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Labour history uncut: Mac the knife

19/04/2013, 03:31:53 PM

by Pete Goddard and Atul Hatwal

“The Liberals must be… destroyed,” declared Ramsay Macdonald, stroking a white cat.

Ok, perhaps not that dramatic, nevertheless it was Ramsay Macdonald’s electoral goal. Labour’s leader had a clear plan of action for 1923. He intended to show the public that Labour was a respectable party, the sort that one day might even make a serene transition into actual, proper government.

To do that, first he had to establish his party as the alternative to the Tories. In a British electoral system that only really had room for two parties, that meant the Liberals had to go.

Oddly, the Liberals didn’t seem to disagree.

They had obliged by splitting into two warring factions under Lloyd George and Asquith. True, there were now moves to broker a reunification under Asquith’s leadership, but rather than a passionate and heartfelt reunion this was an attempt to stay together for the sake of the children. It was all awkward silences and icy stares over dinner.

Margot Asquith reads a scary story for the kids, entitled, "The strange death of Liberal England"

Liberals regularly defied the whip, voting against each other on a range of motions. Meanwhile an aged Asquith seems to have given up trying to lead his party now that sticking it to Lloyd George wasn’t an available option.

It looked like Macdonald couldn’t fail.

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The last few weeks have shown politics at its worst: tribal, divisive and ugly

18/04/2013, 07:00:22 AM

by Peter Watt

Sometimes politics is a noble and even beautiful pursuit where words can capture a moment and inspire. Just think of Martin Luther King on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 or any one of a number of Churchill’s wartime orations.

Then there are political decisions that become once in a generation moments that end up uniting most of the country like the decision to go to war in 1939 or to create a National Health Service in its aftermath.

Other decisions remain more controversial but can still be seen as being decisive moments like the decision to join the EEC, the privatisation program of the 1980’s or the second Iraq war. The point is that over the years politics has mattered because it involved inspiration and decisions being taken that mattered even if they were opposed.

But in the last few years it has felt that politics has mattered less and less. Partly this is because the world has changed so that politics seems to have less influence than say global big business or the seemingly uncontrollable economic forces.

And partly it is the advent of the information age where the internet and social media has fragmented the sense of a shared experience. The reality is that you can set your “virtual preferences” so that you can simply block that which is of little interest or irrelevant.

But politics itself also has to bear some responsibility. In recent months, in addition to being seen as irrelevant, politics has also been ugly. And that ugliness will have served to further drive a wedge between them-and-us; between the tiny band of political warriors and the majority more interested in fuel prices, the security of their family and Gangnam style on YouTube.

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Naiveté is a weakness in all walks of life but in politics, it’s deadly

17/04/2013, 02:08:49 PM

by Rob Marchant

Major political events which blow all other news out of the water, such as the death of Margaret Thatcher, tend to do two things. First, they make us take a step back and take stock, to ponder the grand historical sweep of things; and second, they give us a little time to do so, as the normal scheme of things is largely suspended.

So far, Miliband is having a “good war”: his Thatcher tribute speech was widely thought to be very good and, in any event, the fact that his opponents cut taxes for the well-off a fortnight ago is surely helping his approval ratings. His party is still solidly ahead of the government, although arguably still more down to the latter’s failure than Labour’s conspicuous success.

But politics is about people. About personalities. As we do the stocktaking, we now know much more about Miliband and his leadership style than we did back in 2010. As critical friends, do we not have the right – or rather, the obligation – to comment, if we think that there are weaknesses in the approach? We do.

Last week, various leftists were justifying their rapacious criticisms of Thatcher by the “two wrongs make a right” technique: recalling equally harsh words spoken by Tories on the death of Michael Foot, that same year as Miliband’s accession.

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For pity’s sake, stay at home tomorrow

16/04/2013, 07:00:32 AM

by Ian Stewart

For the past week those of us who remember the 1980s have been in our own ways reliving them. It has been neither a pleasant nor edifying spectacle to watch friends and family tear lumps off each other over the legacy of the frail old woman who died at the Ritz. Facebook accounts are now covered in the detritus of real life as well as online friendships wrecked by casual or bombastic posts that reopened the wounds long thought healed.

