Ralph Miliband on Labour as a ‘Broad Church’. Has Starmerism changed that?
The late Ralph Miliband wrote one of the best books about the history of the Labour Party, Parliamentary Socialism,1961, albeit of course it doesn’t cover the last 60 years.
Miliband, the father of David and Ed, opens the book by making the statement that as a democratic socialist party Labour had always been amongst the most dogmatic. Not about socialism but about the use of Parliamentary as opposed to extra-Parliamentary forms of struggle.
His view at that time was that Labour under Hugh Gaitskell was not a vehicle for socialist advance and the leadership of the rather more ‘left-wing’ Harold Wilson did nothing to change his mind.
He did however keep the matter under review and sometimes returned to the subject, for example in the Socialist Register 1983:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/miliband/1983/xx/advance.htm
Here he see the rise of the Bennite left from the early 1980s as a sign that may be Labour could be claimed for socialism. Significantly perhaps it appeared in the year that a, then young, Jeremy Corbyn first became an MP.
Tom Watson before he stepped down described an effort to abolish his then Deputy Leader position as going against the idea of Labour as a ‘broad church’. Harold Wilson was probably right that Labour owes more to Methodism than Marx but as Miliband noted the ‘broad’ part of the description is harder to justify historically.
Pious references to the Labour Party being a ‘broad church’ which has always incorporated many different strands of thought fail to take account of a crucial fact, namely that the ‘broad church’ of Labour only functioned effectively in the past because one side – the Right and Centre – determined the nature of the services that were to be held, and excluded or threatened with exclusion any clergy too deviant in its dissent.
Socialists can certainly be active in the Labour Party and have been but managing to control it as an institution and grapple with its Parliamentary focus is much harder.
Ralph Miliband never reached a definitive conclusion as to whether socialists could best organise effectively within the Labour Party or outside it, or perhaps both. After the 2021 Labour conference it’s a discussion that remains as relevant as ever.
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