A Strange Eventful History: Democratic Socialism in Britain by Edmund Dell

I’d originally thought to link this review with David Marquand’s The Progressive Dilemma: From Lloyd George to Blair, but I think I’ll save that one for a review to come. Dell’s book deserves to stand on its own, anyway.

A Strange Eventful History: Democratic Socialism in Britain by Edmund Dell

There’s a saying that’s usually attributed to Labour politician Herbert Morrison — ‘Socialism is what a Labour government does’. I’ve always found it to be a fascinating statement, because simply by shifting the emphasis in that statement, you can say one of two things: 1) a Labour government is, by definition, a government that will implement the classic ideas of socialism; or 2) the definition of socialism depends entirely on the Labour government that claims to be implementing it. This particular book kept me thinking about that old saying, and where the emphasis in that saying really lies. And while I can’t deny that Edmund Dell’s book is in many ways a polemic, 500-plus pages of thinly-veiled bitterness about what the Labour movement has become, it’s a book that really does keep you thinking about that possible change in emphasis all the way through.

Now, the late Edmund Dell wasn’t one who had many kind things to say about the Labour party. His book The Schuman Plan and the Abdication of British Leadership in Europe is positively vituperative in its condemnation of the Labour Party’s fear of Franco-German cooperation and further European union. An unsurprising sentiment, perhaps, since he was one of the Labour MPs who broke with the Party and joined the SDP in 1980…in part because of Labour’s anti-Europe stance, though the party’s general drift to the left also played into Dell’s decision to jump ship. But Dell doesn’t seem to have much sympathy for any aspect of Labour government or democratic socialism — at least, not in the way that it has been defined by various Labour politicians and thinkers over the years. And in some ways that lack of sympathy is the book’s main weakness: it’s not always easy to tell when his criticism of Labour’s interpretation of democratic socialism is fully justified, or when he’s attacking Labour out of sheer spite.

Dell is clever with words, I must admit. There’s a wonderful description of Harold Wilson’s desperate, angry pleading with Lyndon Johnson over the shabby state of Britain’s finances in the 1960s: ‘like a suicide threatening to cut his throat on his neighbour’s doorstep’. And I must admit that he does an excellent job with the historical writings, tracing the threads of democratic socialism from the early socialist thinkers in the trade unions right up through Labour’s victory in 1997 (where his account ends). But A Strange Eventful History has to be read with one eye on the writer, always remembering that this history of democratic socialism was written by a man who sadly fell out with the Labour government that claimed to espouse the very ideals of democratic socialism…back when more people considered it to be a truly viable political movement.

New Labour, Old Labour: The Wilson and Callaghan Governments, 1974-79 edited by Anthony Seldon and Kevin Hickson

Once again balancing out the posts on the Tories, here’s a book on Labour during one of its more difficult periods in power.

New Labour, Old Labour: The Wilson and Callaghan Governments, 1974-79 edited by Anthony Seldon and Kevin Hickson

To make a fairly crude analogy, editing a book about the Labour governments of the 1970s is somewhat akin to performing an autopsy on a corpse that has been dragged about, kicked around, and otherwise mangled almost out of recognition. For the last two-and-a-half decades, politicians on both the left and the right have been pointing to the 1970s as an example of what they DON’T want to see happen again. Militant industrial action, a stagnating economy, rampant inflation, the humiliation of the 1976 IMF loan, and finally the so-called Winter of Discontent in 1978-79 all combined to a no-confidence vote in Jim Callaghan’s leadership and the 1979 General Election that brought Margaret Thatcher into power. In the years that followed, Thatcher and her successors (both John Major and Tony Blair) sought to distance themselves from that particular time in British history. Blair even chose to rebrand the party as ‘New Labour’ specifically to assure the electorate that Labour had shaken off its past failures and flaws and was prepared to be a party capable of governing once again. Yet any number of questions still remain: To what extent is New Labour really a radical departure from the party of Keir Hardie, Ramsay MacDonald, Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson, and Jim Callaghan? Were the Wilson and Callaghan years really the string of disasters that today’s politicians like to spend their time rabbiting on about? And if not, why have both the new left and the new right found the 1970s to be a surprisingly useful time period to denounce?

The essays and articles in New Labour, Old Labour are on the whole an excellent collection of analyses of different aspects of the Wilson and Callaghan governments. Well-known and respected historians and political scientists delve into the details of government and governing in the latter half of the 1970s, such as industrial and social policy, Scottish and Welsh devolution, the crisis in Northern Ireland, the Labour Party’s near-meltdown over relations with the EEC, and the ups and (mostly) downs of the economic cycle. Other articles take a more personal look at the mechanics of government, specifically with regard to Wilson and Callaghan’s relationships with their Cabinet ministers, the Parliamentary Labour Party, and the Labour Party rank and file.

