Labour Party (Britain)

Labour Party (Britain)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Labour Party currently led by Tony Blair (b. 1953) has formed the governments of Britain since 1997 through its successes at three consecutive general elections in 1997, 2001, and 2005. It is now a party committed to the “New Labour” ideas of its leader, who maintains a “third-way approach” that accepts that both the state and public enterprise should jointly contribute to Britain’s economic recovery. Peter Mandelson and Roger Liddle in their book The Blair Revolution (1996) state that “New Labour believes that it is possible to combine a free-market economy with social justice: liberty of the individual with wider opportunities for all; One Nation security with efficiency and competitiveness” (p. 1).

As part of this strategy Blair forced the party to drop its traditional Clause 4 when he became leader in 1994, replacing it with an amorphous alternative and thus abandoning a commitment to public ownership, playing down the importance of traditional trade-union and working-class demands, and opening up the possibility of the party capturing more white-collar and middle-class support, the middle ground in British politics. He was able to do so largely because of the way in which both Neil Kinnock (b. 1942), leader between 1983 and 1992, and John Smith, leader from 1992 to 1994, had transformed the party after Labour’s disastrous general election of 1983. Gerald Kaufmann, a Labour MP, had described Labour’s manifesto of 1983 “as the longest suicide note in history,” tied as it was to nationalization in the hands of an increasingly left-wing party that was becoming unpopular in the country and that was ultimately out of power from 1979 until 1997.

In the early 1980s the Labour Party was organized into local constituency Labour parties, which were usually dominated by the bloc-vote influence of the trade unions and often could be operated by a small minority of activist members. The trade unions and left-wing activists usually dominated the local parties, and therefore their representatives often held sway in the annual national conference of the party, which often elected a predominantly left-wing National Executive Committee. Fearful that a small extreme minority could easily dominate the party, Kinnock pressed for a number of reforms, including instigating four policy reviews between 1988 and 1991, one of which, Meet the Challenge and Make the Change (1989), challenged Labour’s shibboleth of nationalization. His policy reviews also ended Labour’s commitment to full employment and universal provision within Britain’s welfare state. Kinnock set up committees to be responsible for Labour’s manifesto commitments and policies, the centralizing authority around the Labour leader. Trade union power at the annual party conference was also reduced to 40 percent of the vote, considerably less than the 1987 bloc vote, and the rest of the vote was based upon an individual ballot of rank-and-file members. The method of electing the party leader was changed, and by the late 1980s the voting in leadership and deputy-leadership elections was established on the basis of One Member One Vote (OMOV). Effectively, then, Kinnock centralized power around the Labour Party leader, neutralized left-wing policies, and reduced the power of the trade unions within their local constituencies and at party conference. It was out of these changes that Blair was able to press forward with his more moderate to right-wing agenda of “New Labour.”

The present Labour Party is thus a far cry from the organization formed as the Labour Representation Committee in 1900, which became the Labour Party in 1906. This had been an alliance of trade unions and socialist groups committed to operating as an independent working-class organization within a parliamentary system. Led at various times by James Keir Hardie (1856–1915), Ramsay MacDonald (1866–1937), and Arthur Henderson (1863–1935), it had emerged quickly, was drawn into the wartime coalition of World War I (then referred to as the “Great War,”) and was able to form its first, albeit minority, Labour government in 1924. By that time the party had become officially socialist as a result of accepting Clause 4 (clause 3d) in its 1918 constitution, which committed it to the public ownership of the means of production. MacDonald’s first government was short-lived, but its essential moderation helped to allay the fears of newspapers that announced the first Labour government’s formation in January 1924 with the headlines “Lenin dead, MacDonald in power.” This government was defeated in the 1924 general election, which was dominated by the Zinoviev, or “Red Letter,” scare, in which what was almost certainly a forged letter was published as evidence that the Soviet Union wished to use the Labour Party to extend the influence of communism in Britain.

MacDonald formed another, minority, Labour government in 1929, but it too was defeated after a brief existence as a result of the mounting economic crisis of 1931, when the Labour cabinet was divided on cutting unemployment benefits by 10 percent. The government resigned but MacDonald continued as prime minister of a national government, and Labour was decimated, cut down from 289 to 52 seats, in the general election of October 1931.

Labour remained in the political wilderness until May 1940, when Clement Attlee (1883–1967), elected leader in 1935, became a member of Winston Churchill’s wartime cabinet. Out of office, the party rethought its policies, and partly because of this, and partly because of the leftward shift during World War II, it won the general election of July 1945 with 393 seats and a thumping majority of 146 seats in the House of Commons. As a result, Attlee led his first administration from 1945 to 1950, and narrowly won a second term from 1950 to 1951. These two Attlee governments were immensely talented, with members such as Ernest Bevin (1881–1951), a foreign secretary who pushed for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949, and Aneurin (Nye) Bevan (1897–1960), who inspired the introduction of the National Health Service in 1948.

Nevertheless, in the early 1950s the Labour government was divided, and it collapsed after Bevan left in 1951 over his opposition to the threatened prescription charges on medicines. The Labour Party was defeated at the 1951 general election and remained out of office for thirteen years, during which it was divided between its left-wing public-ownership groups and its right wing, led by Labour Leader Hugh Gaitskell, who wanted to drop public ownership from his policies. Gaitskell died in 1963, but Labour returned to power under the then moderate, but once left-wing, Harold Wilson (1916–1995) in 1964, and won again in the 1966 general election. However, the Wilson administrations faced serious economic problems, had to devalue the pound, and fell out with the trade unions over how to deal with strikes. Defeated in the 1970 general election, the party brokered a deal with the trade unions in the early 1970s that saw it win two general elections in 1974. Nevertheless, the Wilson and James Callaghan governments of 1976 to 1979 were unable to introduce policies of redistributing income in return for the small wage increases that trade unions were going to accept under the so-called “social contract,” and as a result the Labour Party lost the generalelection of 1979 following the strike-prone “winter of discontent.”

The Labour Party came under the influence of left-wing trade unionists in the early 1980s when led by Michael Foot (b. 1913). However, the disastrous general election of 1983 augured the change of leadership and a move to the right that occurred under Neil Kinnock, John Smith (1938–1994), and Tony Blair. It is now epitomized by the “New Labour” party of Tony Blair.

SEE ALSO Multiparty Systems

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Laybourn, Keith. 1988. The Rise of the Labour Party, 1890–1979. London: Edward Arnold.

Laybourn, Keith. 2000. A Century of Labour. London: Sutton.

Mandelson, Peter, and Roger Liddle. 1996. The Blair Revolution: Can New Labour Deliver? London: Faber and Faber. McKibbin, Ross. 1974. The Evolution of the Labour Party. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Morgan, Kenneth O. 1987. Labour People: Leaders and Lieutenants. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Keith Laybourn