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At the suggestion of my friend and colleague Heather Mendick ( @helensclegel), I recently read "Parliamentary Socialism. A Study in the Politics of Labour" by Ralph Miliband and I wish I had read it some while ago. In it he charts the history of the Party from creation to 1970.
It really is a shameful series of betrayals and surrenders. What comes very clear is just how atypical the period between 2016-2019 was in the long history of the party, and made me realise just how short-sighted a lot of us had been, thinking we could make a real difference.
In the conclusion to the book, Miliband’s view is that those who believe the Labour Party, whatever it past and present shortcomings, can be turned into a socialist party genuinely committed to the creation of a radically different social order, are seriously incorrect.
The Labour Party is no longer even a reformist party and this is no longer the perspective which informs the approach of the Labour leadership. There are many who insist that the party can be turned into a suitable instrument for social change -
- on the grounds that the Labour leadership can be persuaded or compelled to adopt socialist policies. These leaders are no socialists who have lost their way and who can be bought back to the true path by persuasion or pressure.
They are bourgeois politicians with no intention whatsoever of adopting, let alone carrying out, policies which would begin the socialist transformation of Britain. These leaders can be safely relied upon to ignore the wishes of their members and conferences once in office.
The trades union leadership has traditionally acted as a strongly anti-left-wing force. The weakness of the parliamentary left is not accidental but structural and is a condition of their becoming parliamentarians in the first place.
A few have slipped through the net but they have remained isolated and pathetic figures bitterly at odds with the Parliamentary party. There is at present no party or grouping which is capable of posing an effective challenge to the Labour Party as ‘the party of the left’.
This which helps to explain why so many socialists cling to the belief that the Labour Party will eventually be radically transformed. It won't and cannot be. What we require is to begin preparing the ground for the coming into being of such an alternative.
One of the roles of such an organisation has to be dissipating the paralysing illusion about the true purpose of the Labour Party.
All this written in 1970, and is as true today as it was then.
All this written in 1970, and is as true today as it was then.
