One of the most unsuccessful political machines in the Western world has just marked 100 years since it first came to power.
One of the most unsuccessful political machines in the Western world has just marked 100 years since it first came to power.
Britain’s Labour Party produced its first prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, on Jan. 22, 1924, one day after the death of Vladimir Lenin. Ever since, it has spent much of its time obsessing about its values. Should it embrace socialism, as defined by left-wing parties elsewhere in Europe, or is it centrist and managerialist, trying to engineer small improvements in people’s lives within a framework of free-market capitalism?
A Century of Labour, Jon Cruddas, Polity, 288 pp., $30, March 2024; and Keeping the Red Flag Flying, Mark Garnett, Gavin Hyman, and Richard Johnson, 244 pp., $70, July 2024
The recent centenary has produced a spate of new books reflecting on Labour’s legacy and its identity, while looking ahead at what might be the start of a rare interlude of power—the ascent of Keir Starmer as Britain’s next prime minister.
So poor was Labour’s performance last time around in 2019 that Starmer knows he has a gargantuan task just to win the coming election, likely to be held in the autumn. Nevertheless, the odds on this happening are high, as his party enjoys a steady and sustained lead in the opinion polls.
Yet some of Starmer’s critics on the left have dismissed him even before he has started, suggesting he does not have the political courage to make a discernible difference after 14 years of Conservative rule. This is not a new charge. It is leveled against those leaders who have sought to wrench the party toward the center, in order for it to appeal to “floating voters.” Leftist thinkers and activists have often seemed more comfortable with the purity of opposition under the likes of Michael Foot in the 1980s and Jeremy Corbyn in the 2010s, who each led their party to “heroic” defeat.
Labour has been in power for barely a third of the past century. It has had only six prime ministers in its entire history and, of them, only three—Clement Attlee, Harald Wilson and Tony Blair—have won a majority at a general election. In the past seven years alone, the Tories have had five prime ministers (though that statistic is more a reflection of post-Brexit chaos). But the prospect of Labour gaining the keys to 10 Downing Street, rather than being something to savor, has rekindled another bout of often-angry introspection.
Every year, at Labour’s party conference, there are dozens of side meetings ruminating about the future of the party, usually of the glass-half-empty variety and with titles such as “What’s left of the left?” The “pragmatists,” usually branded “Blairites,” are denounced as having no principles. The “idealists,” lumped together as “Corbynites” after the now-banished Corbyn, are dismissed as either childish or extreme.
As Jon Cruddas, a longtime member of Parliament, puts it in his recent book, A Century of Labour, the party’s history “is deeply contested terrain.” Labour, like other socialist or social democratic parties, emerged during the latter part of the Industrial Revolution in the late 19th century as the political voice of the nascent trade union movement. Keir Hardie, a prominent union organizer, became its leader and remains to this day its talisman. (Starmer’s parents named him after the party’s spiritual father.)
After World War I, with the electorate tripling in size, Labour usurped the Liberals as the main opponents of the Conservatives. Yet the party has seen traitors in its midst almost ever since. Ramsay MacDonald, its first prime minister, was never forgiven for “betraying” the working class by forming a national government in 1931 together with the Conservatives and Liberals during the height of the Depression. This coalition cut public spending drastically and ordered police to suppress workers’ protests. MacDonald stayed at the helm until 1935, but he died two years later, a broken man.
Labour’s historic breakthroughs have tended to come as the result of world wars—emergencies that shifted the barriers of class and tradition. First came the expansion of the franchise after 1918. Clement Attlee’s government of 1945 is the one unequivocal object of pride, an administration that introduced the National Health Service and other pioneering social and economic reforms.
Labour would have to wait another decade, for Harold Wilson to arrive with his promise to embrace “the white heat of technology.” However, for all his congregationalist utterances—“Labour is a moral crusade, or it is nothing,” he declared in 1962—Wilson belonged to the incremental school.
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Cruddas, who was first elected to the House of Commons in 2001 for the working-class constituency of Dagenham in East London, is one of Labour’s more original thinkers and underrated figures—one of only a few to have combined loyalty to the leadership with a free spirit. During Blair’s first term, he served as the prime minister’s liaison with the trade unions and was instrumental in securing the introduction of a national minimum wage. But Cruddas became increasingly frustrated with what he calls “the meritocratic elite,” aligning himself to a group calling itself “Blue Labour, which sought to combine a certain social traditionalism with economic redistribution. He later advocated what he called “a soft Brexit.” (He recently announced he will stand down from Parliament at this year’s election.)
Cruddas distills from his history of the party three distinct ideas of justice that he argues should guide Labour. One is economic, another is human rights, and a third is what he calls “virtue,” or the creation of the “good society.” He contends that for most of its history the party has focused on the utilitarian former, financial well-being, at the expense of the other two. History provides ample evidence for this view. Labour administrations have often given the impression of suffering from imposter syndrome. Blair himself described the U.K. as a country that is both small “c” and big “C” conservative (references to the national temperament and the national center-right parties, respectively)—the British would naturally reject anyone who challenged their traditional way of life. Hence, Labour’s role was to introduce improvements to the standard of living without trumpeting radicalism.
