CHAPTER FOUR
‘The Labour Party has never been a socialist party,
although there have always been socialists in it.’
Tony Benn
After the political skirmishes of the immediate post-war government, Labour in opposition saw an outbreak of factionalism and open ideological warfare in the party. Two men became synonymous with this struggle: Nye Bevan on the left and Hugh Gaitskell on the right. The intensity of the conflict throughout the decade pushed the broad church to breaking point and raised existential questions about the nature of Labour as a party and its strategy in post-war Britain. By the early 1960s peace had resumed under the leadership of Harold Wilson, apparently with neither side able to claim an outright victory.
The background was Bevan’s rebellion in the early 1950s. The Korean conflict had just turned the Cold War hot and President Truman appealed to the UN, and in particular Britain, to back up the US intervention in the south. Attlee had proposed cutting back on social policy as a calculated sacrifice to support British militarism. The anti-communist mood was so prevalent by this point that there was complete unity in the Cabinet over support for the US and the South Koreans. The main concern Bevan and others had was to ensure that the military campaign did not detract from the social welfare programmes. However the US demanded more and more money be spent on the war machine. They forced Britain to spend £100 million on NATO, taking the UK’s military expenditure up to 7.5% of GDP.1 Attlee agreed to a three-year rearmament programme that would in the end amount to £3,600 million. Bevan was amazed ‘how quickly the parsimonious treasury voted for money for arms, but nothing else’.2
Bevan and his handful of allies argued passionately that the scale of the military expenditure was simply unrealisable unless cuts were made to social spending. Finally he found a line he was not willing to cross. His worst fears were confirmed when Gaitskell introduced a bill that proposed taking teeth and eye treatment off the NHS. Bevan, a proud man with the NHS as his crowning achievement, threatened to resign if the bill was pursued. Attlee tried to convince him not to go, but when the bill was introduced, Bevan felt he had no choice. Along with John Freeman and Harold Wilson, he resigned his Cabinet post. He saw the cuts as a betrayal of the founding principle of the NHS: that it would provide health care ‘from cradle to grave’.
There was widespread support for Bevan among the membership but his resignation provoked a tide of abuse in the media, who roundly condemned him as an egotist, a frustrated careerist and a self-isolating fool for his actions. One Labour MP derided Bevan’s supporters as ‘an uneasy coalition of well-meaning emotionalists, rejects, frustrates, crack pots, and fellow-travellers’.3 Such was the official view of the Bevanite movement at its birth. After their resignation, the bullish left MPs published a pamphlet called One Way Only. Their argument was that they were only appealing to the policies of 1945 and that it was the Attlee government that had gone back on them in recent years. The strength of this approach was that the MPs appeared to the rank and file not as insurgent disruptors but as continuators of the spirit of 1945. This was why, when the party leadership couldn’t deny that the polices had not been implemented, they ‘had to resort to personal vilification, bureaucratic manoeuvres and petty tyranny’.4
The first shots of what became regarded in Labour folklore as the ‘civil war’ in the party were heard in Parliament in March 1952. When a motion on rearmament was being discussed, Bevan’s supporters put forward a motion condemning the expenditure. The controversy opened up running battles over the balance between welfare and warfare, with the left still urging the government to do more for the poor and working class at home instead of spending money on wars on behalf of the United states. When 57 MPs voted with Bevan against the party whips, the fires of the right were stoked. For them the rearmament debate was all about proving that Labour was a reliable political ally of Washington and could play its role in the fight against communism. To them the Bevanite rebellion smacked of irresponsible posturing, and they suspected the Bevanites of being backed by Moscow.
To many in the party outside of the hallowed chambers of Parliament the stance of the left MPs was exemplary. At the 1952 conference Bevan supporters won seven out of the eight CLP representative seats on the NEC. Bevan’s popularity with the rank and file in the CLPs saw him voted top of this list. Right-wing leaders like Morrison and Dalton were unceremoniously ejected from the NEC, a slight that enraged the establishment and many of the trade union leaders. The fury against the Bevanites was also a response to the fear that they represented a genuine movement in the party and – most ominously – in the unions. The relative stability in the trade union movement – during the years where the grassroots was quiet and obedient to the bureaucracy – was unravelling as a stable economy and full employment emboldened union members. Bevanism captured a mood across the workers’ movement for a new kind of politics and a return of the hopes of 1945.
