The Progressive Dilemma: From Lloyd George to Blair by David Marquand

Slipping in yet another history of the political (centre) left in twentieth-century Britain.

The Progressive Dilemma: From Lloyd George to Blair by David Marquand

Political writer and former Labour (and then SDP, and then Lib Dem, and then New Labour, and then anti-New Labour) politician David Marquand’s book isn’t as much of a polemic as, for instance, Edmund Dell’s strange and eventful history. Nonetheless, the author does have quite a bit of criticism to direct at the politicians he mentions in this book. The Progressive Dilemma is a collection of interconnected essays, beginning with the ‘ghost’ of Liberal Prime Minister H.H. Asquith and continuing through to Tony Blair and New Labour, that presents a historical assessment of why the centre-left was an electoral failure for so much of the twentieth century. It should be noted that this book is a revised edition of Marquand’s earlier book of similar name, which was published in 1991 and therefore only went as far as Neil Kinnock.

Marquand’s main message, it seems, is that the Labour Party’s long-standing insistence on defining itself as the party of the working-class (or rather, the trade unions) severely hampered its ability to re-orient its policies in lines with demographic and societal shifts. The image of Labour as the party of trade unions worked to exclude many Liberals and liberals (note the capitalisation differences) from joining to the party and contributing to its intellectual and political development…which eventually led to stagnation and electoral defeated. The radical redefinition of Labour’s political programme may have made it electable once more, but the lack of a defineable ideology left it crippled, overly prone to drifting with public opinion and, as Marquand worries, less able to govern effectively.

It’s a complicated-sounding summary, and Marquand’s book is fairly complex. I might argue that it’s not very accessible to anyone who doesn’t have a general understanding of twentieth-century British history, particularly in the context of the forces that shape electoral politics. I also would have liked a few more references and citations in the text (more footnotes generally can’t hurt a history book), but that’s my personal preference in such matters. In the end, though, Marquand’s underlying message is a welcome plea for historical context and balance. He points out the flaws with both neoliberal Thatcherite economics and the socialist belief that economies can be micromanaged and engineered precisely to a government’s standards. Yet he also denounces how both sides exaggerate and inflate each other’s faults, creating a falsely persuasive argument against either the ‘bloated bureaucratic socialists’ or the ‘greedy heartless Tories’. That sort of arguing leads nowhere, he claims — and it certainly doesn’t provide an answer to the ‘progressive dilemma’ that continues to pose problems for British politicians in the early years of the twenty-first century.

Chief Whip: The Role, History and Black Arts of Parliamentary Whipping by Tim Renton

And now that it’s the Tories’ turn for their party conference, here’s a memoir from someone who’s had firsthand experience herding cats…or rather, Conservative MPs.

Chief Whip: The Role, History and Black Arts of Parliamentary Whipping by Tim Renton

In political terms, a whip is an elected member of a political party who is responsible for keeping party discipline, ensuring that politicians vote in accordance with the dictates of the senior members of their political party. The whipping system generally does its best to make sure that a Government has enough votes to get its legislation passed — not always an easy task for the handful of whips responsible for keeping their often restive colleagues under control. Whips need to be able to soothe and placate, bully and scold, tempt and threaten, and always keep abreast of fast-changing situations. And because whipping is by its very nature a secretive, clandestine task, not much is known about the thankless and yet crucial position of the person who is responsible for having the ‘whip-hand’, as it were, of his or her political party.

Tim Renton was Chief Whip during the final days of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership (I certainly don’t envy him that position), and his book delves into the complicated history of whips and whipping in British politics. There are pros and cons to having an ‘insider’ write a book about politics, particularly when the insider happens to be writing about a position with which he or she is intimately familiar. The temptation to write a tell-all book or to bore the readers with unrelated anecdotes is almost as bad as the temptation to talk around the subject without actually explaining or clarifying anything. Renton’s book, I think, does an excellent job of writing an entertaining, engaging, and (as far as I can tell) erudite book about the history of the office of the Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury: the actual title given to the Chief Whip, which allows him or her to sit in Cabinet. There are a number of well-crafted pen-portraits of specific Chief Whips from years past — I particularly enjoyed his section on Edward Heath, who by all accounts was a superb Chief Whip (1955-1959) but who found that the very qualities that made him a good whip didn’t necessarily make him a good Prime Minister. Quite the contrary, in fact.

