Labours Old and New: The Parliamentary Right of the British Labour Party 1970-79 and the Roots of New Labour
Stephen Meredith
Manchester University Press, 256pp, £42.25
Stephen Meredith’s book is an excellent academic study of Labour’s parliamentary right in the 1970s. It is a bedside must-read for anoraks of Labour history (like me) and insightful on many of the continuing debates that still perplex social democracy on the central importance of the EU, the modern role of the trade unions and reform of the state. In this respect there is not much ‘new’ about New Labour. The critique that John Mackinotsh and David Marquand developed in the 1970s of the centralised state remains crucial to Labour’s future today, as does the failure after 11 years of government to see a commitment to Europe as fundamental to the achievement of social democratic goals.
The 1970s were not a happy decade for mainstream social democrats. At the Labour conference in 1970 (the first I attended), our newly elected deputy deader and successful ex-chancellor, Roy Jenkins, replied to the economic debate with huge authority: he seemed Wilson’s natural successor. But by the following autumn the unity of Labour’s leadership was shattered on the issue of Europe and its grip on the National Executive rapidly weakening. The unions were swinging left on a rising tide of industrial militancy, and a new ‘1968’ generation of activists were increasingly dominating constituency parties. In London especially, the party of Herbert Morrison was dying out and that of Ken Livingstone being created. The parliamentary right made life more difficult for itself by failing to adjust to the dynamic currents in society – the black and women’s movements, gay rights, new demands of tenant participation and welfare rights – which made the left look on the side of the future and the right stuck in the past. The ‘cultural revolution’ in the party was underway that would sweep through the party in the early 1980s, deliver the leadership disastrously to that romantic old Bevanite, Michael Foot, and bring the party to within a whisker of electing Tony Benn over Denis Healey as his deputy.
One of the big historical questions is why the ‘parliamentary right’, which remained numerically ascendant in the PLP until 1983, allowed this state of affairs to happen. Meredith’s thesis is that the unity of the right was badly weakened by ideological fissures over Europe, trade union reform and whether social democrats should at all costs defend high levels of public expenditure as the necessary means of achieving a more equal society. That there were real divisions on the so-called right on these issues is indisputable. But Meredith exaggerates their significance in Labour’s gadarene rush to the abyss.
In politics ideology only becomes potent when it is part and parcel of a personal struggle for power. The split over Europe in the PLP became exceptionally bitter because Jim Callaghan (in an episode in his memoirs that he prefers to forget) was the first in the shadow cabinet post-1970 to attack common market membership. Wilson panicked because he saw a potential threat to his leadership, leaving the Jenkinsites painfully exposed in arguing that Labour should stick in opposition to the policy it had espoused in government. Tony Crosland saw the opportunity to take advantage of Jenkins’ discomfiture and position himself more as ‘party man’: but he lacked Denis Healey’s ability to switch sides without embarrassment, and ended up abstaining in the key vote (and greatly losing personal credibility with his most ardent admirers) on the grounds that Europe came a long way down the list of his social democratic priorities.
It is not to diminish this valuable piece of research to point out that the young Progress reader wanting to learn about Labour in the 1970s would have a more enjoyable (but also I think more insightful) time reading Giles Radice’s Friends and Rivals: Crosland, Healey and Jenkins.