The tremendous boost in electoral popularity which the Tory Party registered during the Malvinas war came as a tremendous shock to major sections of the left. In three months its support rocketed from 30 per cent to 53 per cent in the opinion polls, confirmed by the results of local government elections and Parliamentary by-elections, and amid a wave of chauvinism not seen for many years. But, argues John Ross, this type of effect, like the dramatic fall in the Labour Party vote over the last 15 years, only comes as a shock because the British left has been living in a world of rhetoric and myths.
The view that the British labour movement is in some sense politically strong is extremely widespread on the British left. Its crudest version, put forward with little serious regard for facts is to be found in the continual quasi-mystical rhetoric about the 'twelve million strong labour movement' put forward by a group such as the Militant.
In more sophisticated versions political strength resides in the supposedly uniquely advanced British relation to Parliament and democracy. Thus for Tony Benn it is, 'democratic socialism ... a home grown British product which has been slowly fashioned over the centuries.' For Michael Foot, summarising Aneurin Bevan, 'The Marxist theory of the state was inescapable, but the liberal criticism of it would re-emerge. Somehow a synthesis must be devised ... Britain and perhaps only Britain, could set the example.'
This parliamentary, 'democratic', emphasis is replaced in other versions by an upholding of the alleged strength of the British tradition of [illegible] class 'common sense' and 'practicality' compared to 'abstract theorising'. A theoretical and polite version is EP Thompson's view that pragmatism, 'has served the British people a great deal better than most Marxists have been prepared to admit.' A crude version, expressing the outlook of the trade union bureaucracy and many others besides is Ben Tillett's famous attack on 'hairbrained chatterers and magpies of Continental Revolutionists', and their unfavourable comparison to, 'the trade unionists of this country, a body of men well organised, who paid their money, and were socialists at their work every day and not merely on the platform, who did not shout for blood-red revolution, and when it came to the revolution, sneaked under the nearest bed,'
The view that the British working class is politically extremely strong, however, has not only provided the basis of perspectives for the reformist left. It has also informed the assumptions, generally explicit but sometimes implicit, of the various individuals and small groups which have sought to 'transform the Labour Party' or 'build a revolutionary party' in Britain. The two principal sets of perspectives for such groups have both been broadly based on such an analysis; although there are many subvariants and combinations these can usefully be identified as 'syndicalism' and 'British entryism'.
In the 'British entryism' version the political strength of the working class is reflected in its supposed massive and undying attachment to the Labour Party which guaranteed it 45 to 50 per cent of the popular vote during the 1940s and 1950s. The formation of a Labour government, naturally with 'socialist policies' is therefore regarded as relatively unproblematic. The working class will be inspired to vote in even higher numbers for the 'nationalisation of the 250 monopolies', and the entire policy of the Labour Party can be changed, from right wing reformism to revolutionary Marxism or centrism, without the working class noticing that the political sheep of MacDonald/Attlee/Gaitskell/Wilson/Callaghan/Foot has transformed into a red-blooded socialist wolf. The same 49 per cent of voters that supported Attlee, or 48 per cent that supported Wilson, will continue to vote for Ken Livingstone or Ted Grant. On this view the working class is labourist first and foremost and reformist second.
From this overall view it flows that the priority is not mass campaigning to transform the existing consciousness of the working class but burrowing through the Labour Party machine to capture parts of it. Mass campaigns, such as CND, or earlier the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, may indeed even be considered dangerous as bringing 'petty-bourgeois influence' to bear on the supposedly unsullied ranks of the labour movement. The Militant group, with its unending propagandism and practical opposition to real campaigns, coupled with continual accommodation to British chauvinism, is a virtually pristine-pure example of such a current.
The syndicalist view is that somehow the working class will throw back the ruling class assaults launched on it through its 'industrial muscle' (souped up of course with revolutionary propaganda). While typically an ultra-left attitude is taken to the Labour Party tactically, tremendous political illusions in labourism are implicitly entertained: though the dominant politics of the working class, and even more its activist trade union layer, is clearly labourism, the 'syndicalist' view does not envisage any decisive political problems for the working class which need to be centrally confronted. Emphasis is instead placed on various organisational measures such as developing combine committees and small scale work to rebuild workplace organisation, in the belief that the working class struggle will primarily be rebuilt through solidarity with local disputes, etc.
