If Labour Wins . . .

Ralph Miliband

Introduction

In our previous issue, Tom Nairn’s essay ‘The Bourgeois Nemesis’, foundational for nlr, appeared for the first time in English. In this number, four other articles, which came out alongside it in 1963, in the same double issue on Britain of the Italian journal Il Contemporaneo, are translated back into English, as the original texts no longer exist. These comprise Peter Wollen on the cinema, Raymond Williams on fiction and drama, Eric Hobsbawm on the social order of that time and Ralph Miliband on the prospects for Labour. The quintet of pieces published in nlr six decades later, striking enough as a set, made up less than half the length of the symposium in Italian. That included articles on the visual arts, music and economy; a short story by Alan Sillitoe; a script for television by Arnold Wesker; a conversation with Joan Littlewood; poems by Michael Hamburger, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, R. S. Thomas and others. Heading the issue was an introductory sketch of the cultural and socio-political landscape of the country, ‘From the Suez expedition to the Profumo affair’, by Giorgio Fanti, who put the double number together. A text on Fanti follows the articles we have had retranslated. Nothing like the collection he assembled existed in Britain itself. It was a remarkable feat. Is there anything comparable to it, published in any European language (including English) in the subsequent sixty years—a symposium of such length, with such a galaxy of talent from the target country, in any journal of a host country? The sad answer is simply, no. The lands of the European Union, which boasts of its cosmopolitan breadth, remain provincially preoccupied with themselves, their elites too ideologically at one to trouble themselves with the cultural or intellectual differences between the countries they rule. Lack of curiosity, born of confidence in political identity, is the hallmark of the caste.

The conjuncture in Britain that generated the coverage of Il Contemporaneo bears, in at least one respect, a close resemblance to that of today. Then, as now, Ukania is at the fag-end of thirteen years of Tory rule: the regime in place no less discredited, its economy flagging still more visibly, the Labour Party all but universally expected to return to office at the next election, looming less than a year ahead. Mark Twain’s adage that history doesn’t repeat itself, though it often rhymes, naturally holds good. Sunak, a more proficient leader, is not Home. But his party is much less popular today than the Conservatives remained even in 1963. It is highly unlikely it will come as close to clinging onto power as Home did in 1964. On the other side of the aisle, Starmer cannot hold a parliamentary candle to Wilson’s performance as leader of the opposition, acknowledged even by opponents as a bravura display of eloquence, trenchancy and wit (evaporating in office). But Starmer’s lead in the opinion polls is to date much larger, and control of his party absolute, which Wilson’s was not. Like Blair, on whom he would like to model himself, and unlike Wilson, he enjoys the benevolence, not just of such reliable stand-bys as the Guardian and the Mirror, but also of the megaphones of the business press, the Financial Times and the Economist. That a clear-cut parliamentary majority for Labour might still prove out of reach is a function, not of any improbable Conservative comeback, but of the fragmentation of the political scene to which Ukanian decline has led, with the snp still in power in Scotland, and the Liberal party leading the challenge to many a southern Tory seat. Yet the first-past-the-post system still favours the post-war dichotomy of the two big parties, whose logic is Starmer in comfortable command at Westminster. With Labour nearing power again in 2024, Miliband’s prognosis of the outcome in 1964 has lost little of its critical edge today.

Socially and culturally, it is another story, as the texts of Hobsbawm, Williams and Wollen bring home. The class divisions of the country are not the same; the composition of its rulers has altered; its trade unions are weaker; sexes and races are less unequal. Britain’s economic plight is graver, with a fall in the growth of productivity and per capita income steeper and more sudden than any drop in the past, whose causes remain to be explored. Culturally, perhaps above all, nothing comparable to the iconoclastic vitality and mordancy of the arts and satires of the early sixties has been visible since. Could the spectacle of a Public Prosecutor in Downing Street do something to alter that?

Ralph Miliband

If Labour Wins . . .

There are countries where the looming defeat of a government gives rise to complex judgements concerning the identity of its successor. Britain is not one of them. The decline of the present Conservative government, which has recently assumed spectacular proportions, and its ever-more-likely defeat at the approaching general election, can have only one beneficiary: the Labour Party. Talk of the Liberal revival remains just that, while the Communist Party goes unmentioned when electoral calculations are in question. Of course, nothing is certain in this context till it has come about, and it would be incautious to underestimate the Conservatives’ capacity to overcome their disadvantage with energy and effect. But it is doubtful they can now regain enough impetus to take them to victory in the year between now and the date when they must call an election. If the electoral consultation were held today they would be massacred; if in the autumn or next spring, the prediction has it, they would be soundly beaten and Labour, after more than twelve years in opposition, would find itself in government again, with a substantial parliamentary majority. Not that this signifies a mass conversion to Labour, still less to socialism. In effect, the indications are that Labour has gained rather little new and positive support; rather, the Conservatives have lost a great deal of ground in the past year or so—enough, that is, to signal the passage from victory to defeat.

