No E P Thompson was not an early centrist
An interesting piece by Julian Coman, an associate Editor of The Guardian, ponders Labour’s latest travails under Starmer.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/may/03/labours-lost-voters-clamour-belonging
I’m no fan of Starmer, as much for his inept leadership, as his policies-such as they are- but the piece is about wider questions around how Labour as an electoral party attracts working class voters in the 2020s.
Of course this question is not new. The historian Gareth Stedman Jones wrote (Why is the Labour Party in a mess,1982) that Labour was a political shell re-made in each generation by those involved.
Hence after the 1959 Election we had ‘Must Labour Lose’ and after 1979 and Thatcher and particularly after the SDP split there was a lot of pondering about Labour winning elections. Eric Hobsbawm wrote the Forward March of Labour halted while Marxism Today promoted New Times before disappearing.
My point is there is a history around such pieces. However towards the end Coman mentions E P Thompson as someone who defended communities against individualism, the market and capitalism.
Coman argues that Thompson was ‘progressive’ and in doing so risks pouring what the late historian himself referred to as the ‘enormous condescension of posterity’ all over his subject.
A case can be made for Thompson as an English regionalist, not keen on London and the Metropolis. Thompson saw himself as the extinct flightless bird the Great Bustard. However much European Marxist ideas interested him (and they did) he was stuck in England.
Yet Thompson was also the internationalist who formed European Nuclear Disarmament working across West and East against nukes. Yet again he was also firm opponent of the forerunner of the EU, the EEC, making the case against Europe in the 1974 Referendum
Thompson had grown up in the CPGB, with its traditions of the popular front formulated in the 1951 British Road to Socialism. Yet he walked out of the Party in 1956 and became a founder of the New Left. His relationship with the Labour Party was problematic, sometimes a member, sometimes not and certainly on the left or to the left of the Party. Not really perhaps someone who would obviously appeal to Sir Keir Starmer.
He was firmly on the side of the Have Nots against the Haves, strongly critical of the police and the authorities (including Directors of Public Prosecutions) and a firm defender of civil liberties.
At the same time he did see the need to build coalitions to win causes and promote progress as he saw it. Perhaps Starmer might like this Thompson more. He was a complex individual (who I knew only slightly) but certainly never an early centrist.
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