To watch a crowd of idiots vandalise my local cinema – which by the way was showing the excellent Spirit of ’45 – and then break the windows of the bastion of Thatcherism that is Brixton’s Banardos shop defied all logic. I mean, Foxtons – I understand that, but Banardos? Please explain?

I still cannot forgive or forget Mrs Thatcher and her government – not for the miners, nor for Corby, nor for letting the free market rip in such a way that highly skilled industrial jobs in my home town were butchered (Lowestoft men built the Virgin Atlantic Challenger that won the blue riband – using state of the art plasma welding – then were left on the scrapheap). I doubt that Germany, Holland or Norway would have done the same. Eastern Coachworks shut down, north sea oil and gas money frittered away, leaving behind an economy reliant on food processing plants and moving away as the only serious option if you have ambition.

What I also cannot forgive is the fact that ever since 1990, every single succeeding government has attempted not to alter the Thatcher consensus, but simply to give it a “human face”. Up until the great crash Major, Blair and Brown had all seemingly achieved this – balancing social spending with deregulation, further privatisation and tax cuts for the rich.

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Getting tough on late payment to SMEs will help build the business wing of Labour’s one nation movement

12/04/2013, 12:15:33 PM

by Dan McCurry

There was an interesting article in last week’s Economist about a speech made by Chuka Umunna to the Federation of Small Businesses, which began with the sleepy audience unengaged, but went on to inspire them to shout, “Hear hear!”

I suspect this was following the announcement that Labour would crack down on big companies that deliberately hold out payments to small companies for months on end.

The article compared Labour’s wooing of small business with the “prawn cocktail offensive” of the early Blair years, when Labour wooed the bankers. However, the crucial difference is that we no longer need to persuade the markets of our commitment to capitalism. This speech was about something altogether different.

Sole traders and small businesses don’t see themselves as in need of the state. Nor has the state previously had much of a role to support them. The Tories believe that the best policy is to actively get out of the way, and they often make passionate speeches boasting of their intention to do absolutely nothing. Chuka disagrees, and he’s right. Small business is absolutely in need of the state, but they mostly don’t realise it, because they don’t know what the state can do for them.

The injustice here is about enterprising people who work hard to build their business, but find themselves continually the victim of the unscrupulous and unchecked greed of powerful companies and individuals. They endure a continual battle to get paid, not because there is no law to protect them, there is plenty of law, but there is inconsistency in the application of the law.

If a man walks into Sainsbury’s and steals a chicken he will be prosecuted. However, if that same man hires a printer to provide a box of leaflets, and doesn’t pay, the police would refuse to prosecute, arguing that it is a civil matter.

This is true even if the purchaser dishonestly intended to avoid payment before placing the order. The printer would have to file a small claim at the county court. There would be no criminal punishment and no mark of bad character against the cheating customer.

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Labour history uncut: Return of the Mac

11/04/2013, 04:24:23 PM

by Pete Goddard and Atul Hatwal

After the general election in November 1922, Labour had a lot to feel good about. It broke three figures for the first time with 142 MPs – 27 more than the total for Lloyd George and Asquith’s Liberal factions put together and firmly established itself as the second party of British politics. Not the first party, true, but one step at a time eh?

Even better, the wave of Labour gains had seen the return of many of the party’s big beasts who had been swept away in Lloyd George’s landslide of 1918.

Returnees included acerbic left wing orator Phillip Snowden, Poplar’s most popular socialist George Lansbury and, the battling pacifist Ramsay Macdonald himself.

The character of this new parliamentary Labour party was quite different to its predecessors. Two, not entirely unconnected, changes marked the 1922 intake: increased representation for the left and the arrival of a number of middle class Labour MPs (including one Clement Attlee, so don’t mock).

