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The British Labour Party: The Conflict Between Socialist Ideals and Practical Politics between the Wars

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2014

Richard W. Lyman
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Extract

The purpose of this paper is to set forth, somewhat arbitrarily, a composite view of the British Labour Party's history between the Wars, to be labelled the orthodox Labour interpretation, and then to set against it a contrasting view which has been expressed by several left-wing writers within the Labour Party. This examination of conflicting opinions can scarcely be dignified with the title historiographical inquiry. In the first place, there are other more or less coherent interpretations of Labour Party history in this period besides the two sketched herein, most notably a Communist view, expressed in such works as Allen Hutt's The Post-War History of the British Working Class. Secondly, as Stephen Graubard has recently said in relation to the Fabian Society, much of the Labour Party history in this period is in fact autobiography. Finally, as will soon become distressingly apparent, the interpretations that most writers have given of Labour between the Wars have been influenced by, connected with, even in some cases identical to the same authors' views on Labour today. History used to be called “past politics”; in this case it cannot entirely escape becoming “present politics.”

According to the orthodox view, the Labour Party was emerging from its infancy in the 1920s, having established its claim to be considered a major contestant for power as recently as 1918. As Francis Williams puts it:

With the acceptance of the new constitution and the endorsement of the international policy contained in the Memorandum on War Aims and the domestic programme contained in Labour and the New Social Order, the Labour Party finally established itself. The formative years were ended. Now at last it was an adult party certain of its own purpose; aware also at last of what it must do to impress that purpose upon the nation.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , November 1965 , pp. 140 - 152
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1965

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References

1. Hutt, Allen, The Post-War History of the British Working Class (London, 1937)Google Scholar.

2. Stephen Graubard, review of A. McBriar, Fabian Socialism and English Politics, in A.H.R., LXIX (1963), 116–17Google Scholar.

3. Williams, Francis, Fifty Years March (London, 1949), p. 284Google Scholar.

4. Williams, , Fifty Years March, p. 336Google Scholar. Cf. Halévy, Éilie, L'ère des tyrannies (Paris, 1938), p. 204Google Scholar: “Bizarre ironie! Le parti qui était censé détenir la clef du problème [of unemployment] se trouvait incapable de la résoudre. Je sais, naturellement, quelle était leur excuse: ils ne pouvaient rien faire parce qu'ils n'avaient pas la majorité absolue. Mais n'étaient-ils pas, au fond de leur coeur, ravis de ne pas l'avoir, parce que les responsibilités du pouvoir les épouvantaient?”

5. Attlee, Clement, As It Happened (London, 1954), p. 87Google Scholar.

6. Quoted in Foot, Michael, Aneurin Bevan, I (London, 1962), 505Google Scholar.

7. The Labour Left, like the Tory Right, has generally tended to minimize the importance of such forces, from the days when it pictured Lloyd George as losing the peace in 1919 almost singlehandedly to those when it imagined that Mao Tsetung and Gen. DeGaulle would tamely follow a British example in nuclear disarmament, were Britain to set one.

8. A word given currency by the title of Rothstein, T. A.'s From Chartism to Labourism (London, 1929)Google Scholar, and revived by the New Left more recently.

9. See Rogow, Arnold, The Labour Government and British Industry, 1945-1951 (Oxford, 1955), esp. chs. vii-viiiGoogle Scholar, for an effective analysis of the Conservative and business community response to the socialist threat in the later stages of the third Labour Government.

10. Dalton, Hugh, The Fateful Years (London, 1957), p. 88Google Scholar.

11. Dalton, Hugh, Call Back Yesterday (London, 1953), pp. 182–83Google Scholar.

12. Attlee, Clement, in The Labour Party in Perspective (London, 1937), p. 59Google Scholar, goes about as far as one can go: “While the immediate shock was severe, the general effect on the Party was salutary. It led to a re-examination of its fundamental position. It caused a reaffirmation of its aims and objects.”

13. See, e.g., Cole, G. D. H., A History of the Labour Party from 1914 (London, 1948), pp. 278–79Google Scholar. “The Party Executive had made up its mind that such vagueness [as had characterized previous programs] would not do, and that the coming years of opposition must be devoted to working out a clear and concise policy which the Party would be pledged and able to translate into legislation when its chance came. This was unquestionably wise; and in fact the Policy Reports which were put forward at every Conference from 1932 onwards did serve as the foundation for the third Labour Government's legislative and administrative programme in 1945: so that the main difficulties over policy then arose in fields which had been surveyed inadequately, or not at all, or where the situation had changed so greatly as to make the programmes devised before 1939 no longer workable in the post-war world” (p. 279). The concluding words do provide an escape hatch, but the emphasis is clearly on the relevance of the planning of the 1930s to the post-1945 policies; discrepancies between the two are made to seem the exception rather than the rule.

