Egalitarian Thought and Labour Politics

Egalitarian Thought and Labour Politics Retreating visions

In Egalitarian Thought and Labour Politics Nicholas Ellison argues that the concept of equality is the cornerstone of the British socialist tradition, and the organizing principle of the Labour Party’s socialist thought. The book examines the alternative understandings of equality which have divided the Labour Party since 1930, tracing the origin of the current shift away from concern for social and economic equality to an increasing emphasis on liberty and ‘equal effective freedom’. Dr Ellison identifies three competing approaches to equality, each rooted in a particular tradition of thought and a distinct faction of the party, and he examines the struggle between these divergent ideologies in the party’s attempt to define its socialist ideals. The book is also concerned with contemporary attitudes to equality within the Labour Party, discussing the importance of the concept to debates about citizenship and market socialism. Nicholas Ellison is Lecturer in Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Durham.

Books published under the joint imprint of LSE/Routledge are works of high academic merit approved by the Publications Committee of the London School of Economics and Political Science. These publications are drawn from the wide range of academic studies in the social sciences for which the LSE has an international reputation.

Egalitarian Thought and Labour Politics

Retreating visions

Nicholas Ellison

London and New York

First published 1994 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004. Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1994 Nicholas Ellison All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-41565-5 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-72389-9 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-06972-6 (Print Edition)

To my Father—and in memory of my Mother

This page intentionally left blank.

Contents

Preface

ix

1

Three visions: Labour and equality in the 1930s

1

2

War, post-war and technocratic socialism

28

3

The Left after Bevanism

52

4

Keynesian socialism in the 1950s

73

5

Rethinking qualitative socialism?

109

6

Interregnum

135

7

Seeking alternatives: technocrats and equality in the 1970s

152

Failing to seek alternatives: qualitative socialists and Keynesians in the 1970s

179

Beyond the three visions?

201

8 9

10 Epilogue

218

Notes

226

Select bibliography

283

Index

305

This page intentionally left blank.

Preface

For the greater part of its history the Labour Party has argued about the nature of equality and the egalitarian socialist society. This book examines Labour’s treatment of equality and related conceptions of the egalitarian future as these have been elaborated in debates about Party doctrine and policy since the 1930s. As consensus has never existed about the meaning of equality, the main objective is not to assess Labour’s record with a view to arriving at some ‘acceptable’ definition of the idea, but to explore the Party’s history of inter- and intra-factional strife through the prism of disagreement about its central organizing principle. The argument developed here is that Labour’s internal debates took place around three roughly denned visions of the egalitarian future —technocratic, Keynesian socialist and qualitative. These strands of thought are referred to as ‘visions’ because each offered not so much a fully worked-out doctrine than a hope for the future which employed different understandings of equality to develop and sustain particular policy preferences. Technocratic socialists understood equality in terms of economic power. They were primarily concerned with public ownership, not for its own sake but because it would reduce the power of private owners and would make for greater productive efficiency. Prospects for greater equality would be improved on both counts, the prime beneficiaries being the working class. Keynesian socialists believed social reform to be more important than economic ownership and concentrated on redistribution and social equality in the mixed economy. They envisaged a classless society of social, if not economic, equals enjoying a broad equality of opportunity. Finally, qualitative socialists employed ideas of ‘fel-

x EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

lowship’ or ‘fraternity’ to illuminate the egalitarian future. Their goal was a society based upon an equality of ‘right relationships’ in which human beings were equal in dignity and worth, and in which opportunities existed not to rise above others but to develop the personal potential with which different individuals were endowed. These three visions retained their basic character for the greater part of the period examined here, with one important qualification. At different times each divided, producing an additional or alternative understanding of equality from within the original. Technocratic socialism provides the clearest example with leftwing technocrat and centre-left variants discernible from the 1930s onwards. Keynesian socialism bifurcated into ‘liberal’ and ‘socialist’ tendencies, the first signs of which emerged in the 1950s, though the major split occurred in the early 1970s. Qualitative socialism was less homogeneous to begin with but here, too, the 1950s saw a growing distinction between those who understood the qualitative ideal in terms of broad social change across a wide range of areas and those who came to believe that it could best be advanced through particular social policies. The approach adopted here suggests two criticisms of past discussions of the Party’s doctrinal debates. First, any assumption that Labour’s doctrine evolved through a sequence of distinct chronological phases—from technocratic collectivism to Keynesianism and so on—is rejected.1 All three visions were intimately involved in debates about policy and principle and if one or other enjoyed temporary dominance this did not eclipse its competitors. Second, discussions about which perspective was more ‘socialist’ are equally difficult to sustain.2 They imply the possibility of agreement over a particular definition of socialism and the existence of the three—and in some ways six—perspectives considered here points to the contestable nature of the egalitarian socialist idea. That said, there are also at least two criticisms which could be levelled at the present line of analysis. It may be questioned, first, whether ‘equality’ really is, or was, the salient principle of Labour’s doctrine; other values—‘democracy’, ‘fellowship’, even public ownership—could be regarded as equally significant. Second, to use an idea as a vehicle for exploring factional struggles may appear naive. After all, what politicians do, and the reasons

PREFACE xi

for their actions, arguably has little bearing on what they think, or profess to think. On the first point, equality does not have to be treated as the central principle of Labour’s socialism so long as it is recognized as the central organizing principle of Party doctrine. Bernard Crick has talked of a cluster of socialist values—liberty, equality, fraternity—of which equality acts as the cohering idea.3 Without its gravitational pull the remaining values can be subject to the force of competing interpretations. Some Party factions reinforced their understandings of equality with help from the additional values of liberty or fraternity, some did not. But no group entirely rejected equality, or denied that a more egalitarian society should be Labour’s abiding raison d'être. The second objection is potentially more damaging because it implies that factional differences over doctrine and policy cannot be treated independently of other contaminating factors— personal political ambition being amongst the more obvious. This point should not be denied entirely. Many Party thinkers who were also active politicians entertained hopes of office in a Labour government, but their interest in a political career need not suggest a betrayal of principle and vision. Indeed the dogged persistence with which they adhered to their conceptions of egalitarian doctrine, sometimes jeopardizing preferment in the process, is particularly noteworthy. The test of ideological purity—being ‘one of us’—was alive and well in the Labour Party long before Mrs Thatcher applied that divisive criterion to her end of the political spectrum. But even if it is possible to curb the temptation to argue that political conviction and political ambition are necessarily incompatible, what can an examination of Labour’s disagreements over equality contribute to a more general understanding of the Party and its history? Because ‘internal’ debates were not conducted in a vacuum but in the context of a potentially changeable ‘external’ social, political and economic environment, they were always more than arguments about esoteric principles. By linking these internal and external dimensions as far as possible into one account, a critical exploration of Party history can be provided that is just as valuable as those which look at, say, Labour’s failures in government or its problematic relationship with the trade unions. In fact disagreements about doctrine pervade these other approaches to Labour history anyway, but they tend to be treated

xii EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

as artefacts of Labour’s power struggles rather than as major vehicles for their expression. Precisely how internal political argument responded to, or interacted with, prevailing exogenous conditions differs according to the period under review. Between the 1930s and the 1960s, for example, democratic socialist ideas of the kind associated with the social and economic reforms of the Attlee governments came to be regarded as legitimate and effective solutions to the problems posed by the pre-war market economy. The probability of some form of egalitarian future became widely accepted during these years and this comparatively friendly ideological climate, coupled with conditions of social and economic stability, was unconducive to widespread popular argument in the labour movement as a whole.4 It did not, however, deter, and perhaps encouraged, the development of a hothouse atmosphere in sections of the Parliamentary Party, disputes over the nature of the three visions being taken to the point of stalemate within and among competing elites. Matters changed markedly during the 1960s. External social changes—not least in industrial relations—and rapid disillusion with the policy failures of the Wilson governments encouraged dissent both in the Party rank and file and amongst a number of trade union leaders impatient with what they regarded as Labour’s willingness to compromise the interests of their members. Thereafter arguments about equality became more widespread and chaotic. Although the three visions emerged from the 1960s reasonably intact, they were quickly threatened by a rapidly changing, hostile economic climate which undermined their more ambitious hopes and policies. Their apparent weakness meant that each was also vulnerable to new understandings of equality emanating from a variety of sources outside the Party which profoundly influenced rank-and-file attitudes in the 1970s and early 1980s. Caught in this hostile environment, the proponents of each vision reacted in different ways—but the general sense is one of overall ‘retreat’. Leftwing technocrats adapted older ideas about state ownership and planning to a newer blend of public ownership and popular democratic participation with a distinctly Marxist flavour. Although the formula seemed briefly to catch the spirit of the times, it displeased some sections of the left and failed to sustain support among the Party or trade union leader-

PREFACE xiii

ship before succumbing to the overwhelming changes which affected Labour in particular and socialism in general during the 1980s. Keynesians, meanwhile, unable to agree among themselves, entirely failed to adapt their ideas to conditions of low or negative growth, while qualitative socialists effectively ceased to exist as a doctrinal force as soon as they began to submerge their concern for egalitarian fellowship beneath more pragmatic issues of poverty and associated pressure group activities. The structure of the book reflects the very different combination of factors which confronted Party politicians and intellectuals before and after the early 1960s. The first five chapters examine the development of Labour’s egalitarian ideas and policies before 1964, and explore the disputes over egalitarian doctrine and policy which preoccupied the Party during these years. Chapter 6 briefly examines the changing economic, social and political environment which destroyed Labour’s intellectual hegemony over the British left and altered the ways in which the Party debated policy and doctrine. The following two chapters trace the fate of the three visions as they unravelled in the 1970s and early 1980s, while Chapter 9 brings the story up to date, briefly exploring the marked departures from past debates as ideas of equality underwent yet further changes after 1983. A short Epilogue assesses prospects for a new understanding of equality based on the combination of Rawlsian and market socialist ideas currently being discussed by Labour’s independent Commission on Social Justice. Many people have helped with this book—some more than they know. Tom Nossiter has read and re-read countless drafts and has sustained my confidence over far too long; he has my eternal gratitude. Thanks, too, are more than due to Paul Heywood and Brendan O’Leary for all their encouragement when I’m sure they had far better things to do, and particularly to Sarah Busby for her perceptive criticisms and unfailing support. I have talked to a great many people about this project at one time or other: Brian Abel-Smith, Rodney Barker, Henry Drucker, Howard Glennerster, Lewis Minkin, David Piachaud, Ben Pimlott and Rene and Paul Saran were most generous, while the late Kay Titmuss not only made her husband’s private papers available to me but was immensely kind and hospitable in the process. Roy Hattersley, Giles Radice and Frank Field were able to confirm at

xiv EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

least some of my perceptions, particularly about recent attempts to recast Labour’s ideas of equality. The staff of a number of libraries and collections have been most helpful and patient. I plagued Angela Raspin and her colleagues at the British Library of Political and Economic Science, and Stephen Byrd at the Labour Party Archives in Manchester more than most, but thanks are also due to Melanie Cooper, Labour Party Librarian at Walworth Road, and staff at Warwick University’s Modern Records Centre, the British Library Reading Room and the libraries of Durham and Newcastle Universities. It would be comforting to think that others could share the responsibility for the errors and misjudgements contained in what follows but that, however, is entirely mine.

Chapter 1

Three visions: Labour and equality in the 1930s

In the political crisis of August 1931 the Labour Party died and had to be reborn. The dramatic events of that period saw the literal disintegration of a minority Labour government caught in the midst of a sterling crisis and fundamentally split over whether to implement public spending cuts.1 Labour’s Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, deserted the Party to lead a Conservativedominated National government, other influential members of the leadership either following him or leaving politics altogether.2 The Party’s discomfiture was compounded by the ensuing general election in October which resulted in an overwhelming victory for the National government, the previous complement of 288 MPs being reduced to 46 with many senior Party figures losing their seats.3 The scale of defeat profoundly shocked a Party and wider movement that had, by the later 1920s, come to regard itself as a party of government and the main vehicle for the peaceful transition to ‘socialism’. Labour swiftly began to rebuild, however. In political and organizational terms the trade union leadership moved to limit the damage by effectively removing responsibility for Party affairs from the decimated Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP), now chaired by the respected but aging George Lansbury. Throughout the 1930s influential union leaders, notably Walter Citrine, General Secretary of the TUC, and Ernest Bevin, General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, played a leading, if not hegemonic, role in controlling Party fortunes through the National Joint Council (NJC) which oversaw the work of the National Executive Committee (NEC) and the small Committee of the PLP.4 1

2 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

But important though they were, these attempts at self-preservation did nothing to provide a long-term sense of direction. As Lewis Minkin has pointed out, the trade unions had interests in a number of areas but were neither sufficiently united, nor sufficiently knowledgeable across the broad range of policy issues to furnish the Party with a much-needed comprehensive programme.5 Despite the endemic distrust with which union leaders viewed socialist intellectuals, the task of rethinking Labour’s socialist objectives fell, by default, to the latter. There was a real sense of beginning again. The crisis had shattered the ‘tentative, doctrineless socialism’, widespread throughout the 1920s, that assumed in Sidney Webb’s oft-quoted phrase ‘the inevitability of gradualness’.6 Social and economic reform, though egalitarian, would not be unduly disruptive but rather would be ‘organic’. As MacDonald had envisaged it, socialism would grow from within capitalism, naturally superseding it as a higher stage of economic and political evolution.7 Labour’s departure had appeared particularly ignominious because these highflown objectives seemed so divorced from the political and economic realities which had confronted the Party. Even before the final collapse it had become increasingly obvious to certain Party intellectuals that a more distinctive sense of socialism and the policies to achieve it was needed,8 and this desire to rethink Party doctrine and policy proved irresistible in the aftermath of defeat. In the immediate flurry of activity newly-emerging strands of Party thinking were temporarily obscured as Labour moved rapidly leftwards, but subsequent developments suggest that this was little more than a reflex desire to construct a new identity untainted by association with now-disgraced leaders. When the dust began to settle three strands of thought began to appear. Each contained its own distinct vision of an egalitarian, socialist future and each, despite internal bifurcation, persisted in identifiable form for over fifty years.

THREE VISIONS ‘Technocratic socialism’ in its 1930s’ variant took two different, though related, forms. Leftwing technocrats like E.F. Wise and Harold Laski looked to a combination of state ownership and physical planning as the only available means of resolving the cri-

THREE VISIONS: LABOUR IN THE 1930S 3

sis of capitalism and advancing the interests of the working class. Their position differed in some respects from John Strachey and others outside the Labour Party who were closer to the Communist Party and espoused an orthodox Marxism,9 but there were clear similarities in the optimism about capitalism’s imminent demise and the benefits this would bring to working people. Hugh Dalton and Evan Durbin were no less committed to ideas of public ownership and physical planning but placed less emphasis on class analysis and quasi-Marxian rhetoric. Believing that Labour’s chief egalitarian objective should be ‘classlessness’ and that this could be achieved through structural economic change, Dalton and Durbin epitomized a ‘centre-left’ strand of technocratic socialism that remained a dominant motif in Party thinking until the 1980s.10 Keynesian socialism made an initial appearance in the 1930s and became increasingly influential after the Second World War. In place of changes in economic ownership, Keynesian socialists looked to the redistribution of wealth, greater access to social welfare and general ‘social amelioration’ to produce a greater equality of opportunity. Keynes’s new ideas about demand management and deficit financing were eagerly seized upon in the 1930s by a number of socialist intellectuals who believed that ‘equality’ was primarily ‘social equality’, now attainable without the unnecessary complications of economic upheaval and dispossession. Where technocrats and Keynesians attempted to flesh out their respective approaches in the immediacy of detailed policymaking, proposals from qualitative socialists tended to be less consistent, borrowing from, but cross-cutting, ideas emerging from these other strands. The qualitative vision was useful to the other perspectives because it provided a powerful, all-embracing image which supplemented their more mundane concerns. Certainly the holistic egalitarianism of R.H.Tawney or G.D.H. Cole, two of Labour’s most respected thinkers, spoke not only to the generation of Labour intellectuals that grew to maturity during the 1930s but to successive generations thereafter. Though their development owed much to the burst of intellectual energy that possessed Labour in the 1930s, each strand of thought naturally had roots in earlier thinking. Technocratic concerns about ownership had been evident in Labour’s programmebuilding since 191811 and while Keynesian socialism barely existed before the 1930s, it was prefigured in various proposals

4 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

for reflationary, demand-led measures to combat recession and unemployment. Within the labour movement the most imaginative challenges came in the form of an ILP pamphlet, The Living Wage, written by H.N.Brailsford, E.F.Wise and J.A. Hobson in 1926, and Oswald Mosley’s demands for a comprehensive programme of public works.12 The qualitative ideal hovered at some distance from either of these developing approaches. It had a much longer pedigree traceable to the utopian socialism of Owen and Ruskin, to William Morris’s concern for human fellowship and to the ILP tradition of ethical socialism best expressed in the writings of Keir Hardie, John Bruce Glazier and MacDonald.13 With the overtly utopian vision of the socialist Valhalla on the wane by the later 1920s, the qualitative ideal moved into a different phase. ‘Fellowship’ remained a central feature of the future egalitarian society but after 1931 the recognition rapidly dawned that detailed policy formulation was important too. Both Cole and Tawney had been intimately involved in policy-making for some years but, during the 1930s, both became increasingly concerned about the Party’s direction and the importance of maintaining the qualitative vision amongst the plethora of new policy initiatives. Their efforts notwithstanding, qualitative socialism failed to thrive in this period. Economic crisis and high unemployment at home, and a worsening situation abroad, meant that the times were too out of joint for a strand of doctrine that assumed the possibility not just of ‘right relationships’ but ‘nice relationships’.

RETHINKING PARTY DOCTRINE: TECHNOCRATIC SOCIALISM AND THE LABOUR LEFT Political ideas and the associated process of detailed policy formulation became, in the 1930s, the province of a small number of committed intellectuals many of whom eventually came to work under the auspices of the National Executive Committee (NEC). The youngest of these, including Evan Durbin and Hugh Gaitskell, gained initial experience in two ‘think tanks’ created in 1930 by G.D.H.Cole, the Socialist Society for Information and Propaganda (SSIP) and the New Fabian Research Bureau (NFRB), before later being co-opted onto formal Party policy committees.14 Cole intended the SSIP to ‘propagandize practical socialist

THREE VISIONS: LABOUR IN THE 1930S 5

policies’ while the NFRB carried out more detailed research into new policy areas. Of the two, the NFRB survived the longest and, dominated by centre-left and Keynesian intellectuals close to the Party leadership, was to make the greater contribution to socialist thought and policy-making. The SSIP’s career, however, was both more dramatic and less illustrious. It quickly fell victim to the split between the official Labour Party and the ILP which occurred in 1932.15 Those members of the ILP who chose to remain with Labour, of whom E.F. Wise was the foremost spokesman, proposed an amalgamation with the SSIP with a view to establishing an internal focus for leftwing criticism. Cole, Durbin and others opposed the move but it was supported by Cripps, Brailsford and William Mellor who got their way with the result that the SSIP was effectively disbanded and replaced by the Socialist League. Wise removed Bevin as chairman—which Bevin never forgot and for which he blamed Cole in particular and intellectuals in general—and the new organization was swiftly transformed into a leftwing body committed to sweeping socialist change.16 In the early 1930s, before the Socialist League became caught up in the Unity campaign against Fascism,17 much of its energy was spent proselytizing the constitutional changes thought to be necessary for the transition to socialism; the demand for the alteration of existing constitutional arrangements was the main hallmark of SSIP activities. Some members of the League, however, notably Wise and Laski, attempted to move beyond immediate political preoccupations to a consideration of socialist doctrine and the nature of the economic and social policies to be pursued by a Labour government. In so doing they furnished a radical vision of technocratic socialism which was to be taken up by future generations. The ideas of Harold Laski, Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics and one of the most prominent intellectuals in the League, had gone through a number of transformations by the time of Labour’s crisis. From an early pluralist, antistate position which privileged the corporate identity of groups and associations, Laski moved through federalism in his Grammar of Politics to the belief that the central state had a leading role to play in the transition to socialism. The slump in 1929 followed by the political crisis of 1931 and the rise of Fascism in Europe during the 1930s were crucial to the process of re-

6 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

evaluation—and Labour’s fall from office left a particularly powerful impression. Convinced that the MacDonald government had been ousted by a bankers’ conspiracy Laski declared that ‘socialist measures are…not obtainable by constitutional means’,18 writing to his American friend Felix Frankfurter that ‘I stand with the left of Labour and, if necessary, I go to the extreme left’.19 The state was effectively controlled by private economic power with the consequence that its institutions operated to their advantage and not to that of society in general. Capitalism and democracy were thus incompatible because ‘the one consistently seeks to maintain inequalities which the other, no less consistently, seeks to abolish’.20 In fact, gathering conviction about the nature of power in the capitalist state led Laski to an ambivalent position in which Marxist method combined uneasily with liberal constitutionalism. He acknowledged Marxism’s capacity to provide an analysis of, inter alia, capitalist state forms, legal institutions, and the development of philosophical systems,21 but eschewed revolutionary violence for ‘revolution by consent’, a constitutional transition to a socialist state by means of public ownership and greater social equality. There was no place in this formulation for the central maxims of orthodox Marxist-Leninist theory—the vanguard party and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Laski conceived equality in a more sophisticated manner than was commonly the case amongst Labour’s leftwingers at the time and offered what amounted to a broadly sketched paradigm of the developing technocratic socialist position. Public ownership was essential because ‘merely to abolish the privileges of feudalism was in no sense to create an equal society’.22 Privilege was associated with private ownership of the means of production and this maintained a system of class relationships inconsistent with democratic notions of justice. The capitalist class could only be destroyed by removing the economic foundation of its wealth. The destruction of capitalism was not an end in itself. Socialist society should embrace a broad equality of reward consistent with Laski’s collectivist belief that each individual ‘presses for the sacrifice of uniqueness for identity’.23 One means to remedy material inequality was to ensure that economic rewards were distributed in a recognizably just manner, ‘justice’ being defined in terms of ‘an insistent drive to equality’.24 Rewards for labour, for example, should come within a much narrower range of income

THREE VISIONS: LABOUR IN THE 1930S 7

differentials than had existed hitherto, the principle of equality only being compromised where ‘the good of those excluded from equal treatment is involved in their exclusion’.25 Equality of reward also needed to be supported by a far-reaching social equality grounded in the provision of equality of opportunity through social welfare. To this end existing private wealth would need to be redistributed to create better housing and education. In a brief discussion of redistribution Laski suggested that the money spent on ‘luxuries’ could be used to provide better housing, educational opportunity and other forms of social service.26 None of these ideas, however, added up to a fully worked-out position so much as a definable ‘attitude’ to equality. Although there were some interesting intimations of an established outlook the policies prescribed for the attainment of greater economic equality and social justice were left vague. Laski never discussed the mechanism by which a greater equality of reward was to be achieved, and the path to social equality amounted to little more than a programme of public works with educational reform— never examined in detail—held out as a further possibility. There was certainly no explanation of how the money spent on luxury goods could be made to find its way into welfare expenditure. The main policy Laski advocated which, crucially, he believed to be the starting-point for all further reform, was public ownership. Even here he provided no explanation of what the term might mean and did not examine methods by which private industries would be transferred to the state or the nature of subsequent state control over the public sector—and this at a time when the labour movement was actively engaged in discussions about the efficacy of the public corporation as a model for public ownership and about worker representation on the boards of public industries.27 Eschewing detail, and having made the general case for capitalism’s demise and post-capitalist equality, Laski preferred to concentrate on the prospects for peaceful revolution in Britain and their constitutional implications. Like many on the Left these ‘immediate issues’ gave way to others as Fascism spread and the international situation worsened in the late 1930s.28 Laski’s lack of willingness to address the details and long-term implications of his thinking was characteristic of leftwing technocratic socialists in the 1930s and beyond. Many of the prominent figures in the Socialist League displayed similar behaviour in their preoccupation with the constitutional position of a committed

8 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

socialist government faced with a capitalist backlash. Indeed in the early 1930s Cripps and Mellor restricted their discussions to the nature of emergency powers, the position of the monarchy and the abolition of the House of Lords, not bothering to indulge in apparently esoteric debates about the nature of socialism and equality. By the later part of the decade they too had become obsessed with prospects for a United Front against Fascism. One individual did not concentrate on such immediate questions, being clearly concerned with the details of socialist economic policy and the economic machinery of transition. Wise, crudely described by Nicholas Davenport in the New Statesman as a ‘political dark horse [and] a suspected Marxist revolutionary’, was an ex-civil servant with first-hand experience of state planning during the First World War who had also worked as a Foreign Trade advisor to the Russian Cooperative Movement in the 1920s.29 He had been active in the ILP until its split with the Labour Party, and his work with Brailsford and Hobson on The Living Wage, though untypical of his future outlook, demonstrated an awareness of the need for Labour to be equipped with detailed economic policies intended to effect a more equal distribution of wealth. The Party’s downfall in 1931 drew Wise’s attention to the need for public ownership and socialist planning. In his opinion, a socialist government should proceed ‘methodically and rapidly’ to take over the leading industries and services of the country ensuring as it did so that there could be no easy return to private ownership.30 The key to this strategy was nationalization of the banking system, which Wise understood to be a vital aspect of a Labour government’s economic programme because of the need for firm control of credit and investment. Of particular significance was the takeover of the joint-stock banks. Owing to their strategic position in the handling of funds for industrial investment Wise claimed they had a vital part to play in assisting industries in the process of socialist reorganization and also in enabling industry to fulfil its ‘new function of working for service rather than for private profit’.31 A nationalized banking system became an integral part of the Socialist League’s proposed National Plan, a further feature of which was to be a National Investment Board (NIB). The Board’s role was to prevent the ‘waste and misdirection’ of long-term capital by regulating new public capital issues and, in the initial

THREE VISIONS: LABOUR IN THE 1930S 9

stages, to control the direction of private investment.32 The NIB would also be responsible for allocating funds in accordance with the Plan. Wise did not go into the functions of the NIB more precisely but it is significant that he mentioned it at all—the demand for state control of investment is typically associated with the moderate socialists in the NFRB or the progressives in the centrist Next Five Years group.33 The League was rarely so specific about economic and financial arrangements. The important point about Wise’s understanding of socialist transition is that he did not conceive it as an end in itself but a necessary stage on the way to a society grounded in equality and social justice. The National Plan, and especially the place of banking in it, had as its central objective the improvement in the standard of life particularly of the poorer sections of the working class, employed, unemployed and aged; the redistribution of the national income derived from industry and agriculture and trade, so as to secure… greater equality of income and economic opportunity; and a wide extension of communal social services.34 In common with all those who regarded economic transition as the first priority, however, Wise believed that the extension of social services and improvements in working-class living standards could not occur until ‘the whole purpose of industry and trade has been changed, and its structure drastically reorganized’.35 His vision of future equality was premised upon far-reaching economic change which involved a redistribution of economic power typical of the technocratic socialist position. The contributions made by Wise and Laski suggest that the Socialist League possessed the rudiments of an egalitarian doctrine on which a developed programme could be based. Public ownership was conceived as an indispensable first step towards equality, there was an acceptance of central state planning and a recognition that immediate demands for social ‘amelioration’ should not be allowed to hinder more thoroughgoing socialist economic reconstruction. But in spite of these promising signs— and indeed the League’s stated ambitions—nothing like a full programme emerged. The failure to produce one can be attributed to the fact that the League’s proposals, though they briefly proved tempting to a number of Labour MPs (including Labour’s future

10 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

leader, Clement Attlee), were not generally accepted by the Party rank and file or the trade unions.36 Despite initial triumph at the Leicester Conference in 1932, where, in the immediate aftermath of crisis, the platform was defeated and Conference approval given to a package of League policies including the nationalization of the joint-stock banks, there was little sign of a willingness to use the victory to influence Labour’s developing policy initiatives in any systematic way. Indeed the League deliberately set itself apart from the Party. Membership remained small and decidely not working class, and no overtures were made to the unions which responded with distrust for what they regarded as little more than a small coterie of Oxbridge intellectuals.37 Proposals were usually advanced in opposition to Party policy and in a manner designed to appeal to a vaguely defined ‘working class’ rather than the specific concerns of prospective Labour voters. In consequence the intellectual initiative shifted towards the centre-left and the League quickly became isolated, as the NEC’s comprehensive victory at the Party conference in 1934 demonstrated. Conference endorsed the Executive’s policy statement For Socialism and Peace by a huge majority, all seventy-five amendments tabled by the League being lost. The defeat effectively marked the end of the Left’s efforts to work for a coherent domestic programme. This combination of strategic and intellectual failure was compounded by Wise’s premature death from a stroke in June 1933. His early practical experience of governmental machinery and his undoubted intellectual ability had endowed the League with an intellectual clarity it was henceforth sadly to lack. Significantly, the Left began to adopt a more rhetorical, campaign-oriented style when Cripps took Wise’s place as chairman. His infamous ‘Buckingham Palace’ speech delivered in January 1934, in which he referred to possible opposition to a Labour government from the Palace, symbolized the new mood on the domestic plane, although the League’s major interests swiftly moved towards international concerns. It became involved in anti-Fascist agitation, initially in its demands for a United Front with the Communist Party and subsequently for a Popular Front involving all radical and liberal parties. Failing to galvanize either Party or unions, the League succeeded only in getting itself proscribed by the Party in 1937.

THREE VISIONS: LABOUR IN THE 1930S 11

TOWARDS CENTRE-LEFT TECHNOCRACY Labour’s collapse forced Hugh Dalton to recognize that ‘one of the causes of our fiasco…was the complete lack of policy on the more important domestic questions’38 and both he and Herbert Morrison as influential members of the NEC began efforts to remedy this deficiency. Supported by Bevin and Citrine they introduced new policy-making machinery of which the most notable innovation was a Policy Committee with four standing subcommittees: finance and trade; the reorganization of industry; local government and social services; and constitutional affairs.39 Of the four, Finance and Trade, chaired by Dalton, was the most influential, reflecting Labour’s preoccupation with the state control of credit and investment. Through Dalton’s efforts its membership came to include a number of intellectuals associated with the NFRB, especially Durbin and Gaitskell,40 who organized the Bureau’s Economic Section in the early 1930s. The committee was also informally advised by a number of Labour sympathizers in the City. In what became known as the XYZ Club, or City Group (with which Dalton had close connections), financiers tried to rectify ‘the Labour Party’s ignorance of the City machinery and [its] complete lack of contacts with the banking world’.41 Coupled with the NFRB, these initiatives provided the organizational base for the development of both centre-left technocracy and Keynesian socialism. Intellectual support for the former came from two sources which looked to state intervention in economy and industry as a key ingredient of the transition to socialism, but which possessed very different ideas about the state’s role. First, Keynes’s new economic theories assumed an indirect role for the state which, despite its attractiveness for many Labour intellectuals in the 1930s, not all believed to be feasible. Durbin worked out his position as it were in association with, but ultimately against, Keynesian ideas. Despite a brief flirtation with Keynesianism he was never persuaded that budgetary policy and the manipulation of demand could prove a substitute for physical ownership and control of the economy by the central state, which alone could ensure the efficient direction of investment—and equality. Second, a more direct role for the state was advocated by enthusiasts of central planning. Cole and Barbara Wootton42 associated planning with Soviet Russia and Stalin’s five-year plans, believed at the time to be a leading example of the central state’s capacity

12 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

for efficiency, and their ideas epitomized the decidedly ‘Fabian’ interest in this form of control. Dalton, influenced both by a visit to the Soviet Union in 1932 and by a meeting with Mussolini in Italy in the same year, endorsed these views, though he was keen to tailor them to British conditions. Praising Italy’s ‘slancio and energia’ to Mussolini, he wondered ‘whether in England, where now there is so much impotence in the face of economic crisis, we could, though our traditions and institutions are different, catch something of this spirit’.43 Durbin’s position was the more complex because it stemmed from an attempt to discover an alternative to the radically different cures for economic depression developed by Keynes and Hayek. Keynes’s theories exercised increasing sway in the period after 1931 and the main ingredients of his General Theory were in place within two years of Labour’s collapse.44 But before 1936 (when The General Theory was first published) his views remained the subject of fierce debate between his disciples at Cambridge and the anti-interventionist free marketeers at the London School of Economics led by Hayek and Robbins. Discussions in the NFRB mirrored those taking place between the leading protagonists: Durbin and Gaitskell were influenced by Hayek while Colin Clark and James Meade, both working closely with Keynes at this time, and soon to be joined by Douglas Jay, became the first generation of Keynesian socialists.45 Hayek was sceptical about Keynes’s conviction that corrections to the trade cycle, on its downswing, could be effected through expansion and government intervention, believing instead that expansionist policies would distort the structure of production by creating an excess of capital in the productive sector. Durbin agreed and argued that policies which concentrated on public works and consumer demand could do nothing to increase capital investment. In Purchasing Power and Trade Depression he claimed that expansion could result in a transfer of resources away from the production of capital which would be both highly inflationary and deleterious for investment.46 In the early part of 1933 Durbin’s views remained firm; the way out of depression would require a contraction in the capital goods industries as the only means of forcing the economic structure to readjust at a lower rate of accumulation—a prescription which, as Winch has put it, was ‘strongly Hayekian in flavour’.47 This phase did not last, however, because Hayek’s free-market views conflicted

THREE VISIONS: LABOUR IN THE 1930S 13

sharply with Durbin’s conception of socialism. He was not prepared to countenance the inegalitarian results of Hayek’s ‘cure’ for capitalist crisis. The desire to avoid inequality briefly led Durbin to Keynes. He was persuaded in the course of discussions with James Meade during 1933 that expansionist strategies could be beneficial, at least in the short term.48 In a pamphlet written for the NFRB in the winter of that year he argued that an expansionist monetary policy would be essential if a socialist government came to power in the midst of a depression.49 Prices and money incomes must be forced up in order to increase the demand for labour and so raise employment. A state-owned banking system, including the jointstock banks, would control the strategy with the assistance of a National Investment Board. Additionally, a Supreme Economic Authority, using taxation to control demand, would be needed to contain expenditure on consumer goods after the economy had expanded to the point where the consumer industries were fully employed, offsetting any inflationary pressure. But Durbin was never wholly convinced. The emphasis he placed upon state planning and control suggests that, pace Meade, he never fully accepted Keynesian economic management. Even after the publication of The General Theory, which temporarily silenced the opposition, he could write to Keynes that, ‘you have given no reason for supposing that your “cure” [for the trade cycle] would not simply lead to an accelerated inflation, and ultimately [a] rise in prices, and the continuous dilemma between allowing the movement to gain impetus or checking it’.50 In his view the state had to play a central role if these difficulties were to be avoided. Durbin consequently occupied a midway position between Hayek and Keynes: he was prepared to use Keynesian policies to offset the worst effects of depression, but agreed with Hayek that expansion could give way to uncontrolled inflation. To prevent this worst of all worlds Durbin looked to direct state control—with apparently uncompromising results. He wrote in 1935 that it was ‘to the centralised control of a democratic community [that] our livelihood and our security must be submitted’.51 Durbin’s developing technocratic perspective was, at least briefly, shared by others, notably his closest friend, Hugh Gaitskell. From his position as an economics lecturer at University College, London, Gaitskell was not so directly involved in debates about Keynes’s ideas between the LSE and Cambridge,

14 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

and did not involve himself closely in arguments about the merits of their respective positions. He certainly supported Durbin’s stance on the socialization of banking, including the joint-stock banks, and on the role of a Supreme Economic Authority, but it is not clear that his enthusiasm for planning was so pronounced. Where Durbin believed, in much the same way as Wise, that ‘economic democracy cannot be secured in an economic system whose strategic points are controlled by propertied interests’, and argued that ‘equality must be preceded by the social control of industry’,52 Gaitskell saw no necessary connection between planning and ‘socialism’, which was primarily about social equality. This interpretation was not surprising for someone who had been converted to socialism by Cole in the heady atmosphere of the General Strike but it left open the question of how socialism was to be achieved. Unlike Durbin, and in a different way Dalton, Gaitskell remained profoundly equivocal about his perception of socialist transition. While ‘economic planning…[was] not a monopoly of [the] Socialist state…and [could] exist without Socialism’53 Gaitskell did not make clear what kind of policies were necessary to produce socialist equality, or indeed what kind of equality he had in mind. The concerns which preoccupied Durbin, and to a lesser extent Gaitskell, did not move Dalton, who nevertheless reached similar conclusions by a different route. Dalton’s views had been formed a generation before the appearance of Keynes’s mature work, and owed much to A.C.Pigou, a pupil of Marshall, who had tutored him at Cambridge.54 Building on Pigou’s ideas about socially optimal distribution, Dalton argued that inequalities of wealth and opportunity were both wasteful and unjust. He took up this theme in Some Aspects of the Inequality of Incomes in Modern Societies, in which he discussed ‘practical methods of reducing inequality, without damage, and if possible with benefit, to productive power’.55 He did not define equality, then or later, as a complete equality of income, or as a rigorous equality of opportunity, but as a reduction of unnecessary inequalities through the taxation of inheritance and, importantly, the control of private monopoly. The former objective was to be accomplished through the application of a version of the Rignano system designed to curb the excesses of inherited wealth, the latter through increased planning and public ownership. This apparent interest in a redistributive equality masked a

THREE VISIONS: LABOUR IN THE 1930S 15

developing appreciation of the need for far-reaching structural change. Attacks on inherited wealth and private economic power implied, in Dalton’s view, a wide measure of state control and he acknowledged the need to adopt policies which gave the state a central position in economic management. Like Durbin, he believed that planning was an essential means to this end, though this perception derived from his appreciation of the benefits of a command economy sharpened by the visits to Italy and the Soviet Union. If Dalton displayed a certain enthusiasm for Mussolini’s version of economic management, the journey to Russia, which took place only months after Labour’s fall, produced a more obvious frustration. Contrasting the Soviet regime’s attempt to create economic order and (hence) an egalitarian environment with the West’s continued economic chaos, he complained that ‘in the Soviet Union at least they are trying to plan: we are not… and in the Soviet Union they have come within measurable distance of achieving a classless and equalitarian society’.56 Dalton’s proposals for the socialization of banking, the formation of a National Investment Board and the creation of a Supreme Economic Authority to oversee all aspects of planning mirrored Durbin’s views, as did his attitude to priorities.57 Practical Socialism for Britain, Dalton’s influential book based on the work of the policy committees which formed the basis of the Party’s major policy statement Labour’s Immediate Programme, only discussed equality after a consideration of the nature of economic planning and public ownership required for its attainment. Public ownership was crucial and needed to be extended past the financial institutions to the basic industries in what would need to be an essential ‘power programme’ for an incoming Labour government.58 Durbin regarded nationalization as the necessary prelude to socialism and looked to the ‘socialized industries’ to stimulate and maintain the volume of investment from which greater prosperity would be derived.59 Dalton, too, assumed that the public sector would be sizeable and would continue to increase, replacing private ownership and control over a ‘steadily increasing part of the economic field’.60 If anything, he went further than Durbin in arguing that public ownership would ultimately contribute to equality. Although the initial act of socialization itself would do little because compensation must be paid to owners, the subsequent process would be egalitarian because

16 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

the public sector would generate no large salaries, no private profits and no large unearned incomes.61 Both these technocrats continued to favour a high degree of physical control of the economy, their final pre-1945 position being summarized in Durbin’s The Politics of Democratic Socialism.62 Durbin remained content to use the power of the state to establish expansionist policies within the growing socialized sector. The state would also work to curb cyclical oscillations of economic activity by controlling income and investment, securing in addition ‘a greater equality in the product of industry’.63 Drawing from the discussions of the group he had chaired in 1934–35, he referred to the need for socialization measures and financial control to precede egalitarian taxation policies. A democratic socialist party must place ‘ameliorative measures’ in their order of priority which meant putting ‘the acquisition of power before the abolition of privilege, control before benefits, the pill before the jam, in social legislation’.64 The egalitarian future consequently remained in the realm of vision, firmly subordinated to the need for immediate economic control—a position which had much in common with the ideas expounded by Wise and Laski.

THE KEYNESIAN SOCIALISTS The gathering force of Keynesian ideas in the 1930s, while having an ambiguous impact upon Durbin, had a decidedly positive effect on others in the NFRB. The leading ‘Keynesian socialists’ in the Bureau were Colin Clark and Douglas Jay, strongly supported by James Meade (a member of Keynes’s ‘circus’ of young economists) who, though never a member of the organization, attended NFRB discussions. These individuals ultimately adopted a position which largely ignored public ownership and physical planning as major aspects of socialism in favour of greater equality defined in terms of the redistribution of wealth. In the years between the Treatise on Money and The General Theory, Keynes’s ideas were in a state of flux, which was reflected in the work of his younger disciples. Economic debate continued over the relationship between investment and savings, the nature of the multiplier and the role of budget deficits. Related practical questions concerned the effect of public works

THREE VISIONS: LABOUR IN THE 1930S 17

on the level of employment and the role of the state in the control of investment. Theoretical confusion, combined with the reaction to Labour’s fall from office, accounts for the initial ambivalence in the work of Keynesian socialists like Clark, who were originally inclined to believe that a wide degree of state intervention in the economy would be necessary. Clark made provision for a State Planning Department which would need to be ‘large and highly organized’ and directly subject to a high-ranking Cabinet minister. He also thought that public ownership, particularly of banking, was a necessary feature of a Labour government’s economic and financial strategy and privileged the creation of an institutional infrastructure for planning over purely egalitarian measures.65 However, Clark’s ideas were increasingly tempered by the recognition that the state could control the economy by directing investment through the interest rate and the budget.66 Moreover, public works could be used to reduce unemployment and stimulate purchasing power. A National Investment Board was the major piece of institutional machinery required for this strategy and Clark, summarizing the work of an NFRB committee on the control of investment, discussed its likely role in a pamphlet published in 1933. The NIB’s major task would be to adjust the total amount of investment of all kinds ‘so that it is neither greater nor less than the amount of savings annually available’.67 The Board was to have control over capital issues, as well as the export of capital, and it was tentatively suggested that it should have powers to supervise the investment funds of the insurance companies, savings banks and building societies. The NIB’s prime purpose, then, was to exercise financial control—but at this stage Clark believed it would need support from a powerful State Planning Department. Two years later Clark produced another pamphlet, A Socialist Budget, at Dalton’s request, for Labour’s Finance and Trade Committee. After discussions with Meade in the intervening period his views had noticeably changed. Although he continued to believe that the joint-stock banks should be brought into public ownership, Clark now acknowledged the importance of egalitarian measures as a priority. The nationalization of industry was only part of a Labour government’s programme; the need to devote immediate attention to the problem of poverty and to ‘improving the conditions under which the working classes live’

18 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

was of equal importance.68 This formulation inverted the order of priorities established by Dalton and others; indeed Clark himself recognized that tackling poverty ‘might even postpone, so long as it does not neglect, [a Labour government’s] more ultimate aims in order to effect these immediate improvements’.69 The statement is tentative, but Clark plainly intended to abide by its logic. A Socialist Budget was devoted entirely to questions of investment and taxation. For the first time Clark suggested deficit budgeting as one means of financing public works; he preferred the taxation of capital through increased surtax to high rates of income tax, and endorsed Dalton’s proposals made in The Inequality of Incomes, for a version of the Rignano Scheme.70 In this way financial control to maintain full employment, together with the redress of material inequalities, became the central tenets of Clark’s Keynesian socialism. Douglas Jay consolidated the position outlined by Clark, but placed greater emphasis upon a speedy realization of greater equality and the fiscal policies required to achieve it. The Socialist Case, published in 1937, is in this sense a forerunner of the Gaitskellite variant of Keynesian socialism in the 1950s, although the book was written not against the centre-left but to counter ‘the flood of quasi-Marxist volumes pouring forth…from Gollancz’s Left Book Club’, and to support Marshall’s proposition that ‘aggregate satisfaction can prima facie be increased by redistribution of wealth, whether voluntarily or compulsorily, of some of the property of the rich among the poor’.71 Influenced by Meade and Gaitskell (who had begun to change his position by the later 1930s), Jay also wanted to justify his theory that unemployment and cyclical depression were essentially monetary phenomena which could be overcome by the management of what he termed ‘total effective demand’. This latter claim cast the solution to unemployment in terms of the aggregate relationship between total effective demand and total costs, and supplied the necessary policies to keep them in equilibrium. Jay believed that the main thing was to regard full employment as the simplest criterion of policy, to realise that abnormal unemployment in the consumers’ goods trades means a deficiency of effective demand, and to group all possible measures of monetary policy as reflationary or deflationary, i.e. as calculated to

THREE VISIONS: LABOUR IN THE 1930S 19

expand or contract Total Effective Demand…. The general aim of policy will then be to reflate when there is abnormal unemployment; and when full employment is reached, to attempt to avoid unemployment on the one hand and rising prices on the other.72 The full weight of Keynesian artillery was to be directed to this end: Jay prescribed public works, a National Investment Board for the direction of investment, and state intervention in the economy through manipulation of the interest rate and deficit budgeting. Full employment notwithstanding, the major egalitarian element in Jay’s conception was the redistribution of wealth which the state, as controller of the budget, could do much to advance. He advocated an assault upon inequalities of wealth, and for the first time introduced what was to become the central plank of his thinking over the next forty years—the conviction that the elimination of unearned incomes should be the major socialist goal. ‘Unearned’ because he was keen to retain large earned incomes as necessary incentives, without which everyone would be worse off owing to entrepreneurs’ refusals to take risks. ‘Equality’ for Jay, and for future Keynesian socialists, had more to do with the removal of those inequalities which were considered unjustifiable, and which were thought to contribute to social divisions. By concentrating on the reduction of inherited income and wealth, Jay intended to diminish the importance of public ownership. He claimed that socialists had been ‘mistaken in making the ownership of the means of production instead of ownership of inherited property the test of socialisation’73 and, controversially for the period, argued that nationalization, though it had come to be regarded as the essence of socialism, really appeared ‘at a very late stage in the argument’.74 If there was a case for public ownership at all it was simply that of a post hoc policy to support the main Keynesian initiative of full employment and to prevent private monopolies from exploiting the public. ‘Confiscation’ (of inherited wealth) was more important, in Jay’s opinion, for without it no redistribution could be achieved.75 This was hardly a wide-ranging egalitarianism. At most it looked towards a form of equality of opportunity where the head-start afforded to some by inherited fortune had been eliminated in favour of a meritocracy based upon income.

20 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

Although this conception of socialism, and the place and nature of equality within it, would be widely endorsed in the 1950s it was generally treated with caution in the late 1930s. Gaitskell, who had moved closer to Jay’s position by 1937, did not accept the full force of his argument. It was not until the shortcomings of physical planning and the controversies over the future of public ownership undermined the Attlee government after 1947 that Labour’s future leader finally accepted the logic of the Keynesian socialist position. The ambivalence is demonstrated in two works published by Gaitskell in 1938 and 1939. He visited Sweden as a member of an NFRB party in 1938 in order to study the economic management techniques of the Swedish Social Democrats. Gaitskell was impressed by the functioning of the state-owned Riksbank and its manipulation of interest rates, and also commended the government’s decision to run a budget deficit during the worst period of the depression between 1932 and 1936.76 However, although he concluded that Sweden was pursuing ‘the best monetary policy available’, he remained unsure that such an approach was by itself sufficient.77 In Money and Everyday Life Gaitskell recommended policies similar to those suggested by Jay—but he argued that they could be frustrated in a predominantly privately owned economy where business confidence counted for so much. His desire for greater equality led him to take a view of capitalism much closer to the one which dominated the labour movement at the time. The irregularities, the waste and the unemployment’, in Gaitskell’s opinion, were such an intrinsic part of the capitalist system that any hope of their abolition without ‘a far more extensive degree of government control over industry than at present exists’ was, to say the least, optimistic.78 The lack of confidence in the capacity of Keynesian policies alone to create the conditions for the redistribution of wealth encouraged Gaitskell to pursue equality through a mixture of public ownership and fiscal controls.

THE QUALITATIVE SOCIALISTS Prevailing concerns about the policies required for greater ‘equality’ left little space for any detailed consideration of the idea itself. With the exception of the Socialist League, ‘disagreements’ over

THREE VISIONS: LABOUR IN THE 1930S 21

policy amounted to little more than differences of emphasis in discussions about the respective merits of ‘amelioration’ and a more full-blooded transition from capitalism to socialism. The perceived need to develop practical policies for the next Labour government meant that policy-makers’ visions of the future socialist society remained hostage to the present. Qualitative socialism was an exception to this general pattern. Cole and Tawney epitomized this strand of thought, believing in their different ways that socialism had to be rooted in a democratic and communal conception of egalitarianism—beliefs that remained at the centre of their respective positions even when, as was most clearly the case with Cole, more immediate considerations overlaid them. While Cole traversed the range of possible alternative strategies, from a quasi-revolutionary position in the early part of the decade to a moderate, almost Keynesian, socialism in the later 1930s, Tawney continued to inhabit the heights of principle, descending only to illustrate the practical benefits of his brand of Christian socialism in his ‘strategy for equality’. For Cole, strategies for egalitarian fellowship were malleable, needing to take account of prevailing political and economic conditions; for Tawney the cause of fellowship often appeared above such worldly concerns. G.D.H.Cole and egalitarian fellowship Having apparently accepted the logic of gradualism in the late 1920s, Cole was propelled rapidly leftwards in 1931. From the mildly redistributivist Next Ten Years, he swiftly adopted the view that ‘socialism involves the means of production becoming the common property of us all…[it] means expropriation’. This meant ‘throwing over “gradualism” absolutely, and going all out for a socialist policy that involves a frontal attack on the strongholds of capitalism all along the line’.79 He claimed that the assault must entail widespread socialization, especially of the financial sector, combined with state planning. Like Wise (and Durbin), Cole agreed that ‘a national economic plan unaccompanied by control over the distribution of the available supply of credit might easily be brought to shipwreck by a divergence of ideas and policy between those responsible for the plan and the joint stock banks’.80 Indeed his enthusiasm for planning appeared boundless. It

22 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

should not just be restricted to the physical direction of important sectors of the economy but, like in the Soviet Union, should include state control of allocation through a highly restricted price system. Production had to be undertaken according to ‘conceptions of social expediency and social justice’, which entailed concentration upon the universal provision of basic commodities to be distributed either free or at low prices.81 The ‘social dividend’ would be distributed on the basis of ‘equality among all adults’ in the hope that as society progressed ‘nearer to equality in its distribution of incomes, demand [would] draw nearer to coincidence with real human needs’.82 Planning, then, cleared the way for a radical egalitarianism in which material inequalities would not only be virtually eliminated but perceptions of social justice and need would somehow be transformed. The assumption that material change would eventuate in further, qualitative changes was typical of qualitative socialist thought. However, Cole’s formula by no means remained static. He continued to believe that material inequalities should be reduced but his perception of both the means and the extent of the reduction fluctuated with his response to immediate issues. At moments during the 1930s Cole appeared to adopt the expansionist policies on Hobsonian or Keynesian lines. A consistent admirer of Hobson’s underconsumptionist argument, he was briefly swayed by Keynes after the publication of The General Theory. Indeed short-term expansionism seemed the best course in the later 1930s when Cole feared that Fascism, not socialism, would replace a collapsing capitalism. In 1936 he could write that our domestic policy should be…not a Socialist policy as such, but a policy of immediate social advancement and economic prosperity…its direct aim will be, not to build a new economic and social order, but to rally support behind it by the immediately beneficent results which it yields.83 Anxiety about the future of democracy encouraged conclusions not dissimilar to Jay’s, and certainly in accord with Labour’s Immediate Programme. Cole’s inconsistencies annoyed many of his contemporaries, notably Bevin, who in 1937 wrote to him asking ‘how anyone could have followed you in the last ten years?’84 But neither his ‘Keynesianism’ nor the earlier ‘planning’ phase fully encapsulate

THREE VISIONS: LABOUR IN THE 1930S 23

Cole’s outlook. If he owed intellectual debts to Marx, Hobson and Keynes, these never outweighed the influence of William Morris. Indeed, many years later following a return to planning and not a little ‘fellow travelling’, he commented that it was Morris ‘who made me a Socialist’.85 Morris’s idea of ’fellowship‘ was the central feature of Cole’s socialism and made him ‘a permanent “Utopian”, even when his more immediate concerns were severely practical’.86 Socialism as fellowship involved a ‘solidaristic’ understanding of social relationships. Economic equality in this context was no more than a first step—one means of bringing nearer social egalitarianism and a ‘common culture’. Cole wrote that ‘social as distinct from economic equality has as its essential foundation a community of culture’ and maintained that, given a common basis of culture and a reasonable approach to equality in economic condition, differences of ability open no gulfs of social inferiority in the way of the less gifted and the arrogance of the able is not reinforced by the sense of social superiority and material success.87 In such a society ideas of equal opportunity, for example, would not simply be a means of fostering different forms of (meritocratic) inequality. Educational and social provision would obviously be considerably expanded, but Cole believed that any policy designed to afford greater opportunity had, as a pre-condition, to be rooted in solidaristic cultural soil. A common culture also implied a spirit of common service in the workplace, which Cole believed could be instilled only where workers had a wide measure of control over decision-making. Although he accepted the necessity of central planning institutions, Cole, alone among Labour’s intellectuals in the 1930s, recognized the importance of industrial democracy. Personnel in each industry must play ‘a vital part in controlling its operation and in passing on their suggestions and ideas in such a way as really to influence the formulation and working of the general plan’.88 His earlier guild socialism was implicit in this conception of workers’ status. Cole acknowledged that ‘the way to industrial self-government in any full sense may be longer and more difficult than I used to think’, but boasted that he remained ‘an unrepentant Guild Socialist’.89 To be meaningful, central planning and

24 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

public ownership must be made genuinely responsive to employees’ interests and this could only be accomplished by the downward extension of democracy in industry, a strategy which alone could guarantee the equality of status commensurate with true fellowship. R.H.Tawney’s equality If Cole’s egalitarian vision was clouded by inconsistencies over policy, Tawney suffered the opposite problem. The undeniable certainty of the benefits of fellowship led him to state—and restate —his ideal with unswerving conviction. Tawney’s beliefs owed much to the moral radicalism of Ruskin and Morris as well as to his own brand of Christian socialism.90 Fellowship and the idea of a community founded on ‘service’ dominated his beliefs from the moment he concluded that ‘modern society [was] sick through the absence of a moral ideal’.91 In 1912 Tawney became the director of the Ratan Tata Foundation (which eventually became the Department of Social Science at the LSE), an organization created from an endowment by an Indian businessman to enquire into the causes of poverty. During his time with the Foundation he came to attribute inequality to an economic system which required, and so encouraged, the subordination of some individuals to others, as well as fostering the material deprivation necessary to sustain these unequal relationships. These early academic activities and the bitterly practical experience of comradeship in arms during the First World War, respectively compounded his beliefs about the inegalitarian effects of capitalism and reinforced his conviction about the importance of fellowship92—both major themes present in Tawney’s early writings.93 After the crisis of 1931, Tawney, like many of Labour’s intellectuals, moved to the left. However, his judgements—heavily critical of the Labour Party and its leadership—were delivered from a characteristically moral standpoint which blamed the MacDonald government’s collapse, not on the failure of particular policies, but on the lack of an agreed doctrine.94 For the rest of his life Tawney’s political writings were devoted to the formulation of a coherent egalitarian creed. Equality, initially published in 1931, with a new edition in 1938 and further editions to follow, dwelt

THREE VISIONS: LABOUR IN THE 1930S 25

upon the perennial themes he considered central to his conception of socialism. Tawney argued that ‘equality of provision is not identity of provision’. Human needs were incommensurate, but this made it all the more important to devote ‘equal care to ensuring that they are met in the different ways most appropriate to them’.95 These views led him to consider a range of ideas for the reduction of material inequalities including the expansion of social provision, selective nationalization and economic planning. His ‘strategy of equality’ required redistributive taxation and the extension of social services as well as a curtailment of the economic power of the capitalist class. Too much wealth and power denied equal dignity. In Tawney’s view, ‘some forms of property…ought to be publicly owned, because as long as they are privately owned, the mass of mankind are dependent to a degree incompatible with human dignity and self-respect, on the will of the owners’.96 Equality, then, must suffuse all aspects of human relationships and not simply the material level because if dignity and respect could be universalized, material possessions would anyway become less important. ‘Where community of environment, and a common education and habit of life, have bred a common tradition of respect and consideration’, Tawney declared, ‘details of the counting-house are forgotten or ignored.’97 This stress on the relational aspects of equality permitted a less meritocratic interpretation of equal opportunity, for example. Where an acquisitive society could offer the chance ‘to climb the educational or economic ladder’ and thus only the opportunity to become unequal, with the consequent persistence of social divisions, egalitarian fellowship offered ‘opportunities to lead a good life in all senses of the term, whether one “rises” or not’. ‘The emphasis of the former interpretation’, Tawney argued, ‘is on mobility…the emphasis of the latter is on solidarity.’98 The difficulty, of course, was how to create a solidaristic common culture in the first place and here both Tawney and Cole suffered from problems not affecting those whose vision of a more equal society was restricted to the material benefits economic and social reform could bring. The problem facing qualitative socialism lay in the need to demonstrate the connections between specific policy recommendations and its vision of socialism as changed human relationships. Whereas those closely involved in Labour’s policy-making circles in the 1930s understood the lan-

26 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

guage of priorities and would have sympathized with Dalton’s comment that ‘socialism is a quantitative thing…a question not of all or nothing, but of less or more’, the qualitative socialists possessed a more ambitious and less easily realizable goal.99

LABOUR PARTY POLICY IN THE LATE 1930s The three strands of Party thinking outlined here were to be of fundamental importance in structuring future debates about egalitarian policy and doctrine but their immediate significance in the 1930s was lessened by the comparative lack of factional strife— once the Socialist League had effectively exiled itself. Qualitative socialism hardly figured as a serious force during the decade, although it would enjoy a certain influence in the future. The different concerns of technocratic and Keynesian socialism—which were sorely to test Party unity in the years to come—were temporarily masked by the embryonic state of these developing perspectives, the personal friendship among many of the leading protagonists and the common agreement, underpinned by trade union anxieties about employment, that Labour urgently needed a clear programme and workable policies. These factors were underwritten by a further commonly agreed aim: that a future Labour government must not shrink from its commitment fundamentally to change the capitalist system. The fruits of the Party’s efforts at domestic programmebuilding and the atmosphere of agreement that characterized much of it were contained in Labour’s Immediate Programme, presented at the 1937 Party conference. The document, drafted by Dalton from an outline by Durbin, unsurprisingly displayed a centre-left focus. Some excesses were removed during the drafting: for example, Dalton had originally included an introductory paragraph promising ‘to plan the economic life of the nation, both industry by industry and district by district’ which was omitted from the published document—but so were specific commitments to Keynesian fiscal and monetary techniques.100 With precedence given to ownership and control of finance and investment as well as a number of basic industries and services, emphasis was placed squarely upon the takeover of the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy.101 Proposals for the redistribution of wealth through taxation and the extension of welfare were

THREE VISIONS: LABOUR IN THE 1930S 27

included but as indicators of the secondary, ameliorative measures that the Party intended to implement in the wake of economic reconstruction. In his speech endorsing the document, Attlee called it ‘a table of priorities showing what will be done first’102—and the order clearly favoured the technocrats. ‘No socialist government’, Attlee declared, ‘can neglect fundamental change for immediate patchwork reform’. Considered from the viewpoint of 1931, the Programme was unquestionably an achievement. Labour was a ‘party’ once more,103 united over domestic policy with a clear short-term strategy for government; moreover, the ultimate objective of the strategy was agreed—as Attlee explained, ‘we are planning for a society that is going to be more and more equalitarian’.104 To this extent the Programme presented ‘an agenda dealing with both proximate goals and ultimate ends’ and thereby provided ‘a clearer view of the horizon’ the Party hoped to reach.105 However, it was by definition ‘immediate’ and did not anticipate potential points of conflict either within or between the three major strands of Party thought. For the next fifty years technocrats, Keynesians and qualitative socialists were to argue with each other and, crucially, amongst themselves about the basic issues of ‘planning’ and public ownership, the priority to be accorded to ameliorative policies—and the kind of equality to be expected as a result. It is an ironic testimony to the Programmes achievement that debates about future priorities—if not always policy details—continued to be conducted within the restricted parameters it set out.

Chapter 2

War, post-war and technocratic socialism

Once agreed, Labour’s Immediate Programme remained the best short summary of Party policy until amended by the 1945 election manifesto, Let Us Face the Future. The difference between the two documents was not great and, with the major proposals contained in the 1937 statement reappearing in the manifesto, wartime did not appear to have altered significantly the policies arrived at in the 1930s. War, however, began a process which eventually fractured the tentative homogeneity of the Immediate Programme. Although serious disagreements did not occur there were nevertheless hints of future divisions in Labour’s wartime discussions. Most obvious was the widening gap between a Left progressively more transfixed by the elevation of public ownership as its principal policy initiative and others of a Keynesian socialist disposition who believed that progress towards equality would require more diverse measures. In the later 1940s, after two years of successful majority government, these disagreements became more pronounced. Less obvious was the changing complexion of technocratic socialism. Disagreements between left and centre-left technocrats in the 1930s had been largely ones of idiom and rhetoric—after all both tendencies believed public ownership and planning to be essential pre-conditions for future egalitarian advance. The division between the two became more substantial during the war, however, as centre-lefters like Durbin, believing that ‘planning’ could be less controversial and just as efficient,1 moved away from a concern about public ownership to an interest in a mixture of physical planning and demand management.

28

WAR, POST-WAR AND TECHNOCRATIC SOCIALISM 29

WARTIME DEVELOPMENTS In the early phase of the war Labour stayed out of government, preferring an electoral truce and ‘constructive opposition’ to Neville Chamberlain’s offer of places in his wartime administration. But this position proved difficult to sustain as the opportunities war offered became clear. If ‘the party was in stasis between September 1939 and May 1940, caught between the Scylla of participation in government and the Charybdis of outright opposition’,2 events constantly pushed Labour towards greater involvement. The apparent efficacy, in Attlee’s words, of ‘the planning and control which war necessitates’ stimulated the widespread belief, voiced by the Party leader, that ‘the world that must emerge from this war must be a world attuned to our ideals’.3 These statements reflected the leadership’s growing enthusiasm for office which received additional support from the TUG, keen to participate more directly in wartime decision-making.4 Pressure for change also came from the PLP, dissatisfied with the government’s conduct of the war and eager to bring things to a head. Attlee’s adjournment motion on May 7th, in the wake of defeat in Norway, saw Labour abandon its previous policy of ‘constructive opposition’ and force a division—much to the relief of a number of Conservatives.5 Chamberlain’s swift resignation and his replacement by Churchill saw the emergence of a coalition in which Attlee, Dalton, Morrison and Bevin all received senior posts.6 Participation in wartime government gave Labour a direct say in discussions about ‘the Peace’ and this stimulated internal debates about reconstruction. The war itself fostered a popular egalitarian mood characterized by demands for ‘equality of sacrifice’ far removed from anything dreamt of in the 1930s which tapped into Labour’s own ambitions. The effects of the greater social mobility resulting from evacuation, the fact that German bombs were no respecters of social class, and the ethos of ‘fair shares’ that rationing created, contributed to the recognition that the war was a ‘people’s war’, and so to the belief that the whole population, because it shared the burdens, should also share the fruits of victory.7 Yet ‘fairness’ was conceived primarily in terms of social policies—better health and housing, better education, better social security—rather than economic transformation. Ameliorative measures were consequently forced to greater promi-

30 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

nence within the Party and this increased the temptation to tamper with the order of priorities established in the 1930s. Even convinced technocrats could be enticed. The closer relationship between economic and social priorities, and the ambivalence it contained, was expressed by Laski, for example, as one of the leading figures in Labour’s Central Committee on Problems of Post-war Reconstruction.8 Laski argued the usual technocratic socialist case against ‘the anarchy of private competition’, but also acknowledged that ‘we cannot, after this war, leave to the cold mercies of voluntary efforts any responsibility for those whose care is a national obligation’.9 These views were certainly reflected by the trade unions to the extent that discussions about post-war social reform were often less concerned about ‘when’ (the answer to which was immediately) than ‘how’. The real beneficiaries of this new flexibility were the Keynesian socialists. In an environment which gave increasing space to the development of social policy, the Party, as well as the Coalition government, was induced to think in evermore ambitious terms. Certainly the publication of the Beveridge Report in 1942 focused mounting popular pressure for widespread social reform. It not only forced the Coalition seriously to examine prospects for universal social insurance but by relating this goal to developments in other areas like health, education and employment policy also galvanized thinking about reconstruction in general.10 Labour’s policy-makers were well placed to exploit this change of pace. Over social insurance, for example, Labour had already decided to adopt a universal, comprehensive plan, independently of Beveridge, but the Report’s popularity significantly boosted the prospects for a fully universal scheme and so encouraged Party policy-makers to develop strategies for the full employment considered essential to sustain it.11 From their salient positions on both Party and government committees12 the members of Labour’s ‘NFRB generation’ participated in ongoing debates about employment policy, becoming in the process convinced of the potential benefits of a judicial mix of Keynesian and technocratic strategies rather than a preponderant reliance on one or other. They were instrumental, for example, in the production of Labour’s most important policy statement of the war, Full Employment and Financial Policy, which committed the Party to sustaining full employment through a mixture of physical planning and Keynesian-inspired fiscal management.13

WAR, POST-WAR AND TECHNOCRATIC SOCIALISM 31

If the blend remained biased towards physical controls the direction of thinking in these circles was nevertheless becoming clearer.14 Durbin, still very much a centre-left technocrat, could comment that ‘the coming into existence of a planned economy will greatly improve the efficiency of our industry and finance in the long term’,15 but he was now less concerned that the state should control all aspects of the economy directly and unconvinced about the need for wholesale public ownership. Gaitskell, in stark contrast to his equivocations of the 1930s, commented that deficit financing was ‘one of our most powerful weapons against unemployment’,16 while Jay’s conviction that post-war financial policy would be largely a matter of budgetary manipulation echoed the ideas he had outlined in The Socialist Case. The secret seemed to lie in a blend of physical and fiscal controls, limited public ownership and the extension of welfare. Full employment and a much greater degree of material and social equality could be achieved, in other words, without entirely disrupting the capitalist market economy.17 These ideas challenged leftwing assumptions. Left technocrats championed an increasingly narrow interpretation of the technocratic vision, which took on greater urgency as the impotence they felt mounted. The Left’s pre-war predicament was partly responsible for this tendency to restrict the scope of its doctrine. After the Socialist League’s demise interest in domestic issues had waned with policy and ideas remaining much as Laski and Wise had left them in the early 1930s. Certainly the first issues of Tribune, the leftwing weekly founded by Cripps and Aneurin Bevan18 in 1937, suggested stasis, Cripps, for example, noting in true League fashion that private ownership of the means of production was ‘inimical, indeed fatal, to a just and fair distribution of wealth’.19 War served to consolidate this outlook without apparently developing it. The perennial conviction that equality could only result from the capture of economic and industrial power was stressed by Bevan who consistently argued that private ownership created inequalities and that greater social equality would be impossible without its abolition.20 Sustaining this version of the technocratic faith in political terms meant speaking out against the electoral truce and demanding an early end to coalition government which, by definition, threatened Labour’s capacity to present itself as a distinctively socialist party. Wartime dirigisme

32 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

notwithstanding, the transition to a lasting socialism could only be guaranteed by a Labour general election victory and to this end leftwingers were consistently critical of Churchill’s conduct of the war, continuously and publicly blaming the Conservativedominated Coalition for the nation’s plight. They were correspondingly chary of the Labour leadership’s role. Capitalism was regarded as the handmaiden of Fascism and the Conservatives as the party of capitalism were not to be trusted. It was therefore important to ensure that a leadership in daily contact with the class enemy was kept to the socialist path.21 In social policy terms leftwingers tended to be less engaged with the many proposals for social reform discussed during the war than other sections of the Party because they were not perceived as central elements of socialism per se22 The Beveridge Proposals, for example, were treated with a certain degree of suspicion and as no substitute for public ownership. Bevan was wary of the Report because he considered that, by solving the problems associated with poverty and unemployment without first creating a socialized economy, its implementation would bolster capitalism and so preserve private economic power. Although his criticism stopped some way short of outright opposition for strategic reasons, Bevan was hostile to the idea of social insurance because it implied that the working class would effectively be funding its own welfare.23 Discussions about economic policy during 1943 and 1944 further increased Bevan’s anxieties in particular and those of the Parliamentary Left in general. Early signs of what became a marked division within technocratic socialism are discernible in the Left’s perception of the relative merits of public ownership and planning. Whereas the thinking parts of the Socialist League, most obviously in the shape of Wise, had regarded the two strategies as inseparable, Bevan, lan Mikardo and others associated with the Labour Left like Michael Foot, looked to public ownership in particular as the harbinger of equality and mainstay of socialism. In Bevan’s view all the basic industries of the country should be nationalized and a Supreme Economic Council created to oversee the running of state industries and services. He was concerned about the emergence of new ideas for full employment that seemed to signal a diminishing interest in ownership in favour of diluted forms of ‘planning’ and was highly critical of the government’s White Paper on employment policy for that reason. As

WAR, POST-WAR AND TECHNOCRATIC SOCIALISM 33

Brooke has pointed out, Bevan’s doubts about the direction of Coalition thinking in this area, voiced in the House of Commons, applied with equal force to Labour’s Full Employment and Financial Policy.24 Laski, though more willing than Bevan to regard planning as a strategy distinct from public ownership, nevertheless linked the two in his later wartime writings. Intimately connected with Labour’s reconstruction debates from his position on the NEC, he had, by 1943, reassessed the order of priorities pressed with such enthusiasm upon the Party’s Reconstruction Committee two years earlier. Convinced of the ‘certainty of a planned society’, he looked to the public ownership of the financial system, the land, fuel and power, and all basic industries and services as the base upon which a future Labour government should build. Indeed Laski claimed that ‘it is the central thesis of the Labour Party’s doctrine that, in the absence of such changes before the end of the war, the fruits of victory will have been thrown away’.25 These views were sustained by the assumption that the war had created a mass constituency for socialism with which government needed to ‘catch up’. Laski’s ‘revolution by consent’, no more than a distant hope in the 1930s, had, so far as he was concerned, come to pass. The point now was to ensure that measures for socialist transition from above matched the expectations from below—and here neither Laski nor others on the left were convinced about the leadership’s commitment to far-reaching socialist change.26 Fears that a Labour government would not take decisive physical control of the economy were voiced publicly by lan Mikardo27 at the 1944 Party conference. His amendment to the NEC’s call for conference approval of Full Employment and Financial Policy demanded a forthright commitment ‘to public ownership of the land, large-scale building, heavy industry, and all forms of banking, transport, and fuel and power’, and gained widespread support, particularly from the constituencies.28 Despite attempts by ‘Manny’ Shinwell, who spoke for the platform, to argue that the NEC document was ‘comprehensive’ because it dealt with ‘three inter-related subjects—full employment, the establishment of sound efficient and effective economic controls, and public ownership’29—little was said about the latter. Indeed Mikardo claimed that ‘in spite of what Mr Shinwell has just said, it still remains the fact that the Executive’s resolution does not mention public ownership’ and went on to lament that ‘we seem to be losing the

34 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

capacity that the old Socialist pioneers had for putting over their Socialism in simple and uncompromising terms’. The point was to appeal ‘not only [to] clear brains but stout hearts, not only [to] plans but principles’.30 Mikardo’s resolution had more to do with contemporary intraParty politics than pure devotion to doctrine. It was important to the Left that the salience of an identifiably ‘Labour’ issue be reinforced in the context of a Party agenda that had come to look excessively ‘coalitionist’. Nevertheless, there was in this successful ‘reminder’ a hint of things to come. The Left’s stripped-down version of ‘technocratic socialism as public ownership’ was en route to elevation as the definitive symbol of the technocratic socialist vision. Although future opponents were to make efforts to contain its appeal by distinguishing between ‘means’ and ‘ends’, leftwingers saw no such distinction. Public ownership was no longer solely a vehicle for transition but the sine qua non of future equality. Once the economic power which defined capitalist social relations had been destroyed, subsequent ameliorative measures would be little more than technical adjustments to an alreadyexisting egalitarianism. The resolution’s success did not lead to further strife at this stage. In the wake of victory over Germany in May 1945 the swift demise of the Coalition eased some of the frustrations imposed by the electoral truce, and of course Labour’s unexpected electoral success in July was sufficient to keep internal divisions at bay.31 The Party’s election manifesto, Let Us Face the Future,32 by blending pragmatism and principle to good effect epitomized the desire not to compromise potential success at the polls. Immediate reforms in social insurance and health were offered in the context of the cautious extension of public ownership to essential industries such as fuel and power, transport and iron and steel. Controls would also be refined and extended on the lines suggested in Full Employment and Financial Policy: the Bank of England would be nationalized and a National Investment Board created to direct investment, while labour, rent, price and many materials would remain subject to physical regulation. No clear priority was accorded to the economic arena but the manifesto sought to reassure doubters of Labour’s commitment to far-reaching economic reorganization. ‘Social security, social reform, a permanent advance in the economic standard of life of our people’, it stated, ‘can only proceed side by side with greater

WAR, POST-WAR AND TECHNOCRATIC SOCIALISM 35

efficiency in industry, greater production, and a greater national drive in industry to meet national economic needs’.33 This formula proved sufficient to win the unequivocal, if temporary, endorsement of all sections of the Party. The first two years of government proceeded relatively smoothly with Labour maintaining unity around its election programme, the major elements of which were swiftly implemented. Roughly 20 per cent of industry was taken into public ownership, physical planning and controls were maintained, the passing of the National Insurance Act in 1946, the creation of the National Health Service and the implementation of the education reforms heralded by the Butler Education Act of 1944 saw the emergence of a welfare state more comprehensive than anything attempted in Britain hitherto.34 However, divisions began to emerge in the wake of serious economic difficulties provoked by the convertibility crisis in the summer of 1947. Deteriorating internal relations were partly a result of the loss of confidence that swept through the government in a year that had already seen industry brought to a standstill because of severe shortages of coal caused by the winter of 1946–47 and ensuing criticism about the inefficiency of the new state-run enterprises. The run on the pound only a few months later, as full convertibility with the American dollar was restored, threatened to undo much of the progress made in exports and the crisis in the balance of payments also jeopardized spending on the embryonic welfare state. These successive difficulties seriously rocked the government and resulted in unrest amongst the leadership—most visible in Cripps’s attempt to replace Attlee as Prime Minister.35 Intra-party tensions were also accompanied by the first signs of the Opposition’s revival after two years in the political wilderness. An added difficulty facing the government was that much of Labour’s programme as set out in Let Us Face the Future had been, or was in the process of being, implemented. By 1948, it had become a matter of urgency to consider the next stages in the transition to socialism and here cracks in Party unity appeared as rival sections began to compete for intellectual hegemony. At this point Gaitskell and Jay, along with others like Tony Crosland from a new generation of intellectuals, began seriously to question the technocratic vision of the socialist future. Drawing on the earlier insights of Keynesian socialism, particularly as they now perceived them in the light of their wartime governmental experi-

36 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

ence, they adopted a redistributive view of socialism which gave priority to ameliorative measures. Sensing danger, leftwingers began to doubt Labour’s socialist motivations, worried lest cherished economic reforms would be jettisoned in favour of redistributive equality and welfare. Their initial response, typified in the views of the Keep Left group, simultaneously broadened and consolidated technocratic doctrine.

