A Century of Labour: a review
Jon Cruddas’s outstanding new intellectual biography of the Labour party highlights three traditions that continue to compete for the party’s soul
A Century of Labour by Jon Cruddas, published to mark the centenary of the first Labour government, is the best history of the party I have read.
Other Labour histories — and there have been very good ones — focus on the party’s warring factions and personalities, frustrations in opposition, and chequered record in government. Cruddas’s new book is different, an intellectual biography of the party, drawing on his experience as an MP, policy advisor, trade unionist, and scholar, to offer a rich analysis of the political philosophies that have competed for Labour’s soul since the party’s origins at the turn of the last century.
Studies of Labour’s divisions tend to present a straight fracture between left and right, or idealists driven by hope for a new society, and pragmatists content to push for incremental change within a prevailing social order beyond the power of politics to change. Cruddas’s analysis is both wider and deeper, identifying more intellectual currents and covering them in greater depth. To summarise, very bluntly, he organises them into three broad traditions, each with a distinct understanding of what justice means, and how it is achieved. The perpetual conflict over Labour’s purpose is driven by the clash and occasional reconciliation between these three schools of thought.
Left utilitarianism: using the machinery of state
The dominant philosophy, certainly since Labour’s first bruising experience of office in the 1920s, is a form of left utilitarianism, the use of the machinery of the state to manage a just distribution of wealth generated by economic growth. This open-ended, technocratic tradition has made pragmatic use of the classic tools of social democracy to channel the economy towards egalitarian ends, including progressive taxation, investment in education and training, selective public ownership, support for unions and workplace rights, robust public services, social housing, rent controls, and targeted welfare provision. It holds clear appeal for policymakers under pressure to demonstrate results, offering ready metrics by which progress can be calibrated, including indices for income distribution, quality of service delivery, poverty, and GDP per head.
This pragmatic tradition has been present in the party since the start: Fabians and trade unions played central roles in Labour’s foundation. But it came to the fore after the first Labour governments, Ramsay MacDonald’s minority administrations, were considered to have had too little policy and technical expertise to know how to push through a reform agenda capable of withstanding the pressures of office. Labour had to toughen up.
And after occupying significant positions in the wartime coalition government a new generation of battle-hardened Labour ministers was able to use the powers of an augmented state to implement the party’s 1945 programme for economic and social reconstruction, pulling the levers of government to extend public ownership, steer the economy and lay the foundations of the postwar welfare state. The governments led by 1945 veteran Harold Wilson in the 1960s and 70s pursued a technocratic agenda for economic modernisation, and New Labour, though less concerned with economic reform, developed a carefully calibrated framework of tax credits and benefits to redistribute the proceeds of a long economic boom. And though Keir Starmer’s programme for office continues to evolve, its technocratic orientation is clear.
Cruddas notes that Labour’s rationalist tendency is shared by its left and right wings. Both seek to capture and use state power to redistribute wealth, differing in regard to the extent of the intervention deemed necessary to pursue their ends, the left aspiring to take much of the economy under ‘democratic control’, the right content to adjust the framework within which the market operates.
Left-liberalism: legislating equality
Cruddas identifies a second rationalist tradition running through the party’s history, a ‘left-liberal’ concern to enhance the freedom of the individual through rights legislation. Though now associated with secular progressivism, liberalism has an ancient heritage, extending back, in England, to the Magna Carta, the 12th century charter that recognised the dignity of the individual against feudal claims.
Cruddas emphasises the profound debt Labour owes to the ‘New Liberalism’ that evolved in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, driven by largely forgotten thinkers such as T.H. Green, L.T. Hobhouse and J.A. Hobson, who sought to define a ‘positive’ rather than merely ‘negative’ understanding of liberty, expanding liberalism’s focus from a narrow concern with formal equality before the law to the material conditions citizens need for meaningful participation in society. This new emphasis on equality manifested in Liberal reforms of the early 20th century such as progressive taxation, the introduction of public pensions and other welfare payments, improved public services, and stronger workplace rights.
Liberalism evolved rapidly through the 20th century. Labour’s most significant contribution remains Anthony Crosland’s 1956 classic The Future of Socialism, which sought to define a ‘strong’ rather than ‘liberal’ equality, showing how distributive, utilitarian economics enhances freedom. Roy Hattersley, Peter Hain and Patrick Diamond followed Crosland, and all were influenced by John Rawls’s 1971 A Theory of Justice, which remains the classic modern statement of social contract theory.
The Wilson and New Labour governments passed significant equalities legislation and constitutional reform, encompassing racial, gender and sexual equality, human rights, devolution to Scotland and Wales, and reform of the House of Lords. Indeed, as Cruddas notes, Tony Blair went so far as to imply that the British progressive cause would have been better served had Labour and the Liberals come together in the early 20th century to form a new party that may have appealed to a broader electoral base than Labour has been able to secure.
Like utilitarianism, left-liberalism is non-prescriptive, seeking to create the legal and material conditions necessary for a good life, rather than specifying what such a life might consist in. Both traditions, in Cruddas’s words, aspire to ‘a non-judgemental state architecture which cultivates the ability of each and every citizen to choose the way they wish to live their lives and actively equips them with the ability to do so’.