What Was Bevanism?
The 1950s was a decade of increasing class struggle. Three times as many days were lost to strike action in 1955 compared to 1951. At the same time the Tories were bending over backwards to include the union leaders in their governmental decision-making – regular meetings with the TUC and heads of key unions were sought by ministers. Arguably the Tories pursued an integrationist strategy better than the Labour Party did. Although the Tories re-privatised road haulage, iron and steel, they were generally committed to social welfare and maintaining full employment.5 As the unions grew and strengthened, some workers became suspicious of their union leaders and concerned that they were too friendly with the Conservatives. Memories of the shooting of strikers and the defeat of the general strike in the inter-war years still lingered for many militants.
It was also a time of mass migration, starting with the Empire Windrush in 1948 and continuing under the Tories as the rapid expansion of industry and the public sector created a labour shortage that had to be made up from abroad. However, the mass immigration quickly became a political football as reactionary forces flocked to racist and nationalist arguments, initiating the kind of racism that has come to characterise mainstream politics subsequently.
In this world, the Labour left faced an uncertain future. As the predicted Tory barbarity failed to materialise and the boom continued, the question loomed as to what kind of politics Labour would need in order to win power again. Bevan’s book In Place of Fear set the right tone for many in the party. In his passionate but rambling style, Bevan made the case for a collective vision against individualism and for the fulfilment of the promises of 1945 – in essence, for Labour to retain the spirit of its policies from the 1930s. In Place of Fear describes a country divided between property and poverty, with democracy as a mediating arena of struggle; in Britain’s case this meant Parliament. If ‘democratic parliaments under private property, under capitalism, are the professional public mourners for private economic crimes’, the key was to turn Parliament into a bastion for working-class resistance: ‘the function of parliamentary democracy, under universal franchise, historically considered, is to expose wealth-privilege to the attack of the people. It is a sword pointed at the heart of property power.’ Whereas the Socialist League had thought about the problems of power and how to exercise it, Bevan believed in a neutral Parliament that was there for the taking at any general election. This unproblematic view of the state meant that the problems of the post-war state-ownership model were only seen from the perspective of improving ministerial oversight and the allocation of civil servants; at no point does Bevan mention workers’ control of industry or even the issue of joint ownership.6
Bevan’s commitment to the neutrality and centrality of Parliament meant that he singularly failed to critically examine the role of the state at all, demonstrating a thoroughly ambiguous and confused attitude towards it. This is even more surprising given that he had experienced what the Socialist League in the 1930s had only theorised: that when faced with an actual encroachment into the profits and power of the capitalists by a Labour government there would be determined resistance. The combat over iron and steel nationalisation clearly confirmed the fears about ruling-class sabotage of a reforming Labour government, even if it enjoyed an unassailable parliamentary majority. But it also demonstrated something more: the true nature of power in society, and that while Parliament was considered sacrosanct by Labour, the capitalists were happy to undermine it and operate against it when they felt the need.
Nevertheless Bevanism was a powerful mood across the party, distrustful of compromise and wanting to see more resolute action – though actual policy differences were vaguer. To spread their message across the party the core left leadership operated as two ‘Brain Trusts’. To broaden their reach outside of the bear pit of Parliament, their role was to tour the country speaking at CLPs and union meetings to explain the politics and the arguments of the parliamentary left. The first Brain Trust was made up of left-wing MPs, who were supported by the ‘Second XI’ composed of prospective parliamentary candidates. In addition the movement had support from Tribune, now moving in a left-wing direction, and the New Statesman. This linked them to well-known left-wing activists across the CLPs, tapping into ‘some of the rebellious vitality of the ranks’.7 The Bevan group on the NEC and in the PLP saw themselves, and were seen more so by their enemies, as the mouthpiece for rank-and-file discontent with the drift in policy.
Disciplining the Left
The Bevanite movement threatened the established hierarchy in a number of ways. Bevan himself was an established leader and popular with rank-and-file members. Still basking in the glory of the NHS and his principled resignation over cuts, many saw him as a staunch class fighter. The Bevanites also threatened a staple component of bureaucratic rule, since they provided alternative channels of communication across the party. The Brain Trust meetings were popular, dynamic and totally out of the control of Transport House.8 Through Foot they had Tribune and through Crossman, the New Statesman. For the right, the real threat was that Bevanism might spread from the party and into the trade unions, challenging internal power relations and established cliques of control. The right had to act quickly to cauterise the wound. Gaitskell damned the movement, labelling it an organised conspiracy; others denounced it (unfairly) as a ‘party within a party’.
