Roy Hattersley has recently been viewed as a left winger in his opposition to Blair. Lindsey German argues that his autobiography tells a different story
It is tempting to look on Roy Hattersley as a benign, avuncular figure in these days of New Labour. His defence in recent months of comprehensive schooling and his attacks on growing inequality have dealt some telling blows to the pro-market enthusiasms of the Blair government. Such was their effectiveness that he was denounced in the most insulting terms (for Blair) - by comparing him to Tony Benn.
Any socialist who feels like making similar comparisons should definitely refrain from doing so until they have read Fifty Years On. Described as 'a prejudiced history of Britain since the war', Roy Hattersley's new book is a reminder of everything that was wrong with Old Labour - and of the fact that Hattersley himself was always a passionate defender of right wing ideas inside the Labour Party.
Anyone who wants to describe the past 50 years, especially from a Labour point of view, should have some explanation of what went wrong at various times. Hattersley has very little analysis on this score. There is no real understanding of why Attlee lost power in 1951 despite an increased vote. Tory victories throughout the 1950s are ascribed to the growing middle class in the British electorate and therefore the gradual disappearance of Labour's traditional constituency.
Labour's unpopularity is usually blamed on the left or the trade unions. Take this as an example:
'The greatest damage was done to Labour's reputation not by arguments about policy but by the way in which a faction within the party insisted on opposing the new proposals [for a poll tax]. The principled opposition to a tax which reduced the local government levy on the rich and increased it for the poor was compromised by the association of some Labour supporters with the damaged, but not yet destroyed, Militant Tendency. They believed that the proper response to the poll tax was fiscal disobedience, and showed every sign of really believing that, if enough people could be persuaded not to pay, the whole scheme would be dropped and a bankrupt government would be forced to resign' (p342).
True, the government did not resign, but its supposedly invincible leader did, largely as a result of the poll tax riot and associated demonstrations and protests. The tax was made unworkable by massive non-payment. Here the left was much closer to political reality than the Labour opposition (deputy leader R Hattersley) which did virtually nothing to fight the tax. Had it been left to them, the poll tax would still be with us, no doubt another of the hated Tory policies which the Labour government can do nothing about.
This example sums up the general philosophy behind the book - Labour governments get elected because of despair with the Tories and because of the outrages of capitalism, but once in office they are powerless to do very much about anything.
So the whole history of postwar governments is portrayed in terms of events which blow them off course and left wingers whose supposed posturing and principles endanger the small reforms which right wing Labour reformers are trying to achieve. Hattersley reserves quite a lot of criticism for those on the left - Aneurin Bevan, Barbara Castle and of course Tony Benn. Perhaps because he was most closely involved in fighting them Hattersley has much scorn for the Bennites. After describing the arguments at the Labour Party conference of 1980 he comments,'When the conference closed on the Friday, with the ritual singing of "Auld Lang Syne", the next election was already lost.'
He describes the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, the body which campaigned for reform of Labour's
constitution - for reselection of MPs, an electoral college to elect the leader and so on - as a threat to the ideal which it claimed to support. For its object was not so much the end of the old autocracy as the creation of a new despotism which imposed its will on powerless Members of Parliament' (p275).
It is not surprising therefore that Hattersley became one of the major witch hunters of the 1980s. The leadership over which he presided with Neil Kinnock drove supporters of Militant and many other left wing activists out of the party.
However, to blame on the one hand the capitalists and on the other the left for Labour's failure (along with the electorate, of course, which repeatedly fails to measure up to Hattersley's expectations) conveniently lets right wing Labour - which has dominated every government since the war - off the hook.
The record shows a rather different picture. Attlee's government was elected in 1945 amid hopes of an end to unemployment, fascism and war. The real reforms the government was able to deliver are still regarded as a high point inside the British working class. As Hattersley himself says, by 1951 it was clear even to the Tories that their task was not to dismantle the welfare state or denationalise industry but to build on what Labour had achieved.
