A Century of Labour by Jon Cruddas
Sir Keir Starmer gazes across the cover of this book at Ramsay MacDonald,. What do they make of each other? One can’t help thinking Sir Keir looks anxious, perhaps recalling how it all went terribly wrong for MacDonald, while MacDonald looks dubious, perhaps reflecting that in the nature of things, and especially of Labour leaders, there is a high probability it will all go terribly wrong for Sir Keir.
Jon Cruddas, Labour MP for Dagenham since 2001, certainly harbours doubts about Sir Keir, whom he describes as “evasive” (a verdict quoted yesterday by Chris Mason, Political Editor of the BBC), and of whom he goes on to say:
“Starmer often seems detached from his own party and uncomfortable in communion with fellow MPs. In his immediate circle he appears to value the familiar and unchallenging. It is difficult to identify the purpose of a future Starmer government – what he seeks to accomplish beyond achieving office.”
Cruddas is altogether quite gloomy about Labour, a party he has served in various capacities for the last 44 years. At the end of his account he says “Labour has no settled understanding of what it is for”, and in power is likely to relapse into “stale technocratic social democracy” which “will prove unable to resist the rise of authoritarian populism”.
Labour, Cruddas concludes, will fail to draw on the “rich radical tradition dating back to Magna Carta, the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 and the Civil Wars”, and “could be destroyed by victory”.
All this is a valuable corrective to the present triumphalism about a Labour victory. Cruddas’s book appears a hundred years since MacDonald became, in January 1924, the first Labour Prime Minister, at the head of a short-lived minority Government.
Cruddas points out that during that century, if one excludes the wartime coalition, Labour has been in power for a total of 33 years, 13 of which were under New Labour. Only six of the party’s 23 leaders have become PM: MacDonald, Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson, James Callaghan, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.
And of those six, only three, Attlee, Wilson and Blair, won a majority at a general election. It is, Cruddas says, a record of underachievement, yet he still believes “The Cause of Labour is the Hope of the World”, a phrase he quotes from The Workers’ Maypole, drawn by Walter Crane in 1894.
Conservatives ought to try to understand something of this. Charles Moore points out, in Not For Turning, the first volume of his life of Margaret Thatcher, that she “liked Labour MPs who stood up for what she called the ‘underdog'”, and was “on good terms with the rabble-rousing left-wing MP Eric Heffer, whose Christian sincerity she respected”, while at the same she had an “absolutely genuine” hatred for socialist doctrines, which “gave her the necessary energy to develop her views and advance them vigorously”.
There have been times when the Conservatives have prospered, and have recruited vast numbers of members, precisely because socialism was seen as a mortal threat to freedom, and to even the smallest property owner.
Cruddas has various qualifications to be our guide to Labour. He has read pretty much everything that matters, yet manages to be quite concise, and he conveys the extent to which socialism grew out of religious faith, and for many of its adherents came to fill the space which would once have been occupied by organised religion, with parties of canvassers setting out into housing estates as missionaries might once have set out.
He quotes a marvellous description by H.W. Massingham, editor of The Nation, of the Labour victory rally in the Albert Hall in January 1924:
“To the thousands of young men and women – the average age struck one as between 20 and 30 – who poured into the Albert Hall, the event came as an almost solemn act of dedication rather than a flaming signal of party triumph.
“The British Labour Party resembles the Catholic Church at least in two particulars. It has faith and an organisation, and it is the union of these two characteristics that produces the effect of disciplined enthusiasm of which these central assemblies are evidence…
“The singing, mostly of hymn tunes and led by a trained choir from the orchestra, was set to the three or four fine English poems by Morris and Carpenter, whose familiar music makes the marching music of the party and spiritualises their vision of a new social order…”
Cruddas’s hero is Attlee, who regarded welfare as “essentially an ethical not transactional question”, and was able to unite the “competing visions of justice that have shaped Labour history”.
Attlee was a man of such modesty that he never lapsed into ostentatious piety: never sounded like a hypocrite and a pharisee, one of the great dangers of the religious approach to politics.
Nor did he descend into the factionalism which has so often bedevilled the Labour Party. By being so evidently patriotic, decent and unselfseeking, for a time he reconciled the British people to socialism, and for 20 years, from 1935 to 1955, he managed the extraordinarily difficult feat of leading the Labour Party.
He loved his old school, Haileybury, and traditional English verse, and cricket, and had served, and been severely wounded, while serving as an infantry officer during the First World War. Frank Field in 2009 published an admirable collection of Attlee’s journalism from the period 1951-65, entitled Attlee’s Great Contemporaries, which gives an excellent impression of the man, conveying his moral seriousness, and laconic, understated sense of humour.
Many on the Left despise Conservatives as morally inferior. This contempt is unwise, for it prohibits understanding. Attlee served as Churchill’s deputy in the wartime coalition and was generous about him: “Winston was superbly lucky. And perhaps the most warming thing about him was that he never ceased to say so.”
Labour refused in 1940 to serve under Neville Chamberlain, who had been abominably rude to Labour MPs in the 1920s.
Cruddas is unfortunately a much less amusing and graceful writer than Attlee. That is the one great drawback to accepting Cruddas as a guide to Labour’s history.
But he does remind us how unhappy many Labour people are with their present leader:
“The desire for internal reconciliation and the campaign pledge to restore the democratic culture of the party never materialised. Once in office, Starmer oversaw a brutal centralisation of power on strictly factional lines and the removal of any signs of independent thought from prospective Labour candidates.”