All in all, Chief Whip helps to clarify a rather shadowy aspect of the inner workings of governments, and does so in a light (if occasionally gossipy) way that makes it a fast and amusing read. The term ‘black arts’ in the title isn’t exactly an exaggeration, either — as Renton explains, there are times when a Chief Whip might well have to resort to a bit of skulduggery when the situation calls for it. But those times deserve to be read about rather than explained by yours truly.

Red Queen: The Authorised Biography of Barbara Castle by Anne Perkins

As with the Lib Dem conference, so now with Labour’s. If we do get word of a snap General Election, I’m well prepared with book reviews tangentially related to that subject, too.

Red Queen: The Authorised Biography of Barbara Castle by Anne Perkins

‘Authorised biography’…it’s a phrase that’s often a turn-off to any potential reader. The fact that the biography is ‘authorised’ by its subject suggests that the author has had to pull his or her punches in dealing with the less pleasant aspects of the subject’s life. After all, it’s a rare individual who would be willing to have a biographer dig through and publish all the really sordid and/or private bits of his or her past, or point out a truly breathtaking blunder and declare, ‘Why yes, So-and-so really did mess up there, and wasn’t it just awful?’ Reading an authorised biography can often be like eating a low-calorie snack when you really want the regular kind — before you start you can pretend that you’re about to enjoy the real thing, but the taste is the first giveaway and it doesn’t get much better from there.

That said, I think that Anne Perkins did a spectacular job in giving a warts-and-all presentation of the life of one of Old Labour’s most high-prolife figures. Barbara Castle was at one time thought to be the most likely woman to become the first leader of a major British political party (an honour that would go to Margaret Thatcher shortly before the end of Castle’s time as a Minister). In Red Queen, Perkins draws a neat sketch of her subject’s early life that contains many parallels to Margaret Thatcher’s own upbringing. Barbara Betts, as she then was, was born into a middle-class family that was very politically active, headed by a dominant father whom Barbara spent much of her young life trying to please. The autobiographical detail is very good, pulling in information that doesn’t necessarily find its way into a political autobiography — specifically, some of the hints of Barbara’s early sex life and her longstanding affair with a married man (which happened before she met her husband Ted). From the well-rounded picture of young Barbara, it’s a bit of a jolt when Perkins goes into detail about the intricacies of Labour politics in the mid-1950s and early 1960s. (So much detail, in fact, that she occasionally loses sight of the biography proper.) But Perkins speaks quite readily of Barbara Castle’s successes and failures, her personal faults and her obsession with her looks, ‘In Place of Strife’ and its aftermath, her dependence on Harold Wilson for her political position and her abrupt sacking shortly after Wilson’s resignation in 1976…it’s all there, and very well organised and fluently told.

Perkins does play upon the pathos of Castle’s later life. It’s hard not to be affected by the swift progression of personal tragedies: the death of her husband and mother in the space of a few weeks’ time (over the Christmas/New Year’s holidays, no less), the bout with breast cancer that led to her mastectomy (an incident which was not very well known until after her death), and the solitary existence that Castle led until her death in 2002 (she died after a nasty fall down the stairs in her home). Rather abruptly, the autobiography ends there, without the usual general ’summing up’ chapter to analyse Barbara Castle on the whole. Perhaps Perkins felt that there was no need for summing up, in the end. I’m inclined to agree, because the book really does speak for itself…and lets Castle speak for herself in a way that feels more honest than the carefully selected entries in her published diaries.

The Strange Death of Tory England by Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Today’s review is posted in remembrance of the late Ian Gilmour. A little less than a year ago, he wrote an interesting article about the Profumo affair for the London Review of Books — it’s worth reading, if you have a few minutes to spare.

The Strange Death of Tory England by Geoffrey Wheatcroft

When you consider that Britain’s Conservative Party won the majority of elections in the 20th century, and from 1922 until 1997 there was no Conservative Party leader who had not ended up as Prime Minister at some point in his or her career, the electoral difficulties and the revolving-door changeover of Party leaders in the last decade or so is intriguing to say the least. Now that the Party is trying to reinvent itself yet again under the leadership of David Cameron, the question presents itself: what on earth happened to the Tories?

