This summer, the Labour party needs a holiday like never before. It needs to turn off Twitter, drink sangria, feel the sand beneath its toes and stare at the ocean. It needs to get a little perspective, think about its future, and buy an oversized sombrero. It needs a rest.
Knowing it as we do, we know the Labour party will not be able to relax by a poolside, reading chicklit or two-day old copies of the Mirror. So, failing a proper holiday, what should we all be reading?
With the Bennites back, and on the brink of taking over if dodgy polls are to be believed, then perhaps we should be reading about what happened last time. Top of the list is Dianne Hayter’s Fightback, which details how moderates in the Labour party and unions struggled to recover from the Social Democratic party split and 1983 manifesto, and how they rebuilt a party capable of winning elections. Labour Solidarity, the St Ermins Group, the campaign for OMOV and the expulsion of the Revolutionary Socialist League: these are events and groups with which we need to be familiar if we are going to have to do all over again.
As background reading we should also dust down The Battle for the Labour Party by David Kogan and Maurice Kogan, which tells the tale of the ‘Outside Left’s’ takeover of the party’s decision-making between the 1970s and the 1980 Wembley conference. It serves as a handy reminder of what happens when you relax the border controls on the left of the party.
I would also add Four Years in the Death of the Labour Party, by Austin Mitchell, which appeared in 1983. It is described by leading Bennite Jon Lansman as ‘an inaccurate and unilluminating rant that lasts almost 200 pages’, which should be recommendation enough. Last, John Golding’s Hammer of the Left: My Part in Defeating the Labour Left tells the story of the Labour members of parliament heroic efforts to beat the Bennites in the 1970s and 1980s. Golding is perhaps the last ever person to go from being a member of parliament to becoming a union general secretary.
Too heavy for the suitcase? In need of something lighter? How about John Rentoul’s Listellany, filled with endlessly amusing top tens, largely supplied by Rentoul’s readers via social media. It includes overrated 1960s bands, Yiddish words, Spoonerisms, palindromes, ways of defeating daleks and political heckles. Or Owen Bennett’s Following Farage, which details his journeys around the United Kingdom in pursuit of the Purple One, and his band of followers, during the general election. It is funny, as well as slightly terrifying. Also terrifying is The Scottish Referendum 2014: Is the Union now Secure? by a team headed up by John Curtice. It analyses the before, during and afterwards of the UK’s near-death experience last year, but without giving anything away, it does not end well.
Finally, there is the publishing sensation of the year. No, not Peter Hain’s book about socialism. It’s Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman. I will read it with a sense of trepidation because like many I grew up with To Kill a Mockingbird never far from reach, and Atticus Finch as a kind of hero. I do not want to discover he is a flawed hero, a product of his racist times, and capable of saying cruel and stupid things. Yet I also do not want to miss out on Lee’s beautiful writing. If anything can take our minds off Labour’s long, hot summer, it is being transported to postwar America.
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Paul Richards is author of Labour’s Revival: The Modernisers’ Manifesto. He tweets @LabourPaul
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