But it was the success at the Morecombe conference that triggered an almighty backlash from party leadership. To stop them organising, Bevanite MPs were banned from meeting separately. At the PLP meeting in March 1952 it was agreed, for the first time since 1945, to reintroduce the standing orders that restricted the freedoms of the MPs. The allegation made by the right was that the Bevanites were ‘a special group within the party, organised, secret, and with their own whips’.9 The Bevanites denied this – they weren’t that well organised! This actually spurred on the left: the re-imposition of standing orders forced the movement out into the wider party and the unions, creating a much more destabilising situation for the party establishment.
This development demonstrated one usually unspoken but cast-iron law of the labour movement: while militants are tolerated episodically in the unions or in the party, they must not be allowed to combine their efforts. Even more intolerable is that a prominent left Labourite should be seen to interfere in the internal workings of the unions against their entrenched leaderships – that was something that no union bureaucrat would accept. As a result, Bevanism, in the words of Leslie Hunter, ‘came into a head-on collision with the leaders of the big trades unions’.10
A key battle was over the docks. Some dockers had criticised the head of the TGWU, Arthur Deakin, and left to form a new union. Tribune covered their strike and the new union sympathetically, which outraged the right. Backing a left union movement was simply unacceptable. Deakin moved to end the subsidy for Tribune from Transport House. The Daily Herald regularly published critical articles against Bevan and his allies. Tribune was rounded on by Gaitskell: ‘it is time to end the attempt at mob rule by a bunch of frustrated journalists’, he thundered.11 These attacks were both personal and demagogic, redolent with the whiff of fear from the establishment when a potential radical force emerges. In response the Bevanite MPs urged CLPs to send in letters of complaint to The Daily Herald.
Deakin and other right-wingers in the TUC hated Bevan but they couldn’t accuse him of being middle class. After all, he was the son of a miner from the Welsh Valleys – the King of Tredegar during the 1926 strike. He had impeccable working-class credentials, whereas Gaitskell was a lecturer by trade and from a well-to-do family. But this did not stop Deakin, the General Secretary of the TGWU, from siding with Gaitskell on every major question. When Bevan stood for treasurer against Gaitskell in 1954 he was furious when he found out that the Durham miners had backed the other candidate. ‘How can you support a public schoolboy from Winchester against a man born in the back streets of Tredegar?’, he demanded to know of Sam Watson, the miners’ leader.12 Clearly bureaucratic ties were thicker than class loyalty. Bevan stood for the leadership after Attlee stepped down in 1955 but only 26 per cent of the PLP backed him – 58 per cent supported Gaitskell.
A central part of the right’s strategy was expulsions and threats of expulsions. The union bosses worked with Transport House to root out the Bevanite ‘lost sheep’ from the party. During the meeting that had re-imposed standing orders on the PLP, a number of right-wing MPs demanded the heads of those who had voted against the whips. The calls for expulsion grew louder in 1954–5, culminating in the Shadow Cabinet moving to expel Bevan from the PLP after he criticised Attlee in the Commons once too often. When it became known that Labour was supporting nuclear testing, Bevan rounded on Attlee and demanded to know if he would use nuclear weapons in the event of a conventional military attack. Flustered and angry, Attlee and his allies had the whip withdrawn from Bevan. He was then summoned to Transport House for a three-hour meeting where he was forced to apologise to Attlee personally and to the party generally for his regular critical interventions in Parliament. Deakin had been quite keen to secure Bevan’s expulsion, but the Tredegar socialist narrowly escaped this fate – the NEC voted to censure him but not expel him by 15 votes to 10.13 It is a testimony to the extent of this ideological clash how far Bevan had come from being the hero of the NHS to being so reviled by his erstwhile comrades only a few years later.
Bevan was partially saved by the looming general election. Labour couldn’t afford to expel such a prominent and well-liked figure just before a public holding to account of their policies and suitability for government. The leadership was concerned about the huge level of support Bevan had across the party – CLPs up and down the country rushed to his defence, passing motions and sending them to Transport House. However, the general election defeat in 1955 and the near miss of his expulsion clearly exhausted Bevan. Although he finally became treasurer of the party in 1956, he was a man looking for some kind of conciliation with the leadership, worn down by the constant tension and friction at the centre of the party.