THE KEEP LEFT GROUP Keep Left, a group of fifteen Labour MPs, was formed in January 1947 not as a result of dissatisfaction with the government’s domestic policies but in response to its reluctance to pursue a ‘socialist’ foreign policy, or ‘third way’ between the increasingly polarized positions of the two superpowers.36 The group’s formation was also a consequence of a dislike of Ernest Bevin’s policy in Palestine among pro-Zionist MPs.37 Its main figures were lan Mikardo, Richard Crossman and Michael Foot, all of whom had entered Parliament for the first time in 1945.38 Keep Left was hardly important if judged against the influence of the Bevanite or Gaitskellite factions of the 1950s. Not only was it small with a high content of middle-class intellectuals, but it had few contacts with powerful elements of the Party either in the leadership or trade unions. However, the Keep Left group sustained—and extended—many of the ideas associated with the Left during the war and in so doing helped to fashion the parameters of the acrimonious debates of the 1950s. Crossman, Foot and Mikardo wrote the group’s first pamphlet, Keep Left, published in May 1947. This examined the major international and domestic problems faced by the Labour government and recommended solutions that blended demands for a socialist strategy at home with the need for Britain to take a moral and egalitarian stance in its dealings both with the superpowers and the colonies. The central thrust of the argument was for a change in Britain’s approach to international politics; Britain’s ertswhile role as a world power could no longer be sustained and attempts to maintain the pretence were endangering the rejuvenation of British industry.39 Drastic cuts in defence spending were needed. These demands would obviously make better sense if the threat of communism, though acknowledged as

WAR, POST-WAR AND TECHNOCRATIC SOCIALISM 37

real enough, could nevertheless be portrayed as overstated. Because the Russians had ‘every reason for many years to avoid war and concentrate on reconstruction at home’40 Britain’s role could be at once more constructive and objective. ‘The task of British Socialism’, Keep Left contended, ‘must be…to save the smaller nations from this futile ideological warfare and to heal the breach between the USA and the USSR.’41 This objective was hardly less ambitious than the old imperial role, but the group wanted a British socialist government to exercise a different kind of world responsibility. It was here that a new dimension of the Left’s approach to technocracy emerged. By creating closer ties with Europe, Britain should adopt a ‘third force’ position in an attempt to rebut both American capitalism and Russian communism, forging instead an alternative in the name of democratic socialism. To be credible such a role would have to entail a reshaping of relations with the colonies. Economic and cultural ties within a free Commonwealth must be promoted in place of traditional imperialist connections. The running down of military commitments in the Middle East, for example, would mean that British manpower and resources could be concentrated on ‘the African development which should be our main colonial responsibility in the next twenty years’.42 Equality stood as the main justification for this approach. As Keep Left made clear, it was important to translate vague talk about ‘the brotherhood of man and equality of races’ into concrete policy initiatives.43 There was a practical incentive: policies aimed at bettering the lot of the colonial and ex-colonial peoples would also be an effective method of combating the spread of communism. The West had to assert a moral, not a military, hegemony. To this end ‘the vast sources of manpower and material’ in the colonial nations needed to be developed and their living standards raised. But the price of such an achievement was not to be the slowing of socialist transition at home. The group saw no contradiction between the domestic and international arenas, arguing indeed that a democratic socialist Britain would be an essential feature of the new international order for two reasons. First, the pursuit of egalitarian policies abroad could not be undertaken in the absence of an egalitarian environment in Britain to stand as an example of the democratic socialist future. Second, because those countries which possessed large quantities of raw materials would

38 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

require machinery and goods from Britain, it was necessary to keep the British economy strong and efficient if mutually beneficial economic relationships were to be allowed to develop. Keep Left believed the maintenance of planning and the extension of social ownership to be the principal means to this end. From Keep Left to Keeping Left Many of the ideas advanced in Keep Left were quickly overtaken by events. The Party immediately signalled its disapproval of the Left’s initiative at the 1947 conference by soundly defeating proposals for a third-force position, Bevin lambasting leftwingers like Crossman for their ‘disloyalty’.44 More importantly, in the three years following the publication of the pamphlet the international scene was transformed. The lure of Marshall Aid45 in the depths of the 1947 financial crisis undermined any prospect of a ‘third force’ socialist foreign policy by strengthening ties between Europe and the United States. Also, Soviet rejection of the Plan combined with action in Czechoslovakia and Berlin in 1948 dashed hopes of an early reconciliation between East and West. As Crossman acknowledged, ‘[Marshall’s] Harvard Speech, the Marshall Plan and the Russian refusal to cooperate in it... completely outdated our proposals for an independent Third Force’.46 If the third-force ideal was still-born, its demise nevertheless strengthened other aspects of the Left’s analysis. The anticommunist stance was enhanced, for example, with the result that the egalitarian argument for greater international equality led by ex-colonial powers was retained, no longer as a feature of the third-force position, but as a clearly anti-communist strategy. This developing aspect of the Left’s position, which distinguished the group from Labour’s small pro-Soviet faction,47 owed much to the work of the Hungarian-born economist Thomas Balogh. Balogh acted as an informal advisor to the Keep Left group and later to the Bevanites. He became centrally concerned with domestic economic issues in the 1950s, but his influence upon the Labour Left always stretched beyond domestic questions to a preoccupation with the possibility of a planned world economy dedicated to the maintenance of equality and full employment. Specifically, Balogh’s vision entailed a planned European economic system guaranteed by a new, regulated relationship with America, whose vast economic capacity continually threatened Europe’s

WAR, POST-WAR AND TECHNOCRATIC SOCIALISM 39

livelihood in the post-war years. This meant, at the very least, American recognition of the need for one-sided tariff concessions to Europe and, further, a willingness to accept ‘a preferential treatment of European products in intra-European trade, as well as in the trade of Western Europe with complementary overseas countries’.48 If planned cooperation could be achieved and the temptation of individual nations to pursue deflationary policies avoided, Balogh believed that policies designed to achieve full employment and maximum production could work to the benefit of all non-communist nations. There was a vestige of the third-force idea in Balogh’s opinion that Europe must be economically autonomous but his central concern was to furnish a method of halting the spread of communism through an internationally oriented egalitarian programme. If the threat was to be allayed a different conception of the role of economics was vital. Economic policy should not be directed solely at an increase of total production but also at ‘equality of distribution’. ‘The survival of [the] Western European social system’, Balogh argued, depends on the evolution of a new approach to the problem of international and national equality. If a progressively improving and progressively juster economic and social system can be established in the West…it can confidently leave communism to wallow in its suspicions and abuse, its terror and enforced confessions, without fear of internal decomposition.49 This was a combative egalitarianism. The underdeveloped regions would be induced to look to an economically viable West as a source of material—and moral—sustenance. In institutional terms, the immense capital investment needed for the development of the ‘backward areas’ necessitated, in Balogh’s view, the reorganization of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development created by the Bretton Woods Agreement. A full-scale International Investment Board was required, the funds for which would come from a rising proportion of the national income of countries whose per capita output increased beyond a specified point. The Board ‘would have a duty to expend these grants in the poorer areas of the world’, and significantly, ‘the investment programmes must not be selected necessarily or narrowly on an economic basis’.50

40 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

These ideas were explicitly drawn upon by a rejuvenated Keep Left group in a further pamphlet, Keeping Left, written by Crossman and Mikardo, published in January 1950. Security from Russian aggression could be achieved by recognizing and correcting ‘the political and economic tensions within the Western world’. It was important to deny the utility of ‘a policy which gives priority to armaments expenditure, and so accentuates the social crisis, [and] actually increases our insecurity'.51 Qualified faith was placed in the Marshall initiative because of the possibility it offered for expansion into a major crusade for world fair shares and part of any such crusade would be the encouragement of social revolutionary movements in the underdeveloped countries. Only if the latter were truly independent could they be expected to regard the Russian exploitation of indigenous communist parties as simply another form of imperialism. By the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 Keep Left recognized that, ultimately, the only solution is the application of the principles of full employment, fair shares and social and racial equality on a world scale. This can be done only through a permanent system of aid by richer nations to poorer nations by means of international and publicly controlled finance and planning.52 This was the technocratic vision on a grand scale. Communism could be contained without further arms expenditure, thereby protecting Labour’s domestic programme, while the domestic economic strategy of central planning and public ownership could be adapted to fit international requirements. Keep Left: the domestic programme Criticism of the government’s performance in domestic affairs, although muted in the first pamphlet, chimed with demands for the reform of the system of piecemeal planning and the imposition of more stringent controls to increase productivity and efficiency. Keep Left displayed a down-to-earth, pragmatic but ‘chivvying’ attitude towards domestic issues. The group simply stated that the government’s approach to planning needed a ‘greater sense of urgency than has been shown over the last couple of years’.53 This amounted to little more than demands for a

WAR, POST-WAR AND TECHNOCRATIC SOCIALISM 41

tighter system of controls designed to divert materials and thus employment from inessential to essential purposes. The Keep Lefters also wanted to see greater direction of labour and a policy of differential wages between the essential and inessential trades—a form of national wages policy—which was to be complemented by a policy on profits which penalized distributed profits but not those used for investment. With the exception of a demand for the extension of joint production committees intended to give the worker enhanced status in the workplace, there was no explicit discussion of equality outside the realm of foreign affairs. This imbalance was soon redressed. From 1948 domestic questions received more attention, typically in the form of demands for fair shares. Two factors influenced this change in emphasis. The economic crisis of 1947 strengthened support for ‘consolidation’ in Cabinet and the major unions, producing a countervailing reponse from the Left which reacted to any hint of retreat from socialist objectives with a mixture of anxiety and dismay.54 Second, leftwingers were keen to point out that calls for ‘austerity’ voiced by Cripps, appointed Chancellor following Dalton’s resignation in the autumn of 1947,55 must imply equal sacrifice. The group distrusted the Keynesian bent of the new Chancellor’s financial policies and his attempts to abolish certain controls— which threatened its finely tuned sense of equal treatment. As Crossman pointed out, ‘a rationed society is more equalitarian than one in which distribution is increasingly determined by the price system’. His fear, echoed throughout the Left, was that the egalitarian atmosphere induced by the war would be lost: ‘decontrol combined with the use of indirect taxation to deter demand, is actually widening the gap between rich and poor…we are now a less equalitarian society than we were two or even four years ago’.56 The response to such anxiety was fervently to advocate ‘fair shares’ and a highly physical vision of equality symbolized by regulated production and distribution.57 Keeping Left best expressed this new, harder approach. Despite the praise accorded the government in the group’s first pamphlet, Labour’s achievements were now described as ‘first-aid repair jobs’ which, although ‘socialist’ in themselves, were insufficiently rigorous to be anything more than a first step.58 Posing the questions as to how solid the socialist structure really was, and how far it conformed

42 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

to the egalitarian principles outlined, the group found Labour wanting. The remedy required a much more comprehensive approach to planning in which both public and private sectors worked ‘to a single plan’.59 Impending economic collapse stimulated demands, often voiced in the 1930s, ‘to begin the systematic planning of the whole economy, which has not yet, as it must, become the framework of our socialist experiment’.60 Maintenance of full employment was the immediate end in view because it could alter dramatically ‘the relative status of master and man, by removing the onesided arbitrary power of dismissal’;61 public ownership, however, remained the most essential long-term component of economic policy because it eradicated centres of uncontrolled economic power and made important spheres of the economy more amenable to central planning.62 Tough physical controls were an additional means of raising productivity. Price regulation and controls over the allocation of raw materials would exert pressure on ‘monopolistic profit margins’ and help to maintain stable prices, regarded by Keep Left as a pre-condition of wage stability. Controls on raw materials were expected to enforce efficiency by ensuring that materials were directed to the most productive companies. These were to be supplemented by the maintenance of food and clothing subsidies and also fiscal measures like the taxation of capital and distributed profits—all designed to equalize purchasing power between the classes. In such conducive circumstances the Keep Left group saw a role for wage controls, briefly announced in the first pamphlet. The spirit of fair shares should embrace wage restraint on the important condition that business profits and capital expenditure were subject to regulation as well. The group envisaged a corporatist arrangement where the government would allocate a general sum for wage increases to the TUC’s General Council to be divided in turn amongst the unions themselves.63 Keep Left’s distinctive contribution, best depicted in Keeping Left, continued the technocratic socialist emphasis on the physical aspects of state ownership and control in ways which sustained the connection with leftwing thinking in the 1930s and during the war. Little attention was paid to budgetary regulation or the question of greater social equality to be achieved through better educational provision and social services, equality being regarded as an integral part of the structural reorganization of the economy. But

WAR, POST-WAR AND TECHNOCRATIC SOCIALISM 43

the group also expounded a more holistic, potentially endurable, attitude to socialist doctrine and policy than either its predecessors or the leftwing groupings that were to succeed it. The addition of an international dimension, for instance, balanced domestic concerns in ways which offered the Party a viable alternative both to the conservative ‘consolidationism’ advocated by many of the Attlee generation and to the so-called ‘fresh thinking’ of the Keynesian socialists. Keeping Left was particularly important because it testified to the Labour Left’s comparative homogeneity in the period immediately prior to the final difficult eighteen months of the Attlee administration. However, this is not to say that the document was influential. Its recommendations found little favour with a changing leadership: leading figures of which were fast losing sympathy for conceptions of socialism and equality which depended heavily on a largely publicly owned and controlled economy.64 Gaitskell, Jay and others were beginning to regard technocratic solutions as clumsy and unnecessary, and there was also a more pragmatic fear amongst the older generation of the leadership—particularly consolidators like Morrison—that talk of wholesale public ownership would prejudice Labour’s chances of retaining its much-needed middle-class vote. For their part, the leaders of the most powerful unions recognized the advantages their members had derived from the Attlee government and did not want to endanger good Party—union relations—to the point where they were prepared to support an informal incomes policy between 1948 and 1950.65 There was no obvious benefit to be gained from promoting the Labour Left at the government’s expense—especially after the 1950 general election which reduced Labour’s majority in the House of Commons to five. Although a slight shift of sympathy was detectable in the Bevanite period, with certain left-leaning unions, like USDAW, expressing Bevanite sympathies, the trade union movement remained generally loyal to the Party leadership until the late 1950s.

BEVANISM The cosy cameraderie of the Keep Left group came to an abrupt end when Labour’s left wing was transformed by the resignations

44 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

of Bevan, Harold Wilson and John Freeman from the government in April 1951. The immediate cause of the Cabinet crisis was the decision taken by the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, Hugh Gaitskell, supported by Attlee, Morrison and the majority of the Labour leadership, to charge for teeth and spectacles supplied by the National Health Service. In fact the charges were no more than one factor in what had become a profound disagreement between technocrats and Keynesian socialists, symbolized by the personal animosity and policy disputes between Bevan and Gaitskell, about the nature and direction of socialism itself.66 General discord in Cabinet and in the Party had been containable while at least some economic restructuring, as well as social welfare reforms, was being undertaken. Certainly until 1948 arguments over priorities had remained broadly within the confines of the domestic programme contained in Let Us Face the Future, but after this time growing disputes about consolidation—epitomized by debates about the future of the iron and steel industries—made it plain that the tensions over Labour’s egalitarian objectives, relatively subdued for much of the past thirteen years, were no longer containable. War in Korea compounded disagreements and radically altered the nature of debate within the Party, for the anticipated level of rearmament expenditure threatened the economic achievements of the new system and also the financing of Labour’s social reforms.67 The Labour Left, represented by Bevan, Crossman and Foot if not in this instance Mikardo, was prepared to accept NATO and the need for a degree of rearmament, and, moreover, was in favour of American action in Korea. What these leftwingers were not prepared to tolerate was the possibility that the transition to socialism might be jeopardized by the industrial dislocation and inflationary pressures accompanying the overzealous pursuit of defence spending.68 The resignations promised to transform the Left’s position in the Parliamentary Party and the wider movement. They suggested the emergence of a united and powerful faction led by Bevan, a charismatic figure who, through his undoubted oratorical skills and ability to command attention in the Commons, was expected directly to influence policy-making in ways which the small Keep Left contingent could never have hoped to achieve. Tribune welcomed the rift claiming that the Labour Party was ‘no longer tongue tied…it is time…for a new period of education and invigo-

WAR, POST-WAR AND TECHNOCRATIC SOCIALISM 45

ration to take place’.69 The New Statesman, though less obviously partisan, also looked forward to the creation of ‘an alternative policy, based on the alternative analysis which they [the Left] believe to be the true one’.70 But such hopes were optimistic for a variety of reasons both extrinsic and intrinsic to the Bevanite group. The ‘external’ circumstances in which the resignations took place were extremely bitter. Although the relative merits of the Bevanite and Gaitskellite cases concerning the need for rearmament have been much debated, what is not in dispute is the profound effect that this rift had on the Party. Personal bitterness was exacerbated by the publication, in 1951, of the first two Bevanite pamphlets, Going Our Way and One Way Only, together with certain articles in Tribune71 attacking Gaitskell. Moreover, the persistence of intraparty strife did little to endear the Bevanites to the rest of the Party at a time when trouble in Iran and Egypt, coupled with an increasingly alarming balance-of-payments deficit, were causing difficulties for the flagging Attlee government. The Bevanites’ success in getting four of their number elected to the Constituency section of the NEC at the Party conference in 1952, with Bevan himself heading the poll, was a significant moment, particularly as two of the leadership’s most senior figures, Dalton and Morrison, failed to be re-elected for the first time in many years. AntiBevanite sympathizers saw this event as confirmation of Gaitskell’s earlier prediction that ‘a fight for the soul of the Labour Party’ was under way.72 These circumstances were hardly auspicious for the serious consideration of leftwing doctrine, but an additional problem concerning the nature of debate within the group compounded the Bevanites’ difficulties. ‘Bevanism’ is best understood as an umbrella term for a number of positions which did not accept the mixed-economy-plus-social-equality formula of the emerging Gaitskellite faction. While the amorphous group of Bevanites shared an antipathy to those they perceived as threatening a socialism based upon planning and public ownership, they were internally divided about what these ideas really entailed and particularly about the policies required for their realization. As Crossman noted, the group is really extraordinarily heterogeneous…. What binds the group together? In our case, there is the old Keep

46 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

Left Group, which did work out a certain homogeneity, with superimposed on it Nye Bevan and Harold Wilson, who have virtually nothing in common, and a number of their personal supporters, such as Will Griffiths and Hugh Delargy, who, as far as I can see, have no coherent political attitude.73 This was no basis upon which to attempt to think seriously about the Left’s doctrinal position. That the group’s figurehead was not someone who enjoyed the intricacies of policy discussions did not help matters. As Crossman commented, ‘Nye always resents any ideas of seriously thinking out policy, he instinctively rejects the raison d’être of the group, which is precisely to think out policy.’74 In fact Bevan’s outlook was at once principled and simplistic. The son of a miner, he had grown up in South Wales and worked in the pits for nine years before going to London to spend two years at the Central Labour College, an institution founded by one of his mentors, the Marxist Noah Ablett. Unlike his fellow students, Jim Griffiths and Morgan Phillips, both of whom came to occupy significant positions in the Party, Bevan retained a firm belief that the working class must capture political power if capitalist exploitation was to cease and socialism to prosper. His politics, rooted in personal experience as well as intellectual study, consequently remained a classic ‘class polities’, although constitutional rather than revolutionary. As his wartime pronouncements had suggested, state ownership of the economy was a pre-condition of working-class political power, ‘the heart and centre of our socialism’—and ‘there [was] no way round this’.75 This belief typified the technocratic disposition towards equality. For Bevan who, ironically, had presided over one of the Attlee government’s most egalitarian reforms—the creation of the National Health Service—‘complete equality [was] a motive that has never moved large masses for any decisive length of time’76 and was not an aim to be pursued. Like Tawney, he quite reasonably claimed that ‘resentment against inequality occurs when it quite clearly flows from social accident such as inherited wealth or occupations of no superior social value’, but reduced this insight to a single dimension, claiming that ‘great wealth… derives from the power to exploit the exertions of others’.77 The point was to eliminate economic exploitation. If this could be

WAR, POST-WAR AND TECHNOCRATIC SOCIALISM 47

achieved the remaining inequalities would be the socially acceptable ones of reward for superior ability or effort. Similar concerns also dominated Bevan’s concern for greater equality among nations. The West should not maintain its own high living standards at the expense of the underdeveloped areas and because laissez-faire economic arrangements could not employ resources prudently without endangering world peace, a planned socialist world economy would be needed to rationalize resource allocation and complement national planning in the interests of a global egalitarianism. The most constructive proposal he produced towards this end was a reiteration of the ideas already advanced by Balogh and contained in the Bevanites’ pamphlets. ‘Suppose we fix a date’, Bevan wrote, ‘towards which we should at once begin to work—when a definite percentage of what we are now spending on arms shall be set aside for the peaceful development of backward parts of the world’.78 Typically, however, once the general remedy had been prescribed, Bevan lost interest in its further development. The idea was occasionally mentioned in his weekly Tribune columns but his interest in international questions was increasingly taken up by specific issues such as German rearmament and the H-bomb. Concerned only with the broad nature of socialist ideas Bevan gave the group no intellectual direction; however, there existed an identifiable ‘inner circle’ of Bevanites consisting of Keep Lefters like Crossman, Foot, Barbara Castle and Balogh, together with others like Wilson and John Freeman who had come into the group with Bevan. These individuals were, for a short while, able to provide a semblance of homogeneity. In the early stages of the group’s history it is possible to discern, in embryo, an approach to socialism which continued the Keep Left tradition, and attempted to combine the cardinal features of planning and public ownership with a conception of equality which stressed the importance of fair shares at home and ‘mutual aid’ abroad. Yet divisions within the core membership were never far from the surface. On the domestic front, One Way Only quoted approvingly from the 1951 election manifesto, endorsing stances on ‘the control of financial forces’, the nationalization of outstanding monopolies and the mutualization of insurance.79 A ‘resolute implementation of the ideas which the party has already worked out and the policies which it has already adopted’ was all that

48 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

was required. Two years later, however, the tone had sharpened. Balogh, in an article critical of Keynesian socialist perspectives, made it clear that the Left regarded equality as inseparable from state ownership and planning. ‘Egalitarian measures and measures to assert control over the economy’ were ‘the essence and life blood’ of attempts to ensure an objective with which Balogh at least was becoming increasingly preoccupied—‘an initial immense burst of energy leading to steady but accelerated progress in Britain’.80 Nationalization and planning were necessary, if not sufficient, conditions of such progress, together with controls over the private sector if investment plans were to be safeguarded. Moreover, these measures would be needed to maintain the social equality necessary if uncontrolled wage increases were not to threaten the economic strategy. These statements suggest a gap between economic reorganization and social amelioration even greater than that implied in previous technocratic formulations. ‘Equality’ certainly remained in the picture but mainly because Balogh assumed that the prospect of state-administered fair shares would provide long-term justification for the concentrated strategy of capital investment and economic planning. Balogh, himself not indifferent to the moral appeal of socialism, adopted this approach in response to two fears. He was conscious of the effects of deflation, remembering his early life in Hungary during the years of recession, and ‘the palpable impotence of the respectable in the face of the rising crisis’ that had ‘cured me of my childhood bogey of inflation’.81 He also remembered Germany’s enormous productive potential, released by Nazi economic planning, and was increasingly worried about the prospect of a centrally planned Soviet economy overhauling the West in economic strength and productive capacity. A planned, but democratic, socialism rooted in the principle of fair shares would avoid the socially deleterious consequences of both the unregulated free market and the totalitarian state. Harold Wilson sympathized with these ideas for different reasons. Initially a member of the Liberal Party, Wilson had worked first with Beveridge, on a study of unemployment in the period between 1927 and 1937, and subsequently with Cole, who encouraged him to write a chapter on the railways for a Fabian Society volume on public ownership.82 During the war he worked in Whitehall producing statistics on coal production for the Secretary of Mines, rapidly becoming convinced that the mining indus-

WAR, POST-WAR AND TECHNOCRATIC SOCIALISM 49

try should be nationalized to maximize productive efficiency.83 In 1944 Wilson left Whitehall for a political career; he was adopted as Labour candidate for Ormskirk, and elected its MP in June 1945. Andrew Roth has described Wilson during Labour’s period of office as a ‘neutral, slightly right-wing technocrat, who stayed out of the Right-Left, Zionist-Arabist arguments which sharply divided the Parliamentary Labour Party’.84 He was not involved with Keep Left and his decision to eliminate many irksome controls, and the ensuing ‘bonfire’ when he went to the Board of Trade in 1948, did not endear him to leftwingers.85 However, Wilson changed gear in 1949 in the wake of disagreements with Jay and Gaitskell over devaluation which, in the case of Labour’s Chancellor-to-be, became somewhat personal.86 Thereafter the Korean War and the resulting increases in arms expenditure drove the President of the Board of Trade, with his eye on the performance of the domestic economy, into the arms of Bevan and his supporters. Whatever the reasons for his resignation,87 Wilson did more than most Bevanites to furnish the group with ideas. In In Place of Dollars, for example, he expressed anxiety about the strength of the American economy and called for a sustained effort on the part of Britain for economic independence. The domestic aspect of the attempt to wrest Britain’s economic fortunes from America’s magnetic pull was a renewed emphasis on fair shares as a major feature of pursuing a strategy drastically to cut dollar expenditure. Like Balogh, he demanded the rigorous control of investment and a renewed emphasis on planning and physical controls of materials in the interests of a more equal redistribution of wealth deemed ‘more than ever necessary’ if full production was to be achieved.88 It was typical of Wilson’s outlook that ‘fair shares, the welfare state and public ownership’ were considered essential not only because they were desirable objectives in themselves but because they were construed pragmatically as necessary for Britain’s economic survival.89 The Bevanites’ treatment of international issues added little to the position adopted by the Keep Lefters. They continued to call for equality among nations and aid for the poorer regions of the world. One Way Only blended technocratic and humanitarian themes in the claim that ‘the principle of fair shares now only fitfully applied at home, must be extended into the international

50 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

sphere’ and reminded readers that ‘more production and more efficient production is certainly desirable, but the way in which it is shared both inside and between nations is no less important’.90 The second pamphlet, Going Our Way, was similar. Freeman restated the links, initially expressed in Keeping Left, between the future of socialism in Britain and the pursuit of equality in the international realm as a response to communist expansion, arguing that foreign policy matters should be settled according to justice rather than force and on the basis of ‘feeding people rather than frightening them’.91 The battle of ideas ‘between Soviet Communism and Western democratic Socialism’ could not be won by arms, but by demonstrating ‘to the world…that Socialism based on political freedom offers the best opportunity for full and happy lives’.92 Rearmament, Freeman argued, must therefore be halted and the expenditure diverted into projects designed to benefit the developing nations. Wilson understood world ‘fair shares’ in a more obviously technocratic manner. An international policy designed to complement the stringent controls he wanted to see placed on the domestic economy, would seek to impose fair shares in raw materials and in the burden of rearmament. This would help to bring raw material prices down while simultaneously reallocating armaments expenditure, mainly to the benefit of Britain.93 General concern about the future of the sterling area led him to demand that America drop trade restrictions and join with other nations in an international effort to plan and allocate raw materials and scarce food. Developing countries needed protection against fluctuations in demand and prices, and consequently international supply and price agreements must be created to ‘put a floor into the market’. If he did not regard the Russian threat in the same way as Balogh or Freeman, Wilson was no more persuaded than they by Bevan’s less developed perspective. The different levels of analytical sophistication adopted by Bevan and his closest supporters like Michael Foot, and others like Balogh and Wilson, suggest a tension within Bevanism. For Bevan and those who were to follow him for the greater part of the 1950s, the egalitarian vision could—indeed should—be reduced to basic technocratic principles held as self-evident and straightforward enough to be amenable to the powerful oratory and journalism at which these individuals excelled. Those who believed that policy and ideas required deeper foundations were

WAR, POST-WAR AND TECHNOCRATIC SOCIALISM 51

left unsatisfied by this outlook. Serious rivalry, according to Crossman, did not take long to emerge. He noted in December 1951, for instance, that Bevan displayed a ‘strong reluctance…to accept the thesis, on which Wilson and Balogh agreed, that merely cutting the arms programme would not remove our main difficulty, the dollar gap’ and commented on ‘Nye’s reluctance to face some of the unpleasant facts about the long-term crisis which Balogh emphasizes’.94 Tensions persisted and extended into other sensitive areas. They undoubtedly contributed to the increasing divergence of views within technocratic socialism between a ‘Tribunite’ faction convinced of the primary doctrinal importance of public ownership and an emerging centre-left element increasingly attracted by the prospect of a centrally planned, but not necessarily state-owned, economy.

Chapter 3

The Left after Bevanism

Latent disagreements among the Bevanites became manifest when the group eventually split in the mid-1950s. The rift within technocratic socialism became increasingly noticeable as the centreleft, in the shape of Wilson, Balogh and Crossman, divorced planning from public ownership and looked to an efficient, planned economy as the major determinant of greater social equality. The Tribunite faction,1 which Bevan continued to lead, was much less coherent. Tribunites like Foot, Castle and Bevan’s wife, Jennie Lee, shared Bevan’s assumptions about international questions and agreed that public ownership was both a necessary and sufficient means of eradicating inequalities of economic power at home. However, there were difficulties on both counts. Hopes for greater equality among nations came to look anachronistic and vague as the Cold War intensified and foreign policy was reduced to a matter of preserving the balance of terror between the two nuclear superpowers. Attitudes to public ownership, meanwhile, became evermore confused, the Tribunites never fully resolving what it was really for. It could of course be treated as the egalitarian solvent of private economic power—the Left’s traditional technocratic interpretation. On the other hand, it seemed at times as though it was construed in a much more radically technocratic manner as the essential ingredient of economic efficiency, irrespective of any wider egalitarian concerns; the original objective had been discounted and the technocratic element threatened to escape its egalitarian confines. Other factors also featured prominently in the Bevanites’ disintegration. Wilson’s decision to stand for the Parliamentary Com52

THE LEFT AFTER BEVANISM 53

mittee in place of Bevan after the latter’s resignation over the leadership’s attitude to SEATO in April 1954 challenged the unity of the group and placed loyalty to Bevan in question.2 Further ‘disloyalty’ was demonstrated a year later, in March 1955, when Bevan abstained in the defence debate over nuclear deterrence and Crossman, Wilson and John Freeman supported the leadership’s bi-partisan approach.3 Less personal issues also conspired against longevity. First, the Bevanites remained a small minority in the Labour Party with little hope of expanding their appeal. Not only was the bulk of the 295 Labour MPs returned to the Commons in November 1951 loyal to the leadership, but trade union support was extremely limited. The years between 1948 and 1959, in the words of one observer, ‘were the years of stability, when a heritage was passed from one generation on the Right to another, years of fundamental unity between the Parliamentary Leadership and the majority of senior trade union leaders’.4 In the early 1950s, the unions were dominated by the loyalist triumvirate of the Transport and General Workers, the General and Municipal Workers and the Mineworkers, the combined votes of which virtually ensured victory for the platform at Party conferences. The Bevanites could normally count on the support of smaller unions like USDAW, the AEU and the NUR. However, communist-controlled unions like the Electricians disliked their attitude to the Soviet Union with the consequence that the group could never muster a serious challenge to the ‘big three’. Although Bevanism flourished in the constituency parties, the latter were never in a position to formulate ideas or determine party policy—indeed the Bevanites were elected to the NEC by the constituency parties precisely to undertake these functions on their behalf.5 The difficulty was that the configuration of forces in the Party’s central institutions prevented them from doing so. This position of enforced impotence was frustrating, particularly for Bevan himself, who had become accustomed to exercising power, as well as for Crossman and Wilson, who consistently sought influence in Labour’s policy-making circles. Outside immediate Party concerns, Britain’s progressively more favourable economic performance under Churchill’s Conservative government threatened the Bevanites’ most basic assumptions. The end of the Korean War in July 1953 created more favourable terms of trade as raw material prices fell. Continued full employ-

54 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

ment and the maintenance of the welfare state, in the context of sustained growth and low inflation led, at least temporarily, to a period of growing affluence which challenged earlier ideas about fair shares and tight economic control. Crossman voiced the perennial fear of the technocratic Left in his rueful comment that, not only is the Labour Party ideologically disintegrated by the fact that Keynesian capitalism is proving…quite an adequate substitute for Socialism. Each of us individually is being changed…and ironically all this happens to the Labour Party because people in Britain are more prosperous and more contented and because peace is breaking out all over the world…. We are missionaries without a mission, or missionaries more and more dubious about the mission.6

THE FRAGMENTING LEFT: INTERNATIONAL ISSUES Despite changed circumstances brought about by the Cold War, Tribunite goals for foreign, Commonwealth and colonial policy continued to draw upon Bevan’s vision for world fair shares. The most obvious vehicle for this essentially humanitarian desire was the Movement for Colonial Freedom, founded in 1954 to oppose the Central African Federation, of which Fenner Brockway, Barbara Castle and others were members. Brockway, for example, was convinced that colonial emancipation was ‘the biggest creative urge of our time, the uplifting of the spirit of human equality, beyond colour or race, the invincible demand for human rights for all peoples’.7 Bevan echoed these sentiments to the extent that he remained interested in third-force arguments and the possibility of a non-aligned bloc, including Britain, pitched against the effective carving-up of the world by the two superpowers. His refusal to support German rearmament, SEATO or the building and testing of a British H-bomb can be read not simply as an attempt to create an alternative programme for a potential leadership challenge but as an effort to counter Labour’s growing pro-Americanism—which he regarded as support for a new form of imperialism.8 This approach, though sufficient for the Tribunites, did not persuade the centre-left. Both groups continued to hope for world equality, but Balogh and Wilson were more specific about the

THE LEFT AFTER BEVANISM 55

kind of international order they envisaged and how it might be obtained. Wilson recommended the creation of an International Development Authority to work for an increase in living standards in the developing countries and to which advanced nations should contribute as much as 3 per cent of their income9 but in all this he drew much from Balogh’s more detailed analysis. Since the end of the war Balogh had been concerned with the problem of maintaining economic balance between rich and poor countries at least partly because of his fear of communist encroachment in the underdeveloped areas of the world. At his most imaginative and ambitious he wished to see ‘a comprehensive and multilateral agreement and the maintenance of full employment on a world-wide basis’.10 Any such agreement must include an egalitarian dimension because the planned development of backward areas was a necessary step towards the achievement of a balanced world economy. The problem was that an international economic system of this kind would be dependent on nations, or blocs of nations, foregoing the temptation to maintain large reserves which would endanger the world balance of payments. A mechanism was needed to impart ‘alternating bias’ to international adjustments in order ‘to preserve or restore the balance in international payments at a high and stable level of employment’.11 Balogh recognized that schemes of this complexity could not become fully operative for ‘a considerable time’ and so fell back on the stop-gap of increases in international liquidity. The IMF should be transformed into an international Central Bank with powers to undertake open-market operations to increase liquidity in countries legitimately needing financial support, while a new International Development Fund would attack world inequality by stimulating investment. He envisaged a situation in which an increasing portion of the balances of persistent creditor nations could be used by the Fund for long-term investment in underdeveloped areas. The complementary roles of the Central Bank and the Fund would work to contain excess need for international liquidity because ‘the credit (or debit) balances of persistent creditor nations’ could easily be reduced, thus limiting the need to expand international liquidity.12 To be sure, in the prevailing conditions of the 1950s these views were no more likely to receive leadership endorsement than Tribunite demands, although they do provide an example of the

56 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

growing difference between Tribunite rhetoric and centre-left attempts to formulate a programme grounded in a particular vision of international equality. Differences between the two types of technocratic socialism were much more marked in developing attitudes towards public ownership and economic policy.

THE FRAGMENTING LEFT: PUBLIC OWNERSHIP AND ECONOMIC PLANNING The Tribunites The Keep Left group always assumed an interrelationship between public ownership and planning but Tribunites regarded the former as the linchpin of socialism. Evidence of this less compromising approach appeared as early as 1950 when Tribune, scenting growing ambivalence among Labour’s leaders, began to demand a more stringent adherence to socialist principles. ‘Principle’ was umbilically tied to public ownership which had to be ‘brought to the forefront of the stage and not secluded shamefacedly in the wings’.13 A further editorial, also advocating a bolder assertion of socialist claims, made plain the Tribunite connection between public ownership and a fully employed, expansionist economy.14 In order to sustain a capital investment programme the power to plan was essential and the only way this could be secured was through the expansion of the public sector. These comments point to the existence of the two dimensions of the Tribunite position mentioned above which leading Tribunites never clearly distinguished. Bevan and his closest disciples, Jennie Lee and Michael Foot, believed socialism to be about public ownership as a means to a greater equality of economic power—equality ultimately being more important than mere ‘efficiency’. Barbara Castle was more ambivalent, treating public ownership both as a moral principle, because it could facilitate equality, and as a prerequisite of efficiency and economic planning, lan Mikardo, a convinced technocrat who considered public ownership, above all, to be economically efficient was further along the continuum. Each of these positions, though they were never fully articulated, are clearly observable in Tribunite criticisms of Labour’s policy statement, Industry and Society. Having lost a second gen-

THE LEFT AFTER BEVANISM 57

eral election in 1955, the Party’s Home Policy Committee decided to produce a series of policy statements designed to advance the task of reassessing Labour’s position in the changing conditions of the mid-1950s. There was a strongly Gaitskellite impetus to this exercise further reinforced by Gaitskell’s accession to the leadership following Attlee’s retirement in December of the same year. The Study Group on the Ownership and Control of Industry which included Gaitskell, Mikardo, Castle, Bevan and Wilson, as well as non-aligned moderates like Jim Griffiths, was given the job of restating Labour’s approach to public ownership. The group produced its report, written by Peter Shore (then head of the Research Department) but, according to Crossman, ‘extensively redrafted by the office at Transport House, removing most of its radical trimmings and making it a great deal more reactionary’, in May 1956.15 Industry and Society advocated traditional public board nationalization for Iron and Steel and Road Haulage—two ‘basic industries’—and also recommended the same treatment for industries manifestly ‘failing the nation’. But the central feature of the document was the Gaitskellite reassessment of the place of public ownership in socialist thought and practice. Gaitskellite intellectuals heavily influenced a new analysis of Britain’s industrial structure which pointed to the changes undergone by the capitalist system in the post-war years, particularly the emergence of a mixed economy and the separation of (capitalist) ownership from (managerial) control.16 Apart from the straight taxation of inherited wealth as one means of redistribution, they argued that the state should acquire shares in selected large companies, rather than take over whole industries, and use the proceeds of death duties and possibly the resources of the proposed Superannuation Scheme for the purchases. The document was not specific about the mechanics of state shareholding and did not recommend how many companies should be subjected to this treatment or how many shares would be necessary to provide a ‘controlling interest’. Unsurprisingly the Tribunites chose maximalist options, demanding a 100 per cent state shareholding in the top 600 companies, but the reasoning behind this strategy differed between individuals. Jennie Lee was concerned with equal power rather than technical efficiency: because we are socialists we consider that it is wrong for vast

58 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

economic empires to remain in private hands…. It is not merely a matter of efficiency. On that level there may be little to choose, but there is a whole world of difference when it comes to deciding whether they exist to enrich the community as a whole or only private investors.17 Barbara Castle, revealing her equivocation about ultimate ends, deemed full ownership to be essential, but was unclear about the relationship between equality and power. In an article in Forward, published a year before the discussions over Industry and Society, she had claimed that ‘if the party stops advocating public ownership and merely talks about an abstract end called “equality”, we betray our own doubts about our own purposes. For socialism is not about equality; it is about power’.18 The statement, written at the height of Gaitskell’s attempts to argue that socialism was ‘about equality’, could be taken to mean that the idea was unimportant providing the economic system had been transformed on socialist lines. However, a further article gave a different view. Castle disliked the proposals simply to acquire ‘a few shares here and there in order to share the capitalist swag’. The state needed a controlling interest ‘for the express purpose of controlling policy’, but her call for ‘effective economic planning’ was now accompanied by the demand that the state intervene ‘in the name of equality [and] social justice’.19 This element was, to all intents and purposes, omitted in Mikardo’s thinking. From his earliest writings Mikardo had been concerned with the possibilities for greater economic efficiency offered by the state ownership of industry and his views developed unswervingly along these lines. He consistently advanced two reasons for public ownership: first, the improved technical efficiency that it offered, and second, the necessity of a large publicly owned sector as a basis for the coordination of economic planning. He regarded the latter reason as particularly important: quite apart from the need to nationalize certain industries in order to deny to a few individuals an undue power over the welfare of their millions of fellow citizens, and quite apart from the reasons for nationalizing any given industry which exist because of the particular circumstances of that industry, there is the overriding point that a community committed to industrial efficiency and full employment must own enough of

THE LEFT AFTER BEVANISM 59

the great capital-investing industries (like steel for instance) to control the volume and flow of investment.20 Such views hardly made equality an issue of primary concern. Control was the important thing and, in Mikardo’s view, it had to be synonymous with ownership. Consequently, although he was technically not against the principle of state shareholding only 100 per cent state ownership would suffice. A Labour government should take the power to acquire shares at a ‘fair valuation’ with the purpose of acquiring ‘the whole of the equity shares of one group of large companies at a time’.21 In this way it would be possible to integrate technical advance and commercial success with the pursuit of the national interest. As to equality, much could be done to advance it through social welfare, but in Mikardo’s opinion such techniques were anyway dependent on an efficient economy. There was in this concatenation of opinions a certain failure of vision. Public ownership, however defined and whatever its ultimate aim, was the one factor that lent the Tribunites a semblance of cohesion. In the absence of any willingness to develop further the embryonic strategy adopted by Keep Left, it was vital that the theme be elaborated in detail both as specific policy and as a major principle of Party doctrine. The fragmentation of Tribunite thinking meant that while public ownership remained the core element of this version of technocratic socialism, it was essentially hollow—an icon of oppositional thinking rather than anything more constructive. An example of the tendency to cling to form rather than substance can be found in the publications of the reconstituted Victory For Socialism (VFS) group, of which Mikardo was a prominent member. The group had originally been a minor fragment on the far left of the Party in the 1940s, and unlike Keep Left, had expressed decidedly pro-Soviet leanings. VFS had also enjoyed a brief prominence in 1956 when it attempted to organize a conference to discuss Labour’s Constitution, much to the consternation of party secretary, Morgan Phillips, and the leadership. However, it was only in February 1958, after Bevan’s ‘defection’ from the Tribune group, and thus the final disappearance of Bevanism as a recognized entity, that VFS was relaunched with a much revamped membership which included salient Tribunite figures.22 VFS strategy was encapsulated in a letter written by the ex-

60 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

Bevanite MP, Stephen Swingler, to all constituency parties. It proclaimed that the group stood for the ‘common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange’ and demanded ‘the nationalization of key companies and industries as a means of placing in the people’s hands decisive economic power’.23 Despite the apparent persistence of equal power arguments the dominant rationale was economic efficiency. VFS claimed that the efficiency associated with planning could best be obtained under the conditions afforded by widespread public ownership. The aim was to ensure the success of central planning by first securing the control of industry. Public ownership would achieve that control because ‘the man-on-the-job [was] willing to cooperate fully with the planners because they both have the same aims’.24 A publicly owned economy would consequently harmonize—and harness— desires for efficiency harboured by both workers and planners. If there was any kind of egalitarian ambition here it was constrained by this highly technocratic objective. This formula-driven approach proved briefly appealing to leading Tribunites like Foot and Castle for two reasons. First, Bevan’s seminal influence waned in the later 1950s depriving those who embraced central Tribunite nostrums of their foremost advocate. Bevan had been conspicuous in the Industry and Society debate only by his absence from many meetings of the study group, and from his refusal to be drawn into public discussion. His pro-Hbomb speech at Brighton in 1957 was regarded by his Tribunite colleagues not only as a betrayal of their beliefs about the need for unilateral disarmament, but also as a general sign that he was seeking accommodation with the Party leadership. There followed a period of estrangement between Bevan and his closest supporters, particularly Michael Foot, which only ended shortly before his death in I960.25 Bevan’s effective removal created a vacuum which the remaining Tribunites subsequently failed to fill. As the New Statesman commented after the Brighton conference: The collapse of the Left…was not due to any betrayal: it was simply that the personality of Mr Bevan no longer provided a cover for its weaknesses. Deprived of his leadership, it was revealed as an army without much discipline or theoretical coherence.26

THE LEFT AFTER BEVANISM 61

The lack of coherence was well illustrated by the Tribunites’ resort to single issue campaigns such as CND in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The second reason for VFS’s appeal was that equality had become compromised in the eyes of the Tribunites by its increasing identification with Gaitskellite thinking. After Gaitskell’s leadership victory equality became ever more closely associated with distributional adjustments in the prevailing context of a mixed economy with a predominant private sector. Public ownership was regarded by the Party leaders as only a minor contributor to the goal of a fairer distribution of wealth.27 In an effort to remain free of the taint of Gaitskellism, the Tribunites were impelled to stress the production-oriented aspects of their socialism. Fearful that this approach, in their view now the only substantial point of disagreement between the two main political parties, would be eradicated completely Foot, Castle and Jennie Lee joined VFS. To Foot, who commented ruefully that ‘if the choice is between Tweedledum and Tweedledee there is no guarantee that Tweedledee will be the victor’,28 it at least seemed as though the group offered a clear distinction between socialism and conservatism. Yet old assumptions lingered and retained a certain edge. Equal power arguments enjoyed a fleeting rejuvenation in 1959, not least because of the failure of Gaitskell’s ill-judged attempt to remove Clause Four from the Party Constitution.29 Their symbolic potential provided Foot and Castle with sufficient ammunition to mount attacks both on increasing material affluence, which offended the sensibilities of the Labour Left in general, and on the Gaitskellite refusal to endorse public ownership. The two were closely connected in Tribunite minds. Foot lamented the coming of ‘get-rich-quick values’ which inhibited the establishment of ‘a real community’ founded upon more than ‘the narrow ambitions of the welfare state’ championed by the Gaitskellites.30 Because society seemed entirely concerned with ‘looking after number one’, vague moral appeals to general principles were ineffective; a stronger line was needed. ‘As long as our economy depends on large accumulations of private capital’, Foot wrote, ‘it needs inequality to make it work…the only way to attack inequality is at the [economic] source. Radicalism without Socialism is an also-ran.’31 In his view, to remove public ownership as the major building-block of socialism, as the Gaitskellites threatened, would

62 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

be to remove any prospect of future equality—and hence the raison d’être of the Party itself. Castle agreed. In an ‘Open Letter’ to Tony Crosland, she stated that the kernel of the ownership argument was precisely about ‘the distribution of rewards in our society’.32 Putting some distance between herself and VFS-style technocracy she argued that ownership ‘may or may not be irrelevant to the rate of growth; it is not irrelevant to the way in which society distributes its rewards and plans its priorities’. By 1959, then, Castle had apparently resolved her earlier doubts about the relation between equality and economic power. The centre-left in the 1950s Balogh, Crossman and Wilson were not a defined ‘faction’ in the manner of the Bevanites or Gaitskellites but they shared a common approach to socialism which owed more to the twin legacies of Keep Left and the views of Dalton and Durbin in the 1930s, than to Bevanism. There was, first, the belief that ‘planning’, rather than public ownership, should be a central component of democratic socialist thinking, and, moreover, that a rigorous form of ‘indicative planning’ was both necessary and superior to the Keynesian socialist techniques favoured by Gaitskellite intellectuals. Second, like the Tribunites, there existed a clear distaste for the increasingly consumption-oriented society that was emerging by the later 1950s. The centre-left exuded an air of puritanism which stressed the importance of collective sacrifice in the wider interests of both economy and community. Both elements of centre-left thinking can be related to the conviction that Britain was becoming less economically efficient and so more prone to economic domination from competitors. Firm control and economic modernization in the context of a prevailing sense of equal contribution to the much-needed productive effort and equal sacrifice of material well-being were the hallmarks of this approach. The most comprehensive discussion of the role of planning came from Balogh and Wilson. Wilson’s views about the domestic arena were contained in his two publications from the Bevanite years and demonstrated a concern with the technical aspects of socialism which at that time he couched in clearly leftwing terms. In pursuit of economic efficiency he recommended ‘a far more purposive direction of our national economic life’ as a necessary

THE LEFT AFTER BEVANISM 63

feature of the need to economize on dollar expenditure. Firm control of capital investment was particularly important to ensure that ‘the right priorities are observed’. Furthermore, ‘the extension of public ownership must be one means of getting the necessary control’.33 These technocratic formulae were supported by a general commitment to fair shares and welfare—but because they were regarded as essential conditions of economic survival. Wilson believed that the redistribution of wealth was necessary to keep internal costs steady. The motivating factors behind Wilson’s thought did not change markedly in the eight years between the publication of In Place of Dollars and his important article, ‘A Four Year Plan for Britain’.34 In the interim, however, Wilson moved centreleftwards. If his decision to stand in place of Bevan in the Parliamentary Committee elections suggested a desire to distance himself from the Bevanites, his appointment as Labour’s Shadow Chancellor in late 1955 began a period in which, politically, Wilson was increasingly successful, especially in his Parliamentary exchanges with Conservative Chancellors, first Harold Macmillan and later Peter Thorneycroft. He did not re-enter intra-party controversies until the early 1960s, a period of Gaitskellite decline, when he became centrally involved in the production of the policy statement Signposts for the Sixties. Wilson’s New Statesman article made the case for a reversal of Conservative economic policies which he judged responsible for falling exports and a rising cost of living, in favour of policies designed to strengthen industrial capacity, through increased investment in important industries. He argued that, the answer to rising prices at home and a weak pound abroad is to increase production, not blindly and unselectively, but with a heavy concentration on the types of industrial investment which can contribute most to strengthening our industrial base and our competitive position.35 Planning was essential. Wilson recommended the creation of a National Investment Board as one means to this end, ‘to work out for each major industry, public and private, the rate of expansion needed’. Public ownership was a further weapon, but one to be used only ‘where a firm or industry refuses to meet the demand placed upon it by the national programme’, or where a

64 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

state-owned company could provide a competitive stimulus to an industry otherwise dominated by the private sector.36 Greater equality was considered to be partly dependent on control over the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy but, in rather greater measure than Crossman or Balogh, Wilson expressed an interest in budgetary and fiscal measures as a means of securing Labour’s social objectives. A Labour Chancellor would need to change the tax system radically if the budget was to become ‘a real and effective instrument of social justice’. However, while equality in the form of redistribution constituted a significant goal, it was hardly the major feature of Wilson’s approach. In much the same way as his predecessors in the 1930s, he believed social equality could not be achieved without first ensuring an efficient economy. Balogh’s position was broadly similar. From the time of his series of Tribune articles in 1947, he had been concerned about the need to furnish the Labour Party with policies capable of supporting his view of democratic socialist doctrine. This took him out of the Bevanite group with Wilson and Crossman, who shared his irritation about the reluctance to discuss policy. In the course of the decade Balogh evolved a conception of the role of indicative planning and public ownership that also offered a view of equality capable of challenging the highly profiled egalitarianism of the Gaitskellites. His attitudes relating to the dollar problem have already been discussed, but in the changing conditions of the 1950s the same analysis remained pertinent to an economy which he considered to be endemically threatened by underinvestment. Balogh wanted a massive investment programme at the expense, if necessary, of immediate consumption. Like Wilson, he believed that Conservative economic policy, by taking advantage of favourable terms of trade to stimulate consumption, was missing the opportunity to invest in Britain’s industrial base. He feared that, without an extensive investment programme, the rapidly modernizing economies of West Germany and Japan, together with the planned economies of the Eastern Bloc, would overhaul Britain. The result would be permanent damage to the economic viability of the nation. The debate which followed the publication of Labour’s policy statement Challenge to Britain in 1953 gave Balogh the chance to air his views. In the New Statesman he made it clear that Labour’s promises committed the party to expensive extensions

THE LEFT AFTER BEVANISM 65

of the welfare state and to investment in private industry but not to ‘anything which is specifically socialist’.37 His fear, shared by many at the time, including the Bevanites and—for rather different reasons—Gaitskell, was that the party had made excessively expensive promises which could not be effectively secured. They would not be achieved because the private sector, still intact at 80 per cent of the economy, would not cooperate in a strategy which would mean higher taxation on income and capital. Balogh believed it naive to imagine that private capital, even if sufficiently productive, would willingly provide resources for an extension of social services. However, he did not seek salvation through a simple extension of Morrison-style nationalization, which in his view merely created isolated and irresponsible areas of managerial power unresponsive to the needs of both workers and the wider community. The public sector was certainly too small, but a flexible approach was necessary if it was to be enlarged in a way conducive to Labour’s economic aims. Public ownership should be played down as a hallmark of socialist strategy in favour of detailed physical controls which could be ‘quickly and effectively imposed’. This outlook harked back to the late 1940s. Licensing control over imports would once again be required together with the restoration of state trading in all important staple imports. The state would also have to reimpose priorities for export orders as well as taking measures to control foreign-exchange dealings. Only controls like these could successfully prevent a capitalist ‘counter-attack’, and provide a satisfactory basis for Labour’s welfare programmes. Equality performed a role in Balogh’s strategy and the order of priority was broadly typical of traditional technocratic assumptions. He remained close to centre-left conceptions of equal power, higher productivity and economic efficiency being the results of greater state intervention and the basis of future social equality. However, perhaps more explicitly than others, Balogh acknowledged that sacrifices were needed to achieve these goals. He echoed Keep Left nostrums in his demands for equality of sacrifice as an intrinsic requirement of economic progress—not neglecting the working class’s ‘contribution’ to the common good in the process. Statutory wage regulation would be necessary, for example, in addition to the regulation of profits and dividends in order to control consumption. Certainly an understanding with

66 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

the trade unions would have to ‘go beyond anything attempted by the post-war Labour Government or envisaged by Labour spokesmen’.38 Efficiency arguments grounded in understandings about fair shares and equal sacrifice provided the main focus of agreement not only between Balogh and Wilson but Richard Crossman as well. Crossman, however, took their thinking further in one direction while showing little interest in developing the egalitarian implications of the centre-left’s position. Like Balogh, he was concerned that the West in general and Britain in particular were in danger of being overhauled by an efficient Eastern Bloc whose capacity for economic planning and control far outstripped Western capabilities. Rather than dwell on specifically economic solutions, Crossman chose to concentrate on the potential for political change. Soviet economic domination, in his view, could be avoided so long as the ‘gigantic powers of the oligopolists’ were transferred to newly created planning institutions of central government,39 but he was more interested in issues of power and accountability in the private and public sectors. Apprehensive about a bureaucratized socialist managerialism which could inhibit democracy, he advocated (almost alone on the Labour Left at this time) workers’ control as a means of avoiding ‘the technocrats’ perversion of our Socialist ideal’ in the workplace. Constitutional changes, meanwhile, would enlarge individual freedom and stimulate an active democratic society, Crossman considering these reforms ‘at least as important as the extension of public ownership and the redistribution of wealth’40 (though quite how they were to be rendered compatible with the powerful public institutions required for efficient central planning he never made clear). In short, unaccountable private economic power would be tamed by central state planning and control, with egalitarian results, while the state’s own totalitarian proclivities would be held in check by a more rigorous democratic accountability. ‘Unless the two [i.e. constitutional and economic reform] march in step’, Crossman argued, ‘we shall merely create a new Leviathan, in which a Socialist managerial oligarchy replaces a capitalist oligarchy.'41 Taking these proposals together, centre-left thinkers were basically united about the need for planning and the general outlines and purposes of economic strategy. Their reasoning did not stop at this point, however. Implementation of the strategy was a mat-

THE LEFT AFTER BEVANISM 67

ter of urgency partly because of Soviet competition but partly, too, because the West seemed bent on self-destruction. The deleterious consequences of unnecessary consumption and private affluence created needless inequalities and so threatened to destroy the social fabric. Influenced by J.K.Galbraith’s The Affluent Society, Balogh was concerned about ‘social balance’, and argued that the endemic instability of consumer capitalism could only be restrained by ‘a juster distribution of the gains in national income’ which would ‘bring about the increase in confidence that is needed for stabilization and growth’.42 It was particularly important to control the new consumerism. Balogh criticized attempts to create new demands and induce individuals to express their personalities in commodities ‘which have symbolic significance’. He argued in almost Marxian vein that goods were no longer wanted for their usefulness ‘but for what they mean, what prestige their ownership secures, what impressions they give, and what emotions they arouse in other people…demand is made practically limitless’.43 This process was detrimental to collective or communal goals which needed to be supported by collective resources like tax revenues. Taxes on profits and individuals became the target of criticism because they threatened consumer affluence—hence the ‘intense propaganda…waged against “molly-coddling” through better schools, better hospitals, better libraries’.44 Balogh hoped consumerism could be diminished by emphasizing equal sacrifice and communal, collective norms, the consequent reduction in demand releasing resources for a rapid investment drive. Crossman did not dissent. Affluence stood condemned because of the need for greater efficiency in the use of productive resources —a view diametrically opposed to Gaitskellite optimism about rising living standards. Crossman’s criticisms, whose imagery was curiously reminiscent of the overt nationalism of the pre-war Right, were directed against the mass demand for inessential goods, stimulated by mass advertising. A conspiracy by ‘the commercialized mass media of mass communication [existed] to dope the critical faculties [and keep] the British people complacently apathetic, while the social and moral sinews of the national organism are weakened by fatty degeneration’.45 Unlike rightwingers, however, Crossman believed creeping apathy could best be resisted by a renewed emphasis on collectivism—not just of an economic kind, but of a moral, communal quality.

68 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

The assault on affluence chimed with the centre-left’s conviction that a planned economy was the only solution for Britain’s economic difficulties and rekindled puritanical appeals for equal sacrifice and a rationed society so prominent in the late 1940s. In a classic expression of the centre-left’s position, combining economic efficiency with a recognition of the importance of this form of equality, Balogh maintained that ‘the vital fact still seems unrecognized that the growth of production is the necessary basis of the social welfare and national greatness’.46 Physical planning would provide ‘the basis of the modernization of industry and the maintenance of an even employment situation while safeguarding growth’.47 Institutionally he envisaged a planning authority on lines similar to Cripps’s short-lived Department of Economic Affairs, independent of the Treasury and so able to oversee the systematic coordination of sustained development, ‘in which each of the projects supports the other, and within which each of the projects is economically justified’.48 This was similar to Wilson’s idea of a National Investment Board and taken together these suggestions found eventual expression in the Department of Economic Affairs, created when Labour came to office in 1964.

THE LABOUR LEFT IN THE EARLY 1960s Splits in technocratic socialism, visible in the 1930s but healed briefly by Keep Left, noticeably widened during the later 1950s – with deleterious consequences for this strand of thought. On the Tribunite wing, the failure further to develop ideas of public ownership and the apparent lack of interest in developing a broader socialist programme encouraged, or did nothing to prevent, the pursuit of single issues. German rearmament in the early 1950s and, after Gaitskell’s defeat over Clause Four, unilateralism at the turn of the decade fed the reluctance, bemoaned by Crossman, to be closely concerned with rethinking policy. By the late 1950s, as the unilateralist wave broke, opposition to Gaitskell increasingly became focused on this one issue. From the time of Bevan’s Brighton speech, until the temporary collapse of CND in 1962, Tribune spearheaded Labour’s anti-nuclear lobby. Although fleeting success came in 1960 when, powerfully supported by Frank Cousins, the leftwing leader of the TGWU, conference approved a unilateralist defence policy, the danger of the

THE LEFT AFTER BEVANISM 69

single-issue strategy was swiftly demonstrated. Following a rigorous campaign by Gaitskell, conference reversed its position the following year and this decision, coupled with the effective collapse of CND in 1962, left the Tribunites exposed. As Anthony Howard remarked at the time, ‘nothing has been more striking than the insignificance of the role that the Left has played in Labour politics in the past year or so’.49 It is not surprising that the most accurate epitaph to Tribunism noted the lack of a serious doctrinal base. Raymond Williams praised the Tribunites’ attachment to ‘the life of the British working class’, but rued the absence of a ‘clear exposition and steady examination of socialist theory’ which he noted as an endemic characteristic of the postwar Labour Left.50 Williams of course looked to the new generation of leftwing theorists—E.P.Thompson, Stuart Hall, Norman Birnbaum— gathered around the Universities and Left Review (later the New Left Review), many of whom had left the Communist Party after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in November 1956. Significantly, the New Left had more regard for Gaitskellite Keynesian socialism than for Tribunite confusions, at least in so far as Gaitskellite intellectuals were treated as serious targets for criticism. Less understandably, however, the New Left failed to appreciate the importance of the emerging centre-left circle which, if not marked by intellectual ability alone, nevertheless made important contributions to Party thinking and, by 1964, had become Labour’s most influential grouping. In contrast to the Tribunites, centre-left intellectuals were ostensibly more successful, although the difficulty with their position lay in the tendency to concentrate exclusively on requirements for an efficient, productive economy—which caused a degree of tension in the group. Generally sympathetic to their views, Crossman nevertheless thought Balogh and Wilson were oversimplistic about the ease with which the economy could be transformed, as is made clear by his report of a conversation of January 1958. Balogh protested that ‘all you need to do’ to achieve the Party’s social and economic desires would be to restore economic expansion, the results of which would make ‘plenty [of resources available] to enable you to pay for increased capital investment, social services, etc., and defence’. Crossman dismissed these claims as ‘typical economists’ nonsense’ and, prophetically as it turned out, wrote that he had forced Balogh to admit ‘that the conditions for

70 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

his pipe dream were, first, at least one year of wage freeze; and, second, no additional public expenditure in the first year of the Labour Government’.51 This preoccupation with questions of strategy reduced the significance of long-term vision and chimed with the Party’s pragmatic need for a workable programme— especially by the early 1960s when it was becoming increasingly clear that Labour could form the next government. By the end of 1962 Labour seemed on the verge of new-found unity—the product of a series of factors which worked in the short term to heal the internal divisions which had afflicted the party throughout the preceding decade. Outwardly, the respective defeats of the Gaitskellites over Clause Four and Tribunites over unilateralism provided space for compromise. Leftwing suspicions were further eased by Gaitskell’s sudden death in January 1963 which, however untimely, contributed to a greater degree of trust between both sections of the Left and other elements of the Party. Faced with a choice of Harold Wilson or the unpopular George Brown as contenders for the leadership there was little doubt whom Tribunites and the centre-left would support. The majority of the Gaitskellites, shattered by their loss, supported Brown for the leadership but had little choice other than to fall in behind Wilson who won by a forty-vote majority in the second ballot.52 External circumstances were also auspicious. The sluggish state of the economy, Macmillan’s Cabinet sackings in 1962, the Profumo Affair and the illness and eventual departure of the Prime Minister, had damaged the image of confident urbanity projected by the Conservatives throughout their thirteen-year rule. The government seemed to be without ideas and appeared increasingly directionless and outdated—an impression that the selection of the aristocratic Sir Alec Douglas-Home as Macmillan’s successor did little to dispel. These factors greatly aided agreement over a programme which conveyed Labour’s new image as a modern party of progress. Signposts for the Sixties, approved at the 1961 conference, boosted party confidence. Signposts had its genesis in an earlier statement, Labour in the Sixties, written by Peter Shore and Morgan Phillips, and well received by conference the previous year. This document had reflected centre-left nostrums in the suggestion that planning and public ownership were vital ingredients of Labour’s armoury if the gathering ‘scientific revolution’ was to be harnessed successfully for public purposes. It was presumably for

THE LEFT AFTER BEVANISM 71

this reason that Mikardo considered it ‘a banner around which the party can rally in unity’.53 The updated policy statement, which according to Crossman had ‘most of the content put into it by Harold, Tommy Balogh and myself’,54 unsurprisingly gave testimony to the burgeoning centre-left consensus on basic issues, and the comparatively reduced role of equality in this version of technocratic socialism. Significantly Crossman wrote the ‘Gaitskellite’ sections on education and welfare, while Wilson and Balogh contributed those on planning and taxation.55 Britain’s weak economic position, continuing poverty and inadequate welfare provision were characteristically attributed to ‘the concentration of power in irresponsible and hidden hands’ and lack of accountability in the ‘control of industry, banking, insurance, commerce, the press and other mass media’.56 Planning was of course the key to future economic efficiency. A National Investment Board would plan the broad lines of economic advance, the central task being to draw up a National Plan for expansion. Although the document acknowledged the need for ‘many kinds of intervention and controls’, public ownership was handled cautiously. Following Industry and Society, state share ownership was endorsed in lieu of capital grants and fixedinterest loans to private industry, but extensions of full state ownership—apart from the age-old commitment to Iron and Steel— were restricted to urban land. Existing public industries, however, were encouraged to widen their interests and expand ‘into whatever fields they can profitably develop’.57 ‘Science’ lent the programme additional weight. Where attacks on affluence in the late 1950s had seemed negative and retrograde, the prospect of technological revolution seemed much more promising. In the aftermath of the successful Scarborough conference of 1963, in which Wilson’s speech on the role of science galvanized the movement, Crossman could note of the centre-left that, we realized that here was the new, creative Socialist idea needed to reconcile the Revisionists of the Right with the Traditionalists of the Left. Harold Wilson succeeded where Hugh Gaitskell failed because he did not propose a substitute for the old Socialism. Instead he offered a reaffirmation of its traditional moral and political arguments in ultra-modern terms.58

72 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

Science, indeed, fast became a panacea for all Labour’s doctrinal difficulties. Wilson himself was to write in 1964 that ‘if there was one word I would use to identify modern socialism it was “science” ’.59 Crossman, apparently forgetting earlier worries about too-easy formulae for a future Labour government, commented that ‘nothing will halt the scientific and technological revolution under which we live [and] a community which does not take control of these forces is doomed to suicide’.60 However, the anticipated ‘revolution’ and the recognition of the need to control it entailed, if not the replacement, then certainly the narrowing of centre-left interpretations of equal power to a more single-minded preoccupation with economic expansion per se, and this carried potential future dangers. In 1963 it was possible to imagine that ‘technology [could] double the standard of living in a dozen years’, but when, only three years later, the brave new world proved chimerical and Labour appeared trapped in a discredited image of progress, disillusionment with centre-left strategies began to force a fundamental reworking of the technocratic socialist vision.

Chapter 4

Keynesian socialism in the 1950s

Although their disagreements were more marked, technocratic socialists were not alone in experiencing internal differences of opinion in the 1950s. Labour’s thirteen years of opposition saw the early signs of a future division within Keynesian socialism which was later to prove extremely damaging. The majority of Gaitskellite1 intellectuals, Gaitskell himself, Douglas Jay and Roy Jenkins, developed an increasingly liberal bias, stressing individual freedom, a predominantly free market economy and a broad equality of opportunity. Tony Crosland, often regarded as the Gaitskellites’ leading thinker and someone who certainly maintained a close personal friendship with the Party leader, developed rather different ideas. In sympathy with the liberal element on a number of points, particularly the importance of individual liberty, Crosland was a broader and more imaginative thinker than his colleagues and this quality sets his brand of egalitarianism apart.2 The embryonic divisions discernible in education policy and his approach to industrial relations in the 1950s stemmed from an understanding of the egalitarian future that stressed the subjective aspects of social equality as much—indeed more—than the ‘objective’ redistribution of material resources. By the early 1970s personal and policy disagreements, and the obvious difference of vision in which they were rooted, had developed to the point where Keynesian socialism terminally divided between a Croslandite and ‘Jenkinsite’ or liberal Keynesian variant. These divisions were still well in the future when Keynesian socialist ideas became increasingly influential in the late 1940s and early 1950s.3 Indeed, in contrast to the turbulence on the Left 73

74 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

the group of young politicians around Gaitskell looked impressively united. Like Dalton before him, Gaitskell consciously moulded a small group of sympathizers, making it his business to encourage young recruits like Crosland and Jenkins4 into Labour’s policy-making circles and using the Fabian Taxation Group as an initial venue in which to ‘bring on’ the younger generation. Dalton, who had been the group’s original orchestrator, managed to ensure that Crosland became its chairman and from 1951 Gaitskell, ex-Chancellor and subsequently Shadow Chancellor in Labour’s Parliamentary Committee, began to exercise increasing sway over this team of economists. The ideas themselves were mainly developed by Crosland, Jay and Jenkins, all of whom shared Gaitskell’s conviction that ‘equality’ should be regarded as the centrepiece of socialism.5 Two other figures were important but, for very different reasons, their ideas did not occupy a prominent place in Gaitskellite thinking. Dalton continued to be involved, remaining a close friend of Gaitskell’s and interested in Crosland’s progress6 but by the early 1950s his influence was on the wane; he had never recovered from his enforced resignation from the Chancellorship in November 1947 and, as his diaries illustrate, considered himself a spent force.7 If not always an enthusiastic supporter of Gaitskellite policies—particularly the recasting of public ownership in Party doctrine8—his financial expertise made him a respected figure in the group to which he remained personally if not intellectually attached until his death in 1962. Gaitskell’s friend and contemporary, Evan Durbin, would surely have played a leading role in the 1950s had he not died prematurely in a drowning accident while on holiday in Cornwall in 1948.9 His notes for a projected book, The Economics of Democratic Socialism, suggest that Durbin had begun to modify his original technocratic, centre-left views in directions that brought him closer to the Keynesian socialism he had eschewed a decade earlier.

POINTS OF AGREEMENT: PLANNING AND PUBLIC OWNERSHIP The Gaitskellites knew what they disliked about Labour’s socialist doctrine even if they were less sure about the precise nature of what should replace it. Learning the lessons of the late 1940s they

KEYNESIAN SOCIALISM IN THE 1950S 75

concluded that the two central nostrums of technocratic socialism —physical planning and public ownership—needed fundamental alteration. Their attitudes to these traditional articles of faith grew out of very different concerns from those of the Left, most particularly the growing recognition, from the late 1940s, that the combination of planning and public ownership was not proving the successful means for socialist transition that had once been hoped. The main objective was to challenge the importance of direct state control of the economy in favour of fiscal or budgetary intervention. Once the old shibboleths of public ownership and planning had been destroyed, the Gaitskellites trusted they could move Party doctrine away from the belief that equality could only be brought about by a far-reaching reorganization of the mode of production to a belief that greater equality—or social justice—could be obtained more easily in a mixed economy. These ideas gained stature in the wake of the political and intellectual changes both in and outside the Labour Party between 1947 and 1951. The fortunes of ‘planning’, broadly understood as central direction of the economy by government ministers exercising physical control over such factors as manpower, production, food and prices, were not only badly hit by the apparent incompetence displayed in 1947 but by the added fact that those in charge of running the economy apparently had little idea of what it really entailed in practice.10 Morrison, who as Lord President of the Council was responsible for economic planning, appeared particularly confused believing it to be simultaneously ‘a very large and complicated business’ and ‘not much more than common sense’.11 Dalton, a member of the Lord President’s Committee, had always been an enthusiast but as Chancellor he was primarily concerned about the relative position of the Treasury in the departmental hierarchy and particularly its position in relation to the Lord President’s Office run by his arch-rival, Morrison. There was consequently an estrangement between the two departments, which did not work closely together in the early years of the administration.12 When Cripps became Minister at the Department of Economic Affairs (DEA), a department specifically created to take the role of the ‘Supreme Economic Authority’ discussed in the 1930s, he tried to establish control over the government’s planning machinery. The first Economic Survey, published in February 1947 under his guidance, was clearly a ‘plan’ in that it set targets for

76 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

economic development, and by the time Cripps succeeded Dalton as Chancellor in November, merging the DEA with the Treasury in the process, there was some hope that the most powerful department in the government would be used as a central planning machine. However, Cripps used his position, not firmly to establish Labour’s planning credentials, but to encourage the abolition of controls and to pursue a full-employment policy which relied principally on budgetary techniques, not physical measures, to maintain employment and guard against inflation.13 The retreat from physical planning was abetted by ‘Keynesian’ civil servants like Jay and James Meade in the Economic Section of the Treasury. In 1947 Meade had urged Dalton to bind budgetary policy and economic planning although the ever-closer relationship between the two was not cemented until Cripps took over the Chancellorship.14 Small advances were made, nevertheless: Jay successfully persuaded Dalton to place a ceiling on food subsidies and allow price rises on certain goods, a practice that was followed by both Cripps and Gaitskell.15 By the time Gaitskell succeeded Cripps at the Treasury, ‘planning’ had become predominantly a question of budgetary strategy. His only budget, despite being delivered at a time when the economy faced difficulties created by the Korean arms programme, has nevertheless been described in only slightly exaggerated fashion as ‘technically an excellent performance, the first wholly Keynesian budget’.16 If Keynesian strategies were enjoying a wide measure of acceptance by the early 1950s, further changes occurred in attitudes to public ownership. After the spate of nationalizations in the basic industries and services between 1946 and 1949 disagreements emerged about the likely number of future takeovers. All sections of the party recognized that public board nationalization had not proved the hoped-for panacea of better industrial relations and economic efficiency, a message rammed home by coal strikes in South Yorkshire and South Wales only six months after vesting day, and losses in the coal industry, on the railways and in civil aviation immediately following their takeover. By 1950 even the Keep Left group, though still enthusiastic, was prepared to admit that ‘we cannot disguise the fact that public corporations have not…provided everything which socialists expected’.17 Others questioned the basis of the policy itself. Herbert Morrison, the architect of the public board method, became increas-

KEYNESIAN SOCIALISM IN THE 1950S 77

ingly disillusioned with his creation and by the late 1940s was expressing opposition to further takeovers in the immediate future and demanding a period of ‘consolidation’ in order to lay ‘firm and secure foundations on which further progress can be made’.18 Although the 1950 general election programme, Labour Believes in Britain, contained a list of industries for nationalization, the ‘list’ came to be regarded as an electoral liability and the new programme, Labour and the New Society, written for the general election in November 1951, trimmed its promises accordingly. Public ownership would only be considered where existing concerns were working against the ‘public interest’, the definition of which was deliberately left vague. Morrison’s support for ‘consolidation’ was typical of the increasingly cautious attitude to public ownership and its place in Labour’s strategy, supported not only by other senior figures in the leadership but by the leaders of the three big unions, Arthur Deakin, Will Lawther and Tom Williamson, who, though not openly hostile, were reluctant to recommend it. This prevailing caution was reflected in policy documents from both wings of the movement in 1953. The General Council’s Interim Report on Public Ownership reviewed prospects for further nationalization but, with the exception of water supply, postponed any commitment to state takeovers pending ‘further study’.19 Labour’s policy statement, Challenge to Britain, reinstated a small ‘list’ of industries considered as potential candidates, but in many cases proposals for outright nationalization were eschewed in favour of the state’s obtaining a ‘controlling interest’ in an enterprise, or even vaguer promises ‘to take powers to acquire any firm which falls down on the job’.20 So, by the early 1950s the efficacy of these two central aspects of the Party’s socialist strategy, apparently so secure in the 1930s, was open to question. Leftwingers, at this point still firm in the conviction that planning and public ownership were essential preconditions of their understanding of equality, continued to demand loyalty to these salient points of policy and principle. The Gaitskellites, on the other hand, wanted to reduce their importance and the symbolic significance they carried in the Party. Economic planning Changing approaches to planning were initially heralded by

78 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

Durbin. His original reasons for demanding direct state control of the economy had been unequivocal: ‘it is perfectly clear’, he had written in 1935, ‘that social equality cannot be achieved in an unplanned economy’.21 Economic reorganization had to precede social amelioration, and physical planning was an obvious ingredient in the transformation of uncontrolled capitalism. However, the growing influence of Keynesian socialist ideas during the war, together with Labour’s subsequent implementation of at least some of the central features of 1930s’ technocratic socialism, prompted Durbin to rethink his position, particularly as, by the later 1940s, economic difficulties were proving no less intractable in the ‘planned’ economy than they had under laissez-faire capitalism. Durbin consequently played down planning in the creation of greater equality, stressing instead the value of human liberty in an egalitarian society. Planning was now described as ‘merely a change in the direction of economic responsibility’;22 it was not to be ignored, but should not be overestimated—and it was certainly not intended to compromise freedom. In a statement that captures the core of subsequent Gaitskellite concerns, he wrote that an approach to equality in the distribution of income, wealth and opportunity can be secured…in which full choice of occupation, free expenditure of income, a pricing system, and political liberty are preserved...to which flexibility and enterprise is restored…that makes use of reason, foresight and experiment.23 Although Durbin did not go into detail about the precise nature of the balance between liberty and equality, the distributional emphasis is clearly signalled as is the preference for a mixed economy. Jay and Gaitskell, along with Jenkins and Crosland, were obviously aware of Durbin’s views, particularly about the nature of equality, its relationship to liberty and the type of economic control needed for its achievement. Indeed the pursuit of a stable relationship between these factors led them to express wariness about Labour implementing any further physical measures. Gaitskell, for example, though happy to admit that the Attlee government had successfully introduced ‘a planning machine in the heart of the Treasury’ which had influenced government policy,24 agreed with Crosland that the verdict on Labour’s economic policy ‘must be a mixed one’.25

KEYNESIAN SOCIALISM IN THE 1950S 79

The younger generation was more forthright. Jenkins claimed that controls had ‘tilted the balance too much towards the austerity of fair shares, and too little towards the incentives of free consumers’ choice’.26 He was not averse to certain restraints, particularly building licensing for major projects, but was keen to ensure that controls did not interfere in the daily lives of ordinary citizens. Crosland, too, could not hide his distaste for the kind of planning which had informed the early Economic Surveys, commenting on the situation in the late 1940s in which ‘targets stated in exact quantitative terms, [were] regularly missed, with the whole business of planning coming into disrepute’.27 Whether it was prices, wages or raw materials, many controls were intended to aid the fulfilment of specific plans or targets, and were therefore implicated in the failure to achieve them. Socialism should not be pursued through ‘a complex mass of detailed controls [which were] highly unpopular, bad for industrial efficiency, and distorting in its effect on production'.28 Controls were at best a last resort and governments would do better to rely on measures to stimulate investment, a restrained taxation policy for business so as not to inhibit incentives and, primarily, the control of consumption through fiscal, and occasionally monetary, policies. The free market was alluring. Jenkins stated optimistically that the price mechanism, ‘stripped of its defects’, would simply become an accurate device for measuring and giving effect to the preferences of individual consumers, ‘a device for which there should clearly be some scope in any society which set a high value on the freedom of individual decision’.29 He never appeared to doubt that the ‘defects’ of the price system actually could be eliminated and did not pursue the question of the relationship between a free market in prices and the potential distortions produced by restrictions on incomes and wealth in the name of equality. In somewhat cooler fashion Crosland regarded the price system as ‘a reasonably satisfactory’ method of distributing the great bulk of consumer and industrial goods, given the total amount of resources available for consumption and industrial investment. Consumers were the best judges of how to spend their money. Significantly, he added that even if this were not the case, ‘the principle of individual liberty would still require that [they] should be left free to spend it’.30 Both Jenkins and Crosland believed that in the prevailing circumstances of increasing mate-

80 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

rial abundance ‘rationing by the purse’ was preferable to ‘rationing by the coupon’.31 The confidence of these younger Gaitskellites stemmed from their faith in economic growth as a panacea for a whole range of potential ills. Dramatic rises in British living standards which followed the end of the Korean War in 1953 were a new experience and, with the important exception of the technocratic socialists, ‘austerity’ came to be considered a thing of the past. This generation regarded the use of physical controls, even to contain inflation, as retrograde and anachronistic in such economically propitious circumstances. If, as early as 1952, Crosland recognized the potential unpopularity of the kind of planning Labour had undertaken between 1945 and 1951, by 1956 he was even less disposed to support it. He calculated that the present rate of growth would allow a doubling of living standards in twenty-five years and suggested that this would only need to be maintained to accommodate ‘all reasonable claims without excessive difficulty’.32 In his Panglossian opinion, if growth was assured the redistribution of wealth would be painless, greater equality would result and liberty would be preserved. Public ownership Paradoxically, since the two were so closely linked, the Gaitskellites were more reluctant to jettison public ownership as a means to equality than they were economic planning. In fact they were rather slow to react to the loss of faith in public board nationalization, continuing to support this traditional method in the belief that it was conducive to greater equality. Sceptical about the Left’s belief that public ownership could break capitalist economic power, Gaitskell could nevertheless write that nationalization helped ‘the move towards greater equality because it prevents people from making any more private fortunes in the industries taken over because the flow of interest is smaller than the corresponding profit incomes, because…it puts a brake on the payment of very high salaries’.33 Jenkins concurred: workers, he suggested, could now see that an increase in capital equipment would not simply benefit the shareholders. Also, the fact that those compensated in concerns already in public hands were paid on a fixedinterest basis made their ‘current income much lower than, in a period of full employment, it would otherwise have been’.34

KEYNESIAN SOCIALISM IN THE 1950S 81

These convictions did not survive long. They fell victim in particular to new arguments about the nature of ownership in a ‘postcapitalist’ mixed economy advanced by Crosland, who, having changed his mind about the egalitarian proclivities of public ownership by 1952,35 argued that ownership of the means of production had become divorced from control. Denning his position against Marxist views of capitalist ownership, first in The Transition from Capitalism’ and later at greater length in The Future of Socialism, Crosland claimed that the traditional dispute between socialists and capitalists was no longer relevant because the individual property rights at the heart of capitalist economic and social power had been converted into ‘passive’ shareholding.36 The important point was that private economic power had passed out of the hands of capitalist owners to salaried managers and higher executives, negating the need for ever-increasing public ownership as the only means of minimizing capitalist economic hegemony. Crosland did not agree with claims that this new private sector salariat had simply replaced the old entrepreneurial class and thus posed a similar threat to the public interest.37 The state’s role had been enormously enhanced and was now ‘an independent intermediate power dominating the economic life of the country’; Keynesian management techniques enabled the state to regulate the distribution of income and capital, plan investment and control the economy in ways unimaginable in the days of uninhibited laissez-faire. In Crosland’s view, ‘the passive state has given way to the active, or at least the ultimately responsible, state; the political authority has emerged as the final arbiter of economic life’.38 These ideas were given an added twist by Austen Albu, Labour MP for Edmonton, an ex-director of the British Institute of Management and Gaitskellite sympathizer. Albu dismissed the significance of the public—private sector divide, arguing that the real division in modern industry was between ‘enterprises managed by their real owners and those which are managed by professional directors’.39 Differences between joint-stock companies and nationalized industries were marginal because control had passed to salaried directors who now constituted a managerial strata separate from the shareholders whose ‘ownership’ had become purely nominal. The emergence of this executive level had made ‘the public joint stock company…nearer to a public corporation than to the classical conception of private industry’.40

82 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

The conviction that the state could regulate economic affairs without resorting to outright ownership, coupled with Albu’s claim of a convergence between public and private forms of organization, had an important effect on Gaitskellite thinking—most obviously these insights facilitated the definitive move away from nationalization as a relevant form of socialist economic organization. In its place came the formulation of new conceptions of public ownership based not on vestigial assumptions about dispossession but on the Keynesian socialist vision of the redistribution of personal wealth and greater social equality. Gaitskell himself was a leading figure in this process of reformulation. His Fabian pamphlet, Socialism and Nationalization, clearly distinguished between nationalization and other potential forms of public ownership. Whereas the future of the former was in doubt, the extension of public ownership was ‘almost certainly necessary if we are to have a much more equal distribution of wealth’.41 Gaitskell was primarily interested in the extension of state shareholding in private companies, very much to the fore in Industry and Society and a theme taken up by other group members, notably Jay who claimed that ‘the future of public ownership should mainly lie, not in the rigid State monopoly… but in participation in more commercially agile enterprises of all kinds’.42 With the state as a part-owner in major enterprises a growing share of the rising dividend and capital gains would gradually be steered into the hands of the community. This formula tapped into a number of other ideas which had the redistribution of wealth as their objective. Jenkins recommended a sweeping capital levy in the belief that many people would be forced to pay their contribution by a transfer of assets to the state in the form of shares.43 A different analysis with potentially similar consequences made its first appearance in 1952. In his contribution to New Fabian Essays, Crosland claimed that in the new, post-capitalist society owner-managers had sunk to the level of passive shareholders.44 This kind of functionless wealth the Gaitskellites wanted to destroy and direct state holdings in private companies was one means of accomplishing their ambition. Where the Gaitskellites could envisage an egalitarian outcome they were content to retain public ownership providing it was limited. The moral basis of the assault on shareholding had utilitarian overtones, resting on the belief that functionless wealth aug-

KEYNESIAN SOCIALISM IN THE 1950S 83

mented material inequality with no obvious social benefit being derived from it. Gaitskell certainly believed that ‘the divorce between ownership and management has gone very far, and the influence of the shareholders on management…is negligible’,45 while Crosland claimed somewhat wildly that ‘even the shareholders themselves seem subconsciously to sense the decline in their economic function; and they have become listless and apathetic to all attempts to organize them for the defence of their ancient rights’.46 The point, however, was to eliminate this increasingly anachronistic source of inequality, and here the group was uncompromising. In his speech during the debate on the policy statement Industry and Society at the 1957 Party conference, Gaitskell made it clear that, whatever the claims of those demanding more nationalization, he considered an assault on passive share ownership, especially in the large businesses, to be a priority.47 His personal version of the demand to nationalize the top 500 firms—a common cry on the Tribunite left—took the form of an attack on their rising share values which were a ‘major source of inequality’. While this approach provoked criticisms both within the Party and from the New Left outside it,48 the kernel of the issue involved an understanding of public ownership which had redistribution as its central objective. Competing definitions of ‘socialism’ which regarded the state as the scourge of private ownership simply confused means with ends; the prospect of the state physically owning the bulk of the economy carried little appeal and, in view of Keynesian attitudes to planning, was anyway irrelevant. This desire to marginalize those aspects of socialism tying it directly to ownership of the means of production led to the illjudged Gaitskellite assault on nationalization and the attempt by the leader to excise Clause Four, which formally committed Labour to the state takeover of the means of production, distribution and exchange, from the Party Constitution. The attack was made in the context not only of certain long-term economic and social factors, some of which concerned the changing character of the labour force—its ‘embourgeoisement’ and the demise of many sectors of heavy industry—but also in the immediate aftermath of a third successive election defeat in the summer of 1959 which prompted Gaitskellite sympathizers to examine the changing nature of the Party’s electoral base.49 Jay’s infamous article in Forward quickly followed by Gaitskell’s no less notorious speech

84 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

to Conference encapsulate the Gaitskellite position on public ownership as it stood at the end of the decade. The article did not actually advocate the removal of Clause Four but it exhibited a terminal impatience with nationalization. ‘We must now make it plain’, Jay wrote, ’that we believe in social ownership through the Cooperative Movement, municipal enterprise and public investment; but that we do not believe in the extension of public monopoly to manufacturing industry or distribution.’50 Even steel did not escape the general embargo and here Jay went further than most of the others. Although he admitted that ‘the case is good’, it was not worth jeopardizing ‘the things for which we really stand’ which he defined as ‘social justice, a fair deal for the old [and] real equality of opportunity’. And here the veteran Keynesian socialist began to display a distinctly ‘liberal’ image, demanding a ‘radical’ party able to appeal to the electorate on a wide range of issues. Jay went so far as to suggest that Labour change its name to something akin to ‘The Labour and Radical Party’ to symbolize the shift away from old socialist concerns. In his speech Gaitskell argued that nationalization had lost the Party votes and consequently that ‘we may not be far from the frontier of this kind of giant state monopoly’.51 He went on to define socialism in terms of equality and social justice, reiterating once again that the equation of nationalization with socialism arose ‘from a complete confusion about the fundamental meaning of socialism, and, in particular, a misunderstanding about ends and means’. Although social ownership would no doubt be extended ‘in particular directions, as circumstances warrant, our goal is not 100% state ownership’. Like Jay, Gaitskell conceived the main task as the achievement of social justice.