Labour and the virtue tradition
A third tradition, however, is prepared to judge: the strand of ‘ethical socialism’ concerned with cultivating a just society comprised of just citizens. Cruddas understands this as a distinctively left interpretation of the classical political philosophy flowing from Aristotle, concerned with the development of political institutions and policies capable of cultivating citizenship, duty, honour, wisdom, fortitude and other virtues. As Cruddas puts it: ‘The idea of the common good associated with this tradition is concerned with personal and mutual flourishing in terms of our talents and vocations, treating people as belonging to families, localities and communities and to shared traditions, interests and faiths neglected by an exclusively legalistic, managerial and technocratic conception of justice and politics.’
It’s a tradition that inspired the party’s first incarnation, the Independent Labour Party (ILP), particularly as expressed in the work of Victorian thinkers such as John Ruskin, William Morris and Thomas Carlyle, who sought to defend the dignity of the individual against the depredations of industrialisation, advocating vocation against specialisation, community against individualism, beauty against commodification, and a refusal to reduce value to commercial exchange. The ‘religion of socialism’ that suffused the ILP generated a host of brief-lived utopian ventures, including the Fellowship of the New Life, and the Brotherhood, Ethical and Labour Churches. It is a romantic tradition gradually occluded by the party’s technocratic and liberal currents, but it has resonated through Labour history.
A Morrisonian belief in the importance of good work inspired the Guild Socialism of the first half of the 20th century, the proposals for workers’ control included in Labour manifestos of the 1970s, programmes for stakeholder capitalism contemplated by New Labour in the 1990s, and ideas for democratic ownership formulated during the Cornyn years. The 1945 government’s technocracy was tempered by Clement Attlee and Aneurin Bevan’s moral earnestness. Tony Blair’s early years as Labour leader were informed by the influence of the communitarian philosopher John Macmurray, and both he and his successor Gordon Brown were Christian Socialists. Though Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour was broadly left libertarian in outlook, Corbyn himself is something of an old-fashioned English radical. Blue Labour, which emerged in response to New Labour’s tendency to clinical proceduralism, is squarely in the Aristotelian tradition, advocating for the role of politics in nurturing the bonds that hold society together. The New Left that emerged in the late 1960s draws on elements of the tradition, particularly through the work of E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams. Major philosophers including Michael Sandel, Charles Taylor and Alasdair Macintyre have developed powerful contemporary formulations of virtue ethics.
But though ever present, the ethical tradition was eclipsed early in the party’s history by pragmatic concerns with electoral calculus and the development of policy sufficiently robust to withstand the challenges of government. Cruddas observes that when in office Labour has tended to retreat to a default utilitarianism and submission to prevailing economic orthodoxies: for all the rhetoric promising a ‘just economy’ the party has failed to develop an alternative economic model sufficiently robust to withstand the fiscal and financial shocks it has faced in government. Programmes for economic planning developed by the 1945 and 1964 administrations came soon ran aground, and the ambitious 1973 manifesto, promising a radical extension of ‘democratic control’ of the economy, was quickly blown away by events. New Labour’s flirtation with stakeholder capitalism, envisaging a widening of ownership beyond shareholders, was dropped before the party took office.
Equal citizens — or good citizens…
Indeed, Cruddas’s book can be read as an extended narrative on the seemingly irresolvable challenges that face all governments inspired by some form of virtue ethics. Just how can the state cultivate virtue in a modern secular liberal society? For sure, governments can implement policies motivated by a desire to improve the welfare of their citizens: better public services, new workplace rights, equalities legislation, taxation and welfare programmes addressing inequality. But improving people’s quality of life is not the same as cultivating their capacity to become good citizens.
The classical political philosophy that inspired the ancient Greek and Renaissance city states assumed conditions that no longer exist: a shared culture nurtured by common values and religious faith, civic piety, a collective capacity for self-sacrifice in service of the common good. Today’s liberal societies prioritise individual agency over collective purpose, corroding the bonds on which communal endeavour depends. They erode the possibility of narratives capable of transcending difference and appealing to a sense of shared purpose. The liberal state rests content with managing differences between multiple subcultures rather than seeking to find common ground between communities.
The economic imperatives of liberal society also work against the classical ideal. Aristotle’s city state assumed citizens would have sufficient time to participate in government. But the modern state prioritises economic over civic participation. With so many preoccupied with the demands of work in a competitive market economy, the burden of government is left to a professional political class. The capacity of governments to restructure national economies to reduce the burdens of market discipline is limited by their absorption in a global marketplace that imposes rigours to which all are subject.
These are challenges for virtue ethicists across the political spectrum, not just those on the left. In Britain, the Conservatives also have strong communitarian traditions, which found their classic expression in Edmund Burke’s understanding of society as an organism bound by an evolving culture sustained by common values, religion, family, neighbourhood, attachment to the land, and the consolations of a national history and mythology. That, however, is now a minority position within the Tory party too, today more attached to economic libertarianism than the cultivation of communal traditions. Indeed both parties betray a certain embarrassment in talking the language of virtue.
But they will need to overcome it if they are to meet the challenge of the various nationalist, theocratic and authoritarian populisms that are much less hesistant about speaking to people’s desire for meaning and purpose. Those populists do not have answers to these difficult questions either. But they continue to reap the benefits of acknowledging desires the mainstream parties struggle to acknowledge. Jon Cruddas’s fine book helps us appreciate the nature of the challenge.
A Century of Labour by Jon Cruddas is published by Polity.
