well as political vision.”

Early days, but the foundation has already attracted lots of interest and could become the catalyst for a new approach to progressive regional politics.

Paul Salveson is convenor of the Hannah Mitchell Foundation. Donations are very welcome (cheques should be made to ‘The Hannah Mitchell Foundation’ and sent to HMF, 90a Radcliffe Road, Golcar, Huddersfield HD7 4EZ)

Membership details, including charges, will be published on our website shortly: www.hannahmitchell.org.uk.

England & Wales

The first strongholds of the ILP were limited largely to the woollen districts of Yorkshire and parts of Lancashire.

Bradford was a major centre. Here the Liberals were the ILP’s main political contenders for working class support. Influenced by the former textile worker, Fred Jowett (left), the ILP pioneered many of the city’s local government reforms. Activists built a solid political base – which lasted well into the 1920s and 1930s – resting upon a network of ILP clubs and a variety of social activates.

Halifax, a textile town with a radical tradition, became another early focal point. John Lister, whose wealthy but eccentric family had lived at Shibden Hall, Halifax, from the 17th century, was the ILP’s first national treasurer.

Across the Pennines in Lancashire, the ILP faced a popular working-class Conservatism. The ILP grew in Manchester and Salford, and in the cotton textile towns of Blackburn and Preston and it had a presence in Rochdale, Oldham, Hyde, Ashton and Stockport.

In Manchester, where Robert Blatchford initiated the influential Clarion newspaper, ILPers organised soup kitchens at times of high unemployment and challenged the callous attitude of the Poor Law Guardians.

In 1896, Manchester ILPers were jailed for speaking at Boggart Hole Clough, an open site taken over by the city council and long used for public meetings. After enormous protests the council backed down.

In Nelson, where the weavers were a major influence, there was a lively ILP branch which pre-dated the national ILP. The Nelson ILP set up its own institute and built the Clarion House, near Pendle, as a base to explore the countryside.

Outside Yorkshire and Lancashire, Leicester was the most significant of the ILP’s English outposts. The massive presence of radical trade unionists in the boot and shoe industry provided the backbone, as it did in Norwich.

In Wales, the working class had formed close bonds with Liberalism. At the end of the last century, these began to crack with the sharp upturn in industrial disputes among the South Wales miners.

The ILP developed a strong and active base in Merthyr Tydfil from where Keir Hardie was elected to parliament in 1900. In 1922, ILPer Richard Wallhead won the seta. The ILP ran the popular Merthyr Pioneer newspaper and a printing co-operative. It had its own football team.

In the 1930s, massive unemployment meant mass poverty in much of Britain. Wales was badly hit. Babies were said to be contracting rickets in their mothers’ wombs.

The ILP continued to have an important political presence during this period. It was very involved in the hunger marches from Wales to London to draw attention to the terrible conditions. In 1935, it joined with the 300,000 people throughout Wales who protested against the hardship caused by the means test. As a result, the government dropped some of its harsher proposals.

Scotland

Scotland presents a rich and complex picture. Many of the ILP’s first generation of ‘leaders’ were Scottish. The Scottish Labour Party was founded in 1888, five years before the ILP itself. The Party in Scotland was then absorbed by the ILP.

But this early prominence did not mean that there was massive support for the ILP from the outset. Most of the ILP’s leading figures made their reputations only after travelling south.

The Scottish Labour Party had made little headway. This was because of the strong attachment to the Liberals in Scotland. In addition, the working class was deeply divided not only culturally (between the ‘respectable’ and the ‘rough’) as in the rest of Britain, but also nationally (Scottish and Irish) and religiously (Catholic and Protestant).

In time, these obstacles were partly overcome and the Irish question diminished. By November 1922, thousands of people were lining the streets of Glasgow to wave off the newly-elected Clydeside ILPers, such as James Maxton (left) as they headed south for the Westminster parliament.

But this support had not been won easily. It rested upon hard-fought disputes to improve social and working conditions, a well as opposition to war. Working class women were at the heart of these struggles. Housing, particularly in Glasgow, was notoriously bad and yet rent were high. The ILP’s housing committee and the Women’s Labour League, initiated a city-wide housing campaign based on women’s neighbourhood groups.

Conditions worsened with the influx of workers during the First World War. In its first wartime edition, Glasgow ILP’s paper, Forward (which was later suppressed by the authorities), called for the government to limit rent rises.

Women’s groups, together with militant Clydeside shipworkers, organised massive rent strikes. In response to this growing working class assertiveness, the government introduced rent controls.

In the past century, thousands of unknown ILPers across Britain have campaigned for better social conditions, for an end to war, and for a society based on equality and justice. By their own strict standards they did no succeed, but their efforts made a significant difference to the lives of millions.

Buy The ILP: Past and Present here

Read other extracts from The ILP: Past & Present here, including:
ILP History 1: The Early Years
- Great Expectations
- Beginnings in Bradford
ILP History 2: Ethical Socialism
- Independent Women
- Living for that Better Day
ILP History 3: Labour’s Rise and Disaffiliation

The ILP met him at the House of Lords last month to talk about his ideas. This is the second part of a two-part interview. Read the first part here.

Radical and conservative – the Blue Labour paradox

One of the questions Alan Finlayson asks is: Will Blue Labour stumble into conservatism under all the usual pressures, the desire to win elections and deal with the here and now, rather than to the wider vision? It’s either a creative or destructive tension, but is that a genuine tension?

It all boils down to where you think we are. If you think it’s going to be one more heave, more tax, more spend, let’s all rally round and protect the unreconstructed Brownite welfare state, then we will lose the election. So that’s the paradox, the more realist you are, the more you’ll lose.

What’s needed is a populism. You can’t be a fake populist. You can only be populist if you start expressing people’s concerns.

Here’s a very interesting story about the forests.

Very early on after Ed won, we were sitting with Jon Cruddas and looking at this thing saying the New Forest, Sherwood Forest and so on were good investments for the timber industry. And Jon just said to me, ‘That can’t be right; that can’t be right.’

So we moved, and we won that within two or three weeks because it touched so many people. It turned out people had much stronger feelings about their forests; they have much more mixed feelings about their local school or whatever, because they know there was money wasted there, they know there was horrible stuff going on in a lot of those places. Our language wasn’t capturing that.

So to develop a genuinely populist agenda is the task in hand. What we’ve got to remember is, we’ve got three and a half years till the next election, so the next year is decisive. The further we can get away from doing things for people, and the more we can get to a place where people actually have more power to do things for themselves, I think the better.

The Labour Party would be a deeply conservative force, in all the wrong ways, if we hadn’t lost so heavily. But as we did, that allows a genuine space to open up. It can’t be the case, it can’t be the case, that if I raise issues about immigration the only response is that I’m a racist. With all the experiences I’ve been through, it doesn’t hold.

I think we’ve been through quite a lot this year, and heard quite a lot of people saying ‘No, I don’t want to play, I don’t want to talk in this way.’ But then people ignore you.

If you look at the ILP, this was a huge concern: How do we talk to people? How do we engage people in a politics where they are participants in their own lives?

One of the things the ILP has long recognised is the tension between winning elections, which lowers political horizons, and the need to build a broader movement which can take us beyond those immediate concerns. I wonder how you see that?

There are three components.

The first is a genuine change in what I call the relational culture of the party. The reality is the average number of people who turn up for branch meetings is 12, the average number who speak is five. So that means there are seven people who don’t say a word. We’ve got to look at that and say, ‘What kind of culture is this?’

So, from an organising point of view, we’re thinking about bringing in suggestions that everyone says their name and where they are from at the beginning of the meeting – just to hear their voice.

Secondly, that every meeting will include a one-to-one conversation. Once again, it’s about getting away from the idea that the only way to get things done is to get pieces of paper out and pass motions. We’ve got to broaden the base of the party.

And then we come to the key thing – being prepared to actually listen and act on things that people care about rather than the things we think they should care about.

I don’t mind going on record saying that March 26^th, the big rally against the government, was an organisational catastrophe. There was no constructive alternative. And everyone went home and thought, ‘Well, what was that?’

Just to say, I’m much more in favour of resisting the sell-offs than the cuts, just to let you know where I’m at.

It’s about rebuilding constituency Labour Parties as places where people can act to protect the people and the places they love.

It’s got to be much more about forests, about violence on the streets and civic culture, than about equality issues. It will be about affordable housing, family housing, the living wage – these issues – and running successful local campaigns that are off the radar of the national media.

There has been a massive rupture of trust and we’ve got to be quite humble and relational about rebuilding that trust. Small steps, small issues around people’s concerns, can lead you to surprising places.

For example, in places like Burnley and Oldham we’ve got to think of ourselves as the ‘common good party’ that brings together the estranged – Muslim and local, working class and middle class.

That’s one side, the re-organisation.

Then we need ideological renewal, and this is what Blue Labour is about, being able to talk about capitalism while continually being in favour of private sector growth –real businesses, making a distinction between financial and productive capital which Ed spoke about in terms of predatory and productive capital. This is where we’ve got to be a lot more conservative in our disposition, talk to people about what they care about.

The third aspect is leadership development at every level from top to bottom, so we bring on genuine leaders who have followers within their own communities, who are prepared to promote their agenda and negotiate with others in developing a new one.

So roughly speaking: re-organisation, ideological renewal and leadership development are the three big ones.

I can see the need not always to go full blast against the whole of capitalism in a practical sense, but Blue Labour’s focus is on the damage done by capitalist commodification. Currently, the worst excesses may have been done by finance capitalism but isn’t capitalism itself always problematic?

This is where we are, I think: all forms of state-directed socialism have been authoritarian and ugly, and anti-democratic, and elitist, and immoral. We’ve got to eat that, we’ve got to absorb it.

