Addressing the myth of ‘Old Labour’

by Martin Odoni

Just before Christmas, journalist and Labour campaigner Abi Wilkinson confessed in the Guardian to having temporarily ‘lost faith’ in her party’s current leader.

Though I was too pessimistic to publicly back [Jeremy Corbyn], a part of me started to wonder, what if? What if the conventional wisdom was wrong and it really was possible to win a general election from the left? What if the tide of hope that was sweeping the party could be replicated at a national level? … … … But I came back down to earth with a bang… there are several reasons for the struggles the party initially faced under Corbyn’s leadership. By the time of the 2016 leadership challenge, almost every committed Labour supporter I knew was in a state of despair – no matter what faction of the party they belonged to. A few kept their hopes up – how I scoffed at their naivety.

I feel compelled to point out that Ms Wilkinson has made more than the one wrong assumption she is aware of.  In fairness, the other is a mistake a great many in the British public make, and one I subscribed to for a long time myself.

The Myth

That assumption is that Labour has a history of getting hammered in General Elections when campaigning from the left, and does better from the centre ground. On close examination, it is quite clear that the only time Labour truly tried to get elected from the left since the Second World War was under Clement Attlee in 1945 – and they won in a big landslide.

Contrary to popular myth, no Labour leader between Attlee and Corbyn (with the possible exception of Michael Foot, but his 1983 General Election campaign does not count for reasons outlined below) has been a ‘Real Leftist’.

The leaders of the Labour Party since World War II. In spiral-inwards order from top-left: Michael Foot, Jeremy Corbyn, Jim Callaghan, Neil Kinnock, Gordon Brown, Ed Miliband, Clement Attlee, John Smith, Tony Blair, Harold Wilson and Hugh Gaitskell.

Gaitskell, 1955-1963

Attlee’s successor, Hugh Gaitskell, spent much of his fruitless time in charge of the Labour Party fighting against the left wing as much as he fought the Tories, and he never won an Election. Gaitskell was the first Labour leader to attempt to abolish Clause IV, due to his centrist policies meeting with frequent opposition from Trade Unions.

Wilson, 1963-1976

Harold Wilson won three General Elections (arguably four, depending how one chooses to view the Hung Parliament of early-1974), as a social democrat who managed to unite the Labour Party, largely by fooling the left into believing he was a socialist. Like Gaitskell before him, Wilson was, in practice, frequently at loggerheads with the likes of Tony Benn, and had a notorious dislike of Marxists. Wilson, always far more effective as a Labour leader than as a Prime Minister, governed Britain for roughly eight years, but beyond his establishment of the Open University, radical – or even significant – policy achievements in his time are barely detectable among long periods of treading water, due in part to the economic difficulties created by industrial decline since the mid-1950s.

Callaghan, 1976-1980

Jim Callaghan epitomises one of the enduring myths of the 1970s. The popular notion long espoused by the British right, including most particularly by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, was that ‘Labour socialism’ was the cause of the industrial chaos and economic stagnation of the 1970s. The notorious ‘Winter of Discontent‘ industrial unrest of 1978 almost certainly guaranteed Callaghan’s defeat by Thatcher in the following year’s Election. But in reality, the problems of the 1970’s had become a crisis far earlier, under the Conservative Government of Edward Heath during 1972-to-1973, and spiralled out of control due to international conditions created by the OPEC Oil Shock. As for the suggestion that Callaghan’s administration was ‘socialist’, this is insanity. He would have been better suited to the Liberal Party, and during his brief time as Prime Minister, he effectively laid the foundations for Thatcherism by following the International Monetary Fund’s demands for drastic cuts in Government expenditure, to combat the hectic inflation-rates of the previous few years. As the late Tony Benn revealed in subsequent years, Callaghan and his Chancellor of the Exchequer, Denis Healey, were well aware that these cuts were no longer necessary, due to the potential ‘inflation-brake’ that could be applied via North Sea Oil e.g. the Government could have insisted that all oil exports from the UK had to be paid for in sterling, increasing demand for, and by extension the value of, British pounds. The spending cuts that Healey insisted on carrying out anyway in fact arguably provoked the Winter of Discontent – and the cuts were effectively anti-socialist, and began the nationwide move to the neoliberal right. It was not the ‘socialist’ nature of the Labour Party in the 1970s that was causing the hardship, it was its centrism.

Foot, 1980-1983

While Michael Foot was a left-wing party leader, Labour’s 1983 General Election campaign cannot be realistically viewed as a true attempt to win power on a left-wing platform. This is partly because Foot never had any real control of the party in the three years he was in the role – Benn and Healey were engaged in a prolonged ‘tug-of-war’ for control throughout – but mainly because the party’s National Executive Committee of the time were not really trying to win. Thanks to the long in-fighting between factions, and the break-off of the Social Democratic Party, Labour was in no shape to return to Government, while Thatcher’s success in the Falklands War the previous year had given the Conservatives a massive boost in chest-banging, jingoistic popularity. The Labour NEC therefore realised, even before their Manifesto was written up, that the Election was already lost, but that it also presented them with a perfect opportunity to discredit the left wing for generations to come; by campaigning on a very left-wing ‘Bennite’ platform in an Election that was already lost, they could then blame the platform for the defeat when it was confirmed. And that is precisely what happened.

