ECONOMICS, DEMOCRATISATION AND LOCALISM: The Lost World of Peter Lee.
| Author | Tomaney, John |
There is a growing recognition that decentralisation and localism should play a key role in a future Labour manifesto. Where should Labour look for lessons about effective localism? The party's own past provides valuable lessons about how to forge a progressive localism.
County Durham emerged as a Labour heartland in the period between the First and Second World Wars, but the origins of this hegemony are poorly understood today. Labour's rise was hard-fought and by no means inevitable. Peter Lee (1864-1935) was a political colossus who, during the 1920s and 1930s, held the leading positions in both the Durham Miners' Association (DMA) and Durham County Council. He presided over Labour's rise, exercising extraordinary local political power. Today, his life and work is largely forgotten in the region he did so much to transform, albeit he is commemorated in the New Town which bears his name. But his life bears scrutiny for the light it sheds on how Labour won and used power in Durham, the strengths and limits of this politics, and its contemporary relevance.
The foundation of Labour's power was the DMA, but local politics was not simply a product of the dominance of coal. The Durham miners came relatively late to Labour. In the early twentieth century, the DMA was aligned with the Liberals. The Miners' Federation of Great Britain affiliated to Labour in 1910, the DMA not until 1919. During the 1920s and 1930s, though, Labour captured control of local government in the county and began to use it to address the neglected basic needs of working people. In his 1946 novel, Charity Main, a lightly fictionalised account of his time in the Durham coalfield, Mark Benney attributes Labour's ascendancy to the need to tackle the legacy of the 'coalowners' complete severance of industrial from social responsibilities'. (1) Peter Lee was the central figure in this story.
Peter Lee went down Littletown Colliery, near Durham, aged 10. In his youth, he was an itinerant drinker and fighter. He was saved by a love of books, a belated commitment to self-improvement and, above all, marriage to his childhood sweetheart, Alice Thompson. Under her influence, he gave up drink and became a Methodist preacher. The couple settled in Wheatley Hill where he took the role of checkweighman at the colliery, the trusted representative of the workforce in the determination of piece earnings.
Peter Lee began his long march through the institutions of local government in 1903...
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