Doctrine and Ethos in the Labour Party

H. M. Drucker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429810503
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Labour Economics
• Index: Economics

First published in 1979. In this important study of Labour Party ideology, the author sought to provoke his readers to a fundamental re-evaluation of the party and of the relationships between the party, Labour ideology and socialist doctrine. What he had to say would have disturbed left and right wings alike within the party, while remaining accessible to students and general readers at all levels who have an interest in the considered analysis of British politics and the concept of ideology.

1

Two Dimensions of Labour’s Ideology

I

In April 1976, James Callaghan was selected as leader of the Labour Party, and hence Prime Minister, by a vote of his colleagues in the Parliamentary Labour Party. This was the first time that the Parliamentary Labour Party had chosen a man leader knowing he would become Prime Minister. Callaghan was only the fourth leader the party had chosen since its recovery in 1935 from the depths of betrayal and division in 1931. In that time, by contrast, there had been eight leaders of the Conservative Party. There had even been four monarchs (and one of them was forced out).

The Labour Party changes leader infrequently. Once it selects a man it is very reluctant to dispose of him against his will. Only Lansbury was forced out – in 1935. No Labour Prime Minister had been forced out. None has even had to defend his position in an election. And while the party has been in opposition the only leader to be challenged to an election was Gaitskell (by the importunate Harold Wilson, in 1960), and he was solidly supported even though his policies were unpopular in the party. That Wilson was not himself challenged in the years of Conservative government after his premiership of 1964–70 – when he was most unpopular – speaks worlds for the strength of Labour’s tradition.

This traditional tenderness to its leaders is, I want to argue, an important part of Labour’s ideology. In arguing in this way I am proposing to use the term ‘ideology’ in a rather broader way than is common amongst political scientists. I am proposing to use it to include the traditions, beliefs, characteristic procedures and feelings which help to animate the members of the party. This is not what commentators about the party normally have in mind when they talk of its ideology. Typically, they concentrate on the doctrinal aspects: they describe the party’s behaviour as an institution as if it were a machine for the creation and propagation of socialist doctrine and the translation of that doctrine into policy, legislation and practice. Some commentators are impressed by the party’s ability to translate its doctrines into practice; but the majority are not.

As against this exclusive emphasis on the doctrinal aspects of Labour’s ideology I want to show first of all that the party’s ideology contains another dimension, which I shall call its ethos, and then to emphasise the importance of this second dimension. Unwillingness to sack leaders is an expression of this ethos. Other expressions are: first, the way it hoards its money; secondly, the formality of its practices (i.e. their embodiment in written, often detailed, rules); and, thirdly, its demands for sacrifices from its leaders. Perhaps the best way to begin this discussion is with an analysis of the existing commentaries.

Recent writings about the ideology of the Labour Party admit of four main theses and one major modification. Chronologically, the first thesis was stated by R. T. McKenzie in British Political Parties (1963).¹ The second was stated by R. Miliband in Parliamentary Socialism (1961); it was substantially modified by Leo Panitch in ‘Ideology and integration: the case of the British Labour Party’, in Political Studies (1972).² The third is found in S. Beer, Modern British Politics (1965),³ and the fourth in a series of papers by Tom Naim, ‘The nature of the Labour Party 1 and 2’, and Perry Anderson, ‘The origins of the present crisis’, in the New Left Review (1964).⁴ McKenzie, leaning heavily for theoretical support on Ostrogorski’s Democracy and the Organisation of Political Parties, submits these gloomy reflections on the role of parties:

The distribution of power within British political parties is primarily a function of cabinet government and the British parliamentary system. … But, whatever the role granted in theory to the extra- parliamentary wings of the parties, in practice final authority rests in both parties with the parliamentary party and its leadership. In this fundamental respect the distribution of power within the two major parties is the same.

As was shown in Chapter 1 both major parties have consistently exaggerated the difference between their party organisations with a view to proving that their own is ‘democratic’ and that of their opponent is not.⁵

McKenzie’s researches led him to minimise the role of ideology in both Conservative and Labour parties. All party activity is assumed to lead to – and hence to be fairly measured by – its ability to control parliamentary activity. The constant theme of this work is the ability or incompetence of the annual conference to control the Cabinet and the leadership. The answer McKenzie comes up with, of course, is that annual conference controls neither.

This lack of control is taken to show that the party is not democratic. Whether or not we accept Professor McKenzie’s single- minded concern with the supposed democracy of the policy-making process, this is surely a singular notion of what the party is all about. The concern with democratic control – or, rather, the injured assertion that the party is not truly democratic – arises periodically within the party. Sometimes, as in the case of Mr Tony Benn, the cry is raised in order to imply that the crier understands what the party really wants. The implicit premiss is that if he were made leader he would actually listen to the party. More typically, it is the rallying call of those who are, at the moment, out of favour with the trade union leadership. The block votes which these leaders command at annual conference give them the power to control the conference. This power is said to be undemocratic. In the later 1950s it was the cry of the Bevanite left; today it is heard from the European right. McKenzie is, in effect, agreeing with those who criticise the system as undemocratic. This is to take these rallying cries too literally. It is also to think of the party (and especially annual conference) as a policy-making machine.

