Why Labour is the people’s party
Greg Rosen |
The 'people power' rhetoric of Ed Miliband's recent Fabian speech surprised some commentators. Had they read Labour's 2010 manifesto, co-written by the younger Miliband and heavily influenced by the 'people power' ideas of the Co-operative Party, of which he is a member, they might have been forewarned. Ironically, the Tory vision of 'people power' by way of the 'Big Society' seems to have blinded some commentators to the roots of Labour's historic epithet as the 'people's party'.
Instead, many have swallowed Steve Hilton's construction that Labour is the party of the state. In part, that is Labour's fault. During the election, some of Labour's senior strategists sought to posit a 'dividing line' between Labour's 'enabling state' and the 'do-it-yourself state' of the Conservatives. Labour has always been about enabling: but it has not always been about the state. Its roots were in empowering, as Clause IV puts it, 'the many not the few': the people, not the state. The state was envisaged by Labour as the servant of the people. It was certainly not, when Labour was formed in 1900, 'of the people': the limitations of Britain's education system at that time meant that few working class children could secure a job or career as a public servant and state employee. 'Public service managers' were usually middle class products of the public schools.
Labour's roots were in the private sector workers who formed the big skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled trade unions of a century ago such as the engineers, electricians, boilermakers, train drivers, and miners - not the public sector. Public sector unions, who hardly then existed, comprise the main part of the TUC not affiliated to Labour. The state grew to provide Labour's supporters with better service and to ensure that private monopolies and oligopolies did not exploit their position at their expense. Appalled by the Soviet Union's gulags, show trials, and mass murder, by the 1930s British politicians nonetheless feared its apparent efficiency and effectiveness, underpinned by five-year plans. They wanted, economically, to imitate it. The Conservatives embraced central planning and bureaucracy as much as Labour. Moreover, colonial administrators, losing one empire, saw in the nationalised industries the potential for another. Pre-1939, the Conservatives created the Central Electricity Generating Board and set up similar corporations to run the BBC, the Tote, and Civil Aviation. When, during the war, the future Tory Cabinet Minister Oliver Lyttelton was asked by Herbert Morrison what he would do with the coal industry, Lyttelton replied: 'nationalise it'.
The late Lord Gilmour, Cabinet minister under Heath and Thatcher, asserted that: 'prudent nationalisation would in some ways have been a more appropriate policy for the Conservatives than Labour; they certainly thought of it first... the centralised structures of the new nationalised industries... (copied by Herbert Morrison from the Conservatives' Central Electricity Generating Board) produced managements that were no less remote from their workers than the previous regime.'
Morrison realised the inadequacies of the 1940s and 50s state - and the importance of its 'consolidation' - but few of the younger generation were interested. In 1951-64, the Conservative government did little to tackle bureaucracy, red-tape or waste. Indeed, when the economy failed to reverse its decline, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan took a more-corporatist-than-thou approach vis-à-vis Labour. It was the failure of Tory corporatism and statism that Harold Wilson decried in his New Britain speeches of 1963-64. Despite Cameron's rhetoric, the Tories were not historically liberal or anti-state. Before the rise of Labour, they were the protectionist and traditionalist opponents of the Liberals. Moreover, contrary to the picture painted by proponents of the 'Big Society', Conservatives were in no sense pro-co-operative: Tory bedrock support included small private shopkeepers, who hated and feared co-operative shops.
In fact the very hostility of Conservative governments over the years to the co-operative principle that spurred the Co-operative Movement to in 1917 to found its own political party. Neville Chamberlain was the Conservative Chancellor who slapped a tax on the 'divvy', despite the millions of signatures on a National Co-operative Petition. Led by Kettering MP Sam Perry, father of Wimbledon tennis star Fred (once an enthusiastic Co-op political activist), the Co-operative Party proved too small on its own to reverse Chamberlain's anti-Co-op 'divvy-tax'. By 1927 it had signed an electoral pact with the Labour Party, an alliance that endures and currently sees twenty-eight Co-op MPs in parliament, including a record number on the Opposition front-bench. It was the Co-operative Party, not the Conservatives, which first advocated mutualising public services (the Co-operative Party persuaded Labour to pledge the mutualisation of the life assurance industry in the Labour manifesto for the 1950 election).
Locally, it was the Co-operative Party that during the 1960s pioneered 'people power': democratically-controlled mutually-owned co-operative social housing schemes, and persuaded the Labour governments to back them, against the prejudices of Whitehall and council officials. Co-operative Party MPs and ministers were also responsible for introducing Britain's framework of consumer rights legislation in the 1960s.
The Co-operative Party discreetly permeated the last Labour government, securing, with Ed Miliband's support, 24 Co-operative Party policies in the 2010 manifesto, including the re-mutualisation of Northern Rock; the conversion of English Heritage, the BBC and British Waterways into co-operatively owned mutuals; support for more co-operative schools and for mutually run rail franchises, housing, Surestart, energy schemes and football clubs.
In Opposition, David Cameron pledged to 'take the lead in applying the co-operative ideal', through creating co-operative schools. In fact, the Labour government, on the initiative of the Co-operative Party, were already doing so - and Cameron's government has axed Labour's funding for co-operative schools. Likewise, the Coalition betrayed Vince Cable's former support for re-mutualising Northern Rock, a pledge Labour adopted in its 2010 manifesto on the urging of the Co-operative Party.
Conservative governments have usually defended the power of the few at the expense of the many. The much-vaunted 1980s privatisations were little to do with people power. Few 'Sids' - ordinary voters who bought discounted British Gas shares - held on for the long-term: most profited from a quick sale to institutional investors. Right or wrong, it was nothing to do with any 'Big Society' in which consumers gained real 'people power'control over services formerly provided by the state.
The Coalition's actions are essentially Thatcherism with a Lib Dem face - the privatisation of public assets with some employee share ownership thrown in. There is nothing about the consumer accountability that would make 'people power' meaningful. Labour's 2010 manifesto promised to mutualise British Waterways, which runs Britain's canals. The Coalition plans to turn the quango into a charitable trust - essentially a less accountable quango.
Labour has the chance to explain to voters that it is the real 'people's party'. It looks like Ed Miliband will take it.
Please note: Views expressed are those of the author.About the author
