RIP Labour as a ‘Broad Church’?
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 saw the rise of the Bennite left from the early 1980s as a sign that maybe 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.
Miliband wrote
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.
The Guardian by contrast argued in an Editorial on 22nd September 2019
The Labour party is nothing if not a broad church, encompassing different traditions working with – not against – each other. In a post-industrial world everything is some kind of coalition. If not, the party is simply a religion of true believers in a multi-faith polity. Over decades, Labour activists, interests and voters have broadly agreed on a common purpose – to elect Labour governments that can redress the imbalance of economic, social and political power in Britain. That broad-church approach has served Labour well and has served Britain well too
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.
With Keir Starmer’s diktat on 15th November that Jeremy Corbyn won’t stand as a Labour candidate at the next Election, there is clearly a battle on (at best) for Labour as any kind of Broad Church. In Starmer’s view Labour is a wholly owned subsidiary of himself. Starmer, a relative newcomer to the labour movement certainly has no grasp of its democratic structures and traditions and does not intend to learn either.
The key point however is to organise to fight the impact of Tory rule in 2023, debating the best vehicle for carrying that forward flows from that, rather than coming before it.
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