Labour’s proud history must be celebrated in street names and statues

The Paul Richards column

History was one of the few subjects I really enjoyed at school. I was taught it by a teacher called Dick Small. He went on to be a Tory election agent, but he can be forgiven for that ideological crime (although not his later actual ones) because he introduced me to E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, when I was 16. As you know, EP Thompson belongs to the left-wing school of historians who recorded and celebrated the roles of the ‘ordinary’ men and women, as opposed to kings, queens, bishops and generals. They unearthed the stories of the Levellers, Chartists, Luddites, Blanketeers, and other forces which emerged from the working classes, and told the story of England’s radicalism, long before the Labour Party was a twinkle in Keir Hardie‘s eye.

You can’t appreciate our current political situation without some understanding of our past. The past is not a foreign country; it is the same country where people without power struggled to get it, whilst those with it resisted; where the weak and stupid took bad decisions and poor people suffered as a result; and where one or two brilliant individuals moved the human race forward by inches. From the recession to terrorism, from environmentalism to religious fundamentalism, every modern challenge has its antecedents and echoes down the centuries. For Labour, our current struggles would be depressingly familiar to our founders: economic slump, home rule for Scotland, the impact of immigration on jobs, binge drinking, political corruption, housing shortages. These were the concerns of Labour in 1900 as much as 2009.

I think we’re rather bad at marking our history. One method of doing so is to commemorate the places and people from the UK’s left-wing history with statues, plaques, and other physical reminders. The post-war period of reconstruction allowed the planners a raft of Attlee Towers and Bevan Courts. One estate in Hammersmith has a tower block named after virtually every member of the 1945-51 Labour government. In recent years there has been a revived enthusiasm for naming roads and buildings after Labour figures. Cardiff has its Callaghan Square and its Bevan statue. Huddersfield station has a statue of Harold Wilson. There’s a statue of Attlee outside Stepney Town Hall, where once he was mayor. Barbara Castle has a statue in Blackburn and railway train named after her. I think I noticed a Frank Dobson Square when I was in the east end last week – was I dreaming? Edinburgh has a Donald Dewar statue. I don’t believe there is a Tony Blair statue anywhere yet, but give it time.

As I write, I am sitting a hundred yards from the site of St Cyprian’s prep school in Summerdown Road, Eastbourne, where a miserable wretch called Eric Blair was subject to vicious authoritarianism and arbitrary punishment. Much later, as George Orwell, he wrote the essay Such, Such Were the Joys which described the cruelties of the English prep school. It is no great leap of imagination to think that Orwell’s love of political liberty and opposition to dictatorship was forged, not in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War, but at the hands of sadistic teachers on the south coast of England. I mention this because there is a plaque marking the site. Eastbourne’s other significant link to left-wing history (and, so far, I have discovered only two) is that Marx and Engels were frequent visitors. I imagine them strolling past the pier on their way to take tea at the Grand Hotel. When Engels died, Eduard Bernstein and Eleanor Marx hired a boat and scattered his ashes off Beachy Head. So no monument exists to the founders of scientific socialism in Eastbourne, and that’s a shame.

Every part of Britain has links to the Labour Party, the trade unions, and radical groups stretching back to the Civil War and beyond. Those links should be remembered. Britain is littered with Victoria Streets, Coronation Gardens and George Squares. Military campaigns, from Trafalgar to Waterloo, are recalled in the names of the streets and stations. We should campaign for more left-wing commemorations. You can start by posting here the left-wing ‘claims to fame’ from your part of the country.