Though God cannot alter the past, historians can
Anne McElvoy
THE PEOPLE'S PARTY: THE HISTORY OF THE LABOUR PARTY by Tony Wright and Matt Carter Thames & Hudson, £18.95, £12.95, pp. 192 Tony Wright is the perfect New Labour intellectual, a solid academic who embod- ies the kind of moderation that gives New Labour a good name and ensures that he is not much heard of outside its confines. As such, he is perfectly placed to undertake this revisionist history of the party, aided by Matt Carter, a blamelessly Blairite young thinker.
No bona fide New Labour project would be complete without a foreword by Tony Blair telling us what to think of it, and he is at pains to explain that the party has `returned to its roots'. This reminds us of what a Janus-like creature Labour has become. Encounter its leaders on a visit to the City or with media proprietors and they'll be telling you how much it has changed. Eavesdrop on the party talking to itself and it is obsessed with sustaining the illusion that it has remained in essence the same 'people's party' as it was: the resort of collective endeavour and shared values of ordinary folk — us against them.
The problem is that the 'us' and 'them' are shifting concepts, allowed to remain deliberately vague in most writing on the Left. The illustrated nature of this book is an important addition here — it is striking how many early images of the Labour Party are scenes of mass gatherings. Then the focus shifts, in the post-war period, to the oligarchy of leader and his shadow cabinet. Talking heads replace people power. By the time you get to the account of Mr Blair's years as leader, the single dominant image is of the man himself. His most senior lieutenant, and now Chancellor, Gordon Brown, is airbrushed, like Trotsky under Stalin, to the role of 'watching another signature being added to the petition against VAT on domestic fuel'. So that's what shadow chancellors do.
To call Labour a 'people's party' today is absurd. It is a centralised, and efficiently- managed party, run, like the Conservatives, by an urban elite and skilled, as the elec- tion result proved, in the mechanisms of consulting the voters and turning their vaguely articulated hopes and fears into solid crosses on the ballot paper.
The real intellectual debate about New Labour is whether the party can claim to be part of a continuum which stretches from the match girls and gas workers securing trade union rights to the party which spent much of the recent election campaign boasting about how restrictive it will be towards the unions. Is it the same party, adapted to new times or (as I believe) a new model movement, in part an accep- tance of the Thatcherite settlement, in part an attempt to articulate marginally differ- ent notions from Conservatism of how to distribute society's goods and deal with its ills?
This is not, alas, an enquiry Mr Wright and his co-author choose to pursue. One of the questions unasked here is whether the 20th century would have been a happier one in Britain if the Liberals had not split in 1916 and Liberalism, not Socialism, had taken on the task of representing working- class aspirations and grievances. The matter of whether those two vaunted achievements of the Labour Party — a universal welfare state and a mighty trade union movement, shored up by a Labour government in 1945 and accepted as the post-war settlement — were a curse rather than a blessing for the country goes politely unraised too.
In fact The People's Party is the most courteous possible account of the Labour Party's century. Its great strength is that it is straightforwardly written and effectively illustrated. Its weakness is that it has abso- lutely no discernible perspective of its own. I admire Mr Wright's instincts and he is which cannot be said for all left-wing intellectuals — a man of plain good will towards his fellow men. But he often seems to be on the way to saying something important while never quite getting there.
Take his account of the Wilson years: The Government managed notable successes in the field of social reform — the sphere of comprehensive education was expanded.
Is this the same author who has his own children educated in grammar schools and has written eloquently of the need for reform of the sink inner-city schools today — a product of this very 'social reform'? All politics is, of course, a combination of reality and wishful thinking. But it does seem that Labour thinkers still manage to live in parallel universes simultaneously. Where cold experience tells them one thing and warm tribal memory of the 'achieve- ments' of the old Labour Party another, they discard the former and indulge the latter.
Thus the glowing references to Labour's creation of the Race Relations Board dis- guise the uncomfortable fact that the soft- ening of the traditional Labour vote in urban working-class areas began with the perception that the party had disregarded the anxieties among ordinary people about the economic and social impact of immi- gration. A veil is drawn over the elec- torate's reluctance to accept these consequences of 'social reforms'. It would surely have been worth analysing Wilson's attempt to save the right-winger, Patrick Gordon Walker, who, having lost on the race vote in Smethwick, was then thrashed again — partly on the same issue — in the Leyton by-election of January 1965.
The authors' account of the splits of the 1980s is a hair-raisingly honest description of electoral melt-down. But is the best that can be said of the 1992 election campaign that 'the hostility of the Tory press' and its scare stories did for Neil Kinnock? (Or, to put it another way, why isn't Mr Blair's victory ascribed so readily to the Sun's sup- port?) Somewhere between Mr Kinnock and Mr Blair — with Mr Smith accorded the usual reverent panagyric — there is a caesura in the Labour Party.
Mr Blair has always looked uncomfort- able faced with the question of whether, given his own radical ideological shifts, he is pleased that Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock did not win general elections before him. The only logical answer is 'yes'. But that is evidently deemed too disturbing a thought to impede the smooth flow of this chronicle.
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