This type of approach is most clearly represented by Tony Cliff and the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), but is also espoused in similar versions by other groupings.
Many other aspects of the traditional British left also flow from this view of the politically advanced character of the British labour movement: as a solution of the major political problems is guaranteed by the political strength of the movement attention should be switched away from these to detailed questions of organisation; as differences on the left arise within an advanced political tradition they are not seen as the type of discussions which inevitably arise in a revolutionary organisation but are instead regarded as the consequences of 'class betrayal'; because the particularly advanced British working class movement is singularly out of line with what are held up as virtues in other countries, international developments and organisation are to be downplayed. The typical British sect with its dogmatic crudities, its particular tactical fetishes, its tyrannical internal regime, its lack of interest in international questions or Marxist ideas, and its implicit or explicit view that the revolution in Britain is about two or three years away is a logical product of this view of the character of the British working class movement. The long and inglorious tradition which stretches from HM Hyndman and his 'Social Democratic Federation' of the 1880s down to Ted Grant and the Militant group is just the 'Marxist' complement of the right wing tradition dating back to Ramsay MacDonald.
Labour's decline
That there are serious political problems in the working class movement was brought home to many by the impact and aftermath of the Malvinas war. But in reality the 'Falkland's factor' was only the spectacular tip of a much more fundamental iceberg. An indicator of the underlying situation has been the rapid decline of the Labour Party vote since the late 1960s. This is something which, at last, is beginning to be incorporated into left wing thinking.
While of course it is not the only important indicator of class consciousness, the percentage of the working class voting for an organisationally independent working class party is an important index of its political consciousness and strength. Table 1 shows how Labour's share of votes cast has fallen from a high of 49 per cent in 1951 to 37 per cent in the 1979 election. Opinion polls, confirmed by local government and by-election results, indicated that this had further fallen to around 30 per cent between May and July 1982. As a proportion of the electorate Labour's vote fell from 40 per cent in 1951 to 28 per cent in 1979.
Table 1
Year — % of votes cast — % of electorate
1951 — 48.8 — 40.3
1955 — 46.4 — 35.6
1959 — 43.8 — 34.5
1964 — 44.1 — 34.0
1966 — 47.9 — 36.4
1970 — [illegible]
1974 (Oct) — 39.3 — 28.6
1979 — 36.9 — 28.0
Source: Percentage of votes cast: Hodgson, Labour at the Crossroads, Martin Robinson, Oxford, 1981. Percentage of the Electorate: Drucker (Ed), Multi-Party Britain, Macmillan, London, 1979.
There is of course no reason to believe that the 30 per cent bottom reached in the Malvinas war represents the actual level of Labour support. Some recovery has taken place and will continue from that depressed point. But there should be no mistaking the underlying pattern since the late 1960s. Labour's vote has fallen significantly as an almost unbroken trend. It is now down to the levels of 1931-35. As one recent review of international comparisons correctly observed: 'Electoral decline for the moderate left on this scale is unique to Britain. Among European countries since the war not even the faltering position of the Danish Social Democrats bears any resemblance to it ... by the late 1970s there were only three European democracies — Belgium, Eire and Switzerland — with a smaller 'combined-left' vote (Social Democrat/Labour plus parties to the left) than the one in Britain.'
Whereas in the other European countries trade unions may have lost members under the bourgeois assault, the vote for working class parties has held up fairly well. In some cases, notably France, Spain, and Greece, there have actually been spectacular breakthroughs by social democratic parties. In short, and contrary to the predominant myths of the left, the British labour movement showed itself not politically strong in face of the bourgeois assault from the late 1960s, but extremely weak in international terms. What is more this cannot be blamed on the 'Labour traitors' as the Labour and union bureaucrats are just as treacherous in other countries where the votes for working class parties have held up far better than in Britain.
Rethinking
Probably the best known example of the dawning of a better realisation of the real situation of the British working class movement was provided by the discussion around Eric Hobsbawm's lecture The Forward March of Labour Halted? 'Most of us,' he had written, 'have not paid as much attention as we ought to this crisis.' His own conclusion was that: 'the forward march of labour and the labour movement ... appears to have come to a halt in this country about twenty-five to thirty years ago.'