...All its Faults, All its Dangers
Left politics in the mid to late 1950s was dominated by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Many on the Labour left at this time were active in CND, which had been formed in 1957. Despite its apparent single-issue focus, it acted more like a lightning rod for a whole range of left issues – nuclear weapons were simply seen as the most odious and dangerous development of recent times. Membership of CND was
not simply a token of the individual’s opposition to the Bomb, but a capsule statement of his position on a variety of unrelated issues which the Bomb was felt to symbolise ... the average CND supporter would be opposed ... to capital punishment, racial discrimination, the monarchy, capitalism and religion, and if religious, to the church ... None of the political parties truly catered for this form of global radicalism. While electorally the majority of CND supported the Labour Party, they made it plain that this was largely faute de mieux [for want of a better alternative].14
The debate on nuclear weapons was thus a debate about a lot more besides, and victory on that question represented for the left a step forward on all the other issues as well.
The mainstream media attacked CND as a tool of the communists and an ancillary for Moscow, dismissing it as a group of well-meaning but dangerous pacifists who would disarm Britain in the face of her enemies. Although CND was in fact very moderate in its demands, the scaremongering and attacks by the establishment gave it an aura of radicalism. Unfortunately these attacks came from the very establishment that CND hoped to influence. The wedding of the Labour right to the state and class interests of the ruling elites meant that any talk of reducing Britain’s role in the world or taking the country out of NATO was anathema. The party’s official position was in favour of global disarmament, but on the condition that Britain would only eliminate its nuclear weapon programme when other states did the same – multilateralism. The grassroots members, who had no wish to see nuclear war and no loyalty to US-led military alliances, felt very differently. The extent of the support for CND in the party CLPs and from the newly elected TGWU General Secretary Frank Cousins with his huge block vote was a very real threat to the multilateralist position. In addition, Victory for Socialism, a small grouping made up of pro-Soviet and pacifist thinkers in Parliament, was working to secure a unilateralist disarmament position. Faced with over 150 motions to the 1957 conference calling on Labour to adopt a position for unilateral disarmament, the NEC was very worried about losing the vote.
Then the left met an unexpected opponent at conference – Bevan. When the motion on nuclear weapons came up, he rose to speak. He explained that he was against nuclear weapons but that unilateral disarmament was impossible – nuclear weapons had to be dismantled internationally, not just in one country. Bevan was clearly concerned about Britain’s role in the world – just as Bevin had been in the 1945 government. He rounded on conference delegates: would they send a foreign secretary ‘naked into the conference chamber’ of the UN? He described the proposal as ‘not a policy but an emotional spasm’.
Bevan’s siding with the leadership shocked and distressed many of his followers in the party. His powerful and passionate rhetoric in the service of the right brought many of his followers to tears as they saw their leader turn on them. As his speech reached its climax, the left-wing delegates sitting in the front rows heckled him, begging him to stop (‘Don’t do it Nye!’). Bevan finished and sat down to cheers from the right who saw that their bête noir was now on their side. Even one MP from the right of the party felt dismayed: ‘When Bevan sat down, I had to get up and go away. I couldn’t stand any more. I felt as if I had been present at a murder – the murder of the enthusiasm that has built the Labour movement.’15 The motion on unilateralism was defeated by 5.8 million votes to 781,000. Even Cousins couldn’t vote for it. He consulted his delegation, urging them to vote for disarmament, but was outvoted 14–16, so the TGWU cast its vote to keep Britain’s nuclear weapons.
Why did Bevan do it? A number of theories abound. His old ally Tom Driberg argued that it was a ‘sacrifice [of] his personal convictions for the sake of the unity of the party’.16 One wonders when the right has made similar sacrifices. Others have concluded that Bevan supported the bomb to assist in strengthening the non-aligned (Third Force) movement, or possibly simply to defend Britain against foreign influence.17 This is a similar conclusion to the one Ralph Miliband drew in 1961, that Bevan viewed unilateralism as a threat to the intricate web of foreign relations Britain was enmeshed in and that such a policy would reduce the influence and power of a ‘Socialist Foreign Minister’ (Bevan was Shadow Foreign Secretary at the time) to forge multilateralism among other nations.18 He may have wanted a return to the Third Force movement of the Keep Left days, where Britain, Yugoslavia and India could form an alliance against west and east, but this was just a dream. Bevan was a radical at home but had an integrationist Achilles Heel when it came to international relations; he couldn’t break from the Labour right on this central question, and in the end this was what demobilised his movement.
