A Party with Socialists in It review – Labour’s left from the 19th century to Corbyn

In writing about a party as muddled together and misrepresented as Labour, clarity is a powerful weapon. Authors who accurately describe the party’s competing factions and traditions, and the ever shifting balance between them, are relatively rare. They are also a threat to Labour’s many enemies, who have often relied on portraying the party, and the left of it in particular, as a vast but hazy conspiracy.

This pithy book, “intended mainly for those who have been drawn into politics” since Jeremy Corbyn stood for leader, aims to “introduce the major historical struggles” of the Labour left and “explain what was at stake”. Simon Hannah is a young leftwing Labour activist, and there is an avuncular foreword from the shadow chancellor, John McDonnell. Yet Hannah’s approach to the Labour left, from its quarrelsome 19th-century origins to its present golden age, is unsparing rather than triumphalist or romantic.

From the start, he argues, Labour had two distinct impulses: one “transformative”, to “challenge the existing power relations in society”, as he neatly puts it; and the other “integrative”, to “take society as it is … incorporating the interests of the labour movement into the establishment”. At first, this distinction seems a bit obvious: Tony Blair was an integrator; Corbyn is a transformer. But Hannah judges the Labour left by what it does rather than says, and so tells a story that is more about unfulfilled promise than excited Corbynistas may like.

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In quick, lucid passages of a few pages each, almost like very good revision notes, Hannah describes the left’s occasional breakthroughs and long periods of near-impotence. It found the first four decades of the 20th century especially hard work. While socialists in other countries mounted revolutions, in Britain, he writes, the left “introduced” an “ambitious house-building programme” during the Labour government of 1924, a government that lasted nine months; held the party leadership for three beleaguered years in the 30s under the rather Corbyn-ish London radical George Lansbury; and otherwise produced a stream of ideas about making Britain more equal that did not “survive contact with government”, as Hannah puts it with a welcome hint of black humour.

Many of the left’s early difficulties will be familiar to observers of current Labour politics. Leftwingers were dismissed as “middle class” by the right of the party and depicted by the press as unpatriotic subversives. Some of the left’s stars, such as Harold Wilson, defected to the Labour mainstream in search of better careers. Some leftwing activists abandoned the party, tempted by purer political bodies, or were expelled by the intermittently intolerant Labour bureaucracy. Radicalising the party, let alone the country, writes Hannah, was “the left’s labour of Sisyphus”.

Then came the landslide election of the Attlee government in 1945. Policies that the left had been struggling to promote for years, such as a hugely expanded welfare state and nationalisation programme, appeared to become widely acceptable almost overnight. Yet really this change was a consequence of the failures of capitalism during the 30s, and the successes of state planning during the second world war. Public opinion had shifted, deep down, in the left’s favour. Corbyn and McDonnell are working on the assumption that, since the financial crisis and the onset of austerity fatigue, the same thing has happened again. They may well be right.

Unlike many leftwingers now, Hannah doesn’t mythologise the Attlee government, pointing out that it contained lots of ministers from the Labour right, and pursued a militaristic foreign policy, which would have horrified Lansbury and Corbyn. Less fresh is the material that follows, about the period from the 50s to the 80s. The long rearguard action fought for Labour socialism by Nye Bevan; the out-manoeuvring of the left by Wilson as prime minister; the unions’ belated embrace of the left during the 70s, and that potent alliance’s determined crushing by Margaret Thatcher – these are all key episodes, but Hannah’s summarising approach leaves little room for anything beyond the most familiar details.

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Nevertheless, telling patterns emerge. He describes the Labour right’s efforts to drive Bevan and his supporters from the party; and then the Labour right’s outrage when the left attempted to do something similar, by deselecting MPs deemed insufficiently socialist during the 70s. To this day, in most academic and media accounts of Labour’s internal politics, the left is presented as the sole aggressor. This book is a welcome corrective.

Another pattern Hannah reveals, but doesn’t make enough of, is the left’s tendency to surge every 20 years. It happened in the 30s, 50s and 70s. It didn’t happen in the 90s: the left was winded by the victory of capitalism over Soviet-style communism, and by the boldness of the Labour right under Blair. Yet that hiatus helps explain the energy of Corbynism. By the 2010s, the Labour left had even more pent-up ambitions than usual.

This book astutely appraises British politics’ most frustrating but important dissident tradition. The next few years may be uncomfortable for those who don’t.