Unfortunately, the framework put forward by Hobsbawm himself provided no adequate answer to the problems set out. Nevertheless for the first time a major figure on the left had assembled a serious body of evidence, and attempted to explain the real trends of the working class movement in Britain, something, incidentally, singularly lacking in the majority of replies to Hobsbawm which instead engaged in the usual vague rhetoric without producing any serious factual material in their support.
What might seem surprising at first sight however is the degree to which the left, or at least the Marxist part of it, has been a prisoner of its own labourist illusions as the trends described unfolded. Indeed, despite its apparently radical break with traditional views, Hobsbawm's essay remained firmly within the labourist tradition. The very vivid image he put forward, 'The Forward March of Labour Halted?' suggests a past period in which the labour movement demonstrated particular vigour and political strength. The difference is that while the conventional view asserts that we are still in the age of labourist strength, Hobsbawm tends to attribute this to a 'golden age' now behind us.
What is of some interest is that both these views, despite Hobsbawm's Marxist terminology, are in complete contrast to the analysis of the British labour movement put forward by 'classical Marxism' — that is the analysis initiated by Marx himself. This recognised that the British working class was in comparative international terms, and in relation to its own ruling class, not strong but on the contrary extremely politically weak — a condition of course not rooted in its genetic nature but in the historic weight of British imperialism and the great [illegible] consciousness this created. Trotsky, for example, writing in 1924, explained this view clearly: 'The British working class is becoming conscious of itself as an independent class hostile to the bourgeoisie much more slowly than the working class of countries with less powerful bourgeoisies .. the growth of the British bourgeoisie, the most advanced bourgeoisie in Europe, having taken place in exceptionally favourable conditions, has for a long time held back the development of the British proletariat.'
Similarly Lenin, summarising the views of Marx and Engels, noted: 'Marx and Engels systematically traced this relation between opportunism in the labour movement and the imperialistic features of British capitalism for several decades. For example, on October 7, 1858, Engels wrote to Marx that: "The British working class is actually becoming more and more bourgeois so that this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat as well as a bourgeoisie. Of course, this is to a certain extent justifiable for a nation which is exploiting the whole world." Almost a quarter of a century later, in a letter dated 11 August 1881, Engels speaks of: "the worst type of British trade unions, which allow themselves to be led by men who have been taught by capitalists, or are at least in their pay." And in a letter to Kautsky, dated 12 September 1882, Engels wrote: "You ask me what the English workers think of colonial policy? Exactly the same as they think about politics in general, the same as what the bourgeois think. There is no working class party here, there are only Conservatives and Liberal-Radicals, and the workers merrily devour with them the fruits of the British colonial monopoly and of the British monopoly of the world market." Engels expressed similar ideas in his preface to the second edition of his Condition of the Working Class in England which appeared in 1892.'
This classical Marxist view of the historical political weakness of the working class movement in Britain is the extreme polar opposite of the dominant labourist/populist view which we have noted earlier. Far from believing that the British working class movement was politically strong, Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and the other writers of classical Marxism stressed the limited character of the political development of the British labour movement compared to other countries. They did, as we shall see, stress that this working class was extremely strong organisationally but they sharply distinguished that from political strength. Given the political implications which flow from this difference it is extremely relevant to indicate which of these two views is in line with the actual facts of the development of the British labour movement.
Prior to World War I
As a starting point, we can consider the period prior to World War II: is there any evidence of particular comparative political strength of the British working class movement in this period — whether it has since been 'halted' or not? The level of votes for the mass working class parties is naturally not in itself a decisive measure of working class political strength — they are usually votes for reformist parties, votes typically underestimate the strength of a working class and so on. Nevertheless, the proportion of the working class which votes for an independent working class party is one index, to be taken with others, of its degree of political consciousness. It is particularly relevant when making international comparisons because there is no reason to suppose that the French, German or Spanish working classes are more or less likely to express their political views through the ballot box than the British. The distortions created by bourgeois elections therefore apply equally in all similar political systems. The first point which stands out in international comparisons is the extremely late date of formation of the Labour Party compared to the mass working class parties in other European states. British society was qualitatively more proletarianised than any other in the world. However by the late 19th century it was the other European working classes which had created mass parties while the British remained essentially tied to the Liberals. By 1898 the German SPD received over 2 million votes and had 56 members of Parliament; the Belgian party in 1900 received 30 per cent of the vote. The first mass party of the British working class, the Labour Party, was not formed until 1900.