KEYNESIANISM, SOCIALISM AND EQUALITY There was, however, some doubt as to exactly what ‘social justice’ and ‘equality’ might mean—and here, over the positive components of their doctrine, the Gaitskellites were unclear. The main difficulty lay in the temptation to regard Keynesianism as a panacea for all economic ills. Keynesianism was not ‘socialism’, but the fact that Keynesian techniques apparently provided the necessary economic space to create conditions conducive to

KEYNESIAN SOCIALISM IN THE 1950S 85

greater material equality led the Gaitskellites to be more complacent about the theory than was warranted. The tendency, in a context of improving economic conditions, was to assume that Keynesian management would lead inexorably to a more equal distribution of material resources. For Jay, now the ‘scourge of the trade cycle and mass unemployment [had] been scotched’52 and governments possessed the tools to sustain economic growth, a more equal distribution of material resources was, by definition, achievable. Jenkins was more circumspect in his suggestion that Keynes’s discovery of the benefits to be gained from stimulating consumption had made the task of eliminating inequality ‘somewhat easier’. The case for equality ‘was not based on a Keynesian analysis of the productive inefficiency of gross inequality’, which he considered proven, but on the conviction that wealth should be more evenly divided the better to promote the general welfare—and of course here Keynesian fiscal strategies would make an important contribution.53 Significantly, however, Crosland was less bothered about the potential outcomes of Keynesian management. Labour’s full employment policy was ‘basically Keynesian’ and this was a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for socialism.54 Arguments for socialism, however, transcended questions of full employment and associated policies because they were related to ‘ultimate ends’. Crosland sympathized with the assumption that ‘Keynesplus-modified-capitalism-plus-welfare-state’ was an acceptable substitute for the kind of programmes worked out in the 1930s, but in his view it was not socialism because ‘we could still have more social equality, a more classless society, and less avoidable distress’.55 These statements hint at a ‘majority’ and ‘minority’ perspective within Gaitskellism. The majority placed a lot of eggs in the Keynesian basket and while there is no good reason to suggest that they only favoured forms of equality that could be obtained through Keynesian economic techniques, there was an inclination towards ideas of material redistribution, usually of wealth rather than income, accompanied by only cautious support for a social equality of opportunity. The exception was Crosland. His desire to see greater social equality coupled with the conviction that it could not simply be bought by an ever greater degree of material redistribution gives his thinking a certain distinction. Although his position grew

86 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

directly from the belief that traditional patterns of ownership, and hence laissez-faire economic practices, had been eroded, these changes only brought society to the threshold of a socialist future. The next task should be to expand social equality by eliminating status differences rather than by further equalizing material resources. Even in his early writings Crosland had considered redistribution to be necessary only as a basic prerequisite of social justice and ‘not because it will provide large material benefits to the mass of the people’.56 Economic growth, the fruits of which would be fairly distributed, would anyway take care of these outstanding inequalities, the real problem was the continuing existence of status inequalities between rich and poor which led to resentment, discontent and social envy, and so to a general atmosphere of hostility. Remedies should be sought on the ‘sociopsychological plane’ where policies should aim to reduce the social significance of material inequalities while enhancing classlessness and equal status.57 Redistribution The Gaitskellites were at their most united over taxation policy where they agreed that redistribution by means other than income taxation should be the major method of advance. By 1949 Crosland was already convinced that little was to be gained in terms of a material improvement for the working class from the taxation of undistributed profits or ‘the remaining personal incomes of the rich’,58 his views being endorsed by Jenkins who acknowledged that ‘surtax…is certainly very severe’ and that ‘it would be idle to pretend that the surtax rates could be further stiffened to any substantial effect’.59 By the 1951 general election Gaitskell and his team of economic advisors60 were already engaged in a quest for more fruitful forms of taxation, anticipating that future progress would come from higher taxes on unearned income and capital—and from higher productivity. The most obvious recourse was to tax capital holdings more harshly, though this idea was hardly new—Dalton had attacked inheritance and the inequality it gave rise to in Some Aspects of the Inequality of Incomes in Modern Communities and Jay had agreed that the central feature of socialist policy should be the abolition of all inherited incomes.61 Gaitskellite ideas about capital taxation can be divided into

KEYNESIAN SOCIALISM IN THE 1950S 87

two parts. In the very early 1950s a steep capital levy remained attractive to some because of the large amount of ready revenue it would bring. Dalton and Jenkins favoured this course in particular. The alternative approach consisted of an amalgam of capital taxes designed to tap the resources of the rich without causing the severe political repercussions a capital levy was believed to entail. It was this latter view that became generally accepted by the Gaitskellites from the mid-1950s onwards. In terms of its egalitarian effects Dalton believed a levy was ‘much the most powerful tax instrument for equalizing distribution’ and thought it could be ‘as stiff as you like’. Moreover, ‘you needn’t wait till they die… Socialism in an afternoon’.62 Jenkins also thought that a levy more advantageous than a tax on capital gains or higher death duties. It was quick but, above all, it would make a significant contribution to ‘a more just and equal social order’.63 He proposed a high levy on all estates valued at over £20,000. But the desire for such a far-reaching measure did not outlast the Korean War and the associated rearmament programme. The era of austerity and fair shares, and the aftermath of Cripps’s ‘special contribution’64 had made such a view tenable, but by 1953 Jenkins had begun to question whether a severe capital levy, which would have to be imposed with a minimum of warning to avoid a dissipation of capital, would be compatible with the democratic process. He baulked at ‘such a complete overturning of existing property relationships’ and argued that a measure of this nature should only be undertaken by a strong government ‘which had placed its views on the subject…fairly before the electorate’.65 Although he continued to recommend a moderate levy at this stage Jenkins lost his original belief in its redistributive efficacy and by the end of the decade had discarded the idea completely.66 Other Gaitskellites writing in the post-war period never considered a capital levy as viable. Crosland thought it would be difficult to organize and difficult ‘to make fair as between different classes of property-owners’.67 Its redistributive potential would also be small because it should not be used to finance public services or reduce taxation; ‘for the nation to consume its savings in this way would be utterly wrong’.68 Jay and Gaitskell agreed, the latter stating that ‘public opinion…would react against a capital levy, except in very special circumstances’,69 with Jay content as

88 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

ever to recommend a capital gains tax and a gift tax designed to augment the effect of death duties by denying the tax-free transfer of gifts inter vivos.70 By the later 1950s a capital gains tax, a gift tax and steep taxation of unearned incomes comprised the Gaitskellites’ major weapons for the assault on property.71 Other important measures concerned company profits and here increased corporate taxation coupled with a capital gains tax, as opposed to statutory dividend limitation, was thought sufficient to limit the size of gains from the distributed surplus.72 All agreed that this assault should consist of an attack on the holdings of large amounts of capital and the ownership of property, which in their view conferred undue advantages on the holders. Gaitskell summed up the position at the Party conference in 1957: our aim is so to adjust the tax system of this country that the taxes fall fairly more on those who are at present getting away without paying them, with the consequence that those on whom the burden falls too heavily…because they have not the opportunity for capital gains, have not the opportunity for spending out of inherited wealth…shall be correspondingly relieved of taxation.73 The emphasis on capital taxation suggests that income differences were regarded as legitimate but that the removal of ‘unfair’ wealth was at least as important as full employment the redistributive effect of which, as Jay pointed out, could be experienced only once and thereafter simply maintained.74 Yet attitudes varied within the group about the potential extent of redistribution achievable through this strategy. Gaitskell and Jay believed that significant inroads could be made into existing inequalities if the capital resources of the rich were diverted into public services and benefits. Gaitskell argued that the taxation of inherited wealth and of gifts inter vivos would enable a sufficiently high rate of saving in the community from which to provide a base for ‘another great advance towards the just society’.75 Jay wanted extensive capital gains made from equity shares as a result of economic growth—the outcome of full employment and growth rather than individual effort—to be put to greater use through investment in public services. The combination of ‘public finance working through progressive taxes, social services and

KEYNESIAN SOCIALISM IN THE 1950S 89

subsidies; full employment; and the redivision of profits (itself partly due to profits taxation) to the disadvantage of dividends and the advantage of company reserves and the Exchequer’76 made for greater equality. Having eschewed all ideas of a capital levy Jenkins also looked to capital taxation to redistribute wealth. Quoting the Minority Report of the Royal Commission on the Taxation of Profits and Income to the effect that both dividends and share values increased in line with profits,77 he estimated that, ‘a future trend of profits showing an annual growth of 3–5 per cent [was] a rate of increase which would give average capital gains, on account of ordinary shares alone, of £500–800 million’. ‘As an extension of the tax base’, Jenkins claimed, ‘this would be well worth the trouble.’78 Convinced that ‘there is a clear redistributive case for taxing capital gains’, Crosland appeared to side with his colleagues. Gains accrued only to those who already owned property and, in view of the twin facts that the distribution of property was both highly unequal and a high proportion of it inherited, it was the ‘least defensible aspect of inequality’.79 However, while he welcomed a tax system which had both greater equity and equality as major goals, he did not expect the proposed measures to effect the kind of changes he wished to see. Concluding that ‘we have now reached the point where further redistribution would make little difference to the standard of living of the masses; to make the rich less rich would not make the poor significantly less poor’,80 Crosland was doubtful whether ‘economic satisfaction’ could be much increased by further vertical redistribution. Traditional welfare arguments may justify selective redistributive measures in favour of certain groups whose average gain might be significantly large, but there was no longer a clear case for general measures because ‘one cannot state unequivocally that a greater equality of income will increase economic welfare’. If more equality was deemed desirable then the case for it had to rest on statements ‘largely, if not entirely, unrelated to economic welfare’.81 Jay agreed with these views so far as income was concerned— the yield from the ‘official incomes’ of the rich, spread over the less well-off, would leave only ‘a few farthings falling from the rich man’s table’.82 But the targeted redistribution of wealth was another matter because it would maximize the benefits of a potentially small yield. The difference between the two lay in the fact

90 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

that he considered this form of redistribution as tantamount to equality. It was not so much that Crosland wanted to quarrel with the practical implications of this position, although his general statements about the questionable relevance of the further redistribution of income quoted above may suggest otherwise; he simply did not expect it to create the kind of social equality he desired. The case for equality had to rest on ‘certain value or ethical judgements of a non-economic character [and] on a belief that more equality, even though carrying few implications for the sum of economic satisfaction, would yet conduce to a “better” society’.83 Crosland was concerned about the persistence of ‘collective resentments’ in the face of the enormous increase in the living standards of great sections of society since 1945 and attributed them to the unreconstructed class system, the regressive social effects of which continued to pervade British society. Eschewing Marx for Weber, neither sheer wealth nor conspicuous consumption were accurate determinants of social class, but ‘style of life and consumption habits exert an exceptionally strong influence on social judgements in Britain’. Class membership could be ‘instantly distinguished by…dress…habits, taste in furniture, type of house, style of entertainment…[and] the most supremely unmistakeable of all symbols of social standing—differences of accent and vocabulary’.84 The tenacity of these traditional status symbols and their tangential relationship to economic wealth created marked discrepancies between new affluence and old social status. Crosland believed that the subjective experience of this hiatus created ‘a feeling amongst well-paid workers that their economic importance is not properly reflected in an enhanced social status and dignity’.85 The result was an increase in social envy and antagonism which was a natural reaction against class stratification and inequality. These cultural inequalities were obviously not amenable to a purely redistributive solution. Their amelioration depended more on attempts to rectify injustices where established habits and practices were deeply embedded and by no means capable of destruction by rational argument: this perception lay at the root of Crosland’s different attitudes to educational provision and industrial relations. Whatever their plausibility, Crosland’s ideas challenged the completeness of the arguments employed by Gaitskell, Jenkins

KEYNESIAN SOCIALISM IN THE 1950S 91

and Jay. His position is instructive. Redistributive taxation was necessary to extend equal opportunities and, like all the group’s members, Crosland claimed that a society which took equality of opportunity seriously had much to commend it because, inter alia, it avoided the injustices of hereditary status, allowed greater mobility between social classes and helped to diminish ‘collective feelings of superiority and inferiority’.86 But left at this point society would be in danger of substituting meritocracy for aristocracy and so perpetuating the rule of an elite. Developing the antimeritocratic theme proposed by his friend Michael Young,87 Crosland claimed that a sense of social inferiority could actually increase if equality of opportunity was interpreted meritocratically and this was allowed to go too far. Heredity at least provided some consolation for those excluded purely on social grounds, but a meritocracy implied that very unequal rewards and privileges are distributed solely on the basis of, if not one, at any rate a particular group of traits of human personality…it is the injustice of isolating, as a basis for extreme inequality, certain selected ones out of the multiple strands that go to make up the human personality, which constitutes the fundamental ethical case against any elite or aristocracy.88 Such an argument could be applied to the abolition of inherited wealth because any approach which recognized the need for differentials in earned income, while demanding an attack on unearned income, contained an inherently meritocratic element. Crosland certainly acknowledged the necessity for income differentials, which he justified on the grounds of incentives or ‘rent of ability’, but was prepared to condone income inequalities only in the context of challenging the social inequalities embedded in cultural assumptions and social and political institutions.89 He concentrated particularly upon education, believing that reforms here held the key to future advances in equality of status, and thus social equality generally. He was also aware of status inequalities in industry and considered remedies for what he regarded as the most irksome. While other Gaitskellites were aware of these issues their tendency to reduce equality to the single dimension of greater opportunities afforded by increased material advantage implied a different vision of socialism.

92 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

Education—towards meritocracy? Nowhere were these differing tendencies clearer than in education policy. Where Gaitskell, Jay and Jenkins displayed a marked leaning towards a straightforward meritocratic equality of opportunity as a means of altering the class basis of educational inequalities it is not clear that their proposed reforms would have gone far enough. After all, an education system based on strictly meritocratic premises, by substituting a new intelligentsia for the old class-based establishment, would not escape Crosland’s criticisms of elitism. There was little disagreement by the early 1950s about the need to reorganize educational provision in the state sector and virtual unanimity throughout the Party as to how it should be accomplished. After nearly two decades of sustained pressure from various interest groups, notably the National Association of Labour Teachers (NALT), the idea of comprehensive schooling made swift headway in policy-making circles after the Party’s fall from power. The Working Party on Education in 1953 demanded the supercession of the 1944 Education Act and recommended the abolition of the ‘eleven-plus’ examination as a prelude to the end of segregation at the secondary level.90 Challenge to Britain formally endorsed the new position. Convinced that all children would benefit academically and socially if they shared the facilities provided by a single school, the Party advocated the abolition of the eleven-plus exam and the elimination of the tripartite system. The Gaitskellites apparently championed the comprehensive idea but their enthusiasm was qualified by a deep-rooted ambivalence about the continued existence of both the grammar schools and the private sector of education. Some members of the group were chary of destroying an entire system of education for the sake of a new and unproven theory. They were aware that educational reform was a possible route to greater equality but reform was not necessarily equated with the upheaval of the whole educational system. Jay, for instance, accepted the case for a higher level of spending on education but fought shy of total reorganization. ‘Socialists’, he wrote, ‘should beware of making the comprehensive school an exclusive dogma. It looks like being the best pattern; but it might not conceivably be so in all circumstances.’91 Jenkins and Gaitskell were more explicit. The former would have welcomed comprehensivization

KEYNESIAN SOCIALISM IN THE 1950S 93

if the entire secondary system was being constructed afresh and argued that all new schools should be built on comprehensive lines. However, he acknowledged the existence of ‘some very good, well established grammar schools’ and hoped that ‘where they are of adequate size, in reasonable buildings, and with a good tradition they will be left undisturbed’. Jenkins believed the schools could act as a ‘bridge between the general level of the State sector and the private sector’ at least while the private sector remained unreformed. More generally he considered his view to accord with ‘both the liberal outlook of the Labour Party and the flexible tradition…of British education’.92 Gaitskell’s concerns were similar. He disliked the eleven-plus and ‘vigorously defended comprehensive schools’ but, as he told his old housemaster, there was ‘no question of our throwing away the tradition of the Grammar School’.93 Indeed he appeared shocked that Labour could be perceived as desiring to abolish these institutions: at a meeting with Lancashire and Cheshire grammar school headmasters in October 1955 he recorded that ‘I was rather astonished to hear them say, one after another, that Labour was against the grammar schools.’94 Gaitskell acknowledged ‘some truth’ in the arguments that comprehensive schooling could lead to geographical class divisions and further that bright children from the working class could be at a disadvantage. His position was ultimately ambivalent: in 1959, for example, he argued that there was ‘no question of our moving away from the comprehensive idea although, equally, we do not intend to be framed by the Tories as the murderers of the grammar school’.95 It is difficult to reconcile these views with anything more than a ‘liberal’, meritocratic interpretation of equality of opportunity. Even allowing for the fact that Labour had accepted the comprehensive idea as the system of the future for the bulk of schoolchildren, the continued existence of the best grammar schools could be expected to result in only the highly intelligent gaining access to higher education and so better careers. The likely emergence in these circumstances of a status hierarchy based upon intelligence would pose a real threat to any further egalitarian ambitions— even in an environment where a marked degree of redistribution was regarded as socially necessary. The private sector of education provides a further example of these Gaitskellites’ comparatively mild egalitarianism. Labour’s

94 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

attitude to the public schools while in office had been one of studied indifference. As one commentator has written, ‘when the government fell in 1951 its record on the whole public-school question indicated a lack of interest which had provoked little criticism within the party’.96 The early years of opposition witnessed a minor shift in perception but an important one because the future of private education came to be regarded as a significant issue during this period. Although Labour acknowledged that the takeover of the best of the public schools ‘cannot be reached within our ten-year programme’—and this diminished the effect of the statement—Challenge to Britain nevertheless stated that ‘our main aim is to end privilege in education'.97 Gaitskellite writings on this issue were at best confused. They recognized the need to reform the public schools but did not consider an overt attack on the private sector to be feasible. In the early 1950s Gaitskell was against even a dilution of the private system, claiming ‘that we have to face the fact that the desire “to do the best for your child” is a very powerful and natural emotion which it would be foolish to ignore or suppress’.98 At that time he recommended an improvement in ‘the quality of state education until it becomes mere foolishness for people to pay to have their children educated privately’.99 The erosion of the independent sector could also be effected by capital taxation which would restrict the resources available to the better-off for the private education of their offspring. According to his biographer, Gaitskell changed his mind, coming to agree with the Fleming Committee’s original recommendation that the public schools should be required to provide a percentage of free places.100 However, he failed to persuade either the Study Group on Education, the NEC or the 1958 annual conference that Fleming pointed the way forward and seemed himself only half-convinced.101 There was an obvious elitism built into the proposals which Gaitskell’s comment to his daughter that ‘I wanted to throw open the “public” schools to merit not wealth’ apparently condoned.102 He also seemed unaware of Crossman’s point that a process of selecting pupils for public schools would make a nonsense of Labour’s commitment to abolish the elevenplus and end segregation at the point of entry to state secondary education.103 Similar difficulties beset Jay and Jenkins. Both disliked what they regarded as the social divisiveness of the public schools but

KEYNESIAN SOCIALISM IN THE 1950S 95

neither would give up an essentially meritocratic position. Jay wanted an end to ‘the dual school system’ which he regarded as a ‘barrier to equality of opportunity’ but merely sought to replace fee-paying in ‘schools which maintain genuinely high academic standards’ with a system of state grants, thus giving the state rather than the schools themselves the power to ‘introduce selection by ability’.104 Jenkins began his discussion in The Labour Case by acknowledging that equality of opportunity was insufficient ‘either as a social or an educational aim’, only lamely to note that ‘it is a great deal better than inequality of opportunity’ and took the substantive point no further.105 He declared a preference for the Fleming scheme but admitted that its implementation would create competition for educational resources as the state’s need for money to finance assisted places would vie with the need for extra resources in the state sector. Jenkins, who considered his book both a commentary on Labour’s 1959 election manifesto and a personal statement, was content in this instance to follow Party policy as expressed in Learning to Live. He therefore supported the decision once again to ignore the public schools altogether and concentrate instead on raising educational standards in the state system. Crosland, conversely, wanted to minimize selection by merit wherever possible. Greater equality of opportunity was important but it needed to be taken further. He initiated serious debate about the place of the public schools in the Party by singling them out as par excellence the barrier to equal opportunity. Even the minor institutions, let alone the ‘thirty or so of the major public schools’, conferred ‘a crucial social advantage’ by providing good prospects for high-paid or high-status jobs.106 In this belief Crosland did not differ from the other Gaitskellites and, like them, his answer to the private sector was to suggest that the Fleming recommendations be implemented. However, his conception of educational policy and its relationship to equality did not stop at the meritocratic stage. Equality of opportunity was not sufficient because more equal access to the independent sector would do nothing to diminish the ‘prestige-gulf between the public schools and the rest which was responsible for the creation of ‘an elite much too detached from the point of view either of social justice, or contentment, or democracy’.107 One of Crosland’s arguments, which prefigured Crossman’s point in 1958, was simply to indicate the inconsistency of advocat-

96 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

ing the abolition of one type of segregation while simultaneously creating another. More stridently than his colleagues he supported the idea of a sustained assault on the tripartite system of secondary education and contended that a Labour government should ‘actively encourage local authorities…to be more audacious in experimenting with comprehensive schools’.108 Years before his infamous comment about wanting ‘to destroy every fucking Grammar school in England’,109 Crosland was far less concerned than Gaitskell about their fate and more willing to use the power of a state-backed campaign to ‘persuade’ local authorities to abandon the tripartite system. Although sympathetic to Fleming, he also supported a provision made by that Committee which had been explicitly designed to discourage pure meritocracy. Free places in the public schools, he argued, ‘should not go only to the cleverest children, but should be spread amongst a wide cross-section, with a preference…for those who want, or seem apt for a boarding-school education’.110 On this crucial point the others had remained silent. The position as Crosland defined it in The Future of Socialism and associated writings of the immediate period did not represent his final view on the subject. A believer in the egalitarian possibilities offered by an integrated education system he wanted to dispense altogether with the taint of elitism and to this end attempted to refine—indeed redefine—the concept of equal opportunity in a manner that stripped it of many of its meritocratic associations. Crosland argued that it could be interpreted in either a ‘weak’ or ‘strong’ sense. The weak interpretation was tantamount to a pure form of meritocracy with access to an elite education based on intelligence as measured by IQ tests, and with ‘all children of the same measured intelligence at the appropriate age [having] completely equal access’.111 The strong definition, which he preferred, took greater account of exogenous factors. Crosland maintained that, taking account of differences in heredity and childhood experience, ‘every child should have the same opportunity for acquiring measured intelligence, so far as this can be controlled by social action’.112 Herein lay the seeds of a radical departure. The existence of an independent sector with selection based upon, wealth failed to satisfy the conditions of even the weak conception of equal opportunity, as all the Gaitskellites agreed. A reformed version of the tripartite system, perhaps with selection

KEYNESIAN SOCIALISM IN THE 1950S 97

at a later age, could be made to satisfy the weak version’s criteria, as Crosland acknowledged. But a danger of upper- and middleclass advantage would remain because of the undoubted effects of social background on a child’s ability to learn. To eradicate the advantages conferred by social class Crosland believed that educational policy should be oriented towards the strong definition. This effectively made greater social equality a pre-condition of educational equality of opportunity, thereby inverting the commonly understood relationship between the two ideas and certainly reversing the direction of causality assumed by other Gaitskellites. He argued in Tawney-like manner that when socialists referred to equal opportunity in terms of ‘a narrow ladder up which only a few exceptional individuals…can ever climb… they concede the narrow, reactionary interpretation of their opponents’. The adoption of the strong definition would lead to a very different result because it implied ‘an immensely high standard of universal provision’. Emphasis consequently shifted from the usual preoccupation with individual mobility to the general standard of social provision. The implications of such an approach ‘for income-distribution, the quality of housing…and above all the calibre of universal education’ meant that the achievement of this ‘truly equal opportunity’ would carry society a long way towards equality.113 As to compulsion in education policy, Crosland continued to hope that the private sector could be encouraged to ‘democratize’ itself. Suitably radicalized, Fleming remained one means of advance but by 1961 he was even prepared to suggest that if the majority of schools refused to accept reform, ‘then the community must assert its right to legislate’.114 For the state sector selection at eleven must end, based as it was ‘on the false assumption that intellectual capacity at that age is fixed for life’.115 Intelligence testing—and in common with the fashion of the day Crosland did not dispute its utility—should not be used as a reason for physically separating children into superior and inferior schools. At most ‘streaming’ within a school which took a wide range of ability could be countenanced, but even here he was reluctant to condone the separation of pupils according to ability before the age of seventeen. By the 1960s the original stress, observable in his earliest writings, on the importance of social as opposed to purely economic factors occupied a central position in Crosland’s approach to the

98 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

idea of equality. If the Future of Socialism marked the zenith of his thinking, he continued to build on its insights and, at least in the case of education, became more radical as the long years of opposition drew to a close. Although his views have been criticized, not least because of the failure to perceive education as a ‘positional good’,116 Crosland attempted to provide a vision of equality not entirely conditional on material or economic change. To be sure, much of the social equality that he wanted was predicated on the future growth that would have to pay for it; but the sense of equality as it would actually be lived was much more dependent upon changed social status and, importantly, the individual’s perception of that changed status. Industrial relations Worker participation or control in industry did not excite Gaitskellite intellectuals overmuch but it is important for the light it sheds on Crosland’s developing ideas about equality. The issue had been dormant for some years. Syndicalism and Guild Socialism had been rejected by the Labour Party in the aftermath of the General Strike, and the idea of trade unionists participating in the management of their own industries had also lost its force after heated debates in the early 1930s.117 The TUC’s 1944 Report on Post-war Reconstruction remained true to the views expressed by the General Council in 1932 and opposed the direct representation of trade unionists on governing boards—a decision later endorsed by the Federation of British Industry and the Attlee government in the shape of Stafford Cripps. With the exception of specific unions—notably the NUR with its long tradition of support for workers’ control—opinion in the 1940s favoured the creation of joint consultative councils at all levels of the nationalized industries on matters not regulated by collective bargaining.118 These arrangements were tentatively extended to private industry after 1947.119 The nature and extent of worker participation was left unresolved, however. Trade unionists sat on the boards of nationalized industries but only in an individual capacity and there were few of them. The joint consultation process did not meet with early success, partly because of the hostility of private companies and partly because it was kept separate from collective bargaining which, as Allan Flanders of the Socialist Commentary group sug-

KEYNESIAN SOCIALISM IN THE 1950S 99

gested, ‘invariably destroy[ed] the workers’ interest in it’.120 While the big unions remained dominated by rightwing General Secretaries, little attempt was made to resolve the position but the image of centralized stability at the top disguised the beginnings of dissent below. Signs of an upsurge of shopfloor activism first emerged in the later 1950s, particularly in high-wage industries such as engineering, and focused on demands for the decentralization of collective bargaining. Shopfloor unrest was reflected in the emergence of a different kind of General Secretary: Frank Cousins, whose election as General Secretary of the TGWU in 1955 surprised even his supporters, exercised the authority of his predecessors but used it very differently—as his conduct during the 1958 London Bus Strike demonstrated.121 Others like Clive Jenkins of the white-collar union ASSET were outspoken in their demands for workers’ control and shopfloor autonomy, making their views known not only at union and Party conferences but in the publications of the ‘New Left’.122 These early signs of future upheaval were largely ignored by Labour’s intellectuals in the 1950s, the tendency being to leave industrial relations to the unions themselves. Gaitskell could mention the need ‘for advancement to a much greater equality of status in work’ at the Party conference in 1957 but commented that this was ‘in some respects a newer subject’ which should be treated primarily as a matter for the trade unions.123 The statement seems odd, coming as it did from a man who in his early years had been a close disciple of G.D.H.Cole, but it indicates the ambivalent manner in which workers’ status and industrial relations were treated by some Gaitskellites—the issue being recognized but held at arm’s length. Of the major figures in the group only Crosland and Jay devoted significant space to industrial matters. Neither displayed any interest in workers’ control and both were plainly sympathetic to Labour’s dominant centralist tradition. However, this common view did not lead to an agreed position. Jay favoured the idea of joint consultation and displayed an interest in selfmanagement schemes of the kind that also interested Crossman, although unlike the latter he remained opposed to the election of trade union representatives to company boards. Crosland was less compromising and showed little enthusiasm either for joint consultation or for any kind of formal worker participation. His conception of greater status for those in the workplace included at

100 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

once more and less than the greater likelihood of a promotion to the company board. Both Crosland and Jay believed that the position and status of the worker in industry could be changed by enhancing the quality of the relationship between employees and management. They avoided what they saw as the trap of workers’ control by redefining the meaning of ‘industrial democracy’ in such a way as to allow for the continuation of the respective traditional functions of trade unions and management. Here they were greatly assisted by the ideas of Hugh Clegg124 whose Industrial Democracy and Nationalization set the tone for Gaitskellite discussions. Definitions of industrial democracy hitherto accepted by the Left were the foci of Clegg’s argument. Syndicalism and Guild Socialism had conceived democracy in the workplace ‘organically’, meaning that both approaches entailed the active participation of all workers in the management of the enterprise. The danger with these views was that, by encouraging beliefs in ‘a mystical common purpose and general will’, they could mask a less than democratic reality of coercion and oppression.125 Consequently it was important to maintain ‘the two sides of industry’ and the oppositional role of the trade unions precisely to avoid this totalitarian prospect. ‘Industrial democracy’ then became, first, the institutionalized opposition of the trade unions to the employer and, second, the attempt by the employer to create a team ‘working together towards a common purpose, so long as that purpose is freely accepted’.126 Trade unions could not—and should not—seek to replace employers in the way that a political opposition party would realistically hope to govern after a period out of power. Their job was to oppose the employer ‘in order to secure from him more favourable treatment for [their] members’.127 Crosland agreed with these views. Industrial democracy was important because the factory worker, better off materially as a result of a decade of full employment and increased union bargaining power, nevertheless continued to experience the indignity of inferior status. ‘Non-pecuniary status privileges’ were widespread in British industry and Crosland believed them to be the source of much ill-feeling.128 Although they could be alleviated by various kinds of public provision and progressive taxation as much as by industrial reforms, the problems they posed still needed tackling in the workplace as well as outside it if social equality and ‘social contentment’ were to be achieved.

KEYNESIAN SOCIALISM IN THE 1950S 101

Because Crosland’s conception of equality was closely tied to the notion of status he was able to treat certain demands for reform as irrelevant or unrealistic. Status inequalities at work, in his opinion, were about the subjective experience of seemingly minor discriminatory procedures which assumed major proportions in the eyes of those discriminated against. It was not that the division of industry between those employing and those employed created a climate of bad industrial relations; like Clegg, Crosland argued that ‘the concept of “two sides” in industry… is not a reactionary or obsolete one, but merely a statement of the obvious’.129 Rather the absence of a greater equality of regard within the prevailing structure was responsible for the predominant ‘Us and Them’ feeling amongst the workforce. He noted the lack of nepotism and greater equality of opportunity that characterized Swedish and American industry, together with the fewer social privileges available to management in those countries, and suggested that such practices should be imported into British industrial relations. Formal measures for ‘participation’ or joint management could not affect individual workers’ subjective feelings of inferiority, while their representatives on management boards would be faced with conflicting loyalties between union and management interests. Crosland believed, furthermore, that formal schemes could encourage group selfishness in the form of a workers’ monopoly of particular sectors of industry. Group membership might stunt individual personality ‘since groups themselves often develop distinctly undemocratic and selfish characteristics’.130 Unions should remain independent and free to exercise their ‘opposition’ role, Crosland suggesting that the main route to workers’ higher status should be through the unions’ increased ability to struggle for better wages and—more importantly for him—better working conditions.131 The major areas of union activity should therefore be twofold. At the national level unions could most effectively pay ‘greater attention to non-wage privileges, and a more ambitious perspective over wages and productivity’.132 The scope of collective bargaining at this level should be widened to include more than a preoccupation with material rewards. At plant level there was an urgent need for greater trust and understanding between management and workforce, and here Crosland thought that an environment conducive to good industrial relations could only be created

102 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

through ‘local’ consultation separate from union bargaining procedures. To be really effective, consultation could not be imposed; it could only ‘spread as a by-product of a gradual improvement in the quality of management—and…a gradual change in the attitude of the Trade Unions’133 in the context of workers working for personal gain within an agreed system of differentials. The success of this system depended partly on management operating an ‘enlightened labour policy’, but also on the unions recognizing the legitimate activities of properly constituted consultative bodies. If responsible employers had to pay more attention to personnel management the unions should not inhibit the process of communication by treating the consultative committees as potential rivals. Anyway separation from the consultation process would leave them free to act as focal points of opposition where management-worker interests could not be reconciled. Ultimately Crosland wanted above-average wage rates, modern plant and skilled management with plentiful information about, and discussion of, the future plans of the enterprise. High industrial morale and ‘contentment’—the consequences of a more equal relationship between management and workforce—were held to depend on a variety of interlocking arrangements: ‘on the quality of local management and supervision, the degree of effective consultation at the point of production, the nature of the wage-bargain, and wider considerations of social equality’.134 Such arrangements, the exact nature of which would vary from industry to industry, were fundamental conditions of enhanced status for any workforce. In America, a nation he considered particularly free from the status consciousness gripping British society, Crosland noted that high morale amongst the workers arose from the application of these techniques even when dividends to shareholders were generous, discipline strict and formal joint consultation absent. Sweden, in more corporatist vein, also displayed an awareness of the importance of workers’ status by incorporating consultation at the national level. Swedish Joint Enterprise Councils were effective because both sides in industry took ‘an enlightened interest in “enterprise economics”, and therefore [took] the whole business seriously’.135 Where Crosland looked to the creation of effective informal relationships between the two sides of industry, Jay was less imaginative but perhaps more realistic. Conscious of the ‘deep… and

KEYNESIAN SOCIALISM IN THE 1950S 103

rather inarticulate wish for “participation” [and] higher “status” ‘which had had a long history in British socialism, he wanted to translate it ‘into something practical and precise’.136 Jay followed Clegg but with a preference, pace Crosland, for formal consultation. He attributed the failure of much of private industry to create a wider system of joint consultation to ‘the unwillingness of old-fashioned managements’, claiming also that the lack of a ‘truly democratic outlook’ inhibited a sense of participation and contentment in industry because those in authority were not always the best qualified to discharge the relevant duties. His response was to demand that promotion be made subject to full equality of opportunity. Promotion by merit, as opposed to ‘prejudice, influence, nepotism or…seniority’, should become the normal method of advance in both the public and private sectors. Jay even suggested—somewhat dubiously—that if ‘every worker could feel confident that he had a fair chance of reaching whatever job his capacities entitled him to’, this ‘would go a long way to enhance a sense of participation in industry’.137 Jay also approved of a measure of direct employee participation in the election of company boards. He criticized shareholders’ reluctance to take financial risks and their apathy in the face of the erosion of their right to elect company directors. To remedy this defect they should be permitted to elect a majority of the directors, but employees with ‘some minimum length of service in the enterprise’ should elect the rest.138 Employee participation at this level, however, should not entail formal trade union representation. Like shareholders, employees would vote as individuals and ideally not for one of their own number or a trade union official ‘but for persons willing and qualified to serve on boards of management’.139 Although he suggested that a version of the German Mitbestimmung system could work in Britain, Jay discounted the major feature of the experiment—the election of employees’ representatives to supervisory boards with direct trade union backing—because it would destroy the prevailing sense of the ‘two sides’ of industry.140 The contrast with Crosland may not be large but it is noteworthy because it points up the different understandings of equality held by these two individuals. Jay wanted an industrial meritocracy. Equal status could either be obtained through the greater opportunity to elect (a minority) of the board, or the opportunity for individual workers to ‘get on’ in the enterprise. Of course it is

104 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

difficult to see how the former could result in a greater equality of status because of the danger of workers’ nominees either becoming too identified with management—a danger made all the more real by Jay’s insistence that the individuals elected by employees should have no formal links with their unions—or simply being marginalized. Where individual workers could themselves become board members there is no reason to suppose that any greater status would accrue to the workforce as a whole. Crosland’s argument suffered from different problems. Although he had prescribed a framework within which individuals could operate, there was no reason why it should necessarily lead to more equal status. Workers’ status in Crosland’s thought depended upon the willingness of management and trade unions to adopt the social attitudes necessary to bring his framework to life. But how could an environment conducive to his conception of equality be created? It was hardly enough to refer continually to the examples of Sweden or the United States—two nations with different state traditions, economies and labour movements. Ultimately Crosland was left in the curious position of placing faith in individuals to achieve what was essentially a collective vision. In this sense at least he had something in common with Socialist Union and the Socialist Commentary collective examined below.

INTO THE 1960s Agreement about the role of planning and public ownership notwithstanding, the Gaitskellites failed to produce a clear, unequivocal doctrine of equality complete with strategies suitable for its realization. There are a number of reasons for this ‘failure’ amongst which intellectual confusion figures prominently. While equality was undoubtedly considered as the socialist value, no member of the group conceived it to be the only value germane to socialism. Like many British socialist thinkers they attached great importance to individual liberty and this limited their willingness to pursue an uncompromising egalitarianism. The emphasis on freedom was obvious in Gaitskell’s conference speeches: in 1957, for instance, while claiming that ‘genuine social equality’ was ‘the heart of our Socialist faith’ he reminded his audience that ‘we do not only want equality, we want freedom and we intend to main-

KEYNESIAN SOCIALISM IN THE 1950S 105

tain it’.141 He conveyed similar sympathies in his friendly chiding of political allies in the Socialist Union for demanding too great a communal orientation from ordinary individuals. The vast majority’, he wrote to Rita Hinden, ‘find their happiness in their family or personal relations, and why on earth shouldn’t they!’142 Jenkins went much further and increasingly espoused liberal causes—to the point where he spent a good deal of time writing biographies of Liberal politicians143—while there was no doubting the direction of Jay’s thinking, epitomized by his acknowledgement that ‘it is only a short-sighted Socialist who is distressed to find that Liberals claim to share with him the ideals of personal liberty, humanity and toleration’.144 Of course the difficulty facing all three was how to retain a space for equality sufficiently large to make it meaningful. The best they could achieve was an uneasy balance between the respective demands of equality and freedom in which the former had to be kept in bounds and defined, weakly, as the greater opportunity to utilize individual autonomy regardless of social class. Crosland’s case was different. He also disliked too much collectivism, observing that ‘the simple act of replacing individual by group or collective relationships does not necessarily make people more contented, or fraternal or amiable’.145 In fact he went further, commenting on the need for ‘a trace of the anarchist and the libertarian’ in the democratic socialist creed and in the conclusion to The Future of Socialism calling for ‘a greater emphasis on private life, on freedom and dissent’.146 These views were confusing because they threatened Crosland’s goal of greater social equality —but he was clear about one thing. Individuals ultimately had to choose equality rather than have it imposed on them. Coupled with economic growth, certain state policies could contribute to an egalitarian climate—most obviously in education and other areas of social policy—but in industry and society more generally individuals had to decide for themselves whether to participate as equals. As it stood, the formulation was not altogether persuasive but the potential for social equality it contained was clearly greater than that envisaged by the other Gaitskellites. In the fullness of time, with public spending levels under threat, it led Crosland to endorse palpably more radical views than his more liberal colleagues. These intellectual disagreements cannot alone be held responsible for Gaitskellism’s ultimate failure but by the early 1960s, with

106 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

signs of disunity increasing, the absence of a coherent ideological rallying point for Keynesian socialism gave no possibility of respite. Crosland became impatient. Extending his self-criticism about the Clause Four episode to Gaitskellism in general he claimed that ‘we were wrong to go for doctrine; we should have gone for power’.147 The failed attack on nationalization had exposed the void in Gaitskellite egalitarianism while doing nothing positively to advance Labour’s political fortunes. Crosland acknowledged this reality in a letter to Gaitskell in November 1960 urging him to face the fact that the impression has got around—and, alas, I myself largely share it—that the middle class leadership of the Party…is leading from an extreme and rather rigid Right-wing position, and has no emotional desire to change any major aspect of the society in which we are living.148 The tone was reasonably friendly and the disagreement did not prevent Crosland becoming active in the Campaign for Democratic Socialism (CDS), founded by Bill Rodgers149 to unite Party opinion around Gaitskell’s leadership in the face of the unilateralist challenge. However, he criticized Jenkins for similar reasons which suggests that Crosland’s concern about the strength of the group’s egalitarian commitment went beyond a purely personal complaint about the leader. His anxieties were compounded rather than allayed by an apparent shift in Gaitskell’s own stance. Chastened by the Clause Four controversy and the ferocity of the struggle with the unilateralists, which prompted a leadership challenge from Harold Wilson in October 1960, Gaitskell could only re-establish his authority at some cost to his stated beliefs. He defeated Wilson with ease but thereafter became more conciliatory towards the centrelefters. His winding-up speech to the 1960 conference strongly endorsed Signposts for the Sixties with its new themes of state planning and the scientific revolution, and referred approvingly five times to Wilson’s heavily technocratic recommendation of the policy statement.150 Done less out of conviction than for reasons of Party unity, this was not so much a U-turn as an admission that the Gaitskellite project as conceived in the 1950s was no longer sustainable. But the clearest sign of fragmentation was yet to come. With

KEYNESIAN SOCIALISM IN THE 1950S 107

the CND defeated by 1962 and the leadership secure, Gaitskell confounded his disciples in the CDS by opposing British membership of the Common Market. The issue had not been a salient one during the 1950s and the Party had paid little attention to it, but Macmillan’s decision to seek entry in 1961 demanded a response. With certain exceptions, opinion was roughly divided on traditional left-right lines. A majority of technocrats, whether Tribunite or centre-left, opposed for a variety of reasons ranging from a distaste for a ‘capitalist club’ to a preference for an Atlantic trading bloc including the United States and the Commonwealth.151 Amongst Gaitskell’s colleagues Jay was firmly against closer ties with Europe as were Healey, Gordon Walker and others outside the immediate circle like Jim Callaghan and Michael Stewart. Jenkins and Crosland, however, as well as younger acolytes like Rodgers and David Marquand in the CDS were convinced Europeans, and assumed Gaitskell would share their enthusiasm. In fact Gaitskell remained agnostic until the summer of 1962 but his opposition hardened thereafter.152 This was partly because of an unfortunate encounter with Jean Monnet, the leading force behind the original coal and steel community, organized by Jenkins, but also because of his disapproval of the terms of entry negotiated by Edward Heath on behalf of the Macmillan government.153 Gaitskell cited the conditions of entry as a major reason for rejecting membership in his speech to the Brighton conference but also chose the occasion to argue in openly emotive terms that British membership of the Common Market would mean ‘the end of a thousand years of history’.154 Greeted with joy by Barbara Castle and other erstwhile opponents, the speech left Gaitskellite sympathizers in visible disarray.155 Whether or not the position could have been retrieved and the group reconstituted it is difficult to tell. Jenkins, not surprisingly, thinks it ‘at least possible’ that Gaitskell would ultimately have changed his mind over the Common Market,156 although agreement on this issue alone could not have repaired the widening ideological differences. But Gaitskell’s sudden death in January 1963, only months after his Brighton speech, left his supporters in shock and the inner circle deprived of its focal point. Thereafter any hopes of new-found unity quickly fell away. In a televised tribute on the night of his death Crosland reiterated his doubts about whether Gaitskell ‘was a sufficiently radical leader for a

108 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

leftwing party’.157 His decision to support Callaghan rather than George Brown in the first round of the ensuing leadership election, thus splitting the anti-Wilson vote, angered Jenkins, Rodgers and the majority of those in the CDS who, albeit hesitatingly, regarded the Deputy Leader as the candidate most sympathetic to their views. With Crosland, as ever, standing slightly apart, Jenkins emerged as the leading figure of a new ‘ex-Gaitskellite’ caucus, which swiftly moved to advance his interests at Crosland’s expense. Efforts to dissuade Crosland from standing for the Shadow Cabinet in case he weakened Jenkins’s chances turned out to be the first shots in an internecine war of manoeuvre that gathered pace throughout the 1960s and early 1970s.

Chapter 5

Rethinking qualitative socialism?

Being primarily concerned with the prospect of political power, technocrats and Keynesian socialists naturally had an eye to electoral considerations when fashioning policies to complement their egalitarian doctrines. At one remove from the political process, qualitative socialists were less inhibited by such matters— although the distance did not prove an advantage. The two dominant versions of qualitative socialism in the 1950s both failed, in their different ways, to overcome the gap between policy and vision that had plagued Cole and Tawney in the 1930s. This in itself was not surprising but the effects were highly detrimental for qualitative socialist thought. By the early 1960s the Socialist Commentary group, suffering a severe lack of confidence in the efficacy of its beliefs, virtually conceded the end of its onceambitious ethical vision. The Titmuss group, on the other hand, salvaged elements of the qualitative ideal, even managing to endow it with new policy proposals, but at some cost. The group’s overriding concern with pension arrangements and other aspects of social policy narrowed the traditional scope of qualitative socialism to a concern about the welfare state.

COLE AND TAWNEY IN THE 1940s AND 1950s Cole’s work during the period 1941 to 1949 witnessed a return to his position of the mid-1930s. He placed great emphasis on the machinery of socialism, which the conditions of war had done so much to create. Three books published in the 1940s1 contained major sections on the need for far-reaching measures of socializa109

110 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

tion and a planned economy in Britain and Europe. After 1949, however, Cole’s briefly held optimism about the course of British socialism in the wake of the victory over Germany was tempered by increasing doubts about Labour’s willingness to pursue the cause with sufficient rigour. Indeed, he claimed that the Party’s 1949 programme gave the impression less of a second instalment of constructive Socialism than of an attempt to consolidate a mixed economy as a lasting solution of the social problem, and settle down to a Keynesian regimen of full employment, low interest rates and controlled capitalism rather than to clear the way for a full-blooded, classless Socialist community.2 While he could understand the immediate electoral difficulties in the way of further nationalization Cole could not so easily condone the failure to make progress with ‘secondary’ goals such as socializing those industries already under public control. With a view to galvanizing Labour’s socialist commitment he organized a series of discussions with prominent Labour intellectuals, intending to produce an updated version of the influential Fabian Essays,3 but the times were decidedly against him. Clear differences existed between Cole and Keep Lefters like Mikardo about the nature of nationalization and the scope of ‘industrial democracy’4 but, more importantly, he found himself seriously at odds with others like John Strachey and Crossman who supported the government’s pro-American position over the Korean War—to the point where he resigned from the project.5 Cole was more inclined than most others in the Party to be sympathetic to communism. Although he described himself as non-communist, democratic socialism and communism were different branches of the same socialist family and so shared a common heritage; they should obviously seek common ground against non-socialist opponents.6 The promotion of ‘detente and disarmament and [the employment of] part of the resources released by disarmament for a common war on want’ should be the means of reconciling communism and democratic socialism.7 Believing in socialism meant ‘believing in social equality, rejecting the solution of a Welfare State still based mainly on capitalist profit-making, and holding this faith in equality as applying, not to one country but to all—that is, as an international gospel of

RETHINKING QUALITATIVE SOCIALISM? 111

humanism’.8 In a last attempt to grasp this vision Cole tried to rescue socialism from its ‘imprisonment within national frontiers…[by] re-creating an international Socialist movement’.9 He founded the International Society for Socialist Studies in 1956 with the intention of bringing socialists together in order to further world equality, but the Utopian nature of the enterprise was quickly exposed because, ironically, its membership failed to overcome national rivalries.10 Cole’s final years saw him adopting much less ambitious views. Welfare alone remained insufficient but his renewed interest in industrial democracy and the social context in which it now existed implied a more parochial sense of priorities. Because all workers were literate and education compulsory, differentials could begin to reflect necessary incentives, not class distinctions, which meant that status issues were more important than other forms of equality. His last book, The Case for Industrial Partnership, argued that, by elevating ordinary workers to the status of partners in industry, society could advance beyond the deadening preoccupation with welfare to a genuine classlessness. The vision, as always, was beguiling, but the connections between the practical recommendations and the ultimate aim proved elusive. ‘Partnership’ owed more to contemporary ideas of joint consultation than to Guild Socialism,11 Cole now believing it ‘to be impracticable to leap straight from capitalist control of industry to any substantial form of democratic workers’ control’.12 Trade unions, originally in the Guild Socialist vanguard, were regarded in Clegglike fashion as ‘defensive’ organizations which ‘if they became participants in industrial managements, would in effect cease to be trade unions’.13 Outside industry itself the best that greater partnership could offer was an increasing sense of responsibility within the workforce which would encourage workers to do their best to make the enterprise successful ‘in terms of rendering good service to the consuming public and thus contributing towards the improvement of the general standard of living’.14 Yet beneath these mild proposals the qualitative ideal persisted. Cole still hoped that industry, suitably organized for partnership, would be a step towards a Socialist society that is…true to its equalitarian principles of human brotherhood [and which rested] on the widest possible diffusion of power and responsibility, so as to enlist the active

112 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

participation of as many as possible of its citizens in the tasks of democratic self-government.15 His conviction, however, owed more to faith than judgement. Perhaps for this reason his ideas were ignored by Bevanites and Gaitskellites alike. More surprisingly, at first sight, his work was also disregarded by other qualitative socialists—Titmuss and his colleagues, and the Socialist Commentary group, looked to Tawney for inspiration. Cole’s socialism and the ambitions of egalitarian fellowship it contained were frequently either too widely (international socialism) or too narrowly (industrial democracy) cast to appeal to the qualitative socialists of the 1950s.16 Tawney enjoyed a very different reputation. Unlike Cole he was content with the progress made by the Attlee governments and optimistic about prospects for further practical advance. In fact the socialist society seemed to be in sight: Tawney wrote to the newly-founded organization, Socialist Union, in November 1951 that It would be easy to suggest methods by which that transition [to socialism] can be accelerated.I . Abolition of inheritance. 2. Tax capital gains as well as incomes. 3. Tighten up control of monopolies. 4. Make workshop committees with real power legally compulsory in all establishments with more than 20 workers. 5. Make a serious attempt to give more power… to workers in nationalised industries. 6. Make primary schools so good as to become the common school for the whole population.17 This ‘programme’ was similar to the prescriptions made in the 1930s, taking account of the gains made. Tawney’s few pieces of published work in the 1950s simply reinforced his broad ‘strategy of equality’. The most important aspect of Tawney’s legacy was arguably this programmatic one18 but, while he recognized the importance of social and economic reforms to the ultimate goal, he never diverged from the belief that socialism was ultimately ‘a way of life’.19 Indeed, the preferred results of economic improvements should be a progressive weakening of the obsession with socioeconomic reforms in order to leave more time for the ‘serious mat-

RETHINKING QUALITATIVE SOCIALISM? 113

ters’ of the quality of human relationships in the moralized society.20 Tawney persisted in his vision of ‘a community of responsible men and women working without fear in comradeship for common ends, all of whom can grow to their full stature [and] develop to the utmost limit the varying capacities with which nature has endowed them’.21 This reading of equality was important because it implied a related conception of liberty regarded as ‘equality in action’ which marked off adherents to the qualitative ideal from those with less exalted ambitions. Tawney did not hold with the view that equality and liberty were antithetical; in fact liberty complemented equality because improved social and economic conditions, by contributing to greater material equality, would also ensure a measure of real freedom for the great mass of people. The two principles were coterminous. Because individuals could not construct ‘the complex fabric of environmental, economic and social arrangements, on which [liberty’s] attainment depends, they look to co-operative action, in which, as citizens, they participate, to undertake that task’.22 Collective action would yield gains in status and freedom; it was in this ‘positive’ sense that Tawney could make the controversial claim that it was necessary ‘to force the pace, and—I won’t say compel—but persuade men to be free’.23 Of course Tawney’s good society depended on the assumption that greater material equality and welfare coupled with the control of irresponsible economic power would create the conditions for greater equality of status and respect, and that this would in turn create the conditions for fellowship. Material improvements, in other words, would make better people. Admirers of his work though they were, Gaitskellite intellectuals were irritated by this insistence that the gap between practical policy recommendations and egalitarian fellowship could be made good by collective action. In Gaitskell’s opinion, Tawney’s desire for a close, communal socialism depended on a political zeal which the British electorate did not possess and he doubted whether people could remain long ‘in a kind of white-hot crusading fever, ready for sacrifice, full of idealism for the cause’ of the kind needed to sustain a Labour majority indefinitely. ‘Can any of us’, he wrote, ‘honestly say that this is a realistic picture of the possibilities?’24 His scepticism, however, was not echoed in the work of the Socialist

114 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

Commentary collective or the small group of intellectuals gathered around Richard Titmuss.

SOCIALIST COMMENTARY The origins of the Socialist Commentary group are in some ways curious. It was the one element of the Labour movement to have its roots in a different intellectual and political tradition, traceable to a small band of socialists working in Germany during and after the First World War who were profoundly influenced by Leonard Nelson, a neo-Kantian philosopher at Goettingen University. As a young man Nelson had become conscious ‘of the absence of any principle to guide him in the conduct of his life’ and set out to formulate an objective system untrammelled by all ‘dogmatism and authoritarianism’ upon which a set of principles could be based.25 Heavily influenced by Kant and Fries, he used Kantian ethics as the foundation upon which ‘a complete system of scientific ethics could be built up’.26 At the heart of this project lay a desire to prescribe the necessary objective conditions for the good society based on justice and fairness, ruled by an elite specially trained for political leadership. To advance the task of educating such an elite Nelson founded the Internationaler Jugenbund (IJB) in 1917 and also established the Walkemuhle, a school in which young socialists were trained for political service and leadership on the lines of his ‘ethical realism’. The IJB and its successor, the Militant Socialist International (MSI), were vanguard organizations for the dissemination of Nelson’s political philosophy.27 Comparison with Lenin’s conception of the vanguard party is apt; indeed Lenin’s ‘fine character and natural simplicity, awoke in Nelson a justified hope of attaining his goal’ and the success of the Russian Revolution testified to the efficacy of the vanguard organization.28 The British section of the Militant Socialist International, the Socialist Vanguard Group (SVG), was established by Allan Flanders following his experience as a student at the Walkemuhle in the 1920s. Flanders had become convinced that ‘the advance towards socialism depends on the ideas of ethical realism gaining ground’ and was impressed by ‘how much even a small group can achieve by a determined joint effort’, the launching of the anti-fascist paper Der Funke in

RETHINKING QUALITATIVE SOCIALISM? 115

1932 by members of the MSI being an example which he witnessed personally.29 The SVG initially displayed all the militancy of its German counterpart with Flanders roundly declaring his belief in the concept of a vanguard party which would go ‘steadily forward in its work independent of the limits set by the ruling class’ and composed of people who possessed ‘the courage and sincerity to direct party policy and their own action in accordance with their principles’.30 Although this political line did not change during the 1930s—the idea of joining the Labour Party being treated with particular contempt—the early 1940s saw the group experiencing a loss of direction. After growing debate about future strategy throughout 1942 an Executive Committee meeting early in 1943 agreed that ‘the hope of realizing the Just State in our time is a receding dream’.31 It was further agreed, for the first time, to get outside contributors for Socialist Commentary—the new name for the group’s journal, changed from the more suggestive Socialist Vanguard a year earlier. An important decision was also made in February 1943 ‘to get really established in the Labour movement’.32 Allan Flanders began to work in the Fabian Society at this time and it was through the Society that he met Rita Hinden, a figure well known for her work with the Fabian Colonial Bureau. Hinden’s invitation to join the editorial committee of Socialist Commentary was further evidence of the attempt to widen the journal’s appeal.33 The SVG had withdrawn from the MSI in 1946, a decision was taken to relax its tight leadership structure the following year,34 and in 1949 the group finally acknowledged the futility of its ambition to be a potential leadership elite, resolving forthwith to retain its identity only as a ‘socialist fellowship’. The Socialist Vanguard group would be dissolved in 1950 to be replaced by a much looser grouping of those concerned to ‘bring an ethical approach into politics’.35 A year later Socialist Union— the sister organization of Socialist Commentary—was founded. Socialist Commentary in the 1950s The decisive organizational changes were reflected in a corresponding shift in political ideas. Nelson’s philosophical system was marginalized and as the group became more closely identified with Labour Party politics so it progressively altered its ideologi-

116 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

cal tone. The overriding preoccupation with the ethical foundations of socialism remained but, having dispensed with the— admittedly eccentric—strategy of an ethical vanguard elite, there remained no clear idea of how the qualitative vision could be brought to fruition. Not surprisingly Nelson’s influence gave way to an increasing appreciation of Tawney, whose strength, however, had never been his ability to link theory and practice. The discussion of socialist values in Socialist Union’s best-known publications, Socialism: A New Statement of Principles (1952) and Twentieth Century Socialism (1956) clearly shows Tawney’s influence on those in the immediate circle—notably Hinden and Flanders.36 Like Tawney, Socialist Union thought in terms of a cluster of values in which equality played the cohering theme. The primacy of human dignity informed one dimension of equality ‘simply [because] we are all human beings, irrespective of wealth, or birth, or creed, or colour’,37 equality ultimately resting ‘simply and surely on…common humanity’.38 This basic ‘sameness’ implied a further, more specific, conception which, while accepting the unavoidable inequalities in individual capacities, sought to diminish their effects by creating an environment in which equality of opportunity could be realized. Equal opportunity meant ‘more than an equal start with the race left to the swiftest’: like Tawney’s definition in Equality, it meant the equal chance for each individual to develop his or her capacities and ‘to lead a full life’. There was no hint of a strict material equality, Hinden claiming that ‘a little more or less of this world’s goods do not bring greater happiness once the limit of poverty has been exceeded’.39 Significantly, however, Socialist Union acknowledged that equality could not be pursued with ‘mathematical precision without destroying some essential part of freedom’40—and here the group got into a muddle. Freedom was regarded as an essential support of greater equality of opportunity but the idea that ‘every opportunity is a freedom, a chance to choose and act according to one’s choice’ plainly threatened equality. Freedom consequently had to be taken beyond its purely negative meaning of the individual’s right to remain free from unnecessary interference to the point where the opportunities it afforded had to be used ‘responsibly’.41 By ‘choosing for ourselves…we become aware of our freedom to choose and our responsibility for the outcome’.42 There was more

RETHINKING QUALITATIVE SOCIALISM? 117

than a hint here of a personal ‘duty’ to achieve those capacities that would contribute most to society but, conversely, the group did not to have the courage of its convictions and proved reluctant to condone measures of state control designed specifically to curb liberty where the realization of one individual’s potential might inhibit the opportunities of others. The addition of fellowship to the principles of equality and liberty completed Socialist Union’s qualitative approach. As in Tawney’s work, fellowship was necessary to establish the quality of the egalitarian environment. It naturally presupposed equal status but also embodied a solidaristic, communal awareness which pulled equality and liberty beyond the definitions more typically assigned to them by the Gaitskellites. Where liberty was treated negatively fellowship would be undermined by the refusal to condone extra-individual constraints designed to foster a greater sense of community. Interpreted positively, liberty could be regarded as compatible with obligations towards the community and thus consistent with fellowship. Socialist Commentary recognized that these principles were not simple to reconcile but wanted to keep them in the forefront of socialist thinking. The group argued that the ‘full meaning’ of the principles would ‘only become clear in application’ and that ‘in their application conflicts will unavoidably arise’,43 which suggested that an attempt would be made to draw out the nature of the relationship between them and their practical embodiment in policy. But this expectation was not borne out and indeed Socialist Commentary’s editorials consistently distinguished between the favoured ‘ends’ and the ‘means’ for their achievement—an exercise hardly conducive to drawing the two elements together. While the ends remained sacrosanct and at one remove, the practical means, loosely defined as ‘any institution or policy [which] advances us towards this great goal’, were regarded as mutable.44 The problem was how to decide which policies best supported the principles, and which did not, and further to show how they did so. If Tawney influenced the group’s contemporary thinking about socialist principles, the choice of policies owed much to the relationship with the Gaitskellites which began in the early 1950s and continued for many years after Gaitskell’s death. Although in the last years of the Attlee governments the journal had sympathized with the ‘consolidators’ in the Labour Cabinet because of their opposition to what was regarded as a too-close

118 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

identification of socialism with public ownership, it quickly came to regard them as ‘an old guard’ and looked instead to the emerging core of intellectuals round Gaitskell. Gaitskell himself certainly regarded the journal as sympathetic and a possible antidote to Tribune. He was Treasurer of the Friends of Socialist Commentary between 1951 and 1955, helping the journal to increase its circulation by persuading a number of trade unions to subscribe, and spoke regularly at the receptions held by Socialist Commentary at the annual Party conference. However, Gaitskell was by no means in full agreement with the group’s views. Declining an invitation from Hinden to write a Foreword to Twentieth Century Socialism, he declared that ‘in the present state of affairs in the party I am a little reluctant to appear to put my name to anything which I do not fully agree with… I am afraid I am still quite a long way from a lot of the things you say’.45 The Gaitskellites were of course sceptical about ‘fraternity’ and the qualitative aspects of socialist thinking. If the words used were often the same, the respective interpretations of the major socialist principles were markedly different. The majority Gaitskellite position of meritocratic equality of opportunity and a negative conception of liberty obviously could not accommodate positive interpretations. Even Crosland neither ventured into the realm of fellowship nor encouraged a view of equality that depended upon a high degree of communal solidarity. There is a sense, however, in which the journal’s claim that ‘we saw socialism in much the same way [as Gaitskell]; [and] were entirely at one in the distinction…between means and ends’ was true because the significant divergences over doctrine were not reflected in differences over policy proposals.46 The hallmark of Socialist Commentary’s outlook was the persistent quest for a credible balance between potentially far-reaching principles and much less radical policies. Public ownership in particular, and economic policy in general, are cases in point. Even in Socialist Vanguard days, those involved with that journal, including Allan Flanders, had never regarded state ownership, whether in the form of outright nationalization or by any other method, as synonymous with socialism.47 Socialist Commentary was consistently anti-Bevanite in the early 1950s with a string of articles and editorials attacking the Bevanites for identifying public ownership too closely with socialism itself, to the detriment of the true, ethical goals.48 The contri-

RETHINKING QUALITATIVE SOCIALISM? 119

bution central state ownership could make to equality was not denied but it was only considered, at best, as one means among many and, at worst, as a threat to individual freedom.49 Other means of economic control were preferred. Like Crosland, the group believed that ‘leading directors and executives’ in the large organizations were ‘the real power holders’50 and that the state was the only agency capable of controlling this managerial power. Policies should include economic planning, through the use of taxation and other budgetary devices, the bolstering of the ‘countervailing power’ of the trade unions and consumers’ organizations—and generally a strategy which favoured a mixed economy and greater material equality through the redistribution of income and wealth.51 Proposals for economic planning assumed the context of ‘a planned market economy’ with the budget regarded as the prime means of distributing wealth and the state’s role conceived as the limited one of ‘strategic participation’.52 The major recommendations for taxation were identical to those propounded by the Gaitskellites—a capital gains tax and higher death duties—displaying a cautious approach to redistribution. Tentative suggestions of a capital levy, to which no objection could be raised ‘on ethical grounds’, were deemed unrealistic on political grounds because ‘the pace of advance towards fair shares in a democracy’ was ultimately conditioned by ‘what the electorate will permit’.53 The evidence suggests that, over questions of ownership and economic policy, Socialist Commentary failed to establish a point of contact between egalitarian principle and practice. Individual freedom would be threatened by too much state ownership so greater material equality, as one condition of equal opportunity, would have to be attained by other methods. The absence of an overcentralized state would protect individual liberty, negatively defined, but would do little to aid a positive conception, or the version of equal opportunity thought to be compatible with it. However ‘radical’ the policy proposals for greater material equality proved to be the connections between them and a positively defined equal opportunity—with the significant changes in human relations this implied—were never established. Consequently, the ultimate goal remained detached from the policies intended to achieve it. Despite the absence of a clear connection, Socialist Commentary continued to believe that the same economic policies recommended by the Gaitskellites, with consider-

120 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

ably less ambitious ends in view, would contribute to the fulfilment of a quite different vision. Industrial democracy Apart from economic policy Socialist Commentary considered other areas believed conducive to the qualitative ideal. Industrial democracy, with the emphasis on fostering equal status between employers and employed, was one example and to this end Allan Flanders, Socialist Commentary’s expert on industrial relations and a leading academic authority in his own right, elaborated a conception of equal status dedicated to the enhancement of selfesteem amongst workers. Self-respecting workers did not want to be looked upon as ‘hands’ or as ‘labour’, but as fellow citizens who, although performing different tasks to those of management, nevertheless wanted their views taken seriously.54 In the context of full employment and a strong union movement Flanders considered equal status to mean ‘responsible participation’ in industry which, oddly, he defined as the unions’ ‘identification with the purposes of management and their desire to further them’.55 This ‘common purpose‘ democracy was industrial fellowship with its attendant components not only of rights but of mutual obligations. Socialist Union echoed Flanders’s sentiments, claiming that ‘each worker has to feel that he is furthering the ends of society’, the implication being that something more than sectional bargaining and the pursuit of ‘selfish’ ends was required for the attainment of true equality of esteem.56 The difficulty with this conception of common purpose was to suggest how such a goal could be reached. Flanders and Socialist Union advocated little more than collective bargaining and joint consultation. Other reforms such as more equal workplace conditions between waged and salaried employees, and the granting of greater access to training opportunities, could possibly result in an enhanced sense of self-esteem but the solidaristic egalitarianism of industrial fellowship remained at one remove from these relatively mundane proposals. The point can be taken further, for other aspects of the group’s approach to the problem of equal status at work seemed actively to undermine its ideal of industrial fellowship. Socialist Union, like Crosland and Clegg, believed the unions’ role should be one of a permanent opposition to management.57 This implied contra-

RETHINKING QUALITATIVE SOCIALISM? 121

diction, with the idea of ‘common purpose’ and identification with management goals, can perhaps be disregarded if the notion of an opposition within a basic unity of purpose is considered feasible. Yet even if it is, a further problem existed in Socialist Union’s position. The continuation of voluntary trade union membership—compulsion being against the principle of liberty— suggests that the level of cohesion and mutual obligation required for industrial fellowship would be difficult to achieve. While closed-shop agreements and compulsory union membership would not necessarily contribute to equal status, they could provide a cohesive, institutional force for dealing with employers and give teeth to the permanent ‘opposition’. It is hard to see how the cohesion expected of industrial fellowship could be realized in a purely ‘voluntary’ environment. Education Socialist Union’s pamphlet Education and Socialism used equal opportunity in the accepted sense of the individual’s ‘equal right to gain knowledge, to develop his powers, and to express his personality’.58 This entailed equal access to different ‘opportunities for self-expression’ and so was congruent with personal freedom. Schools could contribute to liberty by providing individuals with opportunities to acquire knowledge and to explore new ways of developing their capacities. They could advance the ideal of fellowship by performing an integrative function, which would overcome intellectual and class differences through the creation of one communal educational environment.59 The goal was a common educational course in which children would be prepared to ‘make judgements of values, and to have some common understanding of the democratic, scientific and spiritual heritage which they share’.60 Where Crosland wanted to see individuals getting the equal opportunity to gain intelligence, social factors notwithstanding, Socialist Commentary wanted less emphasis placed on ‘intelligence’ per se.61 Moreover, the divide between rich and poor must not be reflected in separate schools, neither should professional prestige and status be allowed to encourage overspecialization to the detriment of non-professional groups. It was important to be aware that because the future doctor’s needs…are much more exacting,

122 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

elaborate and costly than the future dustman’s, it is an easy step to assuming that the latter’s need to develop his whole mind, and his artistic and creative ability is proportionately less important too.62 Aspirations for a common education came in the form of support for comprehensive schooling, regarded as the best alternative to tripartitism, particularly if schools could be split into junior and senior departments to lessen the disadvantages of large numbers. Tendencies to excessive overcentralization and the risk of a standardized education system would be offset by an emphasis upon local diversity, while a mixed ability environment (albeit with streaming) would lead to a reduction in the visibility of intellectual divisions between children and a possible diminution of social divisions by removing the stigma and snobbery perpetuated by the tripartite system. But the desire to reduce the effects of socially imposed divisions amongst schoolchildren did not lead the group to conclude that all such divisions should be avoided. The Fleming Committee’s assisted places scheme was rejected as elitist, but Socialist Union was prepared to compromise over the private sector to the extent of recognizing that public schools, even if assimilated into the state system, ‘would…retain a strong grammar side’.63 Furthermore, probably with the Walkemuhle in mind, Socialist Union also claimed that parents should be free to opt out of the state system ‘if they wished their children to be given an education based on a philosophy, or on a methodology, which is not to be found in state schools’.64 The treatment of the private sector suggests that the proposed homogeneity of the education system was not regarded as inviolable, although Socialist Union went as far in its proposals as any other group in the Party. The desired end was the ambitious one of a common education for egalitarian fellowship, but again there was the unresolved conflict between the positive and negative principles of liberty and their relationship to equality which threatened to undermine this objective. Without the, frankly distasteful, prospect of rigid state control of the economy and a frontal assault on wealth and its corollaries of class and status, the potential for social division must continue to exist, not least in parts of the education system. Although Socialist Union acknowledged that ‘the education system can have little direct

RETHINKING QUALITATIVE SOCIALISM? 123

influence on the inequalities between home backgrounds’, such disparities could disrupt progress towards truly common educational provision.65 To allow certain types of private schooling in these circumstances, perhaps especially if based on a specific philosophy, suggested the privileging of negative liberty over equality. Socialist Commentary in the early 1960s The fragility of Socialist Commentary’s conception of socialism did not seriously affect those involved until the turn of the decade. Until that time the group had been content to tilt at the Bevanites, secure in the knowledge that it at least enjoyed the Party leader’s approval as a valuable ally. After 1959 the position changed. Clause Four, the unilateralist debates and the growing influence of the centre-left challenged the group’s confidence about the relevance of its qualitative vision to the point where it was virtually abandoned. Only Gaitskell’s death, which for Socialist Commentary raised the prospect of the loss of equality as a central source of Party doctrine, forced a further attempt to make the case for qualitative socialism. Ironically, in view of subsequent dissension in the Party, Socialist Union was dissolved in June 1959 ostensibly because its selfappointed task of disseminating socialist principles throughout the movement was considered accomplished. But this proclaimed success did not prevent a feeling of uneasiness about the apparent shortcomings of the collective mode of elaborating and discussing ideas. Bernard Crick’s observation on Twentieth Century Socialism that ‘rarely has anything ever walked the high road of generality so earnestly and deliberately’ was not without foundation and the point was implicitly accepted, at least in part, at Socialist Union’s final meeting.66 Flanders argued that the collective method of discussion was too slow and inefficient when analysis of detailed proposals was needed. While the method had worked well for the general Statement of Principles in 1952, it had proved inadequate to the further task of matching principle to practice: ‘at that point the discussion became more and more dependent on the specialised knowledge of a few people’.67 Certainly by late 1959, after Labour’s defeat at the polls, the group acknowledged that principles had been overstressed at the expense of practical policies and that this could have had a detri-

124 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

mental effect on the labour movement. Gaitskell’s attempt to remove Clause Four was judged a mistake, Hinden commenting that although the distinction between means and ends was important ‘if the main emphasis is put on the ends… socialists do in fact become indistinguishable from Liberals’.68 An editorial in August 1960 echoed this view, stating that the desire to transform Labour into ‘some New Radical Party’ had failed to appreciate that a crucial aspect of Labour’s strength lay in the understanding that public control—albeit not ownership—of the economy was an important aspect of socialism, not least because of the bearing it had upon equality.69 The critical attitude taken to Gaitskellites like Douglas Jay (though he was never mentioned by name) was genuine in that it displayed a real concern about retaining a strong public sector as a central feature of Labour policy. However, in view of the fact that Gaitskellite policies were generally much the same as Socialist Commentary’s, it is likely that the group, aware of the weakness of its own doctrinal position, could not contemplate the loss of a symbol which distinguished its otherwise ‘liberal’ position from those outside the Party. In the event this sense of disillusion was, of necessity, shortlived. Gaitskell’s death in 1963 left the group with little choice but to attempt to rejuvenate the original emphasis on socialist ends, albeit with less confidence and in a less amenable political environment. The leader’s death removed a direct link to the highest ranks of the Party and produced a centre-left leadership less concerned about distinctions between means and ends, and less interested in the type of equality that had fired Gaitskell and his colleagues. A significant editorial, written in June 1964, generalized Hinden’s anxiety about the direction socialism was taking and related this to the further question of Socialist Commentary’s position. The increasingly ‘technical’ nature of politics was a major source of concern because it jeopardized a politics of belief. Referring to the burgeoning number of discrete policy areas, the journal complained that ‘as the subjects themselves become increasingly subdivided, the experts are expected to know more and more about less and less’. Politics consequently became ‘less a matter of the broad, uplifting generalization, more the command of technical know-how’.70 Attempting to maintain its credibility, Socialist Commentary took renewed account of ‘ends’ in an environment

RETHINKING QUALITATIVE SOCIALISM? 125

where ‘means’ now seemed to be all. ‘No outside journal’, it confessed, ‘can compete with [the] wealth of detailed knowledge’— but that did not mean that everything ‘the experts advise, and everything the government does will be beyond criticism’.71 A ‘science-based‘ government could not solve all society’s problems because science could only ‘tell us how to do things… not what to do’ and it certainly could not determine ‘our ends or our priorities’.72 Prophetically, as it turned out, the group believed that the faith in science would endanger ‘the coherence of the labour movement’ and for this reason the moral principles of socialism must continue to have resonance. In what had become a plaintive tone, in contrast to the confidence of a decade before, the journal warned that ‘we know…that the deeper purpose which sustains the socialist movement is a care for equality, and for a better equality of life in which all may share. If these aspirations are lost, the movement will be lost and the days of the Party will be numbered.’73

THE TTTMUSS GROUP In 1960 Tawney was asked by his publishers to provide a new introduction for a further edition of Equality. He recognized the book was ‘badly out of date’ but the task of refurbishing his account of the relative fortunes of equality in modern society proved beyond him. At the age of eighty he was, in Titmuss’s words, ‘daunted…by the complexities of the modern world of statistical fact’ and realized that the simpler tools of measurement and analysis he had employed were now inadequate.74 It was Titmuss himself who furnished the new introduction to Tawney’s book—a fitting task for someone who shared so many of the older man’s views. Richard Titmuss’s route to the Labour Party, and to an enduring position as a leading socialist intellectual, was by no means typical. Initially a Liberal Party member, his interest in social and political issues was fostered by his wife, Kay, who was involved in work with the unemployed in the 1930s. If by 1941 Titmuss considered himself a socialist, his belief had a distinctly ethical bent. Parents’ Revolt, co-authored with Kay, argued that ‘a society based on the Christian ethic—on values rooted in the dignity

126 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

and courage of the common man—would not…produce the pattern of wealth…and the degree of money-consciousness that surrounds us today’.75 The language is reminiscent of Tawney whose Equality Titmuss had read. Titmuss’s acceptance of these ideals did not lead him to join the Labour Party immediately. He first became a member of the 1941 Committee founded by J.B.Priestley and then the Common Wealth Party following the Committee’s merger with Richard Acland’s Forward March movement in 1942.76 Titmuss only joined Labour in the early 1950s when he was asked to become a member of a Fabian committee created to examine future policy towards the social services. By this time he could bring with him a firm conviction about the desirability of egalitarian fellowship strengthened by his wartime experience on the home front, faithfully recorded in his seminal Problems of Social Policy. What impressed Titmuss was the removal of inequalities of status by the universalization of services. He never forgot the experience of common effort, of state provision in place of the disrupted neighbourhood and kinship groups, and of the universal provision afforded by the majority of services. Indeed much of his future work was devoted to the maintenance of the social solidarity he had witnessed during the war and to the extension and improvement of the welfare services that had supported it. In 1950, after the publication of Problems of Social Policy, Titmuss was invited to take the chair of Social Administration at the London School of Economics, a post which he accepted and held until his death in 1973. Important relationships developed here which gave him the encouragement and support he needed to develop his ideas. These included a close friendship with Tawney and also with the prominent members of a younger generation just leaving university to work in the expanding field of sociology. Titmuss came to know and work with leading social researchers like John Vaizey, Michael Young, David Donnison and Tony Lynes but most especially he collaborated with Peter Townsend and Brian Abel-Smith both recently down from Cambridge and beginning careers in social and economic research.77 Titmuss and Abel-Smith worked together on health service costs for the Guillebaud Committee between 1953 and 1955 and later on social policy issues for the governments of Mauritius and Tanganyika, while all three turned their attention to inequalities in social security and old-age pension arrangements. By the later

