Sean Creighton, Labour Heritage Secretary (2002-04), explains why he thinks the history of the Labour movement and the Labour Party is important today. If we want the fundamental changes needed now we need to re-build the faith of ordinary people that their collective voice and action can have an affect.

There is a fundamental contradiction at the heart of New Labour.

On the one hand it wants citizens to be actively involved in the decisions that affect them in the neighbourhoods, local authorities and regions in which they live. This is central to the Urban White Paper, Neighbourhood Renewal, regeneration and social inclusion strategies.
On the other hand it has disempowered its own members, and belittled the historic achievements of Labour movement and Party activists – Old Labour as it calls them.

The legacy of the Labour movement in its widest sense from the 18th Century was the creation of collective organisations through which the social injustices of capitalism could be challenged and through which support services could be provided when workers and their families needed it. These included the benefits and medical services provided by the friendly societies and trade unions, unadulterated food and other goods at fair prices through the retail co-operatives, home ownership along with which increasingly went the vote through building societies, social and leisure activities through the working men’s and miners’ welfare clubs and education activities through the co-operative societies, trade unions and then through the Workers’ Educational Association which celebrates its 100th Anniversary in January.

At the political level a range of organisations fought for the extension of the vote to include men and later women. The organised Labour movement broke through into Parliament in 1892 and then in local government, and campaigned and when in power developed public services. And while there were disagreements over strategy and tactics, there was a vision to achieve social justice and equal opportunities as a minimum and the overthrow or transformation of capitalism into socialism as a maximum.

Without this legacy there would have been no Labour Government in 1945 with its breakthrough in the development of public services, especially the Health Service. While public services were never perfect, they began to be damaged when Labour took a wrong turn in 1976 with the deal with the International Monetary Fund, culminating in the Winter of Discontent, and laying the foundations for the Thatcherite attack on the organised Labour movement and its legacy and its attempt to destroy support for socialism in the UK. When New Labour gained power in 1997 it inherited a legacy of tremendous damage not just to services and employment, but to thousands of communities, and more importantly to millions of people who had been thrown by Thatcherism onto the scrap heap with public services crumbling around them.

The Government recognises that it will take 15-20 years to reverse the damage. It wants to mobilse people, but it continues to marginalise the very organisations that gave it birth, the trade unions, and to hamstring its members.

The Labour movement from the 19th Century and Labour Party political support in the 20th Century were built from below. It is precisely why remembering and celebrating that past history, warts and all, is important. It is the clear message coming out of Barbara’s review of Ealing Labour Party which is on sale on the bookstall. (“The roots of Labour in a West London Suburb-Ealing in the 1930s” by Barbara Humphries)

If we want the fundamental changes needed now we need to re-build the faith of ordinary people that their collective voice and action can have an affect. The history of the Labour movement and Party shows that this was done in the past. New forms of collective organisation are coming into being: especially the diverse range of community organisations. Instead of seeing them as a threat Labour Councilors should see them as allies, moulded in the same tradition out of which the Labour movement and the Party itself grew: collective action to address poverty and what we now call social exclusion, to obtain social and economic justice and create a fairer society.”