Whatever the individual motivations of their leader, the Bevanites never recovered from their namesake’s defection. Although Bevanism as a mood or a movement was always much larger than just one man, with implantation in the unions and across the CLPs, it had ultimately allowed itself to become defined by the whims of the King of Tredegar. The collapse of Bevanism provides one of the most salutary and essential lessons for the Labour left – never rely on a single leader, especially one with the extraordinary pressure of parliamentary politics bearing down on them. Bevan himself – as he had said to Lee about the party years earlier – demonstrated all the faults, all the dangers of Labour, a party integrated into a militarist concept of Britain as a nuclear armed power.
A Class That No Longer Exists
When Labour lost its third general election in a row in 1959, some concluded that the party simply couldn’t win any more. Harold Macmillan’s claim that ‘you’ve never had it so good’ reverberated around the country, fridges in kitchens and cars in driveways giving the appearance of middle-class life extending across all of society. With low unemployment, an increase in housing and a functioning welfare state, the old class antagonisms seemed temporarily ameliorated (though never eliminated). This was the spur for the ‘revisionist’ controversy in Labour. There followed pronouncements that the old class arguments were dead and buried, that, in the words of Douglas Jay, Labour was ‘in danger of fighting under the label of a class which no longer exists’.19
The revisionists were led by Gaitskell, whom many people thought Bevan was probably referring to when he talked of the danger of a party leader being a ‘desiccated calculating machine’. Gaitskell was certainly a calculating bureaucrat, and the first Labour leader to consciously advocate the triangulation of electoralism towards the middle classes as the party’s central strategy. Previous generations had argued that compromises were a temporary pause on the long march to socialism.20 But now they sought out a permanent electoral alliance with the middle classes through a clear moderation of their policies.
Revisionists like Tony Crosland argued that with the mixed economy, full employment and a rising standard of living, capitalism as it was widely understood had ceased to exist in Britain. Property was no longer the issue – the state sector already encompassed enough of the economy to leave the rest of it susceptible to Keynesian measures to end unemployment and poverty. What mattered now was equality under the rubric of social democracy, not socialism.21 Under the post-war consensus, the shift to the left in Britain was now permanent, and the unions enjoyed more freedom and power than business did, even under a Tory government. Gone was the class-struggle rhetoric of the past, instead more nebulous values such as social justice became common currency. Bevan accurately described the differences as being ‘between those who want the mainsprings of economic power transferred to the community and those who believe that private enterprise should still remain supreme but that its worst characteristics should be modified by liberal ideas of justice and equality’.22
One Bevanite, Richard Crossman, wanted to engage with these ideas rather than merely dismiss them. He agreed that Labour had to find a new path but disagreed that the only battles left were over social justice and wealth redistribution. Instead he argued that the rise of corporatism represented a threat to democracy and that Labour had to ‘prevent the concentration of power in the hands of either industrial or state bureaucracies’.23 His response was to place nationalised industries in the control of both Parliament and the workers themselves – a form of industrial democracy. Sadly Crossman had abandoned these ideas by the early 1960s.
Following the 1959 electoral disappointment, Gaitskell again turned on the left, blaming them and the public association of the Labour-union link for the defeat. The result was an attempt to amend Clause IV at conference.24 The Gaitskellites misjudged the situation and overstretched themselves – the idea of social ownership encapsulated in Clause IV still held a place in the heart of the workers’ movement that many were not yet ready to abandon. The unions resisted ditching Clause IV and the proposal was defeated. Even right-wing leaders who would have died in a ditch to support Gaitskell against Bevanism were not willing to compromise on Clause IV, producing a rare moment of unity between the unions and the left. Bevan, in his last speech to conference, explained why he thought Clause IV should remain: ‘Are we going to send a message from this great Labour movement, which is the father and mother of modern democracy and modern socialism, that we in Blackpool in 1959 have turned our backs on our principles because of a temporary unpopularity in a temporarily affluent society?’25
In a sense the revisionists were just being honest – Clause IV was largely a symbolic commitment written into the 1918 constitution. Although it was successfully defended on this occasion, in the daily practice of Labour governments to come, Gaitskell was proven right. Despite the symbolic victory of saving Clause IV, it had no impact on subsequent Labour governments. The defence of the Clause by the left only slowed down the march of the revisionists, it did not stop them. The party was committed to an integrationist strategy by this time, informed as much by tradition as by choice, and the left was not sufficiently well organised or politically clear enough about an alternative. A simple defence was not enough; there was a desperate need for a sharper understanding of what socialism under Labour would look like. Nostalgia for Old Labour was becoming an emotional spasm, not a clear guide to politics.