Every day I think about the millions of innocent people killed by Stalin. I just sit and go, ‘My god.’ They were wiped out, they were taken away, they were shot, they were tortured.

In China now, independent democratic trade unionists are killed every day, but I ask Labour Parties, ‘Do you support independent democratic trade unions in China?’ And sometimes only half the people say ‘Yes.’ Because it’s a developing country, because the West shouldn’t be imposing, and so on …

So this is the key thing: we want a non-commodity market in human beings and nature, and we want competitive markets in tables and chairs, and so on.

We don’t want to be static, self-referential; reality has always got to come in. We want high-end innovation, we want skilled work – this is transformative. We want vocational colleges, we want workers on board, we want all these things, but they take time.

So, it’s about a real market in real commodities with democracy to protect the status of labour and land. The complication with capitalism is when you think one of three things:

• first, that it can be abolished – that can’t be.
• secondly, that it works perfectly well in all markets – that leads to mayhem
• thirdly, and this is where we’ve been, that it can only be legally regulated by the state, whereas we need a massive renewal of things like democratic unions.

And in that tension between the maximisation of profit and the preservation of human beings and their environment, that’s where we want to be.

One massive issue is that [in government] we did not promote regional flourishing. To put it bluntly there was not enough private sector growth in the north east, the north west, the midlands and south west, and the south east was financially driven which had it’s own problems.

I share your disposition about capitalism, but I look at Tesco and think, it’s cheap, healthy food, and it has transformed the lives of the poor. Yet we hate them.

When London Citizens did a living wage campaign against Tesco what we found was enormous middle class loathing while the working class had a love for Tesco. They love the fact that the food was fresh and cheap and the environment was safe. And when they bought a small package of mince they didn’t have a butcher going, ‘Ah, tough week, eh?’ They didn’t feel humiliated.

That’s just a tough example I put out there to say we’ve got to build alliances and relationships with the powers. We’ve got to look at how we can get Tesco to foster regional diversity.

This is just an example: I went to visit an old friend of mine and his parents who I hadn’t seen for ages (we were at Cambridge together) and the place they wanted to take me to was the café in the local Tesco. They were so proud of it. It was a real lesson for me. Tesco is a massive power and the question is how do we negotiate with it for the good.

So if we go along with the idea of real resistance to the commodification of human beings and nature then we have to go with the question of how to create a society that can generate value.

I think vocational training is hugely important. I made a big stink at conference by suggesting we should close down half the universities, turn them into vocational training colleges and put the law schools and medical schools in there. Then you’ll have meaningful pathways of equal status for working people.

I’m at London Met, which is one of the poorest universities. It used to be a really good Poly, City of London. Now we’re a crap university, which is no good to anyone.

The experience of students at Oxford is that they have pastoral care and personal tuition. I’ve got 150 students in a room and I’m not allowed to see them personally any more because I’m told that it violates fairness.

We’ve always got to be radical and conservative in a simultaneous motion. It’s hard, but it gets to good places and, conversationally, it’s great because people can join in.

Here’s a classic example: if you look at union data about what people care about at work, yes, it says they care about how they are treated, but in the top three, always, is that they care about colleagues who don’t do their work. And the unions never, ever, ever, ever mention it. I think it’s about time that we did.

It happens in my university, and it’s found in local government too where people who don’t do their jobs get shunted around. It is a very big issue. Of all the documentation you have to fill in it never touches that issue. Staff know who don’t do their work …

Yes, so I’m in favour of 50 per cent of promotions being on the basis of election by colleagues.

I’m glad I’m out of it, I must admit …

And that’s also significant because you loved it. That’s the tragedy of a lot of people: “I’m glad I’m out of it because it was shit, and yet I care passionately about it all.” And the important thing is not to forget that ambivalence. There is no easy position, which was another thing the ILP was good with.

You’ve talked about the need for real markets for real commodities, and forms of democracy to protect human beings and nature, such as democratic unions, and so on. Elsewhere you’ve talked about the importance of local democracy and community organisation. I wonder how you see the role of the state in all this?

To be clear, there’s a central role for the state but not an exclusive role for the state.

I think we got into a position where we thought the only meaningful thing we could do was elect a Labour government and have the state do it. What we know is that the state can be a class-based organisation. We learned that under Thatcherism.

Secondly, we got into an administrative role with the state where it did things for people. But we must remember democracy is also by the people, of the people – it’s worth bearing in mind.

So, there’s a very, very important role for the state. But we also need a rediscovery of statecraft.

I get criticised for talking about this whole Tudor statecraft thing. The logic is that England then was well behind the rest of Europe in three areas – the first was naval technology, the second was armaments, and the third was in science and maths, in particular.

So they endowed the Greenwich Maritime College with land and authority; they endowed the Woolwich arsenal; they endowed Kings College and Trinity College in Cambridge with very specific professorships in maths, in Greek, Latin and science. And the Royal Exchange in the City was definitive in defeating Amsterdam in loans, insurance and finance.

So, we have to rediscover the role of the state in statecraft, in endowing local institutions and vocational institutions, such as regional banks, environmentally specific vocational colleges. I’m very interested in Newcastle and the sea, and maritime technology, and renewables that can genuinely generate jobs in those places.

So – and this goes quiet deeply into the argument with Keynes – the state is not there for continual crisis management, it’s there to look at long-term developments, to endow institutions and renew the BBC, for example, as a local vocational trainer, as a local form of democratic accountability through journalism. There’s so many imaginative ways we could think about the role of the state.

Secondly, the role of the state is to be clearly what I call ‘the floor and the ceiling’. I’d like to see a living wage, for example, and I would also like to see an interest rate cap. So the state should set limits but not micro-manage the process.

It’s also about redistributing power to people. I would love to see a transformative Labour government that was really serious about constitutional redistribution through such things as unitary city parliaments. I’d like to see the extension of the City of London to all of London; I’d like to see Manchester as a unitary city … renew the civic government of the land.

So there’s a huge role for the state here, but it’s got to be in relationship to markets and society. We have to break the idea that there’s either complicity with the market or straightforward opposition, and to open up the space for regional variety.

In Hackney, for example, I’m in favour of breaking up Hackney council and having Stoke Newington, Hackney, Dalston, Shoreditch – parish councils, so people can know who their representatives are and engage with the strengths they’ve got without everything being seen as a redistribution of one thing to another.

Tottenham was a case in point. The leader of Haringey council was there the evening of the riots and no-one knew who he was. So there was no local government going on and the gap was filled by the mob.

The reason there’s been this misunderstanding about the state is because we became so statist that any retreat from it was seen as anti.

The state has to be the guarantor of justice too, but all this stuff with rights and law should be ultimate but not intimate. You know, if you disagree with someone at work you get accused of bullying …

Our capacity to have these conversations and cope with tensions has gone, so we need a much more robust local tension, that’s key to it.

Can we finish by asking what London Citizens has meant to you?

Well, it was absolutely transformative for me, and part of that is a personal story.

What it taught me first of all was the centrality of relationships. When I started I wanted to persuade people of my position but I learned to question what that meant for the politics of the common good and how you bring people together.

So the living wage stuff came from Catholics, Protestants, Muslims – people who basically hated each other in terms of their religion who found a common ground.

The centrality of leadership was another thing.

And then I realised that over a few years through these London Citizens campaigns we’d developed a more radical political economy than the Labour Party. For me, it was catch up, catch up, catch up. I was always a Labour, secular, left-winger and this was all new.

One of the big lessons for me was which people would turn up. If the mosque said 50 people, the Catholic church says 50 people, the local black church says 50 people, they turn up. When the trade unions said 50 people, no-one turns up. So suddenly the crisis of secular institutions and their reproduction came to me.

And then there’s the importance of creative strategy – we did loads of different kinds of actions for the living wage: mass pray-ins, meals, things the Labour Party would never think of.

And finally, what it taught me above all was to be relaxed with tension, not fear tension, and not to do anything on your own, to always work with others and get to a common place – then you can act in the world.

If you just go off on your own, you’re lost. My big regret is the immigration thing. I was just having a chat, I wasn’t thinking. It was a classic case of what not to do. I allowed a position to develop without talking to other people. I am genuinely sorry for that, you can’t imagine, but it wasn’t about the position, it was about my lack of attention to the idea that relationships precede action.

That’s it, if you want it in three words: relationships precede action, that’s what I learned from organising.

–

Maurice Glasman was talking to Barry Winter and Matthew Brown.

Part 1 of this interview is available here.

Read Attlee, the ILP and the Romantic Tradition by Jon Cruddas here.

The Labour Tradition and the Politics of Paradox, edited by Maurice Glasman, Jonathan Rutherford, Marc Stears and Stuart White is an e-book available from Soundings.

“Love learning which is the food of the mind.”
Extract from The Socialist Ten Commandments

Socialism did not begin with the ILP. But the ILP created a unique blend of socialism. Not only did it achieve independent representation for labour and links with the trade unions, it also worked outside the formal political structures.

Many ILPers saw their main job as converting people to socialism. To do this, they tried to set an example by leading socialist lives. They encouraged a sense of comradeship, commitment and fun. They invited people to participate in a living community with a choice of activities, cultural as well as political.

Inspired by Robert Blatchford’s popular Clarion newspaper, socialism was preached from touring Clarion vans. Cyclists, who joined Clarion clubs to enjoy the countryside, would ride ahead to give advance notice of the arrival of the vans.

Labour churches, first formed in Manchester, offered an alternative to orthodox religious beliefs. They sought: “The realisation of Heaven in this life by the establishment of a society founded on justice and love to thy neighbour.” From this came the Socialist Sunday School movement for children which called for equality and respect for all.

