By Jonathan Todd
“These days I keep coming across traces of vanished Labour social programmes,” writes Polly Toynbee in her 2023 memoir, “where some academics have kept measuring the results, holding onto proof of what succeeds in improving lives for the future day, if it ever comes, when another government as keen on social programmes revives these attempts.”
I was lucky to interview Polly on stage as part of the Political Therapy series that we run at 1000 Trades on the day that Rishi Sunak called the general election that ended with such a government. It was a great evening – but I wish I had read the memoir more closely beforehand.
We might have spoken more about her family’s connections to the city in which we were speaking. Her father edited, “a small left-wing newspaper … called the Birmingham Town Crier … One of its purposes was to rally the people against the Munich appeasement and to bar the city to its most famous son, Neville Chamberlain.”
A generation later, Polly’s sister was running, “one of the local neighbourhood housing and social assistance hubs the council was opening … She found herself at war with the council, because although they built the hubs they never let go, never devolving power let alone funds to neighbourhood control.” Plus ça change.
We might have discussed Polly’s touchpoints with Labour giants. “That family holiday in Yugoslavia when aged thirteen I stood on the quay and yelled for help and saved the lives of A. J. Ayer and Hugo Gaitskell who very nearly drowned.” There are, too, entertaining reflections on knowing Roy Jenkins, details of Harold Wilson’s role in Polly’s youthful, African adventures, and Peter Mandelson’s interactions when Polly worked, for journalist purposes, as a nursery assistant.
Or even the many salacious vignettes: “eye-popping tales of the unlikeliest ladies of the house screwing a tradesman on the kitchen table”; “the lavish, extravagant, exotic wastrel beloved of the gossip columns for nearly marrying Princess Margaret”; “sitting on the art roof hurling down tiles before she was expelled (from boarding school): she’s now a splendid radical doctor.”
It is, as ever, the narrative tension that keeps the pages turning.
There are tensions between civic and family roles. Of her great grandfather Polly writes: “Paragons of virtue are hard to live up to. Vegetarian, teetotal, donors of a large slice of their income to good causes, unmaterialistic, high-minded with relatively humble tastes, vigorous anti-imperialists, campaigners for all the great liberal causes – yet all but one of their children went to the bad in one way or another.” Generations of her family alternate between alcoholism and teetotalism.
Tensions between faith and science. The Pope asked a celebrated archaeologist and practising Catholic relative to investigate whether some bones should be ascribed to St Peter. Based on her findings, he proclaimed that they should in his 1950 Christmas message. “Great-Aunt Jocelyn was not quite so unequivocal in her verdict on the holy bones, but nor did she refute the Pope’s more or less infallible assertion.” Jocelyn’s religiosity is unusual among Polly’s family – with a turn to Christianity by her father becoming a tension between him and her.
Tensions between different kinds of loyalty. Another great grandfather, Harry, a research collaborator of a young William Beveridge, worked on a Royal Commission on poverty that published in 1909. This Royal Commission splintered into majority and minority reports. The minority report was the work of Beatrice Webb and, “saw poverty and unemployment as a systematic failure of society and the economy”. A view that Harry supported, while the majority report was authored by the boss of the charity that employed him and who thought that “moral dereliction was responsible for poverty and family cycles of deprivation could only be broken by individual effort”.
“The dramatic clash at the ending of the Commission (between majority and minority reports) seems to have tipped Harry over the edge into nervous collapse.” He spent the remainder of his life, over 30 years, living an utterly tortured existent in homes for the mentally unwell.
The compulsion to live a good life was agonising for many of Polly’s family, with Harry being a heartbreaking example and her father, Philip, another. “All my life my father struggled to do good, and mocked his own failed attempts.” These efforts extended to an extreme version of The Good Life, with a family smallholding converted into a commune, which was a predictable failure. “By then I had young children, as well as a job and a husband who were entirely uncomprehending of this self-induced suffering, so I mainly avoided the commune.”
The cast of characters that descended on the commune struggled to sustain productive harmony. “Disaffected urban school teachers, university students bent on Finding Themselves – flotsam and jetsam of English society,” wrote Decca Mitaford, a family friend from another famous family.
“Living above one’s moral means,” was what Philip came to lament he had done at the commune: trying to be more morally perfect than he was capable.
Polly’s memoir explores the rich tapestry of class relations. The moral means of the middle classes, determined to save the planet, would be expanded by the state lowering the cost of the solar panels and heat pumps that now enable a sustainability beyond the commune. The moral means of the working classes, most focused on making ends meet, would be expanded by the state financing the social programmes that have been proven to work.
The state can increase all our moral capacity, for all the differences between the classes. And now we have a government that we can hope to understand this. Its leaders will find much to inspire in Polly’s textured and deeply human history.
Jonathan Todd is Deputy Editor of Labour Uncut
Tags: Beatrice Webb, Beveridge, Jonathan Todd, Labour history, Polly Toynbee, the Pope