RETHINKING QUALITATIVE SOCIALISM? 127

1950s the Titmuss group’ had become the major intellectual force behind Labour’s struggle to formulate a national superannuation policy. The group’s work contained two main themes which demonstrate its commitment both to a wider distribution of material resources and to a desire for a greater equality of status between individuals. The first concerned Titmuss’s robust criticisms of the welfare state, the resources of which he believed to be misdirected to the benefit of the already secure middle classes rather than the worst-off sections of society who depended upon state-provided social services. The second, much broader, theme attempted a sustained critique of affluent capitalism and the threat it posed to the prospect of a moralized society. War had produced social measures ‘centred round the whole population irrespective of class, creed or military category’ and had indicated a possible future for greater cooperation in an environment of diminished inequality.78 But this vision was compromised by economic power not subject to social control. Titmuss believed that unless private enterprise was successfully subordinated to social imperatives society would become increasingly ‘irresponsible’, one consequence of which would be the failure of social policy initiatives of the kind he recommended. The welfare state: problems and remedies Titmuss’s reappraisal of the role of the welfare state is best illustrated in the Eleanor Rathbone Memorial Lecture, delivered in December 1955 and published as The Social Division of Welfare the same year. Some of the arguments introduced here were taken up in more detail in Income Distribution and Social Change and were also dealt with by Abel-Smith in 1958 in his essay Whose Welfare State? These works challenged prevailing assumptions that the Beveridge ‘revolution’ had proved too egalitarian and that the burden of redistribution from rich to poor was now excessive.79 In adopting this position Titmuss not only took issue with Conservatives like Powell and Macleod, but also with Crosland and others to his left like Dudley Seers, the Oxford economist and Bevanite sympathizer. All assumed there had been a significant redistribution of income from rich to poor since the beginning of the war, either because they wanted to question the role of the welfare state in order to prevent a further erosion of

128 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

middle-class living standards, or because they wished to acknowledge the extent of change achieved by a Labour government. The argument in The Social Division of Welfare is well known. Essentially, Titmuss questioned the prevailing view of ‘welfare’ as a good only enjoyed by those receiving social benefits as these were commonly understood. Once fiscal advantages such as tax concessions and the occupational benefits made available by companies to their (mainly) salaried workers were included as ‘welfare’ then it became clear that the system was not only stratified but that the better-off actually benefited from it disproportionately. These insights were put to two specific uses. They led to proposals for practical reforms, notably in the area of pensions,80 and encouraged further work on the distribution of income and wealth. In Income Distribution and Social Change Titmuss pushed his analysis beyond welfare, narrowly conceived, to a detailed investigation of the tax system, the existing potential for tax avoidance and ‘how income can be transmuted into capital, “given away”, split or spread among the family’.81 He challenged the basis of the Inland Revenue’s statistical data of the number of incomes—used by Professors Paish and Lydall to demonstrate the redistributive effects of progressive taxation since 1938—showing their failure to include accurate figures for wage-earning wives, or single, widowed and divorced individuals, which ‘could be of substantial importance in spuriously altering the shape and distribution of incomes’.82 He also took care to show the extent of loss to the Exchequer brought about by state subsidies to the rich and the latter’s continuing attempts to avoid taxation.83 This aspect of Titmuss’s approach did not differ markedly from the Gaitskellite position on taxation, mainly because of the common wish to see more punitive capital duties and less loopholes for evasion. Titmuss explicitly agreed with Douglas Jay’s appraisal of inequality in Socialism in the New Society, noting the latter’s fears of ‘the great increase in capital gains’.84 But the analytical twist he gave the discussion lay in the observation that ‘the journey [towards decadent tax systems] has…been hastened by the growth of social welfare provisions in fiscal law’.85 The observation was important for Titmuss, and his colleagues were considerably less sure than the Gaitskellites that society was steadily heading towards greater equality of incomes and standards of living. They consequently took issue with Gaitskellite views of redis-

RETHINKING QUALITATIVE SOCIALISM? 129

tribution as primarily a matter of taxation and argued that social policy must become an active weapon in the state’s hands in order to narrow the material gap between rich and poor. This conviction lay at the root of the numerous attempts by Titmuss, Abel-Smith and Townsend to treat areas of social policy not simply as discrete entities but collectively as sources of a wider egalitarian vision. Socialism, equality and community In an effort to demonstrate the crucial importance of a viable political alternative Titmuss attempted to show how the structure of economic power in capitalist society was inimical to an egalitarian pattern of social relationships. He first became interested in the analysis of economic power, particularly in the finance sector, as a result of his study of ‘welfare’ and the discovery that it by no means only concerned state services for the worst-off. This finding led to the further investigation of the financial position of insurance companies and pension funds, and thence to an appreciation of the concentration of capital and the potential problems it posed for any advance towards the egalitarian socialist community. The increasing power of the large corporations particularly concerned Titmuss because they were outside the orbit of state control and open to market forces. He was therefore dubious about their willingness, or ability, to distribute services ‘according to needs in place of the principle of productivity and performance in a market economy which today powerfully influences access to education and other social services’.86 Private corporations, especially insurance companies and pension funds, were accumulating capital resources at a rapid rate which gave them the potential for far-reaching economic control. Titmuss pointed to the pattern of mergers in the mid-1950s with the concomitant restriction of competition and growth of monopoly power, and to both the Finance Act (1956) and the National Insurance Act (1959), which in his opinion did nothing to discourage these tendencies.87 An example of Titmuss’s antipathy to large unaccountable corporations can be seen in proposals for a national superannuation scheme. As members of the Party’s Committee on Security and Old Age, Titmuss and his colleagues advocated the imposition of controls on the power of private insurance companies by suggesting that the proposed scheme should be compulsory. The Commit-

130 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

tee minutes make it clear that Titmuss wanted a system which, by sucking in the great majority of competitors, would break the power of these companies.88 Abel-Smith and Townsend also wanted the payment of tax-free lump sums on retirement to be made illegal and further suggested that the investment policies of pension and insurance funds should be regularly scrutinized by the state.89 In this sense the group’s plans for social security were tied to its wider conception of the distribution of economic power in British society. The Committee, however, did not accept Titmuss’s reasoning on the question of compulsion and rejected the ideas of Townsend and Abel-Smith as politically infeasible. In the affluent late 1950s this symbolized Labour’s hesitancy in taking an uncompromising stand against corporate power. Titmuss became correspondingly less hopeful about the direction society was taking—in particular the continued expansion of the private corporate sector and the increasing concentration of capital, which grew in tandem with the contraction of the state’s influence. Certainly individualism encouraged by consumer culture and fostered ‘by the feudalism of the corporation’, could easily become a substitute for ‘the sense of common humanity nourished by systems of non-discriminatory mutual aid’.90 The state’s withdrawal was tantamount to a ‘retreat into irresponsibility’: private affluence was apparently condoned at a time when it was vital to acknowledge that ‘to grow in affluence does not mean that we should abandon the quest for equality’.91 The treatment of equality is important. The idea was conceived in redistributive terms for the purposes of the superannuation proposals where the group tried to create a system capable of providing at least half-pay on retirement, but there was more than a hint of technocratic ‘equal power’ arguments. In their approach to policy issues the Titmuss group accepted elements of Gaitskellite and centre-left thinking, implicitly acknowledging the relevance of both factions’ egalitarianism. However, neither of these approaches went far enough because they rejected the notion of the moral community at the heart of Titmuss’s socialism. The real point of an integrated social security system, for example, was not merely to redistribute material goods but to restore a proper sense of social values by compensating individuals for socially imposed ills such as ‘unemployment, short-time working, the decay of skills as a result of technological change and the rational-

RETHINKING QUALITATIVE SOCIALISM? 131

ization of production’.92 Marginalizing the sources of private ‘welfare’ could only contribute to a heightened awareness of the need for such values. Although the impossibility of demonstrating how reforms to the tax and social security systems could result in egalitarian fellowship meant that the gap between policy and vision so typical of qualitative socialism occurred once again, the group went further than most in its attempt to solve the difficulty by seeking a remedy in the notion of universalism. Titmuss had noted, in Problems of Social Policy, that ‘it was the universal character of… welfare policies which ensured their acceptance and success. They were free of social discrimination and the indignities of the poor law’.93 If basic human needs could be met through universal public services, paid for by individual contributions and aimed at meeting ‘the primary needs of the whole population irrespective of class [or] creed’,94 Titmuss believed that social solidarity could be reinforced and the experience of common humanity enhanced. The idea that basic needs would be satisfied as of right by staterun social services illustrates the Titmuss group’s strengths and the weaknesses. Where the group attempted to create a holistic conception of equality, welfare and socialism which related practical ideas for policy to a vision of the egalitarian community, universalism stood as a reminder of the importance of socialist principle in the application of practical policies. The reduction of inequalities was linked intrinsically to the equal status assumed by the universalist idea in the context of a critique of welfare capitalism. So ‘welfare was tied to equality and, because of the force of economically determined power in maintaining and accelerating inequality, both were tied to socialism’.95 The weakness of the conception lay in its vagueness. The group had to show exactly how a practical policy aimed at alleviating primary need could produce the behaviour necessary to create, or at least bring nearer, an integrated society which placed emphasis on changing the basis of human relationships from a preoccupation with acquisitiveness to an appreciation of the benefits of social solidarity and mutual aid. Even in the case of a relatively straightforward example like a national health service the problem is daunting: the service dispenses one uniform good—health— to those whose primary need is to be free from illness and so may be considered a form of universal provision, yet whether an experience of fellowship, or an enhanced sense of the individual’s

132 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

social obligations to others, results from the creation of a national health service is seriously open to question. Social security and pension arrangements present a much more difficult problem. It has to be made clear how proposals which, in the group’s formulation, aimed to do no more than stabilize differentials between certain sections of the population with a wide range of basic needs, could help to promote heightened feelings of social solidarity.96 Apart from the claim that the service must be available to all, Titmuss et al did not provide an explanation of the mechanism involved during their work with the Labour Party in the 1950s and early 1960s. Although Titmuss himself later attempted to do so in The Gift Relationship, his ideas had changed by that time and the attempt anyway met with little success.97 Outside the group universalism did not carry any great appeal. Crossman, whose close connection with the Titmuss group and Labour’s pension plans in the 1950s was almost accidental,98 came to appreciate the potential appeal of the proposals and ensured that they gained a prominent position in the policy statements of the early 1960s; however, neither he nor others were persuaded by universalism. Indeed, Crossman thought that the Party had done the group a favour by restricting the scope of the proposals. The experience of Party policy committees had ‘accelerated the development of [the group’s] thought by about ten years’ and ‘without sitting on the working party, they just wouldn’t have had to solve all [the] problems because, as academics, they haven’t got to provide a finished working plan’.99 The Gaitskellites were also dubious, Crosland particularly so because he did not envisage the wholesale substitution of private provision for publicly delivered state welfare services. So long as state services could compete on equal terms with private provision over standards of excellence there would be no stigma attached to using the former. A classless society would be created less by the sole existence of state-run universal services than by the public recognition of diminishing status differences between state and private welfare consumers as public service delivery improved. Paradoxically, ‘universalism’, for all the breadth and scope it appeared to convey, really only applied to social policy—and in time this turned out to be a serious weakness. Mechanisms for controlling irresponsible economic power, the workings of the

RETHINKING QUALITATIVE SOCIALISM? 133

price system, industrial relations, the problems posed by wage differentials and incentives—none of these were thoroughly discussed by Titmuss and his colleagues, and some not at all, yet they bore directly on the issue of equality. A certain ‘slippage’ was consequently built into the group’s outlook. Because ‘welfare’ was synonymous with equality, discussions became confined to the ‘compensatory’ functions that social policies were thought to possess. Social solidarity remained the overall objective but the means for achieving it were now separated from other questions of vital significance to the proper functioning of welfare itself. Future difficulties resulting from this legacy were prefigured in Peter Townsend’s understanding of socialism and equality. Referring to the Party’s preoccupation with the need to expand production Townsend criticized the tendency ‘to subscribe to the importance of capital investment and of building so-called incentives into the tax system’. There was, he continued, ‘in the policy documents of the Labour Party…a noticeable shifting of feet whenever there is the slightest suggestion of using taxation as a weapon for social ends’. He urged the party to disengage ‘from the cloying attentions’ of those who preferred ‘to invest in machinery rather than people’ and to begin to apply its socialist principles in an effort to improve radically ‘the income and living conditions of the poor and the handicapped’.100 Politicians were certainly frustrated by the narrowness of this view. Harold Wilson—surely one of those at whom the criticisms were aimed—replying to Townsend’s charges of a piecemeal and complacent attitude to social issues, expressed surprise that he ‘who has…done so much backroom work for the Labour Party on the problem of pensions and superannuation, should find it necessary to put these questions’. Townsend, in his opinion, drew ‘too sharp a distinction between the objectives of greater equality and economic expansion’.101 The difficulties in maintaining the credibility of the qualitative vision encountered by Cole and Tawney in their later years, also confronted Socialist Commentary and Titmuss et al They were focused partly on the persistent gap between vision and strategy which had always dogged qualitative socialists, but also on another problem which the later 1950s threw into sharper relief. Tawney and Socialist Commentary felt themselves being, quite literally, overhauled by events—both expressing an almost palpable sense of retreat or withdrawal from the gathering pace of

134 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

modernity. Titmuss and his colleagues did not overtly share these feelings, but this had much to do with the narrowing of their egalitarian vision to more manageable social policy issues—retreat by another name. Neither group, of course, was entirely alone in facing challenges to earlier assumptions. By the early 1960s all Labour’s major factions were re-evaluating their understandings of egalitarian doctrine and policy—not least because there had been ‘an absolute rise in living standards for the majority of workers, fuller wage-packets, more overtime, a gradual filling out of the home with some domestic consumer goods…above all [a] sense of security—a little space to turn round in’.102 To match the prevailing climate the centre-left turned to science and technology, while the Gaitskellites embraced affluence and opportunity. But Socialist Commentary made no attempt to modernize its vision in this way, clinging instead to a rather hollow version of the qualitative ideal. While Titmuss et al offered a reinterpretation of the vision they perhaps did not appreciate that when the traditional ‘submerged fifth’ in poverty had diminished in the public mind to a ‘submerged tenth’, egalitarian policies and ideals which, in the late 1940s, had been anticipated with optimism, were now likely to be perceived as threats.

Chapter 6

Interregnum

The trepidation with which qualitative socialists contemplated Labour’s new faith in expansion and technology in the early 1960s was not without foundation. Disappointment at the loss— or marginalization—of the qualitative ideal belied a fear of political expediency: lacking the coherence that a vision of solidaristic egalitarianism could provide, Labour governments might be tempted to pursue purely pragmatic goals. Technocrats and Keynesians discounted the vision as misguided and naive, with good reason, but there is little doubt that the ‘technocratic settlement’ set out in Signposts for the Sixties contained a number of hostages to fortune which justified qualitative socialist anxieties. Not only would planned economic expansion have to materialize, and a Labour government therefore show itself more capable than its post-war predecessor of instituting the appropriate machinery, but the anticipated fruits would need to be shared in ways which satisfied prevailing expectations of rising living standards and better welfare provision. With the 1940s’ rhetoric of fair shares diminished if not disgraced, little existed in doctrinal terms on which to base appeals for restraint or ‘equality of sacrifice’ should such expectations prove too ambitious. Further thinking was not an option. Previous debates had been divisive enough and after the defeat of unilateralism in 1962 there was no taste for yet more damaging arguments. Practical considerations were also important. The years between Harold Wilson’s election victory in October 1964 and Jim Callaghan’s defeat in May 1979 were mainly ones of government with many of the salient thinkers of the 1950s now Cabinet ministers, too busy to ruminate on the niceties of socialist doctrine.1 Had this not been 135

136 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

the case, however, it is unlikely that anything of the significance of The Future of Socialism could have been written. The increasing complexity of government, rapidly changing social and economic conditions and the literal explosion of leftwing ideas outside Party confines defied easy analysis;2 the task of distilling such a plethora of detail into one seminal volume daunted even the most committed intellectuals.3 Labour consequently had to put up with the tools already to hand and these proved insufficient to deal with the challenges which plagued the Wilson governments of the 1960s. A full history of these governments cannot be provided here but the major difficulties they encountered need attention because they bore directly on subsequent debates about the place of equality in Party doctrine. In brief, severe economic problems in the shape of successive balance of payments crises undermined the key strategy of economic planning. Failure here contributed to further balance of payments difficulties, facing the government with a Hobson’s choice between defending sterling, in the hope of convincing the money markets and international community that Labour was economically ‘trustworthy’, or devaluing the pound to give a quick fillip to growth. The first alternative carried the obvious risk of disadvantaging manufacturing industry with high export prices but promised a breathing space for economic planning if speculation eased. Devaluation, though arguably beneficial for trade, could trigger inflation and would require a deflationary package to support it—thereby threatening the Party’s election promises. Labour chose the first option but was eventually forced into the second. The sequence encapsulates the birth and death of economic planning, and the subsequent resort to a pragmatic ‘Keynesianism’ following Roy Jenkins’s appointment to the Chancellorship after devaluation in November 1967. Both phases marked a retreat from the egalitarian visions discussed above. The sacrifices required to make planning work proved too much for many trade unionists, while the disillusion caused by Labour’s failure to increase welfare provision drove erstwhile supporters to a more uncompromising egalitarianism.

INTERREGNUM 137

ECONOMIC PLANNING AND INCOMES POLICY Harold Wilson’s first administration, with a slender majority of five, was confronted with its first decision about devaluation within hours of taking office. An inherited £800m deficit—twice as much as predicted—led to discussions amongst Treasury officials, senior ministers and economic advisors which ended in a decision to stand by sterling and impose surcharges on a range of imported goods. The decision was a gamble but Wilson, undoubtedly the prime mover, believed it could work if it offset mounting pressure on the pound and, crucially, if the unions stuck to their tentative commitment to a voluntary incomes policy, agreed in 1963.4 ‘Some general coordination of collective bargaining’, to use Balogh’s phrase, had long been a recognized requirement of centre-left conceptions of indicative planning and, in the late 1950s, the Party had made half-hearted attempts to establish the principle of an incomes policy. In 1958 Plan for Progress announced that a government intent on promoting expansion and greater equality had ‘the right to rely on the goodwill and cooperation of the trade union movement as of every other responsible organisation in the country’.5 The unions, however, saw matters rather differently. They were protective of their traditional rights to free collective bargaining and were understandably worried, in the words of one prominent union leader, about ‘a transference of the economic problems of the community on to the shoulders of the organized and unorganized workers merely [so that] the economy could be balanced’.6 With many other issues pressing, Labour fought shy of outright confrontation and the matter was dropped.7 But the wages issue swiftly reappeared from a different quarter. In the early 1960s the Macmillan government, keen to contain inflation and protect a weakening balance of payments, started to intervene directly in public sector wage bargaining. The ‘pay pause’ of July 1961—April 1962 was, in union eyes, very much a wages pause8 and, followed by tight guidelines for public sector wage increases, led George Woodcock, TUG General Secretary, to claim ‘heavy discrimination against those workpeople who were under the direct influence of the government’.9 They disliked it, but Woodcock and the General Council recognized they needed directly to influence government themselves, if union members were to be adequately protected, and this meant having

138 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

‘a place at the table’. Consequently they were forced to take Conservative ‘planning’ seriously and cautiously agreed to membership of the National Economic Development Council, a tripartite advisory body which made up the centrepiece of Conservative planning machinery.10 Part of ‘Neddy’s’ job was to assess prospects for growth and advise government on how to obtain it. Wage levels were an important factor here, as the unions acknowledged, and Woodcock told delegates to the 1963 TUG conference that he was not averse to discussing at the NEDC ‘what part wages can play in a plan for genuine progress’. Even so, the ambivalence persisted. The General Secretary continued to voice the general wariness about ‘this singling out of wages’ and suggestions that traditional union goals were somehow illegitimate.11 There was enough here for Labour to work on. Labour leaders knew that the Party’s election chances would be boosted if it could claim an understanding over wages with the unions and from the latter’s point of view cooperating with Labour was clearly preferable to working with the Conservatives because they could legitimately expect a closer partnership. It was not surprising, therefore, that the 1963 Party conference voted overwhelmingly for an economic policy ‘to secure full employment and continuous expansion’ to be worked out ‘in consultation with the Trade Union Movement’. As a quid pro quo the unions agreed to accept an incomes policy ‘to include salaries, wages, dividends and profits (including speculative profits) and social security benefits’—in other words all forms of income.12 Misgivings certainly remained, with senior figures like Frank Cousins—soon to be co-opted into Wilson’s Cabinet as Minister of Technology—continuing to express a preference for traditional free collective bargaining,13 but such scepticism might have been containable had Labour’s attempts at economic planning resulted in the growth and steadily increasing incomes predicted. The National Plan, the linchpin of centre-left strategy, was intended to deliver these things but, harried by the pressure on sterling, beset by practical and intellectual difficulties and plagued by interdepartmental rivalries, this grand design came to nothing.14 At some point between the Joint Statement of Intent announcing the National Plan in December 1964 and its official launch in November 1965 the balance of expectations changed. What had started ostensibly as a joint venture between government and

INTERREGNUM 139

unions became, in the opinions of many union leaders, an attempt to secure economic stability at the expense of their members’ living standards. There seemed to be evidence for this view. Although the great majority of unions initially accepted the agreements contained in two government White Papers, The Machinery of Prices and Incomes Policy and Prices and Incomes Policy, which committed them to submit wage claims to a National Board of Prices and Incomes within a limit of 3–3.5 per cent, confidence was shaken by increases in indirect taxation, a 4 per cent rise in the retail price index and a 28 per cent increase in dividend payments. Moreover, anxieties were increased by George Brown’s clearly expressed preference for a statutory bite to the policy. Worse was to follow. Wilson’s snap election in March 1966, won with a comfortable majority of ninety-seven, did not, as had been hoped, improve prospects for stability. Heavy pressure on sterling was triggered by a long and economically damaging seamen’s strike in May on a claim which threatened to break incomes policy guidelines. Wilson responded by siding with the employers and declaring a State of Emergency, though rising tempers and the rapidly developing atmosphere of distrust might even then have been contained had it not been for the Prime Minister’s untimely statement insinuating that the NUS was dominated by communists committed to the destruction of the incomes policy. The outburst was badly received by the unions and the Left of the PLP, the latter of which now included not only Michael Foot and other old Tribunites but new figures like Eric Heffer, Norman Buchan and Joan Lestor by no means well-disposed to incomes legislation.15 Sterling fell throughout June and, despite the end of the strike, through July as well. There was muted talk of devaluation but again Wilson, supported by Callaghan, resisted pressure from Brown and other senior Cabinet figures for such a course.16 With growth remaining elusive, the price was a severe deflationary package with public spending cuts and a six-month wages and prices freeze backed by an element of compulsion slipped into the Prices and Incomes Act in the form of fines for those breaking the guidelines. This statutory element was sufficient to force Cousins to resign from the Cabinet in protest, shattering ‘the informal concordat with unions in general, and leftwing unionists in particular’.17 The package unquestionably marked the end of the centre-left’s technocratic strategy. As one observer commented, it

140 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

‘destroyed not only growth, but also the Plan for growth and the very idea of planning for growth’.18 In place of planning came chaos and crisis management as dashed hopes led to a climate of bitterness and hostility.19 Renewed pressure on sterling, partly affected by industrial disputes but also by scarcely concealed Cabinet wrangles and the government’s obvious unpopularity,20 led finally to a forced devaluation on November 18th, 1967, followed shortly afterwards by Gallaghan’s resignation from the Exchequer. To ensure future stability for sterling, the new Chancellor, Roy Jenkins, pursued a strategy that promoted ‘the diversion of resources into exports’.21 Post-devaluation economic policy entailed severe (for that time) public spending cuts in defence and the social services, and a continued stress on incomes policy. Neither planning nor subsequent appeals to an economic logic which apparently had the survival of the capitalist system as its main objective went down well with those who felt themselves to be at the sharp end of either strategy, and this had a particular impact on conceptions of equality. Increasingly vociferous opposition to the government altered the nature of Labour’s egalitarian thought in two key areas. First, anger about incomes policy stimulated demands for greater industrial democracy from union militants and the New Left which, in due course, profoundly influenced a new generation of Labour leftwingers. Second, frustration with the slow pace—and in some cases absence—of social reform altered previous assumptions about social policy.

INCOMES POLICY, EQUALITY AND INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY Incomes policy directly stimulated already existing ideas about industrial democracy and workers’ control. The emergence of decentralized, shopfloor bargaining, partly as a result of full employment and partly in opposition to the centralized unionism of the 1940s and 1950s, favoured a brand of leader prepared to support a much greater degree of local autonomy.22 In their different ways, and coming from very different trade unions, Jack Jones, Hugh Scanlon and Clive Jenkins proved adept at converting traditional calls for free collective bargaining into a strategy which instinctively sympathized with workplace demands.23 The

INTERREGNUM 141

equation was simple. Free collective bargaining had to exist in a capitalist economy because it pushed up wages and higher wages were per se egalitarian. In Scanlon’s view ‘workers [should not] give up their justified increases to the benefit of those who live by owning’,24 while Jenkins advocated a ‘sharper approach‘ to wages because, with ‘two-fifths of private property in the hands of one per cent of the adult population and four-fifths…in the hands of only ten per cent’,25 there was nothing to suggest any overriding commitment to the redistribution of wealth. High wages, then, were not incompatible with equality but a pre-condition of it. By implication, incomes policy, far from being egalitarian as centre-left intellectuals had supposed, was just the opposite because it depressed working-class earnings which governments found easier to control than prices, salaries or other forms of wealth.26 If an incomes policy could ever work it would need to be in an existing planned and publicly owned economy that already possessed a high degree of industrial democracy; in other words in an environment where workers already enjoyed a much greater equality of power with employers. For Jones, industrial democracy provided a prefigurative link between free collective bargaining in the capitalist present and the future planned economy. Its heart, indeed its only raison d’être, lay in the claim that the scope of collective bargaining should be enlarged not only to protect the working class in general but to defend the interests of workers in small, vulnerable unions and low-paid occupations. ‘Occupational differentials, shift-rates and above all incentive schemes and productivity bargaining [should] become increasingly decentralized’,27 reflecting the central role of shop stewards in locally constituted Pay and Productivity Committees. Management should recognize such bodies and ensure their proper functioning by making information about investment plans and future company policy available. Union representatives would need to be included on management boards, a reform that, in Jones’s opinion, would typify the new balance of power in industrial relations.28 Interest in the possibilities offered by industrial democracy spread far beyond the union left, becoming the subject of a Royal Commission (the Donovan Commission) as well as a point of interest for an NEC Working Party.29 However, the only concrete thing to emerge from the gathering debate, set against a background of increasingly tense industrial relations, was the govern-

142 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

ment’s response to the Donovan Report—Barbara Castle’s White Paper, In Place of Strife. Castle had never ceased to believe that ‘the planned growth of wages [should be] part of Socialist planning’, although she was careful to include other forms of income and wealth in her ideas.30 These technocratic views admirably suited her for the job of Secretary of State for the new Department of Employment and Productivity, trusted by Wilson with the difficult task of persuading the unions to accept a statutory incomes policy and certain limitations on strike action. In Place of Strife took seriously Donovan’s recommendations about strengthening the shop floor and extending the scope of collective bargaining,31 but argued that unions had responsibilities as well as rights. Much to their fury, the power to enforce these ‘responsibilities’ seemed to lie not with the unions but with the Secretary of State. A ‘conciliation pause’ could be imposed in unofficial disputes, secret ballots before official strikes could be required and fines could be levied by an Industrial Board where unions breached the new legislation. Reactions to this attempt at centralization united union moderates and militants in a concerted —and successful—effort to destroy the White Paper.32 With the Cabinet split, the government was in no position to force the issue and eventually capitulated,33 but the affair created deep distrust between the political and industrial wings of the movement. As Minkin has written, ‘rejection of the government’s proposals…was followed by an explosion of militancy… [which] nourished the process of factional change and realignment within the unions, producing a climate in which leftwing trade unionists advanced within union structures’.34 Militancy created alliances between trade unionists and the Party very different from those that had existed in the 1940s and 1950s. Far from being able to count on the support—especially the block votes—of large unions like the TGWU and the AEU, the government watched them ally with Tribunites in the PLP and an increasingly confident New Left.35 Jones joined Tribune’s editorial board in 1968 while he, Scanlon and other leaders also developed links with the Institute of Workers’ Control whose annual conferences attracted an increasing number of rank-and-file trade unionists in the late 1960s.36 Significantly for the future, these same leaders gave their blessing to embryonic demands for greater intra-Party democracy. Constituency activists made restless by the government’s

INTERREGNUM 143

behaviour over incomes policy, In Place of Strife and a range of other issues, not least its support for American involvement in the Vietnam War, were beginning to call for new constitutional measures to control Party policy from the conference floor.37 This movement did not become significant until the early 1970s, but calls for the transformation of the Labour Party into ‘an instrument of popular control responsive to the members and their Conference’38 explicitly mirrored demands for more democracy in the industrial arena and became a rallying cry for a new Labour Left.

EQUALITY AND SOCIAL POLICY When Labour came to power in 1964 there was good reason to hope that the new government would look favourably upon social reform. Planned economic growth may have been the major goal but the election manifesto had made it clear that ‘as economic expansion increases our national wealth we shall see to it that the needs of the community are increasingly met’.39 The collapse of planning obviously threatened these promises and Labour’s social policy record failed to show any clear movement towards greater equality,40 although those in government argued, with some justification, that more had been achieved than critics allowed in what, after all, were adverse circumstances.41 Dissatisfaction took different forms depending on the area involved but education and social security provide the best examples of a different kind of attention which signalled a change in the ways Party intellectuals addressed social policy issues. In practical terms there was a greater willingness to resort to fragmented pressure group activities, particularly where specific issues appeared ripe for media coverage—and this new-found activism, at its most marked in the creation and subsequent activities of the Child Poverty Action Group, suggested a deeper disillusion with perceived prospects for equality per se. Education Education was the one area of social policy in which centre-left ideas of economic efficiency potentially chimed with Croslandite concerns for greater social equality. The twin goals were brought together in the 1964 manifesto which stated that ‘our country’s

144 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

“investment in people” is still tragically inadequate’ and promised the reorganization of secondary education along comprehensive lines as a remedy for the inequalities of opportunity associated with the eleven-plus.42 Other reforms were proposed which Labour believed would enhance both equality and the pool of trained labour for industry: the school leaving age was to be raised from fifteen to sixteen; there was to be a massive expansion of further and higher education; and the private sector was to be incorporated into the state system. Some of these promises were kept—at least in part. Crosland initiated the promised expansion of comprehensive schooling taking the total of comprehensive schools from 265 in 1964 to over a 1,000 by 1970. Numbers entering higher education were extended past the totals recommended by the Robbins Report of 1963, and by 1970 there were twice as many students in higher education (457,000) than seven years earlier. Seven new universities were built and others expanded, together with the Open University which, of all Labour’s reforms, perhaps provided the best example of the Party’s desire to achieve genuine equality of access to educational facilities. The polytechnic sector was also enlarged and, subject to CNAA scrutiny, allowed to confer degrees, while teacher-training provision also benefited from enhanced resources and inclusion in the university sector. In a departure which was arguably the most significant of all, the government accepted the Plowden Committee’s recommendation for ‘positive discrimination’ in favour of extra educational provision for primary schoolchildren in deprived areas, setting aside an additional £16m in 1967 for this purpose.43 However, this apparently successful picture was marred by what were perceived at the time as significant failures. The decision not to raise the school leaving age, taken during discussions about public spending cuts after devaluation, was a particular, and highly visible, blow to hopes for greater equality of access to education between social classes. Crosland, who bitterly resented it, fought hard against the cuts in Cabinet but failed to get the decision reversed.44 Two further issues caused disappointment because they seemed to expose the government’s lack of commitment to serious egalitarian reform. In the light of the manifesto promise to ‘integrate’ the private sector into the state system, the failure to tackle this question seemed testimony to the government’s lack of commit-

INTERREGNUM 145

ment to eradicating the most glaring of all educational inequalities. As promised, Crosland, who had claimed that he wanted ‘a proper reform or none at all’,45 had created a Public Schools Commission in 1965 which reported in 1968.46 After criticizing the private sector for being socially divisive, the report did not make the expected recommendation that the schools be integrated by the local education authorities, but argued that they should remain independent and take half their numbers from the state system. The undoubted complexity of tampering with the private sector did not impress the 1968 Party conference which rejected the Commission’s report. No further proposals were offered thereafter and Labour never again came as close to eliminating private education. The government was also criticized for not pursuing comprehensivization with sufficient urgency. The slender resources allocated for comprehensive reform and the vagueness surrounding the government’s intentions meant that this centrepiece of Labour’s education policy had a haphazard character hardly consistent with the stated dedication to the removal of inequalities.47 This attitude stimulated pressure group activity within the Party, the main example being the Comprehensive Schools’ Committee (CSC), formed in 1965 to monitor the development of the new system. From the outset the group was critical of the government’s ‘loose’ understanding of what comprehensivization entailed and equally critical of the slow progress being made towards it.48 The CSC, together with the Socialist Educational Association (formerly the National Association of Labour Teachers) encouraged rank-and-file pressure at Party conferences of sufficient strength to persuade the NEC to accept the case for an Education Bill granting powers to force the hand of reluctant LEAs. A Bill was indeed presented to Parliament in 1970 but, while it imposed a duty on LEAs to introduce comprehensive schooling, it provided no set date for the submission of plans and anyway fell victim to Labour’s general election defeat in June of that year. The Bill’s fate epitomized government policy towards education— too little, too vague and too late—and this was very much the tone of subsequent criticisms. In an influential New Statesman article, Brian Jackson pointed out that, despite an overall increase in education spending, many of Labour’s education proposals had either failed to materialize or not been properly thought out.

146 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

Nursery education had not been expanded, the promised rise in the school leaving age had been postponed and the integration of the private sector into the state system had never taken place. In addition, the failure fully to resource comprehensivization—or even to indicate what the concept of comprehensive education entailed—had created confusion in the secondary sector.49 These criticisms were echoed in greater detail by other commentators50 and, in the early 1970s, stimulated calls for far-reaching changes in Party education policy which challenged prevailing conceptions of equal opportunity.51 Low pay, benefits and poverty The new tendency to pressure group politics was nowhere better demonstrated than in the area of low pay and welfare benefits. In its November 1964 budget the government had carried out its election pledges for immediate pension increases and the abolition of NHS prescription charges, but thereafter welfare spending was restrained by deflationary economic policies. On occasion the government could appear particularly mean in its efforts to restrict spending, the ‘wage-stop’ being a good instance, while on others previously laid plans took too long to come to fruition— the obvious example being the failure to implement the much heralded national superannuation scheme before Labour lost office.52 However, the real bone of contention which drew the criticism of Party intellectuals, if not the public at large, was the government’s apparent reluctance to do anything about poverty. The Titmuss group was especially influential here. Although the qualitative ideal continued to inform their work, concern about poverty provided a more immediate focus. Peter Townsend’s work on the nature of poverty brought it into closer conceptual proximity with equality by challenging previous definitions of poverty as a condition applying to those living at or below a prescribed subsistence level of income.53 This ‘absolute’ approach had informed National Assistance levels in the 1940s and had, in Townsend’s view, led to excessive rigidity in how poverty was understood. Steadily increasing affluence meant that the proportion of those living below the official poverty line had fallen, but this hardly suggested that deprivation had ceased to exist or that society had become more egalitarian; indeed the poverty line needed to be treated more flexibly to take account of

INTERREGNUM 147

the worsening position of the relatively deprived. Townsend claimed that ‘the poor’ could be defined as those who were the least well off in any particular society irrespective of prevailing living standards, therefore implying that poverty could exist even in ostensibly wealthy societies unless countered by a redistributive, egalitarian strategy. Townsend and Abel-Smith’s ‘rediscovery’ of poverty in the early 1960s was an attempt to draw attention to relative levels of deprivation—and thus to the degree of social and material inequality in Britain. The Poor and the Poorest using official National Assistance levels, reanalysed information on family expenditures in 1953–54 and 1960, and found that nearly 4 per cent of the population were living below this ‘absolute’ poverty line. However, by using the more generous measure of ‘140% of the national assistance scale plus rent and/or other housing costs’, which came closer to a relative definition, Abel-Smith and Townsend found that 14 per cent of the population were living in poverty, including over two million children.54 The discovery was made simultaneously with another. Labour’s proposed National Plan did not aim to increase expenditure on public services in the 1964–70 period by as much as Conservative governments had increased it in the preceding six years.55 Townsend’s earlier doubts about the strength of Labour’s commitment to the poorest sections of the community seemed to have been borne out56 and this reinforced his previous inclinations towards an uncompromising view of social policy radically separated from concerns about economic growth. Unlike centre-left and Gaitskellite intellectuals, Titmuss, AbelSmith and Townsend had never been happy about making equality contingent upon growth. A healthy balance of payments may be essential because of the dislocation created by mass unemployment but, as Abel-Smith stated, ‘it is by no means certain that social justice, welfare and better social capital depend upon rapid growth of the economy’.57 For the National Plan to import ideas of living ‘within our means’ denied the fact that decisions about redistribution and levels of social spending were political, not immutable economic ones. If, as Titmuss maintained, socialism was still ‘about what we contribute without price to the community’58 then a Labour government must appeal to a sense of altruism and sacrifice in the hope of encouraging communal enthusiasm for greater equality. Disappointment with the failure to set

148 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

this example through more generosity towards welfare claimants and the low paid impelled Abel-Smith and Townsend in particular to become increasingly outspoken in their criticism of Labour’s social policies. Criticism turned not only on these general points, but on specific ideas informed by the new research findings about the incidence of child poverty. Throughout the 1960s Titmuss advocated the abolition of child tax allowances and their replacement with a universal ‘child endowment’—in his terms a move from fiscal to social welfare. Writing in 1965, he estimated that between 15 and 20 per cent of the nation’s children lived in hardship, the primary cause of which was low earnings. This fact, combined with the rising birth rate, provoked an old Titmuss fear of a collapse of ‘social discipline’ and order,59 a process which he believed would be abetted by the socially fragmenting effects of the free market. Child endowment would make for equality, and thus greater social stability, because it would channel resources to low-earning families while simultaneously withdrawing money from highincome earners.60 Titmuss’s recommendations fell on seemingly deaf ears, which no doubt encouraged his colleagues to take further action. In the face of Labour’s reluctance to take steps to tackle child poverty, Abel-Smith and Townsend, less moved by prospects of a breakdown in ‘social discipline’ than by visible signs of deprivation, attempted to focus public opinion on the government’s failure to act on the evidence about child poverty examined in The Poor and the Poorest. An address on ‘a number of aspects of poverty’ by Abel-Smith to the Society of Friends in the early part of 1965, and the subsequent formation of the Family Poverty Group, began the process by which the original concern of the Titmuss group for greater social equality was overlaid by demands for more spending on the immediate alleviation of poverty, irrespective of the current state of the economy.61 To maximize public concern, the Family Poverty Group was renamed the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) in December 1965, the launch being timed to coincide with the publication of The Poor and the Poorest.62 Its specific purpose was to publicize the high incidence of child poverty and advocate a system of child endowment as a step towards its elimination. In the later 1960s the group became the focal point for criticism of Labour’s failure to deal with family poverty generally. It campaigned against what

INTERREGNUM 149

it regarded as the punitive nature of the benefits system, especially the ‘wage-stop’—the practice of limiting benefit to an individual’s net income level before unemployment—and for an enhancement of family provision. Moreover, the group gained a semi-victory in February 1968 when, after bitter disagreements in Cabinet, the government reluctantly decided to raise family allowances and introduce a temporary clawback procedure to pay for the increase —a step closer to Titmuss’s idea of universal child endowment.63 CPAG continued its pressure-style campaigning in the run-up to the 1970 general election and beyond. The combination of Peter Townsend who became the Group’s chairman in 1969 and the newly-appointed director, Frank Field—a Party ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ respectively—enabled CPAG to exploit media publicity to force the government, in the shape of Richard Crossman (much to his fury) onto the defensive by publicly accusing it of responsibility for increased poverty.64 Although the campaign did not prove particularly successful, it led to a distancing between CPAG and the Labour Party, splitting the Titmuss group in the process. Townsend became increasingly critical while Titmuss and Abel-Smith remained loyal, if perhaps less ‘attached’, than they had been in the 1950s.65

CHANGING TIMES Much had changed by the time the Labour government was defeated in 1970. Wracked by the trauma of incomes policy and deteriorating relations with the trade unions, and pilloried for its failure to support the most vulnerable, the hopes of the early 1960s had failed to materialize. Instead, the government appeared out of touch and out of date, unable or unwilling to appreciate the strength of feeling in the trade unions and unaware of the growing unrest amongst Party pressure groups or the constituency rank and file. Outdatedness was symbolized by a distinct change in intellectual mood and practice. Since the 1930s serious thinking about policy and doctrine had for the most part taken place within the restricted confines of Labour’s intellectual elites. Policies and ideas had been developed, or resisted, essentially by small groupings of politicians and intellectuals drawn from relatively narrow social backgrounds who were used to seeing the fruits of their

150 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

labours translated into policy proposals. Individuals could be ‘brought in’, as had happened to Gaitskell, Durbin and Crosland as well as Titmuss, Abel-Smith and Townsend, but the process was largely one of self-perpetuation whereby strands of thinking could be maintained and rekindled, while new ideas could first be vetted before public presentation. The 1960s, however, saw an explosion of political argument and new forms of debate that largely destroyed these earlier practices. Much of the initial impetus came from leftwingers outside the Party. Where the ‘moral’ Marxists of the 1950s’ New Left66 and the Tribunite wing of the PLP had discovered a certain common ground in the quintessentially ‘English radicalism’ of CND, a ‘new’ New Left gathered round a refurbished New Left Review, spoke in a different language to a younger generation. Under the editorship of Perry Anderson the Review became popular amongst those in the new white-collar public service sector and expanding universities who looked with enthusiasm towards Western Marxism, the European Left and American student activism rather than to the English radical tradition, so revered by figures as different as Tawney, Michael Foot or E.P.Thompson.67 Incomes policy, spending cuts, rising unemployment and Vietnam ensured that, by the later 1960s, Labour was no longer regarded as a potential repository of new thinking by those now attracted to the heady combination of liberation struggles and ‘scientific’ class analysis. As Wilson’s biographer has written, with only slight exaggeration, ‘writers, artists, scientists who had backed Labour in the early 1960s, expressed their disenchantment. Intellectual fashion…moved away and never returned’.68 New ideas demanded new alliances. However temporary they ultimately turned out to be, links among academics, students and trade unionists offered exciting possibilities for direct action and democratic participation. Peter Sedgwick, a young academic who strongly identified with the New Left, could talk, for example, of the relationships forged in the late 1960s between ‘foreign and trade union issues, demonstrator and striker, high-minded altruist and class-conscious egoist’ and confidently predict that as economic conditions worsened so the Left would move ‘straight into Marxism’.69 Even the NEC’s Home Policy Committee acknowledged that ‘revolution was in the air. Whether the particular manifestation comes in a Bolivian forest, Grosvenor Square, a Renault

INTERREGNUM 151

factory or a Chinese canton’. New opportunities and a new generation had been created which ‘seek a grander vision of society’.70 Whatever that vision was—and it was far from clear—it did not rest easily with any of the Party’s previous understandings of egalitarian socialism. With few exceptions, technocratic, Keynesian or qualitative socialists had not perceived equality as the outcome of mass protest or direct action so much as the culminating point of rational strategies expected to create a more equal and, as they saw it, a more moral society for which all progressivelyminded individuals would be duly grateful. These assumptions waned in certain sections of the Party during the 1970s. While qualitative and Keynesian socialists attempted, unsuccessfully, to re-establish faith in their respective ideals, the Left recast the technocratic vision of equal power. State ownership and planning were hardly forsaken but, influenced primarily by union demands for industrial democracy and to a lesser extent by the new practices becoming established in the women’s and other liberation movements, these traditional articles of faith were adjusted to take account of the new ideological climate.

Chapter 7

Seeking alternatives: technocrats and equality in the 1970s

The technocratic Left of the 1970s was a decidedly hard-headed variant of earlier incarnations, a characteristic embodied, for example, in the greater use of Marxian rhetoric, particularly theories of capitalist crisis, to condemn gradualist social reform which had deprived ‘the public at large of the chance to pressurize, criticize or support more radical change’. Real social change, it was argued, would only come from ‘a revolutionary reform of the mode of production, distribution and exchange in the system as a whole’1—and much of the Left’s Alternative Economic Strategy (AES) as it emerged throughout the 1970s was designed to further this technocratic goal.

THE RE-EMERGENCE OF THE TECHNOCRATIC LEFT Little criticism was heard from the PLP Left in the early stages of the 1964–66 government. Wilson, after all, had been the Left’s candidate fighting George Brown for the leadership after Gaitskell’s death and though unhappy about the lack of overt commitment to public ownership in Party policy statements, leftwingers were nevertheless enthusiastic about the National Plan. However, the 1966 seamen’s strike and government calls for a statutory incomes policy began a process whereby leftwingers, in and outside Parliament, became increasingly disillusioned with the government. The beginnings of change in the Party’s higher echelons were heralded by the election of Frank Allaun and Joan Lestor, the former an ex-Vice-President of CND and both identified with the 152

SEEKING ALTERNATIVES 153

Tribunite Left, to the NEC’s constituency section, defeating Callaghan and Anthony Greenwood. Their success was the first sign of restlessness amongst rank-and-file activists which persisted in the leftwing domination of the constituency section throughout the 1970s.2 Allaun, in particular, was associated with early demands for intra-party democracy, which he urged at both the 1968 and 1969 Party conferences. Restlessness was not confined to changes in the NEC. The new intake of leftwingers in March 1966, which included Allaun, Lestor, Eric Heffer and Judith Hart, quickly began to argue that the government had betrayed the working-class voters that had elected it with such high hopes. Heffer’s3 complaints were typical: ‘the Government has followed anti-Socialist policies and has got away from the feelings of the people. Strong Government has become synonymous with attacks on the workers’ conditions instead of the entrenched power and privileges of the City of London and all that they represent’.4 This view informed a plethora of Tribune articles and editorials written between 1967 and 1970. As to the specifics of policy, exchange controls to curb financial speculation, wider public ownership and economic planning were the less-than-original products of Tribunite thinking at this time—with price controls and subsidies, including fair rents and improvements in benefits, comprising the main elements of social policy.5 Incomes policy was the main issue that marked Tribunites off from what otherwise was a ‘centre-left-plus’ position: after 1966 Tribune consistently supported trade union demands for a return to free collective bargaining. This general dissatisfaction, combined as it was with the drift towards greater union militancy, took symbolic shape in the transformation of one Cabinet minister, Tony Benn, from semidetached Gaitskellite into leftwing technocrat. Benn, son of the Liberal peer Lord Stansgate, had entered Parliament in 1950. He voted for Gaitskell in the leadership contest of 1955 but was never intimate with the leader and by the early 1960s had drawn closer to Wilson, science and technology, becoming one of Wilson’s speech writers on these issues. Postmaster-General in the first Wilson government, Benn was appointed to his first Cabinet post as Minister of Technology on Cousins’s resignation in 1966. The usual depiction of Benn after this date is that of a ‘quintessential whizz-kid, developing Concorde with the French, com-

154 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

puterizing industry, building Britain’s civilian nuclear energy programme…a keen supporter of…the Common Market… since it would build up an “integrated European technology” ’.6 Loyalty to Wilson and the government was not in doubt until, suddenly, after Labour’s electoral defeat in 1970 he was reincarnated as a bitter critic of Wilsonian pragmatism and the leading figure of a newly-constituted Labour Left. In fact the transition was rather slower than this account suggests. The new Benn grew from within the old, the final, visible shift being the culmination of a process that can be dated at least to the mid-1960s. An early interest in industrial democracy was displayed in 1966 when, as Postmaster-General, Benn asked to sit on the NEC’s Science and Industry Committee where Jones was chairing discussions on the subject.7 In the financial crisis of July 1966 Benn was openly hostile to Treasury cuts that would be ‘socially inequitable’; moreover, he was critical of Wilson’s denunciation of the Seamen’s Union which, he wrote, ‘made me sick and reminded me of McCarthyism’.8 By 1968 disillusion with the government had set in, possibly prompted by a growing awareness of social and political developments outside the Party. Technology continued to fascinate him, but he was ‘sure that the reconstruction of the Party [was] the most important task’. This had to be done on the basis of stronger trade unions and a PLP with a larger part to play. The student power movement, the Black Power movement and the discontent among trade unionists are very powerful and important new forces in society, and I believe the Labour Party has got to enter into a creative relationship with them.9 Benn also became increasingly critical of Labour’s support for the Vietnam War, and had his sympathy for the unions enhanced by events at Upper Clyde Shipbuilders (UCS) in 1969 where, in his view, the management’s decision to dissolve the company was ‘an abdication of their responsibility and a betrayal’.10 Unable to offer government assistance, he was plainly ‘anti-management’ and recommended the unions to condemn the liquidation. The UCS experience, which coincided with the intense negotiations over In Place of Strife, was sufficiently influential to make Benn change his mind about Castle’s White Paper. In January 1969 he

SEEKING ALTERNATIVES 155

had recorded his active support for the proposals but by June had joined the ‘anxious group, fearing that an Industrial Relations Bill just can’t work’.11 These changing interests involved the two apparently distinct policy elements of industrial democracy and state economic direction which stirred the Left in the 1970s. In Benn’s case, however, they were rooted—contrary to the assumptions of the tabloid press—not in an explicit Marxism but in the English radical tradition of popular protest. There was, to be sure, more than a nod towards Marxist ideas, best expressed in his recognition of Marx’s general contribution to socialist thought and the belief that class was the major form of social division, but human dignity and the ‘advocacy of true human equality’ associated with the Diggers, Chartists and Tawney—in all of which there was more than a hint of Christian Socialism—proved the stronger influence.12 Benn was no qualitative socialist, however. His ideas about industrial democracy, influenced by the development of a militant, decentralized trade unionism, the gathering demands for workers’ control and his own observation of shopfloor activity at UCS, GEC and other companies with which, through Mintech, he was involved displayed a preference for class analysis which would have been foreign to Tawney or Titmuss—if rather less so to Cole. The early faith in state-directed technology suggests the traditional technocratic belief in the need for a powerful state to harness a recalcitrant capitalism—the old equality of economic power much-discussed by the Bevanites.13 Although Benn rapidly lost faith in technology as a panacea for harmonizing the interests of workers, government and industry after 1969, this did not prevent him retaining a central place for public ownership and planning as his views developed in the 1970s.14 By the time of Labour’s defeat in 1970 Benn had joined a number of older figures like Mikardo and Foot as well as the younger generation, including Heffer and Hart, as a major critic of the Wilson governments. However, while each of these figures was to play an important role in leftwing thinking and policy formulation, the guiding intellectual force behind the new approach to technocratic socialism was Stuart Holland, an academic economist, who had been one of Wilson’s economic assistants in the late 1960s. Disappointment at the failure of the National Plan had led Holland to rethink the old centre-left economic strategy

156 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

and produce ideas that combined state economic direction and industrial democracy in ways that proved particularly appealing to Benn. Together, these two strands made up the Left’s major ideological thrust in the 1970s. Industrial democracy and the extension of popular control, coupled with state ownership and central direction of the economy, had the overriding objective of achieving greater equality and status for working-class people in the economic and industrial arena. Conceptions of a wider social equality, to be achieved by economic growth, state welfare policies and redistributive taxation were not so much abandoned in this formulation as tacitly incorporated into the general rubric of democratic participation, and here education stands as the only example of leftwing efforts to attend specifically to social policy issues. Generally, the Left was content to regard the welfare state as a potential site of popular control in which a greater equality of access to services could be extended towards specific groups—for instance, women and ethnic minorities.

TECHNOCRATIC SOCIALISM—INDUSTRY AND INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY Towards a new industrial policy By early 1969 the beginnings of a sea-change can be detected that markedly enlivened ideas about public ownership and the role of the state. In an atmosphere in which past assumptions and commitments were increasingly open to question, the NEC appointed an Economic Strategy Study Group15 to examine the implications of the Platform’s defeat on prices and incomes policy at the Party conference the previous year. Amidst strong criticism of the policy’s inegalitarian nature, particularly its failure to take account of capital movements, distributed profits and gains from mergers, the Study Group endorsed demands on a range of issues from higher capital taxation to minimum wage legislation and the enforcement of tougher price controls. The final report, written in May 1969, was wide-ranging and the particular remedies proposed suggest that Stuart Holland had a hand in its authorship.16 The report provides the first example of the attempt to refashion elements of Party doctrine in the light of a fresh analysis of

SEEKING ALTERNATIVES 157

contemporary capitalism. Here the emergence of a new, multinational structure of industrial power was regarded as having significant implications for ‘community values’ and social equality.17 The government’s overconcentration on the need for a strong balance of payments had forced it to rely on a powerful private sector essentially hostile to many of the Party’s social and industrial ambitions with the result that ‘planning and techniques of intervention’ had been made ‘rather unfashionable’.18 Future Labour governments must consequently reassert central state control over the new industrial environment not purely in the interests of economic efficiency but because it was only by exercising such control that conditions could be created for the extension of democracy and greater equality. The concrete proposals in the paper were few but the key idea of a National Enterprise Board to oversee and control private sector investment, a central aspect of Holland’s later contributions, first made its appearance here. In the next four years the analysis took shape, stimulated by formal discussions in two new NEC committees: the Industrial Policy Sub-Committee and its satellite Public Sector Study Group, and the Economic Planning Working Group.19 The former became a Bennite stronghold and acted as the central forum for the Left’s refashioning of economic and industrial strategy. Less formal contacts also developed in the group emerging around Benn, the inner circle of which included Holland, Judith Hart, Eric Heffer, Benn’s political advisor Frances Morrell and, later, the Cambridge economist Francis Cripps who was to become his economic advisor. Benn himself set out his developing views in a Fabian tract published in September 1970, three months after the government fell. His intellectual debt to Holland was already visible in the acknowledgement of the multinational firm as ‘an entirely new type of economic organism’ and ‘a new source of real power no longer anchored to the geography of the nation state’.20 Benn believed these economic developments threatened equality, which could only be guaranteed by greater democracy and popular control of decision-making. The modern citizen was less prepared to accept ‘poverty, oppression and the denial of human equality than his forebears’ and this new-found autonomy held out the possibility of a more vibrant democratic politics. However, for human dignity and equality to remain primary socialist objectives private ownership had to be controlled in the wider public inter-

158 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

est; moreover ‘social action’ would be necessary to ensure that ‘money can no longer purchase advantages in health and education’.21 At this early stage, Benn claimed vaguely that the recipe for accomplishing these objectives lay in the use of technology to eliminate poverty, the efficient management of resources and the construction of constitutional safeguards against the abuse of power but as time went on the policy prescriptions became progressively more detailed. Holland contributed the major proposals, with support from Richard Pryke, as part of the work undertaken by the NEC’s Industrial Policy Committee. Two papers written by Holland for the Committee and the Economic Planning Working Group in 1972 set out the major components of economic and industrial policy.22 The most striking thing about these documents was the wholesale denunciation of what Holland labelled ‘Keynesian-style interventionism’ but which was really traditional centre-left indicative planning,23 He considered centre-left economic policies too weak to ‘encourage’ private sector corporations to increase their output at a rate sufficient to support the expansion of social spending and welfare. In time-honoured fashion Holland advocated the creation of a planning department to cover medium- and short-term planning— although, somewhat ambitiously, the Treasury would this time be abolished in order to avoid squabbles of the kind that had crippled the DEA.24 Further, he argued that the only way to ensure a rise in output was for the state to control key manufacturing firms by instituting the French system of ‘programme contracts’ (later called planning agreements) designed to exercise influence over investment and pricing policies and thus productivity.25 Certain enterprises would need to be brought into direct public ownership, but the combination of contracts and direct control would provide a ‘push effect’ sufficient to force private sector companies to match state-directed investment and pricing strategies, or risk losing their market share.26 To this end, Holland estimated that twenty new firms should be nationalized to join Rolls-Royce, BP and BAG. Once these firms were under state control, ‘about 33% of the top one hundred manufacturers’ turnover’ would be secured.27 In addition, all companies, whatever their condition of ownership, would have to submit their export, investment and pricing plans for government scrutiny—the idea being to provide a clearer picture of the state of the economy than that achieved by

SEEKING ALTERNATIVES 159

earlier attempts in the 1960s, particularly the abortive industrial surveys under the National Plan. These ideas were only briefly contested inside the Committee. Crosland believed that further public ownership was both unnecessary and unpopular, but was outnumbered. The Keynesian socialists had by this time split into ‘Croslandite’ and ‘Jenkinsite’ factions with a corresponding reduction in their effectiveness; indeed Jenkins, who resigned the Deputy Leadership in April 1972 in protest at the Party’s decision to hold a referendum over EEC membership, more or less absented himself from Party affairs for eighteen months.28 Leftwingers could therefore produce policy proposals virtually unopposed with obvious consequences for the tone of Party policy statements on economic and industrial strategy. The changes made to Labour’s Programme for Britain between 1972 and 1973 are testimony to the Left’s ability to control certain key policy committees. Although there were signs of the work undertaken by the Industrial Policy Committee, mainly in the form of suggestions for a State Holding Company with the power to acquire shares in private sector concerns, the 1972 document was comparatively mild. Labour’s Programme, 1973, however, was a very different affair. The section on ‘A New Economic Strategy’ started boldly with the statement that ‘the challenge in this Programme is a Socialist one’ and continued with the now famous claim that ‘we intend to bring about a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth, in favour of working people and their families’.29 Because ‘social reform [could] not itself bring about effective progress towards equality’ economic power ‘must be transferred from a small elite to the mass of the people’:30 to this effect structural inequality in ownership had to be attacked not simply by a programme of public ownership but by a more extensive assault on capitalist enterprise involving two specific policies developed by the Industrial Policy Committee. First, ‘planning agreements’ would be used to ‘encourage’ large companies to agree to pursue specific economic and social goals in return for a range of possible benefits such as government aid or permission to increase prices; a powerful National Enterprise Board (the preferred title for the State Holding Company) would be created to oversee the entire field of national and regional planning. The NEB would ‘for the first time, provide an instru-

160 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

ment for exercising control in the area of profitable manufacturing industry’.31 Second, although NEB holdings would be spread across the lead firms in different sectors of industry to promote competition and influence pricing and investment policies, the document made it clear that outright ownership of ‘some twentyfive of our largest manfacturers’ would be needed if the Board was to have sufficient power to influence private sector strategies. The ability ‘to match the rapidly changing structure of modern capitalism with [these] new means of intervention’, would allow the NEB to organize and plan economic strategy from employment policy through investment promotion to the spread of industrial democracy, and consequently to guarantee ‘the survival of Britain as an economic force’.32 These policies represent the technocratic dimension of the Left’s new socialist programme which persisted, albeit with diminishing force, into the 1980s in the form of the Alternative Economic Strategy. The importance of the approach lay in the attempt to recast traditional demands for ‘nationalization’ expressed by the Tribunites into a set of proposals which, though still owing much to the Left of the 1950s and even to elements of Dalton and Durbin’s work in the 1930s, put a new gloss on the perceived prerequisites of greater equality. But these ideas were only one part of the new equation: the Left also turned its attention to industrial democracy and democratic participation more generally. Industrial democracy The Bennites pushed the meaning of industrial democracy past demands for the extension of collective bargaining and greater local autonomy to full industrial self-management. Union leaders, mindful of their own position, had said little about selfmanagement, but the Left came to perceive it as a shopfloor brake upon capitalist power and a means of control that could work in harmony with central state direction of the mesoeconomy.33 This understanding lay at the heart of the Left’s developing doctrine in the early 1970s. Benn and Holland believed that the scope of collective bargaining needed to be extended in order to give workers a much greater influence over management decision-making but they also recognized that increased shopfloor power had to be integrated

SEEKING ALTERNATIVES 161

with wider economic needs. This view encouraged an exploration of the relationship between central state direction of the economy and self-management on the shop floor. Holland stressed the need for the state ‘to ensure direct control of the strategic decision making in a range of leading companies’ as well as to ‘coordinate the planned expansion of such firms to fulfil new economic and social objectives’34 while simultaneously recognizing the crucial importance of opening ‘the corridors of power to working people from firms, industries and services of strategic importance in the economy as a whole’.35 Planning agreements were of great strategic importance here. As bargained arrangements between government and meso-sector company managements, Holland claimed they would open a space for shopfloor participation in central economic decision-making. ‘If government and management in the leading public and private companies’, he argued, ‘are to bargain out the shape of things to come, workers’ representatives should have access to the same bargaining’. In this way ‘workers within companies would be able to take issues which affect them most directly from the shop floor to the corridors of Whitehall where state power has proverbially been concentrated’.36 In practice this enhanced workers’ power would admit them to a formally constituted tripartite bargaining process with management and the state. Furnished with accurate information from the planning agreements, workers would be able to participate equally in company decisions whether about expansion, rationalization or plant closure. In the case of the latter, planning agreements would have to include options for new jobs as part of a planned long-term strategy. The advantages afforded by the NEB’s powerful and wide-ranging role as overseer of British industrial performance meant that the government would be in an influential position to provide new investment and jobs in areas of high unemployment or where redundancies were anticipated. But the main point was to give much more power to the shop floor. Workers’ representatives were not to be subordinates in ‘a new framework of planning on the lines of the corporatist state’;37 to avoid this possibility shop stewards should not only negotiate local planning agreements but also personally represent their plant or company in the negotiation of overall company agreements in Whitehall. To emphasize their autonomy, the role of shop stewards in these negotiations would be separate from traditional trade union functions in free collective bargaining.

162 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

This line of reasoning carried Holland and Benn away from the position adopted by trade union leaders in the early 1970s. Rather than drawing on ideas of worker representation in management pursued by Jones in the 1960s, they were more impressed by Ken Coates and Tony Topham at the Institute of Workers’ Control. The Institute provided shopfloor activists, and academics, with a forum for the discussion of radical approaches to industrial democracy in the late 1960s and the 1970s. Although generally supportive of trade unions the Institute’s leading figures were sceptical about the interventionist and representative roles hitherto played by union leaderships. In particular they were concerned that leaders, even with the decentralist sympathies of Jones, regarded ‘participation’ as a means of humanizing factory conditions rather than speeding ‘the process of transition to socialist social relations under which assembly-line and machine shop labour is progressively abolished’.38 The object was to get rid of management as a separate entity altogether. To this end Coates and Topham looked with qualified approval towards industrial self-management as this had evolved in Tito’s Yugoslavia. Holland shared the interest, though all three believed the Yugoslav system, characterized by its setting in a decentralized market economy, to be incomplete. Without a central coordinating authority to ensure ‘strategic planning… regional balance, international competitiveness, relatively stable prices and greater inter-personal equality’ the market system was unstable. Self-managed enterprises needed to be publicly owned or, at the very least, subject to public control via planning agreements. Holland placed his faith in the latter because ‘tripartite bargaining in the mesoeconomic sector between workers’ representatives, management and government can bridge the gap between over-centralized and under-centralized planning’.39 Benn attempted to operationalize these beliefs in his support for a number of worker cooperatives and allied initiatives when Secretary of State for Trade and Industry between 1974 and 1975. The creation of the Triumph motorcycle cooperative at Meriden, the four years of workers’ self-management at IPD/ Fisher Bendix, discussions with workers at BAC and Ferranti about the nature of industrial democracy, and support for the Lucas Aerospace Combine Committee were all instances in which workers controlled, or sought advice on how to control, their own enterprises with support from Benn’s department.40 As he

SEEKING ALTERNATIVES 163

later made clear in his discussion of the Ferranti case, Benn believed that where workers in the union movement ‘worked with full-time officials and established cross-links by joint shop stewards’ committees and consultative committees’ to evolve a company strategy they deserved government support. He echoed Holland in his conviction that ‘the whole purpose of the planning agreement is to introduce [the] democratic tripartite element into industrial policy’. The decentralized approach marked, in his view, a significant departure from past Labour practice: the relationship between trade unions and government could not be shaped solely from the top but had to be ‘matched and married by links between ministers and union officials, shop stewards, joint shop stewards’ committees—even international links.41 In this way active participation, and a greater equality of status, could be achieved. Little in the above formulations extended discussions of equality past the industrial arena and indeed leftwing technocrats seemed typically uninterested in the policy details of wider social equality. Two attempts, however, were made to link selfmanagement and greater participation to broader equality issues. The first concerned a greater equality of incomes and was little more than an adjunct of industrial policy. The second, dealt with below, related to education. Because it held out the prospect of equal status between partners to planning agreements, self-management implied income equality as a result of the elimination of the exploitative capitalist labour contract. Holland argued that self-management would reduce the effects of alienation because workers would cease to regard material rewards as the sole criterion of job satisfaction and therefore be less concerned about the maintenance of differentials.42 The gradual move towards equal incomes, however, would need to be accompanied by other measures, most obviously the taxation of wealth in order to deprive owners and shareholders of their traditional economic advantage. Redistributory policies occupied a more important position than usual in technocratic thinking because incomes policy was anathema to leftwingers after the experience of the 1960s. Coupled with taxation, a socialist approach to income restraint would involve the ‘self-control’ of prices and profits at source, ‘within the companies’ as workers became more powerful, less alienated and so less preoccupied by material gain. Only at this stage could

164 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

a Labour government legitimately ask for ‘long-term voluntary wage restraint’.43 The Left and education policy in the 1970s For a brief period in the early 1970s, Tony Benn, his wife Caroline, well known for her work on the development of comprehensive education in the 1960s,44 and others like Brian Jackson attempted to reshape Labour’s education policy. The NEC had not paid great attention to this area during the Wilson governments, most of the important decisions being taken in Cabinet.45 A new Science and Education Sub-Committee was created in 1971, however, as part of the Executive’s attempt to regain a central role in policy formulation after Labour’s election defeat.46 Requested to examine a wide range of issues including positive discrimination, the education of women and the possible contents of a new Education Act, the Committee started by acknowledging the stringent criticisms Jackson had made in his influential New Statesman article.47 Jackson’s points about the lack of nursery education, and the failure to raise the school leaving age and fully resource comprehensive reform formed the basis of the Committee’s discussions. The main elements of the new approach were initially advanced in January 1972 in a draft statement which brought together the policies and principles on which future progress in education should be based. Most significantly, equality in education was no longer primarily linked to equality of opportunity.48 Though by no means Bennite, Committee members like Shirley Williams and Tyrell Burgess joined others in the conviction that the nonselective, comprehensive principle should be pursued with greater fervour than had been the case in the 1960s—with all the implications this held for a wider equality of access to educational resources. There was a hint of Crosland’s ‘strong’ definition of equal opportunity here, but ‘equal access’ as interpreted in the early 1970s demanded an open and participatory education service capable of enabling pupils and students to understand the importance of (and operate in the context of) democratic decisionmaking. This theme suffused the Committee’s Final Report, completed in October 1972, and subsequently incorporated into Labour’s Programme for Britain. The meritocratic element in

SEEKING ALTERNATIVES 165

equality of opportunity was clearly displaced, the Committee concluding that the idea ‘has not proved, by itself, an adequate basis to meet the varying needs of people or to compensate for the social factors which limit the ability of the majority to take advantage of the opportunities offered’. Instead, democratic participation ought to become ‘a major theme in education reform in the 70s’.49 ‘Democracy’ implied a widening of access to education at all levels. Universal nursery provision should be a major commitment as, of course, should fully comprehensive schooling and the abolition of the independent sector. A revised examinations system would also be necessary to heal existing social divisions created by the segregation of academic and vocational studies. The Committee recognized the right of children ‘to participate in the examination system’, but stressed the value of teacher-based exams adapted to the needs of particular schools as opposed to the prevailing structure, considered too closely tied to ‘university entrance requirements’.50 With exams playing a less important role, admission to higher education could also become ‘comprehensive’, allowing access to education throughout life. Labour’s Programme announced that the distinctions between further, higher and adult education would be abolished and replaced by a single adult education system.51 Those institutions which developed flexible patterns of delivery to extend access to part-timers and sandwich course students would attract the most resources, consistent with ‘the principle that there should be no discrimination in the support given to students by some notion of academic status’.52 The emphasis in this sector—and indeed throughout the system—was to be upon access, participation and outcome. Had it not been for the efforts of the Science and Education Committee and particularly of Caroline Benn who, on her husband’s admission, stimulated his interest and enabled him to represent the Committee’s views in Cabinet,53 it is doubtful whether the Bennite flavour of the proposals would have been taken so far. Even so, the attempt to recast educational equality in the light of the 1964–70 experience was unsuccessful. New education policies were not a high priority in the period immediately after Labour’s return to power in February 1974 and thereafter Party discussions about education ran into a wall of concern about standards and ‘relevance’. A combination of public spending cuts

166 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

and rightwing counterattacks on comprehensive schooling forced Callaghan to try to regain the initiative in his ‘Ruskin Speech’, delivered in October 1977.54 Education should ensure basic standards and fit pupils for the future world of work, a significant shift reflected in Labour’s Green Paper, Education in Schools, issued by the Education Secretary, Shirley Williams, in July 1977. Williams’s earlier predilections notwithstanding, the paper made few references to equality of any kind, stressing instead the links between education, industry and economy, and arguing that ‘young people need to reach maturity with a basic understanding of the economy and the activities, especially manufacturing industry, which are necessary for the creation of…wealth’.55 Leftwingers fought a rearguard action against this developing orthodoxy, particularly Benn in Cabinet informed and supported by Caroline, and the Socialist Educational Association, long associated with the campaign for comprehensive schooling, from the conference floor.56 But in the post-Ruskin period the objectives set out in the early 1970s were reduced to the defence of the nonselective comprehensive principle. Despite protestations to the contrary, Benn believed Williams and Callaghan to be ‘working hand-in-glove to introduce reactionary education policies’57 and tried to exclude Williams’s Education Bill, based on the Green Paper, from the 1977 Queen’s Speech. The delaying tactic worked,58 but the general atmosphere of retrenchment had pushed the focus of education policy away from ideas of democracy and participation towards more limited objectives.

THE DEFEAT OF THE TECHNOCRATIC ALTERNATIVE Bennite technocratic socialism was disrupted by a number of factors which ultimately forced it into retreat. Increasing economic difficulties and the political fall-out these caused, not least among trade union leaders, added to existing doctrinal struggles in the Party and undermined the proposals even as they were being developed. There were, moreover, theoretical problems intrinsic to Bennite doctrine which did not escape the notice of certain critics for, although there was some truth in the judgement that the AES was ‘an enormous advance on mere slogans’,59 it nevertheless contained a number of difficulties that justified a sceptical view of the Left’s claim to have provided Labour with a contem-

SEEKING ALTERNATIVES 167

porary egalitarian programme. The Left’s contribution to Party doctrine in the 1970s, then, was undermined both from ‘without’ and ‘within’. The Left and the Labour government The immediate economic and political backdrop to the Left’s marginalization and the intensification of Party strife that this involved was the seemingly intractable economic difficulties which confronted Labour on the Party’s return to power. Middlemas has written of the period between 1974 and 1976 that individuals who lived through it recall a dangerous, disorienting time when what counted most was to survive. To recapture the feeling of being without landmarks, somewhere between panic and exaltation, requires an effort of imagination comparable to understanding the consequences of an immense natural disaster, eruption or earthquake.60 Whether the collapse of the Bretton Woods Agreement, the oilprice shock and the obvious inability of Keynesian economic management to deal with rising unemployment, high wage claims and falling productivity were capable of producing emotions quite of this order is arguable. What is less open to question is the fact that severe economic difficulties disrupted the post-war complacency of many developed capitalist economies, creating a hiatus in which accepted economic nostrums were openly challenged. Britain, as Middlemas suggests, was slower than many countries to start this process, the underlying reason in his opinion being ‘the reliance of the Labour government, sections of (mainly stateowned) industry, and almost all trade unions, on an accepted version of the past’.61 Continuing subscription to the main features of the post-war settlement consequently delayed the rethinking of economic policy for at least two years. Middlemas’s statement is much too sweeping, at least in the sense that it presents an overhomogeneous picture of Labour’s doctrinal position. Certain members of the government challenged unthinking loyalty to the Keynesian consensus early on, as Joel Barnett has made clear,62 and while it is broadly true that Healey and the Treasury ministers had to wage a protracted struggle with significant elements of the Party throughout the

168 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

1970s, the nature of that struggle varied depending on the protagonists. Leftwingers advocated the AES which they regarded specifically as a means of escaping the deadweight of Keynesian socialism; on the other hand, remaining Keynesian socialists like Crosland were reluctant to abandon demand management and high public spending in favour of more deflationary methods.63 So far as the Left was concerned, an overwhelming majority of the leadership were completely opposed to the proposals for economic and industrial policy and had set about neutralizing them before Labour’s return to power. Efforts to draw the teeth of the 1973 Programme proposals began in the run-up to the Party conference of that year. Initial attempts made to remove the commitment to bring the top twenty-five companies into public ownership under the aegis of the National Enterprise Board were successful but only to the extent that no such promise appeared in the Party’s election manifesto.64 The tortuous debates about the issue, and the fact that Wilson had to threaten to veto the NEC’s proposals, testified to the Left’s strength at this time. Leadership attacks on leftwing policies became more sustained after the election when the assault began in earnest. Throughout the summer of 1974 the Cabinet’s Industrial Development Committee scaled down the power of the proposed National Enterprise Board and the capacity of planning agreements to provide the forceful economic control envisaged by Holland.65 The appointment of Sir Donald (later Lord) Ryder, subsequently described by one critic as ‘a successful businessman of no known radical views’, as first chairman of the National Enterprise Board was a signal to industry that the government did not intend to be vindictive—a sign reinforced by the decision to make the NEB’s powers to extend public ownership into profitable industries consequent upon the agreement of the industries concerned. The decision, declared in the government’s White Paper of August 1974, to make planning agreements between government and mesosector companies voluntary, effectively removed the threat of direct state intervention in large national enterprises. Moreover, the agreements were to be bipartite, between government and companies, with trade unions reduced to a consultative role, far below anything hoped for by Holland and Benn.66 Benn was forced to acknowledge on August 2nd that the ‘very bitter struggle’ over the status of planning agreements in Cabinet had resulted ‘in an important defeat for me’ although, curiously, he

SEEKING ALTERNATIVES 169

appeared initially to underestimate the extensive damage done to the NEB proposal.67 Against the background of impending economic crisis the majority of the Cabinet retreated not just from the radicalism of the 1973 Programme, which even figures like Michael Foot, then Secretary of State for Employment, had come to regard as entirely out of the question, but also from more orthodox Keynesian socialist policies. The 1975 budget witnessed the first serious attempts to cut public spending and call for wage restraint, Healey demanding cuts of £1 billion at the pre-Budget Cabinet meeting of March 25th.68 Benn’s warnings about the abandonment of the Social Contract, a sharp fall in investment and slump were ignored even by Barbara Castle who acknowledged that ‘all of us [were] conscious that something had to be done to stop the inflationary drift’.69 The trade union retreat Waning support for the Left in Cabinet was reflected elsewhere in the movement, most notably among union leaders like Jones and Scanlon who came to see that little was to be gained from serious disagreements with a Labour government. This much was clear even before Labour returned to power. Minds were concentrated by Ted Heath’s Conservative administration which had tried to enforce an incomes policy and restrict hallowed union rights in an Industrial Relations Act beside which In Place of Strife paled into insignificance.70 Discussions in the newly created TUG—Labour Party Liaison Committee,71 initially convened for the purpose of coordinating opposition to the Act, saw the emergence of a closer relationship between leadership and TUC, at its most visible in the formulation of the ‘Social Contract’. This agreement initially appeared to favour the unions. The joint statement, Economic Policy and the Cost of Living, suggested that wage rises were not the major cause of inflation and established that a future Labour government would act to control prices, investment and capital movements, as well as implement industrial democracy. In return for these undoubted concessions the unions promised, in the vaguest terms, to commit themselves to ‘a wide-ranging agreement which is necesssary to control inflation’.72 But two factors quickly undermined the unions’ strong position

170 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

and compelled Jones and Scanlon, prime movers in the Liaison Committee for the implementation of many of the proposals made by the Benn’s Industrial Policy Committee,73 to re-evaluate their commitment to the Left. First, the TUC’s general failure to control union wage claims and the consequent scramble which helped to push inflation to over 25 per cent in 1975 forced leaders to recognize that they were jeopardizing the life of the government. From this time they accepted—indeed fashioned - a rather different understanding of the Social Contract that acknowledged the need for voluntary wage control. TUG agreement to a flat-rate £6 pay increase for 1975–76, steered through by Jones, to be followed by limited percentage increases the following year, resulted in bitter disagreements between union leaders and the Left of the PLP, and plainly contradicted the spirit of the Left’s economic strategy.74 There were, second, positive reasons to support a government that had, under adverse circumstances, demonstrated commitment to trade union demands. The Trades Unions and Labour Relations Act, passed in 1975, abolished Heath’s industrial relations legislation, while the Industry Act, though a shadow of its original Bennite incarnation, nevertheless recognized organized labour’s desire to influence the running of economic and industrial policy. Moreover, in the environment of increasing economic hardship and spiralling unemployment which characterized the mid-to-late 1970s, it became clear to union leaders that what Dorfman has described as ‘the trade-off pattern’ could deliver at least some benefits for trade unionists no longer guaranteed by free collective bargaining.75 In this climate it was not surprising that once-militant figures like Scanlon became fearful about undermining the government’s increasingly fragile hold upon power. Labour lost its slender working majority in 1976 and union leaders’ anxieties were heightened by the increasingly obvious fact that a future Conservative administration would have little truck with them. None of this was helpful to the Left. As Benn acknowledged of the £6 pay policy, ‘when you have the Government and the City and the TUG all supporting the policy for different reasons, it is difficult for the Left to be heard’.76 A further important retreat from earlier ambitions came over union attitudes to industrial democracy. Despite Jones’s evangelism, many leaders were chary of far-reaching commitments in

SEEKING ALTERNATIVES 171

this area especially where these smacked of self-management or workers’ control. While all could agree with Vie Feather that ‘any development towards industrial democracy must be based firmly on trade union principles’, which ruled out both the German Mitbestimmung system and ‘a works council situation which is not strictly related to trade union machinery’,77 distaste for these arrangements (normally regarded as favourable to employers) also included opposition to more radical notions of full self— management. The behaviour of union leaders towards the Combine Committee at Lucas Aerospace, for example, suggested a positive hostility to forms of industrial organization that appeared to circumvent national negotiating machinery whatever the political make-up of the union leadership.78 Interest in selfmanagement was anyway sidelined by inter-union differences about the much more moderate issue of worker representatives on company boards.79 It was to resolve these disagreements, as well as to take account of the (universally hostile) views of employers, that the Committee of Enquiry chaired by Sir Alan (now Lord) Bullock was appointed in December 1975. In view of the above it is not surprising that Benn dismissed the Committee as ‘just corporatist’, before going on to vent his frustration at the general inability to surmount existing divisions: ‘the CBI is divided, the TUG is divided, the Government is divided, and after four years in office we haven’t even stimulated a discussion’.80 There was no opening here for the kind of ideas that interested leftwingers, who became progressively more critical of their union allies. Benn apparently had his doubts as early as 1973 when he observed that Jones ‘far from being a left-wing radical, has settled down into a central position which could best be described at the moment as the Healey stance’81—a harsh judgement in view of Jones’s support for Benn and his policies at the time of the latter’s removal from the Department of Industry.82 Jones, however, had never been convinced by self-management, and by the later 1970s, just before his retirement, was content to argue for the conclusions of Bullock’s majority report which advocated the inclusion of workers’ representatives on management boards while not suggesting any direct usurpation of management functions.83

172 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

The EEC Economic crisis and increasing trade union pragmatism would in all likelihood have been sufficient severely to undermine leftwing policies in the 1970s. There was, however, one further factor which not only fundamentally damaged the AES, but demonstrated the Left’s serious overestimation of its popular appeal. The failure of the ‘No’ campaign against British membership of the European Community, in which Benn figured prominently, had both immediate and long-term repercussions. Benn was ambivalent about the Common Market. He had been in favour of entry in 1965 on the grounds that an economically weak Britain would be better off in Europe than it would surviving as ‘a US protectorate’84 and, fired by the vision of an ‘integrated European technology’ to complement Mintech’s work at home, supported Wilson’s application for membership in 1966– 67. By 1969, however, conscious that the issue was electorally unpopular, he had begun to think about a referendum, although he did not openly propose this course until November 1970 when he released a letter to his Bristol East constituency on the subject to the press.85 For a time he remained formally in favour of entry, following popular endorsement by a referendum until 1973, but the logic of the Left’s economic and industrial strategy with its emphasis on Britain’s control of its own economic destiny seemed to preclude close economic ties with Brussels. By the time Benn became Secretary of State for Industry in February 1974 he was a committed anti-marketeer. Ironically, the idea of a referendum, initially derided by the Shadow Cabinet, had given the Party a suitable weapon with which to oppose Heath’s application for entry in 1970. Coupled with the promise to re-negotiate the terms of membership, it also allowed Wilson to offset mounting leftwing pressure for complete withdrawal—and probably to retain his leadership.86 The referendum result of June 1975, however, which yielded a two-to-one majority in favour of continued membership, backfired on Benn, who had confidently predicted a large ‘No’ vote throughout the campaign, giving Wilson his much-needed excuse to undermine the Left in Cabinet. Benn was immediately moved from the Department of Industry to Energy, and replaced by Eric Varley while Judith Hart was removed from Overseas Development. Eric Heffer, Minister of State for Industry, had already been sacked in

SEEKING ALTERNATIVES 173

April for defying guidelines for ministers and speaking against Europe in the Commons.87 More fundamentally, the outcome of the referendum undermined the credibility of the AES. Premised on the ability of a national government to remain in direct control of its economy without interference from international capital, continued membership of the EEC raised the spectre, explored most articulately by Holland, of a weak supranational body inhibiting potentially stronger national opposition to multinational penetration.88 The ultimate fear was of a powerful corporate capitalism ‘entrenching traditional privileges and placing the interests of the majority in the hands of unaccountable executive oligarchies’.89 It was precisely to counter this danger that Holland and others had looked to both the central state and the unionized shop floor as the agents most capable of controlling the multinational threat. A programme for equality? Political and economic factors and their particular effects on Party, unions and government largely account for the Left’s lack of headway in the 1970s. They cannot account, however, for the defects in the ideas themselves identified both by Keynesian socialists and the extra-Parliamentary Left. Leftwing technocrats attempted to blend central state direction with a fresh approach to issues of participation and control to produce a single egalitarian package. Planning agreements were the major method of reconciling central and ‘local’ interests, but it is not clear how they could have achieved this. It has been pointed out that if Holland’s much-feared meso-economic corporations were sufficiently powerful to pose a threat to governments pursuing Keynesian social democratic policies, they would surely take even greater exception to a government whose economic policies appeared more inimical.90 Any such government would have to be extraordinarily powerful and entirely dedicated to overcoming private sector resistance, but as the period after 1975 demonstrated, Labour was keen to reassure both industry and the City about its good intentions. Arguments similar in intent, if not tone, were advanced by the extra-Parliamentary Left in the early 1980s.91 Some commentators believed the Left’s analysis to be fundamentally misconceived. Wilfred Beckerman, writing in the NewStatesman in 1973, criticized Holland for elevating certain

174 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

‘tendencies’ into economic truths. For example, the increasing degree of industrial concentration, not itself in dispute, could be an effect of import penetration and falling profit margins rather than aggressive acts allowing near-monopolies to price-fix and retain profits sufficient to give independence from governmentimposed fiscal or monetary incentives.92 Beckerman also pointed to the vagueness of the planning objectives and particularly the relationship between the highly specific information expected from companies party to planning agreements and the extremely general uses to which the information was to be put. He was equally scathing about civil servants’ abilities to make sense of company plans and the time it would take to discuss and implement agreements in an ever-shifting, unstable economic environment.93 Holland attempted to counter these claims by restating the central elements of his analysis of the power of the ‘monopoly multinationals’ and their ability to avoid state control,94 but the debate highlighted in academic terms the deep-seated misgivings among elements of the Party about the economic analysis behind the AES and about the capacity of the recommended policies to achieve the Left’s ambitious objectives.95 Further difficulties with the AES concerned the fine balance of power between central state and decentralized participation. Even if a government managed to harness the meso-sector and break the grip of the multinationals, the resulting degree of economic and political dominance could potentially threaten the prospect of a balanced relationship between central state control and democratic participation, both in industry and society as a whole. Fears about such a prospect were expressed by Keynesian socialists who saw a threat to liberty in the destruction of the mixed economy. The free market was valuable because ‘it [secured] a diffusion of responsibility…and because it is a more efficient way of matching output to consumers’ choices than any other system yet tried’.96 The marketplace acted as an antidote to state ‘tyranny’ although it naturally needed to be held in check because it harboured potentially negative implications for equality. Politicians like Shirley Williams wanted a mixed economy to balance state power and the market, equality and liberty. If a degree of sympathy existed for the idea of a National Enterprise Board and even for a suitably reduced form of planning agreements, it was contingent upon both being used to offset the detrimental effects of market activity by fostering a sense of ‘national and social purpose’.97

SEEKING ALTERNATIVES 175

The proposals should not be used as initial steps towards a centrally planned economy. The extra-Parliamentary Left, conversely, dismissed the AES as both reformist and corporatist. Any hope of a balanced relationship between central state and decentralized producer interests was Utopian because the power of the state, coupled with compliant trade union leaderships, to enforce corporatist solutions on the working class meant that the programme would become deeply implicated in propping up an ailing capitalist system. Any ‘balance’ between the state and producer interests would consequently be a sham.98 Those who did see a point in supporting the AES only did so because it held out the hope of greater autonomy at the point of production, thus bringing nearer the prospect of working-class power. The difficulty was that, where shopfloor workers succeeded in gaining greater workplace autonomy, there existed the possibility, in the contemporary capitalist industrial environment, that sectional producer interests might outweigh considerations of the greater good. Writing in 1979, Hodgson saw little evidence of class loyalty and warned that ‘we should be under no illusions about the low level of political consciousness of the working class at the present time’.99 Eric Hobsbawm observed in similar vein that the nature of trade union militancy in the late 1960s and 1970s had been ‘almost entirely economist’, and claimed that ‘economist trade union consciousness may at times set workers against each other rather than establish wider patterns of solidarity’100—a view recently endorsed by Middlemas, an historian of a different persuasion.101

TECHNOCRATIC SOCIALISM IN THE EARLY 1980s Despite suffering severe political defeats, leftwingers did not radically alter their views in the period after the 1979 election because, in their collective opinion, there was no need to. Effective banishment from government during the 1970s, combined with the Party’s comprehensive defeat at the polls on a manifesto from which their policies had been virtually excised,102 allowed the Left to continue to believe in the efficacy of its untried ideas. Far from questioning the basis of its policies, the response was to try to ensure their future prosecution by wresting control of the

176 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

policy-making process from the leadership and vesting it in the NEC and conference floor—a task pursued to the point of obsession in the two years following the 1979 election.103 The fleeting success achieved was in large part due to splits amongst Party moderates following the 1979 defeat and the, often confused, acquiescence of some trade unions in a strategy that seemed to offer hope for the much-desired but illusory combination of free collective bargaining and full employment.104 The vagaries of the debates about intra-party democracy need not be rehearsed in detail here, but they had a deadening effect on doctrinal development which did not go unnoticed. Michael Rustin, writing in 1980, declared that ‘the choice of the ground of the constitution of the Party on which to have the post-election argument was…an indication of the gravest weakness in the analysis and strategic grasp of the Labour left’.105 Constitutional struggle was extraordinarily insular and not matched to the broader challenges facing Labour; ‘thinking’, he argued, ‘needs to be much more outward-looking than this’. There were reasons for the narrow approach. The late 1970s and early 1980s was a period in which the Left grew more quickly than at any time since the 1930s, but numerical strength belied a number of weaknesses. It was, for instance, extraordinarily heterogeneous. Many activists in the 1970s and early 1980s were recent recruits, distinguished from older members partly by age but also by education and occupation.106 Their interests and demands were markedly different. Furthermore, a large number of women entered the Party at this time, attracted by the Left’s (partial) acknowledgement of the importance of feminist issues and by the prospect of using the proposed constitutional procedures to transform Labour into a vehicle for advancing their central concerns. Scope for ‘single issue’ interests was pushed even wider as leftwing activists, keen to harness support from outside traditional Party confines, tried through the Labour Coordinating Committee (LCC) to forge links with a range of groups such as CPAG, Amnesty International and Friends of the Earth.107 Benn summed up the Left’s new character in his comment to Eric Hobsbawm that ‘the Labour Party must align itself with the women’s movement, the black movement, the environmental movement, the peace movement, the rural radical movement, [and] the religious movements that object to monetarism and militarism’.108 However, while activists and the groups and individu-

SEEKING ALTERNATIVES 177

als affiliated through the LCC were mobilized with consummate skill in the cause of greater intra-party democracy it was primarily this objective, rather than agreement about socialist doctrine, that gave them coherence. Echoing Benn, leading leftwingers could always derive a much broader equality of status from his demands but it was far from clear how this desirable state could be reached—unless somehow through the AES.109 To be sure, the AES remained the central tenet of leftwing doctrine but it was frequently criticized for not addressing sectional needs. Michelle Barrett, a leading figure on the Marxist-Feminist Left, scorned the idea that the Left’s objective of ‘full employment’ included women, while Anna Coote referred to the neglect of difficulties thrown up by the kind of work—paid and unpaid— that women were forced to undertake and the degree of economic dependence and control to which they were subjected. ‘The AES’, she declared, ‘does not address itself to such matters…in spite of its radical pretensions, it is embedded in the same old-fashioned patriarchal values that inform and distort all mainstream political thinking today.’110 These criticisms made little impact on the Labour Left. Labour’s Programme, 1982, which represented the Left’s last and most developed attempt to get its policies accepted by the Party, just as the balance of opinion was beginning to turn against it, gave few concessions to new sectional demands. Read in conjunction with the Programmes of 1973 and 1976 it is hard to distinguish any evidence of new thinking at all. The nearest thing to a new departure lay in the greater recognition of women’s role in the home and the need for ‘shorter working hours and more flexible work patterns [to] enable both sexes to better combine family and work responsibilities’,111 but the emphasis placed on the family and the continued separation of private and public spheres understandably angered feminists. Other policies for gender and racial equality had already been discussed in the 1976 document and anyway could be characterized as deeply flawed. Suggestions, for example, to redistribute income across the genders by altering the tax and benefit systems, and to ensure equality of access to education for all children regardless of class, gender or race, remained firmly in the unchallenging mainstream tradition of collectivist welfare provision. Meanwhile the AES reappeared in all its glory, enhancing the Programme’s familiar technocratic character.