This ethical, communal and campaigning approach made the ILP’s politics distinctive. ILPers were intent on creating the whole world anew and they had the confidence and enthusiasm to believe that it could be done. Often their moral vision, that desire to inspire and uplift people, was clearer that their political vision. The connection between politics and morality was not explored. Later, the idea of “living and socialists” came under pressure for electoral reasons.

Nor had ILPers set themselves an easy task. They were trying to appeal to people who led hard lives, many of whom were resistant to radical ideas. In times of recession and rising unemployment, many ILPers were unable to pay their subscriptions. As a result, local branches sometimes found it a struggle to continue with their activities.

The ILP published a stream of literature, leaflets, pamphlets, books and newspapers. In the early 1920s, the ILP’s official paper, renamed New Leader, was edited by one of the most influential socialist writers of the time, H N Brailsford.

In the late 1920s, the ILP Arts Guild sponsored the Masses Film and Theatre Guild to show political films. During the inter-war years and after, ILP summer schools, which combined serious politics with social activities, played host to a wide variety of national and international speakers.

Perhaps it was this sense of community and fellowship which did much to sustain the ILP after the Second World War. The spirit of the old ILP thus influenced the new generation and has encouraged them to renew the ILP’s political message.

The Clarionets

“We were furnished with sandwiches, a primus stove for making tea and stacks of leaflets, pamphlets and the ‘Clarion’. Leaflets and pamphlets we gave away; the Clarion we tried to sell. Arriving at some village in Derbyshire or Cheshire we held an open-air meeting to catch the people as they came out of church or chapel. We were young and raw and given to buffoonery. These was a tradition that one Clarion group had pasted some posters with the legend, ‘Read the Clarion’, on a herd of cows in a field. We scrawled slogans in chalk on barns and farmhouse walls…We sang ‘England arise, the long, long night is over’ outside pubs and on village greens.

“At the club-house, after a ride through the lanes of Cheshire or over the Derbyshire hills, we ate an enormous tea of ham, pickles, jam and cake…Washing up followed, after which we cleared the tables away for either a meeting, a play or a concert, finishing the evening by dancing…By ten o’clock we were shooting down Schools Hill, bunched of wild flowers tied to our handle-bars, apples in our pockets, and the wind lifting our hair.”

North Country Bred: A Working-class Family Chronicle by C Stella Davies, published by Routledge & Kegan Paul (1963)

–

This is an extract from the ILP’s history pamphlet, The ILP: Past & Present.

The first two of six instalments of ILP history taken from the pamphlet are:
The Early Years
Ethical Socialism

“No cause can be won between dinner and tea, and most of us who were married had to work with one hand tied behind us.”

Hannah Mitchell: The Hard Way Up: the Autobiography of a Suffragette and Rebel

From the beginning, the ILP accepted women and men as equal members and, as early as 1895, it supported the extension of the vote to both women and men.

Although women were not relegated to the background, few were involved at the policy making levels in the early years. However, women took a leading part in branch life and as public speakers.

Many carried out the roles traditionally allocated to women in politics. And some, like Hannah Mitchell found that their husbands were happier talking about sex equality than practising it!

Some ILP women were at the forefront of campaigns to improve the lives of poor, working class children in the cities. In Bradford, Margaret McMillan’s pioneering work for children and for school meals won her fame as an educational reformer.

There was one woman on the party’s first national council, Katherine Bruce Glasier. Others were to follow, including the suffrage campaigner Isabella Ford of Leeds. She had been a supporter of the celebrated strike at Manningham mills, Bradford and played a leading role in encouraging women textile workers into unions. In 1905, she was supporting striking mining families who had been evicted from their homes by their employers in Kinsley, near Hemsworth in Yorkshire.

Explaining why she joined the ILP after she had been impressed by its support for women, Isabella Ford said:

“My last doubts were removed after a visit to a Labour Club in the Colne Valley, where the men had been giving a tea party to the women, and had poured out the tea, cut the bread and butter, and washed everything up, without any feminine help and without any accidents! A party, that included the education of men, which had hitherto been so much neglected, as well as the education of women, that gave the one such skill and dexterity, and the other wider and truer views of life, was the party for me I felt, and so I joined.”

When the Pankhursts’ votes-for-women campaign folded with the outbreak of the First World War to further the war effort, it was largely those women in the ILP and the peace movement who continued their dogged work in the school boards and as poor law guardians.

Many thousands of women were also active in the wartime peace movement, and others continued the work of Enid Stacy and others who campaigned for:

• The right for women to choose whether or not to have children.
• Equality in marriage and fair divorce laws.
• The right for women to have guardianship of children.
• Full legal and political rights for women.
• Freedom as workers, including protective legislation for men as well as women.

The years between the wars were difficult ones for women raised during the heady days of the pre-war suffrage campaign.

Inside the Labour Party, ILP women played a distinctive role. Dorothy Jewson and Dora Russell fought to improve women’s’ status in the party were at the forefront of campaigns for birth control and peace.

In fighting for women’s independence, such women found themselves confronting a cautious labour movement afraid of upsetting the voters. They found that winning votes usually took precedence over winning people’s hearts and minds.

As a result, many women became disillusioned with these short term considerations. Others, like Hannah Mitchell, undertook new responsibilities as local councillors.

Votes for Women

The ILP was closely involved with the campaign for votes for women before the First World War. But the issue was not a simple one. There was a heated debate about how to, given the fact that not all working class men had the right to vote either. Some favoured militant action, others persuasion.

Some campaigners argued that women should have the vote on the same basis as men, whilst others said the vote should be extended to all men and women at the same time (the adult suffragists).

These disputes were reflected within the ILP which had attracted many women because of Keir Hardie’s and others’ commitment to the women’s cause. There were, though, many men in the ILP who still had to be persuaded.

Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst drew many of her women activists from ILP members and the ILP had supported the suffragettes. But the increasingly separatist nature of her Women’s Social and Political Union and its undemocratic leadership led to a rift between it and the ILP in England. In Scotland, however, the two organisations continued the work hand in hand.

The ILP’s concerns were much closer to those of the largely northern, radical suffragists who called for ‘womanhood suffrage’ and believed that “it is from a truly democratic organisation alone that satisfactory results can be expected”.

In these campaigns working class women with little or no education learned to be outstanding public speakers and grass roots organisers, touring Britain in the Clarion vans.

Self-taught women who learned their politics on the job like Selina Cooper from Nelson and Ada Neild Chew from Crewe who were supported by middle-class, women speakers and writers like Enid Stacy. She made one of the earliest attempts to bring together the ideas of feminism and socialism.

In the last thirty years, feminists have been discovering the work of the women pioneers and many have been inspired by their example.

–

This is an extract from the ILP’s history pamphlet, The ILP: Past & Present.

The first two of six instalments of ILP history taken from the pamphlet are:
The Early Years
Ethical Socialism

The aim, according to the foundation’s driving force, Paul Salveson, is to create a northern-based ‘think tank’ which will build an evidence-based lobby for directly-elected regional government for the north.

“After a fair bit of debate we agreed a strap-line of ‘an ethical socialist approach to regional government for the north’,” reports Salveson in his Weekly Salvo blog.

“It boils down to celebrating the north’s distinctive socialist heritage, expressed through Chartism, co-operation, the women’s suffrage movement and the decidedly ‘northern’ culture of the Independent Labour Party (formed in Bradford in 1893).

“But it’s not a history society – it’s about making some of that relevant to the present day.”

Hannah Mitchell is not a hugely well-known name from Labour history, says Salveson, but “she encapsulates a lot of the things the Foundation is hoping to be about”.

Born in 1871 on a farm in North Derbyshire, she lived for a while in Glossop before moving to Bolton in the 1890s where she became involved in the socialist movement and an avid reader of Robert Blatchford’s Clarion newspaper. She married a fellow socialist and moved to Ashton-under-Lyne where she became active in the ILP and Labour Church, and was elected to the Board of Guardians, responsible for poor relief.

When the women’s suffrage movement took off in the early 1900s she became a well-known activist in the northern industrial towns, campaigning in Lancashire, Yorkshire and the north-east. She supported the pro-women’s rights Victor Grayson in his epoch-making 1907 election campaign in Colne Valley. She opposed the First World War, regarding war as ‘the worst possible way of settling disputes’.

She was elected onto Manchester City Council and was an outstanding champion of working people’s interests, both in her own ward and across the city, with particular interest in libraries and public baths. She was a talented writer, penning a regular column in the ILP’s Labour’s Northern Voice, often contributing dialect sketches about working class life as ‘Daisy Nook’.

“When we debated a suitable name for the foundation Hannah seemed a good choice,” says Salveson. “She was ‘northern’ to her core, politically and culturally, a working class socialist and feminist with a down-to-earth approach to getting things done.

“The fact she is not well known isn’t a problem; a more famous figure always carries ‘baggage’ and the idea isn’t to slavishly copy all her political interests but use her as an inspiration for our work.”

Hannah Mitchell’s autobiography, The Hard Way Up, is long out of print but if you’re lucky you can find it in second-hand bookshops.

More about the Northern Socialist Network and Hannah Mitchell Foundation can be found on Salveson’s website at www.paulsalveson.org.uk/northern-socialist-network/

We are doing this, first, because the last edition was published in our centenary year, 1993, which makes it rather dated, and secondly, because there is a growing interest in our history among political activists, Labour politicians and academics. So this seems like a good time to proceed.

To help with the process, we are publishing the whole of the original pamphlet on the website and we hope readers will take the opportunity to respond and comment on the material.

