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

The ILP in the 30s

Despite its numerical decline, the ILP remained a significant political force throughout the thirties. In addition, it retained a small but vocal parliamentary presence until Jimmy Maxton’s death in 1946.

But, if disaffiliation appeared to resolved the ILP’s dilemma about its role as a left group within the Labour Party, it posed a new and equally crucial question. What was to be its role outside the party? Squeezed between the electorally cautious Labour Party linked wit the unions, and the manipulative Communist Party linked with the international communist movement, the ILP found it had little room for manoeuvre.

Influenced by a pro-communist group in the ILP, serious consideration was given to affiliating to the Communist International. But the terms were found to be too stiff, just as they had been two decades earlier when the ILP tried to set up a alternative international movement (known as the Two-and-Half International) to build a bridge between reformist and revolutionary socialists. In particular, the ILP was unwilling to subordinate itself to Moscow’s demands.

At the same time, the ILP’s relations with the British Communist Part worsened due to the latter’s subservience to the Soviet Union. Like its counterparts in the rest of the world, the Communist Party in Britain took its political line from the Soviet leadership. That often meant rapid political changes to conform to changes in Stalin’s foreign policy. This was usually accompanied by wholesale abuse of others on the Left who disagreed. The Moscow trials and execution of former Bolshevik leaders further widened the breach between the two main left parties in Britain.

In spite of the difficulties facing the ILP in its new role, it continued with its active propaganda, including the open air meetings for which it was famous. It also retained an energetic youth section where a great many political activists were schooled.

The major campaigns of the decade had a strong ILP presence. The Unity Campaign, organised jointly with the Communist Party and Socialist League, the Hunger Marches, and the anti-fascist activities are among the better known examples. The ILP played a leading role in mobilising mass opposition to thwart the march by Oswald Mosley’s fascist through London’s East End, the heart of the Jewish community.

After the rise of fascism, first in Italy and later in Germany, the ILP actively supported the work of socialists from those countries. There was also a fierce debate about how to respond to the fascist threat while not siding with the imperialist powers.

Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia in1935 brought these matters to a head. Arguably, it led to one of the least honourable decisions taken by the ILP. At first, the ILP conference agreed to support independent working class action against Italy, to oppose its aggression, and to boycott the transport of arms and other supplies. Among the keenest supporters of this policy was a small Trotskyist group inside the ILP, led by the black writer, CLR James.

Jimmy Maxton and the parliamentary party strongly disagreed with the position. They argued that working class sanctions would be indistinguishable from other sanctions and would make war with Italy more likely. They made it clear that they felt unable to comply with the policy. As a result, the conference backed down and agreed to ballot the ILP membership.

As Fenner Brockway wrote: “I agreed at once without any illusions about the result. I knew it was inevitable that the vote would be influenced by the desire to retain Maxton and his colleagues than by the political issues.”

He was right. This led to a political attack on the ILP by the exiled Trotsky who until then, had seen it as a useful channel for his group’s activities. They then left the ILP, although CLR James continued to co-operate with the ILP in anti-colonial activities.

Spanish Civil War

In 1936, to the horror of socialists across the world, there was a fascist uprising in Spain against the elected republican government. Led by General Franco, the rebels were actively backed by Hitler and Mussolini and greatly assisted by the non-intervention of the British and French governments.

To begin with, people fought off the fascists with great courage but they were ill-equipped and the republican side was politically divided. It was also dependent for arms and other material help on the Soviet Union – and Stalin had his own very different agenda. Anxious to forge an alliance with Britain and France against Nazi Germany, he did not wish to do anything that would greatly upset them.

Obviously, developments in Catalonia and its capital, Barcelona, were particularly disquieting for him. A social revolution was taking place and society was being completely reorganised. Influenced by anarchist and socialist ideas, workers were running the factories and the local administration and peasants were collectivising the farms and taking control of the countryside.

Stalin wanted to defeat the fascist but he did not want a revolution, fearful that if he was seen to support if he would fail to woo Britain and France into an alliance. So while he encouraged Communist-led International Brigades to fight, he was also at great pains to stifle the rest of the Left and bury the revolution.

