Labor in Britain

...its second is to avoid the periodic deflation and unemployment with which, in the absence of stable growth, the Tories placated foreign holders of sterling...

...Following upon years of defensive "revisionism," they have helped enormously to restore the spirit and selfconfidence of the Party...

...For the members of these groups are precisely the people with whom Wilson needs to be in touch, not just at election time via the mass media, but between elections, day after day, organizationally...

...But power, however it comes, is opportunity: it offers the chance to reshape British society and establish a foundation for future socialist victories...

...LONDON Five years ago it was widely believed that the British Labor Party had become a permanent minority...

...That sounds like a minimal goal for a socialist party...

...This sort of criticism opens up a whole new world of social discontent and aspiration into which the Labor Party has ventured, up until now, only in a disorganized fashion...

...The crucial problem can be summed up very simply: the links between the working class and the technological middle class, producers all, do not yet exist...

...In practice, the grand alliance of "workers by hand" and "workers by brain" poses all sorts of difficulties...

...But there must also have been many working class Labor supporters who were put off by an election campaign summed up in Wilson's boast: "We are told that we have replaced the cloth cap with the white laboratory coat as the symbol of British Labor...

...But once again, any improvement that is more than marginal depends upon the willingness of the government to attack the private sector...

...At present, the discontents of technicians and clerks often take an anti-union, even a Poujadist form—the basis, perhaps, of some Liberal support...

...To attack the private sector, however, the government needs not only a power of initiative, which for the moment it has, but also active and enthusiastic public support, which it does not have and can only win by publicly explaining its policies and its strategy...

...The links have to be worked out in trade unions and constituency parties, and in local committees...

...Insuring any sort of consistent growth is likely to be far more difficult than most Labor supporters now realize and so the margins for public expenditure, short of really radical nationalization, will be very thin...

...The pension increase, rent control, the income tax hike (affecting only higher incomes), the proposed corporation and capital gains taxes: these redistributive measures—the first undertaken in Britain in 15 years —are part of the essential bargain with the unions...

...Similar considerations hold in the field of housing...

...It is alarming that nothing has been heard of it since...

...This is the key to immediate electoral success (though not necessarily, as we'll argue later on, to that long string of successes required by a Party committed to social transformation...

...Expressed through their unions, however, the demands of these same men for better pay or a share in industrial decision-making could bring them into close alliance with the working class...

...All these are essentials of structural change —and essential also for creating an alliance which will want and work for structural change...

...The domination of local parties by oligarchic councillors and appointed agents concerned mainly with canvass returns, and the narrowness of internal political discussion with no echo in the community outside, have driven many young activists out of the Party and into such movements as CND...

...Tory society is a closed society, in which birth and wealth have priority, in which the master-and-servant, landlord-and-peasant mentality is predominant...

...In this way, the present division in industry between the technical and clerical staff, closely associated with management, and the manual working force, in conflict with management, might be restructured...

...It was a nervous business, almost a paralyzing task for a working class party, and the strain of the effort generated Gaitskell's determination to alter the Party's image and transform its internal structure, radically reducing the authority of the union-dominated annual Party Conference...

...There is a price to pay for ten years of equivocation and timidity: best to pay it quickly...

...Thirdly, there is what the Party calls "selective intervention"—the removal of existing restrictions on the commercial and manufacturing activities of nationalized concerns, the setting up of state factories in depressed regions and new public "growth industries" in areas of rapid technological advance...

...Of course, they are only minor measures, which will have only minor effects—at most, perhaps, stopping the drift towards greater inequality made possible by "Conservative freedom...

...Some of the Gaitskellites on the right of the BLP dreamed of a new "people's party" free of socialist commitments and trade union connections...

...Making the social services a focus of improvement and innovation, providing services so good that there is no incentive to seek special treatment—this would in itself be an expression of socialism in action...

...The fullscale participation of white collar unions in the Labor Party (a few are there already and tend to support the left-wing) would sharply increase the pace of politicization among the new technical classes...

...Had they managed to secure Britain's entry into the Common Market, then the competitive stimulus, larger markets, and above all, weakened position of the trade unions, might have brought economic success—a success in the French style...

...The attempt cannot yet be called successful...

...Nor can voters be replaced as easily as symbols: the surprising size of the Liberal poll suggests that many members of the new middle class, disgusted with the Tories, are still not ready to vote socialist...

...If these short-term policies are successful—if the government can claim to have avoided deflation and insured faster growth, and done both in an atmosphere of greater social justice—then Wilson will probably go quickly to the country, asking for a majority in the House of Commons large enough to carry his whole program...

