It is a truism that history’s winners get to establish their version of events as the official record. So it is with the Labour Party. New Labour was born, Blair and Mandelson tell us, from the need to modernise, to move away from “centralised state socialism” and learn the lessons of Labour’s disappointing terms in office.
The importance of this book is in setting the record straight. It was not today’s “modernisers”, but the Labour left which in the 1970s recognised that to survive as a force for change the Party would have to be innovative and radical. This required a new approach to the idea of the paternalistic state and a recognition of the limits of ‘parliamentary socialism’. “The Labour left wanted to replace it with democratic socialism,” state the authors. “New Labour would replace it with parliamentary capitalism.”
The new left that emerged in the Party in the 1970s contained a number of ingredients. There was the municipal left that replaced the corrupt right wing in local politics in the late 1960s, when Labour lost town halls across the country due to the unpopularity of the Wilson Government. There was the disillusionment from within that government, expressed most clearly by Tony Benn, who began to advance a more popular and participatory democracy along with the need for a more political trade unionism and controls on the power of the media. There was also growing concern with greater accountability and grassroots democracy. Nor were these entirely British trends; across Europe similar tendencies were developing in social democratic parties as a response to the crisis of the post-war order. This book charts in detail the development of the left as a force within the Party, through the collapse of the 1974-9 Labour Government into IMF-dictated monetarism.
The fight for accountability to the rank and file led logically on to reform of the Party’s constitution. The book recalls the hothouse atmosphere after Labour lost office, when a right-wing parliamentary party felt obliged to choose Michael Foot as leader to head off the revolt. Benn’s narrow defeat in the 1981 deputy leadership contest is rightly seen as a turning point: thenceforth the right in the Party opened an offensive that placed respectability in the eyes of capital above the need to defeat the Tories. The Kinnock leadership squandered every opportunity, from the miners’ strike to the poll tax, to defeat the movement’s enemies. In this it was backed intellectually by the Eurocommunist journal Marxism Today and within Labour’s ranks by the emergent “soft left” — formed ostensibly to pull the leadership to the left, but more often abandoning its diminishing principles to keep up with Kinnock’s charge to the right.
The book correctly links the fate of the left to the big class battles of the 1980s, such as those in local government against rate-capping or trade union struggles against Thatcher, with each defeat making Labour easier to “modernise” and safer for business to trust.
Is the fight for socialist policies inside the Party over? The authors do not say so definitively and they are correct to argue that the fight to democratise Labour’s structure must be extended to other institutions of civil society, especially the media. However, activists may feel a good deal more optimistic than Panitch and Leys about the future inside the Party after this year’s excellent showing for the left in the NEC elections.