We aim to put the text online in six stages, starting below with the chapters which deal with the early years of the ILP and the birth of the Labour Party. Each of these instalments will be supplemented by a series of ‘side stories’, boxed out material from the original pamphlet which highlight some important aspects of the ILP’s journey.

It is then over to anyone who wishes to respond to do so. This will help us to enrich what we hope will be a moving account of how different generations of people have sought to build a better society.

Of course, if you wish to purchase the printed version of the pamphlet, complete with images and historical photographs, you can do so from our publications page – we still have a few copies left.

—-

The ILP: Past & Present

Ethical socialism

The early ILP did more than play a key role in setting up and sustaining the Labour Party, however. It made a unique contribution to socialist movement in another way: through the distinctive quality of many of its members’ politics.

Its largely working class membership favoured a very ethical, indeed evangelical, approach to socialism. They wished to live their socialism, to put it into practice, to prefigure the sort of society which they wished to create.

ILPers brought to their politics a passionate moral fervour, a burning desire to redress the injustices and suffering of people’s daily lives under capitalism. As a result, they tried to reconstruct their whole environment and to foster a spirit of comradeship and community. They built their own meeting halls using them for political, social and cultural activities, and as places for the political education of the young.

Through the Labour Churches some countered the Christian doctrine of original sin with a belief in the essential goodness of humanity. The bible’s commandments were replaced by socialist precepts including, “Honour the good, be courteous to all, bow down to none.”

The Leeds-based photographer and poet, Tom Maguire and the popular campaigner, Caroline Martyn, ruined their health propagating the cause and both died relatively young as a result.

Sometimes the moral fervour lent itself to abuse and manipulation. Skilled party leaders, like Ramsay MacDonald, could draw upon the desire for socialist fellowship to disarm their critics by accusing them of “uncomradely behaviour”.

But at its best, the ILP provided an educative and creative environment. People without formal education had the chance to develop skills of public speaking and organising. Here was a workers’ university where they could mix with all sorts of people and argue about all kinds of subjects – from vegetarianism to Marxism, from art to free school meals.

The ILP offered space for the ‘new women’ to explore the meaning of feminism in practice as well as in theory. In Sheffield, Edward Carpenter, courageously opened up the issue of male-female relationships and gay sexuality.

The youthfulness of the movement gave it an energy and a confidence. Theirs was an exuberant, crusading spirit which often obscured the more precise questions about socialist strategy (in marked contrast to many European socialists’ debates of the period). They saw socialism and the “new life” flowing from their living examples as socialists. It was often assumed that socialism would simply come about as more and more people were won to the cause.

The strength of this alternative culture was that it was a powerful motivating force which bound its members closely together. Not only did it encourage the participants to uphold their socialist vision, but it responded to their deeper, emotional needs and gave them a sense of purpose. But, valuable as it was, the religion of socialism was not enough. It offered little guidance on how to chart a clear path through a dangerous, duplicitous and complex world.

This alternative tradition remained a strong influence in the movement – and for a long time at that – but increasingly, electoral pressures came to prevail, particularly in the Labour Party. Winning the hearts and minds of the working class for real change was subordinated to appealing for their votes in the here and now. As a result, the more ‘controversial’ elements of the alternative culture patchwork, like interest in gender and sexuality as political issues, were marginalised.

All this amounted to a serious loss. Indeed, if socialism is to be renewed, the pioneers’ ethical concerns offer some important lesson. For while there can be no simple return to that age of innocence – indeed clarity about political strategy is essential – the moral dimension to socialist politics is also crucial. As is the need to build a living community capable of sustaining it.

The ILP and the Labour Party

From the outset relations within the Labour Party were often tense. At a time of massive unemployment, for example, the performance of the new Labour Party in the Commons seemed lacklustre and uninspiring. Most Labour MPs appeared to be little more than tame supporters of the Liberals.

Rank and file concern about the political direction of the Labour alliance during these years is shown by the dramatics actions of the controversial, young ILP militant, Victor Grayson. Against the express wishes of many national union leaders, and therefore without the national ILP’s consent, he stood and won the Colne Valley by-election in 1907.

Backed as the ‘Labour and Socialist’ candidate, Grayson received support from the ILP branches for three main reasons. First, because they were worried about what they saw as the dead hand of the unions. Secondly, they were increasingly unhappy about the displays of deference being shown by party leaders in parliament. Thirdly, they were concerned about the constraints arising from the electoral understanding between Labour and the Liberals. This expressed itself in their demand to contest Liberal-held seats as a matter of urgency.

Behind this opposition lay two different strands of thought in the ILP. Some simply wanted Labour to adopt more aggressive politics, while others wanted to break the links with the unions and to unite with other socialist parties.

A further sign of these tensions was the publication in 1910 of what was known as the Green Manifesto, a call to reform the Labour Party. Written by four newly-elected members of the ILP national council, they condemned the deals with the Liberals. They argued that instead of the parliamentary party engaging in electoral pacts and tactical alliances in the Commons, “Labour must fight for socialism…against both the capitalist parties impartially.”

Earlier, Keir Hardie, now MP for Merthyr, had shown equal concern about developments in the Labour Party, even though he knew of the deals with the Liberals. Expressing his worries about Labour’s timidity, he felt moved to write: “I grow weary of apologising for the state of things for which I am not responsible and with which I have scant sympathy,” adding “when the miners come in the Annual Conference will be controlled by coal and cotton, and…that means more reaction. There are times when I confess to feeling sore at seeing the fruits of our years of toil being garnered by men who were never of us, and even now would trick us out….”

Votes for Women

But if Keir Hardie was sometimes despondent about the results of his handiwork, he did play an important role in gaining labour movement support for women’s suffrage.

As a result of much agitation, the nineteenth century had seen a slow and hesitant extension of the franchise to men. By the end of the century, men who owned property or who paid rent, had the vote. Now an increasing number of women wanted their political rights too. But both the Liberal and Conservative parties were opposed to women’s suffrage and treated the idea with a mixture of patronising derision and anger.

Through his close links with Sylvia Pankhurst and ILP women’s suffrage campaigners like Isabella Ford, Hardie influenced the ILP’s support for women’s suffrage at a national level.

The ILP’s position, which owed much to the hard and relentless activist of many women ILPers at the grass roots, also set the tempo for the Labour Party’s approach. Namely that partial advances to extend women’s suffrage were better than none. This was a recognition of the fact that many men still need the vote.

As a result, relations, particularly at national level, were often strained between the ILP and the most militant wing of the suffragettes, the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). Matters deteriorated when the WSPU began attacking Labour election candidates.

Led by the former ILPers, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, a formidable and dictatorial mother-and-daughter team, the WSPU saw votes for women as paramount. They became more concerned to win friends at the top than to win working class support, and this estranged them from Sylvia Pankhurst whose main efforts were directed at women in London’s impoverished East End.

Increasingly their outlook diverged from longstanding suffrage campaigners like Isabella Ford of Leeds whose deep involvement with and commitment to women textiles workers fed and informed her support for votes for women. But at local level relations between ILPers and the WSPU were not always quite so tense and there were some who continued to belong to both.

The outbreak of the first world war, which was to have a profound effect not only on the British labour movement beut on the course of European socialism, overshadowed the fight for women’s suffrage. However, by the end of the war the government had accepted the principle. In 1918, women over the age of 31 were given the vote. It had taken 30 years persistent and varied campaigning to achieve (it took another decade before women over 21 to be enfranchised).

The First World War

The war shattered the apparent unity of the European socialist movement which had pledged to oppose the fighting. With a few honourable exceptions, most national parties backed their own government’s war efforts.

In Britain, ILP members actively opposed the war although, characteristically, this was for a range of different reasons. Many working class members were committed pacifists. The British labour movement was split in its attitude to the conflict and to the later introduction of conscription.

While Labour parliamentarians participated in Lloyd George’s war cabinet and trade union leaders toured the country appealing for men to take up arms, thousands of young male ILPers were jailed for non-cooperation and many thousands of women ILPers crusaded for peace.

Trade union leaders also co-operated with industrialists in controlling the manor industries and much working class resistance to the conditions imposed from above too on a syndicalist character. The Russian revolution, particularly the overthrow of the czar in February 1917, was welcomed by the Left in Britain. There was a greater ambivalence about the Bolshevik revolution that October but these dramatic events did contribute to a wider self-confidence and radicalism among many workers.

The Great War is said to have killed Hardie (who died in 1915 shortly after making a most moving speech in Bradford) but it helped make the Labour Party. Not only did it gain experience in government, but war-time controls strengthened the view that state intervention was not only possible but achieved results.

Buy The ILP: Past and Present here

Read other extracts from The ILP: Past & Present here, including:
ILP History 1: The Early Years
- Great Expectations
- Beginnings in Bradford
- Independent Women
- Living for that Better Day
ILP History 3: Labour’s Rise and Disaffiliation
- Strongholds of the ILP

The ILP met him at the House of Lords last month to talk about his ideas. This is the first part of a two-part interview.

Part 1: Labour, tradition and the key to renewal

Last time Labour lost office in 1979, the party tore into itself and the result was very damaging. This time it’s been very different. Why do you think that is?

The overwhelming difference is that then there was a notion of the socialist path not taken, that the Wilson and Callaghan governments were a betrayal of socialism, and that there was a viable socialist strategy which could have been adopted if only we hadn’t sold out.

There’s a far greater sense, now, that two gods failed. First, the free market god, and the other is state socialism. The idea that we lost the last election because we didn’t spend enough money – it just doesn’t sit quite right.

So there’s an ideological difference there.

Secondly, I think there’s a widespread understanding that relationships within the party leadership were dreadful over the period of the government, genuinely dreadful, and that we’re better than that, not worse than that.