...The battle here is specifically for class integration and it must be won if the Labor strategy of class alliance is to make any sense...

...Thomas Balogh, now a Downing Street economic advisor, recently described British capitalism as "a mixture between stereotyped respectable mediocrity and the squalid vulgarity of the speculator...

...If this is so, it would provide the permanent "sociological" majority that Labor last dreamed of in 1945...

...It involves a minimum guarantee of incomes in the short-run and, in the long-run, the provision of benefits at the rate of one-half weekly earnings...

...I11 "It should be our main task," wrote Phillips, "to forge new links between them [the new middle class] and us...

...One white collar union leader has recently demanded that such procedures be established as part of the incomes policy bargain...

...The crucial intellectual link is the common explanation in socialist terms of, first, economic conflict, experienced collectively "at the point of production" and articulated through the unions, and, second, social impoverishment, experienced individually "at the point of consumption" and until now hardly articulated at all...

...But expansion, based on the existing consumer economy, will create its own environment unless it is quickly brought under control and directed toward socialist goals...

...II Compared with Gaistskell's proposals of 1959, Labor's current program, cautious as it undoubtedly is, represents a significant shift to the left...

...It has been estimated that a determined recruiting drive among white coat and white collar workers could increase TUC membership by some two millions (the present membership is around 8 1/2 million...

...It aims at making the traditional Labor claim to represent "workers by hand and by brain" a reality at last...

...Both working class deprivation and the new social poverty of unplanned cities, jammed highways and overcrowded schools, are produced, Wilson argues, by the capitalist economy and its political control in the interests of private owners...

...Drawing upon old traditions of working class solidarity and non-conformist radicalism, he challenged the very quality of life in Tory Britain, "a commercialized society in which everything has its price...

...First and most important is the attainment of an increased annual rate of economic growth...

...The new strategy is not in any simple sense an electoral, but a total political strategy...

...The public system has been relatively neglected by the Tories and a private system has grown up alongside it: corporation pension arrangements (subsidized by large tax reliefs), private payment for medical care, etc...

...For the sake of that support, and in order to win cooperation from the business community, Wilson will be tempted to go slowly and do little...

...And more, these new unionists, with their articulateness and administrative skills, might be important in winning a larger role for organized labor in national and regional planning —and ultimately for workers and technicians in factory democracy...

...It is gradually being transformed into an electoral machine, stressing efficiency in getting out the vote and better use of the mass media, above all its other functions...

...Even economic growth is closely linked to the "career open to talents"—as in the current Party policy statement Signposts for the Sixties: "If the deadwood were cut out of Britain's boardrooms and replaced by the keen young executives, production engineers and scientists who are at present denied their legitimate prospects of promotion, our production and export problems would be much more manageable...

...Modernization, whatever else it may be, is first of all a call for collective effort, not only to raise wages and welfare payments, but also to renew the ruined social capital, dating back to the nineteenth century, of Britain's cities and towns...

...Wilson received no more votes than did Gaitskell...

...This analysis and strategy Wilson has made his own...

...It seeks to engage a desire for usefulness and participation among salaried employees formed in a working class culture, but at present out of touch with the Labor Party...

...In October Wilson apparently lost working class support and picked up just enough middle class votes to squeak by...

...He is far less deferential toward British traditions than the Labor leaders of the 1940s: it is just not possible to imagine him saying to the Queen, as Herbert Morrison said to the King in 1945, that he "had learnt a great deal from the Conservatives on how to govern...

...Education is perhaps the most significant field of all, particularly since the role of the school in determining careers continues to grow...

...Then, among "workers by brain" as already among "workers by hand," union membership would lead to Labor loyalty...

...Socialism would then be creating its own environment...

...The indications are that Labor wants to avoid the general issue of public ownership, to proceed when and where sectional advances can be made...

...Yet to maintain momentum, central to his conception of leadership, and hold the Party united behind his left-of-center policy, he must deliver some socialist goods...

...Similarly, the elaborate structure of company benefits specifically designed to generate loyalty to the firm (and made possible by a tax structure which almost seems designed for the same purpose) stands squarely in the way of a comprehensive system of public services...

...There is no way in which a Labor government can escape the necessity of first enclosing and then dismantling the private sector of the economy...

...But the theory upon which it rests has still to be tested in action...

...if programs intended for the majority are not sacrificed to the "output of graduates" —then the educational system could become something more than the conveyor belt of a class society...