A small ILP contingent went to fight in Catalonia. Among the ILP volunteers was the writer Eric Blair, who was later to find fame under the name of George Orwell. The ILP gave particular support to the non-Stalinist, revolutionary Marxist workers’ party (POUM) which was ruthlessly suppressed by the Communists. Foreign sympathises of the POUM were jailed. Among them was Bob Smillie, chair of the ILP Guild of Youth, who died a prisoner after being arrested at the border.

Stalin succeeded in suppressing the revolution but by 1939 the fascists had won the war. Spain was to endure four decades of Franco’s oppressive rule. Tens of thousands of Spaniards lost their lives in the fighting and even more were killed when the fascists took control.

Labour Relations

It would be a mistake to suppose that the ILP’s disaffiliation from the Labour Party had ended the relationship once and for all. Not so, several attempts were made to re-open the links in the 1930s.

The most promising attempt began in 1938 with an initiative by the Labour Party leader and former ILPer, Clement Attlee. Both Labour’s executive, with a clear majority, and the ILP’s administrative council, with a narrow one, agreed the general terms of re-entry.

In supporting re-affiliation, Fenner Brockway argued that the ILP had changed significantly. He claimed: “when the ILP was in the Labour Party it had no fundamental philosophy or policy and could not act with a united purpose; but during its period outside it had developed a revolutionary socialist basis and its personnel, although smaller in numbers, had vastly improved in dependable quality; the ILP of 1938 was very different from the mixture of reformism, sentiment, utopianism and awakening revolutionism which characterised the ILP of 1932. This being so, was there not a great deal to be said for entering the Labour Party as a disciplined unit, regarding it not as a socialist party with a policy that commanded our consent, but as the class party of the workers and therefore the right and most fruitful field of activity?”

The ILP convened a special conference to decide its future. The meeting never took place. The conference was called for September 1939, the month that Britain declared war on Nazi Germany.

The two parties differed in their attitude to the Second World War as they had done to the first. Opposing involvement, the ILP saw it mainly as a battle between rival imperial powers and once again its members were imprisoned for refusing military conscription. During the war the ILP played a role in what became a broad current of radical dissent against Churchill’s coalition government and there was a revival of interest in its publications.

Actively supporting the war, Labour participated in the war-time coalition. And it emerged from the hostilities stronger, with a reforming programme, winning its first overall majority in the Commons in 1945.

After the War

Post-war Britain left the ILP in continuing decline, with the return of many of its leading figures, like Fenner Brockway, to the Labour Party. The ILP continued with its anti-colonial work, opposed the post-war Labour government’s use of troops in the docks for strike breaking, and participated in a European campaign to build a united socialist Europe.

But as it shrank so its hostility to the Labour Party increased. Although a minority of its members actively supported Labour in their localities, the formal position of the ILP towards the Labour Party really was sectarian. This purism was reinforce by those who recounted stories of left-wingers who joined the Labour Party to transform it but who were themselves politically transformed.

While the ILP continued to support a host of progressive campaigns during these years – particularly in the peace movement – it was inclined to indulge in pious resolution-mongering. Its libertarian outlook attracted people who were unhappy about the lack of tolerance and democracy on much of the left, but otherwise its politics became diffuse.

While the ILP almost sank below the political horizon in these years, it survived by a fine thread. This was due to the resources it had accumulated in earlier years but, more importantly, thanks to the loyalty and commitment of ILPers with fond memories of the party in days gone by and wished to keep something of that alive. The ILP has always been more than a political party. It was a political movement which valued socialist fellowship and this made it possible for it to renew itself.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, there was a small but significant influx of younger activists from the anti-nuclear movement, and some former members of the Communist Party who were disillusioned after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. Unhappy about the lack of radicalism and democracy in the Labour Party and wary of the politics and practices of the far left, the new generation were looking for some kind of alternative. Whatever its faults, the ILP provided them with space to rethink their politics.

In doing so, they became frustrated with the lack of direction of the ILP which by now was a very weak organisation. They challenged its lack of perspective and, as they developed their ideas, they sought to turn the ILP outwards and to reconsider the relationship of socialists to the Labour Party. Support for this rethink also came from longstanding members of the ILP.

In 1974, after several years of debate, the ILP re-adopted a socialist commitment of the Labour Party in its Outline Perspective. In 1975, it changed its constitution to become Independent Labour Publications. On both occasions there were members present who had attended the 1932 disaffiliation conference. Indeed, there were some whose experience went back to before the First World War.

