‘100 years since Labour first came to power, we must ask why it so often loses’

This month heralds the publication of a swathe of books commemorating the first Labour government in January 1924. The anniversary is an important historical moment which raises pertinent questions, the most fundamental of which is why the British Labour Party has won so few elections? 

A century of defeat

Over the course of the last century, Labour governed for 33 years. It secured robust parliamentary majorities only in 1945, 1966, 1997, 2001 and 2005. This was a century of comparative failure for a party expected to dominate British politics given its numerical advantages as the agent of the organised working class alongside its ideological pre-eminence and the rise of collectivism. 

Many explanations were advanced to demonstrate why Labour struggled for so much of this period. An important but under-explored factor centres on the troubled efforts of the party’s revisionist wing to stimulate political revival. 

Revisionists sought to reformulate Labour’s doctrine in the light of economic and social change. There were several waves of ‘revisionism’ over the course of the 20th century. 

The revisionist impulse

The first occurred in the aftermath of the 1931 economic crisis and the disastrous election rout that followed. During the 1930s, Labour entered into a period of creative economic policy formation. Crisis aftershocks stimulated a ferment of ideas about how to plan and co-ordinate the British economy. Prominent intellectuals aided the left in devising a narrative and agenda for power. 

Labour’s ‘immediate programme’ (1937) was the most authoritative policy statement published prior to the Second World War. The document reflected the increasingly constructive dialogue between Labour and John Maynard Keynes. It encompassed a broad alliance of Labour thinkers, notably Evan Durbin, Hugh Dalton and Hugh Gaitskell, alongside John Stratchey, Barbara Wootton, Stafford Cripps, James Meade and Colin Clark. 

The immediate programme advanced the party’s economic ideas, although the interwar intellectuals were excessively reliant on utilitarian and technocratic assumptions. According to the historian David Howell, Labour nonetheless devised a ‘social democratic perspective’ equipping the party with ‘ideological scaffolding’ then harnessed by Clement Attlee’s ministers in power.

In the wake of defeat 

The second phase of revisionism occurred in the aftermath of the Attlee government’s defeat. The perception was that Labour lost its way after six years in power, having adopted a strategy of ‘consolidation’, which meant it had few novel ideas to put before the electorate. There were doubts about the party’s commitment to nationalisation in the midst of a backlash against statism and bureaucratic regulation years after the war ended.

Confident that it would return to power within a few years, Labour proceeded to lose three elections. It was feared that in the emerging affluent society, Labour’s electoral advantage was rapidly receding.

That was the disquieting context for the publication of Anthony Crosland’s landmark volume, The Future of Socialism (1956). Crosland’s contention was that the Labour Party must overcome its obsession with public ownership and central planning, harnessing the redistributive welfare state to achieve social justice.

More controversially, in the wake of the party’s 1959 defeat, Douglas Jay published an infamous article (later retracted at Gaitskell’s insistence) arguing that it must abandon the name ‘Labour’ in order to appeal to the emerging middle class.

Revisionism after Thatcher

The final wave of revisionism (labelled the ‘new revisionism’ by the Labour MP Giles Radice) was an explicit response to the triumph of Thatcherism in the midst of four consecutive defeats. Instead of ‘opinion survey-driven socialism’, the revisionists insisted Labour must reappraise its agenda to meet the incipient challenges of improving public services, embracing quality of life and environmental concerns, alongside the pursuit of political and constitutional reform.

The revisionist ideas provided impetus for Neil Kinnock and John Smith’s modernisation project, subsequently influencing Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s ‘New’ Labour.

With such a fertile revisionist heritage, it is legitimate to ask why the party struggled to reinvent itself in the context of alterations in modern capitalism and the shifting contours of British society?

Revisionist struggles?

A major reason is that, culturally, the revisionists invariably occupied a marginal position, with notable exceptions including the period of Gaitskell’s leadership from 1955 to his untimely death in 1963. Middle-class intellectuals in Noel Thompson’s words, “have been tolerated but rarely loved within the British labour movement”. The revisionists struggled to influence Labour’s mainstream ideological consensus.

Another factor is the intellectual deficiencies of revisionism itself, particularly its reliance on the economic theories of Keynes. As Keynesian macroeconomic stabilisation and demand management began to unravel, there was a crisis of confidence among social democratic intellectuals.

The new revisionism of the 1980s and 1990s was strong on political theory, but notably weak on economics. Labour was compelled to adopt the supply-side activism of the Clinton Democrats. This was sufficient to secure landslide election victories in 1997 and 2001, but neo-endogenous growth theory left many questions unanswered about the functioning of capitalist economies.

A final explanation is the narrowness of the revisionist tradition. In A Century of Labour, Jon Cruddas contends the party is at its most compelling where Labour shapes a narrative weaving together critical elements: the welfare statism of the Fabians; the ethical ‘virtue’ tradition of the early Christian socialists; and the traditional emphasis of liberalism on human rights and freedom.

While the revisionists were attracted to the liberal worldview, they were increasingly attached to a utilitarian and mechanical statism disconnected from the party’s traditions rooted in community and solidarity.

A new openness?

The party’s predicament over the last century is that, while it periodically revised core ideas, Labour rarely found a convincing route to electoral victory. In the mid-20th century, the outbreak of a world war was required to create conditions in which Labour could return to government.

Yet Attlee’s agenda reflected an accommodation that blended an array of traditions. The lesson for the 2020s is that, while Labour must accelerate progress in advancing its governing programme, so doing relies on sustaining intellectual pluralism and openness to new ideas.

This article is part of a series to mark the centenary of the first ever Labour government, guest edited by the Labour MP and writer Jon Cruddas, who has written a new history, ‘A Century of Labour’ (Polity Books).