14. Labour Party, Report of the Annual Conference, 1934, pp. 214–15Google Scholar. A pressure group within the Labour movement, the Socialist Medical Association, had prepared a more detailed scheme, published in 1933 as A Socialized Medical Service. But this differed significantly from the N.H.S. as finally enacted; see the summary of the S.M.A. proposals in Eckstein, Harry, The English Health Service (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), pp. 107–08Google Scholar.

15. See A National Service for Health (London, Labour Party, 1942–1943)Google Scholar. Jewkes, J. and Jewkes, S., The Genesis of the National Health Service (London, 1961), p. 3Google Scholar, point out that it was “not until the publication of the Government's White Paper on Health Services in 1944 that the vital switch of policy was made from the idea of the public provision of a minimum service to the provision of the best possible Health Service for all.” Italics in original.

16. Rogow, , Labour Government and British Industry, p. 2Google Scholar.

17. Quoted in ibid., p. 155. See also Shinwell, Emanuel, Conflict Without Malice (London, 1955), pp. 172–73Google Scholar.

18. He proceeds to enumerate these. Brady, Robert, Crisis in Britain (Berkeley, 1950), p. 41Google Scholar. As a crude measure of the distance between Labour's program in the 1930s and the policies actually carried out in 1945-51, see Attlee's comments on coal in Labour Party in Perspective, p. 186: “The internal price of coal need not be affected by the world price. It is a matter for decision as to how much coal we should sell abroad. … The Coal Board will get the best prices that it can, whether in competition or, preferably, by international agreement, but, whichever it is, there is no reason why it should affect the wage of the miner." It is significant also that when Mowat, Charles, in “The Approach to the Welfare State in Great Britain,” A.H.R., LVIII (1952), 55–63Google Scholar, wishes to cover the interwar years, he does not discuss Labour Party programs and reports, but rather such books as those of Eleanor Rathbone, or SirOrr, John Boyd's Food, Health, and Income (London, 1937)Google Scholar, and then moves on to the crucial contribution of Britain's experience in World War II.

19. Shinwell, Emanuel, The Labour Story (London, 1963), p. 162Google Scholar.

20. Cole, , History of the Labour Party, p. 399Google Scholar.

21. London Library of Political and Economic Science, University of London, Sidney Webb to Beatrice Webb, Feb. 4, 1934, Webb Papers, II 3 (i), item 94. Quoted by kind permission of the Passfield Trustees.

22. Dalton, , The Fateful Years, pp. 74–76Google Scholar.

23. Butler, D. E., The Electoral System in Great Britain, 1918-1951 (Oxford, 1953), p. 184Google Scholar. See McCallum, R. B. and Readman, A., The British General Election of 1945 (London, 1947), pp. 266–67Google Scholar, for a suggestive analysis of the conditions prerequisite to Labour victory, most of which materialized as a result of the War.

24. The latter dilemma is eloquently stated, in another context, by Peter Gay in the preface to his The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism: Eduard Bernstein's Challenge to Marx (New York, 1952)Google Scholar.

25. Dowse, Robert, “The Parliamentary Labour Party in Opposition,” Parliamentary Affairs, XIII (1960), 520–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26. Miliband, Ralph, Parliamentary Socialism (London, 1961), pp. 233–34Google Scholar.

27. See the National Executive's manifesto issued in May 1937 entitled “The Labour Party and the Popular Front”; relevant passages are quoted in Cole, , History of the Labour Party, p. 354Google Scholar. It is clear that the attitude of the Labour leadership would have changed had a major Tory breakaway been likely—see Dalton, The Fateful Years, ch. xiv.

28. Yet after the War Cole could still say, in discussing not the Popular Front but the narrower United Front of Labour, Communists, and I.L.P.: “Even a strictly limited unity for the purpose of the common struggle against Fascism might have made a vital difference to the course of events.” What this difference might have been he does not disclose. Cole, , History of the Labour Party, p. 291Google Scholar.

29. See Laski, Harold, The Crisis and the Constitution (London, 1932)Google Scholar, and Democracy in Crisis (Chapel Hill, 1933)Google Scholar.

30. Title of SirCripps, Stafford's pamphlet, reprinted in Addison, Christopheret al., Problems of a Socialist Government (London, 1933)Google Scholar.

31. See Report of the Annual Conference, 1934, pp. 149–50Google Scholar.

32. But see Rogow, Labour Government and British Industry, esp. ch. ix, for evidence suggesting that the triumph of Gradualism may have been more apparent than real, and that Laski's fears of the 1930s may have been closer to the mark than his optimism towards the end of his life.

33. Report of the Annual Conference, 1934, p. 162Google Scholar.