A few months after the decision to change the ILP’s constitution, the national executive of the Labour Party agreed that members of the ILP could join the Labour Party and vice versa. Not only did this end four decades in which the ILP had gone its separate way from the Labour Party but it opened a new chapter in the ILP’s history.

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
- Strongholds of the ILP

]]> http://www.independentlabour.org.uk/main/2012/01/22/ilp-history-4-war-and-after/feed/ 0 http://www.independentlabour.org.uk/main/2011/12/19/ilp-history-3-labours-rise-and-disaffiliation/ http://www.independentlabour.org.uk/main/2011/12/19/ilp-history-3-labours-rise-and-disaffiliation/#comments Mon, 19 Dec 2011 10:42:29 +0000 Matthew Brown http://www.independentlabour.org.uk/main/?p=2341 The ILP is planning to rewrite and update its booklet, The ILP: Past and Present, written by BARRY WINTER, and invites you to comment online about the contents.

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

Labour’s Rise

From 1918 Labour’s star was in the ascendant. Within four years it held over 140 parliamentary seats and it began to eclipse the Liberals. Other factors lay behind Labour’s rise. In 1918, under the influence of both Sidney Webb, the leading Fabian, and Arthur Henderson, the Labour Party secretary, Labour’s organisation was transformed. From a loose electoral alliance it became a more tightly-knit machine based in the localities. Individual part membership was regularised, removing the need to join through affiliated bodies.

To overcome trade union leaders’ unease about the new local parties becoming too radical, they were accorded even greater power. Trade unions were to have control of the elections to an enlarged national executive and the separate places for affiliated socialist societies were eliminated.

In completing the reform package and to show that Labour had a sense of purpose, the party adopted Sidney Webb’s famous Clause IV, the call for the collective ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange. However, as he rather pointedly explained, his intention was to transform “the Labour Party from a group representing the class interests of manual workers into a fully constituted political party of national scope, ready to take over the government of the country”.

The changes also had a major impact on the ILP. Deliberately so, as both Labour Party and trade unions leaders were determined to ‘fix’ the left after the war. In many areas, the new local Labour parties began to siphon off many activists. No longer did the ILP hold a seat on the national executive, although some ILPers continued to hold seats in the divisional Labour Party section.

Following the party’s constitutional changes, some right-wing ILPers questioned the continued relevance of the ILP. For example, Philip Snowden MP, argued that the ILP had served its historical purpose. The left disagreed, arguing that the ILP was need to act as a socialist pressure group within the Labour Party.

For a time the ILP’s political dilemma about its role in the restructured Labour Party was resolved by the rise of Clifford Allen. An upper class intellectual with great financial skills, he sought to turn the ILP into a high-powered influential policy-making body. Having served three years imprisonment for refusing war-time conscription, he was able to secure financial support for the ILP from middle-class, pacifist sources.

Allen argued: “We must state the case for socialism so convincingly that all people of intelligence and goodwill will turn to it…if the ILP can become the instrument of such a policy, it will sweep all before it.”

As chair of the ILP, he gathered an impressive array of radical intellectuals around it. He relocated the ILP’s head office to palatial surroundings, established research and information departments, and revitalised the flagging Labour Leader newspaper which became New Leader (1922) with a highly paid editor. In addition, the ILP summer schools were transformed into largely middle-class assemblies.

He also cultivated his friendship with Ramsay MacDonald, who had been restored to the Labour leadership after the war which he too had opposed. When MacDonald became Labour’s first prime minister in 1924, Allen was a regular visitor to Downing Street.

However, Allen failed to persuade MacDonald or the Labour Party to set up commissions to prepare detailed schemes of socialist construction for when Labour was in office. So he encouraged the ILP to do so instead. The first commission, on agriculture, included the call for the nationalisation of land. Promoted by the ILP, it was adopted by the Labour Party conference.

But the commission attracting the most attention did not gain Labour’s support. Socialism in Our Time or The Living Wage (as it was also known) was to become a precursor to Labour’s reforms two decades later. It called for the immediate introduction of a fixed minimum wage for all industries and for family allowances. To provide for these the banks, mines, land, electricity and transport were to be nationalised. Any essential industry failing to comply with the minimum wage was also to be taken into public ownership.