...The renationalization of steel, which, after the prolonged controversies of the fifties, has no immediate political charge, and the public ownership of land values, are the two direct measures...

...In part it is due to Wilson's leadership...

...The Party's intentions as to the Health Service are also fairly clear...

...Labor's present program envisages three major inroads into the private sector...

...And at the same time Labor's program includes steel nationalization, comprehensive schools, public ownership of land values—all potentially divisive issues on which a weakening government could well lose whatever middle-class support it has...

...And in the present political and social climate, it is equality of opportunity— the principle of '89 with no socialist glosses—which has dominated the educational discussion...

...The trade union connection is here made the basis of economic policy...

...More than this, he is the first skillful and exciting socialist politician in British history...

...Unable to compete with Tory affluence, burdened with an "old-fashioned" ideology, dependent on a working class doomed to long-term numerical decline, the party looked—even (or especially) to its own leaders—like a political anachronism...

...He appealed to the constructive spirit and the sense of vocation among new technologists and described the excitement of creative and highly skilled work...

...they may be traced to newer groups in the society and were often introduced into British socialist thought through the efforts of the New Left...

...And for the left, Richard Grossman talked of decades of principled opposition...

...The proportion of building by public authorities fell steeply in the years after 1951...

...The new aspirations are different from the more narrowly economic demands of the trade unions...

...The argument that the Tory economy has subordinated "hard center industry to soft center finance" is, in this tradition of industriousness and communal activity, a moral as well as a hard practical criticism of Conservative economic management...

...Insurance companies and industrial pension funds have a vested interest in private pension provision...

...This sort of thing has annoyed many socialists, and with some reason...

...But over the years this will not be sufficient...

...Scientists and engineers, teachers and architects, managers and administrators, have been rediscovered as "producers" and so drawn—at least in Labor Party rhetoric—into close connection with the old working class...

...In doing so, he went beyond the liberal, bourgeois challenge to aristocratic hauteur and amateurism which certain "modern" Tories would also like to attempt...

...For the Party is committed both to economic growth and to radical changes in social priorities, and that means that the wealth produced by growth must be publicly controlled...

...In speech after speech, sometimes with schoolmasterish precision, sometimes with a kind of puritanical passion, he has expounded and elaborated them...

...but it has not been reached in any European country outside Scandinavia...

...This very flair seems likely to drive him leftwards, away from the dullness of right-wing leadership...

...And Wilson often sounds like a hero of 1789, rallying the entire nation against an aristocracy as corrupt as it is incompetent...

...These latter measures could be more important than direct nationalization as a way of increasing both the government's control and its economic resources...

...And, most important of all, "their occupational experiences frequently reinforce their socialist convictions...

...Class linkages depend upon local cooperation, the discovery of shared interests, the working out of common solutions...

...But in another sense, the new radicalism predates the collapse of "MacWonder's" economic miracle and the arrival of Wilson...

...It fastens on the logic of contemporary technological and administrative changes to provide a program for emerging social groups...

...With great success, Wilson made the Tory predilection for luxury flats and London offices a major campaign issue...

...Faced with a major economic crisis and hampered by its narrow parliamentary margin, the Labor government in these first months has adopted policies which clearly reveal only its short-term intentions...

...The "eleven plus" exam has for years consigned the vast majority of working class children to the secondary modern schools, roughly equivalent to vocational high schools in the U.S...

...Like "economic growth," the "career open to talents" is a neutral phrase...

...Balogh has put this argument most forcefully: attacking the Gaitskellite alternative of fiscal manipulation, he insists that increased social spending requires a growing public sector...

...IV Wilson has warned that economic expansion is his first priority and that any major improvements in social provision or extensions of public ownership may be postponed until after increases in exports and investment have been secured...

...Instead he offered careers in public service and "social production...

...NHS has recently become a center of controversy between conservatives attempting to whittle away its comprehensive basis and introduce payment "by those who can afford it," and radicals who want to increase its comprehensiveness by ending all existing charges and extending services into such fields as preventive medicine and domiciliary care...

...Any other course would have required the active cooperation of the unions, and this the Tories couldn't get because they couldn't—or wouldn't—meet the unions' de mands for restraint of profits and salaries as well as of wages...

...The strategy establishes a coherent framework for political activity, such as Labor has not had in years...

...The defection of many workers was probably due to the immigration issue: there was more "white backlash" in Britain than in the U.S...

...Employers, on the other hand, are clearly aware of the dangers of white collar unionization and show signs of stiffening resist ance against it...