Geoffrey Wheatcroft explores that question in The Strange Death of Tory England, a book whose title is a clear reference to George Dangerfield’s 1935 work The Strange Death of Liberal England. Dangerfield’s book was an attempt to understand what had happened to the Liberal Party, which in 1907 had won with a landslide unmatched until the victory of New Labour ninety years later but which by the 1930s had fallen into Labour’s long shadow. Wheatcroft, in turn, explores the history of the concept of a ‘Tory’, its role in the formation of the modern Conservative Party, and the shifts in the electorate and changes in politics that either put the Tories in power (Churchill in 1951, Thatcher in 1979) or drove them from it (Heath in 1974, Major in 1997).

Wheatcroft is a very good writer for this kind of historical survey and examination, turning from gossip to critical analysis to anecdote to introspection without breaking the flow of the narrative. He seems to have enough distance from the subject to avoid falling into apologetics or angry defensiveness, but the distance is not so distant that it loses any of the passion. There are a few points where he could go a little deeper into his analysis and possibly produce a firmer conclusion, but he does touch on a number of critical points, particularly when he highlights the history of the ‘Tory maverick’ (a figure that appears to have faded out in the last decade or so, if the current party roster is anything to go by) who on occasion was not afraid to buck the party’s traditions and put principle before politics. And as Wheatcroft concludes, after musing on the outcome of the 2005 General Election:

Conservatives have sat around for some years saying to themselves that they will get back one day, but there is no necessary reason why this should be so. No law of history says that any political party has to survive. In 1906, the Liberals won the greatest of landslide elections, and within ten years they had lost office as a party, never to hold power again. Whether the Tories are destined to follow them may depend on humility and capacity to learn from error.

The Strange Death of Tory England is not kind to the Tories on the whole, but there is at least a modicum of sympathetic interest in the successes and failings of a political party which is an integral part of modern British history.

A Life at the Centre by Roy Jenkins

Closing out the last day of this year’s Lib Dem conference with an appropriate political memoir.

A Life at the Centre by Roy Jenkins

Roy Jenkins (1920-2003) spent a long and varied career in British and European politics. During his time as a Home Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer under Harold Wilson’s governments, he was the embodiment of Britain in Europe, an advocate of British entry to the EU at a time when the Labour Party seemed generally determined to stick its fingers in its ears and sing very loudly to itself to drown out any thought of possibly joining the European Community. His support of Europe was ‘rewarded’ (I use quotation marks here only because some might consider it a rather dubious reward) by the invitation he received to become a European Commissioner in 1976 — right at a time when it seemed fairly certain that he no longer had any chance of becoming leader of the Labour Party and thereby a potential candidate for prime minister. He served as President of the European Commission during his time in Brussels. But in the late 1970s, he and three other renegade Labour MPs got together and created the Social Democratic Party (SDP), a reaction against both the rise of Thatcherism and the increasingly militant left-wing stance of the Labour Party. Roy Jenkins ended his political career as the leader of the Liberal Democrats (the combined SDP and Liberal Party) in the House of Lords, and wrote several massive biographies about dominating figures in British political history: Churchill, Gladstone, and Asquith, to name a few. In A Life at the Centre, Jenkins switches from political biography to political autobiography as he looks back on his origins, his opinions, and his political career.

A Life at the Centre is not immune to the autobiography’s tendency to drag and meander in sections, particularly at the beginning. Probably the best reason to read this memoir is for the parts where Jenkins discusses (not without a hint of bitterness, I might add) just how divisive a subject the European question was to the Labour Party. Granted, the squabbling over Europe really had its roots in inner-party divisions that had existed inside Labour since the early 1950s, and many commentators have suggested that Harold Wilson’s resignation in 1976 was timed to coincide with a period when Jenkins’ Europeanist stance made him an unacceptable choice for the party rank and file. (It’s a time-honoured tradition with Labour leaders, apparently, if the Clement Attlee-Herbert Morrison example and the more recent Tony Blair-Gordon Brown relations are considered.) But Jenkins resists the temptation to turn to vitriol, both over Europe and over the tensions that marked the uneasy Alliance between the SDP and the Liberals in the 1980s. In an autobiography, that’s worthy of note.

A comprehensive biography of Roy Jenkins hasn’t yet been published. There’s a 1983 biography that has obviously been overtaken by events, and Giles Radice’s Friends and Rivals: Crosland, Jenkins, and Healey does quite a bit to fill in the gaps but only focuses on the connections between its three title subjects. Until someone brings out a biography that tackles both the Jenkins papers and the papers in the National Archives (which are now available through the end of Jenkins’ time in the Labour Party), A Life at the Centre is possibly the best choice for anyone interested in looking at a history of Roy Jenkins’ life and for a notable perspective on the social democratic tradition in postwar British political history.