To Allen’s dismay MacDonald instantly repudiated Socialism in Our Time as “flashy futilities”. This left Allen in a much weakened position in the ILP. Ironically, the policies formulated by his commissions contributed to his downfall. They formed part of the growing shift to the left in the ILP and they widened the rift with the Labour Party.

Fenner Brockway, then ILP general secretary, gave three reasons for Allen’s fall and Jimmy Maxton’s rise: “First the ILP was becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the MacDonald leadership of the Labour Party, particularly after the first Labour Government of 1924. Second, the rank and file outside of London, which remained proletarian, became impatient with the middle class domination of Head Office and the grand scale of its up-keep. Third the membership having accepted the Socialism in Our Time plan seriously, were in a mood to challenge aggressively the gradualism of the Labour Party.”

Growing Divide

Spearheading the criticisms of Allen’s leadership were the militant Clydeside MPs, including Jimmy Maxton and John Wheatley. Under their influence, the ILP embarked upon a more confrontational course with the Labour leadership.

A fierce and fine orator, and a deeply committed and incorruptible socialist, Jimmy Maxton reasserted the party’s class politics. He confirmed the growing conviction of many ILPers that the Labour and trade union leaderships were becoming obstacles to socialism.

During the 1926 General Strike and miners’ lockout, which the Labour leadership found deeply embarrassing, the ILP published The Miner for the impoverished mineworkers’ union, selling 90,000 copies weekly. Following the miners’ betrayal and abandonment by the TUC, Maxton and the miners’ General Secretary, Arthur Cook, himself an ILPer, published a joint manifesto denouncing all forms of class collaboration. The Cook-Maxton Manifesto, coupled with the campaign for Socialism in Our Time, which was regularly defeated at Labour Party conference, made the ILP increasingly unpopular with the Labour leadership.

These differences of political strategy came to a dramatic climax with Labour’s return to office in 1929. MacDonald’s main aim was to show that Labour was ‘fit’ to hold office. Given that the Liberals held the voting balance in the Commons, he was only prepared to introduce measures which they would find acceptable.

As a result of this approach, the minority Labour government soon found itself in deep trouble with its own supporters. Unwilling to challenge the capitalist system, the government soon fell victim to the pressures of a capitalist recession. Public expenditure was cut repeatedly, unemployment soared, and the working class was made to bear the brunt of the crisis.

The ILP’s case, which MacDonald dismissed as mere romanticism, was that a Labour government should stand or fall by a radical programme. First, it should introduce expansionist popular measures  and, at the point when the Liberals blocked further changes, the Government should campaign with the slogan: “The people versus the banks”.

In vain, the ILP rebels in the Commons mounted a desperate resistance to the government. The remainder of the Parliamentary Labour Party dutifully voted as  instructed, obeying the call to “Trust MacDonald”. In desperation, the ILP’s executive announced that its 140 MPs must take the ILP’s whip and not the Labour government’s. Most refused and 123 MPs were expelled.

These divisions bit deep into the ILP itself. In Scotland the ILP branches condemned Maxton for voting against the government by 103 votes to 94, although the ILP nationally upheld ‘the rebels’.

As the economic crisis deepened – and as the labour movement became more resistant – Ramsay MacDonald and the chancellor, Philip Snowden, defected. In consultation with King George V, they collaborated with the Tories to form a national government, sending shockwaves through the Labour Party, but it did nothing to heal the rift with the ILP.

Disaffiliation and its Effects

The specific issue which triggered the ILP’s disaffiliation from the Labour Party was a heated debate on the relationship of the ILP MPs to the Parliamentary Labour Party. In the aftermath of the conflicts with the MacDonald leadership, the new Labour leadership insisted that ILP-sponsored MPs should now be subject to the same parliamentary whip as Labour MPs. The ILP refused.

But, as we have already shown, the roots of the conflict lay much deeper. They relate to the frustration that different generations of socialists have often felt about Labour’s lack of radicalism.

In its early years, ILPers had hoped that by creating and sustaining the Labour Party, in alliance with the trade unions, they could reach the working class and win them to socialism. By 1932, at an emotionally-charged, special conference, this approach was rejected. The branches voted to disaffiliate by 241 votes to 142.

