Labour can no longer let its intellectual conservatism hold it back, writes David Butler

Labour finds itself within a gilded cage of intellectual conservatism. The party must understand and offer solutions to a range of complex issues: the productivity puzzle and secular stagnation which threaten to curtail future growth prospects; the problems of an aging society and housing shortages; and populist anti-elite sentiment. To win again, the party must escape these confines.

Intellectual conservatism is a rigidity of analysis. It is a lack of curiosity about alternative policies and institutional arrangements. It is the creation and defence of shibboleths that do not serve those they are supposed to help. It can offer great comfort; the failure of ideas and policies can be blamed on some ‘other’ (be it political opponents, the media, or the voters). Intellectual conservatism is not just a cage, but a gilded one too.

There are two consequences of intellectual conservatism. First, inflexible and unrevised analysis can lead to a misdiagnosis of the causes of contemporary problems; for example, thinking that the behaviour of developers is a cause, rather than a symptom, of the perversities of the housing market. Second, intellectual conservatism can lead to inappropriate policy responses. Rent controls are a classic example of this; there is substantial evidence that controlling rents leads to underinvestment, a black market and a two-tier system. Yet the calls for controls on rents are perennial on the left of the party.

Intellectual conservatism is a feature of Labour history. In his book A Strange Eventful History, former Labour trade secretary Edmund Dell wrote that the party would trap itself in ‘a hidebound frame of mind which limited its capacity for fresh thought’. There is a multitude of examples of Labour’s past intellectual conservatism from the rejection of trade union and industrial democracy reforms in In Place of Strife and the Bullock report respectively, to the long grind since the 1980s to recognise the consequences of globalisation for social democracy.

This intellectual conservatism, fused with (perceived and real) political constraints, is best captured in Labour’s reaction to the post-Wall Street Crash slump. The Labour government of 1929-1931 failed to embrace the proto-Keynesian economics of loan-financed works, tariffs to protect the balance of payments and the budget, and devaluation. The party, with its utopian socialism, was wedded to free trade, the gold standard and in-year balanced budgets. Seeking to maintain a balanced budget, through cuts to unemployment relief, eventually split the government and led to Ramsay MacDonald forming the national government. Labour’s intellectual conservatism was perhaps best captured by Sidney Webb’s response to that government’s subsequent sterling devaluation and protectionist tariffs: ‘nobody told us we could do that’.

To understand how Labour can break out of this self-imposed constraint, the deep roots of intellectual conservatism must be diagnosed. Core to this is the relative strength of ideology over pragmatism (and a subsequent dislike of revisionism). Labour does not have a well-developed equivalent of Tory pragmatic statecraft. Instead, it has suffered from an ideological rigidity over the mechanisms of social justice that cannot be shifted without great struggle. Simply put, as an attachment to ‘means’, not ‘ends’. Even when such revision takes place, as in the 1950s and the 1990s, there is a reaction against this (from Tony Benn in the late 1970s to Jeremy Corbyn now).

Tied to the relative strength of ideology is Labour’s sentimentalism. The myths and misunderstandings of the Clement Attlee government are symptomatic of this. The ‘Spirit of ‘45’ version of the government is a distortion which excludes the complexities of the era and the more moderate aspects from fiscal conservatism to Nato and the Bomb via Attlee’s dislike of faddish radicals and his willingness to withdraw the whip from the hard left. The myth of 1945 as some Labour nirvana belies the pragmatic reality of the Attlee administration. This sentimental approach to history is grit in the engine of intellectual innovation and attempts to move away from, or reform, the institutions and policies of the Attlee era.

Another root of intellectual conservatism is the perceived and real fragility of progressive gains. Labour has always had a fear of the reversal of progress by conservative forces. The historical memory and reality of Thatcherism have heightened this fear. It is, in part, a function of being a party that seeks economic and social transformation; Hannah Arendt’s observation that the most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution is fitting. This has meant that there is an inbuilt bias towards being defensive rather than realising that the protection of gains requires perpetual renewal and constant adjustment of the policies and institutions of social justice to meet the demands of modern society.

David Marquand in Britain Since 1918 writes of four traditions existing in 20^th century British politics: democratic collectivism, Whig imperialism, Tory nationalism and democratic republicanism. Labour, he argues, has been a democratic collectivist party with elements of Whig imperialism and democratic republicanism. Democratic collectivism is a gradualist tradition favouring technocratic, state-centric progress and sceptical of decentralisation; it is best embodied by the Fabians. By contrast, democratic republicanism is the perpetual outsider, seeing the expansion of republican liberty, an absence of domination, as central to Labour’s mission. The grip of collectivism over the party, coming at the expense of republicanism, has led to the dominance of statist and technocratic solutions to socioeconomic problems at the expense of market, decentralised and civic-based alternatives.

Intellectuals within the Labour party must share some of the blame. Many have failed to understand the workings of politics and power, ignoring Neil Kinnock’s maxim that the victory of ideas must be fought for. Those intellectuals who bridged the gap between the ivory tower and the frontbench, such as Tony Crosland, often did so at the expense of continued intellectual revision; Crosland, the great revisionist, failed to recognise the changes in the British economy and ended up opposing James Callaghan and Denis Healey’s International Monetary Fund deal.

Breaking out of the confines of this intellectually conservative tradition is not an easy task. A full toolkit will be needed. The leader sets the direction of the party; if the leader wishes to be willing to embrace fresh analysis and policies, then they can march even a reluctant party in this direction. Another useful mechanism would be greater cognitive diversity. The writer Ian Leslie has argued that collective wisdom is enhanced through the presence and interaction of different mindsets; this means expanding beyond Oxbridge graduates and thinktankers and bringing people into the heart of the party from a range of cognitive backgrounds that will challenge the leader and hopefully lead to a more open intellectual culture.

However, a top-down approach has its limits; if the leader is intellectually conservative or too weak to impose their own direction, then the bonds will not be broken. Change must also come from the bottom up. Wales, our big cities, and the new combined authorities, perhaps the only places where we will have power for a while, should be laboratories of social democracy, experimenting with policies that can generate lessons that can be shared and incorporated into future manifestos. More widely, those in the republican tradition should organise, argue and create a network of institutions and organisations that promote new analysis, intellectual pluralism and fresh policies while understanding and seeking to gain power.

An intellectually open, pluralist and more republican Labour party would be a different beast. It would accept that, in the words of Richard Reeves and Philip Collins, the ‘good society is messy and unpredictable because it vests power in people’. The move towards republicanism would be the modern equivalent of the party’s shift from classical to Keynesian economics. It would embrace and strengthen the emerging peer-to-peer social justice networks and organisations. It would enable the building of individual assets through the tax system and capital grants, promote alternative forms of corporate ownership (from employee-owned firms to community interest companies), and promote new, local initiatives to help those left behind by new technologies to enable to build their skills. The party would balance this by using a coordinating, strategic state that smoothed out inequalities of wealth and power between individuals and communities. It would not be afraid to pinch ideas, if they fit with our values, from elsewhere.

The gilded cage of intellectual conservatism traps Labour in the past, weakening us as a party that delivers real, meaningful and lasting progressive change which expands the liberty of all. It is up to us, those of us who want an intellectually open party, unafraid of new ideas and the modern world, who must forge it in our own image. It is a long, hard task. We have to be big enough to take it on. Together, we can break out of the gilded cage.

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David Butler is a member of Progress

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Photo: Dominic Campbell