Professor Miliband, in Parliamentary Socialism, has an entirely different attitude to the party. He sees the history of the party, which he takes to be the history of the party in Parliament, to be a series of betrayals of the true revolutionary consciousness of the working class. Parliamentary Socialism, despite its clear moral preference for the ideas of the movement as a whole, is entirely about the ideas and actions of its leaders. Thus, it shares with the McKenzie thesis the notion that the ideology is the ideology of the leadership and that it is a kind of doctrine. Miliband argues that in becoming parliamentary, in agreeing to fight out the class-struggle within the norms of the enemy’s system, it has become part of that system: ‘The Labour party has not only been a parliamentary party, it has been a party deeply imbued with parliamentarianism. ‘⁶

Miliband’s thesis derives its (considerable) moral force from the unargued and, so far as can reasonably be seen, untrue assertion that there was a revolutionary working-class consciousness to be betrayed. Despite this, it has much to commend it. He observes that Labour leaders have behaved as they have because they have chosen to accept a particular ideology. They could have chosen to reject parliamentary methods altogether or, in 1924 and 1929, they could have refused to assume power without a parliamentary majority. Such a stance would clearly have been quite sensible in 1924 and 1929, and certainly in the latter case would have made a great difference to the history of the party. Yet it is not as clear as Miliband would have us believe that following the parliamentary path need have led to disaster. Neither is it clear that the alternatives would have led to a better result. Surely it is possible to argue that at least part of the problem of the Labour Party has been the ineptness with which it has played the parliamentary game? Skidelsky makes a powerful case that this was part of the trouble with the 1929–31 government.

Miliband’s emphasis on Labour’s acceptance of parliamentary conventions is interesting in additional ways. First, because Labour’s acceptance of the conventions of British society and government goes much deeper than that. The party has accepted the notion that the army is a neutral force. Despite provocations by the Conservatives (in Ireland) it has never tried to turn the army or the police into a socialist force even though at several times and in several places it might have tried. It made no capital out of the Invergordon mutiny over sailors’ pay or police strikes in Liverpool. It has further accepted – almost without demur – that the local authorities which it controls ought to act within the law, even when that law has been passed by a Conservative government and is opposed by Labour policy and public opinion. The few exceptions to this rule – George Lansbury’s refusal to cut unemployment benefit (then a local-authority responsibility) in Poplar and the more recent refusal of Labour councillors in Clay Cross to implement the Housing Finance Act – are exceptions which point to the rule. Both actions embarrassed the national party leaders at the time. Both Liberals and Conservatives have given ample precedents for encouraging local authorities, at the very least, not to implement legislation, but Labour has preferred to be conventional and respectable.

Labour is a very respectable party. Its acceptance, only now being challenged, of the power and method of appointment of judges is another example of how respectable it is. Acceptance of parliamentary conventions and constraints – the thing which worries Miliband – is, surely, less than surprising given the party’s general acceptance of all normal conventions. On the contrary, acceptance of parliamentary conventions makes good sense for the Labour Party since Parliament (or, at any rate, the House of Commons) is one powerful institution which Labour can reasonably expect, from time to time, to control.

Miliband’s emphasis on Labour’s parliamentarianism is also interesting because this acceptance has been accompanied by not a little suspicion in the Labour movement each time Labour has been in office (I will develop this point more fully in Chapter 5). Miliband’s book – and this surely is the reason for its popular success – articulates and gives academic authority to this suspicion. It is, that is to say, a successful attempt to mobilise part of the ethos of the movement against the party; or, at any rate, against its present leadership. In other words Parliamentary Socialism plays on the ethos of the movement while failing to see that, in other respects, this very ethos has been largely responsible for inspiring the actions it deplores.

Be this as it may, Miliband is surely right to argue that the parliamentary leadership acts under real doctrinal constraints. His common ground with McKenzie is the assumption that these doctrines are the whole of the picture.⁷ This assumption is also shared by Professor Beer. Beer sees the Conservative and Labour parties as similar devices – machines for the aggregation of votes and the turning of these votes into parliamentary majorities – with different aims derived from different views of society.

But the Tory belief in economic and social inequality put a fundamental principle between them and Labour. For however ambiguous Labour’s commitment to the utopian goal of fellowship had become, British Socialism was at least ‘about equality’.⁸

With Miliband, but against McKenzie, Beer sees ideology as a real force controlling political action. With Miliband, too, he sees ideology as a doctrine: it points to a goal and directs towards it.

It is worth noting that all of these books were published in, and partly shaped by the concerns of, the long period of Tory rule, the ‘Thirteen Wasted Years’ which followed the exhaustion of Labour in 1951. The terms of debate (about the Labour Party, at least) seem to be dictated largely by the polemics between the Bevanites and the Gaitskellites. The electoral failures of a party which purported to represent the overwhelming majority of the electorate provided the background. The failure of nerve of the 1945–51 Labour government towards the end of its term of office was the leitmotif. McKenzie and Beer, in effect, took Gaitskell’s part. McKenzie argued that oligarchy was both an organisational necessity and a historical feature of the Labour Party, so that the Bevanite attack on it was quixotic. Beer, in so far as he was concerned with the Labour Party, reiterated and elaborated Gaitskell’s famous attack on ‘Clause 4’ (nationalisation of the means of production and distribution) delivered to the 1959 Blackpool annual conference.

For Beer and Gaitskell the way to a Labour majority was through an appeal to middle-class voters, and that appeal required dropping the supposedly frightening baggage of specifically working-class demands – most especially nationalisation. This change of programme was given added political weight by the assumption at the time that large sections of the working class had come to share the middle-class ethos. This fear was mentioned by Gaitskell in his 1959 speech. The notion was that the increasingly affluent workers who owned cars and fridges and went for holidays in Majorca would start ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Table of Contents
• 1 Two Dimensions of Labour’s Ideology
• 2 Labour’s Ethos: The Uses of the Past
• 3 Labour’s Doctrines: Is Socialism about Equality?
• 4 Labour’s Doctrines: Socialism without Planning?
• 5 Socialist Ministers: An Ideological Dilemma
• 6 Our Rulers’ Natural Party?
• Appendix: Chronology of Events Significant to the History of the Labour Party
• Bibliography
• Index