I’ve said some very harsh things about Blair and Brown, but not in the sense of them being wicked and evil people, more that they were naïve and pompous.

Third, there are various aspects of the Labour tradition that aren’t straightforwardly statist, that are committed to democracy, that are committed to a resistance to capitalism on the basis of a democratic association. So I also have some quite awkward things to say about the idea of a bunch of Oxbridge PPE graduates running the country. So we need a far greater distribution of power as well as wealth.

What’s amazed me is there is a real thirst for understanding what went wrong. What went wrong is not a betrayal story but one of a relational weakness and an ideological weakness. The traditions are capable of renewal – that is the key.

Then, I’ve also got to give Ed [Miliband] credit. Ed’s kept the space open and hasn’t demonised. He’s genuinely allowed the space to grow.

And the fifth thing is that people now realise we are much more complicated than we used to think – they understand that we can be radical and conservative; that it’s not wrong to care about your parents and your children; and that issues like quality are important as well as equality. I think there’s just a whole generational change where people are aware of complexities.

But – and this is the big but – huge change has got to come. And we mustn’t let the generally good way we’ve dealt with the first year stop those changes now.

I think the hard stuff is coming. There are going to be winners and losers but there has to be significant change within the party, in what we do, what we stand for, and who we represent.

Where do you see those lines of conflict?

Basically, if we think we are going to win on a public sector, unionist, Keynesian agenda – forget it, just really forget it. In my experience, if you ask the public who they think the three big powerful interests are they’d say Murdoch, they’d say the City of London, and they’d say the public sector unions. In Labour we talk about unions as if they are saving the babies – but, you know, we don’t get it.

I think the idea you can just have a permanent public sector stimulus won’t work. We’ve got to move much more towards an economic democracy, to a balance of power in corporate governance, to an embracing of regional particularities. All of these involve facing up to equality, universalism, and Keynesian state theory.

As a family we’ve done well up till now, but we lost, in the second-worst defeat since universal suffrage, we lost defending both the bankers and the bureaucrats … you know, 4.5 million working class votes.

So it’s big therapy [we need]. We’ve got to talk straightforwardly and honestly.

I go to speak to Labour Party groups outside London and there’s a real interest in guild socialism, in the ILP, in these neglected parts of the tradition that spoke of different ways of doing politics.

And there’s the stuff going on all over the world, there’s occupations of financial centres. Where are we, it might as well not be happening.

So I think we’ve done well, so far, but we’ve got to learn some really big things without being uncivil.

So far we’ve been soft in our disagreements, but in two years we’ve got to be putting a credible case to the country about why voting Labour would make the country a better place, and if we are not talking about the things that people think will make the country better, then the Conservatives will win.

As I understand Blue Labour, it is a serious and creative attempt to reconnect the party with its traditions, which New Labour effectively severed (although you argue that there was also some separation in the post-war period). So Blue Labour is a challenge to those ‘progressive’ solutions that promoted subordination to the market. Is that a useful summary?

That’s a great summary. The only thing I would add is that the Labour tradition is deeply rooted in the country, and it is a patriotic politics. It is about the common good of the country.

There’s a real commitment to family life, to Parliament, to … well, I don’t want to get into an argument about the monarchy.

It’s a paradoxical thing. All of us, I think, are both radical and conservative, democratic and love liberty … and we don’t have to make a call on that. What this offers is a balance. You can be those things – you can be both Labour and independent, for example.

How do you view the conservative, less progressive aspects of those working class traditions? Blue Labour has been accused of being nostalgic. How do you answer that criticism?

The answer I suppose is that it’s not just about working class conservatism, it’s also about middle class conservatism – the concern with status, with a sense of order, the idea that that’s been really disrupted by a very financially-driven globalisation process.

The big thing that happened in the early to mid-90s was the last big discussion about political economy. Roughly speaking we went for endogenous growth, for flexible labour markets and the financial sector, and that was considered modern.

The book that I wrote at that time was arguing that the German system – which had worker representation on boards, very strong vocational training, regional banks, very strong federal forms of democratic government – was actually better suited to globalisation because it preserved knowledge, trust, institutions, skills …

Now, I think the results of our experiment are in and we really got it wrong.

So there’s a notion of modernisation that involves no belonging, no institutions, an individual and a collective, but no intermediaries. But that’s not modern, I argue, that’s just completely utopian in a kind of mad way.

We are by definition, social beings connected to others. But also there are traditions that keep us bounded and routed in important ways.

So, the short answer is I hate nostalgia because it sentimentalises things, but equivalently, I hate what I call hyper-modernism because it has no understanding of the meaning of life.

We all have to reckon with questions like, ‘Did we do enough for our parents?’ ‘Were we good colleagues?’ This is actually what drives us. ‘Were we faithful?’ ‘Did we honour our children?’ ‘Were we good neighbours?’

These are much more living concerns than ‘Did it lead to a more egalitarian distribution?’

I should say, I wasn’t expecting Blue Labour to grow to the extent that it has. I’m an organiser by background, so I thought the party needed a massive dose of agitation. I wasn’t thinking that these things would suddenly find themselves on the front pages of newspapers, I really didn’t.

So I take responsibility for provoking some of the misunderstandings. But some of them just come from right back in the 1840s when the labour movement started and people began resisting the domination of reality by the rich – then, the immediate accusation against all forms of protection of skilled work, all forms of attempts at democracy, was nostalgia.

So there’s something about free market economics, something about liberalism, that defines its opponents in that way. And that’s the fight. The fight is to have an absolutely constructive alternative that speaks to the real needs of the country in which democracy is a crucial component.

The ‘Blue’ bit also needs a bit of justifying – that came from my own personal experience.

The Labour movement comes from faith – in the north, Catholic; in the midlands and the south, very strong non-conformist traditions – and from the love of labour. The clue, as I never tire of saying, is in the title: Labour. Work. The work ethic. And the ethics of work.

But when I speak of these things a lot of people who are considered to be on the progressive left think they are conservative issues. They wanted to talk about abstract things – equality, diversity, justice.

So the ‘Blue’ came in just to re-balance the books; just to say, ‘Look, it’s possible to be traditional and radical, and most people are that way.’ People are both angry about the world, and they love it. They don’t want to live somewhere else; they want this place to be better.

In your article, ‘Labour as a radical tradition’, you offer a metaphor of its traditions in terms of the family – sisters, parents and grandparents, and ancestors. I wonder where you think the ILP fits in that picture?

The ILP is a bit muted in that depiction in that it was pretty elitist. But it also had a massive streak of the Labour aristocracy in it. Simultaneously, it had a really robust democratisation agenda, and an internationalist agenda.

So the reason I trod very carefully with the ILP there is that I think the ILP is the real thing, it’s a genuine mix of the radical and the traditional, it’s a genuine mix of the local and international – it had these things. And because the Labour Party was so dead at the time of its birth, stuck with a kind of fiscal conservatism, the ILP was a repository of a lot of energy.

So I would say the ILP had close relatives on both sides of the family.

My feeling was that the ILP was astride these traditions and as they moved apart that split it apart.

Indeed, and that’s why it couldn’t actually grow to be the mainstream. The tensions within it were genuine contradictions, not a paradox.

And they were within the people themselves. I’m reading about Philip Snowden. Here was a man who was known as the ‘prophet of socialism’, ‘St Philip’ in his own community, who had 3,000 people at his funeral, after all he’d done – and yet of course he was caught up in the issues around the analysis of the economy, and those decisions he made…

Yes, we have to love Philip Snowden. He said, ‘There’s more to this than money.’ I have my heresies and Snowden is a Blue Labour hero. He was a genuine ethical organiser and socialist. Roughly speaking he said there’s much more to what we are trying to do than just borrowing money and giving it to people.

Tawney said a great thing around about the same period. He said, ‘We always promise too much and ask too little.’ And that’s very Snowdenian. So I’m very happy to honour Philip Snowden. This is the first time I have but it’s been a long time coming.

Reading what other Blue Labour thinkers like Marc Stears and Jon Cruddas, are saying, it seems there is a pattern emerging here about reconciling the idealists and realists, in Stears’ words, or the prophets and rationalists, in Cruddas’ terms. Do you see it in a similar way?

Just so people understand the context, there’s a number of people – Jon Cruddas, Marc Stears, Duncan Weldon (an economist at the TUC), James Purnell, and others – who are part of this conversation. If we got together and started looking at the things we disagreed about we’d be there all day.

So there are tensions. It’s well known, for example, that I’ve got a much harder view of welfare, because I don’t like the idea of people sitting in houses on their own, with barely enough to eat, and that’s somehow an achievement of socialism. That grates against me. Jon Cruddas has a genuine moral commitment to a much more universal, non-contributory system.

So these are all conversations that are being held in a really decent way. But what unites us all is the idea that the Labour tradition is the key to renewal, that there has been a dearth of working class leadership, which is shocking, and that there has been an atrophy of local democracy.

Where we all kind of agree is that it is going to be paradoxical – local and international, conservative and radical – and we have got to push both sides.

Jon is exemplary in this way – he is genuinely radical, deeply conservative in his disposition, and so on.

So idealists and realists, prophets and rationalists – I would say that we all in ourselves carry two fundamental commitments: one is a genuine desire to be good with the people we are with; and the second is to try and make a better world. And it’s about how that works out.

What’s vital is that the conservational space grows. So this is also an invitation to the ILP to enter the space.

–

Maurice Glasman was talking to Barry Winter and Matthew Brown.

Part 2 of this interview will be published shortly.

Read Attlee, the ILP and the Romantic Tradition by Jon Cruddas here.

The Labour Tradition and the Politics of Paradox, edited by Maurice Glasman, Jonathan Rutherford, Marc Stears and Stuart White is an e-book available from Soundings.

