Duncan Bowie on the Socialist ethos
Radicals by Geoff Andrews published by Yale
There are many books on the history of the British labour movement. This one is very different. The subtitle is ‘The Working Classes and the Making of Modern Britain’, and the author claims the book’s originality is its class focus. However, the book’s focus is much more specific – it is on the role of adult education in developing a labour ethos in the British working class. This is now all somewhat nostalgic, given that today the working class electorate is just as likely to vote Reform as to vote Labour, with Labour being the party of the professional middle class more than ever before, perhaps largely because what was any Labour ethos has long since waned.
I really enjoyed the book, and it brought back both memories and links to much of my own writing and reading. My first book was a study of the interaction between working-class activists and middle-class intellectuals in the Oxford labour movement. Andrews’ study is more a set of interrelated essays than a chronological narrative. He starts with examining the writing in the late 19th century of the journeyman engineer, Thomas Wright, and especially his study of ’Our New Masters’, originally published in 1873. This was at a time when most radical artisans were associated with the Liberal Party. Wright derided the middle-class intellectuals who thought that they could educate the working class, instead arguing that the working classes should educate themselves and develop their own culture — the intelligent artisan “was not led away by utopian ideas; does not believe in social panaceas”.
I have had a copy of a reprint of “Our Masters” for many years, and Andrews has prompted me to re-read it.
Andrews then traces the development of the Labour ethos in the 19th century from Owenism and co-operation, through the Social Democratic Federation, the Independent Labour Party and the Labour Church (rejecting the Fabian middle-class-led statism), and then the role of Ruskin College (where Andrews later studied) and the Workers Education Association, and their struggle to escape domination by the Universities’ educated elite. (I will admit to briefly teaching a WEA local history class just after graduating). Chapters follow with a detailed critique of Tressell’s “Ragged Trousered Philanthropists”, on the General Strike as a defence of the working conditions and wages of the miners and on George Orwell’s writing on class, focusing on the extent to which this was influenced by two working-class writers, Jack Hilton and Jack Common (names which are new to me).
Andrews’ commentary on Orwell takes him to the development of a Labour socialism after the Second World War and the development of a state run welfarism by the Attlee government and the writing in the 1950’s and 60’s by Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams. There is a useful chapter on the Open University (for which Andrews now lectures) as an attempt by the Wilson government to broaden out access to higher education. This is followed by a study of the work of Edward Thompson and Raphael Samuel and the role of the Ruskin History workshops in seeking to ‘make history from below’.
Andrews’ final chapters study the decline of Labour ethos – a chapter “What Went Wrong” contrasts the role of Bert Ramelson as the Communist Party industrial organiser with the writing of Jeremy Seabrook and David Selbourne, and describes the weakening of the role of working class leadership and the miners’ strike of 1984-5 as the last great industrial dispute and defeat of the working class.
A chapter on the New Labour Meritocracy then examines the extent to which the Labour leadership adopted some of the basic principles of Thatcherite neo-liberalism, with little distinction between Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ and Anthony Giddens’ ‘Third Way’, accompanied by a decline in working-class-focused adult and higher education with the commercialisation of both the Open University and Ruskin College.
A sad epilogue recognises the change in the nature of Labour Party activism – no longer the intelligent artisan or trade unionist in a manual trade, but a cohort of middle-class professionals, with a disaffection from the Labour Party in what were once regarded as the Labour Party’s industrial heartlands. Whether these professionals are now themselves being disaffected from Labour and whether there is still a working class that can be recovered by a left party are the two questions we must now ask.