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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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