Thank you very much for inviting me to speak about Clement Attlee. It is not an easy task. Attlee is our only ‘really unknown’ prime minister, as Ken Morgan said, borrowing a term applied to Bonar Law.

A host of very readable biographies exist, yet there remains a sense of something hidden deep within the character of the man. His letters to his brother, Tom, and poems provide some insight, certainly compared to his own autobiography and other limited reminiscences. He is an elusive figure – ‘difficult to know and easy to underrate’, as Jim Callaghan remarked.

So this ‘unknown’ figure has tended to be defined by others, often in a featureless form. This starts with the notion of the ‘accidental leader’ put around by those who did not survive 1931 – the party was to be led by a ‘little mouse’, said Hugh Dalton in 1935. It builds with the portrait of a technocrat and of a man perceived to lack warmth and vision, argued by the likes of Michael Foot; colourless, taciturn. Churchill supposedly suggested he had ‘a lot to be modest about’.

The effect is political diminishment: he was a functional figure overseeing the actions of others, chairing a cabinet of great talents. This is underwhelming, indeed undermining. Let’s call this ‘the orthodox Attlee’.

Is this portrait a correct one? I admit my own ignorance.

Within a sentimental party my personal preferences tend toward the pioneers of the Independent Labour Party.

At the 1935 party conference, in an unnecessary piece of theatre, George Lansbury was pulled down by an Ernest Bevin hostile and contemptuous of the ILP: ‘Let their bleeding ’earts run away with their bleeding ’eads,’ he said.

I assumed 1935 changed the whole sentiment of the party. The ILP disaffiliated in 1932, yet October 1935 was when we turned away from the ILP tradition – indeed the generation – of Hardie, MacDonald and Lansbury.

In the furnace of the late 19th century they had built a charged, passionate socialism of human virtue, creativity and self-realisation that sought to recapture alienated labour and enclosed land.

In its place came the abstractions of the middle class rationalists; various socialisms of deductive reasoning; science and the value theories of Marx, Smith, Mill and Ricardo.

In the thirties – the ‘low dishonest decade’ described by Auden – this played out alongside the defeat of the party intellectuals, of Cole and Tawney, again at the hands of Bevin.

This was victory for the professionals, pragmatists and operators over the prophets. The page turned toward the younger planners and economists around Dalton. The unions retreated into organisation. Literally, as the hailstones smashed into the Brighton Conference centre in 1935, the party lost part of its history.

Attlee’s leadership built on removal and closure. It was a triumph of rationality and managerialism; a socialism of calculus and planning; graphs and levers. Cold. This is my own portrait, if you wish, of ‘the orthodox Attlee’.

Hidden fire

On the 7^th May this year I was invited to say a few words about George Lansbury. We were dedicating a plaque to him on the Bow Road in London’s east end, in the church he worshipped in for 40 years, to mark the 700^th anniversary of Bow Church where his funeral cortege had arrived five years after the hailstones hit the Brighton roof.

It was a magnificent ILP and Christian socialist event. There were hundreds there, including 80 of the Lansbury family, plus his biographer John Shepherd, his granddaughter Angela Lansbury, and Lord Peter Hennessy.

I spoke about Lansbury as the greatest opposition leader, a man with a politics of virtue and decency, and about the ILP notion of fellowship. Attlee benefited when Bevin struck down both this man and this tradition.

At the close the eminent Lord leaned across and we exchanged friendly words, but quietly he suggested I continue my research into Major Attlee. John Shepherd thought a trip from Bow to Stepney might be of use.

Weeks later I was invited to give this lecture. I would formally like to thank University College Oxford for their role in my political re-education.

I suggest today that, quietly, though often crowded out by orthodoxy, we can discover a different character, a man revered by the likes of Manny Shinwell and Fenner Brockway. Scratch beneath the veneer and reveal an ‘inward serenity … a moral and intellectual quietness … born of conviction’, according to Donald Soper. Francis Packenham talked of ‘the most selfless politician of the first rank … but the most ethical PM in the whole of British history’. You search and find – to quote an aide of Mountbatten – that ‘the man burns with a hidden fire’.

Is this a man who through acute shyness, and as an act of conscious political disguise, trained himself to withdraw and underwhelm? Who locked himself down in order to effectively pursue his socialism built around notions of duty and service?

The man who literally held his hand when he died, his manservant Alfred Laker, noted that he ‘had a depth of feeling he took care to keep hidden’. He disguised powerful emotions. He trained himself to lead through acute self-discipline. If so, an extraordinary story emerges of the creation of a political persona.

Revered by some, deemed impenetrable by others. How do we render intelligible the man when those who worked alongside him admit failure? Morrison said to Callaghan: ‘I’ve known Attlee for 25 years but I still don’t understand him.’

Patriot and hero

First, let’s briefly review the broad phases of his career.

On leaving University College, Attlee trained as a lawyer, and was called to the bar in 1906. From October 1905 he began his association with Haileybury House, a boy’s club in Stepney. From 1907 he took over as the club manager, beginning 14 years’ residence in east London. In 1909 he became lecture secretary to the campaign to popularise the Minority Report on the Future of the Poor Law. In 1910 he accepted the role of secretary of Toynbee Hall in Whitechapel. In 1911 he became an official explainer of the 1911 Lloyd George National Insurance Act. In 1912 he was appointed a lecturer at LSE.

During World War One Attlee served with the 6^th South Lancashire Regiment. He was the last but one to leave the beach at Gallipoli. Brockway later said: ‘He never displayed his emotions, but he would tell quietly of the barbarities he had seen.’ Badly wounded at El Hannah, after rehabilitation he served the last three months of the war on the Western Front. He was a patriot, and hero.

Officially discharged 16^th January 1919, he caught the tube straight to the east end. The same year Major Attlee became the youngest ever Mayor of Stepney. He supported Lansbury and the Poplar Rates Rebellion in 1921 and was elected MP for Limehouse in 1922. He backed Ramsay MacDonald over Clynes and became his Parliamentary Private Secretary.

In the first Labour Government of 1924 Attlee served as Under Secretary of State for War. Four and a half years of opposition followed. His appointment to the Simon Commission meant he had no immediate role in the second Labour government. Subsequently he replaced Oswald Mosley as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and in 1931 became Postmaster General.

In 1931, the government fractured under the orthodoxy of MacDonald, Phillip Snowden and Montagu Norman (Governor of the Bank of England), and following the appointment of the May Committee. He described MacDonald’s actions as ‘the greatest betrayal in the political history of this country’. Labour was reduced to 46 MPs plus five ILPers. Attlee held on by 551 votes and was deputy leader to Lansbury. In 1934, he became acting leader for nine months when Lansbury fell and nearly died. Later he defeated Greenwood and Morrison for the leadership.

As Leader of the Opposition Attlee orchestrated the retreat from Labour pacifism, and by November 1937 he had forced the government onto the back foot over spending and appeasement – partly aided by events in Spain which he had visited that year. In October 1938 he denounced Chamberlain over Munich, and he only joined the government in May 1940 once Chamberlain was replaced by Churchill.

On 26^th July 1945 Labour swept to power with 393 seats – its first ever overall parliamentary majority, of 146. Despite late moves by Morrison and Laski to split the party and remove him as leader, Attlee became prime minister. ‘The beneficiary of a victory he had done little to contrive,’ remarked Foot.

The next phase was building Jerusalem: family allowance; national insurance; Industrial Injuries and National Assistance Acts; the 1944 Coalition Education Act; raising the school leaving age to 15; free school milk; building on the 1911 National Insurance Act through the National Health Service.

By 1947 the government was completing 139,000 new council homes per year – all achieved despite intense economic uncertainty after Lease-Lend was stopped and subsequent loan negotiations.

Yet nationalisation was still a priority. The Bank of England, civil aviation, cable and wireless communications, and the mines were all nationalised, as was inland transport – road haulage, canals and the railways – not to mention gas and electricity, iron and steel.

In foreign affairs we had NATO and the Marshall Plan, the secret development of an independent nuclear deterrent, and independence for India.

Plots continued. Bevin refused to move against Attlee in 1947. Later Dalton resigned as Chancellor after leaking the budget. Labour retained power in 1950 yet the big figures were exhausted, some literally dying. The party split in 1951. While Attlee lay in hospital, Gaitskell provoked Bevan into resignation. That year we lost.

Attlee still contested the 1955 election as leader. But he lost and retired. He supported Gaitskell and entered the Lords. Attlee died on 8^th October 1967, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

I have rehearsed many dates and events but how do you get beneath this history?

The unorthodox Attlee

Let’s consider three elements of the Attlee character formed long before he was elected to any political office, which remain consistent throughout his political life. The idealist, the romantic and the ILP socialist. Let’s suggest they constitute ‘the unorthodox Attlee’.

Start here at University College. He entered in 1901, studied modern history and specialised in Italian. He secured a good second which disappointed him; a first might have ensured a fellowship. He later said: ‘I was at this time a conservative.’ He notes in his autobiography that Ernest Barker was ‘the only don who made much impression on me’. Kenneth Harris stated that Attlee left Oxford not very different from the schoolboy who entered. But is this correct?

An alternative interpretation might focus on the role of Barker in anchoring the future PM within the English idealism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It rejected individualism – embedding people in social relations at a time when the neo-classicists were atomising economics – and rejected empiricism and utilitarianism, searching instead for peoples’ good self.

Frank Field has argued that this movement, especially through the work of TH Green, secularised the Christianity ethic within Attlee and ‘marked him indelibly with a confidence so that he could attach absolute meanings to such concepts as duty, responsibility, loyalty and courage’, which were to stay with him for the next 60 years.