Support for the break came from a younger generation of working class activists, angry and dismayed at the shameful record of the MacDonald minority government. Disaffiliation had significant consequences for both parties. With the ILP’s departure, the Labour Party became more manageable. The right wing were well placed to strengthen their hold, to keep down the remaining left forces and to direct the party how they wished.

Following MacDonald’s defection, Labour suffered badly in the general election. In response, trade union leaders decided to exert greater control over the party, rather than to trust the parliamentarians as they had done in the recent past. The union leaders’ efforts were made easier because the parliamentary party was in a weaker position, numerically and politically.

But what really strengthened the unions’ grip was the changing nature of the block vote. To survive the recession, the unions were merging into big general unions where power was concentrated at the top. With their massive voting strength they could, if they chose, dominate the party organisation.

Men like Ernest Bevin, head of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, began to shape Labour’s future. An alliance was constructed between ‘moderate’ parliamentarians and trade union barons that was to last for decades. The block vote became the property of a handful of trade union leaders who placed it at the disposal of right-wing Labour leaderships.

Bevin dismissed the ILP, saying that they “let their bleeding ’earts run away with their bleeding ’eads”.

For a time, the internal opposition to the Labour leadership and trade union control came from a regrouping of Labour lefts with former ILPers. Together, they set up the Socialist League but it never had the chance to establish a sizeable grass roots base along the lines of the earlier ILP.

Under the somewhat eccentric leadership of Sir Stafford Cripps (who foundered the newspaper Tribune in 1937), the Socialist League came into conflict with Labour’s tough-minded national executive. Eventually the executive expelled Cripps and proscribed the Socialist League (although Cripps was later returned to become a most conventional, post-war chancellor of the exchequer). The League disbanded.

It was not long before the ILP’s high hopes about the advantages to be gained from the split with Labour began to ebb. At first, with unemployment at record levels, with Labour’s electoral decline, and with growing international tensions relating to the rise of fascism, many ILPers had thought that a golden opportunity was at hand. For them, the crisis of capitalism was drawing near. They believed that free from the constraints of a compromised and discredited Labour Party, the ILP would be well placed to drive home the socialist message.

The membership figures for these years tell another story, however. Within four months of the fateful decision to leave, the ILP had lost one-third of its branches. Membership, which had stood at 16,773 in 1932, fell annually. By 1935 it had fallen to 4,392. Three-quarters of the membership were lost in three years.

The Socialist League did not gain many recruits from these losses. Nor did the Communist Party, even though a pro-communist group in the ILP, the Revolutionary Policy Committee, had campaigned hard for the ILP’s break with Labour. Its members joined the Communist Party three years after the ILP’s disaffiliation.

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
- Strongholds of the ILP

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.

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

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.

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The ILP: Past & Present

Early Years

The Independent Labour Party (ILP) has made a major political contribution to the British labour movement and to the cause of socialism. No assessment of the Left in Britain is complete without some understanding of its record, whether favourable or critical. Even today we live with the ILP’s historical legacy.

The ILP has remained in continuous existence since its foundation in 1893. But, while its radical spirit has been constant, it has often been transformed by different generations of ILPers striving to make socialism relevant to their times.

This short account of the ILP over the last hundred years outlines some of these developments. In doing so, it touches on many issues that socialists still need to debate more thoroughly Our main aim has been to introduce the subject in a way that encourages rather than forecloses any discussion.

Of course, we cannot avoid reinterpretation. The material that we select is bound to reflect and inform the ILP’s current political perspectives. Interpreting our history is a continuous learning process, however. All knowledge is tentative not fixed. In trying to understand the ILP’s past, we do feel that we have some useful insights to offer to those who share our desire to build a socialist society.

This study also covers the ILP’s return to the Labour Party in 1975 as Independent Labour Publications (ILP) and its role in the subsequent years as part of the Labour left. Finally, we conclude with the ILP’s decision to relaunch itself as a political pressure group in its centenary year, 1993, to work for the renewal of socialism.

