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John Callaghan
© John Callaghan 2008
‘Class is the basis of British party politics; all else is embellishment
and detail’. This widely-quoted remark of Peter Pulzer’s was
considered plausible forty years ago largely because of a pattern of voting
established in 1945. But even in 1967 it was an observation that did little
to explain the success of the Conservative Party. The most successful centre-right
party in Europe continued to take one-third of the working class vote; before
the Second World War it had taken half or more of this vote in the Depression-era
elections of 1931 and 1935. In the fifty years following the advent of universal
suffrage in 1918, majority Labour Governments had existed in only ten of
them. Universal suffrage, viewed from this perspective, had ushered in an
age of Conservative electoral hegemony.
Class cultures in Britain were powerful; but class consciousness favoured
the Tories - in the creation after 1918 of a unified Conservative middle
class and in the alienation of substantial sections of the working class
from organised labour. Arguably, the defensive nature of organised labour
itself obstructed, rather than favoured, the conversion of Labour to a creative
social democratic outlook. The unions were successfully depicted as a selfish,
sectional interest by the Tories; and even when they briefly represented
just over half of the workforce (in 1979) opinion polls showed that many
trade unionists supported this view. Yet it was also true that both the
unions and the Labour Party often talked as if ‘the labour movement’
was coequal with the working class and the working class represented the
vast majority of the population. Those on the left-wing of the party, especially
after 1945, talked as if a strong socialist message would unite the working
class. The leadership, by contrast, believed that the electoral struggle,
particularly in the affluent fifties, could only be won by securing the
centre ground occupied by floating voters.
Doubts about the political self-sufficiency of the working class had always
existed in some minds. Eduard Bernstein’s Evolutionary Socialism
had argued the need for class allies as early as 1899. The logic of the
electoral struggle in Britain was enough to persuade Ramsay MacDonald that
he had to govern on behalf of the nation, not just the working class, let
alone its organised minority. The trades unions had formed the Labour Party
but they largely accepted this logic, just as they accepted the logic of
the Westminster system. All were united in working for the ‘knock-out
blow’ in the form of majority Labour Government. The extinction of
‘third parties’ was implicit in this strategy and looked almost
secure by 1951 when the two main parties shared over 93 per cent of the
votes cast. But if this was the moment when Labour’s share of the
vote had peaked, when party membership was reaching its zenith and contentment
with the political system was undisturbed, it was also the prelude to a
decade of agonising about class.
Labour’s supposed core constituency, the industrial working class,
which it had never monopolised in any case, was now shrinking. It probably
peaked around the time of the First World War when it was just over 50 per
cent of the workforce, though there was no great consciousness of its secular
decline until the 1950s.1 The party’s self-styled modernisers found
it convenient in that decade (as they did in the 1980s) to assume the existence
of a social determinism linking the decline of the old working class to
the need for ideological and organisational renewal. Douglas Jay, eight
days after Labour’s third consecutive general election defeat, in
1959, argued that ‘we are in danger of fighting under the label of
a class that no longer exists’.2 Must Labour lose, asked one influential
study of the party’s electoral prospects? The answer seemed to be
‘yes’ because, as Rita Hinden put it, the working class was
‘objectively and subjectively on the wane’ and yet Labour continued
to be seen as the working class party. Hugh Gaitskell, trying desperately
to shed this image and its supposed socialist corollary - programmatic support
for the nationalisation of everything - told the annual conference that
‘everywhere the balance is shifting away from heavy physical work
… the typical worker of the future is more likely to be a skilled
man in a white overall watching dials in a bright new factory’.3 Such
rhetoric was meant to justify a repudiation of Clause Four of the party’s
constitution and other symbols of full-blooded socialism and class war.
The man in the white overall was keen on none of it.
Gaitskell and his allies were not alone in thinking that class was changing.
New Left thinkers in the 1950s worried about the rise of consumerism and
of the mass media and the ability of these forces to promote a false consciousness
about class interests, even if the class structure remained unaltered (which
it wouldn’t).4 When the Communist Daily Worker was re-launched
as the Morning Star in 1966 the change was justified by some party
leaders as a response to changes in the occupational structure and related
changes in class consciousness; many of those the Communists wished to reach
wouldn’t see themselves as workers, it was argued.5
The 1950s and 60s focus on cultural change tended to the neglect of all
that remained the same in the reproduction of inequalities of power and
wealth, and in some ways all this talk of class and class consciousness
was beside the point. Similar changes in class and occupational structures,
in the growth of consumerism and mass media, had not undermined social democracy
in the Scandinavian countries, nor had it diminished the appetite for social
reform in those countries or prevented the continued growth of the unions.
Indeed, contrary to the assumptions of Labour’s revisionists, the
‘labour movement’ had grown stronger in social democratic Sweden
even as the blue-collar workforce declined. Labour’s problem was that,
having been largely excluded from power for most of the twentieth century,
its periods in office - with the exception of 1945-51 - were largely sterile
and destructive, leaving few permanent achievements. Eventually the 1945
settlement was radically altered, but only in ways detrimental to social
democracy - and this is the period we are in now. Global changes of epoch-making
proportions have brought everything into question. The real issue is not
a class structure from which one can read a set policies: it is to know
what social democracy stands for in the twentieth-first century and devising
ways of promoting it.
Notes
1. A. Przeworski and J. Sprague, Paper Stones: A History of Electoral
Socialism (Chicago Il.: Chicago University Press, 1986).
2. Forward, 16 October 1959.
3. Labour Party, Labour Party Annual Conference Report 1959 (London:
Labour Party, 1959), p. 107.
4. Stuart Hall, ‘A sense of classleness’, Universities and
Left Review, 5, autumn 1958.
5. J. Callaghan, Cold War, Crisis and Conflict: A History of the Communist
Party of Great Britain, 1951-68 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2003).
John Callaghan is Professor of Politics at the University
of Salford and the author of books on social democracy, Labour and Communist
history.
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