Even once formed electoral support for the Labour Party grew extremely slowly. In the last pre-World War I election, that of December 1910, Labour received 370,000 votes — 7 per cent of the total. In contrast the French SP received 1,100,000 in 1910 and the German SPD 4,250,000 in 1912. Furthermore in making these comparisons it must be remembered that the working class was a far larger percentage of the population in Britain than in other countries. The actual proportion of the working class voting Labour was therefore even more unfavourable in Britain than the gross figures for the total votes would indicate.
Even after World War I, which produced the great electoral breakthrough of Labour, this comparative situation remained. In the crucial election of 1918 Labour received 22 per cent compared to 46 per cent (for the SPD and USPD combined) in Germany in 1920, and 37 per cent in 1919 in Belgium. Even in Italy, where the working class was a tiny fraction of the population compared to Britain, the Socialist Party gained 25 per cent in 1919.
Labour's share of the vote did increase in the inter-war period, to 37 per cent, but in a situation where after 1926 the working class had suffered a crushing defeat. Furthermore Labour actually gained less from the break-up of the Liberal Party, the key feature of this period, than did the Conservatives. In short, compared to other major European countries a far lower proportion of the working class took even the elementary step of voting for an organisationally independent working class party in Britain.
The indicators of political consciousness and strength of the British working class on the electoral field are fully confirmed by other indices. The British working class after the rise of imperialism engaged in no serious revolutionary struggle for power comparable to other major European working classes. Major sections, or all, of the French (1871, arguably 1943-45), German (1919), Italian (1919-20, 1943-45), Yugoslav (1941-45), Greek (1943-49), Spanish (1931, 1936-39), and Russian (1905, 1917) working classes passed through authentic revolutionary crises reaching the point of armed insurrection and civil war. The highest point of British working class struggle in this period, the 1926 General Strike, cannot seriously be compared in scope to any of these developments.
The Labour Party rejected even an official position in favour of socialism at its foundation in 1900, whereas the continental European parties were in general formed on a Marxist basis. The impact of the Russian revolution in France, Italy, Germany, and Czechoslovakia was sufficient to split the Social Democratic parties, leading to the formation of mass Communist Parties on a revolutionary basis. The French CP had 121,000 members and received 10 per cent of the vote in 1921. The German CP had 360,000 members at its height in 1921 and 12.6 per cent of the vote in 1924. In Italy the CP had 70,000 members in 1921. In contrast the British Communist Party had probably 3-5000 members at its formation and received 0.4 per cent of the vote in 1922.
In short all the indices show that, compared to the major working classes of Europe the British working class had no 'golden age' but was politically weak in the period prior to World War II. It is the classical Marxist analysis, not the myths of labourism which are confirmed.
Only in one field was the British working class indisputably extremely strong. This was in trade union organisation. Only the German unions, with 4.2 million workers organised in the socialist unions in 1925, compared to 4.4 in the TUC, could compare with the British unions in absolute size. Given the shop steward organisation which had first emerged in Britain during World War I, the British unions were, however, certainly stronger in real terms.
This organisational trade union strength of the British working class was well understood by the Marxist writers — indeed Trotsky referred to Britain as 'the classic country of trade unions'. They refused, however, to confuse this organisational strength and the trade union consciousness it involved, with political strength.
Up to World War II, then, the British working class movement had a clear character. It was, in comparative terms, politically weak and organisationally strong. It is only after World War II that the labourist myths can find even any apparent evidence for their view of the British working class as politically strong.
1945 and after
As regards the rise in the Labour Party vote between 1939 and 1945/51 this of course needs no particular explanation as it corresponded to general international trends created by World War II. Its rise from 38 per cent to 48 per cent was fully in line with other countries. In Belgium the workers' parties advanced from 36 per cent in 1939 to 44 per cent in 1946, in France from 38 per cent in 1936 to 45 per cent in 1945, in Holland from 25 per cent in 1937 to 39 per cent in 1946. Labour was slightly unusual in actually increasing its total and percentage vote between 1945 and 1951 but this is largely accounted for by the increase in the number of candidates it ran (the actual percentage vote per opposed Labour candidate fell from 50.4 in 1945 to 46.7 in 1950), and in the collapse of the Liberal Party vote (from 2,600,000 in 1950 to 731,000 in 1951). The rise in 1945 therefore presents no problems to explain on either a classical Marxist or a Labourist explanation. Both would have predicted it — although as we shall see important implications come out when the facts are examined in terms of social structure and not just crude totals. The real feature which must be explained is the fall in the Labour Party vote after 1951.