Assuming then that Labour returns to government, I propose to examine what the Party will probably do with its victory, which involves asking what Labour is doing now and what it wants to do. Labour policy has been set out, and it is unlikely there will be significant alteration to its political line between now and the elections. This, together with an analysis of the recent past and immediate present, will reduce, even if it does not quite eliminate, conjecture about Labour’s intentions and attitudes.

To start with the recent past: perhaps the most noteworthy characteristic of the history of Labour in the 1950s is its steady succession of electoral defeats. The Party hasn’t won a general election since 1945. It is true that it returned to office in 1950, even if its miserable majority of 7 (down from 140) was synonymous with defeat. It lost the 1951 election and went into opposition, where it lost once more in 1955 and again in 1959. However, the wonder was not that Labour had lost the elections of the 1950s but that it did not do much worse. For the second most noteworthy characteristic of Labour in this period, closely related to the first, was the incapacity, or rather the lack of will, of the leadership to shape and fight for a precise programme of a socialist character. In 1951, even before the government’s capitulation that year, it had become evident that its zeal for reform was exhausted, and it was increasingly hard to see any significant differences from the Conservative opposition, whether in domestic or foreign policy. Most of its energy was devoted to fighting not the Conservatives but those within its own ranks arguing for a different political line. As a result, the Labour Party in the 1950s appeared tepid, timorous, hesitant, defensive and torn by quarrels. Along with the fact that Conservative rule came without the terrible consequences that had been forecast, such as mass unemployment, this was enough to thwart Labour’s efforts to win new support or to hold on to what it already had.

The lesson Labour’s leaders drew from repeated defeat was not that they had not been bold enough, but that they had been too much so; that there was too much in the Party’s ‘image’ that was electorally damaging, especially its formal commitment on the issue of nationalization. This was the situation that Hugh Gaitskell, who became party leader in 1955, set out to change. An earlier generation of Labour leaders could hardly have shown less enthusiasm for nationalization; and yet, for all their reluctance to propose invading the citadel of private capitalism, they felt incapable of maintaining that public ownership could be separated from the Party’s idea of socialism. But this is precisely what the ‘revisionists’ affirmed: not only that nationalization was electorally damaging but that it was irrelevant to Labour’s socialist goals. Naturally, there were cases in which the state might be constrained to take over the management of this or that firm, even an industry. But the sole criterion for should be a functional one, strictly economic and related to considerations of efficiency. This meant the acceptance on a permanent basis of a situation in which the ‘private sector’ would be overwhelmingly predominant, and collectivization would remain marginal, confined mostly to public services. The state would intervene in economic life but only in the form of ‘control’.

These views did not represent a major departure from Labour’s traditional economic philosophy. The ‘revisionists’ merely wanted to give programmatic status to what has been the objective of Labour’s leadership (as distinct from its activists) from the moment the Party was founded. Other ‘revisionist’ demands were scarcely newer: the insistence on Labour’s ‘classless’ character and aims, the active discouragement of trade-union militancy, flattery of middle-class voters, the general weakening of Labour’s political message—this had always been part of the party’s approach. But such demands acquired a new significance in the late 1950s, when the ‘affluence’ in which workers were supposedly wallowing was used to reinforce the need for a new image, appropriate to a ‘post-capitalist’ society of an increasingly petty-bourgeois character.

As for Labour foreign policy in the 1950s, the real battle was fought not between Labour and the Conservatives but within the Party, between left and right. On the main political questions, the two parties were officially at peace. Naturally, differences arose over specific issues, as in the case of Suez. But these did not undermine what was essentially a bipartisan approach to foreign policy. It would be a mistake to think that the Labour left, opposing the official lead, was able to offer a consistent and principled line. Its opposition was often ambiguous and inhibited, without firm ideological bases. As in the case of Bevanism, it was more an attitude than a coherent movement, and its parliamentary leadership—in particular—had a propensity for compromise that regularly turned to its opponents’ advantage.

After Labour’s defeat in the 1959 general election, the internal conflict between left and right entered a more dramatic phase. First, there was Gaitskell’s attempt to amend Clause iv of the Party Constitution, so as to reduce the commitment to nationalization implied. Gaitskell’s defeat on this, thanks to fierce and mostly spontaneous resistance in the trade union movement and Party branches, was noteworthy. But it is no less important that the left opposition, while able to thwart the leadership, did not succeed in gaining a decisive victory. The compromise reached at the Annual Conference in 1960 gave the appearance of victory to the opposition but left effective power, and the right to shape Labour’s programme, in the hands of the ‘revisionist’ leadership.

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If Labour Wins . . .

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