The rise of the left was best illustrated by the increased influence of the Independent Labour Party (ILP). In 1918, 3 MPs had been sponsored by this socialist society. By 1922 this had grown to 32.

Although the centre and centre-right bloc of trade union sponsored MPs was still the largest at 85, for the first time the left had a broad caucus to challenge the right.

The ILP mob was sufficiently large that it even had its own left-wing. This was led by the so-called red Clydesiders, part of the contingent of 30 notably left-wing Scottish MPs. The name may sound like a playground torture (“Sir, that bully just gave me a red Clydesider), but these were committed and uncompromising socialists who weren’t averse to the idea of a workers revolution.

Leading lights included the former school teacher Jimmy Maxton (admiring biographer: Gordon Brown, who clearly failed to absorb every lesson this teacher had to offer) and self-made businessman John Wheatley.

With school teacher Jimmy Maxton in the house, inattentive Labour colleagues lived in fear of the well-aimed blackboard eraser

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We deserved to hear a rounded account of Thatcher yesterday. We didn’t.

11/04/2013, 10:30:59 AM

by Kevin Meagher

In the Thatcherite spirit of free enterprise, the chamber of the House of Commons was leased out yesterday for a private wake as Tory MPs used the occasion of Margaret Thatcher’s death for what is becoming a familiar riff on How She Saved the Country.

As if the gap between the governing and the governed is not enormous enough already, our parliamentarians gathered to not to discuss the perilous state of our economy, but to trade lame anecdotes and hear boilerplate rhetoric about how dead-eyed Britons, existing on a diet of gruel, shuffled through a monochrome landscape before the brilliant new dawn of Thatcherism began in 1979.

This was the Commons at its private school debating chamber worst. History revised without question, assertions pedalled as fact. Guffaws all round.

When Tory MP Christopher Chope said Mrs. Thatcher was “not only a passionate Conservative but a compassionate Conservative” the dial on my irony-ometer whipped round to eleven. Compassion from the same woman who proclaimed there was “no such thing as society?”

Later Tory Daniel Kawczynski brought us the important revelation of how he once sat next to Thatcher at dinner. “I was mesmerised. My heart was beating.” Move over Cicero.

For the most part, Labour MPs sat there like lemons. A hardy few said what we needed to hear more of; that Thatcherism wrought a terrible price for the people and communities at the sharp end of her ideological crusade.

The faux outrage from the Tory benches in response Glenda Jackson’s biting remarks proved George Orwell’s old maxim that in an age of cant telling the truth is a revolutionary act. Plaudits are also due to David Winnick and Dave Anderson from Blaydon for having the guts and good sense to remember their job is to represent the people who send them to Westminster.

Alas, other Labour MPs seemed content to go with the flow and listen to partisan Tory-politicking masquerade as unctuous tribute-making.

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Why has Ed allowed the unions to stitch up the euro candidate selections? What happened to the new politics?

11/04/2013, 07:00:44 AM

by Peter Watt

There has been a lot of retrospective going on recently. Obviously the death of Baroness Thatcher has meant that we have all been reflecting on the politics of the 1970’s and 1980’s. And politics has changed a fait bit since then and Labour politics in particular; long gone are the days when Labour ripped itself apart with splits and division.

Beaten time after time by the Tories, Labour finally realised that it needed to change if it was to win. First Neil Kinnock, then John Smith and finally Tony Blair and Gordon Brown gradually enforced a degree of central control and discipline within the party. There was an understanding that controlling process meant controlling the party. Conferences, policy making and of course selections were all ruthlessly managed.

On the whole the party welcomed it, even if reluctantly at first. There was a significant minority who always complained of course, but most were prepared to overlook what they didn’t like as we kept winning.

Working for the party throughout this period, we were loyal to the Leadership and we worked hard to keep control. Centralisation was the name of the day. But the world moved on and the time for command and control was over.

But at the centre we were slow on the uptake and so the culture of control was hung onto longer than it should’ve been. As the rest of society was opening up and more open sources of information were becoming the norm in business, online and in the media, the Labour party stubbornly refused to change the way that it ran itself. Keeping control meant keeping order.