178 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

Failure to accommodate new demands can be attributed to a deficiency characteristic of technocratic socialism. In the late 1970s and early 1980s leftwingers failed to make real headway with ideas of participatory democracy because, as one contemporary put it, ‘a fresh and convincing vision would [have required] a move away from the traditional framework of Labour Party debates, away from the issue of what a Labour government would do with the state’.112 There was an irony here. Because the preoccupation with participation during the 1970s had been almost exclusively concerned with the economic and industrial arenas, loyalty to the AES inhibited, if it did not actually deny, wider possibilities for grass-roots democracy. On one view ‘the Labour Left still relied too much on Clause Four of the Party constitution…but did not make clear how this objective was relevant in the last quarter of the twentieth century’.113 Put another way, the attempt to encompass the old goal of a state-guided, publicly owned economy with much broader demands for a participatory equality in one egalitarian vision was ultimately confounded by a typically technocratic identification with one half of the equation.

Chapter 8

Failing to seek alternatives: qualitative socialists and Keynesians in the 1970s

Whatever the verdict on their interpretation of technocratic socialism, leftwingers enjoyed a tangible, if fleeting, sense that history in the form of capitalist crisis and rising industrial discontent might be on their side. Qualitative and Keynesian socialists, on the other hand, found themselves confronted by an economic and social environment that threatened their most cherished assumptions. The first part of this chapter considers Peter Towns-end’s defence of egalitarian fellowship in an increasingly cold climate while the second examines the demise of Keynesian socialism. Faced with internal disagreement and a hostile economic and political environment this strand of thought was effectively destroyed by the end of the 1970s.

CHANGING PERCEPTIONS OF EQUALITY IN SOCIAL POLICY Poverty, equality and the qualitative ideal Changing understandings of social equality during the later 1960s and 1970s were most clearly reflected in attitudes to poverty and redistribution where there was discernible disillusion amongst those once persuaded by the qualitative vision. After the founding of the CPAG in 1965 the Titmuss group fragmented. Titmuss himself became Deputy Chairman of the Supplementary Benefits Commission (SBC) in 1968, adopting in the process a more pragmatic approach to social security policy, specifically meanstesting1 and the wage-stop, than his academic writings implied. 179

180 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

Townsend and the CPAG, for whom the SBC was a major target of criticism, were especially critical of the wage-stop because it meant that those on low pay received benefit below the SBC’s own poverty line. To Titmuss’s annoyance, they campaigned vigorously against the policy, regarding it as evidence of the Commission’s refusal to deal with significant causes of poverty.2 Abel-Smith, meanwhile, removed himself from this internecine strife, becoming closely involved first with Crossman and later with Barbara Castle in the minutiae of national superannuation. The detailed work on the intricacies of this extremely complex policy meant there was little time to continue the role of social critic that he had played in the mid-1960s. He did not help Townsend in his ambitious investigation into the nature and extent of poverty in Britain—a task subsequently undertaken by Townsend alone.3 For his part, Townsend tried to keep faith with earlier ideas. While all three continued to be involved in Party policy formulation, remaining members of the NEC’s Social Policy Committee, he alone made a concerted effort to defend the vision that had characterized the group’s work in the 1950s. The Titmuss group’s effective demise meant that the new Social Policy Sub-Committee, appointed in 1971, was less a direct vehicle for Titmuss-style social policy than its predecessors, and in this sense had less coherence as a potential vehicle for thinking out new approaches to social equality. In addition to Titmuss, Abel-Smith and Townsend it included a heterogeneous mix of senior Party figures like Crossman (until he died in 1974), others like Judith Hart—the only Bennite sympathizer—as well as David Ennals and Shirley Williams, both associated with Labour’s Keynesian wing.4 The Committee, moreover, was encumbered with past proposals, notably Crossman’s Pensions Bill, on the verge of enactment when the government fell in 1970, which did not predispose it to new thinking. Where new proposals were considered they came from those disappointed by the failure to redistribute wealth in the 1960s. Hart, for example, tried to persuade the Committee to abandon the insurance principle for pensions in favour of income-related contributions collected through the Inland Revenue. As a Minister of State at the DHSS in the late 1960s, Hart had sided with the CPAG’s advocacy of ‘clawback’ procedures for newly increased family allowances as a means of guaranteeing the universal character of the benefit. She now argued in similar vein

FAILING TO SEEK ALTERNATIVES 181

that pension entitlement should not rest on the amount of past individual contributions but on specific categories of need.5 Like many persuaded of the efficacy of tax-benefit systems, Hart claimed that her plan would be simple to administer, not least because it could be expanded to include all forms of longterm support, therefore removing the need for a separate supplementary benefits system.6 But her main intention was to detach contributions from a specific entitlement. If this could be accomplished the tax system could be used to distribute to the most needy those resources currently funding the pensions of the betteroff. These ideas took national superannuation some way beyond the Titmuss proposals of the 1950s7 and for this reason the initiative was swiftly dismissed by Crossman, David Ennals and Brian O’Malley, who argued that it would be too difficult to change the Party’s established approach to superannuation so completely.8 Nevertheless, her views stand as one example of thinking that continued to look towards a potentially transformative role for social policy. Peter Townsend was the major exponent of this ‘maximalist’ view. The government’s failure to pursue its social policy commitments encouraged him to develop the idea of a ‘social plan’, designed to integrate provision across the full range of social services, with the intention of making welfare provision the overriding priority of economic policy.9 He drew on the idea of planned positive discrimination to combat inequalities in specific services and defined localities initially employed by Plowden, but expanded it to take account of policy areas other than education while also removing its association with locality. In Townsend’s view, prevailing patterns of poverty were such that even identifiable ‘black spots’ were ‘unlikely to contain more than a fifth or perhaps a tenth of those in poverty’.10 An ‘institutional approach‘ was required that would first identify the level of needs across a range of service areas and then implement an integrated strategy of social provision on a planned basis, which would mean ‘bringing certain government departments together which are not accustomed to working with each other’.11 These ideas were pursued with vigour in the 1970s. Labour’s lack of interest in prioritizing social planning made Townsend extremely critical of both the Wilson and Callaghan administrations. Writing in the aftermath of Labour’s defeat in 1979, he claimed that ‘the most crucial problem was the failure to define

182 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

social objectives in any detail and set up the administrative apparatus to control and monitor social planning so that the management of the economy could be properly informed’.12 Singled out for particularly critical treatment were the Treasury’s domination of social expenditure and the failure to accomplish the social goals that Townsend, Titmuss and others had advocated for many years—‘positive action to concert incomes, tax, pricing, subsidy, employment and benefit policies’, for example.13 Townsend believed a Social Development Council, consisting of outside specialists as well as consumers’ and service-providers’ representatives, should be responsible for examining both ‘expenditure priorities between spending departments’ and ‘the wider balance of priorities among public and private social services, employment programmes and fiscal and incomes policies’.14 This rubric would make the Council sufficiently powerful to contain Treasury influence and thus to reverse the prevailing assumptions about the role and purpose of economic policy. Welfare had to have priority. Institutional change on the lines prescribed would allow the welfare state’s role to be recast in conformity with an updated version of Titmuss-style social policy which continued to privilege ‘social’ over ‘fiscal’ and ‘occupational’ forms of provision. For Townsend this entailed a continuing commitment to universalism and consequently the abolition of means-tested and contributory benefits in favour of a benefits system funded out of general taxation, the raising of child benefit to take account of the full costs of bringing up a child and the abolition of tax relief on contributions to occupational pensions. Conceptually, the continued faith in qualitative socialism was epitomized by Townsend’s obsession with the related issues of poverty and inequality, and the primacy given to the latter. Poverty had to be defined as relative because ‘need is relative to social institutions and practices’.15 As he had insisted many times, absolute definitions of poverty, because they took no account of economic growth, allowed governments to claim that fewer and fewer people were really ‘poor’, which meant that increasing social inequality could be ignored.16 The elimination of relative poverty would, by definition, lead to the erosion of social and economic inequalities together with the institutions and assumptions which sustained them. Speculating on how such an objective might be achieved, Townsend looked towards a conception of ‘distributional justice’ which acknowledged the importance of

FAILING TO SEEK ALTERNATIVES 183

enlarged access to resources as well as a greater equality of material distribution; it also implied a high degree of communal solidarity or fellowship. Income might be paid from a common, public source or by a small number of agencies regulated by common principles. An incomes policy would be negotiated annually for workers and non-workers alike. It would therefore absorb the social security scheme, though there would continue to be direct payments… for example, to disabled and elderly people, and child allowances drawn…by mothers.17 Townsend was in no doubt about the major changes in social attitudes required before these ambitious egalitarian goals could be fulfilled. Because ‘the hierarchy of earnings [depended] on an elaborate division of labour [and] the hierarchy of social class [depended] in substantial part on the unequal distribution of wealth, including land, housing and other property’18 a large number of institutions would have their most basic assumptions thrown open to question. This would affect not only the well-todo and the organizations with which they were associated— private companies, private schools and other private services— which perpetuated the unequal distribution of wealth; organized labour was also implicated. Trade unions were responsible for unjustified inequalities, as their control over access to, and differential earnings within, the ‘highly stratified’ labour market demonstrated. These proposals plainly demonstrated Townsend’s continuing desire for the ‘human fellowship, fair shares and freedoms’19 collectively championed by the Titmuss group. Yet, with certain exceptions, there was nothing to suggest that his ideas exercised any great influence over the Labour Party. On its return to power in February 1974, the government implemented a number of manifesto commitments, including the immediate raising of old-age pensions, and the introduction of a version of the national superannuation proposals.20 It also managed, against the economic odds, to ensure that supplementary benefits and old-age pensions increased as a percentage of net income between 1974 and 1979. However, there was little evidence of the comprehensive, holistic approach to the redistribution of income and wealth that Townsend’s vision required.21

184 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

The reasons for this lack of interest are clear. The hand-tomouth pragmatism that characterized social policy in the 1970s had much to do with the constraints placed on public spending after 1975 and retrenchment meant that Labour’s social programme quickly fell victim to Treasury-dominated views of economic policy in no way disposed to substitute social for financial and industrial priorities. More significantly, continuing crisis provided the backdrop for increasing doubts about the grandiose designs Townsend advocated. Despite the general outlines of the duties of his proposed Social Council and the nature of the social plan, he furnished few details about how social policy could act as the vehicle for a major redistribution of wealth. Consequently his ideas were of limited use to ministers who required immediate solutions to the mounting difficulties presented by rising unemployment, falling real wages and the widening gap between rich and poor. At this point traditional criticisms of qualitative socialism were raised once again. Suspicions that the beguiling nature of the vision could compromise hard policy detail were voiced by a new generation of social policy analysts critical of aspects of the Titmuss tradition. David Piachaud, who worked as an advisor on economic and social policy in the Downing Street Policy Unit throughout the period of government, certainly displayed a reluctance to accept the validity of qualitative socialist nostrums. He was dubious, for example, about the real distinction between selective and universal benefits, claiming that ‘there is no benefit that is literally “universal”; and some “selective” benefits are much more widely and easily claimed than some “universal” benefits’.22 The point was to look to the net gain or loss for individuals and families and this might entail making ‘selective’ increases in universal benefits like child benefit (i.e. through clawback), while retaining certain selective provision—Family Income Supplement (FIS), for instance—because ‘it is now almost impossible to eliminate FIS without making some very poor families worseofF’.23 In Piachaud’s view, as well as that of the politicians, it was incumbent upon those who advocated policy changes to demonstrate how their proposals would be put into practice and how they would affect specific sections of the population. To be sure, specific pressure groups like CPAG (which Townsend continued to chair) embodied an attitude to redistribution which implicitly challenged both Piachaud and the govern-

FAILING TO SEEK ALTERNATIVES 185

ment. CPAG’s belief that resources should be redistributed within households through the withdrawal of child tax allowances from the male wage packet and the payment of child benefit to mothers owed much to ideas developed by Townsend and others. Frank Field’s comment that ‘redistribution must also be pursued horizontally, from the childless to those with children…from younger to older sections of the community, and from the con—sumers to some low-paid producers’24 contained Townsendian assumptions about the importance of distributing already-existing resources more equally and clearly indicated a preference for greater social solidarity. The pity, however, was that threats to public spending levels and the social wage forced those conscious of the plight of welfare dependants to attend to short-term issues rather than pursue the long-term vision. In common with other groups like the Disability Alliance (founded by Townsend and Alan Walker in 1974) and the Low Pay Unit, the CPAG spent the 1970s lobbying for higher benefit levels and most particularly for the introduction of universal child benefits. While it became adept at exposing Labour’s weaknesses, the group’s campaigning nature meant that it devoted little time to bolstering qualitative socialist doctrine.25 Support for qualitative socialism was hardly forthcoming from other sections of the movement, particularly the trade unions. With certain notable exceptions, the unions displayed no great interest in universal benefits, let alone a comprehensive social welfare strategy. In the early 1970s the TUG briefly paid greater than usual attention to pensions but this was largely due to the personal interest of Jack Jones who effectively ‘“adopted” the pensioners’ lobby during the Labour government of 1974–9’, forcing his own union to follow suit.26 Jones, of course, was no qualitative socialist and showed no great awareness of Townsend’s ideas —and the majority of unions did not display even his fervour. They were distinctly lukewarm about proposals which threatened either to disrupt long-accepted differentials by making better provision for the low paid, or to increase benefits paid to women from resources which might otherwise be channelled towards increases in take-home pay.27 Evidence from Cabinet sources suggests, for example, that, Jones apart, the Callaghan government’s attempt to abandon its stated commitment to child benefits as part of public spending cuts in 1976 would have gone unopposed

186 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

by the General Council had it not been for the adverse publicity caused by a Cabinet leak to New Society28 More curious perhaps, was the lack of real interest from the technocratic Left. For ministers and trade unionists, caught up with short-term issues, to ignore Townsend’s qualitative vision was understandable, but it is more difficult to explain the absence of any real alliance during the 1970s between Townsend and his associates in the CPAG, and the Bennites. Agreement about the need for far-reaching egalitarian change, including specific ideas favouring greater income equality and the assumption that the state would need to remain a central actor in any future socialist society appeared to give the two strands of opinion much in common but, as always, a significant gap existed between Labour’s technocratic and qualitative understandings of equality. In broad terms Piachaud’s dictum that ‘the left of the Party seems primarily concerned with capturing the ever-receding commanding heights of the economy, rather than with those people living in the depths of society’29 pointed up the perennial difference between the two approaches. Neither side made the effort to marry the Alternative Economic Strategy with ideas for a comprehensive social plan. In common with previous manifestations of technocratic socialism, the AES concentrated expressly upon economic transformation rather than social amelioration, while Townsend appeared concerned only with the inequitable distribution of existing resources. There were differences, too, in attitudes to the trade unions. Where the Bennite Left would not countenance incomes policies of any kind, Townsend was not averse to ‘a more comprehensive incomes policy than the policies primarily of wage restraint which have operated since the early 1960s’.30 The emphasis changed somewhat after 1979. Manifesto, jointly edited by Townsend and a number of leading Bennites in 1981, included a chapter on social policy advancing his arguments for ‘a universal strategy’ by which ‘the income needs of the employed, and non-employed people dependent on state benefits, should be decided according to a common body of principles’.31 The strategy included an expectation, originally suggested by Titmuss in the 1950s, that the pension funds would be taken into ‘accountable common ownership’ to enable ‘the government to create a truly universal social security scheme’ entailing the widespread use of non-selective, non-contributory benefits financed out of

FAILING TO SEEK ALTERNATIVES 187

general taxation.32 Other proposals for a wealth tax, equality of treatment between the sexes and races, and measures to advance equality in education were broadly similar to those demanded, if not actively formulated, by the Bennite Left. However, the links between the AES and Townsend’s understanding of social policy were never elaborated. Townsend certainly acknowledged ‘the inseparability of social effects from economic policy’ and bemoaned the ‘lack of an integrated approach to social planning’,33 but the anticipated benefits of the AES— how it would create different and better ‘social effects’ or integrate social planning priorities—were never clarified. In the absence of such clarification difficulties seemed to abound. These were best articulated by Piachaud and Davies, who stressed the possible contradictions between social and economic objectives and implied that Townsend’s assumption of potential harmony between them was chimerical. They pointed to possible conflicts over competing goals within the public sector, the need to persuade voters to comply with the high taxation necessary to support ambitious social objectives and, most importantly, the ‘conflicts between economic growth and efficiency on the one hand and redistribution and equity on the other’.34 Unimpressed by the AES and unconvinced by the vision of an integrated social and economic policy, the two argued that ‘the best prospect for social policy continues to lie in a mixed economy’— an increasingly popular opinion amongst a new generation of social policy writers in the early 1980s.35 Difficulties, however, existed here as well. After a decade of declining influence in the Party, during which various attempts to revive Keynesian socialist fortunes had fallen victim to internal dissension, leadership pragmatism in the face of economic difficulties and the Left’s gathering strength among the rank and file, little remained of the original vision. Without the traditional linchpin of high public spending and with declining faith in state economic management it was not always easy to discern what supporters of the mixed economy actually believed or what their attitude to equality really was.

THE DECLINE OF KEYNESIAN SOCIALISM Three factors spelt the weakness of Keynesian socialism in the

188 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

1970s. First, doctrinal disagreement exacerbated by personal rivalry between Roy Jenkins and Tony Grosland, the leading figures of the post-Gaitskell generation, ensured a lack of intellectual coherence that, had it existed, might have focused the efforts of an influential section of the Party on the refashioning of Keynesian socialist ideas. The question of Britain’s membership of the EEC was particularly important: divergence over this issue epitomized the growing distance between Keynesian socialism’s ‘liberal’ and ‘socialist’ strands, evident during the Gaitskellite period.36 Second, the severity of economic crisis after 1975 not only resulted in a loss of faith in Keynesian management among senior leadership figures like Healey and Callaghan, but also deprived those who continued to place hope in these techniques of any stable foundation on which to recast them. Finally, the persistence and success of leftwing attacks on Party organization, not least the early attempts in certain constituencies to deselect ‘moderate’ MPs,37 had a negative effect on morale and succeeded, as the Left appeared to gain increasing control in the later 1970s and early 1980s, in driving a sizeable fragment of ‘liberal’ Keynesian sympathizers out of the Party entirely. These factors were all the more noticeable because of the terminal weakness of traditional centre-left technocracy. This strand had not only been compromised by policy failures in the 1960s, but was subsequently pulled apart by the conflict between the remaining factions. Lingering briefly in Balogh’s contributions to the Finance and Economic Committee in the early 1970s, centreleft thought was dismembered by a combination of Holland’s reinterpretation of its technocratic nostrums and Crosland’s incorporation of certain other features—particularly incomes policy— originally associated with Balogh, Wilson and Crossman in the late 1950s. Jenkinsite social democracy The group gathered around Roy Jenkins in the early 1970s consisted of younger figures like Shirley Williams, William Rodgers, David Owen and David Marquand, many of whom had been members of the Campaign for Social Democracy a decade earlier and all of whom had since become MPs. Along with Dick Taverne, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State to Jenkins at the Home Office, and Roy Hattersley—the latter a close friend of

FAILING TO SEEK ALTERNATIVES 189

Jenkins—these individuals were instrumental in persuading him to stand for the Deputy Leadership after George Brown’s resignation in July 1970. Two main points of agreement bound the group together. Consensus over a policy programme that encapsulated the developing ‘liberal’ Keynesianism which best characterized Jenkins’s doctrinal position and, more significantly, clear agreement about the importance of British membership of the EEC. Some Jenkinsites’ had been actively involved in Europe for some time—Rodgers, for example, had led the British delegation to the Council of Europe in 1967–68—but all were convinced that the nation’s economic survival depended upon gaining membership. The issue was of the utmost importance to Jenkins himself, long an enthusiastic supporter of European entry, even to the point of defying Gaitskell over entry in 1962.38 Europe haunted his deteriorating relationship with the Labour Party for the first half of the 1970s and dictated his decision to resign the Deputy Leadership in April 1972. It also weighed heavily in his subsequent determination to leave the government in 1976 following his failure to wrest the premiership from Callaghan in the leadership election caused by Wilson’s resignation. Again, Europe perpetuated and deepened, though did not cause, the rift between Jenkins and Crosland which so damaged Keynesian socialist prospects in the 1970s. As to policy and ideas, there was little change in the views that Jenkins had advanced in the late 1950s. Writing in November 1970 in upbeat mood he maintained that Labour could start the 1970s in ‘reasonably good heart’ having ‘had a reasonably successful government in very difficult circumstances’.39 Significantly, he pointed to the ‘substantially extended area of individual freedom’ - a product of his successful period at the Home Office—rather than to other issues which arguably would have carried greater resonance for Labour. This theme was pursued in somewhat greater depth in a series of speeches given in the summer of 1972 which were subsequently turned into a book, What Matters Now. These were compiled ‘with the help of a group of supporters of whom David and Judith Marquand were the most intellectually fertile’ and were concerned with ‘the stubborn persistence of avoidable deprivation and injustice, and the need for a radical and coherent strategy to combat them’.40 Jenkins criticized the continuing existence of a poverty-stricken

190 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

minority, the visible inequalities between the different regions of the United Kingdom and inequalities in the workplace. His remedies were ostensibly hard-hitting. Wealth needed to be redistributed, even in periods of low growth, and he argued that ‘a country as wealthy as Britain ought to be able to remove the abuses of remaining poverty within approximately its present resources’.41 He implicitly acknowledged the force of Townsend’s arguments about relative deprivation and the case for universal benefits as a means of combating family poverty and the effects of low pay,42 and even nodded towards the prevailing Zeitgeist in his demand for the extension of collective bargaining ‘to encourage industrial democracy at shopfloor level’.43 The emphasis of these proposals, however, was squarely upon avoidable inequalities and the speeches displayed no great inclination to push the boundaries forward. Moreover, the remedies themselves were described in only the most general terms. Consideration of economic and industrial strategy remained noticeably absent, while there was no mention of the priorities a future Labour government should establish. ‘Persuasion’ seemed to count for more than a well-worked-out strategy: we have to persuade men and women who are themselves reasonably well off that they have a duty to forgo some of the advantages they would otherwise enjoy for the sake of others who are much poorer than they are. We have to persuade the car workers…that they have an obligation to the low-paid workers in the public sector. We have to persuade the British people as a whole that they have an obligation to Africans and Asians whom they have never seen.44 It was ‘a formidable task’ but Jenkins thought that, in place of appeals to material interest or dated class loyalties, ‘our only hope is to appeal to the latent idealism of all men and women of goodwill’. There were surely intimations of the future SDP here, particularly in his reminder that Labour had always ‘transcended class affiliations’ and his call for the Party to adopt a new role as ‘a broad-based, international, radical, generous-minded party’.45 Important because they indicate the kind of concerns that fired the Jenkinsites, these ideas received little attention. This was partly due to Labour’s swing leftwards between 1970 and 1973 but more obviously to Jenkins’s—and the Party’s—increasing pre-

FAILING TO SEEK ALTERNATIVES 191

occupation with the EEC. Although there had been all-party agreement about the desirability of entry since 1967, it was only after President de Gaulle’s resignation in 1969 and his replacement by Georges Pompidou that removal of this seemingly permanent block on British hopes became a serious possibility. While it had continued, the French veto meant that Wilson’s stated commitment to Europe had aroused little serious internal opposition, but once out of government and with European membership on the political agenda significant elements in the Party began to take a different view and splits emerged.46 Europe affected Party doctrine to the extent that it sharply focused—and therefore exacerbated—differing approaches to economic development and equality. The Bennite view of the EEC as a sort of ‘capitalist club’, controlled in the interests of multinational companies, has already been discussed;47 Jenkins and his supporters, conversely, looked to ‘the freeing of trade and the consequent stimulation of the vast productive capacity of modern developed economies’ with a view to ensuring ‘that the increasing wealth is fairly spread, both between individuals and between the different regions of the component nations’.48 Floating between the two factions was Crosland (to be joined by Roy Hattersley), who remained favourably disposed to Europe but unmoved by the Jenkinsites’ enthusiasm, unconvinced by their greater faith in free-market solutions and worried about the damage continuing splits over Europe might do to the Party. The significant point is the part the issue played in the fragmentation of Keynesian socialism. Europe sustained and reinforced the personal and intellectual divisions between Jenkins and Crosland which had developed during the 1960s, fed by Jenkins’s appointment to the Chancellorship—the focus of Crosland’s ambition—in 1968, and further fuelled by disagreements about spending cuts.49 Jenkins felt let down by Crosland’s ‘less than firm’ attitude and his view that ‘the European issue was a minor one’ which diverted ‘attention from the major issues of domestic politics’.50 For his part, Crosland complained about the Jenkinsites’ ‘extremism’. He was irritated by their attempts both to impugn his integrity by suggesting he had abandoned former allies and to ascribe his lukewarm attitude to opportunism rather than to genuine anxiety about splitting the Party. The rift ran deep. Jenkinsites like David Marquand were plainly shocked that Crosland,

192 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

the hero of The Future of Socialism, could treat them and their cause in so cavalier a fashion, and this perhaps explains the depth of their anger.51 In April 1972 Jenkins resigned the Deputy Leadership in protest at the Party’s decision to hold a referendum on EEC membership.52 This move, which had been in prospect for some time, had a number of consequences which were to prove terminal for hopes of refashioning the Keynesian socialist alternative. It meant that Jenkins was effectively cut off from direct involvement in policy-making at a crucial stage in the intra-party debates between ‘right’ and ‘left’—the very moment that the Bennites were consolidating their hold on the Industrial Policy Committee. The resignation also encouraged Jenkins’s closest allies to follow suit. Harold Lever and George Thomson left the Shadow Cabinet while Taverne, Rodgers, Owen and Dickson Mabon resigned their junior portfolios, the Jenkinsites therefore collectively depriving themselves of direct influence in the Party’s higher echelons.53 But most importantly, Jenkins’s departure led to the final parting of the ways between himself and Crosland. Crosland had abstained on the vote for EEC entry in October 1971, the Jenkinsites voting with the Conservatives. This ‘opportunism’ had not endeared him to the pro-European faction, but his subsequent decision to stand for the Deputy Leadership was not taken well.54 The Jenkinsites voted for Ted Short, therefore ensuring Crosland’s defeat, and also withdrew their support in the Shadow Cabinet elections. Perfunctory attempts were made to repair the damage, but to no avail. Susan Crosland reports a difficult meeting between the two protagonists a year or so after the Deputy Leadership contest, noting that ‘Roy and Tony [recognized] that their battered friendship could just about survive if both acknowledged that their political priorities were irreconcilable’.55 Crosland and Keynesian socialism in the 1970s Disagreements over Europe by no means exhausted the depths of that irreconcilability. Crosland’s intellectual concerns as they developed in the 1970s, lay clearly to the left of Jenkins. He had become impatient with Keynesian economic management as this had been employed in the late 1960s and seemed increasingly disposed towards a blend of his original Keynesian socialism and old

FAILING TO SEEK ALTERNATIVES 193

centre-left ideas. Crosland now appeared rather closer to Balogh, for example, who claimed that Keynesianism ‘has proved [a] broken…reed in helping to attain a steady dynamism in our economy’ and that the expectation that ‘budgetary management and changes in the long-term rate of interest would do it all’.56 He remained better disposed than Balogh to Keynesian solutions, but nevertheless recognized the weakness of techniques that had, in his view, repeatedly capitulated to the vagaries of the balance of payments. Future Labour governments must give growth a much higher priority and Crosland, never enthusiastic in the past about ‘planning’, now admitted that growth would have to entail the use of instruments other than the manipulation of home demand ‘to regulate the balance of payments and price inflation’.57 The most significant of these instruments, for both Crosland and Balogh, was a prices and incomes policy. Balogh’s argument, elaborated in ‘Labour and Inflation’, was little more than an updated version of the views he had developed in the 1950s, but one which did not disguise his antipathy towards organized labour. Because industrial concentration deriving from the need for efficiency in an increasingly competitive global marketplace allowed firms to fix prices and so, in a period of full employment, to correlate prices and wage costs, ‘trade unions [could not] be successful in increasing the share of wages in the national income’.58 The resulting wage-price spiral would adversely affect the balance of payments, with the consequent risk of unemployment and deflation, and would—ironically—also culminate in greater inequality among trade unions themselves as the more powerful advanced their own material interests. There was nothing egalitarian or socialist about this behaviour, in Balogh’s opinion; indeed he appeared puzzled by the unions’ tendency to ‘wholly [disregard] the accumulation of evidence that, by industrial action alone, they could implement any policy which could claim to be social, let alone Socialist’.59 These ideas were typically centre-left in conception and it was partly because of this pedigree that they were ignored by a Party and movement that by 1970 was either, like Bennite technocrats, thoroughly ill-disposed to the idea of incomes policy or, like the Jenkinsites, disillusioned with all forms of state planning. It is significant, nevertheless, that Balogh received so little support from erstwhile allies like Harold Wilson, who as a prime mover responsible for In Place of Strife, over which Balogh had advised him,

194 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

had been apparently so convinced of the need to control the unions. In fact Balogh was gradually moving away from his central position as Wilson’s economic advisor by 1968, when he was elevated to the Lords, a promotion initially designed to prevent him having to return to full-time duties at Oxford60 but one that became a convenient means of keeping him at arm’s length from governmental affairs.61 Although he stayed on as Crossman’s advisor during the latter’s time as Secretary of State for Social Services, often advising Wilson as well, the ties between the old centre-left grouping lessened until, in July 1969, Crossman could write that ‘Roy and Harold…don’t want the Government associated with Tommy [Balogh] and Nicky [Kaldor]’.62 Balogh was to remain on the fringes of Party policy-making, not least as a coopted member of the Finance and Economic Affairs SubCommittee in 1972, but by this time he was ‘thought to be past his best in contributing ideas’.63 If Balogh’s Fabian pamphlet represented effectively the last gasp of the old centre-left, Crosland’s writing in the early 1970s, though apparently more compelling, can also be characterized as a last attempt to freshen his Keynesian socialism in the light of accumulated experience. The starting-point was the bold declaration that, social and economic changes notwithstanding, the principles and objectives of social policy remained essentially the same as they had done a decade earlier. The need to alleviate poverty, effect a more equal distribution of wealth and the improvement of access to all social services were ‘still our most urgent social problems; and no one could possibly say that they are within sight of attainment’.64 In a more considered piece Crosland reiterated this message in doctrinal terms: There is, at least, no need for revisionists to revise our definition of socialism. Socialism, in our view, was basically about equality. By equality we meant more than a meritocratic society of equal opportunities in which the greatest rewards would go to those with the most fortunate genetic endowment and family background; we adopted the ‘strong’ definition of equality—what Rawls has subsequently called the ‘democratic’ as opposed to the ‘liberal’ conception.65 Within this desire to maintain consistency with his previous observations, however, there was evidence of change. Crosland

FAILING TO SEEK ALTERNATIVES 195

contined to perceive high public spending as the sine qua non of greater equality, but he confessed that attempts at a ‘relative transfer of resources from private to public expenditure’ could be inflationary in a slow-growing economy—with deleterious results for equality.66 Expansion needed to be tightly controlled. The state would have to be involved in direct economic intervention through regulation and public ownership—including the regulation of incomes. Crosland was aware, though by no means as concerned as Holland, about the tendency to multinational concentration but, like Holland, believed in the need for ‘a much firmer competition policy to halt it’.67 This was not to be achieved by the state takeover of large numbers of companies but by a purposeful government imposing its will on the private corporation. Public ownership was only useful where it could contribute to public saving and thus to expansion in the interests of financing greater social equality. Development land, private rented housing, parts of the construction and insurance industries, and a state oil company were Crosland’s priorities for direct public ownership because ‘these would make the most direct contribution to a better distribution of wealth, power and welfare’.68 Redistribution of existing resources would be accomplished, in the usual way, by higher taxation of capital gains, a tax which integrated gifts inter vivos and death duties, and a wealth tax. These ideas plainly differed from the kind of liberal Keynesianism associated with Jenkins’s Chancellorship in the late 1960s and came close to inverting the priorities Crosland had established in his earlier work. ‘British society—slow moving, rigid, class-ridden’, had in his view, ‘proved much harder to change than was supposed’.69 Just as in the 1950s, when he had diverged from the views of his Gaitskellite colleagues, he was prepared to countenance the prospect of greater state intervention if the result was an increase in equality. He was not, however, prepared to go as far as the Left in this direction, preferring as always to regard public ownership as one among many instruments for the advance to equality and certainly not something that could ‘revolutionize society’. But equality itself was a problem because Crosland now appeared less certain about the meaning of the idea. He had written, rather defensively, in Socialism Now that it was unnecessary to define equality precisely or indicate how much equality was

196 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

required before an egalitarian society could be said to exist and seemed aware of the conceptual difficulties: ‘what…are the most crucial causes of inequality…what are the most important inequalities…income, capital, education, housing or industrial power? Or are they between the sexes or between the races?’70 The response, however, was to declare that ‘I have not the competence to write a new philosophical treatise on all these matters’, nor in his opinion was it politically necessary because as long as obvious and observable inequalities continued to exist there was plenty for a Labour government to do. ‘A practising politician in the Britain of the 1970s, not cerebrating in a monastery cell but living day by day in the thick of things, is not required to answer the stern examiner’s question: how much equality ultimately?’71 Yet the question ‘how much’ was continually being asked, not least by analysts like Piachaud who had become ever more concerned about the empirical impact of Labour’s policies. Crosland’s standpoint seemed out of kilter with the new attitude, itself partly the product of the far-reaching social changes of the 1960s. This sense of anachronism was evident in the comments about Socialism Now received from close friends like lan Little and Wilfred Beckerman. Little commented, for example, that ‘generally speaking, I feel that you do not face up to the problems of equality. It’s too easy to say more equality…what sort of equality do most [people] want?’72 Beckerman was equally direct: ‘it all seems a bit vague…your admirers will have expected a new lead and new insights into the events of the last twenty years. I rather fear they will be disappointed.’73 But the desire for equality certainly persisted. Crosland wanted a much greater degree of ‘social amelioration’ and claimed that ‘an exceptionally high priority [should be given] to the relief of poverty, distress and social squalor’.74 Unlike the poverty lobby, however, he provided only vague indications of the policies he regarded as necessary to accomplish this aim and appeared at a loss when confronted by the complexities such a once-straightforward hope had come to involve; to make the poor less poor, we need above all to raise their incomes. At present there is a muddled piecemeal rag-bag of often means-tested income supplements which some critics would like to replace with a single basic scheme of guaranteed

FAILING TO SEEK ALTERNATIVES 197

annual income… I am not competent to pronounce on such long-term proposals.75 Another factor was at work as well. Crosland remained convinced that ‘the achievement of greater equality without intolerable social stress and a probable curtailment of liberty depends heavily on economic growth’.76 While rapid growth would not guarantee equality—and Crosland acknowledged the dangers of bureaucracy and the advantages the middle classes had derived from the welfare state—he asserted that ‘low or zero growth wholly excludes the possibility’.77 Townsend, then, was wrong about the prospect of a radical redistribution within existing resources. It was one thing to remain unapologetic about high taxation, even public ownership, in conditions where money incomes were growing and inflation low, but quite another to conceive of a transition to equality when these conditions did not apply. In practical political and economic terms, of course, the conditions did indeed cease to apply, with catastrophic results for Crosland’s position. In 1975 he could still write of the increasingly obvious setback to economic growth that, if there were reason to believe that this was permanent and that we were entering a phase of zero growth, social democrats would indeed be anxious and confused; for while scarcity persists we cannot possibly achieve our aims and redeem our pledges without a healthy rate of growth.78 These comments were written after Denis Healey’s budget in March of that year when Crosland, then Secretary of State for the Environment, had tried to get decisions about public spending cuts delayed, particularly where these affected housing.79 Alarmed by high inflation, he accepted the necessity of cuts in November but attempted (and failed) to get the overall package of £3.75 billion reduced.80 But the real blow came in the shape of the massive reduction in public expenditure in the mid-1970s. On top of the 1975 cuts, Healey was forced into more radical measures as a result of the discovery, published in the February 1976 Public Expenditure White Paper, that state spending stood at 60 per cent of GDP—a figure which prompted Jenkinsites as well as Conservatives to

198 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

claim that the mixed economy had ceased to have any meaning.81 This finding, accompanied by Wilson’s resignation in March82 and constant speculation against sterling resulting from Treasury mishandling of exchange-rate policy83 forced a further round of cuts, totalling £1 billion, designed to restore confidence and avoid a formal loan request to the International Monetary Fund (IMF)— a strategy undermined by poor August trade figures and the threat of the seamen’s strike. Healey eventually requested IMF intervention in September 1976, his decision being triggered by the failure to prevent sterling falling below the £1.70 mark against the dollar and fears about squandering further resources in a vain attempt to support it. The move was not simply a temporary setback to the government’s economic and financial policies: it represented, above all, Croslandite socialism’s moment of surrender to the ‘practical monetarism’ or ‘Keynes-minus’ that had been becoming increasingly influential in the Treasury and the Bank of England since 1974.84 The spending cuts required by the IMF,85 initially of £5 billion but halved during the negotiations, on top of those that had already been agreed, signalled the end of hopes that full employment and greater social and material equality could be achieved by growth-financed public expenditure. Even at this eleventh hour Crosland and his two major allies, Harold Lever at the Duchy of Lancaster and Roy Hattersley, Minister of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, were not convinced by the strategy and argued against it.86 Crosland claimed in Cabinet, in much the same terms as Michael Foot, that the level of the proposed cuts was too high and risked unnecessary deflation, and therefore higher unemployment, at a time when there was no danger of the economy overheating. According to Benn, Crosland also argued that the cuts were not simply economically and socially misguided but ‘destructive of what he had believed in all his life’.87 But he and his allies ultimately put Party unity before personal belief and supported the Healey and Callaghan proposals in order to avoid a damaging Cabinet split.88 In view of what Crosland had stated only months before the sterling crisis began, the decision to opt for more cuts and accept the IMF’s conditions must have made him painfully aware of the extent of the defeat. He had not trimmed his ideas in the early 1970s like Jenkins and his ‘liberal’ Keynesian supporters; in fact his commitment to public spending and a high degree of state

FAILING TO SEEK ALTERNATIVES 199

intervention in economy and society had remained remarkably consistent. With that commitment effectively renounced by the leadership—epitomized by Callaghan’s speech to the 1976 Party conference during which he declared bluntly that ‘we used to think you could spend your way out of a recession…I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists’89—Crosland had nothing of substance to fall back on. This much was clear in one of the last pieces he wrote before his premature death in February 1977. Acknowledging that ‘the economic crisis inevitably imposes limits on how fast we can progress towards a more equal society’, he went on to affirm a continuing belief in the ideal which now had to be pursued in other ways. Taxes could not be increased but loopholes and exemptions should be eliminated; industrial democracy needed to be extended; and it was important to pursue ‘measures to outlaw racial or sexual discrimination’ which ‘cost little in terms of public expenditure’.90 Even within existing public spending, priorities could be altered so that less could be spent on ‘roads used by the better off’ and more on housing or social security benefits. Crosland argued that this ‘programme’ encapsulated ‘a sense of purpose within the bounds of the practical’ but there was no real comparison with his past attempts to define socialist doctrine and, with no indication of the future role of the state in a period of renewed interest in the free market, the ideas finally veered towards a benign liberalism rather than anything more profound.91 In the period after Crosland’s death, Keynesian socialism was both bereft of ideas and effectively leaderless. There were, to be sure, attempts to resurrect the spirit, if not the letter, of the intellectual approach and to support it by creating organizations within the Party to champion the cause. To this end, the Manifesto Group, consisting of seventy Labour MPs including Jenkinsites like Rodgers, Owen and lan Wrigglesworth, as well as Roy Hattersley and Harold Lever, was founded in 1976 primarily to stem the gathering tide of the Alternative Economic Strategy within the PLP. The group published a short pamphlet, What We Must Do, in May 1977 which restated faith in limited planning and the mixed economy while questioning the wisdom of increasing public spending. Even sympathizers were only lukewarm. Reviewing the pamphlet for Socialist Commentary, Anthony King complained that too many complex subjects were treated in a simplistic manner which led him to ponder ‘what the future

200 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

course should be of democratic socialist thinking in Britain…. No one can any longer “do a Crosland”’.92 The difficulty of course was that the senior—Jenkinsite—figures associated with the Manifesto Group were extremely chary of ‘doing a Crosland’ while having little of substance to offer themselves. Rodgers, for instance, took the opportunity of a Crosland Memorial Lecture to criticize the philosophy of high public spending and argue that more attention should be paid to ensuring ‘value for money across the whole range of public services’. Increases in public spending should be ‘dependent on achieving economic growth and rising personal living standards first’.93 Looking back to Durbin rather than Crosland, Rodgers claimed that people wanted greater control of their own lives. This demanded more attention to individual liberty—including lower personal taxation—and also to certain areas of collective activity, like greater industrial democracy, where individuals could be better included in decisions governing their working lives.94 The thrust was towards the recognition that, Labour activists apart, most individuals put personal consumption before the pursuit of equality and that the Party should recognize this fact. Whatever the merits of this view, it lacked any sense of Crosland’s commitment to equality as the central feature of Labour’s vision of the future. It was apposite that in its final issue Socialist Commentary should refer to the ideological vacuum in the Labour Party, and in particular that those who share the Manifesto Group position…find it much easier to define themselves in terms of their difference from the simplifications of the Left than in terms of putting forward their own inevitably complex positive policies of democratic socialism.95 If Socialist Commentary underestimated the difficulty of discovering new ways forward in hard times, this did not detract from the poignancy of Benn’s observation that, because ‘high public expenditure based on full employment, which would redistribute wealth, was no longer an option’ a harsh choice had to be made between ‘monetarism and the Labour manifesto’—by which he meant the AES.96 Keynesian socialism had indeed been squeezed out of existence by these two equally unpalatable alternatives.

Chapter 9

Beyond the three visions?

By the early 1980s the egalitarian visions that had informed Labour Party doctrine for the past fifty years were discredited. Centre-left technocratic ideals, briefly triumphant twenty years before, had been found wanting during the 1960s and the Bennite Left, successful in gaining a hold in the constituencies and the NEC, had subsequently failed to convince the Party and trade union leaderships either of the viability, or wider popularity, of the AES. Keynesian socialism, rocked by internal disagreements and the consequences of low growth, could offer no alternative proposals for the social equality that Crosland and others had desired. Qualitative socialism, first narrowed to a concern for welfare issues, had become confined to the margins of Party thinking as hopes for classless fellowship faded in the heated atmosphere of the late 1970s. There seemed little chance of reviving these visions in the very different environment of the 1980s. Although the Jenkinsites were already convinced, it took a little longer before growing numbers of others, particularly on the left of the Party, accepted that many of Labour’s traditional egalitarian assumptions were no longer viable. By the mid-1980s, however, the realization had become widespread and a new desire for unity, reinforced by the Party’s disastrous 1983 general election defeat, encouraged efforts to rebuild Labour’s shattered doctrinal base. The current chapter and subsequent Epilogue examine the major attempts to recast egalitarian ideas in the 1980s and early 1990s. Of most significance has been the gradual emergence of ideas that might loosely be termed ‘market socialist’.1 A new generation of intellectuals, influenced by New Right criticisms of 201

202 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

state-based collectivism,2 conceive equality not as an ‘end-state’ vision but as an open-ended, ‘starting-gate’ theory.3 Elements of their thinking have persuaded a number of senior politicians to the extent that the traditional emphasis on collective outcomes has largely been rejected in favour of strategies designed to produce ‘democratic equality’ and equalize ‘effective freedom’.

THE CHALLENGES OF THE 1980s By the late 1970s Labour governments were associated in the public mind with high public spending, high taxation and inflation, and an inability to control the trade unions. Although demandside Keynesianism had been effectively abandoned in the mid1970s and the Callaghan government had done much to bring down both public spending and inflation, the resurgence of wage militancy after the breakdown of the government’s pay policy, and the ensuing 1978–79 ‘winter of discontent’ did nothing to restore the Party’s tarnished image. Successive public sector strikes by, inter alia, refuse collectors, gravediggers and hospital workers provided opponents with an endless source of political capital with which to scare potential voters and, unsurprisingly, Labour was soundly defeated in the 1979 general election. The election was significant because it provided firmer evidence than hitherto of a long-feared pattern of class and partisan ‘dealignment’ first noticed in the 1950s.4 Declining attachments to class position and a weaker sense of identification with a particular political party meant that neither Labour nor the Conservatives could rely on the loyalty of traditional supporters irrespective of specific issues and policy proposals.5 Some analysts had detected a detachment of middle-class Conservative supporters from ‘their’ party in the 1974 elections, but 1979 saw the defection of large segments of the working class—notably skilled workers—from their traditional Labour orientation with Labour’s share of the vote falling even amongst semi-skilled and unskilled workers.6 Subsequent elections in 1983 and 1987 confirmed this pattern. These movements were rooted in deep-seated economic changes. The decline in manufacturing employment, observable by the 1960s, had become increasingly noticeable in the 1970s as had Britain’s low rate of growth and the gathering pace of change

BEYOND THE THREE VISIONS? 203

in the nature of work from male, full-time industrial employment to more flexible, casual, often female occupations in the high technology and service sectors typified the fundamental restructuring of the economy during the 1980s.7 Dramatically rising male unemployment weakened the trade unions, particularly those engaged in manufacturing and associated private sector industries,8 while at the same time the rising real wages of those remaining in full-time work, together with easier access to consumer credit, created a new affluence amongst significant sections of the skilled working class, distancing them from the low-paid, or dependent on welfare.9 Britain was not alone in having to cope with these new ‘postindustrial’ circumstances. Restructuring of a similar kind went on in all developed countries, some of which, like France, had begun the 1980s with avowedly socialist governments committed to reinstating collectivist policies. But the British experience was unusual because Conservative governments embraced the new environment as an opportunity to eliminate old practices and open the economy to international competition. The internationalization of finance and the decline of the relationship between financial markets and national systems of regulation, meant that the government became less able to control its economic destiny, the abolition of exchange controls in 1980 and City deregulation in 1985 being particularly important in creating an open financial market ripe for speculation.10 In the industrial sector, privatization and the refusal to support ‘lame duck’ industries increased the vulnerability of British manufacturing to multinational penetration at a time when investment in domestic industry was falling in favour of investment in services.11 The combination of financial deregulation, low investment in manufacturing, multinational dependence and increasing global competition meant that the outlook for British industry grew bleak—to the point where certain observers could claim that the country now provided little more than ‘a relatively skilled, disciplined and compliant workforce [for] a low-wage assembly point within the European region’.12 Meanwhile, the growing significance of the EEC as a major trading bloc in a highly competitive global economy underscored the general trend, with the result that policies designed to control and direct a specifically national economy, whether broadly Keynesian, centre-left or the AES, came to seem almost quaint.13

204 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

These changes were bolstered by a new ideology which fundamentally challenged Labour’s egalitarian doctrines. The ‘free economy, strong state’14 Conservatism of the Thatcher years promoted a very different morality to the collectivist, statist assumptions which had underpinned past thinking. Tight control of the money supply to prevent inflation was tied to a rhetoric of individual liberty and responsibility which allowed government to distance itself from the major post-war commitments of support for the economy, full employment and high levels of welfare provision. Business had to become responsible for itself, free of government interference in the free market, and individuals, too, were expected to exercise greater responsibility in place of the old emphasis on collective service provision. Paradoxically, the Thatcher regimes were not afraid to use state power ‘negatively’ to undermine the remaining bastions of ‘socialist’ influence. They encouraged free-market activities not only through the privatization programmes but also by confronting special interests—particularly organized labour—that threatened ‘natural’ market allocations. Legislation to control union power became progressively more punitive, while the TUC’s access to Downing Street, so much a feature of the 1970s, was contemptuously withdrawn and the institutional paraphernalia of 1970s’ ‘corporatism’ either downgraded, like ‘Neddy’, or, like the muchhated National Enterprise Board, demolished entirely. Local government, where Labour councils remained in control in many metropolitan areas, had its powers steadily curtailed throughout the 1980s by cuts in central state grants, supported by ‘ratecapping’. Centrally delivered welfare services and benefits, meanwhile, were either reduced or reorganized to reflect the imperatives of the prevailing orthodoxy.15 The above factors would certainly have been sufficient to undermine Labour’s long-held hopes about ‘progress’, but a further—and from the viewpoint of the early 1980s, entirely unpredictable—change had a profound effect on all European socialist parties. Although the Party had never regarded them with any great enthusiasm and had certainly never advocated Soviet-style command planning, the political and economic collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe Communist regimes, which had continuously pronounced the virtues of centralized state planning, signalled a wider bankruptcy of socialist strategies and a symbolic victory for the free market.

BEYOND THE THREE VISIONS? 205

Of course the nature and effects of many of these changes were not clear in the early 1980s and Labour initially responded to electoral defeat in typical fashion. For three years after the 1979 election the Left dominated the Party, enjoying popular support in the constituencies, a qualified sympathy from certain trade unions and a majority on the NEC. From this position of relative strength leftwingers championed the AES and associated policies, despite growing doubts about their shortcomings. This phase did not last long. The Left fragmented after the bitter Deputy Leadership contest between Benn and Healey in 1981 –a process aided by growing union anxiety about the Party’s electability.16 Union concerns did not prevent the catastrophic election defeat of 1983, fought on an avowedly leftwing programme, but determination that Labour should never again be so humiliated was reflected in the ‘dream ticket’ election of Neil Kinnock and Roy Hattersley as Leader and Deputy Leader, respectively, at the 1983 Party conference. Slowly at first, the Party began to search for a middleground as key ‘soft left’ figures like Michael Meacher, Robin Cook and David Blunkett moved to support Kinnock’s singleminded attempts at ‘modernization’.17

RECONSTRUCTING PARTY DOCTRINE The collapse of Keynesian socialism meant that no obvious middle-ground existed and therefore had to be constructed anew. Labour approached the task on two fronts. Politically, Kinnock ruthlessly pursued a radical reorganization of the Party bureaucracy that swept away much of the old policy-making machinery, undermined the NEC, reduced the union presence on Party bodies and gave more power to the leader’s private office and the Parliamentary leadership.18 As part of this general assault on the old bastions of leftwing power, highly public—and highly effective— attacks were mounted against the extreme left in the form of the Militant Tendency19 and the leadership also took care to put suitable distance between itself and a number of leftwing local councils, notably the Militant-dominated Liverpool council, and others mainly in London. This political initiative was unquestionably successful and resulted in the effective elimination of any sustained dissent in the Parliamentary Party and trade unions between the mid-1980s and the early 1990s.

206 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

Ideological change occurred in tandem with these political changes, if at a lower level of intensity, and can be divided into two categories. First, the most pressing need was to refashion economic policy. Second, certain individuals were keen to provide Labour with an updated doctrine capable of supporting new economic initiatives while also furnishing the Party with a modern, radical identity. The position as it stood before the April 1992 general election is best summarized in the proposals contained in Labour’s Policy Review, set up after the 1987 election defeat, but the two or so years preceding the Review saw the Party beginning dispense with many long-held assumptions. Even those not enamoured with the AES had continued, in the early 1980s, to advocate forms of modified corporatism and an industrial strategy that stressed planning, the control of investment and high public spending through proposed institutional arrangements like a ‘National Economic Assessment’.20 These policies were whittled away after 1983, their place being taken by a series of new departures as Labour began to face a number of unpalatable truths. The loss of faith in the ability of governments to plan for and control economic growth led to a new emphasis on ‘partnership’ between government and the private sector, while acceptance of the dangers posed by inflation resulted in much greater caution about public spending commitments. Above all, there occurred a marked shift towards formal recognition of the free market as an important wealth creator. Several policy statements produced between 1985 and 1987 charted these shifts21 but a Home Policy Committee document prepared as a draft NEC statement for the 1986 conference captured the extent of change at this ‘half-way’ stage.22 Although corporatist structures like the National Economic Assessment and a National Economic Summit were retained, the Party now explicitly acknowledged that detailed central planning was neither feasible nor desirable. Planning had to be selective and strategic, and should aim to help both private and public industries compete in domestic and foreign markets. The most significant proposal here was the identification of a medium-term industrial strategy which promoted the state’s facilitative role in the industrial arena. It was designed to encourage productivity and higher employment, control exchange-rate policy, fund investment in research and development (particularly in

BEYOND THE THREE VISIONS? 207

high-technology industries), encourage the development of new products and designs, and coordinate public and private sector industrial activities. Central to its success would be a National (renamed British) Investment Bank able to invest in, or lend to, specific enterprises judged vital to industrial and employment priorities.23 A corporatist element remained in the Bank’s requirement for a business plan drawn up by government, management and workforce to promote these priorities in the enterprises concerned, but the stress was on commercial viability. Labour sought not to dictate to the market but to create a partnership with it. These proposals were best elaborated, not in any policy statement, but by Roy Hattersley, Labour’s Shadow Chancellor, in charge of rethinking economic policy between 1984 and 1987 and, at one remove from the heat of immediate debate, by market socialists in the Fabian Philosophy Group. For all his association with the Party’s right wing, Hattersley had never been tempted by the SDP and remained committed to the reformulation of a systematic, recognizably socialist, doctrine. To this end, Economic Priorities for a Labour Government and Choose Freedom stressed the continuing importance of liberty and equality, and tried to demonstrate the relationship between these ideas and the new macro-economic programme. In a sort of ‘Crosland-minus’, Hattersley first outlined a programme aimed to reduce unemployment through the stimulation of the economy, to be achieved on the supply-side by a combination of the medium-term industrial strategy and exchange-rate stability and, on the demand-side, by redistributive taxation and the cautious expansion of public spending.24 Caution was the watchword. In the light of the French experience under Mitterrand ‘where an overambitious expansion had to be reversed’25 there was to be no demand-led dash for growth. Instead ‘a rigorous pattern of priorities’ was required in which economic growth, job creation and an anti-poverty programme should come before wage rises or other social spending.26 On the supply-side, the plans for a British Investment Bank to provide funds ‘available on terms that promote UK investment’ underpinned Labour’s belief that the ‘short-termism’ induced by an unregulated City searching for quick returns and the crude use of interest rates must be eliminated if British industry was to compete on stable terms with rivals in Europe, Japan and America. Although attention had to be paid to industry’s training require-

208 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

ments, public spending generally had to be ‘carefully targeted’ towards capital investment in areas, not import sensitive, ‘which [would] produce the most jobs at the least cost and which, by their stimulation, stimulate other sectors of the economy’.27 Hattersley emphasized Labour’s new commitment to the market —though he was careful to blend this with a continuing appreciation of the need for government regulation and ‘social ownership’. A socialist government should no longer seek to control the market or try to diminish its importance; rather it should recognize the potential compatibility between socialism and markets and discover ways in which market power could be made to yield ‘a more equal distribution of the resources which make up aggregate demand’.28 A free market in areas of social provision, however, obviously remained unacceptable because scarce resources had to be distributed according to need, not ability to pay. Basic utilities—transport, energy, telecommunications— should be publicly owned for the same reason, but the great bulk of the economy should operate on market principles bolstered by a range of government measures to ensure, inter alia, fair employment and proper investment, though with enterprises open to the prospect of taking part in a ‘national macroeconomic strategy concerning the level of investment and profits, the location of industry and the encouragement of exports’.29 The melding of boundaries between public and private meant that ownership per se was less important. Old-style Morrisonian nationalization, made suitably accountable to consumers’ needs, might remain relevant to the public utilities in which ‘public ownership in the form of state corporations centrally owned, planned and administered [was] essential’,30 but outside these enterprises ‘social ownership’ could take a variety of forms. Hattersley cited consumer and worker cooperatives, local authority-owned companies and public investment in private companies as methods of social ownership and resurrected earlier ideas of socially owned companies competing with private oligarchic corporations in certain sectors to stimulate greater competition.31 He also condoned employee share-ownership schemes, increasingly common in America, as an example of the ways in which private and social ownership could be blended, and recommended that tax incentives be used to encourage their development.32 The time’, he argued,

BEYOND THE THREE VISIONS? 209

has gone for us to assault the sector of private ownership in a head-on charge. Rather should we penetrate the whole system, thinking of the mixed economy not as two separate and incompatible sectors with an impregnable boundary line…but as two economic systems which can overlap and mutually benefit each other.33 Much of this was pure Crosland. The distaste for too much planning, the willingness to conceive new forms of public ownership and the stress upon the benefits of the market were reminiscent of his concerns in the 1950s. Superficially like his mentor, Hattersley also argued that equality should be a significant feature of the future society, but here he departed sufficiently from Croslandite orthodoxy to underline the Party’s general move away from traditional egalitarian assumptions. ‘Equality of outcome’ was the announced objective but the phrase is something of a misnomer. Hattersley did not mean equality of result or ‘a process by which we are all squeezed into the same mould’; rather he claimed that ‘society should attempt to replace…“imposed” and everincreasing inequalities with a conscious effort to remove or reduce them’.34 Equality of outcome referred to ‘a just distribution of the nation’s resources…the real prospect of receiving a fair share of wealth and power’35—the point being that a just share of resources would ensure a greater worth of individual liberty. Hattersley’s ideas owed much to discussions with Raymond Plant and others who were attempting to rethink socialist attitudes to liberty and markets. Plant’s general view was that ‘equality’ should be ‘democratic equality’, primarily ‘concerned with a more equal distribution of…primary goods to secure a fair value of liberty’.36 His approach generally chimed with Hattersley’s beliefs, the major difference with Crosland’s position being the rejection of attempts to control outcomes too rigidly. Crosland had wanted to use state power to eradicate the social divisions he considered most detrimental to social harmony and classlessness in the belief that greater social equality would follow. Market socialists denied the possibility of an equality of result on at least two grounds: it would almost certainly involve too much bureaucratic interference and it was chimerical because it wrongly assumed that goods distributed equally would retain an equal value.37 Dispensing with end-state equality as a governing ideal did not,

210 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

of course, entail rejecting state intervention entirely. Hattersley made it clear that state provision would be necessary to ensure an equitable balance of basic goods—education, health and income, for example—and so genuine individual liberty. ‘The extension of the sum of freedom—real freedom’ he argued, was ‘the ultimate and fundamental object of government’; it was ‘in pursuit of that aim—and that aim alone—that state intervention is justified’.38 The balance between freedom and equality was construed in terms of Rawls’s ‘difference principle’—that inequality is ‘justifiable only if the difference in expectation is to the advantage of the representative man who is worse-off’.39 On this reading, equality apparently continued to enjoy a strong presence: Plant pointed out, for instance, that ‘a fair distribution of the worth of liberty is…going to involve [a] far greater equality of income and wealth’,40 and to this end agreed with Hattersley that ‘the egalitarian may well be committed to a greater use of state power than it is currently fashionable to admit’.41 But differences in reward would be inevitable nevertheless: the Rawlsian formula recognized the need for incentives, for example, ‘for reasons of economic efficiency, to produce more goods without which the worst-off members would actually be worse off’.42 The Policy Review Needless to say, these fairly intricate discussions did not penetrate too far into Party debate. However, the policy statements of the mid-1980s and the contributions from Hattersley and Plant created the basis for further initiatives in the latter part of the decade and the early 1990s. A third successive defeat in the 1987 general election provided the immediate stimulus. Although the leadership never seriously believed it could win,43 Kinnock had hoped to dent the huge Conservative majority—reduced in the event by only 21 seats to 102. The idea to conduct a ‘policy review’ emerged quickly in the wake of defeat, partly to avoid a damaging electoral post-mortem and partly because of the claims of certain leadership figures, notably Bryan Gould, the election campaign coordinator, that Labour’s ideas must be thoroughly modernized if it was ever again to form a government. For Gould, the Party needed to be more ‘relevant’ as a political movement; it would attract voters only if its policies were genuinely understood and had popular appeal.44

BEYOND THE THREE VISIONS? 211

The review process consequently had its roots in electoral pragmatism as much as in any desire to attend to Party ideology. A paper written by Geoff Bish, head of the Party’s Policy Directorate, just after the election noted that the clarification of core values would be useful, but that means should have priority over ends in the formulation of imaginative but credible proposals. These were to be expressed in simply-stated key policy commitments in specific areas rather than in the old format of detailed Labour Programmes.45 Pragmatism was evident, too, in the leadership’s tight control of the Review’s organization. The Seven Policy Review Groups (PRGs) had joint convenors taken from the NEC and the Shadow Cabinet chosen by the leader, who also joined them in choosing group members. Each PRG, though allowed to call expert opinion, was restricted to roughly nine people, so avoiding the temptation to appoint too many sub-groups of the kind associated with the Left’s domination of the NEC in the early 1980s.46 Walworth Road’s extensive communications machine closely monitored the whole process, ensuring that ‘political demands would be inseparable from the communications imperative’.47 Although many of the Review’s proposals, particularly on economic policy, had been discussed between 1985 and 1987, they were codified and formalized by the lengthy process.48 The medium-term industrial strategy re-emerged, for example, in the form of promises to enhance the Department of Trade and Industry to a status ‘equal, if not superior…to that of the Treasury’ and the claim that ‘the new DTI will need to develop a close partnership with both sides of industry’.49 Despite this apparent resort to traditional planning formulae the market gained greater ascendancy. Support for the market derived from the Party’s recognition of the far-reaching economic and social changes Britain was undergoing. Internationalization of the economy, which accelerated towards the end of the 1980s, made ‘national protectionist’ policies look increasingly redundant to the point where even the National Economic Assessment and associated ideas of the mid1980s seemed anachronistic. For these reasons the medium-term industrial strategy, for all its talk of ‘partnership’ and hints about DTI planning power, left much to the private sector.50 The state would not be concerned with ‘detailed decision-making in industry but with strategic interventions in key sectors…to develop

212 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

strategies, to identify priorities, and provide assistance [and] resources…that industry will need’.51 These ideas were in line with the Review’s underlying message that ‘the economic role of modern government is to help make the market system work properly where it can, will and should—and to replace or strengthen it where it can’t, won’t or shouldn’t’.52 Macro-economic policy was treated in like manner. John Eatwell, a one-time Tribunite sympathizer who became an instrumental force behind the thinking of the economic PRGs, commented on the hopelessness of attempting ‘Keynesianism in one country’ in a period when EEC countries were becoming increasingly interdependent.53 Economies were far more open than they had been even a decade earlier with the result that ‘short-term macroeconomic management [as] the key to the maintenance of full employment’ had to be abandoned. If they were to be used at all, such strategies would need to take place at EEC level supported by British membership of the ERM—and Eatwell commented on the new ‘enthusiasm for the EC as an arena within which Labour’s objectives can best be attained’.54 By the late 1980s, the state was no longer in a position to maintain even the internal economic power that Party intellectuals had taken for granted in the past. Eatwell and others like Gordon Brown, Labour’s Shadow Spokesman for Trade and Industry after 1987, believed that few areas remained where governments could intervene directly. The Conservative privatization programme had swallowed most of the major public utilities and the cost of buying them back would be prohibitive for a Labour government with more pressing priorities, so the scope for increasing ‘social ownership’ was small. Though promising to establish voting control in key utilities like British Telecom, Bryan Gould’s Productive and Competitive Economy group agreed that the utilities would be designated ‘public interest companies’, subject to new Regulatory Commissions to safeguard consumer interests rather than brought immediately into public ownership. In other types of enterprise the group saw no direct role for the state and argued that an increase in ‘economic democracy’ through the extension of employee share-ownership or, ‘where more appropriate’ the ownership or management of enterprises ‘by consumers or local communities’ would provide the requisite flexibility for an evolving post-industrial, free market economy.55 These ideas fitted broadly with Eatwell’s views, particularly his

BEYOND THE THREE VISIONS? 213

concern that Labour should ‘turn toward the core ideas of European social democracy’ which he characterized as ‘a fusion of socialist ideas with an acknowledgement of the dynamic potential of markets’.56 Eatwell argued that Labour’s economic policies had been unsuccessful in the past because of the consistent failure to induce the private sector to comply with its demands. Regulation rather than nationalization and the ‘replacement of the idea that industrial policy should involve the government making managerial decisions, with the proposition that the state should provide the “well-springs” of growth’57 were more likely to encourage the private sector to cooperate with the medium-term strategy. Economic reform, then, ‘should be essentially institutional reform, creating a framework within which social objectives can be attained, rather than attempting to impose social objectives on an inappropriate framework’.58 In the light of these comments it was not surprising that the shorter follow-up to Meet the Challenge, Make the Change welcomed ‘the efficiency and realism which markets can provide’.59 In one sense these proposals were reminiscent of the Gaitskellite variants of Keynesian socialism. The importance of the market and individual liberty were hardly new motifs in Party thinking, and equivocation about state ownership had been a key characteristic of Gaitskellism in both its guises. Yet, in another sense, the proposals clearly departed from these old Keynesian socialist concerns. The economic impotence of national governments had largely been conceded and this had effects on their capacity, or willingness, to create full employment or implement other desirable social reforms. Far from being able to trust to growth and manipulate the economy accordingly, Labour could only attempt ‘market management’ through medium-term supply-side policies in the hope of maintaining a sufficiently stable environment for British industry. Priorities were consequently important (as Hattersley had already acknowledged) and ‘social amelioration’, to use an old phrase, could not be the object of policy per se.60 ‘Equality’ as a substantive demand-side goal had to be discounted —as the Review’s excessively cautious approach to redistribution suggested.61 ‘Freedom’ seemed to be the substitute. In contrast to the Gaitskellites’ comparatively restrained interest, individual liberty and enforceable rights were stressed heavily, the policy statement Democratic Socialist Aims and Values, endorsed at the 1988 con-

214 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

ference, giving them pride of place. The statement owed much to Hattersley as well as others like Bernard Crick and David Blunkett, but although the emphasis on individualism was toned down in the face of ‘soft left’ opposition during Shadow Cabinet and NEC discussions,62 the document still opened with the claim that ‘the true purpose of democratic socialism and, therefore, the true aim of the Labour Party, is the creation of a genuinely free society, in which the fundamental objective of government is the protection and extension of individual liberty irrespective of class, sex, age, race, colour or creed’.63 Dangerous-sounding phrases like ‘equality of outcome’ were not mentioned directly and no reference was made to Rawls’s theory of ‘legitimate inequality’. The drift of the argument became clearer in Meet the Challenge, Make the Change, which claimed that citizens had ‘to take responsibility for their own lives and to fulfil their obligations to others’.64 The state could play an important role in affording those individuals who lacked them the resources to pursue these goals, but there was no doubt, in Kinnock’s words, that ‘there is a limit to what the modern state can and should do’.65 A range of proposals to enhance the freedom of individual citizens and ‘consumers’ replaced previous emphases on collectivist outcomes though, on the face of it, Labour’s ideas for welfare remained decidedly traditional. The Review set out the case for pension increases, the raising of income support levels and made clear the Party’s continuing commitment to comprehensive state education and a National Health Service, free at the point of use. However, state services were tied more closely to liberty and choice. Pensioners were to be offered ‘greater choice’ in a refashioned SERPS while those on means-tested benefits could expect assistance from a ‘user-friendly DSS’ in obtaining ‘access to the labour market and by the raising of National Insurance benefits such as the state pension to more adequate levels’.66 NHS patients would enjoy a more consumer-oriented service characterized not only by a ‘Charter for Patients’ Rights’ but by various proposals to involve users in the planning of services and to give ‘people the chance to make informed choices about where, when and how they are treated’.67 Equal opportunities policies in the areas of gender, race and sexuality had similar objectives.68 The Policy Review, then, made the case for an ‘enabling state’, oddly not itself subject to constitutional reform,69 underpinning both an essentially free-market economy and individual liberty.