...Among the manual workers, the need for skilled craftsmen will increase, but the number of unskilled jobs will stay about the same, continuing their long-term relative decline...

...Today, membership remains healthy, but in every other way, the Party as a mass organization shows signs of sclerosis...

...Such changes would reverse the trend in recent years towards dual standards—middle and working class standards—in social security and health...

...In the 1950s the already growing class of administrative, scientific and technical personnel had been imagined by Labor leaders, with an assist perhaps from American sociologists, as a mass of "floating voters"—without social or political loyalties, but caught up in the Tory ethos of individual advance and private affluence...

...All the government's decisions thus far can be understood in these terms...

...accepting the ideological conventions about status and individual promotion—they are not likely recruits for socialism...

...A skillful politician like Wilson may pick up some of their votes at this or that election, but he can hardly build his hopes for long-term power on such a social base...

...Here Labor is committed to the "comprehensive principle"—which means, first of all, the abolition of selection for grammar schools and therefore higher education at the age of eleven...

...If labor is to create a common identification among its new middle class and working class supporters, its social programs have a crucial role...

...By allocating resources to things like cars and high-priced housing rather than to urban redevelopment and public building, it will set the new occupational groups on a firmly "individualist" course...

...In his pre-election speeches Wilson evoked the "bourgeois spirit" of rationality and equality of opportunity, but he placed it in a new social context, entirely different from the entrepreneurial society of the nineteenth century and the speculators' world of the past fifteen years...

...All this was suggested in Labor in the Sixties...

...They have to be created...

...The electoral victory of last October doesn't settle any of the questions raised at the time of the '59 defeat...

...It stems from a new analysis of British society and a new Labor strategy, both first proposed in Morgan Phillip's policy statement Labor in the Sixties and adopted at the 1960 Party Conference...

...Wilson was not offering careers in accumulation and consumption...

...Working in large bureaucratic companies...

...These difficulties are likely to be even more apparent in the next five or ten years...

...This might happen as early as the spring or autumn of 1965...

...The Labor Party can make sociological trends work in its favor— the crucial words here are the verbs...

...In an extraordinary reversal of the terms of political debate, Wilson succeeded during the fall campaign in characterizing Tory defenders of the free market as dogmatic and doctrinaire, incapable of adopting obvious remedies to pressing social evils...

...But the comprehensive schools could be used to break down the class assumptions which underlie this discussion...

...V The public sector is an indispensable instrument for directing resources towards social spending...

...But there is as yet no sign of how far they will be pressed or how they will be publicly defended...

...Labor's first commitment is to satisfy these demands...

...This new radicalism is, in part, an almost automatic response to the accumulating failures of Tory free enterprise...

...Here then is another crucial difficulty: without a growing public sector and its financial surpluses, no large diversion of resources to public spending, no income redistribution, no weakening of the social power of capital will be possible...

...Begun in the mid-fifties by the "angry young men" and the New Left, the systematic assault upon deferential reflexes in culture and society has at last found a political reflection in Wilson's radicalism...

...These voters Labor now sought anxiously to woo...

...caught up in a paternalistic atmosphere of company benefits, pensions and social life...

...This is not only a question of better amenities...

...The political parallel to unionization is the re-establishment of the Labor Party as a movement, a focus of intense loyalty, sparking activity both locally and nationally...

...There are some good reasons for this priority— in the short run...

...Wilson's new strategy is rooted in the belief that the technical middle class as a class can be incorporated into a socialist base—even unionized and brought directly into the TUC and the Party...

...If they are not worked out, then Labor's socialist policies will only alienate its middle class supporters, while any adjustment of the Party to the existing interests of the middle class will call into question its socialist commitments and alienate its working class base...

...In a sense, this proposes the reappearance of an ancient coalition: the union of classes which made possible the great bourgeois revolutions...

...His own arguments for economic planning and public control (always vigorously put, but highly ambiguous as to the precise nature and extent of the intervention) have consistently aimed at pulling together the older working class defense of nationalization with the new consumer demands for public provision and social service...

...it requires activity at every social level...

...If it remains long in office, a Labor government would probably undertake changes along these latter lines (prescription charges have already been dropped...

...it was a Labor government which pushed through the legislation which made possible their new positions...

...the development of a social security program which would provide common services at a high standard—all these have much more than economic significance...

...Especially when planning is regional or local, new schools and town centers, urban redevelopment and public housing, all serve to generate that lively social spirit and grass-roots political activism upon which Wilson must depend...

