Labour: a party of protest?
Darren Jones, who is a Labour MP, can often be found in the media saying, to be kind, the most inane things.
On this occasion he has suggested that Labour is not a party of protest as it may have been for example under Jeremy Corbyn, but one focused on achieving an election victory.
It seems reasonable to suggest that Mr Jones has never read even the first page of Ralph Miliband’s history of the first six decades of the Labour Party, Parliamentary Socialism. There Miliband notes that Labour has always been the most dogmatic of parties, not about socialism but about Parliamentary process.
The origins of the Labour Party in 1900 were a combination of trade union officials and leaders and socialist organisations, the Independent Labour Party and the Social Democratic Federation. The SDF withdrew but ILP supporters- of who Keir Hardie was one- featured in the first 1924 Labour Government.
On both sides of the equation protest featured. Unions had strikes, certainly an industrial protest. The ILP campaigned on a range of bread and butter working class issues around housing and poverty. Protest was most certainly involved.
The 1924 Labour Government was not about protest, even though numbers of Ministers had a strong track record of protesting. Rather it was focused on reassuring the King and the Establishment that it could govern prudently.
Attlee in 1945,a Major, headed a Government consisting of some who had served in the Coalition wartime Government. Ernie Bevin, a union leader and an architect of NATO was not exactly a protest man. Nye Bevan who had been temporarily booted out of the Party in the 1930s for wanting to do more about fascism was a protester. Then again he was also the statesman who gave us the NHS.
In the modern era it might be argued that Labour has been a party with protesters in it, even at the most senior levels, but not a party of protest. Michael Foot was central to CND marches in the early 1960s. Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell certainly was not. In the mid-1980s Neil Kinnock did not overtly support the miners, but many Labour MPs did. More recently well over a hundred Labour MPs voted against the Iraq War in 2003 and many protested about it. Tony Blair by contrast was a big fan.
Labour it can be argued has been a party of Government that did not support protest when in Office. It did however contain numbers who did back protests in and out of Office including MPs. Both can be accommodated within the framework of Parliamentary Socialism.
However as Darren Jones seems to be saying under Starmer’s Narrow Church, protesters will not be allowed in to worship. It is a model that has always had support in the Labour Party but there have also been other perspectives that took a much more nuanced view of the balance between power and protest. On reflection Mr Jones might some to see that the two are related not just in general but in the history and structures of the Party of which he is an MP.
Guardian article 3rd April 2024
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