BEYOND THE THREE VISIONS? 215

Collectivist inputs continued to be favoured in limited areas, but much less importance was attached to outcomes. For a time, at least, enthusiasm for this new formula went beyond the Review process, spilling over into the writings of a number of Party intellectuals in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Giles Radice’s ‘new revisionism’ argued, for example, that ‘in many areas of the economy, the market can work well’.70 Where it did not, or could not, state services should ‘be run in the interests of the consumer and injections of public resources must result in an improvement in quality’ with a view to ensuring ‘legally enforceable rights for parents and patients, [and] for more efficient and accountable management’.71 Gould, too, acknowledged ‘the undoubted advantages of the market’, while stressing the need for socialists to ‘correct imbalances’.72 This would mean putting consumers in a position of greater equality by enhancing individual rights. ‘We have been unwilling to recognize’, he wrote, ‘that collective provision is merely a means to an end, and that any system, whether collective or otherwise, that does not meet the needs and interests of the individuals it is meant to serve must be reckoned a failure.’73 Although his enthusiasm for markets was much less pronounced, Michael Meacher looked towards a decentralized, flexible economy characterized by partnership between government and industry which obliquely admitted the inevitability of a large private sector.74 The ultimate objective was the diffusion of power and this meant paying attention to individuals as employees and consumers. As the single repository of collective resources the state should not try to act as a universal provider but ‘in different contexts, as [a] regulator, advocate, enabler or protector’. The point was to link it ‘to the cause of socialist individualism’.75 Meacher claimed that individual empowerment ‘goes to the heart of almost every area of economic activity, social welfare or civic regulation’ and offers a ‘much more attractive vista of socialism than the “statism” of the past’.76 Agreement did not run deep, however. Though attractive in the abstract, equal effective liberty is open to interpretation and clear differences exist among these protagonists about the necessary extent of the free market and the benefits to be gained from individual empowerment.77 Above all, the Policy Review itself interpreted the formula gingerly and so pleased nobody. While critics pronounced favourably on aspects of the policies on offer, there

216 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

was concern about the absence of any cohering theme outside individual liberty—itself a value hardly specific to the Labour Party.78 An early analysis of the Review made a particularly indicative judgement. Hughes and Wintour argued that ‘for all its bulk, the completed review document was short on radical ambition’, and went on to say that it lacked ‘self-contained values’. They also noted similar dissatisfaction within the Party, quoting the (generally sympathetic) Labour Coordinating Committee’s opinion that ‘the final review document provides no central logic —no framework around which specific policies are built’.79

THE CURRENT POSITION For all the heat it generated, the Policy Review qua ‘policy’ was effectively consigned to history when Labour lost a fourth successive general election in April 1992. Defeat came partly, no doubt, because of muddle and defensiveness over tax proposals, but partly, too, because there seemed to be little overall sense of direction. Writing a week after the election, Hugo Young commented on Labour’s lack of idealism and the scepticism of an electorate which might have voted for higher taxes had it believed that ‘their yield really would be spent to better purpose’.80 His conclusion may be debatable, but Young and other political journalists who have argued in similar terms surely have a point if by ‘lack of idealism’ they mean excessive caution.81 It is possible, for example, that the equalization of ‘effective freedom’ could still provide the basis for a new egalitarian vision if interpreted with sufficient rigour. The danger, of course, is that the Party has already compromised its egalitarian identity too far and, having lost the visions that, however problematically, gave it its character, has fallen victim to prevailing values. This does not mean that laissez-faire individualism has been swallowed wholesale but the apparent need to conform to ‘externally’ imposed values makes it difficult to interpret new ideas in challenging ways.82 Yet another election defeat, demonstrating the Policy Review’s failure to break this vicious circle, has increased the sense of frustration—as renewed dissension suggests. The strength of current disagreements in the Party hardly matches the debates of old but there is a certain familiarity never-

BEYOND THE THREE VISIONS? 217

theless. ‘Modernizers’ call for further moves away from the ‘past’, broadly on lines suggested by the Policy Review, while their soft left critics demand greater attention to traditional values.83 The argument has been stimulated by Gordon Brown’s apparent abandonment of commitments to raise taxes on top earners and his withdrawal of all public spending promises pending the report by the independent Commission on Social Justice (CSJ).84 Brown’s Clinton-like promise to ‘invest and grow’ rather than ‘tax and spend’, and his apparent interest in ‘the economics of individual potential’,85 has alarmed soft left figures like Blunkett who regard any attempt to turn Labour into a version of the American Democratic Party as rather more than a step too far. Support for these criticisms has also been voiced from a different quarter. Bryan Gould, defeated by the late John Smith in the leadership election following Kinnock’s resignation, and apparently disturbed by continuing calls for further modernization, questioned whether Labour pursued electoral pragmatism too enthusiastically in the 1980s. Over macro-economic policy, for example, he claimed that the Party was too quick to accept the prevailing pessimism about the inability of national governments to pursue Keynesianbased strategies for full employment—which he regards as ‘our most valuable instrument in achieving individual fulfilment and social cohesion, social justice and economic efficiency’.86 Whether, after Britain’s forced withdrawal from the ERM, this heralds a reassessment of the likely viability of a ‘national’ macroeconomic policy and higher public spending it is too early to tell, but impatience with the status quo is clearly rising. Meanwhile, in a new initiative putting responsibility for serious thinking at one remove from the Party itself, Smith abolished much of the Party’s internal policy-making machinery and farmed out the task of examining Labour’s basic purposes and values to the independent Commission on Social Justice under the auspices of the Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR).87 It is not yet possible to say to what practical use the first fruits of its theoretical deliberations may be put in a Blair-led Labour Party, but the CSJ’s interpretation of ‘democratic equality’ provides a useful point of departure for a concluding analysis of the prospects for a new egalitarian vision.

Chapter 10

Epilogue

The end of a book is not the best place to embark upon a serious examination of new ideas. However, it is worth ending this discussion by assessing current prospects for a much-needed revitalization of the Party’s egalitarian character. The need is there for two reasons. First, pragmatically, Labour must have a distinctive ‘creed’—not because it is important to possess some transcendental agreement about the future, but because the absence of tangible ideas on which to base policy proposals limits its scope for movement. In the aftermath of the 1931 crisis Tawney wrote the following: the Labour Party is hesitant in action because divided in mind. It does not achieve what it could, because it does not know what it wants. It frets out of office and fumbles in it, because it lacks the assurance either to wait or to strike. Being without clear convictions as to its own meaning and purpose, it is deprived of the dynamic which only convictions can supply.1 His words may as well be a verdict on the Party today—and contemporary argument both within the Party and outside it suggests that the problem is widely recognized. The second reason involves the wider issue of the likely prognosis for a society which lacks the sense of coherence that equality, suitably defined, can bring. It is currently fashionable to talk about ‘post-industrialism’ and ‘post-modernism’, terms used to refer to the political, social and economic fragmentation of industrialized societies following the collapse of the practices and ideas that have dominated them, in one way or other, since the eigh218

EPILOGUE 219

teenth century.2 Post-modernists claim that little remains of the original ‘enlightenment’ hopes for rational social progress— whether conceived in terms of equality, liberty, democracy or other definitions of progress such as ‘the victory of the working class’. Instead ‘disorganization’ and ‘dis-unity’ characterize many economic and social practices—displayed above all in the decline of traditional forms of work—while the shifting ‘pluralisms’, ‘differences’ or ‘othernesses’ of new social and political movements, jostle for space in the ideological vacuum left by the retreat of the ‘master discourses’.3 These ideas cannot be discussed in detail here, but the collapse of older certainties plainly has implications for Labour—indeed the disintegration of the Party’s egalitarian visions can be understood as one instance of the wider decline of modernist ideologies. However, rather than submit to the chaos of competing interests that post-modernists regard as an inevitable consequence of the prevailing climate, a political party must try to contain them in the enduring framework of a rehabilitated political community. From the post-modern standpoint this may be a contradiction in terms, but it is at least arguable that the task of formulating new ideas, or reformulating old ones, less with the intention of promoting a specific view of ‘progress’ than the humbler aim of containing the trend towards disintegration, remains worthwhile. Both these reasons are intrinsic to the deliberations of Labour’s Commission on Social Justice, the second perhaps more subliminally than the first. To be successful by any standard, the CSJ must furnish the Party with a distinctive ‘creed’ not just able to yield attractive policy proposals but capable of sustaining a realistic vision of the future. It must also ensure that the doctrine of social justice it produces is strong enough to contain the centrifugal pressures of post-modern fragmentation. The CSJ has, to date, produced two short pamphlets that attempt to make a case for a conception of ‘social justice’ defined as a hierarchy of four key ideas in which equality figures as a significant ‘negative’ value. First, a free society is founded on the equal worth of all citizens who, second, are entitled to have their basic needs for income, food, shelter, education and health met by the state. Third, the self-respect and personal autonomy ‘inherent in the idea of equal worth’ depend on ‘the widest possible access to opportunities and life-chances’ but, fourth, and importantly, it is argued that

220 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

‘inequalities are not necessarily unjust’ but that ‘those which are should be reduced and where possible eliminated’.4 These four main ideas translate into a number of policy options intended to close the prevailing ‘justice gap’. In short, ‘fair taxation’, the widening of access to wealth, and a ‘modern form of full employment’ set in an economic framework which encourages ‘long-term investment in people, ideas and infrastructure’ lay the basis for a conception of citizenship grounded in responsibilities as well as rights.5 Importantly, the Commission acknowledges the new flexibility and diversity which characterizes both home, workplace and attitudes to old age and retirement. Traditional collectivist approaches to employment and welfare based on Beveridge’s assumptions, made in a very different era, may no longer be appropriate in all cases. Looser patterns of employment, not just to match the requirements of business but to meet the difficulties posed by a less stable family environment, will be needed if childcare and care of the elderly are to be undertaken without having to resort to total dependence on the benefits system—and the costs such dependence entails.6 Additionally, new pension arrangements and methods of funding them will be needed to fit changing attitudes to ‘retirement’, particularly as the number of older people in the population expands. Post-industrial conditions of the kind the CSJ identifies carry implications for the role and nature of the state. To avoid excessive dependence and the risk of the re-emergence of the paternalistic stress on outcomes, the Commission sees the need for ‘new mechanisms of collective action which will at the same time meet common goals and liberate individual talent’.7 However, outside state-guaranteed services for basic needs there may be a variety of forms of social provision organized and funded by both the private and public sectors. This would suggest that, in common with the earlier concerns of the Policy Review, the CSJ wants an enabling state rather than anything more interventionist. In fact the Commission’s thinking generally echoes the themes already employed in the Review and beyond that, the ideas of Hattersley, Plant and others. A fair worth of freedom, Plant’s ‘democratic equality’, remains the primary goal and the ideological source of the various policy proposals. But can this formula satisfy the difficult criteria set out above? On one view it can. To realize these ideas in practice would almost certainly require fundamental social, economic and politi-

EPILOGUE 221

cal change. The CSJ points out, surely correctly, that even supposedly weak aspirations like equality of opportunity can be potentially radical because ‘the changes required in order to give the most disadvantaged…the same life-chances as the more fortunate would be very wide-ranging indeed’.8 Again, the Rawls-inspired conception of ‘unjustified inequalities’ may not guarantee the removal of all inequalities but it could ensure greater ‘fairness’ if pursued with sufficient rigour. Incomes, for example, are unlikely to be equal because the nature of the work or the effort put into it may vary; but this would not deny a sense of ‘fair’ reward such as that contained in the formula of ‘equal pay for work of equal value’.9 Just as importantly, gender and racial inequalities would be subject to much more rigorous scrutiny, the balance of social proof lying with those wanting to justify them, not their victims. Changes of this nature would be changes indeed and would go a long way towards the goal of equalizing effective freedom. Yet there must be doubts on a number of counts as to whether effective freedom itself goes far enough. One difficulty concerns the old issue of the extent to which individuals are likely to endorse the practical implications of an ideal where this involves costs to themselves. Without wishing to dig up outdated arguments about ‘ownership’, the most obvious example here concerns the problem of how economic power is wielded. How, for example, will the business community react to demands for more justice in the treatment of employees at work, ‘fair’ wages and higher taxes on large salaries? Even the comparatively mild requirements of the Maastricht ‘social chapter’ have been opposed by many industrialists, so a renewed interest in full employment—and better conditions of employment—will at the very least need careful negotiation. There is more than a small possibility that the state will have to exercise a good deal of power ‘as owner, as planner, as enforcer of social and economic priorities’10 if the economic basis of equal freedom is to be secured. Doubts of this kind raise a much larger issue—whether, at root, a programme for social justice of the kind propounded by the CSJ can be egalitarian in the sense that it increases the prospect of an integrated political community. This is not to maintain that all outcomes need be equal or that communal fellowship or sisterhood should be reintroduced as an explicit objective, but it is to claim that theories of equal effective freedom will need to govern for the consequences of excessive freedom where these threaten

222 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

social harmony. To their everlasting credit each of Labour’s original visions was egalitarian, or better, ‘communitarian’ in this broad manner. However debatable its policy prescriptions, each in its own way was about ‘integration’—literally the welding of different social groups into a coherent whole necessarily greater than the sum of its parts. The current emphasis on negative equality and ‘equal freedom’ as ends in themselves suggests that this goal has been lost. The argument of course is that liberty may need to be restrained in the interests of a relatively open-ended version of equality that accords the needs of the whole community priority over those of specific groups or individuals. How can this be accomplished without undermining the valuable good of personal autonomy? The—inevitably complex—answer must lie in the use of a considerably more robust definition of citizenship than Labour managed in the Policy Review. Citizens’ obligations need to be stressed as much as their rights and, where necessary, the state must encourage them to recognize certain responsibilities as part of their status as citizens.11 If this appears unduly restrictive it has to be set against the danger of a ‘loss of universal solidarities and mutual responsibilities’ that the withdrawal of the state and the post-industrial fragmentation of society imply.12 Citizenship and an equal worth of freedom tend to be treated as coextensive but the former implies a holism not necessarily contained in the latter. ‘Obligation’ links the two, defining the limits to which liberty can be taken. It is not clear from what the CSJ has published so far whether it is prepared to push this understanding of citizenship sufficiently hard to qualify the clear emphasis on equal freedom. If citizenship is not employed in this manner, however, it is unlikely that the suggested proposals will produce anything more than an updated ‘new liberalism’ and so fail to provide Labour with a sufficiently distinctive identity. To go one step further, the failure to pursue citizenship could actively threaten the possibility of greater effective freedom. The idea implies, above all, ‘membership’ of a wider community—a community that must generally be agreed to exist before measures to further social justice can be regarded as legitimate. Without it there can be no justification for such measures and no focus for social responsibilities—leaving only empowered self-interest.13 ‘Community’, therefore, would need to come logically before liberty if proposals for redistributive taxation, provi-

EPILOGUE 223

sion for basic needs and so on are to have any general significance.14 Two types of danger, one from the ‘right’ of the political spectrum the other from the ‘left’, will threaten if the importance of citizenship and community is not sufficiently emphasized. The first refers to the problems raised by the appearance in the industrialized world of an affluent majority apparently uncommitted to the wider good. In societies like Britain and the United States where the majority of the electorate now enjoys higher standards of living than at any time in the past, the temptation exists, as Galbraith has noted, for governments to appeal to the self-interest of voters through ‘short-run economic policies of contentment’.15 Promises to cut welfare spending and reduce taxation on the wealthy, coupled with the creation of a social and political climate which justifies ‘the untrammeled, uninhibited pursuit and possession of wealth’ and ‘a reduced sense of public responsibility for the poor’16 can be used to induce a retreat into selfishness which empowerment without responsibility can bring. The result will be the detachment of the majority from a concern with the plight of the worst-off minority and the exacerbation of social disintegration. A vigorous enforcement of citizenship obligations and rights would reduce the complacency created by this ‘culture of contentment’. Individual empowerment is inadequate unless accompanied by a wider sense of social responsibility. As Meacher has commented, ‘empowering people in the market or mixed economy should be a key part of the socialist credo [but] it is not itself sufficient. The use to which that power is put is just as important.’17 ‘Socialist empowerment‘ would involve the use of personal autonomy to benefit others or to contribute to a better community but would surely need to be supported by a strong interpretation of citizenship. The second danger comes from what are broadly described as the ‘new social movements’. Contemporary reactions against late modernist assumptions that different forms of oppression, and different conceptions of the good society, can be assimilated under the banner of a sort of universal, anti-capitalist liberation have created a welter of new demands as a number of groups have become aware of basic inequalities of condition. Postmodernists, standing apart from the heated debates both within and among this multiplicity of particularized interests, may

224 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

rejoice in the new diversity, but they ignore the fact that each ‘local determinism’ is not itself enamoured of ‘difference’ for its own sake. Understandably, a range of new movements—ethnic minorities, women, ecological and religious groups—want to claim that the discrimination they experience must be ameliorated on their terms, or the new society they seek must reflect their priorities, but there is an obvious difficulty with such positions. The demands of these movements cannot simply be directed against archetypal oppressors like privileged, white men, who should certainly be ‘encouraged’ to reconsider the positions of power they occupy. Groups with different agendas necessarily compete against each other. In the absence of agreed principles on which to base wider alliances, identify priority cases for better treatment and so on, competition will not culminate in the alleviation of grievances or the universal adoption of one or other new ideology, but in W.H.Auden’s ‘riot of subjective visions’. Demands will become progressively more specific and separatisms will flourish. To avoid such a prospect ‘there must be some institutional filter for interest group claims…and the most obvious candidate here is a set of integrated values and principles around the idea of citizenship’.18 This is hardly a popular position to hold because it may require the various groups that perfectly legitimately perceive themselves as subject to discrimination to subordinate their demands to the good of the community as a whole. The likely extent of such ‘subordination’ obviously needs separate, detailed discussion, but it should not be taken to imply that groups cannot pursue their interests (in fact they should be given resources to do so). Rather, those interests should be pursued in the context of a political framework that places certain limits on the nature and extent of their expression—and in so doing allows each a fair degree of exposure. Because each individual or group member is a common member of a wider community he or she needs ‘to acknowledge others as being of equal account’.19 Any argument that seeks to privilege the general over the particular in this way risks being labelled as anti-democratic, ‘statist’ and therefore coercive. It certainly prompts questions about who controls the community, and in whose interests, and raises legitimate concerns about the loss of individual or group identities. To allay the more obvious suspicions it is important to understand that any political programme stressing citizenship and community

EPILOGUE 225

in the terms outlined here would do so in the recognition that these ideals do not seek to reduce the significance of democratic equality but to give it a distinctively socialist or solidaristic flavour. There is no question, then, of the wider community being anything other than thoroughly democratic with a high degree of popular involvement in the social, economic and political arenas. Moreover, the responsibilities and rights associated with citizenship are specifically contained within the public realm. The private sphere, in which so many of our roles and identities are formed and in which we spend so much of our lives, would remain an area largely free from interference. On this reading democratic equality is but one aspect of a broader equality that seeks to restrain the excesses of liberty and ‘difference’. Difference there will always be, but it needs balancing against a prevailing sense of integration. There is no intention here to manipulate outcomes or define particular paths of progress in the manner of the old egalitarian visions. But there is no reason to be defensive about ideas that still contain a flavour of those earlier convictions. Put simply, Labour may well need to talk more about liberty but it can only do so with credibility if it retains a sense of equality and social justice.

Notes

Preface 1. A number of volumes take this approach, most obviously Alan Warde, Consensus and Beyond, Manchester University Press, 1982 and Geoffrey Foote, The Labour Party’s Political Thought: A History, Groom Helm, 1985. 2. See, inter alia, Ralph Miliband, Parliamentary Socialism, Merlin, 1972 and David Coates, The Labour Party and the Struggle for Socialism, Cambridge University Press, 1975. 3. Bernard Crick, ‘Socialist Values and Time’, Fabian Tract 495, 1984. 4. The Bevanite period saw a degree of restlessness in certain constituencies and trade unions, but it did not become widespread and both sections of the movement remained loyal to the Party leadership in the 1940s and 1950s. 1 Three visions: Labour and equality in the 1930s 1. A forecast deficit of £120m and cuts of £97m, including a 20 per cent cut in unemployment benefit, were recommended by the May Committee, appointed by Labour’s Chancellor, Philip Snowdon to examine the state of the economy. 2. MacDonald was reluctant to go but came under pressure from senior Conservatives to ‘save the nation’. Williamson suggests that he did not fully appreciate the magnitude of his decision either for himself or for the Labour Party. See Phillip Williamson, National Crisis and National Government: British Politics, the Economy and Empire, 1926–1932, Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 346 passim. 3. Labour’s Foreign Secretary, Arthur Henderson, was a major casualty along with thirteen Cabinet and twenty-one junior ministers. Only the veteran pacifist and Poplar Councillor, George Lansbury, survived from MacDonald’s Cabinet, to take the chairmanship of Labour’s Parliamentary rump. Of the little band remaining, relative youngsters like Clement 226

NOTES 227

4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

Attlee and Stafford Cripps found themselves in positions of influence in the PLP. Mainly through the reformulated National Joint Council which coordinated the work of the General Council, the National Executive Committee and the Executive Committee of the Parliamentary Labour Party. The General Council had seven seats on the NJC while the NEC and PLP had three each. Union hegemony did not lead to any attempt to take over the intellectual direction of the Party; the unions were neither sufficiently united, nor sufficiently confident, to embark on the formidable task of rethinking socialist doctrine. See Lewis Minkin, The Contentious Alliance: Trade Unions and the Labour Party, Edinburgh University Press, 1991, pp. 41–2. Webb used the phrase in his conference speech as Party chairman in 1923. See the account in Charles Loch Mowatt, Britain Between the Wars, 1918–1940, Methuen, 1968, p. 153. MacDonald had always stressed the moral correctness of socialism, the essentially cooperative nature of socialist society and the inevitability of the transition to socialism—all at the expense of detailed policy proposals. See Ramsay MacDonald, Socialism: Critical and Constructive, Cassell and Co., 1924, pp. 190–1. Writing in the summer of 1930, Margaret Cole commented on the ‘clamant need for some effort by socialists to inject a more lively spirit into polities’ and persuaded her husband, G.D.H.Cole, to ‘give a lead’. See Margaret Cole, The Life of G.D.H.Cole, Macmillan, 1971, p. 175. G.D. H.Cole’s response was to found the Society for Socialist Information and Propaganda and the New Fabian Research Bureau. See Strachey’s The Coming Struggle for Power, Gollancz, 1932. Wise and Laski were not entirely at odds with centre-lefters like Durbin and Dalton. Disagreements certainly existed—coupled with a degree of personal antipathy among the leading protagonists—but there were similarities, particularly where economic policy was concerned. Rhetoric was a different matter, however. At Party conferences, in its journalism and at public meetings the Labour Left in the Socialist League espoused a class politics and a complete faith in the inevitability of capitalism’s downfall profoundly at odds with the centre-left’s outlook. See Ross McKibbin, The Evolution of the Labour Party, 1910–1924, Clarendon Press, 1974, pp. 97–106. McKibbin makes it clear that there was little taste for ‘socialism’ amongst the unions which they regarded as the doctrine of much-distrusted intellectuals. Of the twenty-six resolutions of June 1918 which formed the basis of Labour’s new consititution, twenty-three dealt with specific policies for industry and welfare not intended to advance socialism so much as pragmatic trade union collectivism. The ILP document was in no sense ‘Keynesian’, but made explicit use of Hobson’s underconsumptionist thesis, which differed from Keynes’s ideas in important respects and for which the latter had little regard. None of his criticisms, however, detract from the fact that the pamphlet contained a hint of the future in its endorsement of enhanced purchasing

228 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

power as an expansionist route out of recession. For Mosley’s progress see Phillip Williamson, National Crisis, pp. 94–6 and pp. 145–9; also Robert Skidelsky, Politicians and the Slump, Macmillan, 1967, pp. 192– 8 for his ideas about public works. Ramsay MacDonald, Socialism and Society, Independent Labour Party Publications, 1905; Keir Hardie, From Serfdom to Socialism, ILP Publications, 1907; John Bruce Glasier, The Meaning of Socialism, Blackfriars Press, 1919. Bevin initially chaired the SSIP with Cole as Vice-Chairman. Other members included the ex-Guild Socialist William Mellor, Attlee, Cripps and Tawney. Evan Durbin and Hugh Gaitskell, young Oxford intellectuals from the ‘Cole group’ were also members. The NFRB had a similar membership with the addition of Harold Laski, W.A. Robson and Philip Noel-Baker from the, at that time, moribund Fabian Society. At a Special Conference in July 1932 the ILP voted to disaffiliate from die Labour Party (241 votes to 142). The decision was the culmination of the increasingly bad relations between the two bodies which had noticeably worsened during the second MacDonald administration. A large minority led by Wise, who did not share Maxton’s belief that the ILP could mount a credible challenge to Labour for working-class votes, chose to remain in the official fold. In order to maintain their semiseparate identity these ‘affiliationists’ decided to create an organization to promote their views. The SSIP expressed interest in the ex-ILPers’ membership but was not prepared for the takeover bid that transformed it into the Socialist League. See Ben Pimlott, Labour and the Left in the 1930s, Alien and Unwin, 1986, pp. 42–5. After the League’s formation, Cole, Mellor, Raymond Postgate and Arthur Pugh remained on the Executive. Margaret Cole, E.A. Radice and Gilbert Mitchison continued to occupy official positions. Cole and Radice resigned from the League in 1933 when it became clear that much of its activities were in opposition to official Labour policy. Bevin meanwhile refused Cole’s offer of the vice-chair of NFRB; see Alan Bullock, The Life and Times of Ernest Bevin, Vol. 1, Heinemann, 1960, p. 515. The League supported overtures from the Communist Party for a United Front against Fascism from 1933 onwards—Cole, Tawney and Wise signing a letter to the Labour Movement recommending it. ‘Unity’ was never endorsed by the official Party and in the event its constituent parts —the ILP, the CP and the League—fell out with the campaign ending in recriminations and members of the League under threat of expulsion from the Labour Party. See Ben Pimlott, Labour and the Left, pp. 98-106. Harold Laski, ‘Representative Democracy’, in Sir Stafford Cripps, S.K. Ratcliffe, Harold Laski, Hugh Dalton, A.L.Rowse and Bernard Shaw, Where Stands Socialism Today?, Rich and Cowan, 1933, p. 17. Isaac Kramnick and Barry Shearman, Harold Laski: A Life on the Left, Hamish Hamilton, 1993, p. 291. Harold Laski, Democracy in Crisis, Alien and Unwin, 1933, p. 215. Harold Laski, ‘Reflections on the Crisis’, Political Quarterly, 1932, 12 (2).

NOTES 229

22. Harold Laski, Parliamentary Government in England, Alien and Unwin, 1938, p. 47. 23. Laski, Democracy, p. 201. 24. Laski, Parliamentary Government, p. 47. 25. Harold Laski, The State in Theory and Practice, Alien and Unwin, 1935, p. 34. 26. Laski, Democracy, pp. 225–6. 27. See discussions, initially concerned with the composition of management boards in the transport and electricity supply industries, at the 1932 Party conference which developed into a general debate about the right of unions involved in particular industries to be directly represented in their management structures. Despite a technical victory for those in favour of direct representation at the 1933 conference it never became Party policy and the matter was quietly dropped. See LPACR, 1932, pp. 211–25; LPACR, 1933, pp. 204–10. 28. After 1934 Laski became increasingly concerned with events in Spain, Italy and Germany, his decision to join the selection committee of the ‘fellow travelling’ Left Book Club, founded by Victor Gollancz in 1936, being a direct consequence of his support for the Spanish Republicans and the Popular Front. 29. Nicholas Davenport, Memoirs of a City Radical, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974, pp. 70–1. 30. E.F.Wise, ‘Control of Finance and the Financiers’, in Stafford Cripps (ed.), Problems of a Socialist Government, Gollancz, 1933, p. 68. 31. E.F.Wise, ‘The Socialization of Banking’, Political Quarterly, 1933, 4 (4), p. 176. 32. Wise, The Socialization of Banking’, pp. 169 and 179. 33. The Next Five Years Group was formed in 1934 to unite progressive opinion across the traditional political divide. The Next Five Years: An Essay in Political Agreement, Macmillan, 1935, was the group’s main contribution, the most important aspect of which was the acceptance of economic planning, a degree of nationalization (i.e. of public utilities) and some regulation of financial institutions like the Bank of England. For an analysis of this type of ‘middle opinion’ see Arthur Marwick, ‘Middle Opinion in the Thirties: Planning, Progress and Political Agreement’, English Historical Review, April 1964, 79. 34. E.F.Wise, ‘The Socialization of Banking’, p. 171. 35. E.F.Wise, ‘Control of Finance’, p. 69. 36. About 10 of Labour’s 46 MPs were interested. Only one trade unionist, Arthur Pugh, belonged to the League’s National Council. Harold Clay served as a regional member of the National Council until 1935. 37. Pimlott points out that the National Council between 1932 and 1937 included two Etonians, two Wykehamists and a Harrovian. See Labour and the Left, pp. 46 and 56–7. 38. Quoted in David Howell, British Social Democracy, Groom Helm, 1976, p. 65. 39. The Committee consisted of four trade unionists, a member from the Cooperative Society, the leader of the PLP, George Lansbury, and Dalton and Morrison.

230 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

40. Gaitskell came from an affluent Tory background. Following a Winchester education, he went to Oxford where he became a member of the ‘Cole group’ following the General Strike. A brief phase of ultra-leftism after the 1931 crisis quickly ended in a renewed commitment to Parliamentary socialism in the wake of Gaitskell’s first-hand experience of the Austrian socialists’ violent defeat by the Dolfuss regime in 1934. Durbin came from a Baptist family and was expected to follow his father into the Ministry. However, an interest in economics was fostered by Gaitskell and, more importantly, Durbin’s New College tutor, Lionel Robbins, who helped him to secure the Ricardo fellowship at University College in 1930 and hired him to lecture at the LSE at the end of that year. 41. Elizabeth Durbin, New Jerusalems: The Labour Party and the Economics of Democratic Socialism, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985, p. 82. 42. Barbara Wootton (later Baroness Wootton) had been a Research Officer with the joint TUC-Labour Party research department in the 1920s before moving into workers’ education. She was a convinced ‘planner’ and was closely involved with Labour’s policy-making initiatives throughout the 1930s. 43. Pimlott (ed.), The Political Diaries of Hugh Dalton, 1918–40, 1945–60, Jonathan Cape, 1986, p. 173. 44. Clarke suggests that the ‘initial insights’ and ‘disjointed flashes of illumination’ which ultimately led to the General Theory began as early as March 1932 with the acknowledgement that ‘saving [as opposed to investment] was no longer the dog but the tail’, Peter Clarke, The Keynesian Revolution in the Making, 1924–1936, Clarendon Press, 1990, p. 258. 45. See Elizabeth Durbin, New Jerusalems, pp. 107–8. Douglas Jay, a Wykehamist like Gaitskell, went on to New College, Oxford to read Greats in 1926 and then on to an economics fellowship at All Souls. Robbins was Jay’s informal ‘tutor’ at All Souls, introducing him to Alfred Marshall, Pigou and Marx. Working for The Times and The Economist during this period, Jay did not participate in Labour Party discussions until 1935, having been attracted by Gaitskell’s chapter on ‘Social Credit’ theories in Cole’s What Everybody Wants to Know About Money (Gollancz, 1933). Jay met Durbin during the 1935 election campaign and thereafter began to contribute to NFRB discussions on pricing policy. 46. Evan Durbin, Purchasing Power and Trade Depression, Chapman and Hall, 1933, pp. 171–84. 47. Donald Winch, Economics and Policy, Hodder and Stoughton, 1969, p. 345. 48. Elizabeth Durbin, New Jerusalems, pp. 139–40; Peter Clarke, The Keynesian Revolution, p. 253. 49. Evan Durbin, Socialist Credit Policy, New Fabian Research Bureau, Pamphlet 15, 1933, p. 30. 50. Elizabeth Durbin, New Jerusalem, 1985, p. 152. 51. Evan Durbin, ‘The Importance of Planning’, in George Catlin (ed.), New Trends in Socialism, Lovatt, Dickinson and Thompson, 1935, p. 166. 52. Durbin, Socialist Credit Policy, p. 5.

NOTES 231

53. Elizabeth Durbin, New Jerusalems, p. 128. 54. Pigou was a disciple of Marshall who developed ideas on welfare economics which distinguished between the marginal private and marginal social product, and showed that where these diverged the free-market system could not result in a socially optimal distribution of resources. 55. Hugh Dalton, Some Aspects of the Inequality of Incomes in Modern Committees, Routledge, 1920, p. 239. 56. Hugh Dalton, ‘Financial Institutions in the Transition’, in Cripps et al, Where Stands Socialism Today?, p. 62. 57. Hugh Dalton, Practical Socialism for Britain, George Routledge and Sons, 1935, pp. 310–11. 58. Here Dalton and Durbin adhered to a strategy elaborated in 1934 and 1935 by a group of intellectuals including Durbin, who chaired the meetings, and others like Gaitskell, Wootton and Tawney. The group concluded that, apart from the financial measures deemed necessary to consolidate Labour’s position and provide for an immediate rise in prosperity, other socialization measures would be essential and must take precedence over egalitarian policies. See Elizabeth Durbin, New Jerusalems, pp. 189–90. 59. Evan Durbin, Socialist Credit Policy, pp. 5 and 33. 60. Dalton, Practical Socialism, pp. 93 and 146–7. 61. Dalton, Practical Socialism, p. 327. In fact industries such as iron and steel, cotton and insurance did not find a place in the Immediate Programme drafted by Dalton in 1937, although they had appeared in the 1934 policy statement, For Socialism and Peace, and had also been discussed by Durbin’s group, mentioned above. In the financial sector no reference was made to the joint-stock banks whose nationalization Durbin and Gaitskell championed until 1936 when they changed their position to accord with Dalton’s contrary view. 62. Evan Durbin, The Politics of Democratic Socialism, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1940. 63. Evan Durbin, Democratic Socialism, p. 147. 64. Evan Durbin, Democratic Socialism, p. 306. 65. Colin Clark, National Planning, SSIP Pamphlet 5, 1931. 66. Colin Clark, ‘Investment, Savings and Public Finance’, in Cole (ed.), What Everybody Wants to Know About Money, pp. 424–6. 67. Colin Clark, The Control of Investment, NFRB Pamphlet 8, 1933, p. 16. 68. Colin Clark, A Socialist Budget, NFRB Pamphlet 22, 1935, p. 11. 69. Clark, A Socialist Budget, p. 11. 70. Clark, A Socialist Budget, pp. 18–26 and 29–31. 71. Douglas Jay, Change and Fortune: A Political Record, Hutchinson, 1980, pp. 62–3. 72. Douglas Jay, The Socialist Case, Faber and Faber, 1937, p. 214. 73. Jay, The Socialist Case, p. 238. 74. Jay, The Socialist Case, p. 321. 75. Jay, The Socialist Case, p. 324. 76. Hugh Gaitskell, ‘The Banking System and Monetary Policy’, in Margaret Cole (ed.), Democratic Sweden, George Routledge and Sons, 1938, p. 106.

232 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

77. Gaitskell, The Banking System’, p. 107. 78. Hugh Gaitskell, Money and Everyday Life, Labour Book Service, 1939, p. 96. 79. G.D.H.Cole, What is This Socialism?, Clarion Press, 1933, p. 15. 80. G.D.H.Cole, The Intelligent Man’s Guide Through World Chaos, Gollancz, 1932, p. 309. 81. G.D.H.Cole, Principles of Economic Planning, Gollancz, 1935, p. 224. 82. Cole, Principles, p. 254 and G.D.H.Cole, The Simple Case for Socialism, Gollancz, 1935, p. 130. 83. G.D.H.Cole, The People’s Front, Gollancz, 1937, p. 249. 84. Bullock, Ernest Bevin, Vol. 1, p. 530. 85. The speech was delivered in 1951. See A.W.Wright, G.D.H.Cole and Socialist Democracy, Clarendon Press, 1979, p. 14. 86. See Wright, G.D.H.Cole, p. 14. In Cole’s view specific methods were simply means to much more ambitious ends: ‘the essence of socialism is to be found, not in a particular way of organising the conduct of industry, but in a particular relationship among men… socialisation [for example] is a means to an end—a means towards the realisation of the ideal of human equality which lies at the basis of the socialist movement’, Cole, The Intelligent Man’s Guide, pp. 580–1. 87. Cole, The Simple Case for Socialism, pp. 265–6 and 268. 88. Cole, Principles of Economic Planning, p. 327. 89. Cole, Principles, p. 339. A fuller exposition of Cole’s thinking about guild socialism at this time can be found in The Simple Case for Socialism, pp. 137–8. 90. See Norman Dennis and A.H.Halsey, English Ethical Socialism, Clarendon Press, 1988. 91. Quoted in J.M.Winter and D.M.Joslin, Tawney’s Commonplace Book, Cambridge University Press, 1972, p. 88. 92. See The Attack’ in R.H.Tawney, The Attack and Other Papers, Spokesman, 1981. 93. See R.H.Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century, Longmans, Green and Co., 1912; Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, John Murray, 1926; and The Acquisitive Society, Bell, 1921. 94. R.H.Tawney, ‘The Choice Before the Labour Party’ (Political Quarterly, 1934), reprinted in The Attack. 95. R.H.Tawney, Equality, Alien and Unwin, 1964 edn, pp. 49–50. 96. R.H.Tawney, ‘A Note on Christianity and the Social Order’, reprinted in The Attack, p. 188. 97. Tawney, Equality p. 113. 98. Tawney, ‘A Note on Christianity’, pp. 190–1. 99. Dalton, Practical Socialism, p. 26. 100. See Elizabeth Durbin, New Jerusalems, pp. 246–7. 101. The list of candidates for public ownership was shorter than that given in For Socialism and Peace, but coal, electricity, gas, railways and transport were included. 102. See LPACR, 1937, pp. 182–3. 103. A fact symbolized by the election of 156 MPs in 1935 followed by the decision in 1937, albeit hotly contested by certain union leaders, to

NOTES 233

increase constituency representatives on the NEC. The decision marked the return to influence of the political wing. 104. LPACR, 1937, p. 182. 105. Stephen Brooke, Labour’s War: The Labour Party During the Second World War, Clarendon Press, 1992, p. 31. 2 War, post-war and technocratic socialism 1. For a short account see lan Taylor, ‘Labour and the Impact of War, 1939–45’, in Nick Tiratsoo (ed.), The Attlee Years, Pinter, 1991. Stephen Brooke examines the question in depth and concludes that while ‘vindicating Labour’s arguments for planning’ the war promoted each of the possible methods of intervention—public ownership, physical planning and demand management—in different ways. The latter two methods came out best With active intervention being more or less taken for granted state ownership seemed less important than it had appeared in the 1930s. These views were certainly held by centre-left technocrats and Keynesian socialists. For their part, the trade unions saw public ownership as important but recognized it as one among many possible forms of control. Brooke notes that Labour’s sub-committees on public ownership were ‘top-heavy with “second-eleven” trade unionists’ and ‘missed the influence of a Morrison or a Dalton’. See Stephen Brooke, Labour’s War: The Labour Party During the Second World War, Clarendon Press, 1992, pp. 243 and 268—and Chapter 6 passim. 2. Brooke, Labour’s War, p. 37. 3. Clement Attlee, LPACR, 1940, p. 123. The Labour leader went on to claim ‘there could be no return to the old order’. 4. Before Labour entered the Coalition relations between the trade unions and the Conservative government had been difficult, the most obvious problems being over wages and union intransigence towards government requests for voluntary controls, and labour shortages in certain industries. The deadlock broke after the Coalition was formed and a much closer relationship between government and unions—symbolized by Ernest Bevin’s appointment as Minister of Labour—evolved. See Denis Barnes and Eileen Reid, ‘A New Relationship: Trade Unions in the Second World War’, in Ben Pimlott and Chris Cook (eds), Trades Unions in British Politics: The First 250 Years, Longman, 1991, pp. 140–5. 5. Two hundred MPs, including forty Conservatives, voted against the government whose majority was reduced to eighty-one—a technical victory but, in view of the potential majority of over two hundred, a moral defeat. After consultations with die NEC, Party leaders made it clear that they would serve in a coalition government, but not under Chamberlain. 6. Attlee became Lord Privy Seal, Morrison, Minister of Supply, Dalton, Minister of Economic Warfare and Bevin, Minister of Labour. Dalton provides a first-hand account of the negotiations between Attlee and Churchill; see Ben Pimlott (ed.), The Political Diary of Hugh Dalton,

234 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

7.

8.

9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

18.

1918–40, 1945–60, Jonathan Cape, 1986, pp. 345–9. Whitehall arrangements also changed to reflect the new order: an influx of people from industry, finance, the universities and the professions combined to make a ‘civil service of a kind and effectiveness that we have not seen since’—see Peter Hennessy, Never Again: Britain 1945–51, Vintage, 1993, p. 43. See particularly Addison, The Road to 1945, Quartet, 1977, and Angus Calder, The People’s War, Jonathan Cape, 1969. Whether or not this led to a ‘consensus’ in policy-making is another matter—and one again being currently debated. See Brooke, Labour’s War for a counter view to Addison’s argument that the wartime conditions fostered a progressive bi-partisan attitude to social and economic reforms from which Labour benefited in 1945. The committee was created in July 1941 and grew out of Laski’s interests as well as Arthur Greenwood’s official participation in Coalition discussions about reconstruction. Membership included Manny Shinwell, Jim Griffiths, Harold Clay, Philip Noel-Baker, Harold Laski and, ex-officio, most senior leadership figures. Quoted from The Old World and the New Society, in Brooke, Labour’s War, pp. 108–9. The Coalition’s Reconstruction Priorities Committee was created in early 1943 under Sir John Anderson, Lord President of the Council. Bevin, Morrison and Jowitt were members. See Brooke, Labour’s War, p. 110 passim. Brooke argues, against Addison and others, that Labour had a distinct approach to social policy and reform which did not simply conform to the blueprints for social insurance, education and health discussed by the Coalition. Gaitskell, Jay and Dalton remained active on the NEC’s Finance Committee and the Fabian Society’s Economic Committee, chaired by Durbin. Durbin also prepared evidence for the Beveridge inquiry. As in the 1930s, a process ‘supervised’ by Dalton. Labour’s document was more inclined to underpin Keynesian strategies with a greater degree of physical direction than the Coalition’s full employment White Paper. The stress on ‘physical’ planning came primarily from Dalton who, while happy to give his ‘postwarriors’ their Keynesian head, nevertheless continued to regard physical controls as both more egalitarian and more powerful. See Ben Pimlott, Hugh Dalton, Jonathan Cape, 1985, p. 396. Evan Durbin, What We Have to Defend, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1942, p. 76. Hugh Gaitskell, ‘Notes on Post-war Taxation’, quoted in Brooke, Labour’s War, p. 250. Facts not lost on the unions which welcomed the full employment White Paper while insisting that they should be able to function without state interference, representing their members in the traditional manner through free collective bargaining—a recipe for future disagreements. See Reid and Barnes, in Pimlott and Cook (eds), Trade Unions in British Politics, p. 152. Bevan, of whom more below, had been a keen supporter of the United

NOTES 235

19. 20. 21.

22.

23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32.

and Popular Fronts in the 1930s. Along with Cripps and three others he was briefly expelled from the Party in May 1939 for supporting Cripps’s ‘National Petition Campaign’, over the head of the NEC. Cripps did not rejoin the Party until 1945 but Bevan was readmitted in December 1939. Tribune, 29.1.37. Aneurin Bevan, Why Not Trust the Tories?, Fanfare Press, 1944, pp. 88–9. Labour was not a particularly happy Party during the war. The rank and file felt divorced from a leadership preoccupied with government and did not trust the Coalition to implement the Beveridge proposals and other reforms. On a number of occasions constituency parties ignored the electoral truce and supported ‘Independent Labour’, or other appropriately labelled candidates in by-elections. The Parliamentary Party was also divided. Bevan and the left of the PLP constantly criticized the leadership for not promoting socialist policies—to the point where Bevin withdrew from Party meetings for a full year in protest. See Lewis Minkin, The Contentious Alliance: Trade Unions and the Labour Party, Edinburgh University Press, 1991, p. 59, and for a full account of PLP-leadership disagreements during this period, Brooke, Labour’s War, pp. 72–90. Internal pressure groups were obviously involved in a range of areas— notably health and education—where the SMA and NALT made important contributions. However, these groups were small and had little impact outside their own areas of interest. He did not want to reject the Report for fear of playing into the hands of Conservatives close to Churchill (like Brendan Bracken) who were also hostile, albeit for different reasons. See Addison, The Road to 1945, pp. 216–18 and John Campbell, Nye Bevan and the Mirage of British Socialism, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987, p. 127. Brooke, Labour’s War, pp. 258–60. Harold Laski, Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, Alien and Unwin, 1944, pp. 307–8 and 335. Isaac Kramnick and Barry Sheerman, Harold Laski: A Life on the Left, Hamish Hamilton, 1993, pp. 435–49. At this time Mikardo was a member of the Reading Trades Council. He became an MP in 1945 and remained a leading figure on the Tribunite Left throughout his Parliamentary career. LPACR, 1944, p. 162—the NALT and twenty DLPs tabled amendments to the NEC’s resolution. The size of the vote against the resolution was not recorded. LPACR, 1944, p. 161. LPACR, 1944, p. 163. Dalton, Attlee and Bevin, worried lest a quick election would result in a Conservative victory on the strength of Churchill’s leadership record, favoured a continuation of the Coalition until the autumn of 1945. Morrison, however, did not. For Dalton’s views see Ben Pimlott, The Second World War Diary of Hugh Dalton, 1940–45, Jonathan Cape, 1986, pp. 861–3. Written by Morrison with Michael Young’s (head of the Research Department) help.

236 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

33. Let Us Face the Future, quoted in Brooke, Labour’s War, p. 316. My emphasis. 34. For the history of the Attlee governments see K.O.Morgan, Labour in Power, 1945–1951, Clarendon Press, 1984; Henry Pelling, The Labour Governments, 1945–51, Macmillan, 1984; Peter Hennessy, Never Again. 35. Dalton provides a full account of this incident in his diary, see File 35. Dalton Papers, BLPES. 36. Jonathan Schneer, Labour’s Conscience: The Labour Left, 1945–51, Unwin Hyman, 1988, pp. 53–60. 37. See Morgan, Labour in Power, pp. 206–18. Despite a vociferous group of MPs, many themselves Jews, committed to expanding the numbers of Jews allowed into the newly founded homeland, Bevin proved unsympathetic to calls for higher levels of emigration. 38. Crossman had close family ties with Clement Attlee and had been at Winchester with Douglas jay. He taught philosophy at New College, Oxford until 1937 before beginning a long association with the New Statesman where he took over Michael Foot’s position as assistant editor in 1938. Crossman became Labour MP for Coventry in 1945 and eventually held a number of senior posts in the Wilson governments of the 1960s. Foot came from a well-known Liberal, Quaker family. Influenced by Anthony (son of Arthur) Greenwood and John (son of Stafford) Cripps he joined the Oxford Labour Club when an undergraduate in the early 1930s. He embarked on a journalistic career first at the New Statesman and subsequently with Beaverbrook’s Evening Standard. He also wrote for Tribune during the war and for the Daily Herald. 39. Keep Left, New Statesman Pamphlet, 1947, p. 30. 40. Keep Left, p. 33. 41. Keep Left, p. 35. 42. Keep Left, p. 44. 43. Keep Left, p. 44. 44. According to Dalton, ‘Crossman was obliterated, humiliated and deeply offended’, Pimlott, Political Diaries, p. 393. 45. The Marshall programme constituted an offer Britain could hardly refuse. As Hennessy has commented, Marshall Aid allowed ‘the liberated western nations and Britain to avoid choking off their nascent booms in the pivotal year of 1947 when dollar famine and balance of payments problems caused nightmares in their finance ministries’, Never Again, p. 296. 46. Quoted in Schneer, Labour’s Conscience, p. 96. 47. John Platts-Mills, Leslie Solley and Konni Zilliacus made up the core of a small number of MPs who took protest against Bevin’s foreign policy beyond the relatively mild criticisms of the Keep Left group. AntiAmericanism and a generally pro-Soviet line meant that Marshall Aid was rejected, although the loose grouping is best remembered for the ‘Nenni telegram’ incident—the message of support, primarily organized by Platts-Mills, sent to the Italian Communist Party on the eve of the Italian elections in 1948 signed by thirty-seven Labour MPs and treated by the government as a contravention of Party policy. Platts-Mills was

NOTES 237

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63.

64.

65.

expelled, later followed by Solley and Zilliacus, for overt defiance of the NEC’s anti-Communist line. Thomas Balogh, The Dollar Crisis: Causes and Cures, Basil Blackwell, 1949, p. 176. Balogh, The Dollar Crisis, p. xxxvii. Balogh, The Dollar Crisis, p. 166. Keeping Left, New Statesman Pamphlet, 1950, p. 22. Keeping Left, p. 25. Keep Left, p. 15. Indeed leftwingers like Tom Driberg and Leslie Hale were surprised that the government did not immediately adopt Keep Left policies during the 1947 financial crisis. Dalton resigned in November 1947 having divulged details of his budget to a lobby correspondent immediately before revealing his proposals to the House. See Pimlott, Hugh Dalton, Ch. 29. R.H.S.Crossman, New Statesman, 28.5.49, p. 549. ‘Fair shares’ originated in a publicity campaign devised by the Board of Trade to popularize rationing in 1941. A theme echoed by Mikardo in his pamphlet, The Second Five Years: A Labour Programme for 1950, Gollancz (Fabian Research Series 124), 1948. Keeping Left, p. 14. Keeping Left, p. 14. Keeping Left, p. 28. The Left were particularly concerned about the fate of iron and steel and machine tools. Both were regarded as essential for the nation’s export potential, and so were considered to be early candidates for public ownership. Keeping Left, p. 40. Government and unions were locked in wage difficulties at this time after the breakdown of the voluntary wage restraint which had marked Cripps’s Chancellorship. For an account see Leo Panitch, Social Democracy and Industrial Militancy: The Labour Party, the Trade Unions and Incomes Policy, 1945–1974, Cambridge University Press, 1976, pp. 22–6. Keeping Left enjoyed success in certain constituencies. Hornchurch, for example, where a combination of personal loyalty to Geoffrey Bing—a Nenni telegram signatory and member of Keep Left—coupled with a leftleaning constituency party produced a sympathetic response to the views expressed in the pamphlets. See Schneer, Labour’s Conscience, pp. 165–74. The biggest unions at this time were the TGWU (975,000), the AEU (704,000), the NUGMW (605,000), the NUM (533,000), the NUR (410,000) and USDAW (275,000). Between 1945 and 1956 Labour’s leadership enjoyed a generally settled relationship with fiercely antiCommunist union bosses like Arthur Deakin of the Transport Workers, Will Lawther of the Miners, Tom Williamson of the Municipal Workers and Jack Tanner of the Engineers. These figures were responsible for maintaining the voluntary wage agreement between 1947 and 1950;

238 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

66.

67. 68.

69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

they sided with the leadership during the Bevanite period and supported Gaitskell’s bid for the leadership following Attlee’s resignation in 1955. Perceptions of these disputes, particularly as mirrored in the disagreements between Bevan and Gaitskell, depend to a large extent on the loyalties of the commentators involved. See Philip Williams, Hugh Gaitskell, Jonathan Cape, 1979, pp. 249–68; Michael Foot, Aneurin Bevan, Vol. II, Granada, 1982, pp. 317–20. Morgan’s more objective account suggests that Bevan was probably right about the limited benefits to be derived from the health service charges. See Morgan, Labour in Power, pp. 442–51. Figures for the increased arms programme started at £3,600m and increased to £4,700m. The Left accepted the initial figure grudgingly but could not countenance the further increase. Another war only five years after the conclusion of the Second World War came as a shock—and not one for which Britain was prepared. Seen as a possible prelude to a third world war, East and West took it seriously. As to its economic impact, Hennessy has commented that the war, by ‘quadrupling the defence estimates… choked off the export-led boom begun by the 1949 devaluation’ and therefore cut short ‘our best moment for a post-World War II economic take-off’, Hennessy, Never Again, p. 406. Tribune, 4.5.51. New Statesman, 19.5.51, p. 551. See for example, Tribune, 20.4.51. Quoted in Philip Williams, Hugh Gaitskell, p. 268. Janet Morgan (ed.), The Backbench Diaries of Richard Crossman, Hamish Hamilton and Jonathan Cape, 1981, p. 53. Morgan, Backbench Diaries, p. 99. Tribune, 16.9.52. Aneurin Bevan, In Place of Fear, Quartet, 1978, p. 84. Bevan, In Place of Fear, p. 89. Bevan, In Place of Fear, p. 174. One Way Only, Tribune Pamphlet, 1951, p. 16. Bevan had originally wanted full nationalization of insurance but was defeated in the Home Policy Committee. See minutes, 14.11.49, Box 48, Labour Party Archives. Thomas Balogh, ‘Austerity and Progress’, Fabian Journal, July 1953, p. 16. Thomas Balogh, Unequal Partners, Vol. II, Basil Blackwell, 1963, p. 3. Harold Wilson, The Making of a Prime Minister: Memoirs, 1916–1964, Weidenfeld and Nicolson/Michael Joseph, 1986, p. 52. Harold Wilson, New Deal for Coal, Contact, 1944. Andrew Roth, Harold Wilson: Yorkshire Walter Mitty, MacDonald and James, 1977, p. 78. According to Pimlott, Mikardo first became suspicious of Wilson from this time—a feeling he never lost. Wilson also opposed the ideas for Development Councils for each industry proposed in Keeping Left, preferring the equally technocratic idea of appointing government directors to the boards of the largest companies. See Ben Pimlott, Harold Wilson, Harper Collins, 1992, pp. 127–31.

NOTES 239

86. With Cripps seriously ill in Switzerland in 1949, economic policy was placed in the hands of Jay, Gaitskell and Wilson. Pressure on sterling had increased during the early summer of that year and the Americans were demanding a devaluation. Gaitskell and Jay were in favour and Wilson belatedly agreed with them—but only after the decision had won a majority in Cabinet. It seemed to Jay that Wilson’s prime objective was to come out on the winning side rather than agree a principled decision. However, Pimlott is careful to point out the degree of ambition each of these figures possessed—a feature heightened by Cripps’s serious condition and the prospect of the Chancellorship becoming vacant. See Pimlott, Harold Wilson, pp. 136–46. 87. Pimlott suggests that Wilson might have been trying to use the threat of resignation as a means of gaining a safer seat. Huyton was looking marginal in 1950. See Pimlott, Harold Wilson, pp. 162–72. 88. Harold Wilson, In Place of Dollars, Tribune Monthly Publications, 1953, p. 14. 89. Wilson, In Place of Dollars, p. 14. 90. One Way Only, p. 8. 91. Going Our Way, Tribune Pamphlet, 1951, p. 11. 92. Going Our Way, p. 11. 93. Tribune, 5.10.51. 94. Morgan (ed.), Backbench Diaries, p. 52. 3 The Left after Bevanism 1. In the period after the group’s disintegration the individuals who had personally identified with Bevan became closely associated with Tribune, edited by Michael Foot. Foot, lan Mikardo, Barbara Castle and Bevan’s wife, Jennie Lee, made up the intellectual core of this faction. Fenner Brockway, an old campaigner from the ILP, and the playwright Benn Levy were also long-term sympathizers. 2. On April 13th Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, made a statement to the Commons about the situation in Indo-China and the continuing war between Ho Chi Minh’s supporters and the French. He was in favour of American plans to create a defence organization along the lines of NATO. The proposition received muted support by Attlee, at which point Bevan pushed past the leader in his attempt to get to the despatch box to denounce the whole idea. The following day Bevan announced his resignation from the Shadow Cabinet, professing himself ‘deeply shocked’ by the Party leadership’s response to the Eden proposal. For differing accounts see John Campbell, Nye Bevan and the Mirage of British Socialism, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987, pp. 287–8 and Michael Foot, Aneurin Bevan 1945–1960, Vol. II, Granada, 1982, p. 427. 3. The specific issue concerned ‘first use’ of nuclear weapons. The government’s White Paper accepted a first-use policy against conventional attack, and Labour did not dispute this decision. Bevan, who was not against the bomb from a moral standpoint, decided after much prevarica-

240 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

tion to oppose Labour’s acceptance of the policy and thus abstained on the Party’s amendment to the White Paper. Sixty-two MPs abstained with him, but leading figures like Crossman and Wilson as well as Stephen Swingler, Hugh Delargy and Leslie Hale voted with the leadership. See Janet Morgan (ed.), The Backbench Diaries of Richard Crossman, Hamish Hamilton and Jonathan Cape, 1981, pp. 392–4. As to Wilson’s ‘loyalty’, Pimlott notes that his ‘seriously left-wing phase was brief. He recognized Bevan was unlikely to become a serious challenger for the leadership and that the Bevanite label, once useful to get him elected to the constituency section of the NEC, would pull him down. See Pimlott, Harold Wilson, Harper Collins, 1992, pp. 182–5. Lewis Minkin, The Contentious Alliance, Edinburgh University Press, 1991, p. 77. For a brief analysis of union attitudes to Bevanism see David Howell, The Rise and Fall of Bevanism, ILP, Square One Publications, 1981, pp. 21–35. Mark Jenkins, Bevanism: Labour’s High Tide, Spokesman Books, 1979, Ch. 6. Janet Morgan (ed.), Backbench Diaries, p. 437. Tribune, 3.5.57. For Brockway’s view see Towards Tomorrow, HartDavis and MacGibbon, 1977, p. 216. See Bevan’s Tribune articles July/August 1953, ‘In Place of the Cold War’, and also It Need Not Happen, Tribune Pamphlet, 1954. Harold Wilson, War on World Poverty, Gollancz, 1953, p. 175. Thomas Balogh, The Dollar Crisis: Causes and Cure, Basil Blackwell, 1949, p. 238. Balogh, Dollar Crisis, p. 247. Balogh, Dollar Crisis, p. 252. Tribune, 3.3.50. Tribune, 24.3.50. Morgan (ed.), Backbench Diaries, p. 600. See the Study Group’s final draft. Re 154, Labour Party Archives, pp. 9– 15. The document was printed as Towards Equality: Labour’s Policy for Social Justice, 1956. Gaitskellite approaches to public ownership are discussed below, Chapter 4. Tribune, 22.11.57. Forward, 31.8.56. Tribune, 13.9.57. lan Mikardo, The Labour Case, Alien and Wingate, 1950, p. 139. Tribune, 19.7.57. VFS in its 1956 guise contained Stephen Swingler, Konni Zilliacus, Fenner Brockway, Bob Edwards and Frank Allaun among its more prominent members. The enlarged group of 1958 had on its Executive Council, Frank Allaun, Basil Davidson, Harold Davies, Michael Foot, Judith Hart, Clive Jenkins, Hugh Jenkins, Benn Levy, lan Mikardo, Ralph Miliband, Renée Short, Sidney Siverman, the Reverend Donald Soper, Gerald Southgate, Sybil Wingate and Konni Zilliacus…amongst others. File, GS/VS/85, Labour Party Archives. ‘Victory for Socialism’, Industry Your Servant, 1958, p. 7. Following the Brighton speech, Michael Foot, as editor of Tribune, had

NOTES 241

26.

27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

the slogan ‘The paper that leads the anti-H-bomb Campaign’ put on the front of each issue. Jennie Lee has commented that ‘so tense was the strain on their [Foot and Bevan’s] relationship that they almost came to blows’. See Jennie Lee, My Life with Nye, Penguin, 1981, p. 281. For Foot’s view see Aneurin Bevan, Vol. II, pp. 271–83. The reasons for Bevan’s actions are not entirely clear but Gaitskell’s unassailable position as Party leader at this time, coupled with the prospect of a Labour government being elected in the aftermath of the Suez crisis, makes it probable that he calculated that the best position he could hope for in a future Labour Cabinet would be Foreign Secretary. Bevan’s increasing concentration on foreign policy from that period suggests that he had come to terms with his likely future. If the ‘realism’ of his keynote speech at Brighton was one indication of such a recognition, the muted reply to Gaitskell’s attack on ‘Clause Four’ at the Margate conference in 1959 was another. New Statesman, 12.10.57, p. 449. The journal made a further perceptive comment: ‘Bevanism’, it stated, ‘was a political mood as much as a movement. It reflected more a sense of where the Labour Party ought not to go than a sense of where it ought to go.’ See Towards Equality, and Chapter 4, below. Tribune, 27.3.59. Put in the 1918 Constitution by Sidney Webb, Clause Four (part four) committed the Party to the public ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange. It became a particular target for the Gaitskellites who misjudged the sincerity of the labour movement’s attachment to public ownership at least as a symbol of socialist intent if nothing else. See Chapter 5 for further discussion of the Clause Four issue. Tribune, 27.3.59. Tribune, 4.12.59. New Statesman, 24.9.60, p. 416. Harold Wilson, In Place of Dollars, Tribune Monthly Publications, 1953, p. 15. New Statesman, 24.3.61, pp. 462–3. New Statesman, 24.3.61, p. 462. New Statesman, 24.3.61, pp. 463–4. New Statesman, 19.12.53, pp. 784–6. New Statesman, 15.2.58, p. 190. Richard Crossman, ‘The Affluent Society’, in Planning for Freedom, Hamish Hamilton, 1965, p. 100. Crossman, ‘Planning for Freedom’, in Planning for Freedom, p. 84. Crossman, ‘Planning for Freedom’, p. 84. New Statesman, 24.10.59, p. 529. New Statesman, 24.10.59, p. 529. New Statesman, 24.10.59, p. 529. Crossman, The Affluent Society’, pp. 97–8. Minutes of the Finance and Economic Policy Sub-Committee, Re 195, ‘Notes on Economic Planning’, p. 1, Labour Party Archives.

242 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

47. Thomas Balogh, Planning for Progress: A Strategy for Labour, Fabian Tract 346, July 1963, p. 42. 48. Balogh, Re 195, p. 8. Although essentially ‘indicative’ in character, Balogh envisaged some suspension of the price mechanism. He believed it could (a) only allocate resources efficiently in the theoretical context of perfect competition, and (b) would result in a less than full utilization of resources, thus preventing their fuller use for faster innovation and higher investment. 49. New Statesman, 27.3.64, p. 482. 50. New Statesman, 24.1.59, p. 124. 51. Morgan (ed.), Backbench Diaries, p. 655. 52. The leadership contest featured Wilson, Brown and James Callaghan in the first ballot in which Wilson received 115 votes, Brown 88 and Callaghan 41. Wilson secured 144 votes to Brown’s 103 in the second round. 53. Tribune, 23.9.60. 54. Morgan (ed.), Backbench Diaries, p. 945. 55. David Howell, British Social Democracy, Groom Helm, 1976, p. 231. 56. The Finance and Economic Policy Sub-Committee, RD 24, May 1961, Labour Party Archives, p. 5. 57. RD 24, p. 27. 58. Crossman, ‘Scientists in Whitehall’, in Planning for Freedom, p. 139. 59. Harold Wilson, The Relevance of British Socialism, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964, p. 41. 60. Crossman, ‘Scientists in Whitehall’, p. 140. 4 Keynesian socialism in the 1950s 1. ‘Gaitskellite’ as opposed to the more common ‘revisionist’. Other groups and individuals described as ‘revisionists’ had important differences with Gaitskell and his colleagues; there is a clear distinction, for example, between Richard Titmuss’s position and the outlook of the Gaitskellites. Rita Hinden and Allan Flanders, the editors of Socialist Commentary, have also been regarded in the same terms, but had a very different approach to socialist thinking—particularly equality. 2. Quite literally. Crosland ‘was brought up in the intense, austere, narrow Christianity of the Plymouth Brethren’, his parents belonging to the Exclusive Brethren. Although, as Susan Crosland notes, he had a happy childhood with parents ‘far less severe…than those of Edmund Gosse’ it was nevertheless a singular upbringing, outside the normal experience of most children. It left its mark. Crosland enjoyed solitude—if not the literal separateness of the Brethren—and as Susan Crosland has written, ‘he had been inculcated with the sense of being apart from other people’—a sense which, despite his undoubted capacity for ‘good living’, he never lost. See Susan Crosland, Tony Crosland, Coronet, 1983, Ch. 1. 3. Partly at least in line with Gaitskell’s political fortunes—most obviously his promotion to the Chancellorship in 1950.

NOTES 243

4. Crosland and Roy Jenkins were good friends at this time, indeed Jenkins has since described him as ‘the most exciting friend of my life’. While at Oxford together in 1940 they had founded the Oxford University Democratic Socialist Club (in opposition to the Communist-dominated Labour Club) which Crosland chaired and of which Jenkins became Treasurer. See Roy Jenkins, A Life at the Centre, Macmillan, 1991, pp. 30–8. Jenkins, himself, was the son of Arthur Jenkins, a Welsh miner and Labour MP who became Attlee’s PPS during the war. Roy first became an MP in 1948 but moved from his Central Southwark constituency to Stechford, Birmingham for the 1950 general election. 5. Other major Party figures-to-be like Woodrow Wyatt, Patrick Gordon Walker and Denis Healey were associated with the group but either made no significant contribution to Gaitskellite thinking, or, like Healey, became specialists in areas not directly pertinent to debates about egalitarian doctrine—for example, foreign and defence policy. 6. Dalton first met Crosland in 1947 at the home of Nicholas Davenport. A diary entry in September 1948 notes that Crosland was the ‘chief discovery’ of the Fabian conference at Buscot Park, Dalton commenting on his ‘intellectual honesty’, ‘courage’ and ‘personal gifts’. See Susan Crosland, Tony Crosland, p. 48 and Dalton Diaries, 24.9.48. file 36, BLPES. 7. Dalton confided to his diary that he was ‘well past my best -physically, mentally and socially’—though, characteristically, he added that ‘my best was pretty good’. Dalton Diaries, 12.10.51, file 42, BLPES. 8. Very much a product of the rethinking of the 1930s and the Coalition government, Dalton never lost his technocratic socialist enthusiasm for public ownership and planning. He made common cause with Bevan and Cripps over iron and steel nationalization in 1947, for example, against the wishes of Morrison and other consolidationists, and continued to favour policies of direct or ‘physical’ control over purely fiscal strategies. 9. Gaitskell attested to his friend’s contribution to British socialist thinking in Recent Developments in British Socialist Thinking, Cooperative Union Ltd, 1956. He particularly noted the contribution of The Politics of Democratic Socialism, claiming that it marked the transition from the ‘pioneering stage [of socialism] to that of responsibility and power’. 10. Hennessy comments of the difference between French and British attitudes to planning the immediate post-war period that ‘one had a mechanism for converting an economic plan into a productivity drive, the other did not’. Where Monnet’s Commissariat du Plan made a difference to the long-term economic regeneration of France, Plowden’s Central Economic Planning Staff was, at best, marginal’. The tripartite Economic Planning Board, in Hennessy’s view, was ‘an example of British machinery-of-government ad hocery at its worst’ with no one apparently knowing what it was for. See Never Again Britain 1945–51, Vintage, 1993, pp. 378–9. 11. Herbert Morrison, The Peaceful Revolution: Speeches by the Rt Honourable Herbert Morrison, Alien and Unwin, 1949, pp. 13–21. 12. Ben Pimlott, Hugh Dalton, Jonathan Cape, 1985, p. 467. 13. See K.O.Morgan, Labour in Power, 1945–1951, Clarendon Press, 1984,

244 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

20. 21.

22. 23. 24.

p. 364; Alan Budd, The Politics of Economic Planning, Fontana, 1978, Ch. 4; Alec Cairncross, The Years of Recovery: British Economic Policy, 1945–1951, Methuen, 1985, pp. 324–34. The change of method behind Cripps’s policies can be traced through the history of the Economic Surveys. In contrast to that of 1947, the targeting element in 1950 Survey had been excised altogether. It was, The Economist claimed, ‘weak to the point of being meaningless’. Dalton remained reluctant to adopt Keynesian strategies. In June 1946 James Meade recorded his dismay at Dalton’s attempt to divide the budget from the proposed economic surveys: ‘to one who, like myself, believes that the main instrument in a Liberal-Socialist state for carrying out any plan must be fiscal policy, and who therefore believes that the budgetary policy and the economic plan must be as closely linked as possible, this was terrifying’. Quoted in Pimlott, Hugh Dalton, p. 470. Douglas Jay, Change and Fortune, Hutchinson, 1980, pp. 184–5. Morgan, Labour in Power, p. 451. Keeping Left, New Statesman Pamphlet, 1950, p. 29. Quoted in Bernard Donoghue and G.W.Jones, Herbert Morrison: Portrait of a Politician, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973, p. 443. Morrison noted after the 1950 election that ‘it is…quite clear that the majority of the electorate are not disposed to accept nationalization for the sake of nationalization’. He believed electors wanted existing nationalized industries to be made more efficient before embarking on any further measures. This conviction was based on his own experience of talking to Labour supporters at the polls, and on his conviction that middle-class voters were particularly hostile to nationalization—hence their desertion of the Party in February 1950. See Donoghue and Jones, Herbert Morrison, pp. 456–7. Trade Union Congress, Interim Report on Public Ownership, TUG, 1953, pp. 37–51. The report is a study in prevarication. Investing institutions, chemicals, machine tools, electrical equipment, aircraft, shipbuilding and textiles were all considered by the General Council which did not recommend nationalization in any of these cases. The Economist commented that ‘the leaders of the TUG as they express themselves in the General Council’s report, could hardly go further in opposing nationalization’. Quoted in Ralph Miliband, Parliamentary Socialism, Merlin, 1972, p. 321. Labour Party, Challenge to Britain, printed in LPACR Report, 1953, p. 69. Attempts from the floor to reaffirm a commitment to old-style nationalization failed. See LPACR, 1953, pp. 100–1. Evan Durbin, ‘The Importance of Planning’, in G. Catlin (ed.), New Trends in Socialism, Lovatt, Dickinson and Thompson, 1935, reprinted in Evan Durbin, Problems of Economic Planning, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949, p. 44. Evan Durbin, ‘Professor Hayek on Economic Planning’, in Problems of Economic Planning, p. 100. The Durbin Papers, notes for The Economics of Democratic Socialism, Ch. 3, Box 6, BLPES. Hugh Gaitskell, ‘Labour and Economic Planning’, Fabian Journal, 1951,

NOTES 245

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

14, p. 6. Writing in 1953, Gaitskell remained impressed with the full employment which had followed from an active manpower and location of industry policy and continued to defend the level of physical controls utilized by the Attlee governments, stating that he was prepared to continue using them should Labour be reelected in the near future. However, Gaitskell also recognized that it was one thing to maintain controls already in place but quite another to reimpose them once they had been removed. See ‘The Economic Aims of the Labour Party’, Political Quarterly, 1953, 24, pp. 12–13. C.A.R.Crosland, Britain’s Economic Problem, Jonathan Cape, 1953, pp. 36–7. Roy Jenkins, The Labour Case, Penguin, 1959, p. 74. C.A.R.Crosland, The Future of Socialism, Jonathan Cape, 1956, p. 459. C.A.R.Crosland, ‘The Transition from Capitalism’, in R.H.S. Crossman (ed.), New Fabian Essays, Turnstile, 1952, p. 64. Roy Jenkins, The Pursuit of Progress: A Critical Analysis of the Achievement and Prospect of the Labour Party, Heinemann, 1953, p. 137. Crosland, The Future of Socialism, pp. 504–6. Jenkins, The Pursuit of Progress, pp. 138–9. Crosland, The Future of Socialism, p. 385. Hugh Gaitskell, ‘The Economic Aims of the Labour Party’, p. 16. Jenkins, The Pursuit of Progress, p. 102. In 1950 Crosland wrote in Socialist Commentary that nationalization still had a place in Labour policy because of its redistributive potential. Socialist Commentary, February 1950, p. 30. Crosland, ‘The Transition from Capitalism’, p. 38. James Burnham, The Managerial Resolution, Putnam, 1942. Crosland, The Future of Socialism, p. 63. Austen Albu, ‘The Organisation of Industry’, in Crossman (ed.), New Fabian Essays, p. 132. Albu, ‘The Organisation of Industry’, p. 134. Hugh Gaitskell, Socialism and Nationalization, Fabian Tract 300, July 1956, p. 34. Douglas Jay, ‘Public Capital and Private Enterprise’, Fabian Journal, July 1959, p. 13. Roy Jenkins, Fair Shares for the Rich, Tribune Pamphlet, 1951, pp. 15–16. Crosland, ‘The Transition from Capitalism’, p. 37. Gaitskell, ‘Socialism and Nationalization’, p. 17. Crosland, The Future of Socialism, p. 353. LPACR, 1957, p. 159. The debate between Crosland and the New Left, personified by Norman Birnbaum, E.P.Thompson, Stuart Hall and Michael Barrat-Brown, concerned the question of Crosland’s assessment of changes in the ownership structures of large corporations. The New Left protested the falsity of Crosland’s claim that the managerial strata of large firms had supplanted the ‘capitalist’ owners with the result that these institutions were no longer conducted purely on the basis of the profit motive. By demon-

246 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

49.

50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

strating the numbers of directors who were also share owners, the level of interlocking directorships and the tendency to a controlled oligopoly, New Left thinkers argued that, although modern capitalism had undergone apparent structural change, the original motivating force of exploitation for profit was still very much alive. See Michael BarratBrown, ‘The Controllers’, Universities and Left Review, 1958, 5; BarratBrown, ‘Crosland’s Enemy—A Reply’, New Left Review, 1963, 19. Also, Charles Taylor, ‘What’s Wrong with Capitalism?—1’, New Left Review, 1960, 2. Mark Abrams and Richard Rose, Must Labour Lose?, Penguin, 1960. The original articles which made up the book were published in Socialist Commentary, May-August, 1960. The authors explicitly endorsed the ‘embourgeoisement’ thesis and greatly influenced Gaitskellite thinking. Forward, 16.9.59. LPACR, 1959, p. 111. Douglas Jay, Socialism in the New Society, Longman, 1962, p. 136. Roy Jenkins, ‘Equality’, in Crossman (ed.), New Fabian Essays, p. 71. Tribune, 23.2.50. Crosland, The Future of Socialism, p. 115. Tribune, 5.8.49. Crosland, The Transition from Capitalism’, pp. 62–3. Tribune, 12.8.49. Roy Jenkins, Fair Shares for the Rich, p. 4. Jenkins’s views were endorsed by academic sympathizers like lan Little, an economist and friend of Crosland, who believed that ‘the limits of the power of fiscal policy to reduce…the consumption of the rich may have been reached or surpassed’. See I.M.D.Little, ‘Economic Developments and Policies’, in G. D.N.Worswick and P.H.Ady (eds), The British Economy 1945–1950, Clarendon Press, 1952, p. 185. The Finance Bill team included Dalton, Jenkins, Jay, Crosland and, ultimately, Wilson. It numbered twenty-four in all. A central feature of The Socialist Case. See Chapter 1, above. Hugh Dalton’s papers, file 9/26, BLPES. Jenkins, Fair Shares for the Rich, p. 12. The contribution levied up to 50 per cent on investment incomes in addition to what the government already took in income tax. It was intended as a once-and-for-all measure, however; Cripps actually reduced income tax in each of his budgets. See Alec Cairncross, The Years of Recovery, pp. 423–4. Jenkins, The Pursuit of Progress, p. 80. No mention of a levy was made in Jenkins’s 1959 publication, The Labour Case. Tribune, 19.8.49. Tribune, 19.8.49. Gaitskell, ‘The Economic Aims of the Labour Party’, p. 18. Jay, Socialism in the New Society, p. 271. See Jenkins, The Labour Case, pp. 129–34. Crosland, The Future of Socialism, Chs 14–15. Jay submitted a paper to the Study Group on the Control of Industry in

NOTES 247

73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87.

88. 89.

90.

January 1958 entitled ‘Dividend Limitation’. He argued against formal limitation on the grounds of the complexity of administration, and instead declared a preference for a capital gains tax and a heavy corporation tax on undistributed profits. On the first point there was general agreement; on the latter, Jay never proved able to persuade his colleagues to implement a stringent corporate taxation policy. See Re 289, Labour Party Archives. LPACR, 1957, p. 130. Jay, Socialism in the New Society, p. 214. Gaitskell, ‘The Economic Aims of the Labour Party’, p. 18. Jay, Socialism in the New Society, p. 190. A major recommendation of the Royal Commission was the abolition of the distinction for tax purposes between dividends and undistributed profits. It was argued that dividend payments were desirable as a stimulant for investment, those placed on reserve simply strengthening the savings of large companies and thus limiting competition. This recommendation was implemented in 1958 by the Conservative Chancellor, Heathcoat Amory. Jenkins wanted to maintain the distinction, as did all Gaitskellites, for reasons of flexibility—providing a Labour government with a choice of fiscal weapons—and social justice. Jenkins, The Labour Case, p. 133. Crosland, The Future of Socialism, p. 326. Crosland, The Future of Socialism, p. 190. Crosland, The Future of Socialism, p. 191. Jay, Socialism in the New Society, p. 25. Crosland, The Future of Socialism, p. 192. Crosland, The Future of Socialism, p. 177. Crosland, The Future of Socialism, p. 200. Crosland, The Future of Socialism, p. 219. Young wrote a parody of the meritocratic society, The Rise of the Meritocracy, Penguin, 1975, in which he took equality of opportunity to its logical extreme. In the ‘traditional society’ (Young was writing from the projected year 2034) there was a wide gap between subjective and objective status with the result that those of low status could console themselves by acknowledging that they never had a fair chance in the first place. ‘Educational injustice [for example] enabled people to preserve their illusions, inequality of opportunity fostered the myth of human equality’ (p. 106). Such solace would not be available in the perfectly meritocratic society with a resulting increase in discontentment. Crosland, The Future of Socialism, pp. 235–6. Crosland, The Future of Socialism, pp. 210–11. He argued that ‘no socialist…has disputed the need for a degree of inequality here, and because otherwise certain kinds of work, or risk, or burdensome responsibility will not be shouldered. Thus one should pay differentially high rewards to the artist, the coal-miner, the innovating entrepreneur, and the top executive’. See R240, 11.3.53, Labour Party Archives. The working party, which was part of the NEC’s Social Services Sub-Committee, consisted of Richard Crossman, Alice Bacon, Margaret Herbison and David Gins-

248 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100.

101.

102. 103.

104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115.

berg (from the Research Department). An open commitment to comprehensive education was made by Alice Bacon at the 1952 Party conference. She voiced the fear of many supporters at this time that the longer the tripartite system was allowed to remain the more difficult it would be to remove. Jay, Socialism in the New Society, p. 247. Jenkins, The Labour Case, pp. 98–9. Philip Williams, Hugh Gaitskell, Jonathan Cape, 1979, p. 466. Philip Williams, The Diary of Hugh Gaitskell, 1945–1956, Jonathan Cape, 1983, p. 328. Williams, Hugh Gaitskell, p. 467. Rodney Barker, Education and Politics 1900–1951: A Study of the Labour Party, Clarendon Press, 1972, pp. 118–19. LPACR, 1953, p. 76. Gaitskell, ‘The Economic Aims of the Labour Party’, p. 17. Gaitskell, ‘Economic Aims’, p. 17. The Fleming Committee was appointed in 1942 ‘to consider means whereby the association between the public schools…and the general educational system of the country could be developed and extended’. When the Committee reported in 1944 it proposed that the public schools should offer 25 per cent of their places to pupils who had spent at least two years in state-funded primary schools. Labour took little notice of the Report at the time. Gaitskell, however, favoured the general idea although he believed that the number of assisted places should be 50 per cent. Gaitskell did not consider the issue a votewinner, telling his old Winchester housemaster that ‘the ordinary man does not disapprove of the Public Schools and, on the whole, does not want much done about them’. See Williams, Hugh Gaitskell, p. 467. Williams, Hugh Gaitskell, p. 468. Crossman opposed the idea of assisted places, arguing that such a scheme would simply transform the public schools into direct grant schools, effectively preserving two sectors in education. See R.H. S. Crossman, R240, November 1957, ‘Suggested Framework for a Section of the Education Policy Statement Dealing with the Private Sector’, Labour Party Archives. Jay, Socialism in the New Society, p. 250. Jenkins, The Labour Case, p. 87. Crosland, The Future of Socialism, p. 261. Crosland, The Future of Socialism, Ch. 10 and pp. 265–6. Crosland, The Future of Socialism, p. 275. Susan Crosland, Tony Crosland, p. 148. Crosland, The Future of Socialism, p. 276. C.A. R. Crosland, The Conservative Enemy, Jonathan Cape, 1962, p. 169. Crosland, The Conservative Enemy, p. 173. Crosland, The Conservative Enemy, p. 174. Crosland, The Conservative Enemy, p. 182. Crosland, The Conservative Enemy, p. 173.

NOTES 249

116. Following Fred Hirsch, it may be that education cannot be a fixed good, the ever-increasing availability of which will provide the same quality or value of benefit for each individual. See Fred Hirsch, The Social Limits to Growth, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977; R.Plant, ‘Hirsch, Hayek and Habermas: Dilemmas of Distribution’, in A. Ellis and K. Kumar (eds), Dilemmas of Liberal Democracies: Studies in Fred Hirsch’s ‘Social Limits to Growth’, Tavistock, 1983. 117. The main protagonists were Herbert Morrison and Harold Clay of the TGWU, the latter supported by Bevin. Morrison wanted the board members of nationalized corporations to be chosen solely on individual capacity. Clay and Bevin argued that Labour should be represented. The issue was submitted to the General Council of the TUG and the NEC for arbitration and both bodies favoured Morrison’s view. Despite TUG conference approval, the Party conference rejected the Morrison doctrine by 140,000 votes. However, in the event the leadership was able to let the matter quietly slip—so ensuring the victory of the Morrisonian principle in the spate of nationalizations after the war. 118. Allan Flanders, Industrial Relations’, in Worswick and Ady (eds), The British Economy 1945–50, Clarendon Press, 1952, pp. 121–3. 119. A.A.Rogow and P.Shore, The Labour Government and British Industry 1945–1951, Basil Blackwell, 1955, p. 111. 120. Flanders, ‘Industrial Relations’, p. 123. 121. G.Goodman, The Awkward Warrior: Frank Cousins: His Life and Times, Spokesman, 1979, pp. 104–6. Cousins’s handling of the bus strike was indicative of the new mood in which rank-and-file leaders were given their head over pay claims rather than ‘encouraged’ to act ‘responsibly’. The ‘strike decisively marked the end’ of ‘a long tradition of autocratic leadership’, according to Goodman. 122. See, for example, ‘The Insiders’, Universities and Left Review 1958, 3 (supplement). Jenkins wanted a workers’ voice in workshop management and higher policy-making coupled with absolute workers’ authority at local level over working arrangements, hiring and firing. 123. LPACR, 1956, p. 130. 124. Clegg, a leading authority on industrial relations and the role of trade unions, was an Official Fellow at Nuffield College from 1949 to 1966, when he became an Emeritus Fellow on moving to a chair at Warwick University. He was also a member of the Donovan Commission on industrial relations appointed by the Wilson government in 1965. 125. Hugh Clegg, Industrial Democracy and Nationalization, Basil Blackwell, 1951, pp. 35–6. Clegg’s position contrasted markedly with those on the New Left, like Royden Harrison. See the latter’s ‘Retreat from Industrial Democracy’, New Left Review, 1960, 4, pp. 33–8. 126. Clegg, Industrial Democracy, p. 121. 127. Clegg, Industrial Democracy, p. 26. 128. Crosland, The Future of Socialism, p. 335. 129. Crosland, The Future of Socialism, p. 345. By accepting the necessity of a division of labour, Crosland ignored traditional Marxist ideas of alienation. ‘Alienation of the workers’, he argued, ‘is an inevitable fact whether ownership is “capitalist” or collectivist…. In Soviet Russia, just

250 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135.