Making Socialists

Over the years, ILPers have been active in a variety of different political situations. Yet many of the questions facing them are still as relevant to us today. Indeed, the way that present-day socialists respond to these questions, whether consciously or otherwise, will help shape the future prospects of socialism, just as the actions of past generations have influenced the present.

For example, how do we ‘make socialists’ in an anti-socialist environment> How do we sustain a living political community in a hostile world especially when the prospects look bleak? How do we combine fellowship, democracy and heated political debate?

More questions then suggest themselves. What is the relationship between parliamentary and extra-parliamentary struggles? How should socialists respond to feminism and other movements? How should the Left relate to the non-socialist, working class and their organisations, in particular trade unions? And last, but by no means least, how should socialists relate to the Labour Party once it has been established?

From the beginning these issues greatly influenced the founders of the ILP who were politically isolated from the vast majority of people. The pioneers knew that they lived in an environment hostile to socialist ideas but they believed it was possible to overcome this, to change peoples’ outlooks, to ‘make socialists’.

The decision about the party’s name and purpose clearly shows one of their dilemmas. Should the new group choose a name that might widen the gulf between it and the wider working class? That is, should it declare its socialism in its name as well as its purpose?

The result was a classic political compromise. Based upon the delegates’ perceptions of working class opinion, the new party consciously described itself as a party of labour rather than socialism. Then it adopted a resolution declaring its object “shall be to secure the collective ownership of all the means of productions, distribution and exchanges.”

Although it rejected a motion to restrict the party’s aims to fighting elections, the conference did commit itself, however, to seeking “Independent Labour Representation on all legislative, governing and administrative bodies”.

The founders wanted to combine the long-term aim of creating a socialist society to empower the working class with the short-term ambition of winning elections to improve the quality of people’s lives more immediately.

This strategy was not without its problems and its critics then, as it is now. A lot depends upon the weight given to the conflicting pressures of appealing for votes in a conservative culture as opposed to campaigning to transform the political culture itself.

But what sort of people were present at this founding conference and why did they attend? Most of the 120 or so delegates at the Bradford conference were young, working class men largely from the industrial north of England and Scotland. The Scottish Labour Party and the Marxist Social Democratic Federation (SDF) were also represented. There were about 80 delegates present from already-formed, local independent labour parties, plus a handful of trade unions and trades councils delegates.

These local parties had already begun to strive for and achieve independent working class representation on local councils and other local bodies. They described themselves as ‘independent’ to distinguish themselves from earlier working class public representatives linked with the Liberal Party.

Many of the socialists who founded the ILP had been deeply involved in attempts to set up the ‘new unions’ and to unionise previously unorganised workers in the 1880s and 1890s. They backed the gasworkers in Leeds and Bradford, the London dockers, and textile workers in West Yorkshire – the best-known dispute being the five-month strike at Manningham Mills in Bradford that began in December 1890.

After making swift and dramatic advances most of these initiatives foundered because of greater resistance by employers and because large numbers of these workers were sacked in the recession. In assessing these experiences, some argues that trade union struggles, while important, were not enough. That to advance the interests of the working class, indeed to make space for effective trade unionism, independent political activity was also a necessity.

The public figure who best personifies this determined break with Liberalism, from ‘Lib-Labism’ as it was known, was Keir Hardie. He chaired the Bradford conference and the following year the ILP elected him as their first president. Keir Hardie had won a seat in parliament as the Independent Labour candidate for West Ham North in 1892. His newspaper, Labour Leader (formerly The Miner), Was later to become the official journal of the ILP.

Under his influence, the national ILP began to establish itself but not without a struggle. There were many setbacks, especially when ILPers contested elections. For example, in the 1895 general election, Keir Hardie lost his parliamentary seat and no other ILP candidates were successful.

Some of the new party’s critics were quick to pronounce it dead but they underestimated the political commitment and tenacity of the socialist pioneers.

It took some time and a great deal of effort before ILPers were eventually to overcome Lib-Labism. The commitment of many trade unionists to the Liberal Party, which had grown up during the boom years of the second half of the nineteenth century, was an enduring one.

Often they faced a great deal of hostility attempting to do so. When ILPers contested the Barnsley by-election 1897, they came into sharp conflict not only with the Liberal Party but with the Yorkshire miner’s association, whose president was a Liberal MP. So angry were the mineworkers in one pit village that they welcomed Hardie and the ILP candidate with a hail of stones.