But that presupposes, perhaps unfairly, that Labour is committed to acquiring and maintaining power. It says something about a political party’s history that a whole tome can be devoted exclusively to its years out of power, but that is what a collection of academics have done in a book called Keeping the Red Flag Flying. While their contribution is not without merits, it prompts the thought that some around the Labour party appear to feel more comfortable talking about the party’s long periods in the wilderness. It allows them to debate the purity of ideas unencumbered by the hard choices of government.
As the authors point out, in 1979, the year Margaret Thatcher won her first victory, Labour’s share of the vote fell only marginally, by 2 percent. What then transpired was that the party went into freefall, obsessed with internecine strife, arguing over its rules and fighting with key figures in municipalities (the city of Liverpool came under a group known as the “Militant Tendency”) instead of presenting a credible alternative to Thatcher’s assault on trade-union rights. As a result, Labour stayed out of office for 18 long years. The Thatcher revolution oversaw the transformation of Britain into a free-wheeling, low-tax economy based around the city of London’s financial services—and the emasculation of traditional working-class industries such as coal mining and steel that were once the foundation of the Labour movement.
Enter stage right: Tony Blair. He is unique in Labour history for being a serial winner—but before that he traveled light. Labour had (again) managed to lose an election it should have won in 1992. Its new leader, John Smith, who reassembled a reassuring bank manager of the old school, was steadily reviving the party’s fortunes, only to die suddenly in 1994. Blair, a little-known young man oozing charisma, promised to accelerate change. He subsequently did so with a determination that shocked many.
After gaining a landslide in 1997, accompanied by slick PR and rigid internal party discipline, he was voted back in with another healthy majority in 2001 and repeated the feat in 2005. While Conservatives venerate Thatcher for her electoral successes, Blair’s are regarded by his party with suspicion. He stands accused by some in the Labour movements of a twin crime. He failed to use his unprecedented mandate to introduce radical measures on the domestic front even while the Tories were in long-term disarray. Labour invested considerable sums into the health system, education, and other public services (partly due to healthy finances bequeathed by John Major). It modernized specific parts of the constitution and took Britain closer to Europe. Yet it did not challenge any of the fundamental tenets of the economic system or the distribution of power.
Indeed, the only significant risk he took in his decade in power, the only time he threw caution to the wind, was the disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003. The Iraq legacy produced the turn of events that culminated in the firebrand Corbyn, who not only took Labour to the fringes of politics, but also, through his innate hostility toward Europe and refusal to engage in the referendum campaign, helped facilitate the Brexit vote in 2016. Corbyn’s haplessness enabled the arrival of the dangerous clown, Boris Johnson, to power three years later.
Pro-Remain campaigner Steve Bray protests on Brighton Beach, England, on the second day of the Labour Party conference on Sept. 22, 2019. Leon Neal/Getty Images
These two books provide useful contributions to the internal debate about Labour. What they fail to do, however, is to set it in any international template, to provide comparisons with the policymaking arguments and political fortunes of sister parties such as Germany’s Social Democrats, France’s Socialists, or U.S. Democrats. Omissions such as this reinforce a sense of a growing insularity about the British political debate.
Both books provide a defeatist interpretation on the politics of Brexit. They suggest that Starmer sabotaged a potential “softer” post-Brexit arrangement that then Conservative prime minister, Theresa May, was seeking with Brussels—either because he wanted to push Corbyn into a corner or he genuinely believed that Brexit could be reversed. To be sure, Starmer was a staunch “Remainer.” It is equally correct to say that soon after he became leader in 2020, he dropped any discussion of returning to the EU. Cruddas, however, insists that Starmer should have backed Corbyn in seeking “a progressive ‘Leave’ agenda” —a miserable outcome and an oxymoron if ever there was one.
For many on the center-left, a tangible improvement in relations with Europe will be the acid test for Starmer. The signs so far are not particularly encouraging: He is sticking to the mantra “make Brexit work”—another contradiction in terms.
More generally, he is jettisoning any policies that make his party look “radical” (some around him equate that word with “threatening”). Labour will enter the election with a stripped-down manifesto that has removed or watered down, inter alia, a commitment to a £28 billion “green jobs” agenda (a U.K. equivalent of the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act), plans to give workers in precarious jobs such as delivery drivers more rights, brings the water and energy sectors back into public ownership, and introduces mandatory “clean air zones.”
The aim is to provide no hostages to fortune, no “attack lines” for the enemy. Cruddas describes Starmer as traveling light: “He appears detached from the deeper intellectual traditions that have shaped the history” of the party.
Which brings us back to the template that has dogged Labour throughout its first century: to offer radicalism (and lose) or to play it safe (and win). The contrast with the right could not be starker. Whatever the size of their majority, even when they have not commanded a majority, Conservative leaders have usually gone for broke. Timidity has dogged Labour. It is not a word in the Tory lexicon.
Books are independently selected by FP editors. FP earns an affiliate commission on anything purchased through links to Amazon.com on this page.
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