Neither Left Nor Right? The Liberal Democrats and the Electorate by Andrew Russell and Edward Fieldhouse

With the Lib Dem conference going on at the moment, it only makes sense to post a book review about one of the more recent works on the party in question.

Neither Left Nor Right? The Liberal Democrats and the Electorate by Andrew Russell and Edward Fieldhouse

It’s a simple fact that third-party politics tend to be overlooked in a two-party system. The only time anyone really pays attention to a third party is when something happens to draw attention to it — and most of the time, that comes down to either a scandal or a really surprising election result. Finding solid political research and analysis about a third party that doesn’t focus on the scandals or the election surprises isn’t easy. And that, in essence, is the reason for Andrew Russell and Edward Fieldhouse’s book Neither Left Nor Right? The Liberal Democrats and the Electorate.

The book looks at voting patterns and party organisations to determine who votes for the Liberal Democrats and how these voting patterns have changed over the course of past elections. It looks at the various forms of the Liberal Party, including the Social Democractic Party and the SDP/Liberal Alliance of the 1980s. It also compares and contrasts the Liberal Democrats with the Labour and Conservative parties, exploring several key questions. Who votes for the Liberal Democrats, and why? How does the party leadership affect voting patterns? (The book was written and printed before the whole leadership kerfluffle with Charles Kennedy, so the information on that front is really only valid up through the Kennedy leadership.) How do the Liberal Democrats have to adapt their tactics in different constituencies, in a way that neither Labour nor the Tories really have to consider? And what is the importance of the grassroots organisation on a party that — as the authors state nearly ad nauseam in their analysis — tends to believe that for something to be real, it has to be local?

The analysis in Neither Left Nor Right? appears to be good but fairly basic; the authors don’t really make any conclusions that seem to me to be glaringly mistaken or out of step with what I’d already felt to be true about the Lib Dems and their political workings. There were more than a handful of good, succinct pen-portraits of grassroots campaigns and the influences that work on the political situation in different areas of the country. The book on the whole is a bit repetitive, but would likely appeal to those interested in political sociology and the workings of third-party politics in a traditionally two-party system. But there was one particular thing about the book that really annoyed me. Perhaps it’s just the copyeditor in me showing through (though since it’s what I’m doing for a living at the moment, I probably shouldn’t be so surprised when it does), but my edition of the book was very poorly edited. Grammatical inconsistencies, punctuation problems, actual misspellings of fairly simple words…I actually had to put it down once or twice because I was all but reaching for my red and blue pencils. Some editor clearly was asleep (quite possibly catatonic) on the job, and that always makes me wonder about the quality of the information itself.

If this book runs into future editions, I’d like to go back through and look at it again. At the moment, though, the mistakes are distracting enough to make me save this book only for the infrequent times when I need to look at primarily statistical data.

The Politico’s Book of the Dead edited by Iain Dale

One of my tags for this blog is ‘dead politicians’. This review’s designed to make full use of it.

The Politico’s Book of the Dead edited by Iain Dale

Despite the morbid-sounding title and the very creepy illustration on the front cover (zombie Alan Clark!), this book is a collection of short biographies — or rather, obituaries — of various British politicians and political figures. Most of the obituaries are recent ones, from within the last twenty years or so, but there are a few from earlier in the twentieth century. The only real criterion for inclusion in Politico’s Book of the Dead seems to be that in one way or another, the individual has made a strong contribution to modern British politics.

It is easy to see the reason for some of the editor’s selections. Prime Ministers Harold Macmillan and Harold Wilson get fairly long entries, as does John Smith, Tony Blair’s predecessor as Labour Party leader. Sir Oswald Mosley (of British Union of Fascists fame) and Alan Clark (of Diaries fame) also have detailed biographical entries. Some of the deceased are more known for their connections through famous relatives than for their own deeds — Megan Lloyd-George and Violet Bonham-Carter are two such individuals. Quite a few are relatively obscure, often known only for one event or action that gave them the proverbial fifteen minutes of fame. But most interestingly, there are obituaries for three fictional political figures: Jim Hacker and Sir Humphrey Appleby from the television series Yes, Minister/Yes, Prime Minister, and Harry Perkins from the book and later TV mini-series A Very British Coup.