Before going on to examine in detail the reasons for this decline we will first remove two erroneous explanations which are sometimes argued: increasing prosperity and the changing structure of the population. Both can only be even apparently defended by neglecting to examine Britain in either an international or a systematic historical context.
The explanation of the decline in Labour Party votes in terms of increasing prosperity is, of course, the crudest of all bourgeois explanations. It is simply the old theory of 'embourgeoisement' much favoured in the 1950s and 60s. It does, however, also sometimes poke up its head in left wing arguments. In a recent article in International, for example, Rich Palser wrote: 'Nor should we be misled by the decline in Labour's vote from 40.3 per cent of the electorate in 1951 to 28 per cent in 1979 ... Labour's electoral decline [is] to be explained ... in the alleviation and obscuring of the depth of the crisis of British capitalism during the post-war boom.'
This view does not stand any serious examination. First, British post-war working class prosperity has been extremely limited compared to countries such as West Germany, Sweden, France, Holland, etc. Yet in these countries, no fall in votes for working class parties comparable in scope to that for the Labour Party has taken place.
Furthermore the explanation in terms of prosperity would lead to a pattern of change the exact reverse of that which has actually occurred. Labour's vote in fact held up fairly well during the real period of prosperity in the late 1950s and early 1960s — declining from 49 per cent in 1951 to 44 per cent in 1959 but then rising again to 48 per cent in 1966. The real collapse of the Labour Party vote came after the beginning of the economic crisis in the late 1960s. If 'prosperity' was the reason for the decline then one would have to assume that its high vote was explained by the poverty of the 1960s compared to the days of halcyon prosperity from the 1970s onwards, and the veritable Garden of Eden under Thatcher!
The other common explanation for the decline in the Labour Party vote is that of a 'changing social structure'. Hobsbawm for example is an explicit advocate of this view. Such an explanation of course has the merit that objective position in the social structure is a significant Marxist concept whereas prosperity is not. Furthermore such a view is apparently supported by the fact that truly dramatic changes have taken place in the social structure of Britain.
According to the figures cited by Hobsbawm, manual workers have declined as a proportion of the employed population from around 75 per cent in 1911 to only slightly over a half in 1976 (and even fewer today). Non-manual workers have increased to not far short of half the workforce. Furthermore one-third of the workforce is today in the state sector. The proportion of married women in work has increased from 13 per cent in 1931, to 20 per cent in 1951, to 50 per cent today. Simultaneously the number of 'employers and proprietors' has decreased from 7 per cent of the population to 3½ per cent since 1911, and the number of domestic servants from over 1½ million in 1911 to an insignificant number today. These are major changes which must be incorporated into any socialist analysis.
However, important as they are for other questions, they cannot account for the decline in the Labour vote. First, the proportion of the population which is working class, that is possessing solely its labour power to sell to live, actually increased in the employed population. Secondly, all studies indicate that it is precisely inside the working class, and not outside it, that the Labour party vote has declined. Thirdly, the transformations in British society have been paralleled in other countries and therefore cannot explain why it is specifically the Labour Party vote which has declined whereas that for working class parties in other major European countries has maintained its level or even increased.
Finally even Hobsbawm himself is forced to note that the decline in the Labour party vote did not at all occur as an even process. The number of people voting Labour fell primarily in two sharp drops of 1.5 million votes: the first from 1951-55, the second from 1966-74. Apart from this the shift in the Labour Party vote has either been fractional or actually in an upward direction (see Table 1). A third major fall in Labour votes may well have occurred after 1979, although this has yet to be established.
The two dramatic falls evidently do not correspond to shifts in the structure of the population, to 'prosperity', or even to factors such as unemployment (which started its real vast surge only later). They do however correspond to very sharp shifts in the political conjuncture.
1951-55 was the absolute height of the Cold-War bourgeois offensive — something which undoubtedly helped first the tremendous increase in the Conservative Party vote, up by nearly 4 million between 1945 and 1951, and then the dramatic fall in the Labour vote from 1951 to 1955. This mounting bourgeois political offensive first consolidated forces around its own chief party and then severely cut into the Labour vote. Similarly the sharp fall in the Labour Party vote after 1966 corresponds to the bourgeois withdrawal of support from the Labour government, which major sectors had advocated in 1964-66, and the start of the offensive which culminated in the Heath government.
