After 'new Britain'.
| Author | Hassan, Gerry |
| Position | Essays |
The question that hovers above the Iraq inquiry is--since the evidence on Saddam Hussein's weaponry was so flaky and the post-war planning so atrocious--why on earth Tony Blair did it. One theory, albeit not the one likely to be offered by Mr Blair himself, is that his militarism and messianism, the mix of responsibility and entitlement that he evinced, are part of the inheritance of all post-imperial British leaders ... If empire is the backdrop of Britain's foreign entanglements, it is also implicated in the country's exposure to another great debacle, the financial crash. The City and the empire grew up symbiotically. Imperial trade and investment made London a world financial centre; the City became vital to the British economy, while at the same time, preoccupied as it was with foreign deals, largely separate from the rest of it. The empire thus bequeathed commercial habits, and an overmighty financial sector, which British taxpayers now have cause to regret. Bagehot, The Economist, 5 December 2009 We stand at a critical point in Labour's fortunes: sixteen years of New Labour; the exhaustion of a prescriptive, limiting way of understanding, enacting and doing politics, and the end of the line for the incantation of 'modernisation' and 'New Britain'.
The definitive story of New Labour has yet to be written. When it is, it will clearly be a lot more sophisticated and nuanced than the politics as personality of Andrew Rawnsley's interpretation (2010)--the dominant media account of the period--or those of the main players who have put pen to paper so far (Mandelson, 2010; Campbell, 2010; Blair, 2010). The experience of New Labour has to be put into a longer-term perspective which locates it in the evolution, crisis and ultimate demise of Labour Britain's once powerful story. This story gave the party a party a purpose and animating project which was its 'soul' and 'utopia' for much of its existence, and which now stands exhausted, humiliated and defeated (see Shaw, 2007).
The five Labour leadership candidates have much to contend with, including the shadow of New Labour, yet one area they have shown little understanding of is the need to address the terrain of the story of Labour Britain. The numerous leadership debates have shown no awareness of the need to explore the question of how Labour understands Britain as a country, state and set of nations. How does the British state and government act in a progressive manner which has an over-arching UK-wide purpose, while acknowledging its multinational character, wider geo-political context, and the territorial dimensions which inform it? To put it simply, how does Labour tell a story of a 'Labour nation' and state after New Labour?
The story of Labour Britain
The march is not yet over. It is only just beginning. These fifty years and the years that went before them are but the prelude to the greater story. Now, as it makes ready for a new advance, Labour calls to its ranks as throughout its history a great company, the company of those of all ages and all classes who are not afraid to fight for the progress of mankind and to give their fidelity to the cause of the brotherhood of man. Francis Williams, Fifty Years' March: The Rise of the Labour Party (1950) There was once was a powerful, resonant story of Labour Britain. It was a profoundly British story, about progress, the forward march of working people, interwoven with the claim of organised labour having its place recognised under the right, enlightened leadership. This story gave the Labour Party a sense of moral mission and purpose and carried an appeal well beyond its natural boundaries. It was a story of 'the Labour nation' which Labour had deep ambivalence about, in the main because of the powerful Tory association with the nation and from this with Empire, xenophobia and imperialism. Labour was a deeply British party, shaped by the culture, codes and history of these isles--insular, self-congratulatory, suspicious of foreign ways, and yet at the same time it saw itself as part of an international calling and crusade.
Arthur Aughey put it that 'the Labour nation was to be sustained by the social democratic state' and full employment, redistribution and social justice (2001, 90). This 'Labour nation' was bound together by the values of community, class and citizenship which concealed significant Labour ill-ease about the nation: these values were utilised in a solidaristic project centred on the ideas of greater equality and efficiency. This vision was maintained by the post-war international order and system of managed, organised and secure capitalism. When that system began to become unstable and unravel it posed huge problems for social democratic politics.
Labour became the party of the central state and the dominant account of this became the Fabian perspective which saw the state as a powerful political instrument for good, for planning, redistribution and progressive ends. There was in this the rise of the expert, the technocrat and science, and the belief in rational, calculated, logical action as compared to the perfidy and unplanned chaos of the market.
All of this contributed to a mainstream Labour tradition which propagated the Whig notion of British history: of continuity, lack of rupture, organic change, and a trust in the institutions of British public life. There was a counter-Whig view which stressed the progressive narrative of British history: the Levellers, Diggers, Tom Paine, the Chartists, and there was even within this version an implicit acceptance of the wider Whig history, of Britain as this exceptional, blessed island of liberty, which would see Labour politicians from Foot to Brown cite 'one thousand years of British history' without any embarrassment for their historical illiteracy (Hassan, 2009a).
The Whig version of history can be maligned or caricatured, but carries weight and influence to this day. Previous historical accounts of the forward march of Labour from Francis Williams and Cole and Postgate still influence the collective memory of the party (Williams, 1950; Cole and Postgage, 1946). More recent and mainstream accounts from the likes of A. J. P. Taylor have told an account of the progress of British democracy which has been comforting to Labour (Taylor, 1965). To this day populist historians such as Andrew Marr have given voice to a post-war story which portrays Blair's Britain as cosmopolitan, liberal, diverse and at ease with itself: as the continuation of progress (Marr, 2007).
Labour embraced the idea of the UK as a unitary state, where the political central authority held an uncontested monopoly of political power to enforce standardisation and uniformity throughout the country. This was predominantly an English story of democracy, liberty and rights, and the progression of English parliamentary sovereignty, ignoring the Scots, Welsh and Irish. The problems of English/British oppression in Ireland, or the opposite story of the Scots freely joining the union as equals in the Treaties of Union, were usually glossed over in a wider pan-English/British incorporating narrative.
Then there was the issue of Britain's role and place in the world, and in particular the issue of the Empire, colonialism and imperialism. While Labour was influenced from its earliest days by an explicit, instinctual anti-imperialism, the party also embraced what Adam Smith called 'the project of an Empire' as a vehicle for progress and civilisation (Darwin, 2009). Important apologists for Empire such as the Fabians George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells were outriders here, but they tapped a wider sense that the Empire could provide a great global project for progress, efficiency and benevolence (Porter, 2006).
Shaw's 'Fabianism and the Empire' took up these positions explicitly, but a wider problem was the failure of Labour to articulate any kind of understanding of how the prosperity and living standards of people in Britain was based on the exploitation of millions of people across the world (Porter, 2008). George Orwell reflected upon this one month after Labour's famous victory in 1945, commenting that 'the chief danger of the situation lies in the fact that the English people have never been made to grasp that the sources of their prosperity lie outside England'. This was 'incompatible with the spirit of Socialism' and the source of the problem unambiguous: 'the parochial outlook of the Labour Party itself is largely responsible for this'. Orwell concluded that with the odd exception, he had 'never met an English Socialist who would face it' (Orwell, 1968, 395-96).
This still has repercussions in present-day post-Empire Britain. The relationship between Empire, multi-national identities and the British state has remained blurred, as have the consequences of the retreat from imperial citizenship which began with the Nationality Act of 1948 to contemporary post-imperial citizenship (Mycock, 2010).
The strange death of Labour Britain
In the 1960s and 1970s Britain went into a period of severe economic crisis and difficulty which had massive consequences for Labour, social...
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