Trade union alliance

Influenced by such experiences, many ILPers concluded that it was vital to end their isolation from the trade unions. That if the ILP was too take the socialist message to the working class and to win their votes, it had to forge and alliance with the unions. This decision has left and indelible mark on the labour movement.

To begin wit, it meant campaigning for a broad-based party of labour within the unions. Growing economic instability made this work somewhat easier and trade unionists more receptive. As the century ended and as the recession bit deeper, trade unions came under attack from the capitalist class and from unfavourable court rulings which threatened their existence. In the process, the Liberals proved to be unsympathetic to the cause of labour, showing that they were as much a party of the employers and the establishment as the Tories.

Keir Hardie and the ILP supported trade union action, helping, advising and raising money for strike funds. Largely through the efforts of ILPers active in the unions the policy of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) was changed. In 1899, the TUC finally agreed that it would seek independent working class representation in parliament. Given its earlier hostility to the Left, this marked a significant and hard-earned breakthrough.

Labour party

Over 100 national trade unions (not including the miners) attended the founding conference in London, together with representatives from the ILP, the Fabian Society and the Social Democratic Federation (SDF).

Almost a decade older than the ILP, the Fabian Society was largely of a body of middle class reformers. London was their political centre of gravity. Late converts to the idea of a new party of labour, the Fabians had originally argues for ‘permeating’ the Liberals with their detailed policies for progressive reform. But their views changed as this strategy made little headway.

Even at its birth in 1900 the Labour Representation Committee – which was to become the Labour Party in 1906 – was a compromise. Rejecting the call from the Marxist SDF for a “recognition of the class war” and for the “socialisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange”, the founders instead opted for the ILP’s much looser formulation. Unhappy with this decision the SDF soon broke away.

It was Keir Hardie who moved the successful resolution defining the party’s purpose as setting up “a distinct Labour Group in parliament”. He did so conscious that the trade union leaders were unwilling to consider any wider political commitment.

Thus the fledgling Labour Party was not socialist. Nor could the individual members belong to it directly. To join, it was necessary to belong to either an affiliated trade union or one of the socialist societies. So while this development represented a clear organisational break with the Liberals, radical liberalism as a set of political ideas, rather than collectivism, still remained a major influence within Labour’s ranks.

None the less, an important new chapter in the history of the labour movement and British politics had begun. At the same time, the ILP’s isolation from official trade unionism was ended, but a heavy price was exacted. The unions had a small but clear majority on the national executive committee of the party and the party’s supreme policy-making body, the annual conference, was dominated by the trade union block vote.

Leading ILPers, notably Ramsay MacDonald, provided the Labour Party’s first generation of parliamentary leaders and so began the process of accommodation of labour leaders into the political system. MacDonald was not alone in equating his own personal rise from poverty to political office with the course that Labour should follow. For him the party would win power and achieve socialism through an inevitable, but gradual, evolutionary process.

Meanwhile, the ILP itself provide the main agitational rank and file base of the Labour Party in the constituencies. Its members led the campaigns to win support from the wider working class.

Buy The ILP: Past and Present here

Read other extracts from The ILP: Past & Present here, including:
Great Expectations
Beginnings in Bradford
ILP History 2: Ethical Socialism
Independent Women

The schedule is:

11am, Monday 7 November
: ‘Labour and Patriotism from Jameson to 1945’

11am, Monday 14 November
: ‘Labour and the New Left: Reclaiming an Authentic English Socialism’

11am, Monday 21 November
: ‘Labour, Patriotism and Economic Liberalism: The Failures of Keating and 
Blair’

All seminars take place in the Swire Seminar Room, University College. All welcome.

Conveners: Dr Ben Jackson and Professor Marc Stears

Any enquiries about this event should be directed to Dr Ben Jackson.

More information from University College.

Already accessible in the About section of this website, this sets out the organisation’s perspective on capitalism, markets and democracy, the role of political agencies and the Labour Party in progressive change, and the state of the left.

It was drafted by the ILP’s National Administrative Council and received broad endorsement from ILP members and Friends at the ILP Weekend School in Scarborough on 7/8 May 2011.

If you would like hard copy version contact us at info@independentlabour.org.uk.