In short the major falls in the Labour Party vote do not at all correspond to a view based on economic ('prosperity') or social ('changing structure of the population') elements. They are however entirely in line with the classical Marxist view of the political weakness of the British working class movement. The working class proved incapable of withstanding the two major post-war ruling class political assaults and Labour's vote fell accordingly. Whereas the working class of other European states withstood economic and social changes Labour's political weakness left it exposed.
Finally this view allows Labour's actual apparent strength in international comparisons from 1945-51 to be put much more clearly in perspective. Taken purely in terms of the electoral total the votes look comparable or even slightly favourable for Labour — for example 40 per cent for the Socialist Party and Communist Party in Italy in 1946, 43 per cent for the SP and CP in France in the same year, and 48 per cent for the Labour Party in 1945.
Once the actual social structure of the countries is taken into account however the comparison in terms of working class votes becomes drastically unfavourable to Labour. For example in France in 1946, 37 per cent of the working population were in agriculture and fishing — the great bulk as peasants. In Italy in 1951 the proportion was 42 per cent — almost eight times the comparable British figure!
In short, given the tremendously larger relative size of the working class within the population in Britain, it is clear that even at its peak, a far lower proportion of workers voted for the Labour Party in Britain than for parties of the working class in states such as France and Italy. The view that the working class movement in Britain even in 1945-51 was in comparative terms politically strong, is simply an illusion created by looking at gross electoral statistics abstracted from the real social structures of the countries.
Organisational strength
As we have seen the classical Marxist analysis of the British labour movement stressed not only the political weakness of the British working class historically created by the power of imperialism, but also its organisational trade union strength. How then does this second aspect stand up to the test of events?
Unlike the Labour Party vote the trade union membership of the working class did not decline after the late 1960s. On the contrary trade union membership sharply increased — rising from 10 million in 1968 to 13.5 million in 1979. Although a decline in absolute terms due to unemployment set in after this there was no relative decline and the percentage of the employed workforce in trade unions rose sharply throughout the decade and has since stabilised at the level established in the late 1970s. However, far from the growth of the trade unions leading to an automatic increase in support for Labour, the actual proportion of members of trade unions voting for the Labour Party fell drastically. According to the best estimates the percentage of trade union members voting Labour fell from 71 per cent in 1964, to 51 per cent in 1979, to, according to a poll commissioned by BBC television, around 43 per cent who would have voted Labour in an election in September 1982. It is not necessary to hold that the percentages are absolutely accurate to see the tremendous decline in the percentage of trade union members voting Labour. The contrast between organisational strength and political weakness could scarcely be more vividly illustrated.
The future
Up to now in this article we have consciously used only empirical material. We wanted to show that only a classical Marxist analysis of the characteristics of the British working class movement could account for the pattern of its development. Having established the point however we may proceed to use this analysis to fill in some details and draw some conclusions.
This is a question of some importance. The lack of an adequate theoretical framework has meant that the majority of the British left has been subject to the most extreme impressionism. From 1979-81, culminating in the Benn Deputy Leadership campaign, a general euphoria reigned regarding an allegedly irreversible surge forward by the left inside the Labour Party. One year later, when the right had clearly regained the offensive, despair and gloom held sway with Peter Kellner writing in the New Statesman, for example, that: 'the far left has had its day ... fundamentally it is now in retreat.' A series of books have been published, notably Dennis Kavanagh's The Politics of the Labour Party which purport to show the irreversible electoral decline of the Labour Party. These in general draw on the same materials, and methods of research, as those published during the 1950s which proved that Labour could never again win an election because of the disappearance of the industrial working class, and those produced after the Labour electoral victory of 1964 which proved that it would now in general win because of the dying out of old pre-1919 non-Labour voters!
Once however the underlying features of the workers' movement are grasped, then the entire development of the British Labour Party in the twentieth century, including recent developments, is easily comprehensible. We might put it paradoxically, that Labour's vote held up on its old basis, not despite prosperity, as the bourgeois sociologists think, but because of prosperity. The space for the rightist Labour politics, able to impose itself against a working class politically weakened by imperialism, was only possible because of the historical economic strength of the British ruling class. The other major European working classes, facing far weaker enemies and in far less developed imperialist states, developed a far higher political class struggle and consciousness than in Britain. It is precisely for this reason that Labour's vote began to fall drastically not in a period of prosperity but precisely when that prosperity began to collapse.