Unilateralism Wins
Continuing the rumbling battles over foreign policy, this period saw the left–right split intensify over the continued question of unilateral disarmament. After three years of campaigning and cajoling, the movement behind unilateralism was gaining strength, helped by Frank Cousins and the might of the TGWU. There were mass annual demonstrations with thousands of people marching to the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston. Many CND protestors looked to Labour as their natural political ally. At the 1959 party conference the unilateralist motion garnered over 2.7 million votes, and a growing number of labour organisations were now committed to dismantling British nuclear weapons. The 1960 conference in Scarborough was clearly going to be a historic showdown. Foot, writing in Tribune just before the conference, urged delegates to seize the opportunity afforded by Cousins’ public backing of the left on the issue: ‘Scarborough will be momentous,’ he concluded. ‘No-one can doubt that. Either it will mark the rebirth of the party or the name will become the symbol for tragic and dismal confusion.’26
To the surprise of many, the conference motion in favour of unilateralism passed, against the instructions of the NEC. The mood was jubilant among the rank and file, though there was a certain naive belief that the conference vote had settled the matter. In fact, CND was unprepared for the victory and had no plans for how to follow through and ensure the conference position was adopted by the wider party. By contrast, the party’s leaders knew exactly what to do. Their response was instructive for two reasons. Firstly, due to the vote taking place in a year with no general election, the change in policy had no impact at all on the message coming from most MPs after the conference. After Gaitskell lobbied hard among the union leaders (appealing to their ‘common sense’ – there was a general election on the horizon after all), he successfully outmanoeuvred Cousins and the decision was reversed the following year, causing no real upset for the political line or functioning of the Labour Party nationally. Secondly, Gaitskell furiously defended his right to speak publicly against the position even if it was passed. He declared that MPs would ignore the vote, defying the conference delegates: ‘So what do you expect them to do: Go back on the pledges they gave the people who elected them from their constituencies? … Do you think that we can become overnight the pacifists, unilateralists and fellow-travellers that other people are?’ He announced to the assembled delegates that he and his comrades would ‘fight, fight and fight again to save the party I love’, which meant overturning the motion at the next conference and decisively beating the left. He admitted that the conference was essentially powerless to alter the PLP’s course: ‘The place to decide the leadership is not here but in the Parliamentary Labour Party.’27 Many delegates were left wondering what the point of conference was if that was the case.
To Gaitskell’s credit at least he was honest. He truly believed, as almost every other Labour leader has done, that MPs should not be bound by conference decisions. What hope did the rank and file have when the parliamentarians were so intent on maintaining their autonomy?28 The 1960 conference became infamous for many activists. The sheer obstinacy of the parliamentarians exposed just how little the membership could hold their representatives to account. It was a difficult lesson to learn.29
Rebels With a Cause
After the third electoral defeat in 1959, the NEC launched a revamp of the party to appeal beyond its traditional voter base. Internal polling data had found the party significantly underperformed among newer, younger voters – the prevalence of white hair among Labour MPs did not help, and the party had not had a functioning youth organisation for several years. Some Labour branches had ‘youth sections’ attached to them, but there were no official national or regional structures. The insurgent feeling among many younger members led to demands for a genuine national organisation for the young people, especially as they were becoming more involved in campaigns and issues like unilateralism. Rather than lose an entire generation to CND, a new organisation was proposed – named Young Socialists (YS) – that would be run centrally but with some limited activities designed to attract younger activists. YS was partly intended to head off the groundswell of support that Keep Left, a rank-and-file publication unrelated to the old Keep Left group, was getting. Keep Left was clearly run by Trotskyists and was organising among younger members of the party, gaining a hearing for its socialist arguments. The NEC thought it was better to integrate the youth into something controllable than allow autonomy to run amok.
