Parties and People by McKibbin Ross;

Parties and People by McKibbin Ross;

Author:McKibbin, Ross;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA - OSO
Published: 2010-09-14T16:00:00+00:00


5

The English Road to Socialism

The Party victorious in 1945 had, of course, a pre-history. The programme that the Labour Party presented to the electorate in 1945 was not developed overnight and was a product of more than just the Second World War. Indeed, to a large degree it had been formulated even before the outbreak of war. In this chapter I wish to discuss the evolution of that programme and consider the ways in which, and with what success, it was implemented by the Attlee government. To do so, we need to go back a little, to look at the Labour Party’s reaction to the disaster of 1931 and its further electoral defeat in 1935. That is when the story of the Attlee government begins.

I have suggested that the events of 1931 largely destroyed a form of ethical socialism associated particularly with MacDonald and Snowden, but not only with them.1 One of the consequences is that in the 1930s, Ben Jackson has argued, ‘economic theory’ largely drove ‘fellowship’ out of the Labour Party. Fellowship, he suggests, was missing from the writings of Dalton, Gaitskell, Durbin, or Jay in the 1930s. ‘The substitution of economic theory for idealist philosophy or evolutionary imagery precipitated a shift from an organicist understanding of the social unit to a more individualist analysis.’2 The argument for equality was now grounded in an economical–theoretical interpretation: ‘Keynes was not an egalitarian, but the important point was that his most influential disciples were.’3 Since these men were evermore influential in the evolution of Labour policy, doctrines of fellowship were increasingly missing from the Labour Party itself. Although this argument perhaps underrates the continued importance of ‘physical planning’ in Labour thinking, it is, I think, largely right.4 But the change was, of course, not just intellectual. It was a result of a change in the social origins of the Labour leadership. With the exception of Ernest Bevin, who is a rule-proving exception (and who had been converted to a quasi-Keynesian economics by Keynes himself), Herbert Morrison (the son of a policeman and thus only on the border of the working class) and Aneurin Bevan, every significant member of Attlee’s government was of middle or upper-middle-class origin. The decay of the autodidact tradition accompanied the process by which the leadership of the Labour Party passed from the working to the educated middle class.

That process, however, reflected changes in the educational and social composition of the Parliamentary Labour Party as a whole. J. F. S. Ross once suggested that the Conservative Party was the party of the public school, the Liberal Party the party of the secondary school and Labour the party of the elementary school.5 After 1945 that was true only to the extent that Labour had more MPs with just an elementary education than any other party. It is also the case that trade union sponsored MPs—more likely to have had only an elementary education—had safer seats; thus more likely to be in parliament. If, however, we look at the



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