The old Labour Party vote was cast in conditions when Labour, through extreme reformism, still granted something to the working class. The collapse of the imperialist conditions which gave rise to that possibility led inevitably to an initial fall in Labour's vote — as always consciousness initially lags behind reality.
But if this is the short term effect, what of the long term one? Here the trends can be seen by going beyond the average figures to the unevenness they cover over. We will look at two processes — the rise of the left wing inside the Labour Party symbolised by Bennism and the increasing geographical unevenness of the Labour Party vote. As we will see the two are not at all unconnected.
Labour's revival
The first thing to note is that the political geography of Britain is not at all random. The great bastion of Conservative power is the south of England outside London. Long before they became Labour strongholds Scotland, Wales, and the north of England were the great fortresses of the Liberals against the Tories. For example in the election of January 1910 the Liberals won 27 out of 34 seats in Wales and 59 out of 70 in Scotland.
These huge regional and national inequalities, which of course have their roots far earlier, have continued to show themselves throughout the twentieth century. Taking the elections in which the Labour and Tory parties came closest, the pattern shows up with great clarity. In 1929 the Conservatives only failed to win 53 out of 164 seats in southern England outside London, but could only win 51 out of 171 in northern England. In 1950 the Tories only lost 55 out of 199 southern England seats and only won 61 out of 169 in the north of England. In 1964 they only lost 49 out of 206 seats in southern England and won only 53 out of 167 in the north of England.
As regards the most recent elections the situation was well summarised in a recent study: 'At the 1979 general election it (Labour) won 62 per cent of the seats in Scotland and 58.3 per cent of the English seats. In each of the three most distant English regions from London — the North, North West, and Yorks and Humberside — it won a higher percentage of seats than in Scotland, in the North region over 80 per cent ... If the party were dependent on the seats it can win in England, its chances of achieving power would be slim indeed for it has not won 50 per cent of the English seats since 1951 except for 1966.'
Furthermore, while Labour's overall vote has declined it has actually strengthened its grip on those traditional bastions. This process was shown in its most extreme form in 1979 when Labour was severely defeated nationally but there was actually a swing in its favour in Scotland. In the words of Curtice and Stead surveying the 1979 election: 'We have witnessed at each election since 1959, stages in a long-term shift in the regional voting pattern ... The peripheral areas of Britain, with their higher unemployment, and the decline in the inner parts of the conurbations have become steadily more Labour.'
The Labour vote in these areas of course was always to a major degree, and increasingly is, of a different type to the class collaborationist vote which has declined with the demise of imperialist prosperity. These were the regions which never, even at the height of British capitalist success, benefited to the same degree from imperialist strength as did the south east of England.
Their political character is revealed not just in the proportion of votes for the Labour Party. Scotland and South Wales are also the traditional areas of support for the Communist Party — including when it was a revolutionary organisation. The most authentically revolutionary currents in the then British state prior to the Communist Party — James Connolly in Ireland and John MacLean in Scotland — also came from outside the English heartland. It has always been the south and south-east which have lagged. It is the consolidating grip of Labour on the Scottish, Welsh and north of England sections of the working class, not on the basis of imperialist prosperity but amid increasing economic oppression and misery, which offers the best omen for the future strength of the labour movement. For like it or not the north of England, Scotland, South Wales today show the picture of Britain tomorrow. Horrendous as it may seem, the days of Thatcherism [illegible] regarded as good old days of prosperity compared to what is to come as Britain's [illegible] decline continues. As this unfolds the labour movement's political grip will expand again to far wider layers of the country. But this time on a very different political basis to the old one of open class collaboration.
The significance of Bennism
The developments we have outlined above should not occasion any short term optimism as regards the majority trends in the political situation and the working class. On the contrary, for a whole period the decay of the old politics of Labourism will proceed far more rapidly than the building of an alternative which can fight back. Great defeats will be suffered even in addition to those already imposed and only in the course of a protracted period will these be overcome. The left wing of the British labour movement has its own 'long march' ahead of it. The wave of struggles of 1964-74, and the 'first round' of Bennism in 1979-81, are only the first shots in that prolonged struggle.
