Sean Creighton, Labour Heritage Secretary (2002-04) explains why regardless of where individuals stand on the Old and New Labour divide, the 100th Anniversary of the change of the name of the Labour Representation Committee to the Labour Party in 2006 provides CLPs the opportunity to reflect on the way Labour has developed, and to celebrate their local histories and contributions.

The future of Labour History : a Discussion Note

Introduction

 Most contributions to debate on where Labour history is going have tended to be made by academics. There are a lot of us involved in Labour history at different levels who are not academics. We fit our interest, our reading, research and writing into those gaps of time between work, families, and community, political and social life.

I have been lucky in that as a freelance administrator and researcher from 1989-2000 I was able to undertake the occasional piece of paid historical research, some of which has linked directly to my own personal research interests (Battersea & Wandsworth Labour movement history), and others which have given me a new way of looking at the broad context of those interests (community, family, black, sport, and friendly society history).

I pursue my historical interests partly out of personal interest, and partly because I think that it is important for community and political activists seeking to change society today to understand how things have arrived at where they are, and for those activists to have some knowledge (even if not understanding) of the history of the movement(s) that they are part of, and of the organisations of which they are members.

 Specialisation

I regard Labour history as multi-faceted within which there are lots of specialist histories: the working class in general; the labour movement as a whole; the individual political organisations such as the Labour Party and the former Communist Party; and other forms of organisation, including certain types of friendly societies, the trade unions and the co-operatives; workplace, community, women, leisure, etc. Obviously historians have to specialise, but specialisation can lead to fragmentation, to forgetting that each specialism only gives a partial picture, to delusions that your own specialism is more important than others, for being lost in trees, failing to see the shape of the wood and the changes it is undergoing.

I frequently find myself frustrated reading books on labour history, especially those that present a national view. Movements and organisations with large scale followings are essentially made up of supporters at local level. Leaders usually cannot emerge nationally without a local base. That local base is provided by activists and supporters. Yet the work carried out at local level, of trying to understand those local bases often seems to be regarded as secondary. For instance, I see the same old hostile arguments trotted out about John Burns accepting a post in the Liberal Government from 1906, usually based on the critiques of his SDF opponents at the time, totally ignoring the support for his action within the broader Labour movement in Battersea, and indeed welcomed at the time by the TUC. I do not see how John Burns can be understood without understanding that local base and his relationship with it, especially given that the newly constituted reformist-revolutionary alliance Battersea Trades Council & Labour Party under the 1918 Constitution wanted him as one of its prospective Parliamentary candidates for the Khaki Election, even if at the end he declined because he refused to accept the discipline of the Parliamentary Labour Party.

Loss of Purpose

Labour historians seem to have lost their way; they have lost a sense of purpose. There are a number of reasons for this.

Labour history may have gathered strength in the 1960s, but it did so at a time when the Labour movement itself was setting in place a fundamental change in its organisational structure. It separated off the Trades Councils from the Labour Parties. As the years have gone by the links at local level between Parties and trade unions have got weaker and weaker to the point where so many activists, lacking a historical understanding or practical experience of the link, succumbed to anti-union attacks. The national leadership felt it had to distance the Party further by weakening the involvement of the trade unions at national level.  

The Influence of Thatcherism

Triggered by Thatcherism's success Eric Hobsbawm's The Forward March of Labour Halted? debate set in motion a strong wave of negativeness and hopelessness among many activists, especially in the Communist Party. The Communist Party journal Marxism Today, which had published many fine pieces of Labour history, turned its back on history and stopped publishing such articles. A whole intellectual industry was born telling us that socialism and the labour movement were dead and Thatcherism was triumphant. This reaction contributed to her success. Although she vowed to, she did not actually need to kill off socialism. The Labour Party got scared and did it itself.

It is interesting to note that the death of the Communist Party sparked off a lively historical debate about its influence. This has allowed us to look back and ponder what the Labour movement might have been like nationally and at local level if it had not organisationally fractured in the early 1920s. Some of the product of such history may be regarded by some in derogatory terms as archaeology, but archaeology is precisely what is needed. It has been 'archaeological' digging that gave us Labour, working class, feminist and black history. The main job still facing labour historians is the archaeological digging at the level of the locality and of the organisations. The real problem is that Labour history is in danger of becoming 'antiquarian'. Labour history has become 'safe' to study. It no longer engages with the practice of creating its own next phase. It is safely locked inside obscure and expensive journals and books. It does not know how to communicate to a mass audience through the organisations of the Labour movement.

By the mid-1990s some of the organisations themselves seemed to care little about their own history and stopped encouraging their members to have some knowledge about it. This has been particularly the case with the national Labour Party. A debate was started at the May AGM 1996 of Labour Heritage about its role and whether it should continue to exist. The decision taken was that it should continue.

The Problem of Old and New Labour

There are a number of problems in relation to the organisation and promotion of Labour Party history within the Party (and indeed outside as well).

In its reshaping of the Party the New Labour project has adopted a strong anti-historical outlook. The history of the Labour Party is that of 'Old Labour'. 'New Labour' has been busy wiping the historic slate clean ready to make a new history. However the history of the Party cannot be totally ignored and lip-service is paid in a half-hearted way on selective parts of it, like the 1945 Labour Victory.

The membership composition of the Labour Party has changed dramatically as a result of the New Labour project. Those recruited since Tony Blair became Leader have done so at a time when the history and values of the Labour Party have been denigrated by the leadership. Unless local CLPs act, the audience for the consumption of the Party's history decreases dramatically.

The valuing of local Labour Party initiative, of the individuals who helped to shape and run local communities, has not been part of the New Labour project. Indeed in order to re-shape the Party, to create discipline, it has actively devalued, by-passing the official CLP structures, and increasing centralised interference in the affairs of local CLPs.

The anti-historic and centralist tendencies of New Labour are in contradiction to the positive elements of its message: its talk about decentralisation of power, of local and central government partnership, of valuing the role of local government, of involving people, of creating a participative democracy in opposition to the erosion of local government and expansion of state centralism under the Tories, and of re-building community. These positive aspects of the New Labour project are meaningless unless there is a celebration of the contribution the Party has made in the past to those concepts in practice.

A Party not rooted in an understanding and value of its past risks sliding into being a populist Party reacting to the changing whims of manipulated public opinion. Until the invasion of Iraq was this not what New Labour had become?

Working Towards 2006

Regardless of where individuals stand on the Old and New Labour divide, the 100^th Anniversary of the change of the name of the Labour Representation Committee to the Labour Party in 2006 provides CLPs the opportunity to reflect on the way Labour has developed, and to celebrate their local histories and contributions.

Sean Creighton

Secretary

Labour Heritage