But then we lost a general election and rightly our new Leader demanded a new approach to our politics. There was talk of reaching out beyond our closed ranks: of allowing creativity and innovation and welcoming the possibilities that there may well be differences in tone and approach in different parts of the country.

As an old school control freak you would expect me to be sceptical. But no; I am hugely supportive of an approach that begins to break down the barriers to our politics. I can see just how remote and closed our politics actually is and how unattractive it is to most voters. I wholeheartedly agree with Ed when he says:

“It’s not just about winning elections… It’s about constructing a real political movement. It’s a change from machine politics to grassroots politics.”

So I welcome the opening up of the party; except that is not what is happening. The words are all well and good but the reality is that nothing has changed. Actually that isn’t true. If anything it is getting worse.

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Thatcher’s legacy and the politics of blame

10/04/2013, 03:17:33 PM

by Jonathan Roberts

The past couple of days have been absurd. As a centrist, I have looked on with quiet respect, but also with head in hands as ideologue after ideologue lined up to offer their views on Lady Thatcher’s legacy.

I say at the outset that, for those so inclined, the time to celebrate was not this week, it was in 1990 or 1997. Ed Miliband, Neil Kinnock and others have rightly offered generous and respectful words on Mrs Thatcher’s passing, and it is my view that anyone who has expressed joy at the death of this frail old lady cannot realistically claim moral superiority, nor can they claim to be a particularly nice person – regardless of the anger they may still feel.

Like many other commentators, I was merely a child when Thatcher left Number Ten for the last time. Being the son of two council workers I was not one of those who directly benefited from the Thatcher years, nor was I one of those who directly suffered. So it is with that relative impartiality that I offer these thoughts.

The fundamental position of the left is that Thatcher destroyed the concept of society and abandoned countless decent, hardworking people to the scrapheap. The position of the right is that she rescued the country from militant trade unionism and gave people the opportunity to be free from state reliance.

Both of these positions are true.

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The real lesson of Thatcher for Labour

10/04/2013, 11:18:29 AM

by Jonathan Todd

Toby Helm and Daniel Boffey wrote in the Observer, the day before Margaret Thatcher’s death was announced, under a headline of “Labour plans radical shift over welfare state payouts”. But did their article tell us anything about the party’s commitment to the contributory principle that Liam Byrne didn’t tell us in his speech on William Beveridge over a year ago? And did their article tell us anything about our jobs guarantee that had not already been announced?

In short, the Observer splashed on a story devoid of new content at the end of the week in which George Osborne audaciously – but predictably – used the conviction of Mick Philpott to attack again on welfare. We must presume that Labour felt this attack strong enough to wish to respond to but lacked any new policy with which to do so.

Then Thatcher died and decisively moved the news agenda on. Perhaps we should be grateful to her for obscuring Labour’s lack of substance on this central and contentious issue. But is there anything else that Labour should be grateful to Thatcher for?

We should all, according to the words spoken by David Cameron on Downing street on Monday, be grateful to her for saving the UK. Her alienation of Scotland may yet, though, come to be seen as having contributed significantly to the breakup of the union.

While the decline of some industries may have been inevitable, her dearth of industrial policy stripped whole regions of alternative futures. Local government was gutted of capacity to respond to these changes, as power was concentrated in Whitehall by a government that claimed it did not believe in the role of the state. Ballooning welfare payments also meant that this state was hardly minimal.

All of these baleful legacies remain to be dealt with. Yet Martin Amis spoke for many on Monday when he told Newsnight that she was “a necessary prime minister”. Thus, the real question for Labour is not whether we have anything to be grateful to Thatcher for but why, even after all the suffering endured by areas within which our movement is woven most deeply, this view is widely held.

Is it because the rest of the country lacks the compassion to care for these communities? Has Thatcherism or capitalism itself made our fellow citizens spiteful and capricious? The truth is closer to home than that.

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