However, it is also true that the government of 1945-51 operated as it did to help rebuild a war ravaged capitalism, and that its reforms were part of creating a healthier, more skilled and more productive working class and were therefore of benefit to the capitalist class. At the same time, Labour used troops to attack striking workers such as the dockers, and was totally committed to a foreign policy which meant retaining empire, committing Britain to high defence spending, and to nuclear weapons. When the Tories were re-elected in 1951, this reflected no great enthusiasm for their policies but was rather a sign that Labour had nothing radical to offer (although even then its vote was higher than that of the Tories).
The boom years of the 1950s saw Labour's leadership even more abject in its attempt to compromise with capitalism. Hattersley's heroes, such as the leader Hugh Gaitskell and the right wing ideologue Anthony Crosland, argued for a party which would abandon outdated notions of class and class struggle and appeal to the upwardly mobile middle classes. They had little impact. Capitalism was booming, living standards were rising far faster than had previously been imagined, and workers' demands could be relatively easily met through what was known as 'do it yourself' reformism.
Again it was discontent with the Tories that led to Labour's narrow election win in 1964 under Harold Wilson. The very limited reforms introduced by Wilson which led to a much bigger government majority 18 months later were reversed in 1966 and 1967 by a series of cuts and attacks on workers. This in turn created disillusion with Labour which led both to a Tory electoral revival and to a sudden surge of racism round Enoch Powell. The Wilson and Callaghan governments in the 1970s - elected after the biggest industrial upsurge in Britain since just after the First World War - again created working class disillusion by launching the biggest round of spending cuts ever alongside wage restraint. Labour's reaction to strikes against its policies was to attack them and - along with the left trade union leaders of the time - to give official sanction to crossing picket lines, thus ensuring increasing divisions and bitterness inside the working class movement.
It was this process - of which Hattersley is totally uncritical - that led to the victory of Thatcher in 1979 and to the civil war which then broke out inside the Labour Party. One thing is absolutely certain - Labour lost in 1979 because it attacked working class people, not because it wasn't 'middle class' enough. This can be seen from the way in which manual working class votes haemorrhaged away from Labour in the last months of 1978 and early 1979.
The polarisation of Labour which followed found Hattersley firmly on the right wing. Despite the initial victories of the Bennites, most of the 1980s marked a gradual reclaiming of ground by the right, punctuated by key turning points such as the abandonment of the fight against ratecapping by even the most left wing Labour councils, and the defeat of the year long miners' strike of 1984-85. Electorally, the move to the right did not help.
Hattersley's explanation for electoral defeat in 1992 is both insulting and misguided:
'There was an underlying reason - perhaps more important than the destruction of Neil Kinnock - for Labour's defeat. The British people had ceased to care - or at least to care enough to risk their new-found and, as they imagined, precarious prosperity by supporting policies which helped the poor... The new middle classes liked what they had achieved and acquired since the war, and they were not in a mood to lose any of it' (p372).
You would hardly believe from this that the election took place in the middle of the worst recession for many years. Redundancies, 'downsizing' and mortgage repossessions were at record levels, as was the general level of discontent in society. It is a terrible indictment of the bankruptcy of the Kinnock-Hattersley leadership that it was unable to gain from such a situation.
The problem for Labour's right was that it had no clear alternative to the Tories and it was not prepared to challenge the priorities of the market, even when they destroyed people's lives.
Perhaps the most ironic aspect of this book is that Hattersley clearly regrets the coming of Blair but he has no understanding that Blair marks the visible end of the reform road which Labour's right and indeed left have relied on for so long. Hattersley argues that John Major's fate was sealed once John Smith became leader in 1992. He criticises Blair implicitly by saying that 'Smith was determined to modernise his party. But he wanted to bring the old principles up to date, not replace them. He looked for intellectual improvements, not ideological alternatives' (p 374).
John Smith would have been a different leader of the Labour Party. There would not have been the strong ideological commitment to big business, to the flexible market and to the supposed strengths of Thatcherism. As Hattersley says, 'The ideas which had inspired a century of democratic socialists were ruthlessly discredited. They had survived since Attlee's day and were therefore, by definition, too ancient to be of any value in New Labour's brave new world' (p385). However, as the evidence of the past 50 years shows, a Smith government too would have followed the dictates of big business and the market. The only force which was able to stop them in the past - and which will have to do so again - is the power of the working class. And that power is written out of Roy Hattersley's history.
Fifty Years On by Roy Hattersley is published by Little Brown, price £20