The majority of the labour movement and its entire traditional leadership faces to the past not the future. Any revival, any attempt to reconstitute the movement on a new basis will initially be the work of a minority. The minority in turn is not evenly distributed. On a scale of majorities in areas it is shown in Labour's consolidating grip, despite its overall decline, in its traditional fortresses. As majorities of particular layers of the working class it is shown inevitably first among the most advanced sections. The overwhelming votes of the miners for Scargill as president and Benn for the deputy leadership of the Labour party, when the trade union bureaucracy as a whole [illegible], is a reflection of a real situation. It is shown by the majority support among Labour activists for Benn while these are still a minority of the working class compared to the majority that support the old Labour line.
The forces who constitute the present basis for the reconstruction of the labour movement are clear to see: those who resisted the Malvinas war and its attendant carnival of chauvinism, those who resisted the TUC sell-out of ASLEF and are today supporting the health workers with deeds as well as words, the new recruits who are rallying to the Labour Party, building oppositions in the unions and making CND one of the largest campaigns in British history. Although individual workers will go beyond this, the majority politics of this current in the next period will be of a Bennite character, for the base of the Benn current — as opposed to its leaders who compose a section of the labour bureaucracy — precisely represents those sections of the working class who seek a militant political solution to the present crisis through the mass organisations.
For the immediate future the supporters of the 'new politics' will remain a minority, but as Britain slides further into decline, and providing the organisational strength of the labour movement continues to be sustained, they will win further support in Labour's heartlands as the vicious effects of [illegible] strike further and further home. For all its unavoidable ups and downs, Bennism is at the beginning of its development; what is dying is the rotten hulk of old Labour reformism: the tradition of MacDonald, Attlee, Gaitskell, Wilson, Callaghan and Foot. Once again the chance is there to build a movement in the tradition of Eleanor Marx, of Connolly, MacLean, Pankhurst, and the Communist Party in its revolutionary period. Alongside those who today follow Benn and Scargill, we must fight to win the working class to socialism for the whole of the above discussion underlines that this battle is not won but only embarked upon. Every kind of mass campaign, from industrial solidarity to nuclear disarmament, is a crucial element in this battle whose main field of contention, given their weight in society and their dominance of the Labour Party, will be the trade unions. The old Labourism has only a past; the 'old dogmas' of classical Marxism, however, are only just beginning their ascent inside the British working class.
John Ross is a leading member of the Fourth International.
References
1. Benn, Arguments for Socialism, Penguin, London 1980, p146.
2. Foot, Aneurin Bevan, Vol 2, Davis-Poynter, London 1973.
3. Thompson and Saville, The New Reasoner Vol 1 No 1, cited in Ali, The Coming British Revolution, Cape, London 1972 p197.
4. [illegible] Pelling, Origins of the Labour Party, OUP, London 1966.
5. We use the term 'British entryism' because it has absolutely nothing [illegible] advocated by Trotsky during the 1930s in Britain.
6. We here refer to the theoretical and political positions. The real basis of such currents is of course social — their accommodation to the strength of British imperialism.
7. See for example the material in The Politics of the Labour Party ed Kavanagh, George Allen and Unwin, London 1982. See also Kendall, The Labour Movement in Europe, Allen Lane, London 1975 from which all factual material in the following sections is taken unless otherwise specifically credited.
8. Kavanagh op cit p13.
9. Hobsbawm et al The Forward March of Labour Halted?, New Left Books, London, 1981 p1.
10. See Phil Hearse's critique of Hobsbawm et al in International Vol 7 No 1.
11. Trotsky — Through What Stage Are We Passing?
12. Lenin — Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism.
13. Trotsky — The Errors in Principle of Syndicalism, in Leon Trotsky on the Trade Unions, Pathfinder Press, New York 1975 p29.
14. [illegible] in International Vol 7 No 4.
15. Hobsbawm op cit p9-49.
16. See for example Crewe, 'The Labour Party and the Electorate' in Kavanagh op cit p9-49.
17. Calculated from Mitchell, Statistical Appendix, in The Fontana Economic History of Europe Vol 6 (2).
18. Panorama, 6 September 1982.
19. New Statesman 10 September 1982.
20. Blake, The Conservative Party from Peel to Churchill, Fontana, London 1976 p200.
21. Sharpe, 'The Labour Party and the Geography of Inequality, a Puzzle', in Kavanagh op cit p139.
22. Ibid p139.