This idealism was reinforced at the LSE under EJ Urwick, himself a student of Green and of the turn of the century Toynbee Hall, later an author of the ‘Social Good’. Within Attlee it built an absolutism that translated into belief in the superiority of British institutions – including school, college, indeed, monarchy – in nurturing an ability to help live a virtuous life.

The corollary was that he saw patriotism itself as a virtue – representing loyalty to the institutions of the country, and the ‘emotion of every free-thinking Briton’, as he described it.

Fast forward some 45 years. After defeat in 1951 and through to 1966, Attlee wrote a series of short essays, obituaries, pen portraits and book reviews. His style remained short, almost terse. They show modesty and shyness yet extraordinary self-confidence and decisiveness; respect, courtesy and humour; intensity without malice; occasional barbs. These studies – of Churchill and Lansbury, Bevin and Bevan, Montgomery and George Marshall, Lord Woolton, Beatrice Webb, and many others, and specifically when discussing literature or ethics – reveal a deep humanity.

The same 1905 virtues re-appear throughout: duty, responsibility, loyalty and courage whether discussing persons and traditions, or leadership and power. Again and again, he shows a preoccupation with questions of decency, goodness, character, integrity and judgement, patriotism and England.

Yet still, on leaving this college he was a conservative.

Of course, in one sense – like much of the distinctive English left – this never changed. Roy Jenkins once said that Attlee ‘rather like Gladstone, confined his radicalism to politics. In everything else he was profoundly conservative’.

But the romantic in him was to change as he distilled a specific English socialism.

In 1954 Attlee wrote a short article entitled ‘The Pleasure of Books’. It charts his lifelong love of literature – his ‘ruling passion’ – especially the Romantic Movement and the Pre-Raphaelites. After Oxford we can identify less of a continental bent – the Italian Renaissance and Risorgimento of the political conservative – and one more distinctly anchored within English political radicalism.

It was his brother Laurence who first took Attlee to the Haileybury Club in Durham Road, Stepney, in October 1905. Yet it is the influence of his brother Tom that is critical in the making of the socialist.

Tom, the Christian socialist, was a pacifist colleague of Lansbury, disciple of FD Maurice and avid reader of John Ruskin and William Morris. After Oxford he imparted into his younger brother Clem an ‘amalgam of those artistic, religious and political ideas which were germinating in his own mind’, to quote Kenneth Harris. ‘I too began to understand their social gospel,’ wrote Attlee much later.

Freeborn Englishman

Again fast forward 50 years. In the mid-1950s, beginning here in Oxford, and after Attlee had stood down as leader, parts of the so-called ‘New Left’ sought to focus on William Morris and his work as part of a general rehabilitation of a lost historical socialist arc – one authentically English, romantic, anti-scientific, and artistic in orientation.

EP Thompson’s work, for example, is part of a distinctly political project to identify a specific English politics of virtue – in Morris himself and the broader emerging working class. The sub-title of Thompson’s biography of Morris is Romantic to Revolutionary.

Raymond Williams, in Culture and Society, defines a political, artistic and cultural tradition from Ruskin through Morris to the modern New Left.

Starting with Ruskin he focuses on his resistance to laissez faire society though artistic criticism where ‘the art of any country is the exponent of its social and political virtues … the exponent of its ethical life’.

What we value in life is taken out of the realm of political economy – of supply and demand, of calculus – and instead relates to the virtue of the labour itself, seen as the ‘joyful and right exertion of perfect life in man’.

With Ruskin the notions of wealth and value, and indeed labour, is used to attack 19^th century Liberalism for its cold utilitarianism, and instead promote a society governed by ‘what is good for men, raising them and making them happy’. What it is to become a ‘freeborn Englishman’.

The socialism of Morris is grounded in this emancipatory conception of human labour and creativity. Art constitutes a politics of resistance to life being commodified. Socialism is not some technical equation; it is the form of this resistance.

It is a continuous struggle, not just against capitalism but also left wing utilitarianism and Fabianism. Socialist change is not simply political and economic change – the ‘machinery’ of socialism, as he called it – but of heightened consciousness, self-realisation.

Morris is the key historic figure in translating a romantic approach to life and art into heightened political activity in the cauldron of 1880s England.

This period was one of change and rupture, of political realignment and struggle. Socialist responses divided between rational and romantic. For parts of the New Left, Morris remains the key figure on one side. Fabianism, utilitarianism and various scientific socialist or economistic strands stand on the other side. Half a century earlier Attlee trod a similar path to those who were to become the New Left.

In a very short piece in the Socialist Review of 1923 Attlee criticises statist, or municipal socialist traditions, and reveals this embrace of a distinct English strand. He writes, for example, that ‘the socialist movement was not merely a revolt against the unequal distribution of wealth … but a protest against the enslavement of man by the machine’, referring to the uniquely English socialist traditions learnt from his brother Tom between 1905 and 1907.

Later, in 1954, he wrote about how Morris ensured ‘literary intent merges with socialist impulse’. By early 1908 it led him to ILP membership. Formally he broke with the ILP in 1931; philosophically he never did.

The ILP and domestic socialism

Founded in Bradford in 1893 the ILP grew from the bottom up, ‘from those shadowy parts known as the provinces’, to quote EP Thompson. Its image was of bohemianism: ‘braving apathy and hostility, buoyed up by optimism, concerned not with the minutiae of political dealings but the broad uncomplicated advocacy of ethical principles’. Yet by 1931 it had descended into the ‘heart of Labour’s agony’, to quote from David Howell.

In many ways, 1895 was the critical year for the ILP. Under Hardie it turned away from the doctrinaire economism of the Social Democratic Federation and set in motion what was to become this distinctive tradition. This turn was a move away from scientific socialist elements embraced by the likes of the SDF where its ‘strange disregard of the religious, moral and aesthetic sentiments of the people is an overwhelming defect’, suggested Glasier. Instead it created a unique blend of domestic socialism.

In its notion of a ‘Labour Church’ and the ‘Socialist Sunday School’ movements with their alternative commandments, the ILP sort ‘the realisation of Heaven in this life by the establishment of a society founded on justice and love to thy neighbour’, and to ‘honour the good, be courteous to all, bow down to none’. Its politics were ethical, not materialistic.

In 1907 MacDonald wrote: ‘With the formation of the ILP, socialism in Britain entered upon a new phase. Continental shibboleths and phases were discarded. The propaganda became British. The history which it used, the modes of thought which it adopted, the political methods it pursued, the allies it sought for, were all determined by British conditions’.

It produced an evangelical, ethical, moral fervour within its politics.

In Attlee’s autobiography he counterposes his first visit to a Fabian meeting in October 1907 with him finally becoming a socialist. The Fabians – where, he remarked, ‘the platform seemed to be full of bearded men’ – ‘provided Attlee with the bridge by which he crossed to socialism. No sooner was he on the other side than he began to feel uncomfortable,’ says Kenneth Harris. ‘They would not take him far enough’.

It was patronism that he detected and a top-down culture that failed to stir him. Instead, Stepney taught him – in his own words – that the ‘working class would be fit to govern, and moreover that it had virtues and values which were in some respects superior to those of the middle class Fabians’.

Step forward Tommy Williams, an east end wharf keeper, ‘a fiery little Welshman’ who came to Haileybury House to denounce the Charity Organisation Society. His passion led directly to Attlee joining with the 15 other members of Stepney ILP in January 1908. It was this alternative socialist emotion that chimed with his literary and idealist sentiments. As Attlee wonderfully described it: ‘Williams proclaimed his socialist faith and I, listening, said, “I am a socialist too”.’

Despite many overlaps in terms of policy, membership and organisation, these were different traditions within and around the labour movement. Attlee said, in 1923, that: ‘The Fabian school of socialism, while strong in dealing with facts, was always rather weak in dealing with persons. It considered more the organisation of things than the life of the people.’

The death mask

Clement Attlee never really interested me. I bought into the carefully constructed persona. My re-evaluation began on being gently chastised in Bow Church. You discover what AJP Taylor once said, that ‘Attlee grows on you.’

I suggest the essential elements to the political character of Clement Attlee were in place by 1914. An amalgam of idealistic, romantic and socialist traditions that were to mould a politician of remarkable toughness and consistency. Yet these passions were obscured by the systematic creation of a political persona – amounting to a non-image – which has helped forge ‘the orthodox Attlee’ that we think we know and lazily turn to. Frank Field has described it as the construction of a political death mask.

His minimalism, terse manner, limited revelations and notional modesty reinforced the construction. Yet, his later short essays reveal hidden wiring; an intense, passionate socialism with antecedents within English radicalism, producing a rich, authentic, specifically English socialism.

More often than not this romantic tradition has lost out within left politics as the organisers and rationalists have won. Maybe Attlee succeeded when the ILP or elements within the New Left lost out precisely because – and quite deliberately – his political passions were locked down within a ‘rib cage of tradition’.

So what did it produce for the country and party?

The greatest contribution was in the summer of 1940. Within weeks of Labour entering the wartime coalition allied forces had retreated from the Dunkirk beaches and we were left vulnerable by the collapse of France. Churchill appeared old and isolated among his Conservative colleagues. Invasion appeared imminent. Yet by September the German strategy had changed and the blitz followed.

It is during these weeks that Attlee showed an extraordinary resolve, backed up by Greenwood, in completely resisting any notion of a negotiated peace suggested from within the Conservative ranks by Halifax and Chamberlain. Moreover, it was Attlee who brought rigour and order to day-to-day government operations and parliament, and in the drive for reconstruction.