This was a time of shifting cultural values and challenges to the status quo. The emerging youth counter-culture of the 1950s – rock and roll, short skirts and teenage rebellion – was a factor in the revival of the radical left. Criticisms of western consumerist culture entwined with a growing mistrust of the Soviet bloc. The crushing of the Hungarian revolution by Soviet tanks in 1956 had exposed the reactionary nature of Stalinism to a whole new generation, while in Britain the sense of alienation and cultural despondency among many young people was palpable. This was the era of literature written by ‘angry young men’, where the vituperative play Look Back in Anger by John Osborne captured a mood. Mods and Rockers battled it out on Brighton beach as different youth subcultures reacted to the new economic situation in different ways, resisting or subverting the dominant values of the time. Consumer capitalism, so lauded by their parents, seemed like a cultural wasteland for many of the baby-boomer generation.
The new youth organisation was one of the few success stories coming out of Labour in the early 1960s. YS blossomed to over 700 branches within the space of a few years. Where YS groups had become active in campaigns, ranging from supporting the Glasgow Apprentices strike to campaigning against apartheid in South Africa, they reported significant gains in membership. The Wigan branch in particular achieved astounding growth, with over 300 joining in a couple of months through what was called ‘Wiganisation’: mixing politics with social events to attract working-class youth interested in more than just bland committee meetings.
There were also organisational concessions that allowed debate and ideological struggle to emerge in a more structured way. YS was permitted to have its own conference, though its leadership would be selected from regional delegates, accompanied by three enforcers from the NEC to ensure that things did not get out of hand. The constitution of the new organisation was fixed and unamendable, it even banned political discussion on a range of topics, but at least there was now a functioning youth section that could advise the NEC on youth matters – a step forward. The NEC also proposed a youth paper to be edited by an appointed person, though it did specify that ‘the member of the Transport House staff in charge of the publication will himself be a Young Socialist’.30 A young man named Roger Protz was assigned the job but resigned within months, claiming that Transport House was running the magazine and he was just a token figurehead. Within months of his resignation he became the editor of Keep Left.
Some new YS groups began to resist the control of Transport House. In 1960, as part of the move to co-opt the youth into the party mainstream, the NEC instructed two YS branches to desist from sponsoring Keep Left. The magazine hit back in its next issue with the headline: ‘Our reply to the disrupters and witch-hunters on the NEC: we shall not shut down this paper’. Another 26 YS branches signed up as sponsors. There was a growing sense that Transport House was out of line by censoring the youth.
The first YS conference in 1961, meeting just six months after the events of the Scarborough debacle, ignored the ban on discussing certain topics and passed a range of left motions on nationalisation, leaving NATO, withdrawal of troops from the colonies, and – most controversially – unilateralism. They also overwhelmingly passed a motion calling on Gaitskell to resign, which infuriated the NEC. There was another showdown between Gaitskellites and socialists at the following conference where – although the Labour Party had by now backed down on its unilateralist position – the YS conference again passed motions in favour of unilateralism and calling for Gaitskell to resign. Frustration with the manoeuvrings of party bureaucrats at May Day rallies in London and Glasgow saw YS members storm the conference stage, which led to swift retaliation from the NEC. Protz was expelled and then several left-wing members of the YS National Committee were suspended. Keep Left was formally banned in 1962.
When the 1962 Labour Party conference backed the suspensions and the attacks on the paper, Keep Left responded by urging YS to fight for its autonomy and to defend free speech in the party. In contrast, when the other radical left paper – Young Guard, backed by Ted Grant and Tony Cliff – was turned on by the NEC, its editors capitulated under the pressure. They agreed to a series of demands, promising to ‘improve the paper’s tone[!], be open to all YS opinion and stop being “factional”’.31 At a subsequent YS conference, Young Guard supporters went as far as voting against a motion calling for a fight back against the Keep Left expulsions. But Keep Left also played a part in its own downfall. It was run by a Trotskyist group led by Gerry Healy, and despite some notable campaigning work it alienated many YS members with its dogmatic predictions of impending capitalist doom and its ultra-left posturing.32
By 1964, with a general election looming, the Labour Party NEC had had enough. Reg Underhill was appointed to deal with the Trotskyists among the youth. Keep Left called a separate, independent YS conference in 1965 which took most of the branches with it. The rump ‘official’ YS conference that year was the last – the national party shut the organisation down shortly afterwards. The left was divided on the issue of the fight back, not least because a serious concerted campaign against Transport House would obviously lead to a split (which it did). But if Keep Left had simply surrendered it would have led to the neutering of any attempt to build an independent youth movement. Once again, the emphasis on defending a transformative course when the leadership demanded integration mattered when the left made its decisions.