Kinnock, 1983-1992

Neil Kinnock might have been a left-winger before becoming leader, but as soon as he was voted into the job to succeed Foot, he moved the party even further to the right than it had been under Wilson or Callaghan, by effectively cutting off the left wing altogether. He is especially vilified by the miners of the 1980s, after he effectively abandoned them during the Miners’ Strikes of 1984-85, during which he left them with nobody prominent to speak up for them in Parliament.

Smith, 1992-1994

John Smith is sometimes held up as a real socialist whose premature death in 1994, after two years as leader, somehow deprived the UK of a proper left-wing Prime Minister. (Apologies to the Angry Yorkshireman, but his endorsement of Smith earlier this year is based almost entirely on one speech, doubtfully taken at face-value.) Smith is a little like many loved political/leadership figures of the past – such as Richard The Lionheart or Vladimir Ilyitch Lenin – in that he is only assumed to be a man of wise and benevolent Government because he died before the full effects of his policies could be felt. “If only he had lived on, his country would have been a much better place…” is the classic refrain. But if the world had had more experience of what their governance was really like, it is doubtful that we would be able to see much difference between them and the much-vilified successors who ruled in their stead. (Judging by his actions on Crusade, morally, Richard the Lionheart is difficult to distinguish from his maligned brother ‘Bad King’ John, and it was Lenin, not Joseph Stalin, who was responsible for the ‘Red Terror‘ of the Chekhists in 1918.) The clue that should lead us to doubt that Smith was greatly different from those who followed him is that, for better or worse, he made constitutional changes to the party,  weakening the Trade Unions, and saw Tony Blair and Gordon Brown as his natural successors. Given he knew them better than anyone else in party circles, and effectively mentored them both, he could only have seen them as his successors if he was roughly as far from the left as they were.

Blair, 1994-2007, & Brown, 2007-2010

So when Tony Blair established ‘New Labour’ in the 1990s, yes, he was even more conservative than any of his predecessors, but he was really just formalising an unspoken reality; that the Labour Party was a centrist political faction that was manipulating and controlling the British Left. ‘Old Labour’ as he called it – by which he meant left-wing-and-soft-left socialists in the Labour Party – had never really been in charge in the first place. And despite the personal animosity that developed between them, Gordon Brown was much the same. All ‘New Labour’ were really doing was making the party’s portfolio glossier while reducing the scope for the ‘Real Left’ to rebel against them effectively.

Miliband, 2010-2015, & Corbyn, 2015-?

As for Ed Miliband, he did try to move the party a little to the left while he was leader, but by his own admission, he was still a member of New Labour and needed to be more radical than he dared to try. Other Parliamentary Party members tried to blame the calamitous defeat in the 2015 General Election on his move to the left, when in truth it would have been wiser to blame his failure to move far enough to the left. And while Jeremy Corbyn in this year’s General Election was making a very strong attempt to get elected from the left, an awful lot of his party were clearly doing no more than going through the motions.

Centrism keeps failing

The long years of electoral under-achievement by the Labour Party were more to do with centrist failure than socialist ‘dreaming’, and stretch decades further back into history than the emergence of Blair. ‘Old Labour’ and ‘socialist Labour’ have not been synonymous since at least 1950, and the peculiar economic turbulence of the 1970s had nothing to do with socialism going wrong, but with underlying weaknesses in British core industries that had needed phasing out and replacing during the long-running feud between Wilson and Heath. (Wilson’s failure to try, and Heath’s foolish-but-understandable attempt to prop up these industries early in the 1970s, demonstrate the former’s lack of daring and the latter’s lack of imagination.)

Corbyn therefore differs from the past to which he is often accused of trying to return, whereas the likes of Blair were always more consistent with that past than his own rhetoric would have us believe. Abi Wilkinson is far from the first person, and very unlikely to be the last, to be taken in by the fiction that the Labour Party of the 1980s-and-before was left wing, and centrist thereafter. But it is another of those fictions that is in sore need of being combatted. Neoliberalism did not solve the problems left behind by socialism, because the British Governments of the 1960s and 1970s were not socialist, and the problems were caused by a mix of obsolete industries and international fuel crises. And far from being a solution, neoliberalism simply added rapid recession-cycles to the other problems.

Can socialism, even of the mild variety that Corbyn stands for, resolve the chaos of monetarism and the limitations of Keynesianism? Maybe, maybe not. But we will never find out the true answer to that so long as people wrongly imagine that the economic and industrial policy Corbyn is proposing is merely something that has ‘already been tried’.