...Urban planning and redevelopment, transport provision and traffic control, extension of the educational system, public support for cultural activity, control over the mass media: these are the demands of an "affluent" society, but they are given immediate political relevance by the Labor Party's effort to create links between the older working class movement and the new middle classes...

...Wilson seems to count on economic growth and increased social spending to give the government a manageable majority in a 1965 or 1966 election...

...By increasing the flow of money into the private sector, it will reinforce the social relationships of corporate business...

...The high command of too large a sector of Britain's industry is manned either dynastically, or on the basis of a family, school or social network...

...Local Labor councils—insufficiently supported, it should be said, by constituency parties no longer organized for agitational activity—are opposed by parents and teachers who fear the swamping of the existing grammar schools by working class children and who reject the egalitarian values upon which the comprehensive principle is based...

...Now the visible setting of alternative priorities by a Labor government—and the enforcement of high architectural standards—can go a long way toward breaking the almost automatic link currently made between prosperity and individual consumption...

...The provision of community housing on a scale and at a standard which encourages multi-class occupation...

...Today, by the narrowest of margins and the best of luck, there is a Labor government...

...Unionization is the key to the consciousness of the new middle classes...

...the creation of a comprehensive educational system in which hierarchical and deferential attitudes might finally be challenged...

...he made few concessions to that extraordinary love of commodities thought typical of affluent man in the fifties...

...For the same reasons, consumers' associations, societies for state education, local campaigns for public transport, housing associations, etc., have all grown up outside of and out of touch with the Party, claiming a nonpartisanship which Labor should dispute...

...Unin membership and activity can go a long way towards transforming the ideas of white coat and white collar workers about their firms, their colleagues on the job, their own careers...

...Already in Liverpool and Bristol, a political battle of major proportions is raging over the establishment of comprehensive schools...

...Clearly, a mere increase in the numbers of technologists and white collar employees is not going to help...

...This then is Labor's strategy...

...And he is far more deeply antagonistic toward Tory selfishness and arrogance (and toward all the "flimflam" of Tory prosperity) than the leaders of the '50s...

...Many of the new "workers by brain," as Phillips argued, are the products of Labor homes...

...All this made possible a far more forthright and self-confident demand for public intervention in economic life than was ever heard from the Gaitskellites...

...The ambiguities of Labor's position are nowhere more evident than in its educational program...

...The old middle classes never launched such an attack...

...November 30, 1964...

...All this will urgently require government help, and there is so far no sign that the Party has even considered the political importance of such changes...

...If the same distinctions are not allowed to develop within the schools, and between the schools of different neighborhoods, as exist today between grammar and secondary modern schools...

...In the field of social security, Labor is committed to a scheme which would end poverty in old age...

...For this reason, it is enormously significant that the principles of '89 are being enunciated by socialists...

...What matters are the sorts of careers which in fact are opened up...

...Its new middle class supporters are at present committed to equality of opportunity for their children and want a system guaranteeing access to all the available occupational ladders...

...This new confidence that major social changes might in the long run be made favorable to the Labor Party, and that the Party might be speaking for emergent social groups as well as for declining ones, marks the fundamental contrast in temper between the Labor leadership of the fifties and that of the sixties...

...In the immediate future, wrote Phillips, "a vast growth will occur in professional and technical occupations, especially engineers, scientists and technicians...

...Once again, in education as in social service, if the whole population depends on the state system, and a high enough priority is given to raising standards, positive identification with the community might begin to replace a complacent or desperate reliance on oneself...

...If this is so, then there is a good case, in terms of the Party's new strategy, for pressing ahead with nationalization, whatever the short-term risks...

...Resistance is not difficult, for there are at present no legal procedures for union recognition...

...The immediate goal is not any significant equalization of incomes, but the establishment of an incomes policy which includes salaries, dividends, rents and profits as well as wages, and guarantees to the unions a voice at least as loud as any other in national planning...

...it has been made possible only by the educational and social advance of working class sons...

...The Tories have no effective growth policy—during the campaign Lord Home pretended there was no such thing as an economy—and this was one of the reasons for their defeat...

...There are other things also that a Labor government ought to do: as a large employer, through ministries, it could greatly further the trends on which its own long-term prospects may depend...

...But in a society as scarred by hierarchy and deference as Britain remains even today, a savage attack upon hereditary privilege is necessary...

...Wilson, in the name of youthful innovation and a technically-oriented dissent ing tradition of socially useful work, implicitly attacks both these prevailing social styles...