Most of these obituaries were written at the time of the subject’s death, though some were written specifically for this book. The majority given here tend towards the fairly dull and watery, mainly (I imagine) through the wish to not speak ill of the dead. In Alan Clark’s case, for example, his marital infidelities are brushed aside rather blithely (in my opinion). I also would have liked to see obits for at least all the dead prime ministers and party leaders since World War II, and the book doesn’t offer that either. But Politico’s selection is a fairly representative sample of British movers and shakers both past and present, and it’s good for picking up and reading a few at a time to expand your knowledge of the late great and good.

Lords of Parliament: Manners, Rituals and Politics by Emma Crewe

If I happened to be inventing cute titles for these book review posts, this one would probably be something like ‘Kind Hearts and (Ninety-Two Remaining) Coronets’.

Lords of Parliament: Manners, Rituals and Politics by Emma Crewe

One of the better-known quotations of Walter Bagehot is his assertion that the cure for admiring the British House of Lords is to go and look at it. Even today, after nearly a century’s worth of quite radical constitutional change beginning with the Parliament Act of 1911, the thought of the House of Lords still tends to conjure up an image of doddering old men in fancy dress making rambling speeches to their sleeping (or possibly deceased) peers. But with all the talk of further changes to the House of Lords, possibly even to its abolition and replacement with an elected upper house, it’s increasingly apparent that very few people actually know what the House of Lords is like in this day and age. The cash-for-honours scandal certainly hasn’t helped its image at all in recent years, for one thing. And even though all but 92 of the hereditary peers were removed from the Lords in 1999, doing much to redress the balance of the Lords’ political composition and vastly reduce its inbuilt Conservative majority, for the most part the Lords is still regarded as the last bastion of intolerance, privilege, aristocracy, and tradition-for-tradition’s-sake.

Lords of Parliament seeks to challenge many of these long-standing assumptions. Researcher Emma Crewe spent two years doing an in-depth anthropological study of the House of Lords, both of the institution and its denizens. She was given almost unlimited access to areas of the Lords that are usually never open to anyone save the peers and the Lords staff. She observed debates, ate and drank with peers and staff, sat in on committee meetings, conducted interviews with dukes and doorkeepers, and in general immersed herself in the day-to-day life of the upper house. And over the course of her research, she uncovered any number of subcultures and hierarchies within the Lords, unspoken rules that govern the conduct of those who work within its precincts, and a remarkably deep sense of social and political committment that all too often manages to rise above the party politics of the Commons. If a week is a long time in politics, as the saying goes, then the Lords operates at a much slower pace — which at times can be viewed as foot-dragging, but at other times may well be the necessary pause for reflection that can prevent a too-hasty rush to ill-judged action.

I can’t comment on the soundness of Crewe’s writing as a piece of anthropological research, but from a political-historical perspective, Lords of Parliament is an absolutely fascinating study in the British Constitution as a working document. If I were to teach a course on contemporary British politics, I’d make the book required reading. Crewe delves deeply into the numerous symbols and rituals that are part and parcel of the work of the Lords, from the highly stylised speech patterns used in debates to the symbols of office that are always on display when Parliament is in session. She looks at the role of peers as experts in certain topics, and at the relationships between the political parties and with crossbench peers who have no specific party affiliation. Crewe also explores relationships amongst the peers themselves and between peers and members of staff, pointing out the ways in which subtle but strict checks are kept on those who somehow deviate from established procedures and protocols. These self-governance procedures tend to regulate conduct in the Lords — for instance, a peer’s eccentricities of habit may be tolerated if he or she is unfailingly competent in debate and courteous in the chamber, but rudeness (which can take many forms) or persistent incompetence during debate is met with stern disapproval. Trying to go through and explain all of Crewe’s findings would take a very long time, but her writing style strikes the right balance between academic and anecdotal, making the book a smooth, comprehensive, and eminently readable piece of research.

One final thing to point out: Crewe doesn’t openly say whether she’s for or against the abolition of the Lords and its replacement with a different kind of second chamber, but she does give a few points for further consideration. Symbolism, she argues, is the stuff of which national identity is made — and there’s no getting around that. There’s a difference between a ritual that deliberately creates a sense of social distance or superiority and a ritual that preserves a sense of continuity with the past. Writing off the House of Lords as a complete anachronism is just as problematic as insisting that nothing about it should ever be changed. Further reform to the House of Lords is always going to be a tricky issue on many levels, but if nothing else, Crewe’s book does quite a bit to dispel the worst of the outdated stereotypes about what goes on in the red-carpeted halls in the less well-known half of the Palace of Westminster.

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.