There were several articles I particularly enjoyed — not surprisingly, they happened to be by authors I’ve read before whose writing styles appeal to me. Philip Norton’s article about the Labour Party’s struggles to keep control of Parliament was a personal favourite, though that might have something to do with the fact that thanks to my master’s dissertation, I can practically cite chapter and verse out of some of Norton’s other books about parliamentary dissent. Dennis Kavanagh also does a fine job looking at why it’s so convenient for politicians today to misread and misinterpret Old Labour, finding in it a useful way to define themselves and their political platforms to the electorate (’this is what we’re not’ rather than ‘this is what we are’). The one article that I wish had not been included was about social inequality under Old Labour, written jointly by Polly Toynbee and David Walker. I’m not overly fond of Polly Toynbee’s writing style to begin with, so perhaps that was a mark against the article to start. However, in the midst of so many well-written scholarly articles on the time period, the work of two journalists simply doesn’t feel like it belongs — it feels lightweight, somehow. I suppose it was added in there to make the book more marketable to a nonscholarly audience, but I think I would’ve rather seen the article written by someone else (who doesn’t set my teeth on edge to read him/her).

I used Anthony Seldon and Stuart Ball’s similar book on Edward Heath’s government (1970-1974) extensively when writing my dissertation. I’ve a feeling that this book will be of use to anyone interested in the two governments that followed — and for that matter, it should be required reading for anyone who wants to take a stab at doing some serious analysis and criticism of British politics since 1979.

Friends and Rivals: Crosland, Jenkins, and Healey by Giles Radice

A slight shift away from the Tories and their troubles to the Labour Party and its internal conflicts.

Friends and Rivals: Crosland, Jenkins, and Healey by Giles Radice

The history of the Labour Party in the post-war period tends to be a study in personality conflicts. From the Bevanites vs. the Gaitskellites in the 1950s to the low-level sniping and griping dutifully recorded by Tony Benn, Richard Crossman, and Barbara Castle in the 1960s and 1970s — not to mention the whole of the 1980s — party politics and personal politics seem to go hand in hand throughout. (Small wonder that Tony Blair looked back in horror at his predecessors’ approach to party management.) In Friends and Rivals, former MP Giles Radice has written a study of three of the biggest Labour personalities of their day: Tony Crosland, Roy Jenkins, and Denis Healey. They were in the limelight of Labour politics for nearly two decades, in and out of various Cabinet and Shadow Cabinet posts. Yet Radice’s book is not merely about the three politicians as people, but rather about the way in which their three-way rivalry gradually weakened the Labour Party’s position in the country and paved the way for the rise of the militant left…and Britain’s swing toward Margaret Thatcher’s particular brand of conservatism.

Tony Crosland is certainly known for his stated desire to destroy ‘every fucking grammar school’ during his time as Education Secretary, but his book The Future of Socialism was the Little Red Book for a generation of centre-left politicians. Roy Jenkins was one of the crown princes of the Labour Party during Harold Wilson’s time, with any number of supporters who would have carried him on their shoulders to Number 10 Downing Street, but his determination to see Britain into Europe cost him his place in British politics for the better part of a decade — only to see him re-enter the political scene at the head of the Social Democratic Party in the early 1980s. Denis Healey had the unenviable position of Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1976, when Britain had to go cap in hand to the IMF for a massive financial bailout. He ran for leader of the Labour Party in 1979, only to be defeated by Michael Foot and the growing hard left movement that took control of Labour during that time period. All three men were brilliant in the ways that work best for politicians — Oxford graduates, devastatingly clever debaters, excellent writers and public speakers. Indeed, it’s easy to see how their similarities contributed significantly to their personal differences as each attempted to outshine and out-manoeuvre the other two.

Radice’s book is a very well done piece of research, thorough without being tedious and chatty without being superficial. The lives of Crosland, Jenkins, and Healey are so intertwined that to write about one without the other two would be a very difficult task, and Radice somehow manages to give all three of them equal attention. (My one criticism, and it is a minor one, is that I have a bit of a problem with Radice’s occasional tendency to say, ‘I was there at the time, and here’s what I thought and look how correct I was’, or something to that effect. It’s a small distraction in what is otherwise an excellent account.) I would say that this book is almost required reading for a deeper understand of 1960s and 1970s British politics, particularly with reference to the British entry into the EEC and the conflicts that plagued Harold Wilson’s various Labour Governments. It’s an intriguing study of the politics of personalities — an aspect of political history which remains extremely important no matter who happens to be occupying the front benches or standing at the despatch boxes.