Forward March of Labour
I became interested and active in politics in the late 1970's - and for the next 20 years the labour and trade union movement (THIGMOO - This Great Movement Of Ours) was stuck in the political doldrums.
So the following article written by Martin Kettle for The Guardian newspaper struck a chord with me - since I shared the view that the forward march of labour had indeed come to a shuddering halt - but largely because of THIGMOO's inability to face up to a few home truths.
Trade union membership relied on the old, nationalised industries which were in in terminal decline - on the closed shop which meant people had to become union members whether they wanted to or not - unions made decisions via a handful of members at poorly attended branch meetings - unions called strikes without the support of a membership ballot.
Trade union leaders were, with the odd exception, one-dimensional - all card carrying Labour Party members who spoke as if all of their members supported Labour as well.
Which they didn't of course - and the sands have been shifting ever since - especially in Scotland where Labour enjoys around 30% of the popular vote - with more than two thirds of the population supporting other parties.
Because ordinary trade union members have the same broad range of views about politics as everyone else - the times were changing and the challenge facing the trade unions was to get ahead of the game - by adapting themselves to the modern age.
Which never happened - yet the trade unions remain a potent force inside the Labour Party where they still control 50% of the votes at Labour conference - and retain a crucial role in Labour leadership contests.
Both Johann Lamont and Ed Miliband owe their victories to the support of a handful of union bosses - and the tiny percentage of unions activists who vote (often more than once) in Labour leadership ballots.
Whether Ed Miliband can match the electoral success of Tony Blair remains to be seen - but one thing's for sure, he won't do it by trying to turn the clock back - or by getting into bed with a handful of unrepresentative union bosses - who have learned nothing in the past 30 years.
Ed Miliband and Tony Blair have more in common than those stuck in the past can allow
Like Eric Hobsbawm, Miliband and Blair recognise the Labour party has to transcend old failed labourism to win and govern
by Martin Kettle
'The death of Eric Hobsbawm last Monday was announced in the hall of the Labour party conference. That would have been unthinkable a generation ago.'
"Most of us are marked in various ways by the politics of the era in which we first became involved. This is not the same as saying, hopefully, that nobody's political views ever change, although all of us can probably think of people we know whose political views have managed to get stuck depressingly early on in their lives, and have never altered.
But, in the same way that Napoleon once said that to understand a country's foreign policy it is always useful to look first at the map, so in understanding a person's politics, it is always useful to know when they were born.
That certainly went for Eric Hobsbawm, who died on Monday. Hobsbawm's lifelong Marxism was rooted in the way he became politically engaged in Berlin as Hitler came to power and the feelings he experienced in Popular Front France in the mid-1930s. Hobsbawm has been much censured for continuing to articulate why communists of his generation so often thought the way they did about the Soviet Union. But this only supports my point. If even the possessor of the greatest and most wide-ranging historical mind I ever expect to encounter could be marked in this way, then which of the rest of us lesser intellectual fry is likely to be wholly different?
The imprint of formative political years is certainly one way of looking at the evolution of the modern Labour party. Consider this. When Tony Blair was 26 in 1979, a divided and shambolic Labour party was swept from power by Margaret Thatcher's Conservatives. When Ed Miliband was 26 in 1995, by contrast, a divided and shambolic Tory party was already reeling towards landslide defeat under Blair.
That doesn't tell you everything about the political differences between the two Labour leaders. But it goes some way to explain why Blair, coming to political maturity in a period of terrible Labour failure, was and is a pessimist about his party – mistakenly in my view – and why Miliband, reaching his maturity during a surging wave of Labour success, is basically an optimist about it, perhaps mistakenly too.
In my own case, it was Hobsbawm who, more than anyone, supplied the formative imprint. In 1978, he gave his Marx Memorial Lecture. I was present, and clearly remember it as being a rather involved piece of labour historical research rather than the seminal moment in late 20th-century left revisionism that it has become in retrospect. But its key sentence made just as much of an impact back then as today.
Marshalling his statistics to show how the industrial working class was in decline as a proportion of the working population, how trade union membership was static and the Labour share of the vote gradually shrinking, Hobsbawm's lecture reached its key sentence. "The forward march of labour and the labour movement, which Marx predicted," he said, "appears to have come to a halt in this country about 25 to 30 years ago." In other words, it peaked around the time of the Attlee Labour governments of the postwar era.
If one event could be said to have rid me of the leftism with which I still flirted at that time – and I still possess a letter from Tony Benn thanking me for writing to suggest he ran for the party leadership in 1976 – it was the Hobsbawm lecture and the rich debate that followed in Marxism Today and the Guardian in the early 1980s. Hobsbawm's lecture compelled a generation to think more truthfully and less romantically about the trajectory and momentum of the labour and socialist project. And everything that Hobsbawm said about the condition of those projects back then is even more true today.
When Hobsbawm gave his lecture, the proportion of manual workers and their families in the population had already declined from 75% in 1911 to a little over half in 1976. Today it is well under a third. When Hobsbawm spoke, 46% of the workforce were in trade unions. Today the proportion is 26%. When Hobsbawm spoke, Labour's most recent general election vote share was 39%. Today that figure is 29%.
But if the forward march of labour had already halted long ago, what words should we use to describe what has happened to it today? Gone into retreat? Regrouped? Ended? My preference is simply to say that the question has become – long ago – historically irrelevant for all foreseeable political purposes. The Labour party exists. But labourism is no longer the big answer to anything. That's one reason I am unconvinced about Labour's invocation of the spirit of 1945 in Manchester this week.
Hobsbawm's death at the start of the Labour conference was even announced in the hall. That would have been unthinkable a generation ago. It was, though, appropriate. Because it was not hard to see how Hobsbawm's lecture posed and continues to pose an epochal challenge to the modern Labour party.
It seems to be fashionable this week to say that Blair and Miliband have offered ideologically different answers to the Hobsbawm question of what the post-labourist Labour party should become. Much of the difference, however, can be explained by history rather than ideology. Blair became leader in an expanding global economy. There was more of everything for everyone. It is hardly surprising, especially after four successive election defeats, that Blair often took the line of least resistance and invited everyone into his big tent. Some of us criticised this at the time. But he was a pessimist in optimistic times. And he won three elections.
Miliband faces the same question in different circumstances. He became leader in a contracting global economy. There is less of most things for most people. He has to make cuts and say no. Miliband's mildly social democratic approach isn't proof that he is a better, wiser or more principled leader than Blair, let alone a more popular one. It is proof that he is an optimist who faces difficult choices, some of which are imposed on him by Blair's failings. They are different leaders in different situations, and they are not stepping into the same river.
But they both know one big thing – that the Labour party always has to transcend old failed labourism if it is to win and govern. Blair's New Labour and Miliband's one-nation Labour are different attempts to reach out to voters who turned away from Old Labour. Blair's attempt was then. It was extremely successful. Miliband's is now. Its prospects are more fragile. They have more in common than those whose politics are stuck in the past can allow. Hobsbawm would have understood that. And so should we."