Together with Bevin at Labour and Morrison at Supply, the Labour Party brought steel to the national mission. By the year’s end the threat of negotiation had been seen off. Throughout the rest of the war Attlee encountered major internal party tensions and divisions from the likes of Bevan and Laski – who charged him with ‘MacDonaldism’. At times his patriotic sense of duty endangered his own position. Yet what was never negotiable was the idealist absolutism chiselled into him decades before.

So Labour became embedded into the national story; it was a long way from the Zinoviev Letter. This conditioned the victory of 1945 and was maintained decades later, arguably until epochal shifts around Thatcherism.

The left has always had an uncomfortable relationship with issues of patriotism and nationhood which are generally deemed the natural preserve of the right. We cultivate alternative loyalties – to regions, races and genders.

In those critical periods, in the emergence of Attlee’s socialism, following the decline of Gladstonian Liberalism and the onset of the Boer war, much of the left sought to emphasise patriotism as pathology. Politically this tended toward a fear of the uneducated mob, those unable to resist the elemental patriotic callings inspired by the right and, consequently, to an elitist political culture on the left resistant to genuine mass participation.

This was never the nature of Attlee’s socialism. Again he was to anticipate many of the later New Left concerns. Historians such as Christopher Hill with the ‘Norman Yoke’, and Thompson on what it is to be ‘freeborn’, sought out a radical patriotism within a more democratic socialist constituency. In this you could also include George Orwell.

On taking the leadership role Attlee was central to Labour’s retreat from pacifism and in the reconstruction of a new Labour patriotic sentiment. Events in Spain and European fascism were critical, but so to was his own certainty and personal heroism, the product of enlisting in 1914, driven by a specific idealist conception of England’s institutions and virtues. We all owe the man an extraordinary debt.

And so do the poor.

One of the most fearful fates of the dispossessed was the paupers’ grave. Reclaiming the dignity of the person at the moment of death was central to early ethical socialist traditions, part of a deeper story about the dehumanising effects of capitalism and also of resistance.

Peter Hennessey and Frank Field both cite a profoundly revealing conversation between Attlee and Jim Griffiths, his welfare minister, whilst steering the national insurance reforms through the Commons. He asked Griffiths if he could move the clause to introduce the death grant.

Prime ministers do not move bill clauses, or indeed bills. But this detail is allegorical – it tells of his deeper passions, his sense of duty to the poor as humans and his resistance to other left variants which have always sought a demonisation of the poor as in some sense deserving.

It anchors Attlee within a specifically working class search for respectability, one he knew in Stepney. It takes us back to the Minority report on the Future of the Poor Law, arguably the most important public document of the last century, to which Attlee was a young campaign secretary in 1909. And it goes back to when Tommy Williams recruited him to the ILP on the basis of a burning indignation in the face of charity and the workhouse.

He rejected the high handedness of the Fabian approach to the working class and assorted eugenic elements around the rational left. Welfare, to him, was essentially ethical not transactional; more Lansbury than Webb; more ILP than Fabian.

Attlee gave unstinting support to Griffiths against those who sought to dilute his post war welfare policies. He was consistent and resolute.

‘The orthodox Attlee’ is deemed a centraliser and statist; overseeing a culture where the ‘man in Whitehall knows best’ and nationalisation is an end in itself. Indeed, it has been powerfully argued that the problems for Labour really began in 1945 because of these beliefs. Yet Attlee’s approach was more thoughtful and nuanced, driven by an ILP training that consistently sought a routemap between the guild socialist and Fabian traditions.

He backed the Poplar rebels in the twenties in stark contrast to Morrison who was to lead the later nationalisation programme. In his writings he attacked municipalisation and statism within Labour and was central to ILP policy-making with its emphasis on industrial democracy, the living wage and devolving power.

Francis Packenham stated that ‘Attlee didn’t care a damn for nationalisation’, although as leader he felt obliged to implement the party manifesto. He entered politics to build just institutions to allow people to flourish and to confront poverty. Institutional politics, parties and remedies were not the priority; he liked political rebellion.

And what of the nature of leadership itself?

What is astonishing is the way the man learnt how to lead – literally on the battlefield – through a specific combination of factors drawn from family, school and college. Duty, responsibility, loyalty and courage were the four core values he sought to uphold in the public and private domains.

He was to remain leader of the Labour Party for some 20 years, seeing off a number of challenges. In the 1950s he handed the party on in good shape, holding on, in effect, to stop Morrison. Like Lansbury before him many were resistant to him going. He commanded great loyalty, most obviously from Bevin. He was curt yet prone to acts of great kindness. He built a notion of leadership on the foundations of a conception of the human condition which he cherished.

‘True judgement is found, in my view, only in men of character. Judgement, indeed, presupposes character. Judgement comes from the capacity of learning from one’s mistakes, which requires humility.’

He steered through by managing large personalities and egos with great skill – Morrison, Dalton, Cripps, Bevan and Laski. Harold Wilson was of the belief that Attlee would have been able to keep Bevan in the cabinet in 1951 if he had not been in hospital.

It is the persona – the ‘death mask’ – that really intrigues, the way Attlee managed to lead the most radical government without exposing his own radicalism. He believed the party should be run from the left; quietly he backed Bevan over Gaitskell, yet he was cornered on a hospital bed and Bevin was dying. He felt Bevan lost the chance for leadership which he might well have supported. He refused to expel the Bevanites in 1952 and was against Gaitskell’s crusade on clause 4. He later described Wilson’s government as lacking radical fire.

The final element I want to point to again comes from Stepney – his ability to understand the essential decency and virtues of working people. It reminds you of the John Updike quote: to ‘give the ordinary its beautiful due’.

He was never the public school do-gooding charity worker. Despite his own background he genuinely became part of that working class ILP tradition of a lived socialism, romantic and utopian. I don’t see these as criticisms rather as virtues that give the left hope and meaning.

The most insightful pieces on Attlee I found were stories from Stepney printed in a short book published in Tower Hamlets – little testimonies from local people about the man, his celebration and respect for the ordinary things in life that give it meaning, and of a Labour Party embedded in that culture. The ‘death grant’ clause says it all.

A democratic patriotism

‘Attlee is a small person, with no personality, nor real standing in the movement,’ said Dalton. Vainglorious politicians often tend to lack a sense of self.

Those more grounded, disagreed. Jack Jones said: ‘His message was clear, forthright, honest, dignified and essentially humane… a great patriot and a true socialist.’

This week marks 60 years since the party defeat in 1951 and the removal of Clement Attlee as Prime Minister. Virtually 60 years before that the ILP was formed; 105 years ago Morris died.

Today the Labour Party sits, often listlessly, between poles of economic liberalism and remote cosmopolitanism, content within our abstractions and our belief in timeless values that few can readily identify. A festering English resentment builds, yet we recoil from patriotism often in the same way the left did 100 years ago.

Maybe we should return to a politics of virtue, romance and passion; maybe we should return to idealism, William Morris and the ILP.

Maybe we should turn to those enduring features of Clement Attlee – a democratic patriotism; a refusal to accept the poor as undeserving; a nuanced approach to the role of the state; leadership built on the notions of duty, responsibility, loyalty and courage – and to a party respectful of ordinary, parochial culture, not elite and remote.

Clement Attlee was arguably the greatest Prime Minister this country has ever had. But he was not the greatest Labour Leader of the Opposition – that is still reserved for Lansbury after 1931.

But neither of these was the most important individual member of the Labour movement. I suggest that accolade belongs to Tommy Williams, the fiery young Welshman who convinced the young Clement Attlee to join the ILP in January 1908. Many millions who have never heard of him are forever grateful.

–

This is a slightly edited version of the Clement Attlee Memorial Lecture given by Jon Cruddas MP at University College, Oxford on 28^th October 2011.

Details of his series of Attlee seminars, ‘Patriotism, Fellowship and the Left: Explorations in British labour History’ are available from University College.

We are inviting your comments on the ILP’s history pamphlet, The ILP: Past & Present, which can be accessed here, including The Early Years, Great Expectations and Beginnings in Bradford.

For information about the Attlee Foundation go to: http://www.attlee.org.uk/

‘I have never wavered…’, brief extracts from Attlee’s The Labour Party in Perspective, published in 1937.

‘Some thirty years ago, when I was a young barrister just down from Oxford, I engaged in various forms of social work in East London. The condition of the people in that area as I saw them at close quarters led me to study their causes and to reconsider the assumptions of the social class to which I belonged. I became an enthusiastic convert to Socialism. I joined the Fabian Society and the Independent Labour Party and became a member of my trade union, the National Union of Clerks, For many years I worked as a rank and file member of the movement, taking my share of the work of branch activities, and propaganda meetings at street corners. I shared the hopes and disappointments incidental to Socialist work…

‘After the war, as Mayor and Alderman of a Borough Council and a Poor Law Guardian, I had full experience of municipal work. I was then elected to Parliament. Circumstances called me to occupy a position of high responsibility in the movement. Throughout those years I have never wavered in my faith in the cause of Socialism. I have never doubted that the Labour Party, whatever faults or failings it may have, is the only practical instrument in this country for the attainment of a new order of society.’

The Labour Party in Perspective (1937), pages 7 & 8, ‘Introductory’

‘The deciding factor, to my mind, will not be leadership or the exact theories which are held to be orthodox Socialism. It will not be the brilliance of particular individuals. The thing that will secure the triumph of Labour will be the demonstration by Socialists in their lives that they have a high ideal and live up to it. People are converted more by what they see Socialists are than what they hear them say. Here is the responsibility which lies upon everyone in the movement.’

The Labour Party in Perspective (1937), page 285, ‘Prospect’

Read ‘Attlee, the ILP and the Romantic Tradition‘, by Jon Cruddas MP