136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143.

144. 145. 146. 147. 148.

149.

150.

as much as in the United States, the employer and the labourer “confront each other as buyer and seller”; the control centre is separated from the workers; and the possibility of exploitation, and of all the other features of “capitalism” is present’ (p. 70). Crosland, The Future of Socialism, p. 341. He believed that ‘the antithesis of competition is not always cooperation—it may be social ossification, and the denial of individual rights’. Ideas echoed in the Donovan Report in 1967. See Chapter 6, below. Crosland, The Future of Socialism, p. 347. Crosland, The Future of Socialism, p. 342. Crosland, The Future of Socialism, p. 361. Crosland, The Future of Socialism, p. 342. For contemporary criticisms of Crosland’s optimism about the Swedish system of industrial relations see Perry Anderson, ‘Sweden: Mr Crosland’s Dreamland’, Part II, New Left Review, 1961, 9. Jay, Socialism in the New Society, p. 325. Jay, Socialism, p. 326. Jay, Socialism, p. 331. Jay, Socialism, p. 332. By law the supervisory board of a joint-stock company had to consist of one-third employees’ representatives nominated by them by secret ballot. LPACR, 1957, p. 131. Williams, Hugh Gaitskell, p. 391. The trend started with Mr Balfour’s Poodle: An Account of the Struggle between the House of Lords and the Government of Mr Asquith, Heinemann, 1954 and continued with Sir Charles Dilke: A Victorian Tragedy, Collins, 1958 and Asquith, Collins, 1964. Jay, Socialism in the New Society, p. 31. Crosland, The Future of Socialism, p. 91. Crosland, The Future of Socialism, p. 524. Quoted in Peter Clarke, A Question of Leadership: Gladstone to Thatcher, Hamish Hamilton, 1991, p. 253. Susan Crosland, Tony Crosland, p. 107. Crosland also noted on Jenkins’s lack of interest in social change and thought it had something to do with too much socializing with Conservatives. Jenkins himself has commented on his absence from Party matters in the late 1950s and early 1960s. See Roy Jenkins, A Life at the Centre, pp. 131–3. A staunch Gaitskell supporter, Rodgers was one of fifteen defeated candidates who offered their public backing for the Leader’s attack on Clause Four in 1959. A convinced social democrat and ‘European’, he sat as Labour MP for Stockton-on-Tees from 1962 until 1981, and SDP member, 1981–83, holding a variety of junior ministerial posts in the Labour governments of the 1960s and 1970s. Philip Williams, Hugh Gaitskell, p. 662. Pimlott also notes that Gaitskell moved closer to Crossman and Wilson at this time (see Ben Pimlott, Harold Wilson, Harper Collins, 1992, p. 246). Crosland was mainly concerned about the loss of ‘equality’ as a major objective. Commenting on Ray Gunter’s introduction to Labour in the Sixties praising the scientific revolution, he pointed out that ‘the most remarkable thing is that he

NOTES 251

151.

152. 153.

154.

155. 156. 157.

did not stress what was the dividing line [of socialism from liberalism] and that is a certain belief about class, and a certain belief about equality’, LPACR, 1960, p. 142. Wilson’s speech to conference, October 1961, captured most of these themes. Barbara Castle also thought that ‘a few rich countries were determined to protect their interests at the expense of the rest of the world’. See her autobiography, Fighting All the Way, Macmillan, 1993, pp. 328–9. Williams, Hugh Gaitskell, Ch. 25. For example, the failure to insist on safeguards for Commonwealth and EFTA countries, and fears of the likely consequences of European agricultural protectionism. Gaitskell was especially concerned about New Zealand’s position (with whose Labour opposition leader, Walter Nash, he was particularly close) and remained dubious about the vague promises made to India, Pakistan and African countries about possible trade agreements. LPACR 1962, p. 90. Party politics may have played a role here but his biographer has claimed that ‘he spoke at Brighton out of conviction not calculation’. See Williams, Hugh Gaitskell, p. 747 and David Marquand, The Progressive Dilemma: From Lloyd George to Kinnock, Heinemann, 1991, pp. 129–30. Rodgers sat through the standing ovation, Jenkins refused to applaud and, on his own account, remained bitter for some time. See Jenkins, A Life at the Centre, p. 146. Jenkins, A Life, p. 147. Healey, Stewart, Callaghan and Gordon Walker all changed their minds during the 1960s. Susan Crosland, Tony Crosland, p. 113. 5 Rethinking qualitative socialism?

1. Europe, Russia and the Future, Gollancz, 1941; Great Britain in the Post-war World, Gollancz, 1942; and The Intelligent Man’s Guide to the Post-war World, Gollancz, 1947. 2. G.D.H.Cole, ‘Socialism or Mixed Economy?’, New Statesman, 23.4.49, p. 399. 3. G.B.Shaw (ed.), Fabian Essays in Socialism, W.Scott, 1889. 4. Cole interpreted industrial democracy as ‘workers’ control’ while in the 1940s Mikardo was content with ‘joint consultation’. 5. See Jonathan Schneer, Labour’s Conscience: The Labour Left 1945–51, Unwin Hyman, 1988, pp. 97–9. Crossman complained to Dalton that Cole was ‘pro-Russian’, Dalton Papers 9/10, BLPES. 6. G.D.H.Cole, ‘Socialists and Communism’, New Statesman, 5.5.56. 7. G.D.H.Cole, World Socialism Restated, New Statesman Pamphlet, 1956, p. 18. 8. G.D.H.Cole, The Future of Socialism, Part II’, New Statesman, 22.1.55, p. 92. 9. Cole, The Future of Socialism’, p. 92.

252 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

10. Margaret Cole, The Life of G.D.H.Cole, Macmillan, 1971, p. 285. According to Margaret Cole, ‘the objects which those who joined [the ISSS] had in mind were wildly incompatible…there were bitter personal quarrels; none of the research projects came to anything; national groups split off; the Society’s journal faded away after a few issues’. The Soviet invasion of Hungary occurred six months after the ISSS was founded— an event which did little to foster links between communists and democratic socialists. In more critical vein, Anthony Wright has argued that ‘despite all his insistence on the essential unity of international socialism, [Cole] never made a critical attempt to define the content of this unity’. SeeA. W.Wright, G.D.H.Cole and Socialist Democracy, Clarendon Press, 1979, p. 260. 11. Cole believed that joint consultation should take place not only at workshop level, but at regional and national levels. While he continued to claim that this would be a stage towards some form of workers’ control, which would be based on joint decision-making, all his recommendations were directed to immediate developments in industrial relations. Here he held almost ‘Cleggite’ views about the place of consultation and the negligible role of the unions in it, which gave him something in common with Crosland, and Allan Flanders of the Socialist Commentary group. 12. Quoted in A.W.Wright, G.D.H.Cole, p. 135. 13. G.D. H.Cole, The Case for Industrial Partnership, Macmillan, 1957, p. 15. 14. Cole, Industrial Partnership, p. 36. 15. G.D.H.Cole, The History of Socialist Thought, Vol. V, Socialism and Fascism, Macmillan, 1960, p. 337. 16. As Margaret Cole later wrote, ‘the ideas which had been the mainspring of his life and work—industrial democracy, workers’ control, a pluralist society—seemed to have lost their appeal’—although her comment ignores the New Left’s rising interest. The New Left Reviews first editorial referred to ‘a whole neglected tradition within socialism [which] needs to be imaginatively rediscovered’. This meant reconsidering questions of bureaucracy, ‘the distance between men and decisions which affect them, the problem of overcentralization, and the vested power of the propertied classes. See New Left Review, Jan.-Feb., 1960, 1, p. 1. 17. Comments on a draft of Socialist Union’s Socialism: A New Statement of Principles, Socialist Commentary Archives, Box 10, Warwick University Modern Records Centre. 18. The view taken by Julian Le Grand in The Strategy of Equality, Alien and Unwin, 1982, Ch. 1. 19. Tawney Papers, Box 20, 19/2, p. 3, BLPES. 20. Socialist Commentary Archives, Box 10, Warwick University. 21. R.H. Tawney, ‘British Socialism Today’, in Rita Hinden (ed.), The Radical Tradition, Pelican, 1964, p. 176. 22. R.H.Tawney, Equality, Alien and Unwin, 1964 edn, p. 232. 23. Tawney, ‘British Socialism Today’, p. 185. 24. H.Gaitskell, Tawney’s Essays’, New Statesman, 21.2.53, p. 210. The comments were made as part of a review of The Attack and Other

NOTES 253

25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

Papers, originally published in 1953. Gaitskell’s comments contrast with the Address he gave at Tawney’s memorial service held on February 8th 1962, printed as a postscript in The Radical Tradition.Crosland also voiced his doubts, commenting in The Future of Socialism, that few would ‘quarrel with [the] ethical aspiration towards a more fraternal and cooperative society…. The difficulty is to find the framework within which it can be fulfilled’. See C.A.R.Crosland, The Future of Socialism, Jonathan Cape, 1956, pp. 89–90. Militant Socialist International (MSI) (British Section), Leonard Nelson: Philosopher, Politician, Educationalist, International Publishing Co., 1939, pp. 6–8. MSI, Leonard Nelson, p. 9. Internationaler Sozialistischer Kampf-Bund was the name taken by the IJB after it was expelled from the German SPD in 1926. The reasons for the expulsion concerned the radical leanings of the IJB at a time when the SPD was beginning to moderate its policies, and the antipathy of the SPD towards Nelson’s conceptions of leadership. See Mary Saran, Never Give Up, Oswald Wolff, 1976, pp. 48–51. MSI, Leonard Nelson, p. 11. Saran, Never Give Up, p. 82. Der Funke, The Spark’—named after the Russian paper Iskra for which Lenin had written. Allan Flanders, ‘Socialist Political Unity’, Socialist Vanguard, 1936, 1 (10), p. 257. Papers of the Socialist Vanguard Group, Box 2, Warwick University Modern Records Centre. Socialist Vanguard Papers, Box 1, Warwick University. Hinden became joint editor of Socialist Commentary with Flanders in 1946. Committee Minutes in the SVG Papers, Box 3, Warwick University. SVG Papers, Box 4, paper dated 29.5.49, Warwick University. See Allan Flanders, ‘Rita Hinden’, in J.M.Bellamy and John Saville (eds), Dictionary of Labour Biography, Vol. II, Macmillan, 1974, p. 181. Socialist Union, Socialism: A New Statement of Principles, (4th edn) Socialist Commentary Publications, 1958 (Lincolns-Praeger, 1952), p. 29. Socialist Union, Twentieth Century Socialism, Penguin, 1956, p. 24. Rita Hinden, ‘Towards New Vistas’, Socialist Commentary, December 1951, p. 277. Socialist Union, A New Statement, p. 37. Socialist Union, Twentieth Century Socialism, p. 38. Socialist Union, A New Statement, p. 35. Socialist Union, A New Statement, p. 37. Editorial, ‘Left or Right?’, Socialist Commentary, June 1954, pp. 141–2. See also ‘Ends and Means’, Socialist Commentary, January 1960, pp. 2–3. Letter dated 5.10.55, SVG papers, Box 13, Warwick University. Editorial, ‘The Lost Leader’, Socialist Commentary, February 1963, p. 3. See, for example, a paper written by Flanders about 1943–44, ‘The Future of British Socialism’. He argued that the British Labour Party and the socialist movement were by no means synonymous. Labour was only equated with socialism because socialism had become equated with

254 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

nationalization. The point was to make Labour a properly socialist party by substituting socialist principles for ‘economic dogma’. SVG Papers, Box 3, Warwick University. See Socialist Commentary, November 1951; May 1952; November 1952; October 1953; June 1954; April 1955—and this does not exhaust the list. Socialist Union, A New Statement, p. 23. Socialist Union, Twentieth Century Socialism, p. 128. Editorial, ‘Means and Ends’, Socialist Commentary, p. 3. Socialist Union, Twentieth Century Socialism, pp. 136–7. Socialist Union, Twentieth Century Socialism, pp. 79–84. Allan Flanders, British Trade Unionism, Bureau of Current Affairs, Background Handbook, 7, 1948, p. 57. Allan Flanders, ‘The Meaning of Industrial Democracy’, Socialist Commentary, April 1960, p. 14. Socialist Union, Twentieth Century Socialism, p. 57. Socialist Union, Twentieth Century Socialism, pp. 104–5. Socialist Union, Education and Socialism, Socialist Commentary Publications, 1958, p. 11. Socialist Union, Education and Socialism, pp. 19–20. Socialist Union, Education and Socialism, p. 13. Socialist Union wrote that ‘the attempt to erase…social barriers will be ineffective as long as the education separates children into different types of school either on the basis of wealth, or of intelligence or special interests’. See Education and Socialism, p. 20. Socialist Union, Education and Socialism, p. 14. Socialist Union, Education and Socialism, p. 54. Socialist Union, Education and Socialism, p. 51. Socialist Union, Education and Socialism, p. 11. Bernard Crick, ‘Socialist Literature in the 1950s’, Political Quarterly, 1960, 31, p. 369. SVG Papers, Box 13, Warwick University. Rita Hinden, ‘The Public Ownership Debate’, Socialist Commentary, March 1960, p. 5. Editorial, Socialist Commentary, August 1960, p. 3. The journal made it clear that control over the economy was an important dimension of socialism because it could affect the distribution of wealth and even claimed that ‘Aneurin Bevan was right when he said this is an ugly society, and the central issue is the issue of economic power’. Socialist Commentary had not changed sides, however: a further passage stated that ‘there are many ways of controlling economic power apart from putting it under public ownership’. Socialist Commentary, June 1964, p. 3. Socialist Commentary, June 1964, p. 3. Socialist Commentary, June 1964, p. 4. Socialist Commentary, June 1964, p. 5. R.M.Titmuss, ‘Introduction’ to R.H.Tawney, Equality, 1964 edn, p. 10. R.M.Titmuss and K.Titmuss, Parents’ Revolt, Seeker and Warburg, 1942, p. 15. See also Titmuss’s article ‘The End of Economic

NOTES 255

76.

77.

78. 79. 80.

81. 82. 83.

Parenthood’, in the New Statesman, 9.8.41. Book and article claimed that childbirth rates were not sufficient to replace the population and that this was due to the desire of individuals for a higher standard of living. ‘The fundamental factor is…the psychological atmosphere of a society which places acquisitiveness before children’ (New Statesman, p. 131). The Common Wealth Party suited Titmuss’s ethical view of socialism, but he may have been aware that there had to be more to socialism than purely a statement of ideals. Kay Titmuss commented in June 1974 in a note about Titmuss’s connection with Common Wealth, that ‘I think Richard knew quite early that the Common Wealth movement would not get very far, but it provided him with the feeling of trying to do something for the country and we must remember his job was in insurance—War Damage Claims, which was unsatisfying.’ File in the possession of the late Kay Titmuss. Peter Townsend and Brian Abel-Smith had degrees in Economics and Anthropology, respectively. By 1951 Abel-Smith had begun to research into the costs of the National Health Service while Townsend started work with an independent research unit, Political and Economic Planning, before moving on to a job as Research Officer with Michael Young’s Institute of Community Studies. Both became lecturers in the Department of Social Administration at the LSE in the late 1950s. R.M.Titmuss, ‘War and Social Policy’, in Essays on the Welfare State, Alien and Unwin, 1963, p. 82. R.M.Titmuss, ‘The Social Division of Welfare’ in Essays on the Welfare State, p. 35. The full story of the group’s attempts to provide Labour with a new national superannuation scheme cannot be told here. In short, with encouragement from Richard Crossman, Titmuss et al tried to substitute a system of graduated payments (according to income) for the traditional and increasingly expensive ‘flat-rate’ system produced by Beveridge —the point being to produce a formula that would yield half-pay on retirement for the lowest-paid members of the community. Pensions would also be ‘dynamised’ to protect their value. The scheme’s main purpose was ‘to aid the lower paid worker more than the higher paid’ in order to ensure ‘that there are not more inequalities in old age than in working life’—whether it would actually have achieved this is open to question. See R.H. S.Crossman, The Politics of Pensions (Eleanor Rathbone Memorial Lecture, 14.5.71), Liverpool University Press, 1972; Brian Abel-Smith and Peter Townsend, New Pensions for Old, Fabian Research Series 171, 1953; R.M.Titmuss, The Future Development of Pensions and Superannuation’, Re 83, June 1956, Labour Party Archives; National Superannuation, Labour Party, 1957. Quoted from a letter, dated 6.12.61, sent to Tawney about the contents of Income Distribution and Social Change. R.M.Titmuss, Income Distribution and Social Change, Alien and Unwin, 1962, pp. 57–8. Titmuss, Income Distribution, p. 96. Titmuss claimed that ‘literally nothing is known about [trusts] in terms of numbers, beneficiaries and amounts of capital involved’; however, using rough figures derived

256 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

84. 85. 86. 87. 88.

89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97.

98.

fromj. R.S.Revell’s analysis of holders of personal wealth, he argued that the amount of non-taxable wealth held in trusts could be as much as £4,500m. If non-dutiable settled property was included (i.e. that conferred on surviving spouses) the figure would rise to £6,500m. Titmuss, Income Distribution, pp. 112–13. Titmuss, Income Distribution, p. 196. R.M.Titmuss, The Limits of the Welfare State’, New Left Review, 1964, 27, p. 35. R.M.Titmuss, ‘The Irresponsible Society’, in Essays on the Welfare State, pp. 234–5. Committee on Social Security and Old Age, 27.6.56, Labour Party Archives. Titmuss advocated ‘nationalization by persuasion’. A national insurance scheme should be so satisfactory that employers would have no incentive to run their own schemes. Others on the Committee, notably Douglas Jay, were less sanguine than Titmuss. Jay thought it might be possible to reorganize tax concessions for private companies so as to make the state system more attractive, but beyond this he was reluctant to go. The other group that was worried by Titmuss’s ideas was the Cooperative movement. At a meeting on 20.3.58, Coop representatives made it clear that a successful national scheme may lead to their members contracting out of the Cooperative schemes. Abel-Smith and Townsend, New Pensions for Old, p. 27. Titmuss, ‘The Limits of the Welfare State’, p. 33. Titmuss, ‘The Irresponsible Society’, pp. 241 and 243. R.M.Titmuss, ‘Industrialization and the Family’, in Essays, p. 112. Titmuss, Problems of Social Policy, p. 514. Titmuss, ‘War and Social Policy’, in Essays, p. 82. A.W.Wright, ‘Tawneyism Revisited’, in Ben Pimlott (ed.), Fabian Essays in Socialist Thought, Heinemann, 1984, p. 94. For a criticism of the egalitarian nature of the pensions policy see David Piachaud, New Statesman, 18.6.71, pp. 830–2. See R.M.Titmuss, The Gift Relationship, Alien and Unwin, 1970. Although the book constituted a courageous attempt to argue the case for ‘altruism’ in social policy in the belief that ‘the ways in which society organizes and structures its social institutions—and particularly its health and welfare systems—can encourage or discourage the altruistic in man’, the work was criticized on a number of grounds. See David Reisman, Richard Titmuss: Welfare and Society, Heinemann, 1977, Part III, Ch. 8; Raymond Plant, Hugh Lesser and Peter Taylor-Gooby, Political Philosophy and Social Welfare, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980, Ch. 7. On his own account Crossman was ‘set up’ by the rightwing chairperson, Edith Summerskill, at the 1955 Party conference. Summerskill, who could not speak from the platform, asked Crossman, then identified with the Bevanites, to answer calls for higher pensions from the floor in the hope of embarrassing him. On the advice of Peter Shore, head of the Research Department, who was aware of the new work of Titmuss and his colleagues, Crossman talked of the possibility of working out a new,

NOTES 257

99.

100. 101. 102.

more equitable scheme. See Crossman, The Politics of Pensions, and LPACR, 1955, p. 202. Janet Morgan (ed.), The Backbench Diaries of Richard Crossman, Hamish Hamilton and Jonathan Cape, 1981, p. 584. Crossman mischievously noted the ‘delicious discovery—that, in the course of getting a decent pensions plan, we shall have evolved by far the most efficient and unobjectionable machine for buying up equities! Brian Abel-Smith is a bit alarmed about this’ (Backbench Diaries, p. 590). Peter Townsend, ‘The Truce on Inequality’, New Statesman, 9.9.59, pp.143–4. Harold Wilson, The War on Poverty’, New Statesman, 3.10.59, p. 413. Stuart Hall, ‘The Supply of Demand’, in E.P.Thompson (ed.), Out of Apathy, Stevens, 1960, p. 79. 6 Interregnum

1. Crosland, Jenkins, Jay, Crossman and Barbara Castle all became Cabinet ministers in the two Wilson governments of 1964–70, while Balogh became an economic advisor. 2. In so far as they relate to changes in leftwing thinking some of these issues are briefly discussed in the concluding part of this chapter; there is no space, however, to examine the wider social changes experienced in Britain in the early 1960s which had such an impact on the British Left in general. Stuart Laing, Representations of Working-class Life, 1957– 1964, Macmillan, 1986 and Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution, Pelican, 1965, Part III, explore social and cultural change in the early 1960s in some depth. 3. Crosland himself acknowledged the enormity of the task—see below, Chapter 8. 4. Debate continues over the wisdom of the decision. Crosland wanted a swift devaluation as did two of Wilson’s economic advisors, Nicholas Kaldor and Andrew Nield; George Brown, who changed his mind several times, at this point did not. In true centre-left fashion, however, Balogh and Wilson believed that if planned-growth-plus-incomes policy could be achieved devaluation would be unnecessary. See Pimlott, Harold Wilson, Harper Collins, 1992, pp. 349–54. 5. Plan for Progress: Labour’s Policy for British Economic Expansion, Labour Party, 1958, p. 37. 6. Frank Cousins, LPACR, 1958, pp. 165–6. 7. The message was not repeated in Signposts for the Sixties, for example which, for all its concentration on planning, made no mention of the wage issue at all. 8. George Woodcock claimed the Conservatives’ had imposed an effective pay freeze in the public sector during the ‘pay pause’ and that pay norms were anyway inequitable because they only applied to wages and not salaries, profits or dividends. See Keith Middlemas, Power, Competition

258 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

and the State, Vol. II, Threats to the Postwar Settlement, 1961–1974, Macmillan, 1990, p. 37. TUG Annual Conference Report, 1962, p. 367. Middlemas, Power, Competition, Vol. II, p. 53. TUG, 1962, p. 370. Composite 13, LPACR, 1963, pp. 189–90. The motion also called for ‘a better system of popular administration of industrial enterprises by involving the staff of these concerns more directly in their administration’. Cousins wrote in October 1963 that ‘if we do not fulfil the purposes for which members join unions, to protect and raise their general standard of living, then unions will wither and finally die’. Quoted in Robert Taylor, ‘The Trade Union Problem in the Age of Consensus, 1960–79’, in Ben Pimlott and Chris Cook (eds), Trade Unions in British Politics: The First 250 Years, Longmans, 1991, p. 182. For example, the Industrial Enquiry, conducted by a wide range of organizations, including trade associations and Economic Development Committees, though detailed in the kind of information it sought to discover, failed to take account of the entirely hypothetical nature of the exercise. Assumed growth targets of 25 per cent in six years were not treated seriously by respondents because many firms did not normally plan even five years ahead. See Alan Budd, The Politics of Economic Planning, Fontana, 1978, pp. 110–81; Roger Opie, ‘Economic Planning and Growth’, in Wilfred Beckerman (ed.), The Labour Government’s Economic Record, 1964–1970, Duckworth, 1972, pp. 166–70. Moreover, little time was spent on the intricate process of matching estimates of supply and demand for commodities—as the Plan’s short gestation period (eleven months) testified. The intellectual vagueness of the enterprise was epitomized in George Brown’s claim that the Plan was ‘a guide to action’ which showed ‘who is responsible for what [and] the main things that have to be done…by whom’ (Cmnd 2764, p. 1)—a comment worthy of Morrison’s equally hazy definition of planning uttered twenty years earlier. For a brief discussion of Tribunite thinking during the 1960s see Alan Warde, Consensus and Beyond, Manchester University Press, 1982, Ch. 5, and Chapter 7, below. Ben Pimlott, Harold Wilson, pp. 414–27. Pimlott, Harold Wilson, p. 410. Increasingly strident resolutions demanding an end to incomes policy became the norm at successive TUG and Labour Party conferences between 1966 and 1968. Both conferences voted against a statutory prices and incomes policy by overwhelming majorities in 1968. The story of prices and incomes legislation between this time and the demise of the government in 1970 is one of increasing opposition both on the left of the PLP and in the trade unions to the principle of a Labour government acting against what many perceived as the wider interests of the labour movement. Opie, ‘Economic Planning’, p. 171. Symbolized in the DEA’s swift demise, following George Brown’s resignation, and the corresponding enhancement of Treasury power. Epitomized by the rapidly mounting number of unofficial strikes such as

NOTES 259

20. 21. 22.

23.

24. 25. 26.

those at Ford and Girling Brakes, and unemployment, which rose to 500,000 in the first quarter of 1967—a high figure by the standards of the day. Labour lost two by-elections at Hamilton and Leicester South-west in 1967. Roy Jenkins, A Life at the Centre, Macmillan, 1991, p. 221. Shopfloor bargaining mushroomed to create an informal, fragmented ‘second tier’ of industrial relations in industries such as engineering, vehicle construction and printing, leading to the creation of a morass of agreements about wages, productivity and conditions that shifted power towards organized workers at the expense of employers. See John Goldthorpe, ‘Industrial Relations in Great Britain: A Critique of Reformism’, Politics and Society, 1974; Allan Flanders, Management and Unions, Faber, 1970. Jack Jones, who succeeded Frank Cousins as General Secretary of the TGWU, shared his views about incomes policy but was instinctively more sympathetic to demands for workers’ control. His political background included involvement in the Spanish Civil War, an association in the 1940s with the National Labour Colleges and long experience as a District, then Regional, Secretary in the engineering section of the TGWU in the Midlands. Hugh Scanlon of the highly decentralized AEU had a background in shopfloor bargaining which made him the Left’s candidate in the campaign for the presidency on the retirement of Will Carron, its rightwing leader, in 1967. He beat Carron’s choice, John Boyd, in a hard-fought election in which incomes policy was the central issue. Clive Jenkins, General Secretary of the white-collar union ASSET, and from a very different part of the union world, had a long history of sympathy for workers’ control. Initially favourably disposed, he came to oppose the prices and incomes policy when the government began, in his view, to depart from the agreement reached at the 1963 conference in a deliberate attempt to restrict union autonomy. In fact Jenkins was one of the first leaders to voice his opposition publicly, tabling an emergency resolution at the 1965 Party conference calling on the movement to ‘disapprove’ of the proposed prices and incomes legislation (LPACR, p. 231). See also Clive Jenkins, ‘We Haven’t Got Enough’, in Robin Blackburn and Alexander Cockburn (eds), The Incompatibles: Trade Union Militancy and the Consensus, Penguin, 1967. TUC Economic Review, 1968, p. 117. TUG Economic Review, 1967, p. 28. Evidence of the truth of such a view can be seen in Jenkins’s reputed comment to Cabinet that ‘if we are not seen to deal strongly with wages we can’t avoid a second devaluation, world monetary confusion and the destruction of this government’. See Barbara Castle, The Castle Diaries, 1964–76, Macmillan, 1990, p. 195. Union leaders were also distinctly unimpressed by suggestions that differentials between unions were a sign of their own inegalitarian practices—a stance which appeared to be partly vindicated in 1967 when the government accepted an NBPI report on top salaries which recommended a 60 per cent rise over three years for top earners in the nationalized industries. Panitch has pointed out

260 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

27. 28. 29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

34. 35. 36. 37.

that in the 1960s 80 per cent of all manual workers earned between £15 and £33 per week—a relatively narrow range compared to the much wider gap between wages and salaries. See Leo Panitch, Social Democracy and Industrial Militancy, Cambridge University Press, 1976, p. 216. Jack Jones, ‘Unions Today and Tomorrow’, in Blackburn and Cockburn (eds), The Incompatibles, p. 126. Jones aired these views more publicly at the TUG conference in 1968 (see pp. 531–2) and in Tribune, 11.2.66. The Royal Commission on Trades Unions and Employers Associations was appointed in 1965 and reported in 1968. It found that de facto changes towards plant-level bargaining had already taken place and concluded that the scope of industrial democracy and collective bargaining should be formally extended. The working party, chaired by Jones, was set up in 1967 and echoed the Donovan recommendations. See Industrial Democracy, Labour Party, 1967. Barbara Castle, Diaries, p. 192. In a manner reminiscent of earlier Tribunite days, Castle believed that a prerequisite of incomes policy was that ‘sacrifices be shared’ and, as one means towards this objective, claimed that ‘the minimum social provision in the Budget must be a wealth tax’. The Commission’s views were not as radical as these recommendations make them sound. For one thing decentralized bargaining was not unpopular with employers, who ‘for the most part did not deplore the reemergence of workplace trade unionism but on the contrary preferred to work in alliance with shop stewards’. See Robert Taylor, The Trade Union Question in British Politics: Government and Unions since 1945, Basil Blackwell, 1993, pp. 151–7. Those like Jones and Scanlon who had always disliked incomes policy were joined by George Woodcock and his deputy Vie Feather. Like Woodcock, Feather (who succeeded him as General Secretary in March 1969—in the midst of the crisis) had favoured the continuation of a voluntary incomes policy but found that opposition to In Place of Strife, and the loss of autonomy it represented, left little room for compromise. Surrender took the form of a face-saving ‘solemn and binding agreement’ between unions and government in which the TUG undertook to act responsibly and try to resolve unofficial disputes. See Taylor, The Trade Union Question, pp. 157–73. Alliance and counter-alliance within Cabinet are discussed by Pimlott, Harold Wilson, pp. 531–40. Lewis Minkin, The Contentious Alliance: Trade Unions and the Labour Party, Edinburgh University Press, 1991, p. 115. See below, Chapter 7. Ken Coates claimed 500 at the 1968 Nottingham conference. See The Crisis of British Socialism, Spokesman, 1972, p. 197. Minkin, The Contentious Alliance, p. 161. An attempt to launch a Campaign for a Democratic Labour Party, beginning amongst activists in Sheffield, flopped at the 1967 Party conference, but Frank Allaun and Joan Lestor, both on the Tribunite wing of PLP, were involved. The following year ‘Socialist Charter’ was formed in Sheffield to campaign for

NOTES 261

38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43.

44. 45. 46.

47.

intra-Party democracy. The group enjoyed the support of Jones, Scanlon, and Lawrence Daly of the NUM, as well as Tribunite MPs. Socialist Charter, quoted in Minkin, The Contentious Alliance, p. 164. Labour Party, Let’s Go With Labour for the New Britain, 1964, p. 13. The failure of the post-war welfare state to effect any significant redistribution of wealth or advantage is discussed in Julian Le Grand, The Strategy of Equality, Alien and Unwin, 1982. See, for example, Richard Crossman, ‘Socialism and Planning’, reprinted in William Rodgers (ed.) Socialism and Affluence: Four Fabian Essays, Fabian Society, 1970. The piece was written specifically against Crossman’s erstwhile friends Peter Townsend and Brian Abel-Smith. Between October 1964 and the general election of 1966 a number of manifesto commitments were implemented, including increases in old-age pensions and national assistance rates, the abolition of NHS prescription charges and the beginnings of comprehensive reform in secondary education. In general, over the 1964–70 period the government claimed to have made advances in many social policy areas. Spending on social security increased by 80 per cent between 1964/65 and 1969/70; improvements were made in the redistributory potential of capital taxation via the institution of a capital gains tax; and health and housing also benefited from increased resources. Labour Party, Let’s Go With Labour, pp. 13–14. The Committee chaired by Lady Plowden was appointed by the Conservative Education Secretary, Edward Boyle, in 1963 and reported in 1967. In the words of its Secretary, it ‘took on the exemplary function adopted by all previous consultative committees…it laid out the best practices that could be found in primary schools with a view to encouraging others to follow them’. Of all the recommendations made (among which were the abolition of full class teaching and streaming), two were particularly striking: the call for a massive expansion of nursery schooling and the creation of educational priority areas. Welcomed by Crosland, the government tried to pay some attention to the latter— while failing to make an impression on the paltry provision of nursery education. Labour permitted extra building allocations to certain local authorities for 1968–69 and subsequent years, and more money was made available for teaching staff in priority schools. Richard Crossman, Diaries of a Cabinet Minister, Vol. II (ed. Janet Morgan), Hamish Hamilton and Jonathan Cape, 1976, pp. 636 and 642–6; See also The Times, 19.7.67, on Crosland’s speech in Norwich. Brian Simon, Education and the Social Order, 1940–1990, Lawrence and Wishart, 1991, p. 321. The membership included David Donnison, John Vaizey and Bernard Williams, as well as the heads of two comprehensive schools, an industrialist and a trade unionist. However, Simon notes that ‘the bulk of the membership came from the educational establishment, mostly with knowledge, experience and involvement in independent schools’. Education and the Social Order, p. 322. Caroline Benn and Brian Simon, Half Way There: Report on the British Comprehensive School Reform, Penguin, 1972; John Ahier and Michael

262 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

48.

49. 50.

51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

59. 60. 61. 62.

63.

Flude (eds), Contemporary Education Policy, Groom Helm, 1983; Simon, Education and the Social Order, pp. 281–2. See Caroline Benn, Comprehensive Reorganization Survey, 68–69, quoted in Simon, Education and the Social Order, p. 300. Benn questioned whether it was good enough that ‘only one quarter of secondary school pupils should be in comprehensive schools almost five years after the government was elected with a clear mandate for national reorganization’. Brian Jackson, New Statesman, 4.6.71, pp. 760–1. Particularly Howard Glennerster, ‘Education and Inequality’, and Dennis Marsden, ‘Politicians, Inequality and Comprehensives’, in Peter Townsend and Nicholas Bosanquet (eds), Labour and Inequality, Fabian Society, 1972. See below, pp. 164–5. Certain changes had been made, but the scheme remained recognizably that which the Titmuss group had designed in the 1950s. Spending cuts had delayed implementation, but a Bill was progressing through Parliament when the government fell. For comments on the proposed legislation see A.B.Atkinson, ‘Inequality and Social Security’, in Townsend and Bosanquet (eds), Labour and Inequality, pp. 22–3 and Richard Titmuss, New Statesman, 27.2.69, pp. 315–17. Peter Townsend, ‘The Meaning of Poverty’, British Journal of Sociology, 1962, 13 (3). Brian Abel-Smith and Peter Townsend, The Poor and the Poorest, Bell and Sons, 1965, p. 57. Brian Abel-Smith, Labour’s Social Plans, Fabian Tract 369, 1966, reprinted in William Rodgers (ed.), Socialism and Affluence: Four Fabian Essays, Fabian Society, 1970, p. 11. See above, p. 133. Abel-Smith, ‘Labour’s Social Plans’, p. 15. R.M.Titmuss, ‘Choice and the Welfare State’, Fabian Tract 370,1966, reprinted in William Rodgers (ed.), Socialism and Affluence, p. 38. Titmuss gave full expression to this comment in The Gift Relationship, Alien and Unwin, 1970. ‘Child Endowment and Population Growth’, July 1965, Titmuss Papers, BLPES. See Michael McCarthy, Campaigning for the Poor: CPAG and the Politics of Welfare, Groom Helm, 1986, p. 42. These events are discussed by Frank Field, Poverty and Politics, Heinemann, 1982, Ch. 2; Michael McCarthy, Campaigning for the Poor, Ch. 3; Keith Banting, Poverty, Politics and Policy, Macmillan, 1979, Ch. 3. A memorandum, ‘Family Poverty’, was submitted to the government on December 23rd—The Poor and the Poorest had been published a day earlier. Abel-Smith and Townsend enjoyed the ‘official’ support of a number of well-known academics and professionals, including Baroness Wootton and Dame Eileen Younghusband. The government shied from the prospect of implementing the full CPAG proposal and abolishing child tax allowances entirely because, in order to pay for the new benefit, tax deductions would have had to affect not

NOTES 263

64.

65. 66.

67.

68. 69. 70.

just the obviously better-off but ‘the earnings of the great majority of men in manual, clerical and service occupations’ with potentially dire electoral consequences. Of course, for all the debate, the government did not approve family allowance for the first child—an innovation that had to await a further CPAG campaign in the 1970s—and raising family allowances did not prove popular among Labour supporters. See Banting, Poverty, Politics and Policy, p. 92 and generally pp. 82–107. Crossman, Diaries of a Cabinet Minister, Vol. III (ed. Janet Morgan), p. 791. New Statesman, 23.1.70; Field, Poverty and Politics, pp. 32–3. This refers to the ‘Poor Get Poorer under Labour’ campaign, initiated by Field—and much resented by Titmuss, then Deputy Chairman of the Supplementary Benefits Commission. See Chapter 8. Titmuss became Deputy Chairman of the Supplementary Benefits Commission and Abel-Smith became increasingly preoccupied with the machinery of pensions in the early 1970s. ‘Moral’ Marxists because many of those involved with the New Reasoner and the Universities and Left Review were more concerned about the ways in which capitalism exploited human resources and eroded human dignity than with esoteric debates about the precise state of Marxist theory. E.P.Thompson’s work stands as the best example of this version of the English radical tradition (see, for example, The Making of the English Working Class, Penguin, 1961), although the scope of the ‘old’ New Left’s project was far from purely historical. For the bitter disagreements surrounding Perry Anderson’s editorial ‘coup’ on the New Left Review in 1962 see E.P.Thompson, ‘The Peculiarities of the English’, reprinted in The Poverty of Theory, Merlin, 1978. Michael Rustin briefly surveys the history of the ‘old’ and ‘new’ Lefts in For a Pluralist Socialism, Verso, 1985, Ch. 2. Pimlott, Harold Wilson, p. 393. Peter Sedgwick, ‘Farewell, Grosvenor Square’, in David Widgery (ed.), The Left in Britain, 1958–1968, Penguin, 1976, p. 28. Home Policy Committee, Labour in the Seventies, Re 318, July 1968, LP Library. 7 Seeking alternatives: technocrats and equality in the 1970s

1. Stuart Holland, The Socialist Challenge, Quartet, 1975, p. 157. 2. Early signs of restlessness can be detected in Party conference debates long before 1967, but these elections turned out to be the first moves in a campaign which saw the control of the NEC progressively wrested from the leadership as both the trade union and constituency sections returned leftwing candidates. 3. Eric Heffer, MP for Liverpool, Walton, was a leading figure on the left of the PLP until his death in 1991. He gained ministerial office as Minister of State at the Department of Industry, 1974–75, but was sacked by Harold Wilson for breaking Cabinet silence on the EEC referendum in 1975.

264 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

4. Tribune, 22.6.67. 5. See the ten-point manifesto in Tribune, 26.1.68. Social spending was to be paid for by defence cuts. 6. K.O.Morgan, Labour People, Clarendon Press, 1987, p. 304. 7. Tony Benn, Out of the Wilderness: Diaries, 1963–67, Arrow Books, 1988. p. 427. 8. Benn, Diaries, 1963–67, p. 439. 9. Tony Benn, Office Without Power: Diaries, 1968–72, Arrow Books, 1989. p. 74. 10. Benn, Diaries, 1968–72, p. 183. 11. Benn, Diaries, 1968–72, pp. 143 and 186. See also Jad Adams, Tony Benn: A Biography, Macmillan, 1992, pp. 290–99. 12. See Tony Benn, Arguments for Socialism (ed. Chris Mullin), Penguin, 1980, p. 27. 13. The difference of course was that Benn wanted to ensure a link between technology and greater industrial democracy. State-supported technology and the democratization of decision-making would challenge established management practices and enhance the status of workers. See Tony Benn, ‘Technology and the Quality of Life’, in Diaries, 1968–72, pp. 489–94. 14. Old technocrats like lan Mikardo had never given up their belief in the need for central state direction of the economy and continued to advocate sweeping public ownership—initially without reference to Benn whose activities at Mintech were not always regarded as sufficiently ‘socialist’—while others like Michael Foot continued to regard public ownership as the distinguishing feature of any Labour government. See Benn’s entry for April 28th 1968 in Diaries, 1968–72, pp. 62–3. 15. The membership included Mikardo, Castle, Geoff Bish and Terry Pitt. Bish worked in the Research Department, 1968–74 before becoming the Party’s Policy Director—a post he held until the reorganization of the Policy Directorate after the 1992 general election. Pitt headed the Research Department, 1965–74. Both individuals were sympathetic to Bennite ideas during the 1970s and early 1980s. 16. See Re 462, Labour Party Archives. 17. Re 462, p. 18. 18. Re 462, p. 59. 19. Michael Hatfield, The House the Left Built, Gollancz, 1978, pp. 54–5 and 146–8 describes the takeover of the Industrial Policy Committee. 20. Benn, Diaries, 1968–72, p. 507. 21. Benn, Diaries, 1968–72, pp. 509–10. 22. ‘Planning and Policy Coordination’, RD 315; ‘The New Economic Imperatives’, RD 473, Labour Party Archives. 23. Most obviously the National Plan which was heavily criticized for misinterpreting the ‘dynamics of modern capitalist growth’, and particularly the failure to recognize that companies would not comply voluntarily with government planning targets. See RD 315, p.l. 24. RD 315, p. 8. 25. RD 315, p. 18. 26. RD 473, p. 3.

NOTES 265

27. RD 473, p. 6. 28. Roy Jenkins, A Life at the Centre, Macmillan, 1991, Ch. 19. Hatfield states that Jenkins attended only four meetings of Finance and Economic Policy Committee; see The House the Left Built, pp. 57–8. For disagreements between Jenkins and Crosland see Chapter 9, below. 29. Labour’s Programme, 1973, Labour Party, p. 13. 30. Labour’s Programme, 1973, p. 31. 31. Labour’s Programme, 1973, p. 33. 32. Labour’s Programme, 1973, p. 34. These ideas were reflected in the Green Paper, drafted by the Industrial Policy Committee, on the National Enterprise Board published in 1973. Judith Hart summed up the thrust of the paper, in her comment that ‘what the NEB means is that, through public ownership of up to 20 to 25 leading companies in profitable manufacturing over a five-year period, there can be a new direct instrument of economic planning for a Labour Government to use’ (Tribune, 25.5.73). 33. See the Green Paper on the NEB, pp. 15–16. 34. Holland, The Socialist Challenge, p. 159. 35. Holland, The Socialist Challenge, p. 161. 36. Holland, The Socialist Challenge, p. 271; see also Re 126, ‘A Ten-year Industrial Strategy for Britain’, Labour Party, April 1975—written by Benn, Morrell and Francis Cripps. 37. Holland, The Socialist Challenge, p. 277. 38. Ken Coates and Tony Topham, The New Unionism, Pelican, 1974, p. 214. 39. Holland, The Socialist Challenge, p. 282; see also Coates and Topham, The New Unionism, pp. 238–45. 40. Tony Benn, Against the Tide: Diaries, 1973–76, Arrow Books, 1990, pp. 59–61 and 220–1; see also Benn, Arguments for Socialism, pp. 65–8. 41. Benn, Arguments for Socialism, p. 72. 42. Holland, The Socialist Challenge, p. 256. 43. Holland, The Socialist Challenge, pp. 172–3. 44. Caroline Benn and Brian Simon, Half Way There: Report on the British Comprehensive School Reform, Penguin, 1972. 45. For example, decisions on comprehensivization, university expansion, the creation of the Open University and the new Polytechnic sector. Between 1967 and 1970 the NEC’s Higher and Further Education SubCommittee concentrated primarily on further and adult education—and particularly on the future financing of post-school provision. 46. The membership included Brian Jackson, Caroline Benn, Jack Straw, Shirley Williams, Tyrell Burgess and John Vaizey. 47. New Statesman, 4.6.71, see pp. 760–1. 48. See RD 240, January 1972, ‘Draft Policy Statement on Education’. 49. Labour’s Programme, 1972, Labour Party, 1972, p. 54. 50. Labour’s Programme, 1973, p. 79. 51. Labour’s Programme, 1973, p. 77. 52. Labour’s Programme, 1973, p. 78. 53. Benn, Diaries, 1973–76, p. 629. 54. A series of ‘Black Papers’ published between 1969 and 1977 argued that

266 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

55. 56. 57.

58.

59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

65.

66.

falling standards were directly attributable to the move away from the grammar school system to comprehensive schooling—particularly mixed ability teaching. Brian Cox, Caroline (Baroness) Cox, Rhodes Boyson and others called for more inspection by HMIs,national testing throughout school life and greater freedom for parents in the choice of school for their offspring. Shirley Williams encompassed some of these demands in her Education Bill—notably greater parental choice. See The Fight for Education, Black Paper 4, 1975 and Black Paper 1977, Black Paper 5, 1977. Also Brian Simon, Education and the Social Order, 1940–1990, Lawrence and Wishart, 1991, pp. 455–61. Education in Schools: A Consultative Document, Green Paper, Cmnd 6869, July 1977, p. 35. The SEA’s opposition took the relatively unthreatening form of numerous resolutions calling for an end to selection. See LPACR, 1973 and 1976. Benn, Diaries, 1973–76, pp. 628–9. Shirley Williams put up a spirited defence of the government’s favourable attitude to comprehensivization at the 1976 conference but it does not seem as though the policy enjoyed a high priority. See Bernard Donoghue’s comments, Prime Minister: The Conduct of Policy under Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, Jonathan Cape, 1987, p. 109. Tony Benn, Conflicts of Interest, Diaries, 1977–80, Arrow Books, 1991, pp. 231–2. The Bill was not included in the government’s legislative programme until 1978, thus falling with the Callaghan government before enactment in the 1978–79 Parliamentary session. Geoff Hodgson, Socialist Economic Strategy, Labour Party Discussion Series 2, ILP Square One Publications, 1979, p. 25. Keith Middlemas, Power, Competition and the State, Vol. III, The End of the Postwar Era: Britain since 1974, Macmillan, 1990, p. 3. Middlemas, Power, Vol. III, p. 9. Joel Barnett, Inside the Treasury, André Deutsch, 1982, p. 60. See also Thomas Balogh, RD 226, ‘The Party’s Economic Policy’, January 1972, Labour Party Archives. See below, Chapter 9. The episode is described by Hatfield, The House the Left Built, Ch. 8, and more briefly by Adams, Tony Benn, p. 336. Benn’s speech to the 1973 Party conference was a model of technocratic socialist thinking, combining arguments for efficiency with the reminder that ‘our policy on public ownership is based upon a serious analysis of the developing power structure in our society’ which, if left uncontrolled, would reduce ‘our political democracy…to a fiction’ (see LPACR, 1973, p. 185). Benn’s account is contained in his June 28th and July 9th entries, Diaries, 1973–76, pp. 187–9 and 193–4. Castle notes that ‘the White Paper [on industrial policy]…was very different both in tone and content from the Green Paper Tony Benn had proposed three months earlier’. See The Castle Diaries, 1964–76, Macmillan, 1990, pp. 493–4. Only one voluntary planning agreement was made—in 1976 between the government and the crisis-ridden Chrysler UK, which reneged on it within two years. For comments from the far left on Labour’s economic

NOTES 267

67. 68. 69. 70.

71. 72. 73.

74.

75.

76.

climb-down see A. Glyn and John Harrison, The British Economic Disaster, Pluto, 1980, pp. 115–16; Tom Forester, ‘Neutralizing the Industrial Strategy’, in Ken Coates (ed.), What Went Wrong? Explaining the Fall of the Labour Government, Spokesman, 1979, pp. 82–7. Benn, Diaries, 1973–76, pp. 213–15. Denis Healey, The Time of My Life, Michael Joseph, 1989, pp. 384 and 401; also Barnett, Inside the Treasury, p. 94. Castle, The Castle Diaries, p. 584 (original emphasis). The Act involved the creation of a Registrar of Trade Unions and Employers’ Associations, registration with which was compulsory if unions wanted to enjoy full legal status. A National Industrial Relations Court would, inter alia, enforce collective agreements between unions and employers and rule in cases of strikes in support of closed shops (now banned), solidarity actions or inter-union disputes. See Robert Taylor, The Trade Union Question in BritishPolitics: Government and Unions since 1945, Basil Blackwell, 1993, pp. 182–4. The membership was drawn from the NEC, TUG and PLP. See Lewis Minkin, The Contentious Alliance: Trade Unions and the Labour Party, Edinburgh University Press, 1991, pp. 118–19. Economic Policy and the Cost of Living, Labour Party, February 1973, paragraph 20. To this effect the Joint Statement on Social and Economic Policy made it clear that the scope of collective bargaining was to be extended to recruitment, training, discipline, redundancy and dismissals. See the summary in TUG Economic Review, 1973, pp. 404–5, and subsequent debate pp. 542–9. The pay policy was a visible blow to leftwing hopes. Faced with sustained pressure from their leaderships, the union rank and file endorsed the £6 per week flat-rate increase for all members. See Jack Jones, Union Man, Collins, 1986, pp. 296–7. Stridently opposed by the Tribune Group (Mikardo bitterly attacking Jones at the 1975 Party conference) and constituency activists on the grounds that it attacked working-class living standards, the deal marked the beginning of a period, effectively lasting until the winter of 1978, in which Cabinet and the General Council tried to control wages through negotiated Voluntary’ settlements. Unemployment stood at 643,000 in October 1974 and had risen to 940,000 a year later. Dorfman refers to the TUC’s cooperation in enforcing pay guidelines under the Social Contract, in return for which government continued to consult union leaders about economic and industrial matters and also made certain limited ‘incentives’ available, normally through allocations of public spending for specific purposes to soften the impact of falling wages and rising unemployment. See Gerald A.Dorfman, Government versus Trade Unionism since 1968, Macmillan, 1979, p. 123; also Robert Taylor, The Trade Union Question in British Politics, pp. 141–2; Minkin, The Contentious Alliance, 169–73. Benn, Diaries, 1973–76, p. 522. In Benn’s view, leaders like Murray, Jones, Scanlon and Basnett wanted the government to survive at any price (which included a pact with the Liberal Party): ‘they are critical of the left because they think the left would bring the government down’.

268 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87.

88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102.

Tony Benn, Conflicts of Interest: Diaries, 1977–80, Arrow Books, 1990, pp. 80–1. TUG, 1973, p. 542. Hilary Wainwright and Dave Elliott, The Lucas Plan: A New Trade Unionism in the Making?, Allison and Busby, 1982. TUG conference debate on industrial democracy, 1974. The NUM, GMWU and EEPTU were against the idea of representatives on management boards, though the Engineers and TGWU remained in favour. Benn, Diaries, 1977–80, p. 267. Benn, Diaries, 1973–76, p. 46. Jones, Union Man, pp. 298–9. Jack Jones, New Statesman, 4.2.77, pp. 143–4. Benn, Diaries, 1963–67, p. 204. Adams, Tony Benn, p. 327. Pimlott, Harold Wilson, HarperCollins, 1992, pp. 592–7. Benn, Diaries, 1973–76, pp. 396–400. These events encouraged leftwingers to think seriously about the distribution of power in the Party and the rank and file’s weak position over the control of policy implementation. In conversation with Clive Jenkins immediately after the sackings, Benn said that ‘we really must ask ourselves…why is it that when we get the right policy, we sweat it out and then it doesn’t get implemented? The reason is that when we are in office we are not wired to the labour movement’. Holland, The Socialist Challenge, p. 330. Francis Cripps, The British Crisis: Can the Left Win?’, New Left Review, 1982, 128, p. 96. David Marquand, The Unprincipled Society, Fontana, 1988, p. 72. See for example, David Coates, ‘Labour’s New Reformism’, New Left Review, Jan .-Feb. 1981, 129, pp. 10–11; Andrew Glyn and John Harrison, The British Economic Disaster, pp. 161–3. New Statesman, 8.6.73, p. 836. New Statesman, 8.6.73, p. 838. New Statesman, 15.6.73, p. 882. Further critical assessment of the AES is contained in Jim Tomlinson’s, The Unequal Struggle?, Methuen, 1982, Ch. 6. Shirley Williams, Re 198, June 1975, p. 9, Labour Party Archives. Williams, Re 198, p. 9. Leo Panitch, ‘Trade Unions and the Capitalist State’, New Left Review, Sept.-Oct., 125, 1981, pp. 40–1. Geoff Hodgson, Socialist Economic Strategy, p. 47. Eric Hobsbawm (ed.), The Forward March of Labour Halted?, Verso, 1981, p. 18. Middlemas, Power, Competition and the State, Vol. III, pp. 53–6. The 1979 election manifesto was drawn up by Callaghan and a handful of advisors with only notional NEC consultation; key leftwing policies like planning agreements or abolition of the House of Lords were either watered down or removed completely. Commentators on Left and Right agree that the Prime Minister failed to appreciate the strength of feeling among constituency activists about conference sovereignty over the mani-

NOTES 269

103. 104.

105. 106. 107.

108. 109. 110.

111. 112. 113.

festo—despite growing evidence that rank-and-file demands for closer control of the leadership and PLP were becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. See David Kogan and Maurice Kogan, The Battle for the Labour Party, Kogan Page, 1983 (2nd edn), pp. 35–40; Tony Benn, Diaries, 1977–80, pp. 485–8. The story is told by Kogan and Kogan, The Battle for the Labour Party; Patrick Seyd, The Rise and Fall of the Labour Left, Macmillan, 1987; Tony Benn, The End of an Era: Diaries, 1980–90, Hutchinson, 1992. For the changing nature of union leaderships and the complexities of union attitudes to intra-Party democracy see Lewis Minkin, The Contentious Alliance, pp. 196–205; see also Andrew Taylor, Trade Unions and the Labour Party, Groom Helm, 1984, p. 134. Michael Rustin, The New Left and the Crisis’, New Left Review, MayJune 1980, 121 p. 65. Patrick Seyd, Rise and Fall, pp. 45–7—university educated, white-collar unionized. Gareth Stedman Jones, New Socialist, Jan./Feb. 1982, p. 13. In contrast to the CLPD which had consitutional reform as its explicit aim, the LCC was a pressure group concerned with wider policy issues. At its most popular in the early 1980s, the LCC had about 800 individual members and over sixty affiliated organizations. Hobsbawm, The Forward March of Labour Halted, p. 89. For example, Francis Cripps, John Griffith, Frances Morrell, Jimmy Reid, Peter Townsend, Stuart Weir, Manifesto, Pan Books, 1981, p. 125. Anna Coote, New Socialist, Nov./Dec. 1981, p. 5. The point was often repeated in these pages. See A.Pettifor, Jan./Feb. 1983; B. Rogers, Nov./ Dec. 1983, p. 6; also Sam Aaronovitch, ‘The Alternative Economic Strategy; Goodbye to All That?’, Marxism Today, Feb. 1986, which belatedly summed up criticisms of the AES. Labour’s Programme, 1982, Labour Party, 1982, p. 86. Hilary Wainwright, ‘Moving Beyond the Fragments’, in Sheila Rowbotham, Lynne Segal and Hilary Wainwright, Beyond the Fragments: Feminism and the Making of Socialism, Merlin Press, 1979, p. 216. Seyd, Rise and Fall, p. 178. 8 Failing to seek alternatives: qualitative socialists and Keynesians in the 1970s

1. A number of chapters in Titmuss’s Commitment to Welfare, Alien and Unwin, 1968, suggest a recasting of the universalist versus selectivist debate. He certainly believed ‘that those students of welfare who are seeing the main problem today in terms of universalism versus selective services are presenting a naive and oversimplified picture of policy choices’ (p. 132), and wanted to examine how ‘socially acceptable selective services aiming to discriminate positively…in favour of those whose needs are greatest’ could be incorporated into a universalist framework (p. 135). 2. A Guardian article published on 19.1.71 stated that the CPAG’s legal advisor, Rosalind Brooke, had written to the SBC complaining of slow-

270 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

ness in reviewing wage-stop cases and accusing it in particular of ‘gross negligence’ in respect of disabled persons and their rights. Articles in Poverty, the CPAG journal, made clear the group’s impatience with the Supplementary Benefits Commission over the wage-stop issue (for example, John Vaizey, ‘A Minimum Wage Policy’, Summer 1969). Rifts of a more personal nature between Titmuss on the one side and Townsend and Frank Field on the other also developed at this time. See the Titmuss papers, file 2/ 214, BLPES. Information from an interview with David Piachaud, 23.9.92. David Ennals had been Crossman’s Minister of State at the DHSS between 1968 and 1970 and was to be Secretary of State for Social Services following Barbara Castle’s forced departure in 1976. Judith Hart had been Minister for Social Security in the late 1960s and was to be Minister for Overseas Development between February 1974 and June 1975. Brian O’Malley had been Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the DHSS 1969–70 and was to be Minister of State at the DHSS from 1974 until his death in 1976. See Hart’s paper on pensions policy, RD 580, January 1973, p. 9, Labour Party Archives. RD 580, p. 10. Support for these views came from David Piachaud—at least obliquely. He challenged the ‘egalitarian’ nature of the superannuation proposals in a New Statesman article published on 18.6.71. See minutes of the Social Policy Committee meeting held on 29.1.73, Labour Party Archives. Peter Townsend, The Need for a Social Plan’, Re 173, June 1967 and ‘A Review of Some Ways of Satisfying Needs and Obtaining Best Value for Money in Social Policy’, Re 296, 1968, Social Policy Advisory Committee, Labour Party Archives. Townsend published his views in Sociology and Social Policy, Penguin, 1976, Ch. 4. Townsend, Re 173, p. 4. Peter Townsend, ‘Labour in Power’, Fabian Autumn Lectures, 1966, reprinted in William Rodgers (ed.), Socialism and Affluence: Four Fabian Essays, Fabian Society, 1970, p. 66. Peter Townsend, ‘Social Planning and the Treasury’, in Nick Bosanquet and Peter Townsend (eds), Labour and Equality, Heinemann, 1980, p. 6. Townsend, ‘Social Planning and the Treasury’, p. 11. Townsend, ‘Social Planning’, p. 22. Letter from Peter Townsend to New Society on the ‘Concept of Poverty’, 7.8.80, p. 281. The kind of argument being advanced by Keith Joseph and Jonathan Sumption, Equality, Murray, 1979. Peter Townsend, Poverty in the United Kingdom, Penguin, 1979, p. 925. Townsend, Poverty in the United Kingdom, p. 925. Peter Townsend, ‘Social Services for All’, in Frances Cripps, John Griffith, Frances Morrell, Jimmy Reid, Peter Townsend, Stuart Weir, Manifesto, Pan Books, 1981, p. 198. A Version’ because individuals already in occupational schemes would be allowed to stay in them providing they met certain standards. As

NOTES 271

21.

22. 23.

24. 25.

26.

27.

28.

Piachaud has written, ‘the new pensions scheme was essentially a compromise…in terms of making adequate provision for old age it fell far short of the Crossman plan [more clearly based on the original Titmuss proposals]’, David Piachaud, ‘Social Security’, in Peter Townsend and Nicholas Bosanquet (eds), Labour and Inequality, Fabian Society, 1972, p. 177. Taken together, the impact of inflation, rising unemployment and incomes policies on earnings produced a fall of at least 8 per cent in real take-home pay between March 1975 and the summer of 1977. See Paul Ormerod, ‘The Economic Record’, in Bosanquet and Townsend (eds), Labour and Equality, p. 59 and also Ormerod, ‘Incomes Policy’, in Michael Artis and David Cobham (eds), Labour’s Economic Policies, 1974–79, Manchester University Press, 1991, pp. 63–4. David Piachaud, New Society, 15.3.79, p. 604. Piachaud, New Society, 15.3.79, p. 605. There were alternatives to retaining FIS but Piachaud was not impressed. Child benefit could be increased, for example, with the benefit being taxable; however, in his view this would not be of significant cash advantage. Mothers might collect more but fathers would pay more tax. Frank Field, Poverty and Politics, Heinemann, 1982, p. 175. CPAG’s main activities in the 1970s consisted of trying to ensure both a higher level of family provision and a system of universal rather than means-tested benefits; its close involvement with the campaign for child benefits, nearly abandoned by the Cabinet in 1976. stands as a good example of the short-term nature of the CPAG’s objectives. Paul Whiteley and Steve Winyard, Pressure for the Poor: The Poverty Lobby and Policy-making, Methuen, 1987, p. 102. As discussed above, Jones cast his interest in equality wider than most union leaders, combining his concern about the decentralization of power and equality of status in industrial settings with an acute awareness of the inequalities of income and wealth outside the industrial arena. See his contributions to Party debates: LPACR, 1973, p. 270; TUG, 1977. pp. 411–12. He also agreed with the CPAG about the need for universal child benefits, paid to the mother, and funded by the abolition of child tax allowances on male wages. Field has commented that whereas union pressure helped to sustain the impetus for higher-value pensions and national superannuation, ‘such interest was not shown by the Movement in other areas of social policy’. See Frank Field, ‘The Poor’, in Ken Coates (ed.), What Went Wrong?: Explaining the Fall of the Labour Government, Spokesman, 1979, p. 160. Scanlon was one of those leaders less anxious about increasing child benefit and ‘much more concerned with the cut in male “familywage” packets’. See Lewis Minkin, The Contentious Alliance: Trade Unions and the Labour Party, Edinburgh University Press, 1991, p. 175. See Michael McCarthy, Campaigning for Poor: CPAG and the Politics of Welfare, Groom Helm, 1986, p. 227; Chris Pond, ‘Low Pay’, in Bosanquet and Townsend (eds), Labour and Equality, pp. 88 and 98–9; Denis Healey, The Time of My Life, Michael Joseph, 1989, pp. 448–9; Joel Barnett, Inside the Treasury, André Deutsch, 1982, pp. 54–5;

272 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48. 49.

50. 51.

Bernard Donoghue, Prime Minister: The Conduct of Policy under Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan, Jonathan Cape, 1987, p. 116. David Piachaud, New Society, 22.3.79, p. 672. Townsend, Poverty in the United Kingdom, p. 926. Townsend, ‘Social Services for All’, p. 199. Townsend, ‘Social Services for All’, p. 200. Peter Townsend, New Socialist, Sept./Oct. 1981, p. 26. Gavyn Davies and David Piachaud, ‘Social Policy and the Economy’, in Howard Glennerster (ed.), The Future of the Welfare State: Remaking Social Policy, Gower, 1983, p. 41. Davies and Piachaud, ‘Social Policy and the Economy’, p. 43. See Chapter 4 above. The most notable case being that of Dick Taverne in Lincoln—ousted by Margaret Jackson (now Beckett) in 1973. See pp. 107–8, above. Roy Jenkins, Socialist Commentary, November 1970, pp. 4–5. Roy Jenkins, A Life at the Centre, Macmillan, 1991, pp. 339 and 353; see also John Campbell, Roy Jenkins: A Biography, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983, p. 146. Roy Jenkins, What Matters Now, Fontana, 1972, p. 20. Jenkins, What Matters Now, pp. 48 and 50–1. Jenkins, What Matters Now, Ch. 6ff. Jenkins, What Matters Now, pp. 21–2. Jenkins, What Matters Now, pp. 118 and 122. See also John Campbell, Roy Jenkins, p. 154. Britain’s membership of Europe was not a simple ‘left-right’ issue. Callaghan as well as Mikardo and Foot belonged to the ‘no’ camp, Benn opposed entry belatedly, and Tony Crosland and Denis Healey were by no means unequivocally in favour. Between 1970 and 1972, however, it became increasingly clear that the main lines of division were indeed between leftwingers in the shape of Foot, Benn, Holland, Mikardo and Castle, and the Jenkinsites at the opposite pole of the Party—Crosland remaining uncommitted in the middle. See Chapter 8. Jenkins, What Matters Now, p. 79. That Crosland wanted to be Chancellor is not in doubt. He told his wife, Susan, on the eve of Callaghan’s resignation in 1967 that ‘as every social objective I believe in depends on getting the economy right, I suppose one would like to be Chancellor of the Exchequer’—and was given reason to suppose by Callaghan himself that he would indeed be given the Chancellorship. See Susan Crosland, Tony Crosland, Coronet, 1983, p. 187. Jenkins, A Life at the Centre, p. 217, confirms the story, commenting that ‘it would be idle to pretend that these events of November 1967 did not leave a scar on Crosland which had the effect of crucially damaging the cohesion of the Labour right over the next eight or nine years’. Jenkins, A Life at the Centre, p. 318. Marquand now admits that ‘we were wrong, of course…he had not shared our allegiance in the first place, or, if he had, he had ceased to do

NOTES 273

52.

53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

so’, The Progressive Dilemma: From Lloyd George to Kinnock, Heinemann, 1991, p. 167–8. The pressure on Jenkins had mounted in 1971, particularly after the Party conference rejected the conditions of entry into the EEC negotiated by the Heath government and called upon Labour MPs to follow suit. Just re-elected Deputy Leader, Jenkins and sixty-nine other MPs voted with the Conservatives for entry in the division on October 28th 1971. Caught between loyalty to the Party and his own convictions, however, he voted against the Second Reading and subsequent stages of the enabling legislation. This inconsistent behaviour obviously could not be sustained and it was not surprising that Jenkins chose the first available opportunity to clarify his ambiguous position. Two sympathizers did not make this ultimate gesture. Shirley Williams stayed in the Shadow Cabinet as did Roy Hattersley—who was promoted to Shadow Education spokesman. Susan Crosland, Tony Crosland, pp. 242–4. There was of course more to it than this—but only just. Jenkins admits that he made calculations about future leadership chances which could have been jeopardized had Crosland become Deputy Leader. He writes, however, that although ‘our motives were not just to block Crosland… we genuinely thought that Short had behaved better than he’ (Jenkins, A Life at the Centre, p. 352—my emphasis). Marquand correctly warns against Susan Crosland’s caricature of the Jenkinsites as ‘a malevolent phalanx’ moved to vindictiveness by Crosland’s ‘betrayal’ over Europe and the Deputy Leadership contest, but he too appears to admit some element of collective conspiracy when commenting that ‘it was not his [Crosland’s] fault that he fell off the pedestal on which we had placed him. It was our fault for putting him there…the Crosland of the 1970s was no longer our sort of Croslandite’ (Marquand, The Progressive Dilemma, p. 170). Susan Crosland, Tony Crosland, p. 251. Thomas Balogh, Labour and Inflation, Fabian Tract 403, 1970, pp. 9 and 27. Tony Crosland, A Social Democratic Britain, Fabian Tract 404, 1971, p. 7. Balogh, ‘Labour and Inflation’, p. 31. Balogh, ‘Labour and Inflation’, p. 18. Richard Crossman, Diaries of a Cabinet Minister, Vol. III, Secretary of State for Social Services, 1968–70, (ed. Janet Morgan) Hamish Hamilton and Jonathan Cape, 1977, p. 48. Balogh was unpopular with civil servants and had become widely distrusted even by Wilson who, now Balogh was a member of the Upper House, was wary about letting him see Cabinet papers. See Crossman, Diaries, Vol. III, p. 107. Crossman, Diaries, Vol. III, p. 568. Michael Hatfield, The House the Left Built, Gollancz, 1978, p. 91. Crosland, ‘A Social Democratic Britain’, p. 1. Tony Crosland, ‘Socialism Now’, in Socialism Now and Other Essays (ed. Dick Leonard), Jonathan Cape, 1974, p. 15. Crosland ‘Socialism Now’, p. 26.

274 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81.

82.

83.

84.

85.

Crosland, ‘Socialism Now’, p. 34. Crosland, ‘Socialism Now’, p. 43. Crosland, ‘Socialism Now’, p. 44. Crosland, ‘Socialism Now’, p. 16. Crosland, ‘Socialism Now’, p. 17. Letter (undated), Crosland papers, file 13/17, BLPES. Letter, 6.11.73, Crosland papers, file 13/17, BLPES. Beckerman was certainly right about those like David Marquand who were disappointed that the Crosland of the 1970s could not respond to the need for new ideas in the way that ‘the daring imaginative intellectual saboteur’ of the 1950s would have done. See Marquand, The Progressive Dilemma, pp. 174–5. Tony Crosland, Social Democracy in Europe, Fabian Tract 438, 1975, p. 2. Crosland, ‘Socialism Now’, p. 47. Crosland, Social Democracy in Europe, p. 9. Crosland, A Social Democratic Britain, p. 2. Crosland, Social Democracy in Europe, p. 9. Tony Benn describes Crosland’s arguments against spending cuts in Against the Tide: Diaries, 1973–76, Arrow Books, 1989, pp. 356 and 379. Susan Crosland, Tony Crosland, p. 307; Benn, Diaries, 1973–76, p. 461. The high figure caused consternation at the time but subsequently what constituted ‘public spending’ was redefined. What was counted as ‘debt interest’ was redefined, capital spending for the nationalized industries was only included if it came from borrowing rather than profits and, finally, GDP was calculated at ‘market’ rather than ‘factor’ prices—a higher figure because it included indirect taxes—which ‘reduced public expenditure as a proportion of the whole’. Consequently, the overall figure was reduced for 1976/77 from £6,500m to £l,800m. See Joel Barnett, Inside the Treasury, pp. 80–1; Healey also provides an account of the episode in The Time of My Life, pp. 401–2. The resignation was long in the preparation according to Ben Pimlott, although this did not prevent a variety of rumours—including stories of an MI5 vendetta against the Prime Minister—circulating for some time after he left office. See Ben Pimlott, Harold Wilson, Harper Collins, 1992, pp. 648–9 and generally Chs 28–30. The Treasury’s desire to secure a fall in the pound in the interests of a more competitive exchange rate resulted in a prolonged crisis of confidence. See Donoghue, Prime Minister, pp. 85–6; Healey, The Time of My Life, pp. 426–7. Keith Middlemas, Power, Competition and the State, Vol. III, The End of the Postwar Era: Britain since 1974, Macmillan, 1990, p. 142. For Bernard Donoghue in the Downing Street Policy Unit the agreement ‘formally entrenched monetarism in Labour’s economic policy-making, although it really only made public what had been happening privately in Whitehall’. The IMF loan announced by Healey in December 1976 amounted to

NOTES 275

86. 87. 88.

89. 90. 91.

92. 93. 94. 95. 96.

$3.0 billion to be made available in three instalments, the first to come early in 1977. They were supported at a distance by Shirley Williams and David Ennals, Secretary of State for Social Services, who were chary of going too far because of the need to protect their departmental budgets. Tony Benn, Diaries, 1973–76, p. 674. The main proposals included £3,000m of cuts over two years– 1977/78 and 1978/79—to be found from the sale of £500m worth of Burmah Oil shares and a £2bn cut in PSBR. After much debate the Cabinet agreed to these figures. See Joel Barnett, Inside the Treasury, pp. 103–11. Of Crosland’s reluctant acquiescence, Susan Crosland has written that he believed that ‘if it became known that the anti-deflationists constituted a large minority in Cabinet, this would ruin confidence not only in currency markets. It could smash up the Party’. Susan Crosland, Tony Crosland, p. 382. LPACR, 1976, p. 188. Tony Crosland, Socialist Commentary, October 1976, p. 3. Something might have come from these ideas, although it hard to say exactly what; according to Roy Hattersley, Crosland was preparing a book based on his Socialist Commentary piece, the working title of which was Socialism in a Cold Climate (interview, 13.10.92). Anthony King, Socialist Commentary, May 1977, p. 4. William Rodgers, ‘Socialism without Abundance’, Crosland Memorial Lecture, Socialist Commentary, July/Aug. 1977, special supplement, p. iv (original emphasis). Rodgers, ‘Socialism without Abundance’, p. vi. Editorial, Socialist Commentary, December 1978, p. 3. Tony Benn, Conflicts of Interest: Diaries, 1977–80, Arrow Books, 1991, p. 43. 9 Beyond the three visions?

1. The term refers to a variety of possible forms of political and economic organization where social or cooperative systems of ownership are integrated with the market, suitably reformed and ‘democratized’, as the most efficient system of allocation. Economic democracy—the empowerment of consumers in the marketplace—must be made compatible with social democracy, defined as a state-guaranteed system of social justice. To be able to utilize their liberty, consumers must have fair access to the material resources required for the satisfaction of basic needs and the state will have a role in ensuring individual entitlements and possibly providing certain basic goods and services. See Alec Nove, The Economics ofFeasible Socialism Revisited, Harper Collins, 1991; David Miller, Market, State and Community: Theoretical Foundations of Market Socialism, Clarendon Press, 1989. 2. For example, public choice critiques of overloaded government, bureaucratic oversupply, ‘coercion’ and ‘crowding out’.

276 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

3. See, particularly, Raymond Plant, ‘Socialism, Markets and Endstates’, in Julian LeGrand and Saul Estrin (eds), Market Socialism, Clarendon Press, 1989, Ch. 3. 4. Mark Abrams, Rita Hinden and Richard Rose, Must Labour Lose?, Penguin, 1960. Recognized by at least one Labour politician—see Frank Field, Freedom and Wealth in a Socialist Future, 2nd edn, Constable, 1987, pp. 224–6. 5. With the exception of 1966, Labour’s share of the vote fell in each election between 1951 and 1979 and continued to do so throughout the 1980s. Explanations vary: for class and partisan dealignment see Ivor Crewe, ‘The Electorate: Partisan Dealignment Ten Years On’, West European Politics, 1983, 6. Heath, Jowell and Curtice dispute Crewe’s definition of class and attribute Labour’s changing vote to the altered class structure rather than declining class loyalties. See Anthony Heath, Roger Jowell and John Curtice, How Britain Votes, Pergamon Press, 1985. 6. Forty-four per cent of skilled workers voted Conservative in 1979. On trade union reform and how to tackle unemployment a majority of Labour voters agreed with Tory policies. Indeed those who voted Conservative were generally more convinced of the correctness of Tory policies than were Labour voters of ‘their’ Party’s policies. 7. Growth averaged only 1.4 per cent annually between 1973 and 1979. For a discussion of these structural changes see David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, Blackwell, 1989, Part II. 8. Overall membership fell from a peak of 13.5m (58.9 per cent) in 1979 to 10.1m (39.2 per cent) in 1989 and 9.5m (32 per cent) in 1991. Unemployment and labour market changes saw union membership contract sharply, particularly in the private sector. Conservative industrial relations legislation in the 1980s, notably restrictions on strike action and the effective abolition of closed-shop agreements, compounded the unions’ problems, though it is not clear that government policy had the negative effect on British trade unionism that was intended. See David Marsh, The New Politics of British Trade Unionism, Macmillan, 1992, pp. 217–24 and Robert Taylor, The Trade Union Question in British Politics: Government and Unions since 1945, Basil Blackwell, 1993, pp. 312–16. 9. See Andrew Glynn, The “Productivity Miracle”, Profits and Investment’, in Jonathan Michie (ed.), The Economic Legacy, 1979–1992, Academic Press, 1992, pp. 79–81. It is a difficult calculation to make, but Glynn argues that while aggregate real-wage incomes fell by 5 per cent in manufacturing industry, ‘those workers who kept their jobs…saw a substantial (28 per cent) increase in their real wages’. 10. See Jerry Coakley and Laurence Harris, ‘Financial Globalization and Deregulation’, in Michie (ed.), The Economic Legacy, pp. 43–9. 11. Andrew Glynn, ‘The Macro-anatomy of the Thatcher Years’, in Francis Green (ed.), The Restructuring of the UK Economy, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989, pp. 72–3. 12. Ben Fine and Clara Poletti, ‘Industrial Prospects in the Light of Privatization’, in Michie (ed.), The Economic Legacy, p. 330.

NOTES 277

13. Paul Auerbach, ‘Multinationals and the British Economy’, in Green (ed.), The Restructuring of the UK Economy, pp. 271–6. 14. The phrase is taken from Andrew Gamble, Free Economy and Strong State, Macmillan, 1988. 15. Public housing was virtually abolished and education suffered cuts, particularly In capital spending. User charges were introduced or raised in the personal social services while the 1985 Fowler review of social security saw cuts in unemployment benefit, including the abolition of the earnings-related element, and reductions in child benefit which was not raised in line with inflation. Internal market reforms in the NHS, though costly, marked a departure from earlier versions of health service management in line with government beliefs about market-led cost-efficiency. 16. The story is told from the Bennite position by Tony Benn, The End of an Era: Diaries, 1980–90, Hutchinson, 1992 and Richard Heffernan and Mike Marqusee, Defeat from the Jaws of Victory, Verso, 1992. Patrick Seyd, The Rise and Fall of the Labour Left, Macmillan, 1987, Ch. 7 provides a more balanced account. Trade union concern is discussed by Lewis Minkin, The Contentious Alliance: Trade Unions and the Labour Party, Edinburgh University Press, 1991, p. 407. 17. The process by which the Party ‘right’ and a new soft left middle-ground formed a working alliance began with Tribune group abstentions in the Deputy Leadership contest and the defeat of Bennite supporters in the NEC election. Thereafter the Bennite left split between the remaining Bennites (Benn, Dennis Skinner and Eric Heffer) and those members of the Tribune group who were keen to make peace with Kinnock. Their support, spurred by the 1983 defeat, was consolidated in the mid-1980s. 18. The reforms included the abolition of all NEC policy committees and their replacement by a new Policy Directorate and new Joint Policy Committees with equal representation from NEC, trade unions and Shadow Cabinet. Kinnock also built up his own personal base through the Leader’s Office, and a new Campaigns and Communications Directorate headed by Peter Mandelson, and supported by a Campaign Management Team. These changes widened the gap between Party and unions which had little direct influence on the newly created bodies. After 1986 the Liaison Committee ceased to play a central role in policy discussion and union-Party links became a matter of private contacts between union leaders and Front Bench spokespeople. 19. Most obviously Kinnock’s 1985 Party conference speech in Bournemouth which heralded the successful attempt to expel the Tendency’s members from the Party. LPACR, 1985, p. 128. 20. Planning remained AES inspired at this time—see Economic Planning and Industrial Democracy—TUC/LP Liaison Committee, 1982. The document recommended the creation of a new planning department and a National Planning Council to replace ‘Neddy’. 21. For example, A New Partnership—A New Britain’, Investing in Britain both published in 1985; Social Ownership, 1986; New Industrial Strength for Britain, 1986. Planning, now little more than a strategy for consensus-building and coordination between industry and the state, became progressively more diluted and the NEA’s role more opaque.