The remaining YS branches were relaunched as the Labour Party Young Socialists (LPYS) in 1965. The struggle between the youth and the Labour leadership was not over Trotskyism as such, since most of the demands of the supposed revolutionaries were not about revolutionary strategy or tactics – they were the typical left-wing demands of the time around workers’ rights, nuclear weapons and British imperialism. The fight occurred essentially because the youth sections were too critical of the leadership and too boisterous in their attitudes. Though Healy’s followers had departed, in 1964 Ted Grant and his supporters in the youth sections and in Liverpool launched a new socialist newspaper, with a name that was to become familiar across the country – Militant.
The End of the Civil War
By the end of the 1950s the civil war was winding down. Bevanism had dwindled from its highpoint of the mid 1950s and the Tribune group in Parliament emerged as the primary left organisation. The group largely limited itself to the parliamentary struggle which left it fighting a losing battle on unfavourable terrain. For all its activity the left had failed to stop the ascendancy of the right – Labour had in reality become a revisionist party. The strength of the Bevanite movement was undermined by its limited focus on continuing the 1945 agenda. It failed to examine what had changed in British capitalism, the nature of the post-war boom, or the role of a powerful rank-and-file trade union movement. From 1947 onwards, the left’s arguments were more suitable to describing the problems of lassiez-faire economics and counter-posing these in a rudimentary way to the planned economy of socialism. Any serious analysis would conclude that British capitalism was not really organised along these lines any more. Other issues weren’t adequately dealt with, including the role of the mixed economy in sustaining capitalism, the role of Labour in disciplining the workforce for greater profitability, and the democratisation of state-run enterprises. It was this unimaginative clinging to the past that perhaps most dogged the Bevan years and left it unable to really challenge the right – despite the defeat of the Clause IV amendment in 1959.
When Labour published their economic proposals in Industry and Society in 1957 it encapsulated a thoroughly revisionist view of public ownership: that it should be extended to iron and road haulage but no further. Further public ownership would be examined on a case by case basis only if it was proved that the industry in question was ‘failing the nation’. The principle of using nationalisation as a weapon of war against capitalism and to strengthen socialism was already lost in practice; now it was lost in theory.33 Gaitskell died suddenly in 1963, but his legacy was eventually to triumph in later generations. In his last years of life, Bevan was deeply frustrated at the enforced silence that his Shadow Cabinet role – the reward for backing the leadership – now imposed. He had finally won the position of Deputy Leader in 1959, but by this time he was suffering from terminal cancer. His view of many of his fellow MPs was thoroughly jaded: ‘I am heartily sickened by the Parliamentary Labour Party. It is rotten through and through: corrupt, full of patronage and seeking after patronage, unprincipled.’ When a journalist friend asked for his views on the future of socialism in the Labour Party, he replied: ‘Well what other instrument is there? Though I know that, sometimes I don’t know how I could stay in the Labour Party. It isn’t really socialist at all.’34
At the time, however, the end of the civil war was claimed as a victory for both sides. When Harold Wilson won the leadership the left were overjoyed. A Bevanite, the very man who had resigned in 1951 alongside Nye, was now in charge of the party. Wilson surrounded himself with Bevanites, people like Crossman and Castle. With the Tories in disarray over economic questions, a Labour government – and a left one at that – looked possible for the first time in a generation. But before long the right were even more pleased. Wilson was a changed man since his Bevanite days. With his eyes on 10 Downing Street, he was more than happy to plot a course taking revisionism as his starting point. The incoming Labour government, however, faced a problem – the affluent days were coming to an end. The post-war boom was fizzling out and major structural issues with the British economy would soon be revealed. People remember the Macmillan line ‘you’ve never had it so good’, but few know the words that followed: ‘What is worrying us is “is it too good to be true?” or perhaps I should say “is it too good to last?”’
It was not going to last.