A Party with Socialists in It , livre ebook

A Party with Socialists in It
A welcome corrective. This book astutely appraises British politics most frustrating but important dissident tradition.
- Guardian
Admirably clear-sighted.
- New Statesman
At a very crucial time in British politics, this book helps us to fill in important gaps in our knowledge.
-David Coates, author of Prolonged Labour: The Slow Birth of New Labour in Britain
A well-timed explanation of the class contradictions at the root of the Labour Party from its creation to the present day.
- Labour Briefing

First published 2018; second edition 2022 by Pluto Press
New Wing, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 1LA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright Simon Hannah 2018, 2022
The right of Simon Hannah to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7453 4558 1 Hardback
ISBN 978 0 7453 4557 4 Paperback
ISBN 978 0 7453 4561 1 PDF
ISBN 978 0 7453 4559 8 EPUB
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.
Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England
Simultaneously printed in the United Kingdom and United States of America
Contents
Foreword to the Second Edition by Nadia Whittome MP
Foreword to the First Edition by John McDonnell MP
Introduction
1 Divided Beginnings
2 Second Time as Disaster
3 The Age of Consent
4 The Civil War
5 Though Cowards Flinch
6 The Broad Church Collapses
7 The Single Idea
8 The Corbyn Supremacy
9 From Ancient Grudge Break to New Mutiny
Conclusion: Where Civil Blood Makes Civil Hands Unclean
Notes
Index
Foreword to the Second Edition
Nadia Whittome MP
When I first got involved in the Labour Party in 2013, things were beginning to look up for the Labour left. The party s failure to meaningfully oppose Tory austerity policy was a disappointment to many, but it was around this period that the ground began to shift, as we started to move on from the leaderships of Blair and Brown. The left won a clutch of parliamentary selections, and you could feel the tightly controlled atmosphere of the New Labour era begin to lift. The following year would see the introduction of the system for leadership elections - ironically one that was first proposed by the gang of four in the early 1980s - that would enable Jeremy Corbyn to win the leadership.
For four years after 2015, it felt like there was a real space for the left in the mainstream of British politics. Corbyn s election as Labour leader blew open Westminster, and posed a genuine alternative to the neoliberal consensus that had persisted in both main parties since Blair took over Labour in 1994. We went from being the party of PFI and the Iraq War to being the party of the National Investment Bank and free education. After decades of hollowing-out and over-professionalisation, Labour once again became the home of mass politics, as the movements that cleared the way for Corbyn s leadership came into the party.
Reading this book, you realise what an anomaly that era was. At pretty much every other moment in Labour s history, the left has been either a junior coalition partner to more centrist political forces, or an isolated and ridiculed minority. This was certainly the case in the period immediately before I joined the party during the New Labour years, but it was also the case during the post-war period and in the 1980s when the left was, in terms of organisation and links to a militant labour movement, much stronger than it was in 2015. The unlikely and momentary success of the Corbyn project produced a window of opportunity for the left s ideas, and its people. The fact that I m an MP is in essence the product of that narrow window.
Simon Hannah s history of the Labour left is a vivid account of more than a hundred years of heroism, defeat, and mass movements which changed the course of British politics. It is a must-read for everyone now involved in the Labour left, if only because it distils a series of awkward strategic dilemmas with which we must all now grapple, and poses the question of whether the Labour left is a dead end. Regardless of what you think about that question, the story it tells is compelling.
Corbynism failed as a project in large part because it failed to learn the lessons of the history that this book contains. If the transformative wing of the party was ever going to succeed, democratising the party was always going to have to be a priority. To make our project sustainable, we would have to turn outwards and rebuild the trade union movement and social movements. But instead, external pressures meant that we looked inwards, focusing on the day-to-day battle for survival and the standard electoral cycle. Despite the best efforts of many activists, nothing much changed in terms of the accountability of the parliamentary party or the party machine. The result is that we are now marginalised once again. Like the Labour left in decades past, we are back in the position of passing conference motions - on wages, energy nationalisation and the anti-union laws - which are openly flouted by the leadership.
One of the problems with the Labour left s relationship with its own history is that it very often takes the form of nostalgia, or of personal adulation for people like Jeremy Corbyn and Tony Benn. Benn and Corbyn are inspiring figures, but, especially given the strategic crisis that we now face, it is inadequate to talk about standing on the shoulders of giants and then to carry on as usual. As much as anything, it would do a disservice to the giants, who must by now be quite bored of all the adulation and frustrated with the left s lack of progress in recent years. What we need is a strategy for the future that is capable of bringing about transformational change.
What that strategy might look like is too big a question to try to deal with in this foreword, but we can say for certain that it will be answered by a movement that is much wider than a narrow circle of politicians, or even the Labour left as a whole. If we have learned anything from the Labour left s history, it is that it has never risen alone. The coming years will see mass movements around the cost-of-living crisis, climate change and racial justice, and our future will to a great extent be determined by how successful these movements are in having a political impact and developing a political expression. I see my job as being an ally to these movements, and to the project of building a re-energised and militant labour movement.
Labour remains a critical battleground for socialists in Britain. In order to confront the climate crisis with anything like the urgency that is required, we will need the state to act, and Labour is, under our current electoral system, the only means we have to form a progressive government. What its policies are, and who populates the parliamentary Labour party, is something we cannot leave uncontested, however frustrating and arduous the process of contesting it might be. The defining question for socialists today is not in or out of the Labour Party , but how we can bring together an ecology of different strategies and movements towards a socialist politics that has pluralism and genuine democracy at its heart.
Things change quickly. When I joined Labour in 2013, no one (least of all Jeremy Corbyn) had any idea what would happen just two years later. I come from a generation - and this generation is the future of Labour as well as the future of the electorate - that overwhelmingly rejects the economics of neoliberalism and the politics of border-building and hate. Labour held a 43-point lead among voters under the age of 25 at the last election. When polled, more than half of young people in the United States, in the beating heart of global capital, hold negative views of capitalism. Deep underground things are changing, and while mainstream politics continues to be dominated by unhinged nationalist ideologues and dull professionals in suits, that process of change will shift politics in ways we cannot entirely predict.
We must learn from history, but that does not mean abandoning hope, or assuming that events now will simply be an action replay of those in the past. The strategic impasse that socialists now face, which Simon Hannah eloquently sets out, could yet be washed away by events much faster than any of us dare to dream.
Foreword to the First Edition
John McDonnell MP
What is the Labour Party for? This has been the question at the centre of the party s history since the first trade unionists and progressives came together to discuss whether an independent political party to represent working people should exist at all. The question has focused on whether the Labour Party is a party of social reform aiming simply to ameliorate our existing capitalist society, or a reformist party that seeks to replace capitalism by incremental social reform, or a transformative, some would say revolutionary party, aiming at the radical replacement of the existing economic and social system.
Both those who wish to bring about change in our society and those who want to resist change have sought to understand and influence the role of the party. The various depictions of the party have both informed the decisions of people looking for a vehicle to fulfil their ambition for change and determined the reactions of those desperate to preserve the power and privileges they have secured through the existing system.
This book s incisive history of Labour illustrates that the party has been and can be at different moments in history a party of varying roles: in changing times