278 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

22. ‘Labour: The Party of Production’, PD 734, September 1986, Labour Party Library. 23. Originally discussed in Investing in Britain, 1985, pp. 20–1. 24. Roy Hattersley, Economic Priorities for a Labour Government, Macmillan, 1987, Introduction, passim. 25. Hattersley, Economic Priorities, p. 47. 26. Hattersley, Economic Priorities, p. 60. 27. Hattersley, Economic Priorities, p. 59. 28. Roy Hattersley, Choose Freedom: The Future for Democratic Socialism, Michael Joseph, 1987, p. 169. 29. Hattersley, Choose Freedom, pp. 170–1. 30. Hattersley, Choose Freedom, p. 185. 31. Hattersley, Economic Priorities, pp. 162–3. 32. Hattersley, Economic Priorities, pp. 165 and 206. 33. Hattersley, Economic Priorities, p. 169. 34. Hattersley, Choose Freedom, p. 37. 35. Hattersley, Choose Freedom, p. 37. 36. Raymond Plant, Equality, Markets and the State, Fabian Tract 494, 1984, p. 7. 37. Plant cited Fred Hirsch’s theory of positional goods to show that certain resources ‘cannot be distributed more equally without changing [the] value to those who consume it’. 38. Hattersley, Choose Freedom, p. 102. 39. Quoted in Choose Freedom, p. 98. 40. Plant, ‘Equality, Markets’, p. 26. 41. Plant, ‘Equality, Markets’, p. 15. 42. Plant, ‘Equality, Markets’, p. 27. 43. Colin Hughes and Patrick Wintour, Labour Rebuilt, 4th Estate, 1990, p. 28. 44. Hughes and Wintour, Labour Rebuilt, p. 38. Initial paper by Tom Sawyer—NUPE and chair of HPC—also keen and influential on organization—wrote the paper ‘An Approach to Policy Making’, September 1987. 45. Geoff Bish, PD 1052a, ‘Policy Development for the 1990s’, Home Policy Committee, July 1987, p. 2. Kinnock’s lukewarm attitude to the paper stimulated Tom Sawyer, General Secretary of NUPE, to push harder for a thoroughgoing review. Sawyer had been a Bennite sympathizer in the early 1980s but by the mid-1980s, fearing that Labour was out of touch with ordinary voters, had rejected this course in favour of a more populist approach. He wanted an open review process in which the Party listened to its constituency and trade union members and concentrated on examining key themes and issues which underpinned Party policy. See Tom Sawyer, ‘An Approach to Policy Making’, September 1987, Labour Party Library. 46. For example, Kinnock’s personal intervention in Michael Meacher’s People at Work group. See Hughes and Win tour, Labour Rebuilt, Ch. 10. The leader also charged Gordon Brown, Shadow Chief Secretary, with the task of costing all economic proposals—and later, in December 1989, Kinnock, concerned about the number of proposals coming from

NOTES 279

47.

48. 49. 50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

the three economic PRGs, demanded the creation of an Economic Policy Sub-Committee comprised of Shadow Cabinet members and the six conveners to coordinate the work of the three groups. Hughes and Wintour, Labour Rebuilt, p. 63. Overlapping areas of discussion were initially coordinated by a triumvirate of Geoff Bish, head of the Policy Directorate, Tom Sawyer, chair of the Home Policy Committee and Larry Whitty, the Party’s General Secretary. See GS 94/10/87, NEC, Labour Party Library—a note from the General Secretary on the Review process and timetable. There was some rivalry between the Policy Directorate and the Campaign Management Team about how the Review’s conclusions should be put together—and the process was far from smooth. Effectively three stages in two years followed by ongoing amendation. Meet the Challenge, Make the Change (hereafter MCMC), Labour Party, 1989, pp. 10–11. For a critique of the economic policies contained in the Policy Review see Andrew Gamble, ‘The Labour Party and Economic Management’, in Martin Smith and Joanna Spear (eds), The Changing Labour Party, Routledge, 1992. MCMC, p. 11. MCMC, p. 6. John Eatwell, The Economics of the Policy Review’, PD 2381, January 1990, Labour Party Library. These views were reflected in MCMC John Eatwell, ‘The Development of Labour Policy’, in Michie (ed.), The Economic Legacy, p. 334. MCMC, p. 13. Eatwell, ‘Development of Labour Policy’, p. 337. Eatwell, ‘Labour Policy’, p. 335. Eatwell, ‘Labour Policy’, p. 335. Looking to the Future, Labour Party 1990, p. 6. / See Andrew Graham, ‘Updating the Policy Review: Macroeconomic Policy’, PD 2417, February 1990, Labour Party Library. ‘Fair taxation’, for example, meant a less than 20 per cent band for lowincome earners and progression was not to be steep: the Review recommended a maximum of 50 per cent for top earners—to be introduced gradually. Reform of National Insurance contributions would also help to ‘reduce the burden on the low paid’. See MCMC, pp. 31–2. This process is discussed by Hughes and Wintour, Labour Rebuilt, pp. 69–73. Blunkett made clear his concerns about the individualistic direction the policy statement was taking in Tribune, 1.1.88. Democratic Socialist Aims and Values, Labour Party, 1988, p. 3. MCMC, p. 6. MCMC, p. 6. MCMC, p. 37. MCMC, p. 52. The Review demanded equal opportunities for women at work, in child care and education. A Ministry for Women would be created to embrace the work carried out by the Equal Opportunities Commission and oversee the working of the Equal Pay Act. Responsibility for racial equality

280 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

78.

79. 80. 81. 82.

83.

84. 85. 86. 87.

would be given to a specific department and lesbian and gay rights would also be protected in law. A combination of employment protection, ‘enabling’ policies to provide greater access to education and child care, and tougher antidiscrimination legislation would enhance the opportunities open to women and minority groups. In each case the stated objective of policy was enhanced choice and empowerment for individual members of minorities. A point made by Stephen Howe, New Statesman and Society, 19.5.89, pp. 30–1. Giles Radice, Labour’s Path to Power: The New Revisionism, Macmillan, 1989, p. 91. Radice, Labour’s Path, pp. 160–1. Bryan Gould, A Future for Socialism, Jonathan Cape, 1989, p. 109. Gould, A Future for Socialism, pp. 18–19. Michael Meacher, Diffusing Power, Pluto, 1992, pp. 164–5. Meacher, Diffusing Power, p. 17. Meacher, Diffusing Power, p. 21. Meacher, for example, understood individual empowerment as the use of individual capacities ‘to benefit others or to contribute to a better community or environment’. His view contrasted with the less equivocal positions of Gould and Radice, or others like Frank Field—all of whom acknowledged that greater liberty can only be bought at the cost of endstate equality. Gould, for instance, emphasized individual choice within collective provision but accentuated voucher schemes and other forms of subsidy ‘direct to the consumer’ (A Future for Socialism, pp. 168–9). See New Statesman and Society, 19.5.89, pp. 28–39 and also David Marquand in New Statesman and Society, 2.6.89: qualified support for freedom from a Jenkinsite who believes the Party is still too interventionist. Hughes and Wintour, Labour Rebuilt, pp. 205–6. Hugo Young, Guardian, 16.4.92. Edward Pearce’s Guardian quip (11.11.92) that ‘my, what a dangerous pinko Hugh Gaitskell looks from here’ sums up one kind of impatience with the Party’s present doctrineless policy stance. The Policy Review notwithstanding, a private poll taken in January 1993 suggested that voters were unclear about Labour’s ideology, beliefs and image and that no progress had been made in clarifying these areas since the 1987 election. Tory waverers, on the other hand, regarded Labour as ‘the party of the past’—see Guardian, 5.1.93. The recent debate is captured by Gordon Brown, Labour’s Economic Approach, Statements to Conference, Labour Party, 1993 and Peter Hain, What’s Left? The Future of Labour, Tribune Publications, 1993, pp. 5–16. See Brown, Labour’s Economic Approach, p. 16 and the Epilogue for a short discussion of the Commission’s work. Ben Pimlott, Independent on Sunday, 12.9.93. Bryan Gould, Guardian, 3.7.93. Citing the continuing trend to modernization and that course, Gould resigned from the Party in early 1994. Formal consideration of doctrine has become a feature of a number of

NOTES 281

Western European socialist parties—although none have so far put it out to tender in quite the way Labour has. See Paul Heywood, ‘Rethinking Socialism in Spain: Programma 2000 and the Social State’, Coexistence, 1993, 30. 10 Epilogue 1. R.H.Tawney, ‘The Choice before the Labour Party’, in The Attack and Other Papers, Spokesman Books, 1981, pp. 55–6. 2. A vast number of books deal with post-modernity. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, Blackwell, 1989 and Stephen K. White, The Political Theory of Postmodernism, Cambridge, 1991 trace in some depth the ideas briefly touched on here. 3. See Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, Ch. 3, for a discussion of these themes. 4. Commission on Social Justice, The Justice Gap, Institute of Public Policy Research, 1993, p. i. 5. Commission on Social Justice, Social Justice in a Changing World, Institute of Public Policy Research, 1993, pp. 25–9. 6. Employer involvement, acceptance of lower working hours and a better universal system of childcare provision will obviously be expensive. 7. CSJ, Social Justice, p. 21. 8. CSJ, Justice Gap, p. 9. 9. CSJ, Justice Gap, p. 15. 10. Alec Nove, quoted in Christopher Pierson, ‘Democracy, Markets and Capital: Are there Necessary Limits to Economic Democracy’, in David Held (ed.), Prospects far Democracy, Polity, 1993, p. 191. A market socialist economy with, say, a high degree of cooperative ownership as well as extensive democracy within other enterprises would still need to address the self-interest of the various producer-groups. As Pierson claims, ‘market socialism promises a form of economic democracy within the enterprise but not between enterprises…it promises the enfranchisement of those who are employed, but not the growing numbers…who find themselves outside the paid/employed population’ (original emphasis). 11. Responsibilities would need to include the duty to obey the law, but may encompass parental duties and even the obligation to seek employment. Further, there may need to be a range of ‘contracts’ which define the responsibilities of employers, trade unions, service providers and others who are in positions of power. It may also be necessary to provide methods of enforcing not just individual rights as market socialists and others recommend, but specific patterns of conduct in circumstances where the powerful can inhibit the legitimate freedoms of others. Raymond Plant, ‘Social Rights and the Reconstruction of Welfare’, in Geoff Andrews (ed.), Citizenship, Lawrence and Wishart, 1991, deals with some of these issues. It remains to be seen whether Labour’s new leader, Tony Blair, apparently enthused by the prospect of individual freedom and opportu-

282 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

12. 13.

14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

nity in a context of greater communal obligation, is prepared to encourage the powerful to accept the ‘obligation’ to limit (at least) their economic freedom of action in the communal interest. Geoff Mulgan, ‘Citizens and Responsibilities’, in Andrews (ed.), Citizenship, p. 41. As Miller has commented, a system of distributive justice ‘can’t be legitimized unless people see themselves as tied together communally’. See David Miller, ‘In What Sense Must Socialism be Communitarian?’, in Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred D.Miller and Jeffrey Paul (eds), Socialism, Blackwell, 1989, p. 72. How ‘community’ is defined will of course need to be the subject of detailed discussion, though Miller claims that it needs to be at least as wide as the nation-state. See David Miller, Market, State and Community, Clarendon Press, 1989, p. 245. J.K.Galbraith, The Culture of Contentment, Sinclair-Stevenson, 1992, p. 157. Galbraith, The Culture of Contentment, pp. 96–7. Michael Meacher, Diffusing Power, Pluto, 1992, p. 187 (original emphasis). Plant, ‘Social Rights’, p. 54. Angela Phillips, ‘Citizenship and Feminist Theory’, in Andrews (ed.), Citizenship, p. 84.

Select bibliography

Private papers Anthony Crosland Papers—British Library of Political and Economic Science. Hugh Dalton Papers—BLPES. Evan Durbin Papers—BLPES. Hetherington Papers—BLPES. Labour Party Archives, Manchester and Labour Party Library, London. Socialist Commentary/Socialist Vanguard Papers—Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick. R.H.Tawney Papers—BLPES. R.M.Titmuss Papers—BLPES and private papers in the possession of the late Kay Titmuss.

Labour Party Committee papers Education Committee, 1945–58 Equality Study Group, 1956 Finance and Economic Policy Committee, 1952–64 Home Policy Committee, 1947–51 Home Policy Committee, 1951–60 Individual and Society Study Group, 1956 Industries for Nationalization, 1948 Privately Owned Industry, 1952 Social Services, 1948–52 283

284 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

Social Security and Old Age, 1956–62 Socially Owned Industries, 1952 Study Group on the Control of Industry, 1958 Study Group on the Ownership and Control of Industry, 1956–57 Taxation Working Party, 1964 Social Policy Advisory Committee, 1965–68 Discrimination Against Women Study Group, 1967 Race Relations Working Party, 1967 Higher and Further Education Sub-Committee, 1967 Working Party on Industrial Democracy, 1967 Finance and Economic Affairs Advisory Committee, 1966–68/1971–72 Economic Strategy Study Group, 1969 Taxation Study Group, 1969–70 Science and Education Sub-Committee, 1971–74 Social Policy Sub-Committee, 1971–74 Industrial Policy Sub-Committee, 1972–73 Economic Planning Working Group, 1972–73 Industrial Policy Sub-Committee, 1975 Race Relations Study Group, 1979 Finance and Economic Affairs Sub-Committee, 1980 Industrial Policy Sub-Committee, 1982 Policy Review Groups, 1988–90: – – – – –

Productive and Competitive Economy Economic Equality Consumers and the Community Democracy for the Individual and the Community People at Work

Newspapers and periodicals Dissent Encounter Fabian Journal Forward Guardian The Independent on Sunday Marxism Today

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 285

New Socialist New Society New Statesman New Statesman and Society Political Quarterly Poverty Socialist Commentary Socialist Vanguard The Times Tribune Vanguard

Diaries, memoirs, autobiographies, biographies Jad Adams, Tony Benn: A Biography, Macmillan, 1992. Joel Barnett, Inside the Treasury, André Deutsch, 1982. J.M.Bellamy and John Saville (eds), A Dictionary of Labour Biography, Vol. II, Macmillan, 1974. Tony Benn, Out of the Wilderness: Diaries 1963–67, Arrow Books, 1988. Tony Benn, Office Without Power: Diaries 1968–72, Arrow Books, 1989. Tony Benn, Against the Tide: Diaries 1973–76, Arrow Books, 1990. Tony Benn, Conflicts of Interest: Diaries 1977–80, Arrow Books, 1991. Tony Benn, The End of an Era: Diaries 1980–90, Hutchinson, 1992. Fenner Brockway, Towards Tomorrow, Hart-Davis and MacGibbon, 1977. Alan Bullock, The Life and Times of Ernest Bevin, Vol. I, Heinemann, 1960. John Campbell, Roy Jenkins: A Biography, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983. John Campbell, Nye Bevan and the Mirage of British Socialism, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987. Barbara Castle, Fighting All the Way, Macmillan, 1993. Barbara Castle, The Castle Diaries 1964–76, Macmillan, 1990. Margaret Cole, The Life of G.D.H.Cole, Macmillan, 1971. Susan Crosland, Tony Crosland, Coronet, 1983.

286 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

Richard Crossman, The Diaries of a Cabinet Minister, Vol. I: Minister of Homing 1964–1966, Hamish Hamilton and Jonathan Cape, 1975; Vol. II: Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House of Commons, 1966–68, 1976; Vol. III: Secretary of State for Social Services, 1968–70, 1977 (all ed. Janet Morgan). Nicholas Davenport, Memoirs of a City Radical, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974. Bernard Donoghue and G.W.Jones, Herbert Morrison: Portrait of a Politician, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973. Michael Foot, Aneurin Bevan, 1897–1945 and 1945–1960, Vols. I and II, Granada, 1982. Paul Foot, The Politics of Harold Wilson, Penguin, 1968. Geoffrey Goodman, The Awkward Warrior: Frank Cousins: His Life and Times, Spokesman, 1979. Denis Healey, The Time of My Life, Michael Joseph, 1989. Simon Hoggart and David Leigh, Michael Foot: A Portrait, Hodder and Stoughton, 1981. Anthony Howard, Richard Crossman: The Pursuit of Power, Pimlico, 1990. Douglas Jay, Change and Fortune: A Political Record, Hutchinson, 1980. Roy Jenkins, A Life at the Centre, Macmillan, 1991. Jack Jones, Union Man, Collins, 1986. Isaac Kramnick and Barry Sheerman, Harold Laski: A Life on the Left, Hamish Hamilton, 1993. Jennie Lee, My Life with Nye, Penguin, 1981. Militant Socialist International (British Section), Leonard Nelson: Philosopher, Politician, Educationalist, International Publishing Co., 1939. Janet Morgan (ed.), The Backbench Diaries of Richard Crossman, Hamish Hamilton and Jonathan Cape, 1981. Ben Pimlott, Hugh Dalton, Jonathan Cape, 1985. Ben Pimlott (ed.), The Political Diary of Hugh Dalton 1918–40, 1945–60, Jonathan Cape, 1986. Ben Pimlott (ed.), The Second World War Diary of Hugh Dalton, 1940–45, Jonathan Cape, 1986. Ben Pimlott, Harold Wilson, Harper Collins, 1992. David Reisman, Richard Titmuss: Welfare and Society, Heinemann, 1977.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 287

Andrew Roth, Harold Wilson: Yorkshire Walter Mitty, MacDonald and James, 1977. Mary Saran, Never Give Up, Wolff, 1976. Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: The Economist as Saviour, 1920–37, Macmillan, 1992. Ross Terrill, R.H.Tawney and His Times, André Deutsch, 1974. Philip Williams, Hugh Gaitskell: A Political Biography, Jonathan Cape, 1979. Philip Williams, The Diary of Hugh Gaitskell, 1945–1956, Jonathan Cape, 1983. Harold Wilson, The Making of a Prime Minister: Memoirs, 1916– 1964, Weidenfeld and Nicolson/Michael Joseph, 1986. A.W.Wright, G.D.H.Cole and Socialist Democracy, Clarendon Press, 1979. A.W.Wright, R.H.Tawney, Manchester University Press, 1987.

Books (primary sources) Brian Abel-Smith and Peter Townsend, The Poor and the Poorest, Bell and Sons, 1965. Mark Abrams, Rita Hinden and Richard Rose, Must Labour Lose?, Penguin, 1960. Christopher Addison (ed.), Problems of a Socialist Government, Gollancz, 1933. Thomas Balogh, The Dollar Crisis: Causes and Cures, Basil Blackwell, 1949. Thomas Balogh, Unequal Partners, Vol. II, Basil Blackwell, 1963. Tony Benn, Arguments for Socialism (ed. Chris Mullin), Penguin, 1980. Tony Benn, Arguments for Democracy, Penguin, 1982. Caroline Benn and Brian Simon, Half Way There: Report on the British Comprehensive School Reform, Penguin, 1972. Aneurin Bevan, Why Not Trust the Tories?, Fanfare Press, 1944. Aneurin Bevan, In Place of Fear, Quartet, 1978. Robin Blackburn and Alexander Cockburn (eds), The Incompatibles: Trade Union Militancy and the Consensus, Penguin, 1967. Nicholas Bosanquet and Peter Townsend (eds), Labour and Equality, Heinemann, 1980. James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution, Putnam, 1942.

288 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

George Catlin (ed.), New Trends in Socialism, Lovatt, Dickinson and Thompson, 1935. Hugh Clegg, Industrial Democracy and Nationalization, Basil Blackwell, 1951. Ken Coates, The Crisis of British Socialism: Essays on the Rise of Harold Wilson and the Fall of the Labour Party, Spokesman, 1972. Ken Coates (ed.), What Went Wrong? Explaining the Fall of the Labour Government, Spokesman, 1979. Ken Coates and Tony Topham, The New Unionism, Pelican, 1974. G.D.H.Cole, The Next Ten Years in British Social and Economic Policy, Macmillan, 1929. G.D.H.Cole, The Intelligent Man’s Guide Through World Chaos, Gollancz, 1932. G.D.H.Cole (ed.), What Everybody Wants to Know About Money, Gollancz, 1933. G.D.H.Cole, What is This Socialism?, Clarion Press, 1933. G.D.H.Cole, Principles of Economic Planning, Gollancz, 1935. G.D.H.Cole, The Simple Case far Socialism, Gollancz, 1935. G.D.H.Cole, The People’s Front, Gollancz, 1937. G.D.H.Cole, Europe, Russia and the Future, Gollancz, 1941. G.D.H.Cole, Great Britain in the Post-war World, Gollancz, 1942. G.D.H.Cole, The Intelligent Man’s Guide to the Post-war World, Gollancz, 1947. G.D.H.Cole, Essays in Social Theory, Macmillan, 1950. G.D.H.Cole, The Case for Industrial Partnership, Macmillan, 1957. G.D.H.Cole, The History of Socialist Thought, Vol. V, Socialism and Facism, Macmillan, 1960. Commission on Social Justice, The Justice Gap, Institute of Public Policy Research, 1993. Commission on Social Justice, Social Justice in a Changing World, Institute of Public Policy Research, 1993. Francis Cripps, Frances Morrell, Jimmy Reid, Peter Townsend and Stuart Weir, Manifesto, Pan Books, 1981. Stafford Cripps, Problems of a Socialist Government, Gollancz, 1933. Stafford Cripps, Why This Socialism?, Gollancz, 1934. Stafford Cripps, S.K.Ratcliffe, Harold Laski, Hugh Dalton, A.L.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 289

Rowse and Bernard Shaw, Where Stands Socialism Today?, Rich and Cowan, 1933. C.A.R.Crosland, Britain’s Economic Problem, Jonathan Cape, 1953. C.A.R.Crosland, The Future of Socialism, Jonathan Cape, 1956. C.A.R.Crosland, The Conservative Enemy, Jonathan Cape, 1962. Tony Crosland, Socialism Now and Other Essays (ed. Dick Leonard), Jonathan Cape, 1974. R.H.S.Crossman (ed.), New Fabian Essays, London, Turnstile, 1952. R.H.S.Crossman, Planning for Freedom, Hamish Hamilton, 1965. Hugh Dalton, Some Aspects of the Inequality of Incomes in Modern Communities, Routledge, 1920. Hugh Dalton, The Capital Levy Explained, Labour Publishing Co., 1923. Hugh Dalton (ed.), Unbalanced Budgets: A Study of the Financial Crisis in 15 Countries, Routledge, 1934. Hugh Dalton, Practical Socialism for Britain, George Routledge and Sons, 1935. Hugh Dalton, Principles of Public Finance, Routledge, 1954. E.F.M.Durbin, Purchasing Power and Trade Depression: A Critique of Under-consumption Theories, Chapman and Hall, 1933. E.F.M.Durbin, The Problem of Credit Policy, Chapman and Hall, 1935. E.F.M.Durbin, The Politics of Democratic Socialism, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1940. E.F.M.Durbin, What Have We to Defend?, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1942. E.F.M.Durbin, Problems of Economic Planning, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949. Allan Flanders, Unions and Management, Faber, 1970. Frank Field, Poverty and Politics, Heinemann, 1982. Frank Field, Freedom and Wealth in a Socialist Future, 2nd edn, Constable, 1987. H.T.N.Gaitskell, Money and Everyday Life, Labour Book Service, 1939. John Bruce Glasier, The Meaning of Socialism, Blackfriars Press, 1919. Bryan Gould, A Future for Socialism, Jonathan Cape, 1989. Keir Hardie, From Serfdom to Socialism, ILP Publications, 1907.

290 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

Roy Hattersley, Choose Freedom: The Future of Democratic Socialism, Michael Joseph, 1987. Roy Hattersley, Economic Priorities for a Labour Government, Macmillan, 1987. Eric Hobsbawm (ed.), The Forward March of Labour Halted?, Verso, 1981. Stuart Holland, The Socialist Challenge, London, Quartet, 1975. Douglas Jay, The Socialist Case, Faber and Faber, 1937, and 2nd edn, 1947. Douglas Jay, Socialism in the New Society, Longman, 1962. Roy Jenkins, The Pursuit of Progress: A Critical Analysis of the Achievement and Prospect of the Labour Party, Heinemann, 1953. Roy Jenkins, Mr Balfour’s Poodle: An Account of the Struggle between the House of Lords and the Government of Mr Asquith, Heinemann, 1954. Roy Jenkins, Sir Charles Dilke: A Victorian Tragedy, Collins, 1958. Roy Jenkins, The Labour Case, Penguin, 1959. Roy Jenkins, Asquith, Collins, 1964. Roy Jenkins, Essays and Speeches (ed. A. Lester), Collins, 1967. Roy Jenkins, What Matters Now, Fontana, 1972. Labour Party, Annual Conference Reports: 1931–93. Harold Laski, Democracy in Crisis, Alien and Unwin, 1933. Harold Laski, The State in Theory and Practice, George Alien and Unwin, 1935. Harold Laski, Parliamentary Government in England, Alien and Unwin, 1938. Harold Laski, Grammar of Politics, Alien and Unwin, 1941. Harold Laski, Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, Alien and Unwin, 1944. J.Ramsay MacDonald, Socialism and Society, Independent Labour Party Publications, 1905. J.Ramsay MacDonald, Socialism: Critical and Constructive, Cassell and Co., 1924. Norman MacKenzie (ed.), Conviction, MacGibbon Kee, 1958. Harold Macmillan, The Middle Way, Macmillan, 1938. Michael Meacher, Diffusing Power, Pluto, 1992. Herbert Morrison, Socialization and Transport, Constable, 1933. Herbert Morrison, The Peaceful Revolution: Speeches by the Rt Honourable Herbert Morrison, Alien and Unwin, 1949.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 291

Next Five Years Group, The Next Five Years: An Essay in Political Agreement, Macmillan, 1935. Paul Ormerod, ‘The Economic Record’, in Nicholas Bosanquet and Peter Townsend (eds), Labour and Equality, Heinemann, 1980. Chris Pond, ‘Low Pay’, in Nicholas Bosanquet and Peter Townsend (eds), Labour and Equality, Heinemann, 1980. Giles Radice, Labour’s Path to Power: The New Revisionism, Macmillan, 1989. Sheila Rowbotham, Lynne Segal and Hilary Wainwright, Beyond the Fragments: Feminism and the Making of Socialism, Merlin, 1979. G.B.Shaw (ed.), Fabian Essays in Socialism, W. Scott, 1889. Socialist Union, Socialism: A New Statement of Principles, Socialist Commentary Publications, 1958 (Lincolns-Prager, 1952). Socialist Union, Twentieth Century Socialism, Penguin, 1956. E.J.St L.Strachey, The Coming Struggle for Power, Gollancz, 1932. R.H.Tawney,The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century, Longmans, Green and Co., 1912. R.H.Tawney, The Acquisitive Society, Bell, 1921. R.H.Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, John Murray, 1926. R.H.Tawney, Equality, Alien and Unwin, 1931, 1938, 1952 and 1964 editions. R.H.Tawney, The Radical Tradition (ed. Rita Hinden), Pelican, 1964. R.H.Tawney, The Attack and Other Papers, Spokesman, 1981. E.P.Thompson (ed.), Out of Apathy, Stevens, 1960. E.P.Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, Pelican, 1961. E.P.Thompson, The Poverty of Theory, Merlin, 1978. Richard Titmuss, Poverty and Population, Macmillan, 1938. Richard Titmuss, Problems of Social Policy, HMSO, 1950. Richard Titmuss, Income Distribution and Social Change, Alien and Unwin, 1962. Richard Titmuss, Essays on the Welfare State, Alien and Unwin, 1963. Richard Titmuss, Commitment to Welfare, Alien and Unwin, 1968.

292 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

Richard Titmuss, The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy, Alien and Unwin, 1970. Richard Titmuss and Kay Titmuss, Parents’ Revolt, Secker and Warburg, 1942. Peter Townsend, Sociology and Social Policy, Penguin, 1976. Peter Townsend, Poverty in the United Kingdom, Penguin, 1979. Peter Townsend and Nicholas Bosanquet (eds), Labour and Inequality, Fabian Society, 1972. Trade Union, Economic Reviews, 1965–75. Trades Union Congress, Annual Conference Reports, 1962, 1974, 1977. Hilary Wainwright and Dave Elliott, The Lucas Plan: A New Trade Unionism in the Making?, Allison and Busby, 1982. David Widgery (ed.), The Left in Britain, 1958–1968, Penguin, 1976. Harold Wilson, New Deal for Coal, Contact, 1944. Harold Wilson, War on World Poverty, Gollancz, 1953. Harold Wilson, Purpose in Politics, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964. Harold Wilson, The Relevance of British Socialism, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964. Michael Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy, Penguin, 1975.

Articles and pamphlets Brian Abel-Smith, The Reform of Social Security, Fabian Research Series, 161, 1953. Brian Abel-Smith, ‘Means Tests in Pensions’, Fabian Journal, July 1956. Brian Abel-Smith, ‘Whose Welfare State?’, in Norman Mackenzie (ed.), Conviction, MacGibbon Kee, 1958. Brian Abel-Smith, ‘Labour’s Social Plans’, Fabian Tract 369, 1966. Brian Abel-Smith and Peter Townsend, New Pensions for the Old, Fabian Research Series, 171, 1953. Austen Albu, ‘The Organisation of Industry’, in R.H. S. Crossman (ed.), New Fabian Essays, Turnstile, 1952. Perry Anderson, ‘Sweden: Mr Crosland’s Dreamland’, New Left Review, 9, 1961. Perry Anderson, ‘Critique of Wilsonism’, New Left Review, 27, 1964.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 293

Perry Anderson, The Left in the Fifties’, New Left Review, 29, 1965. Perry Anderson, ‘Origins of the Present Crisis’, in Perry Anderson and Robin Blackburn (eds), Towards Socialism, Fontana, 1965. A.B. Atkinson, ‘Inequality and Social Security’, in Peter Townsend and Nicholas Bosanquet (eds), Labour and Inequality, Fabian Society, 1972. Thomas Balogh, ‘Austerity and Progress’, Fabian Journal, July 1953. Thomas Balogh, ‘A Socialist Economic Policy?’, Fabian Journal, July 1955. Thomas Balogh, Planning for Progress: A Strategy for Labour, Fabian Tract 346, July 1963. Thomas Balogh, ‘Labour and Inflation’, Fabian Tract 403, 1970. Michael Barrat-Brown, ‘The Controllers’, Universities and Left Review, 5, 1958. Michael Barrat-Brown, ‘Crosland’s Enemy—A Reply’, New Left Review, 19, 1963. Aneurin Bevan, It Need Not Happen, Tribune Pamphlet, 1954. Gordon Brown, Labour’s Economic Approach, Statements to Conference, Labour Party, 1993. Colin Clark, National Planning, SSIP Pamphlet 5, 1931. Colin Clark, The Control of Investment, NFRB Pamphlet 8, 1933. Colin Clark, ‘Investment, Savings and Public Finance’, in G.D. H. Cole (ed.), What Everybody Wants to Know About Money, Gollancz, 1933. Colin Clark, A Socialist Budget, NFRB Pamphlet 22, 1935. David Coates, ‘Labour’s New Reformism’, New Left Review, 129, Jan.-Feb., 1981. G.D.H.Cole, World Socialism Restated, New Statesman pamphlet, 1956. Bernard Crick, ‘Socialist Literature in the 1950s’, Political Quarterly, 31, 1960. Francis Cripps, The British Crisis: Can the Left Win?’, New Left Review, 128, 1982. Stafford Cripps, ‘Parliamentary Institutions and the Transition to Socialism’, in Where Stands Socialism Today: Replies by Sir Stafford Cripps, S.K. Ratcliffe, Harold Laski, Hugh Dalton, A. L. Rowse, Bernard Shaw, Rich and Cowan, 1933. C.A.R.Crosland, The Transition from Capitalism’, in R.H.S. Crossman (ed.), New Fabian Essays, Turnstile, 1952.

294 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

Tony Crosland, A Social Democratic Britain, Fabian Tract 404, 1971. Tony Crosland, Social Democracy in Europe, Fabian Tract 438, 1975. R.H.S.Crossman, Keep Left, New Statesman Pamphlet, 1947. R.H.S.Crossman, Keeping Left, New Statesman Pamphlet, 1950. R.H.S.Crossman, Towards a Philosophy of Socialism’, in R.H.S. Crossman (ed.), New Fabian Essays, Turnstile, 1952. R.H.S.Crossman, ‘The Affluent Society’, in Planning for Freedom, Hamish Hamilton, 1965. R.H.S.Crossman, ‘Planning for Freedom’, in Planning for Freedom, Hamish Hamilton, 1965. R.H.S.Crossman, ‘Scientists in Whitehall’, in Planning for Freedom, Hamish Hamilton, 1965. R.H.S.Crossman, The Politics of Pensions (Eleanor Rathbone Memorial Lecture), Liverpool University Press, 1972. Hugh Dalton, ‘Financial Institutions in the Transition’, in Sir Stafford Cripps, S.K.Ratcliffe, Hugh Dalton, A.L.Rowse and Bernard Shaw, Where Stands Socialism Today?, Rich and Cowan, 1933. E.F.M.Durbin, ‘Money and Prices’, in G.D.H.Cole (ed.), What Everybody Wants to Know About Money, Gollancz, 1933. E.F.M.Durbin, Socialist Credit Policy, NFRB Pamphlet 15, 1933. E.F.M.Durbin, ‘The Importance of Planning’, in G.Catlin (ed.), New Trends in Socialism, Lovatt Dickinson and Thompson, 1935. John Eatwell, ‘The Development of Labour Party Policy’, in Jonathan Michie (ed.), The Economic Legacy, 1979–1992, Academic Press, 1992. Frank Field, The Poor’, in Ken Coates (ed.), What Went Wrong? Explaining the Fall of the Labour Government, Spokesman, 1979. Allan Flanders, British Trade Unionism, Bureau of Current Affairs, Background Handbook, 7, 1948. Allan Flanders, ‘Industrial Relations’, in G.D.N.Worswick and P. H. Ady (eds), The Labour Government and British Industry, Basil Blackwell, 1955. Allan Flanders, ‘Rita Hinden’, in J.M.Bellamy and J.Saville (eds), Dictionary of Labour Biography, Vol. II, Macmillan, 1974. Tom Forester, ‘Neutralizing the Industrial Strategy’, in Ken

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 295

Coates (ed.), What Went Wrong? Explaining the Fall of the Labour Government, Spokesman, 1979. H.T.N.Gaitskell, The Banking System and Monetary Policy’, in Margaret Cole (ed.), Democratic Sweden, George Routledge and Sons, 1938. H.T.N.Gaitskell, ‘Labour and Economic Planning’, Fabian Journal, 14, 1951. H.T.N.Gaitskell, The Economic Aims of the Labour Party’, Political Quarterly, 24, 1953. H.T.N.Gaitskell, Recent Developments in British Socialist Thinking, Cooperative Union Ltd, 1956. H.T.N.Gaitskell, Socialism and Nationalization, Fabian Society Tract 300, July 1956. H.T.N.Gaitskell, ‘At Oxford in the Twenties’, in Asa Briggs and John Saville (eds), Essays in Honour of G.D.H.Cole, Macmillan, 1967. Howard Glennerster, ‘Education and Inequality’, in Peter Townsend and Nicholas Bosanquet (eds), Labour and Inequality, Fabian Society, 1972. Going Our Way, Tribune Pamphlet, 1951. Peter Hain, What’s Left? The Future of Labour, Tribune Pamphlet, Tribune Publications, 1993. Stuart Hall, The Supply of Demand’, in E.P.Thompson (ed.), Out of Apathy, Stevens, 1960. Royden Harrison, ‘Retreat from Industrial Democracy’, New Left Review, 4, 1960. Geoffrey Hodgson, Socialist Economic Strategy, Labour Party Discussion Series 2, ILP Discussion Series 2, 1979. Douglas Jay, ‘Public Capital and Private Enterprise’, Fabian Journal, July 1959. Clive Jenkins, The Insiders’, Universities and Left Review, 3, 1958. Clive Jenkins, ‘We Haven’t Got Enough’, in Robin Blackburn and Alexander Cockburn (eds), The Incompatibles: Trade Union Militancy and the Consensus, Penguin, 1967. Roy Jenkins, Fair Shares for the Rich, Tribune Pamphlet, 1951. Roy Jenkins, ‘Equality’, in R.H. S. Crossman (ed.), New Fabian Essays, Turnstile, 1952. Jack Jones, ‘Unions Today and Tomorrow’, in Robin Blackburn and Alexander Cockburn (eds), The Incompatibles: Trade Union Militancy and the Consensus, Penguin, 1967.

296 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

Labour Party Published Policy Statements and Manifestos: Labour’s Immediate Programme, 1937. Let Us Face the Future, 1945. Challenge to Britain, 1953. Personal Freedom: Labour’s Policy for the Individual and Society, 1956. Towards Equality: Labour’s Policy for Social Justice, 1956. Industry and Society, 1957. National Superannuation, 1957. Learning to Live, 1958. Plan for Progress: Labour’s Policy for British Economic Expansion, 1958. The Future Labour Offers You, 1959. Labour in the Sixties, 1960. Signposts for the Sixties, 1961. Labour and the Scientific Revolution, 1963. Let’s Go With Labour for a New Britain, 1964. Industrial Democracy, 1967. Labour in the Seventies, 1968. A New Partnership—A New Britain, 1985. Investing in Britain, 1985. Social Ownership, 1986. New Industrial Strength for Britain, 1986. Democratic Socialist Aims and Values, 1988. Meet the Challenge, Make the Change: A New Agenda for Britain, 1989. Looking to the Future, 1990. Labour’s Programmes, 1972, 1973, 1976, 1982. Harold Laski, ‘Reflections on the Crisis’, Political Quarterly, 12 (2), 1932. Harold Laski, ‘Representative Democracy’, in Sir Stafford Cripps, S.K. Ratcliffe, Harold Laski, Hugh Dalton, A.L.Rowse and Bernard Shaw, Where Stands Socialism Today?, Rich and Cowan, 1933. I.M.D.Little, ‘Economic Developments and Policies’, in G.D.N. Worswick and P.H.Ady (eds), The British Economy 1945– 1950, Clarendon Press, 1952. Dennis Marsden, ‘Politicians, Inequality and Comprehensives’, in Peter Townsend and Nicholas Bosanquet (eds), Labour and Inequality, Fabian Society, 1972. William Mellor, ‘The Claim of the Unemployed’, in Stafford

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 297

Cripps (ed.), Problems of a Socialist Government, Gollancz, 1933. lan Mikardo, The Second Five Years: A Labour Programme for 1950, Gollancz (Fabian Research Series 124), 1948. lan Mikardo, The Labour Case, Alien and Wingate, 1950. One Way Only, Tribune Pamphlet, 1951. Leo Panitch, ‘Trade Unions and the Capitalist State’, New Left Review, 125, 1981. David Piachaud, ‘Social Security’, in Peter Townsend and Nicholas Bosanquet (eds), Labour and Inequality, Fabian Society, 1972. William Rodgers (ed.), Socialism and Affluence: Four Fabian Essays, Fabian Society, 1970. Michael Rustin, ‘The New Left and the Crisis’, New Left Review, 121, 1980. Peter Sedgwick, ‘Farewell, Grosvenor Square’, in David Widgery (ed.), The Left in Britain, 1958–1968, Penguin, 1976. Socialist Union, Education and Socialism, Socialist Commentary Publications, 1958. Socialist Vanguard, Leonard Nelson: Philosopher, Politician, Educationist, International Publishing Company, 1939. R.H.Tawney, ‘British Socialism Today’, in Rita Hinden (ed.), The Radical Tradition, Pelican, 1964. R.H.Tawney, The Attack’, in R.H.Tawney, The Attack and Other Papers, Spokesman, 1981. R.H.Tawney, The Choice Before the Labour Party’, in R.H. Tawney, The Attack and Other Papers, Spokesman, 1981. R.H.Tawney, ‘Christianity and the Social Order’, in R.H. Tawney, The Attack and Other Papers, Spokesman, 1981. Charles Taylor, ‘What’s Wrong with Capitalism?—1’, New Left Review, 2, 1960. E.P.Thompson, The Peculiarities of the English’, reprinted in The Poverty of Theory, Merlin, 1978. R.M.Titmuss, The Social Division of Welfare, in Essays on the Welfare State, Alien and Unwin, 1963. R.M.Titmuss, ‘War and Social Policy’, in Essays on the Welfare State, Alien and Unwin, 1963. R.M.Titmuss, ‘Introduction’, to R.H.Tawney, Equality, Alien and Unwin, 1964. Richard Titmuss, The Limits of the Welfare State’, New Left Review, 27, 1964.

298 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

Richard Titmuss, ‘Choice and the Welfare State’, Fabian Tract 370, 1966. Peter Townsend, The Right to Work in Old Age’, Fabian Journal, July 1957. Peter Townsend, ‘The Meaning of Poverty’, British Journal of Sociology, 13 (3), 1962. Peter Townsend, ‘Labour in Power’, Fabian Autumn Lectures, 1966. Peter Townsend, ‘Social Planning and the Treasury’, in Nicholas Bosanquet and Peter Townsend (eds), Labour and Equality, Heinemann, 1980. Peter Townsend, ‘Social Services for All’, in Francis Cripps et al, Manifesto, Pan Books, 1981. Trades Union Congress, Interim Report on Public Ownership, TUG, 1953. TUC/Labour Party Liaison Committee, Economic Policy and the Cost of Living, 1973. TUC/Labour Party Liaison Committee, Economic Planning and Industrial Democracy, 1982. Victory for Socialism, Industry Your Servant, 1958. Hilary Wainwright, ‘Moving Beyond the Fragments’, in Sheila Rowbotham, Lynne Segal and Hilary Wainwright, Beyond the Fragments: Feminism and the Making of Socialism, Merlin Press, 1979. Harold Wilson, In Place of Dollars, Tribune Monthly Publications, 1953. E.F.Wise, ‘Control of Finance and the Financiers’, in Stafford Cripps (ed.), Problems of a Socialist Government, Gollancz, 1933. E.F.Wise, ‘The Socialization of Banking’, Political Quarterly, 4 (4), 1933.

Books (secondary sources) Paul Addison, The Road to 1945, Quartet, 1977. John Ahier and Michael Flude (eds), Contemporary Education Policy, Groom Helm, 1983. Geoff Andrews (ed.), Citizenship, Lawrence and Wishart, 1991. Michael Artis and David Cobham (eds), Labour’s Economic Policies, 1974–79, Manchester University Press, 1991.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 299

Keith Banting, Poverty, Politics and Policy, Macmillan, 1979. Rodney Barker, Education and Politics 1900–1951: A Study of the Labour Party, Clarendon Press, 1972. Wilfred Beckerman (ed.), The Labour Government’s Economic Record, 1964–70, Duckworth, 1972. Stephen Brooke, Labour’s War: The Labour Party During the Second World War, Clarendon Press, 1992. Alan Budd, The Politics of Economic Planning, Fontana, 1978. Alec Cairncross, The Years of Recovery: British Economic Policy, 1945–1951, Methuen, 1985. Angus Calder, The People’s War: Britain 1939–1945, Jonathan Cape, 1969. Peter Clarke, Liberals and Social Democrats, Cambridge University Press, 1978. Peter Clarke, The Keynesian Revolution in the Making, 1924– 1936, Clarendon Press, 1990. Peter Clarke, A Question of Leadership: Gladstone to Thatcher, Hamish Hamilton, 1991. David Coates, The Labour Party and the Struggle for Socialism, Cambridge University Press, 1975. David Coates, Labour in Power?, Longman, 1980. Norman Dennis and A.H.Halsey, English Ethical Socialism, Clarendon Press, 1988. Bernard Donoghue, Prime Minister: The Conduct of Policy Under Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, Jonathan Cape, 1987. Gerald A.Dorfman, Government versus Trade Unionism since 1968, Macmillan, 1979. Elizabeth Durbin, New Jerusalems: The Labour Party and the Economics of Democratic Socialism, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985. Adrian Ellis and Krishan Kumar (eds), Dilemmas of Liberal Democracies: Fred Hirsch’s ‘Social Limits to Growth’, Tavistock, 1983. Geoffrey Foote, The Labour Party’s Political Thought, Groom Helm, 1985. J.K.Galbraith, The Culture of Contentment, Sinclair-Stevenson, 1992. Andrew Gamble, Free Economy and Strong State, Macmillan, 1988.

300 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

Howard Glennerster (ed.), The Future of the Welfare State: Remaking Social Policy, Gower, 1983. Andrew Glyn and John Harrison, The British Economic Disaster, Pluto, 1980. Francis Green (ed.), The Restructuring of the British Economy, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, Blackwell, 1989. Michael Hatfield, The House the Left Built, Gollancz, 1978. Anthony Heath, Roger Jowell and John Curtice, How Britain Votes, Pergamon Press, 1985. Richard Heffernan and Mike Marqusee, Defeat from the Jaws of Victory, Verso, 1992. David Held (ed.), Prospects for Democracy: North, South, East and West, Polity, 1993. Peter Hennessy, Never Again: Britain 1945–51, Vintage, 1993. Fred Hirsch, The Social Limits to Growth, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977. David Howell, British Social Democracy, Groom Helm, 1976. Colin Hughes and Patrick Win tour, Labour Rebuilt, 4th Estate, 1990. Mark Jenkins, Bevanism: Labour’s High Tide, Spokesman, 1979. Keith Joseph and Jonathan Sumptian, Equality, Murray, 1979. David Kogan and Maurice Kogan, The Battle for the Labour Party, Kogan Page, 1983. Stuart Laing, Representations of Working-class Life, Macmillan, 1986. Julian Le Grand, The Strategy of Equality, Alien and Unwin, 1982. Julian Le Grand and Saul Estrin (eds), Market Socialism, Clarendon Press, 1989. Michael McCarthy, Campaigning for the Poor: CPAG and the Politics of Welfare, Groom Helm, 1986. Ross McKibbin, The Evolution of the Labour Party, 1910–1924, Clarendon Press, 1974. David Marquand, The Unprincipled Society, Fontana, 1988. David Marquand, The Progressive Dilemma: From Lloyd George to Kinnock, Heinemann, 1991. David Marsh, The New Politics of British Trade Unionism, Macmillan, 1992. Jonathan Michie (ed.), The Economic Legacy, 1979–1992, Academic Press, 1992.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 301

Keith Middlemas, Power, Competition and the State, Macmillan. Vol. I: Britain in Search of Balance, 1940–1961, 1986; Vol. II: Threats to the Postwar Settlement, 1961–1974, 1990; Vol. III: The End of the Postwar Era: Britain since 1974, 1990. Ralph Miliband, Parliamentary Socialism, Merlin, 1972. David Miller, Market, State and Community: Theoretical Foundations of Market Socialism , Clarendon Press, 1989. Lewis Minkin, The Contentious Alliance: Trade Unions and the Labour Party, Edinburgh University Press, 1991. K.O.Morgan, Labour in Power 1945–1951, Clarendon Press, 1984. K.O.Morgan, Labour People, Clarendon Press, 1987. Charles Loch Mowatt, Britain Between the Wars, 1918–1940, Methuen, 1968. Alec Nove, The Economics of Feasible Socialism Revisited, Harper Collins, 1991. Leo Panitch, Social Democracy and Industrial Militancy: The Labour Party, the Trade Unions and Incomes Policy, 1945– 1974, Cambridge University Press, 1976. Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred D. Miller and Jeffrey Paul (eds), Socialism, Basil Blackwell, 1989. Henry Pelling, The Labour Governments, 1945–51, Macmillan, 1984. Ben Pimlott, Labour and the Left in the 1930s, Alien and Unwin, 1986. Ben Pimlott and C.Cook (eds), Trade Unions in British Politics: The First 250 Years, Longman, 1991. Raymond Plant, Hugh Lesser and Peter Taylor-Gooby, Political Philosophy and Social Welfare, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980. A.A.Rogow and Peter Shore, The Labour Government and British Industry 1945–1951, Basil Blackwell, 1955. Michael Rustin, For a Pluralist Socialism, Verso, 1985. Jonathan Schneer, Labour’s Conscience: The Labour Left 1945– 51, Unwin Hyman, 1988. Patrick Seyd, The Rise and Fall of the Labour Left, Macmillan, 1987. Brian Simon, Education and the Social Order, 1940–1990, Lawrence and Wishart, 1991. Robert Skidelsky, Politicians and the Slump: The Labour Government of 1929–31, Macmillan, 1967.

302 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

Martin Smith and Joanna Spear (eds), The Changing Labour Party, Routledge, 1992. Andrew Taylor, Trade Unions and the Labour Party, Groom Helm, 1984. Robert Taylor, The Trade Union Question in British Politics: Government and Unions since 1945, Basil Blackwell, 1993. Nick Tiratsoo (ed.), The Attlee Years, Pinter, 1991. Jim Tomlinson, The Unequal Struggle? British Socialism and the Capitalist Enterprise, Methuen, 1982. Jim Tomlinson, Public Policy and the Economy since 1900, Clarendon Press, 1990. Alan Warde, Consensus and Beyond: The Development of Labour Party Strategy since the Second World War, Manchester University Press, 1982. Stephen K.White, The Political Theory of Postmodernism, Cambridge, 1991. Paul Whiteley and Stephen J.Winyard, Pressure for the Poor: The Poverty Lobby and Policy-making, Methuen, 1987. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution, Pelican, 1965. Phillip Williamson, National Crisis and National Government: British Politics, the Economy and the Empire 1926–1932, Cambridge University Press, 1992. Donald Winch, Economics and Policy, Hodder and Stoughton, 1969. J.M.Winter, Socialism and the Challenge of War, Routledge, 1974. J.M.Winter and D.M.Joslin, Tawney’s Commonplace Book, Cambridge University Press, 1972. G.D.N Worswick and P.H.Ady (eds), The British Economy 1945– 1950, Clarendon Press, 1952. Anthony Wright, Socialisms, Oxford University Press, 1986.

Articles and pamphlets (secondary sources) John Ahier, ‘The Politics of Educational Change: The Case of the Yorkshire Middle Schools’, in John Ahier and Michael Flude, Contemporary Education Policy, Groom Helm, 1983. Paul Auerbach, ‘Multinationals and the British Economy’, in Francis Green (ed.), The Restructuring of the British Economy, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 303

Denis Barnes and Eileen Reid, ‘A New Relationship: Trade Unions in the Second World War’, in Ben Pimlott and Chris Cook (eds), Trades Unions in British Politics: The First 250 Years, Longman, 1991. Jerry Coakley and Laurence Harris, ‘Financial Globalization and Deregulation’, in Jonathan Michie (ed.), The Economic Legacy, 1979–1992, Academic Press, 1992. Ivor Crewe, ‘The Electorate: Partisan Dealignment Ten Years On’, West European Politics, 6, 1983. Bernard Crick, ‘Socialist Values and Time’, Fabian Tract 495, 1984. Gavyn Davies and David Piachaud, ‘Social Policy and the Economy’, in Howard Glennerster (ed.), The Future of the Welfare State: Remaking Social Policy, Gower, 1983. Ben Fine and Clara Poletti, ‘Industrial Prospects in the Light of Privatization’, in Jonathan Michie (ed.), The Economic Legacy, 1979–1992, Academic Press, 1992. Andrew Gamble, ‘The Labour Party and Economic Management’, in Martin Smith and Joanna Spear (eds), The Changing Labour Party, Routledge, 1992. Andrew Glynn, ‘The Macro-anatomy of the Thatcher Years’, in Francis Green (ed.), The Restructuring of the British Economy, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989. Andrew Glynn, ‘The “Productivity Miracle”, Profits and Investment’, in Jonathan Michie (ed.), The Economic Legacy, 1979– 1992, Academic Press, 1992. John Goldthorpe, ‘Industrial Relations in Great Britain: A Critique of Reformism’, Politics and Society, 1974. Paul Heywood, ‘Rethinking Socialism in Spain: Programma 2000 and the Social State’, Coexistence, 30, 1993. David Howell, The Rise and Fall of Bevanism, ILP, Square One Publications, 1981. Arthur Marwick, ‘Middle Opinion in the Thirties: Planning, Progress and Political Agreement’, English Historical Review, 79, April 1964. David Miller, ‘In What Sense Must Socialism be Communitarian?’, in Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred D. Miller and Jeffrey Paul (eds), Socialism, Basil Blackwell, 1989. Geoff Mulgan, ‘Citizens and Responsibilities’, in Geoff Andrews (ed.), Citizenship, Lawrence and Wishart, 1991. Roger Opie, ‘Economic Planning and Growth’, in Wilfred Beck-

304 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

erman (ed.), The Labour Government’s Economic Record, 1964–1970, Duckworth, 1972. Paul Ormerod, ‘Incomes Policy’, in Michael Artis and David Cobham (eds), Labours Economic Policies 1974–79, Manchester University Press, 1991. Angela Phillips, ‘Citizenship and Feminist Theory’, in Geoff Andrews (ed.), Citizenship, Lawrence and Wishart, 1990. Christopher Pierson, ‘Democracy, Markets and Capital: Are there Necessary Limits to Economic Democracy?’, in David Held (ed.), Prospects for Democracy: North, South, East and West, Polity, 1993. Raymond Plant, ‘Hirsch, Hayek and Habermas: Dilemmas of Distribution’, in Adrian Ellis and Krishan Kumar (eds), Dilemmas of Liberal Democracies: Studies in Fred Hirsch’s ‘Social Limits to Growth’, Tavistock, 1983. Raymond Plant, ‘Equality, Markets and the State’, Fabian Tract 494, 1984. Raymond Plant, ‘Socialism, Markets and End-states’, in Julian Le Grand and Saul Estrin (eds), Market Socialism, Clarendon Press, 1989. Raymond Plant, ‘Social Rights and the Reconstruction of Welfare’, in Geoff Andrews (ed.), Citizenship, Lawrence and Wishart, 1991. lan Taylor, ‘Labour and the Impact of War 1939–45’, in Nick Tiratsoo (ed.), The Attlee Years, Pinter, 1991. Robert Taylor, ‘The Trade Union Problem in the Age of Consensus, 1960–1979, in Ben Pimlott and Chris Cook (eds), Trade Unions in British Politics: The First 250 Years, Longman, 1991. Anthony Wright, ‘Tawneyism Revisited: Equality, Welfare and Socialism’, in Ben Pimlott (ed.), Fabian Essays in Socialist Thought, Heinemann, 1984.

Index

Abel-Smith, Brian 125, 126, 128, 129, 146–147, 148, 149, 179, 254, 256, 260 Ablett, Noah 45 Acland, Richard 125 AES see Alternative Economic Strategy The Affluent Society (Galbraith) 66 Albu, Austen 80–81 Allaun, Frank 152–152, 240, 260 Alternative Economic Strategy (AES) 152, 159, 165, 166, 171–172, 173, 174, 176–177, 185–186, 198, 200, 202, 205, 206 Amnesty International 175 Anderson, Perry 149, 262 Anderson, Sir John 233 Attlee, Clement 8, 28, 34, 42, 44, 77, 97, 116, 226, 227, 233 Auden, W.H. 223 Bacon, Alice 247 Balogh, Thomas 37–38, 46, 47, 48, 50, 52, 53–54, 61, 64–67, 68–69, 137, 187, 192–193, 256 banks/banking 7–10, 13, 16, 228, 230 Barnett, Joel 166 Barrat-Brown, Michael 245 Barrett, Michelle 177 Beckerman, Wilfred 172–173, 195, 273 Benn, Caroline 163, 164

Benn, Tony 152–155, 156–157, 159, 161–165, 167, 169, 171, 200, 205, 263, 266, 268 Bennites 185, 191, 192, 201 Bevan, Aneurin 30, 31, 43, 45–50, 52–52, 55, 59–59, 67, 227, 234, 237, 239, 243, 253; Brighton speech 59, 67, 240 Bevanites/Bevanism 37, 43–50, 52–52, 112, 117, 226, 238–239, 240 Beveridge, William 47; Reports 29, 31 Bevin, Ernest 1, 4, 10, 22, 28, 35, 37, 232, 233, 234 Birnbaum, Norman 68, 245 Bish, Geoff 210, 264, 278 ‘Black Papers’ 265 Blair, Tony 281 Blunkett, David 205, 213, 216, 279 Boyle, Edward 260 Brailsford, H.N. 3, 4, 7 Bretton Woods Agreement 38, 166 Brighton Conference (1957) 59 British Investment Bank 206 Brockway, Fenner 53, 239, 240 Brooke, Rosalind 269 Brooke, Stephen 32, 232 Brown, George 69, 107, 152, 187, 241, 256, 257, 258 Brown, Gordon 211, 216, 278 Buchan, Norman 137 budget controls 41, 118, 243 Bullock, Sir Alan (now Lord) 170

305

306 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

Callaghan, James 106, 135, 137–138, 152, 165, 180, 184, 187, 188, 197, 201, 241, 271 Campaign for Democratic Socialism (CDS) 105–106, 107, 187 The Case for Industrial Partnership (Cole) 110 Castle, Barbara 46, 52, 53, 55, 57, 59, 106, 140–141, 153, 168, 179, 239, 251, 256, 269, 271 Central African Federation 53 Central Labour College 45 centre-left, in the 1950s 61–67 Challenge to Britain 64, 76, 91, 93 Chamberlain, Neville 28 Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) 142,147–148,175,179–179, 184–185, 262, 269 Choose Freedom 206 Churchill, Sir Winston 28, 31, 52, 235 citizenship 219, 221–222, 223–224 Citrine, Walter 1, 10 City Group (XYZ) 10 Clark, Colin 11, 15–17 class analysis 2–2, 8, 17, 45, 89, 126, 155, 201 Clause Four 61, 69, 82, 83, 105, 122, 177, 240–241 clawback 179, 184 Clay, Harold 228, 233, 248–249 Clegg, Hugh 99–100, 119, 249 CND 61, 67, 68, 106, 149, 152 Coates, Ken 161 Cole, G.D.H. 2, 3, 4, 10, 20–23, 47, 98, 109–112, 132, 155, 227, 231, 252 Cole, Margaret 227, 227 Commission on Social Justice (CSJ) 216, 218–221 Common Wealth Party 125, 254 Common Market see EEC community 221–222, 223 Comprehensive Schools’ Committee 144 Cook, Robin 205 Coote, Anna 176

corporate power 128–129 Cousins, Frank 67, 98, 137, 249, 257 CPAG see Child Poverty Action Group Crick, Bernard 122, 213 Cripps, Francis 156 Cripps, John 235 Cripps, Stafford 4, 7, 30, 34, 40, 67, 74–75, 86, 97, 226, 227, 234, 238, 243; Buckingham Palace speech 9 Crosland, Tony 61, 65, 73, 73, 77–79, 80, 84–85, 86, 88–90, 94–95, 97, 98–104, 104, 106, 107, 117, 118, 120, 143, 148, 158, 167, 34, 186, 187, 188, 190, 191–200, 242, 245, 249–250, 256, 271, 272, 274 Crossman, Richard 35, 37, 39, 40, 45, 46, 50, 52, 52, 56, 61, 64, 65, 66, 68, 70–71, 93, 95, 148, 179, 193, 235, 236, 255 Dalton, Hugh 2, 10–11, 13–14, 16, 25, 28, 40, 44, 73, 75, 85, 86, 227, 230, 233, 235, 243 Davenport, Nicholas 7 DEA see Department of Economic Affairs Deakin, Arthur 76 defence 36, 39, 46, 48, 68, 86, 237, 239 Delargy, Hugh 45, 239 Democratic Socialist Aims and Values 213 Department of Economic Affairs (DEA) 74 Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) 210 Der Funke 113 Disability Alliance 184 Donnison, David 125 Donoghue, Bernard 273 Donovan Commission 140, 141, 249 Dorfman, Gerald A. 169, 267 Douglas-Home, Sir Alec 69 Downing Street Policy Unit 184

INDEX 307

Driberg, Tom 236 DTI see Department of Trade and Industry Durbin, Evan 2, 3, 4, 10–15, 25, 30, 73, 76, 148, 200, 227, 230, 233 Eatwell, John 211, 212 economic planning 21, 25–26, 32, 39, 41, 46, 50, 76–79, 118, 155, 192, 209, 243, 268, 276; agreements 172–174; and incomes policy 135–139; and public ownership 55–67, 73–76; role of 61–62 Economic Policy and the Cost of Living 168 Economic Priorities for a Labour Government 206 Economic Surveys 74, 78 Eden, Anthony 239 education 29, 42, 91–97, 120–122, 142–145, 163–165, 247, 248, 260–261, 265–266 Education Act, (1944) 91 Education in Schools 165 Education and Socialism 120 Edwards, Bob 240 EEC 106, 171–172, 188, 189–190, 189–191, 202, 211, 271 efficiency 65 Ennals, David 179, 180, 269, 274 equal opportunities 22, 92, 213–214, 247, 279 equality 5–6, 19–20, 64, 64–65, 77, 79, 100, 104, 115, 123, 155–156, 194–195, 209, 212, 218; Cole’s egalitarian fellowship 20–23; and industrial democracy 139–142; and poverty 179–186; and power 5759, 61; programme for 172–174; redistributive 12–13; and social justice 83–85; and social policy 142–148, 260; strategy of 109–112; Tawney’s views 23–25; and the Titmuss group 128–133

Equality (Tawney) 124 ERM 211, 216 Fabian Essays 109 Fabian Philosophy Group 206 Fabian Society 48, 115 Fabian Taxation Group 73 fair shares 86 Family Income Supplement (FIS) 184, 270 Family Poverty Group 147 Fascism 4, 227 Feather, Vic 170, 259 Federation of British Industry 97 fellowship 112, 116–117, 182 Field, Frank 148, 184, 269, 270 Finance Act, (1956) 128 FIS see Family Income Supplement Flanders, Allan 98, 113, 115, 117, 118, 242, 252 Fleming Committee 93, 96, 121, 248 Foot, Michael 31, 35, 43, 49, 52, 55, 59, 61, 137, 149, 155, 168, 197, 235, 239, 240, 263, 271 For Socialism and Peace 9, 230 foreign policy 37–38, 48–49, 53–54, 236, 239, 251 Forward 57, 83 Forward March movement 125 A Four Year Plan for Britain 62 Fowler, Norman 276 Frankfurter, Felix 5 free market 11–12, 78, 173, 207 freedom 115–116, 117, 182, 212–213, 221 Freeman, John 43, 46, 49, 52 Friends of the Earth 175 full employment 17–18, 30, 32, 38, 52, 54, 80, 84, 87–88, 212, 220, 234 Full Employment and Financial Policy 29–30, 32, 33 The Future of Socialism (Crosland) 80, 95, 97, 104, 135, 190 Gaitskell, Hugh 3, 10, 12–13, 19,

308 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

34, 42, 43, 44, 48, 56, 61, 64, 67, 69, 73, 79, 81–83, 85, 87, 90, 91–92, 103–107, 112, 116–117, 122, 123, 148, 152, 188, 227, 229, 237, 243, 245, 252, 279 Gaitskellites 73–73, 74, 77, 79, 81–82, 83, 86, 90, 91, 93, 94–95, 103, 105, 112, 116, 117, 123, 128, 131, 213 Galbraith,J.K 66, 222 Gaulle, President de 190 The General Theory (Keynes) 12, 15, 229 ‘get-rich-quick’ 61 The Gift Relationship (Titmuss) 131 Glazier, John Bruce 3 Going Our Way 44, 49 good society 112–112, 113 Gould, Bryan 209, 211, 214, 216, 279, 280 Grammar of Politics (Laski) 4 Greenwood, Anthony 152, 235 Greenwood, Arthur 233 Griffith, Will 45 Griffiths, Jim 45, 233 Guild Socialism 23, 97, 99, 110 Guillebaud Committee 125 Hale, Leslie 236, 239 Hall, Stuart 68, 245 Hart, Judith 152, 155, 156, 171, 179–180, 264 Hattersley, Roy 187, 190, 193, 197, 205, 206, 207, 209, 212, 213, 219 Hayek, FA. 11–12 Healey, Denis 106, 166, 168, 187, 197, 205, 242, 271 Heath, Edward 106, 168, 169, 171 Heffer, Eric 137, 152, 156, 171, 263 Henderson, Arthur 226 Hinden, Rita 104, 115, 117, 122–123, 242 Hirsch, Fred 248 Hobsbawm, Eric 174, 175 Hobson,J.A. 3, 7, 22, 227

Holland, Stuart 155, 155, 156, 159, 161, 162, 172, 173, 187 Howard, Anthony 68 Hughes, Colin 215 ILP see International Labour Party IMF see International Monetary Fund In Place of Dollars 48, 62 In Place of Strife (Castle) 140–141, 153, 168, 192 Income Distribution and Social Change (Titmuss) 126, 128 incomes policy 42, 137–138, 192, 256, 257, 259–260, 270; and economic planning 135–139; equality and industrial democracy 139–142 industrial democracy 109, 110, 119–120, 139–142, 159–163, 200 Industrial Democracy and Nationalization (Clegg) 99 Industrial Enquiry 257 Industrial Policy committee 191 industrial relations 97–104 Industrial Relations Act 168, 169 industry, policy for 155–159 Industry and Society (Gaitskell) 55, 56, 57, 59, 81, 82 The Inequality of Incomes (Dalton) 17 Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR) 216 Institute of Workers’ Control 161 Interim Report on Public Ownership (TUC) 76, 244 International Bank for Reconstruction and Development 38 International Development Authority 54 International Jugenbund (IJB) 113 International Labour Party (ILP) 3, 4, 7, 227 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 54, 197, 273 International Society for Socialist Studies (ISSS) 110, 252

INDEX 309

investment 15–16, 47, 54, 128–129, 246 ISSS see International Society for Socialist Studies

Kinnock, Neil 205, 209, 213, 276, 278 Korean War 39, 43, 48, 52, 74, 75, 79, 86, 109

Jackson, Brian 144, 163 Jay, Douglas 11, 15, 17–19, 21, 30, 34, 42, 48, 73, 73, 75, 77, 81, 85–87, 90, 91, 94, 98–100, 102, 104, 106, 123, 128, 229, 235 Jenkins, Clive 98, 138, 258, 268 Jenkins, Roy 73, 73, 77–78, 79, 81, 84, 86, 88, 90, 91, 92, 94, 104, 106, 107, 135, 138, 158, 186, 187–191, 194, 242, 246, 249, 256, 272 Jenkinsite social democracy 187–191 Joint Statement of Intent 137 Joint Statement on Social and Economic Policy 267 Jones, Jack 138, 139, 141, 161, 168, 169–170, 184, 258, 270 Joseph, Keith 269 justice see social justice

Labour Believes in Britain 76 The Labour Case (Jenkins) 94 Labour Coordinating Committee (LCC) 175–176, 269 Labour doctrine, internal/ external political arguments x; three visions ix , see also Keynesian socialism; qualitative socialism; technocratic socialism Labour and the New Society 76 Labour Party 201–201; challenges of the 1980s 201–205; changing times 148–150; crisis in 1–2; current position 215–216; egalitarian objectives 43, 45, 46–47; interregnum 135–135; as party of progress 69–70; policy in the late 1930s 25–26; policy review 209–215; restructuring party doctrine 205–209; rethinking party doctrine 3–10; and socialist movement 253; three visions 2–3 Labour in the Sixties (Shore and Phillips) 69 Labour’s Programmes 14, 21, 25–26, 28, 158, 163–164, 167–168, 176, 210 Lansbury, George 1, 226 Laski, Harold 2, 4–6, 8, 15, 29, 30, 32, 227, 227, 228, 233 Lawther, Will 76 LCC see Labour Coordinating Committee Learning to Live 94 Lee, Jennie 52, 55, 56, 61, 239 Left 52–52, 205; in the early 1960s 67–71; and education policy 163–165; international issues 53–55; and Labour government 166–168; public ownership and economic planning 55–67; re-emergence of 152–155 Left Book Club 17, 228

Kaldor, Nicholas 193, 256 Kant, I. 113 Keep Left Group 35–42, 44, 46, 48, 74, 75, 109, 236; domestic programme 39–42 Keeping Left 237 Keynes, J.M. 11–13, 15, 22, 227 Keynesian socialism 2, 15–19, 25–26, 28, 29, 61, 73–73, 135, 150, 167, 172, 201, 201, 205, 212, 233, 243; in the 1960s 103–107; in the 1970s 191–200; decline of 186–200; economic planning 76–79; and education 91–97; and equality ix ; industrial relations 97–104; and planning 73–76; public ownership 73–76, 79–83; redistribution 85–91; social justice and equality 83–85 King, Anthony 198

310 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

Leicester Conference (1932) 9 Lestor, Joan 137, 152, 152, 260 Let Us Face the Future 28, 33, 34, 43 Lever, Harold 191, 197 Liberal Party 47, 104, 123 liberty 112, 117, 214–215 Little, lan 195 The Living Wage (Brailsford, Wise, Hobson) 3 Low Pay Unit 184 Lydall, Professor 128 Lynes, Tony 125 Mabon, Dickson 191 MacDonald, Ramsay 1, 2, 3, 4, 226, 227 The Machinery of Prices and Incomes Policy 137 Macleod, lain 126 Macmillan, Harold 62, 69, 106, 137 macro-economic policy 216 Manifesto 185 Manifesto Group 198–200 market socialism 201, 274, 280–281 Marquand, David 106, 187, 188, 190, 271, 272, 279 Marquand, Judith 188 Marshall Aid 37, 236 Marshall, Alfred 13, 17, 37, 39, 229 Marx, Karl 22 Marxism 2, 5, 66, 149, 155, 262 Meacher, Michael 205, 214, 222, 279 Meade, James 11, 12, 15, 16, 75, 243 Meet the Challenge, Meet the Change 212, 213 Mellor, William 4, 7, 227 Middlemass, Keith 166 Mikardo, lan 31, 32, 35, 39, 56, 57–59, 70, 109, 155, 235, 238, 239, 263, 271 Militant Socialist International (MSI) 113, 115 Militant Tendency 205

Minkin, Lewis 2, 141 Mitbestimmung system 102 Mitchison, Gilbert 227 Mitterand, François 206 Money and Everyday Life (Gaitskell) 19 Monnet,Jean 106 Morrell, Frances 156 Morris, William 3, 23 Morrison, Herbert 10, 28, 42, 43, 44, 74, 75–76, 233, 235, 243, 244, 248–249 Mosley, Oswald 3, 227 Movement for Colonial Freedom 53 MSI see Militant Socialist International Mussolini, Benito 11 National Assistance 145–146 National Association of Labour Teachers (NALT) 91, 144 National Economic Assessment 206, 210 National Economic Development Council (‘Neddy’) 137–137 National Enterprise Board (NEB) 158–159, 160, 167, 173, 204 National Executive Council (NEC) 1, 3, 9, 32, 52, 93, 140, 149, 152, 152–152, 153, 175, 201, 205, 210, 227, 228, 232, 263; Economic Strategy Group 155; Finance and Economic Affairs sub-committee 193; Home Policy Committee 206; Industrial Policy sub-committee 156, 157, 158; Policy Committee 10, 229; Public Sector Study Group 156; Science and Education sub-committee 163; Social Policy Committee 179 National Health Service (NHS) 34, 43, 45, 213, 254, 276 National Insurance Acts 34, 128 National Investment Bank 206 National Investment Board (NIB) 7–8, 12, 14, 16, 33, 62, 70, 156

INDEX 311

National Joint Council (NJC) 1, 226–227 National Plans 155, 158 nationalization 47, 64, 80–83, 109, 157, 228, 255 NATO 43 NEC see National Executive Council NEDC see National Economic Development Council (‘Neddy’) Nelson, Leonard 113, 115–115 New Fabian Essays 81 New Fabian Research Bureau (NFRB) 3, 10, 12, 15, 16, 19, 29, 227 New Left 68, 82, 98, 138, 141, 149, 245, 252 New Left Review 68, 149 New Right 201 New Society 184 New Statesman 7, 44, 59, 64, 144, 163, 173 Next Five Years group 8, 228 Next Ten Years (Cole) 20 NFRB see New Fabian Research Bureau NIB see National Investment Board Nield, Andrew 256 NJC see National Joint Council Noel-Baker, Philip 227, 233 O’Malley, Brian 180, 269 One Way Only 44, 46–47, 49 Owen, David 187, 198 Paish, F.W. 128 Palestine 35, 235 Parents’Revolt (Titmuss) 124 Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) 1, 28, 137, 149, 152, 153, 169, 226, 227, 234 partnership 110, 206, 210 Pay and Productivity Committees 140 pensions 128, 131, 182, 219, 254, 256 Phillips, Morgan 45, 59, 69 Piachaud, David 184, 185, 186,

195, 269–270; and Davies, Gavyn 186 Pigou, A.C. 13, 229, 230 Pimlott, Ben 238, 273 Pitt, Terry 264 Plan for Progress 137 planning see economic planning Plant, Raymond 209–209, 219 Platts-Mill, John 236 Plowden, Lady, Report 180, 260–261 PLP see Parliamentary Labour Party Policy Review Groups (PRGs) 206, 209–215, 210, 214, 215–216 The Politics of Democratic Socialism (Durbin) 15 Pompidou, Georges 190 The Poor and the Poorest 146, 147 post-modernism 218–218, 222 Postgate, Raymond 227 poverty 145–148, 156, 157, 193, 262; equality and the qualitative ideal 179–186 Powell, Enoch 126 Practical Socialism for Britain (Dalton) 14 pressure group politics 145 price system 78 Prices and Incomes Policy 137 Priestley, J.B. 125 privatization 202, 204, 211 Problems of Post-war Reconstruction, Central Committee on 29, 32, 233 Problems of Social Policy 125 Productive and Competitive Economic group 211 Pryke, Richard 157 Public Expenditure White Paper (1976) 197 public ownership 5–8, 14–15, 25–26, 31, 32–33, 39, 41, 44, 46, 50, 52, 79–83, 117, 155, 207–209, 220, 232, 236, 253; and planning 2–2, 55–67, 73–76 Public Schools Commission 144 Pugh, Arthur 227, 228

312 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

Purchasing Power and Trade Depression 11 qualitative socialism 3, 20–25, 109, 135, 201; changing perceptions 179–186; and equality ix; influence of Cole and Tawney 109–113; and Socialist Commentary group 113–124; and Titmuss group 124–133 Radice, E.A. 227 Radice, Giles 214, 279 Ratan Tata Foundation 23 Rawls, John 193, 209, 213 redistribution of wealth 2, 18–19, 26, 65, 81, 85–91, 118, 140, 158, 182–186, 189, 194, 197 Report on Post-war Reconstruction (TUC) 97 Rignano system 13–14, 17 Robbins, Lionel 11, 229 Robbins Report (1963) 143 Robson, W.A. 227 Rodgers, Bill 105, 106, 107, 187, 191, 198, 200, 250 Roth, Andrew 48 Ruskin, John 3, 23 Russian Cooperative Movement 7 Rustin, Michael 175 Ryder, Sir Donald (later Lord) 167 Sawyer, Tom 277, 278 Scanlon, Hugh 138, 141, 168, 169 Scarborough Conference (1963) 70 science 70–71, 124, 250 SDP 189, 206 Security and Old Age, Committee on 128 Sedgwick, Peter 149 Seers, Dudley 126 Shinwell, Emmanuel (‘Manny’) 32, 33, 233 Shore, Peter 56, 69 Short, Ted 191 Signposts for the Sixties (Gaitskell) 62, 69, 105, 135 single issue interests 175–176

Smith, John 216 Snowdon, Philip 226 social chapter 220 Social Commentary group 112 Social Contract 168, 169 The Social Division of Welfare (Titmuss) 126–128 social insurance 29, 31 social justice 181, 218–219, 281; and equality 83–85 social security 131, 276 Socialism: A New Statement of Principles 115 Socialism and Nationalization (Gaitskell) 81 Socialism in the New Society (Jay) 128 Socialism Now 194, 195 A Socialist Budget (Clark) 16, 17 The Socialist Case (Jay) 17, 30 Socialist Charter 260 Socialist Commentary 98, 103, 109, 113–115, 115, 116, 117, 123, 132–133, 198, 200; in the 1950s 115–118; in the early 1960s 122–124; and education 120–122; and industrial democracy 119–120 Socialist Educational Association 144, 165 Socialist League 4, 6, 7, 8–10, 9, 25, 30, 31, 227, 227 Socialist Society for Information and Propaganda (SSIP) 3, 4, 227 Socialist Union 103, 115–116, 121, 122 Socialist Vanguard 115, 117 Socialist Vanguard Group (SVG) 113 Solley, Leslie 236 Some Aspects of the Inequality of Incomes in Modern Communities (Dalton) 13, 85 SSIP see Socialist Society for Information and Propaganda Stalin, Joseph 10 starting-gate theory 201 Statement of Principles 122 Stewart, Michael 106

INDEX 313

Strachey, John 2, 109 strikes 98, 138, 249, 258 Study Group on Ownership and Control of Industry 56 Summerskill, Edith 256 Sumption, Jonathan 269 Supplementary Benefits Commission (SBC) 179–179 Supreme Economic Council 31 SVG see Socialist Vanguard Group Swedish Joint Enterprise Councils 101 Swedish Social Democrats 19 Swingler, Stephen 59, 239, 240 Syndicalism 97, 99 Taverne, Dick 187, 191 Tawney, R.H. 2, 3, 20, 23–25, 45, 112–113, 124, 125, 132, 155, 218, 227 tax/taxation 17, 40, 66, 85–88, 118, 128, 162, 180, 181, 198, 200, 215, 219, 246–247, 278 Taxation of Profits and Income, Minority Report 88 technocratic socialism 2, 25, 52, 73, 135; changes in 28; defeat of 165–174; in the early 1980s 174–177; and education policy 163–165; and equality ix; industry and industrial democracy 155–163; and Labour left 3–10, 152–155; towards centre-left 10–15; wartime developments 28–35 Thatcher, Margaret 204 Thompson, E.P 68, 149, 245, 262 Thomson, George 191 Thorneycroft, Peter 62 Titmuss group 124–126, 145, 179, 180, 182, 261; and socialism, equality, community 128–133; and welfare state 126–128 Titmuss, Kay 124–125 Titmuss, Richard 112, 112, 124–133, 146, 147, 148, 149, 155, 179, 181, 185, 242, 254,

255, 262, 269; Eleanor Rathbone Memorial Lecture 126 Tito, Marshall 161 Tophan, Tony 161 Townsend, Peter 125, 128, 129, 132, 145–147, 148, 149, 179–179, 180–186, 197, 254, 260, 269 trade cycle 11, 12 trade unions 1, 42, 52, 97–93, 100, 110, 118, 137, 141, 155, 168–170, 172, 174, 175, 182, 202, 227, 228, 232, 237, 257–260, 266–267, 268, 270, 275; retreat of 168–170 Trades Unions and Labour Relations Act (1975) 169 The Transition from Capitalism (Crosland) 80 Treatise on Money (Keynes) 15 Tribune 44, 46, 64, 67, 141, 152, 239 Tribune Group 50, 52, 53–61, 67–68, 149, 152, 152, 257, 267, 276 TUC 28, 41, 184, 204 Twentieth Century Socialism 115, 122 unemployment 47, 166, 169, 202, 267 unilateralism 135 universalism 131–132 Universities and Left Review (later the New Left Review) 68 Upper Clyde Shipbuilders (UCS) 153, 155 utopian socialism 3 Vaizey,John 125 Varley, Eric 171 VFS see Victory for Socialism Victory for Socialism (VFS) 59–59, 61, 61, 240 wages 41, 69, 101, 137–137, 139, 145–148, 166, 168, 192, 201, 236–237

314 EGALITARIAN THOUGHT AND LABOUR POLITICS

Walker, Alan 184 Walker, Patrick Gordon 106, 242 Webb, Sidney 2, 227, 241 welfare state 2, 8, 34, 48, 52, 59, 109–110, 126, 128, 130–133, 254, 269 What Matters Now 188 Whitty, Larry 278 Whose Welfare State? (AbelSmith) 126 Williams, Raymond 68 Williams, Shirley 163, 165, 179, 187, 265, 272, 273 Williamson, Tony 76 Wilson, Harold 43, 45, 46, 47–48, 49, 52–52, 54, 61–62, 64, 65, 68, 69, 71, 105, 107, 132, 135, 135–137, 138, 152, 152–153, 155, 167, 171, 180, 187, 190, 192–193, 197, 238, 239, 241, 251, 273 Winch, Donald 11 Wintour, Patrick 215 Wise, E.F. 2, 3, 4, 7, 8–10, 13, 15, 227 women’s movement 176–177 Woodcock, George 137, 257, 259 Wootton, Barbara 10, 229 Working Party on Education 91 Wrigglesworth, lan 198 Wyatt, Woodrow 242 XYZ Club (City Group) 10 Young, Michael 90, 125, 215 Zilliacus, Konni 236, 240