The below is work in progress. As a General Election is due in the UK in 2024 the left is discussing what approaches might be taken that would maximise a left presence and impact. Standing independent candidates is one possibility, exerting pressure on mainstream candidates by campaigns on key issues is another.
What can be said is that there is a history to the question. Between 1920 and 1956 most left activity in terms of elections (not all certainly) was focused on the Communist Party. It had a record of standing candidates and was occasionally successful in electing MPs. After 1956, as the Party split, a new independent left, the new left, was faced with the challenge of how to operate in the Parliamentary arena and whether that was in any case the best or most appropriate place to be anyway. Over more than four decades E P Thompson played a key role both in terms of activism and his history writing- the two being linked.
EP Thompson and General Election
EP Thompson never stood as a candidate in a General Election, and his voting record is unknown, although following the publication of the first part of his MI5 file recently it is possible that we might find a clue to this in the National Archives. One might suspect Communist and then, mostly, Labour after 1956. However as an historian and activist he certainly had a perspective on General Elections and on occasion intervened in them.
He backed an Independent Left candidate, Lawrence Daly, a miners union official in Fife in the 1959 Election, who he had worked with closely in the post-1956 new left, although he saw more broadly that there was some difference between Labour and Tory positions. His 1959 Essay on Psephology underlines that point.
Thompson was clear that a Tory victory would make things worse for working people in a variety of ways, but he also looked much wider in respect of its impact in terms of Britain’s defence and foreign policies.
Thompson also focused on how Elections take place and how attempts are made to manipulate public opinion in them just as they were, in much cruder ways, pre-1832 when Old Corruption and rotten Electoral Boroughs existed.
He argues in the Poverty of Theory that while a Cobbettian Old Corruption is clearly long past, it had by the 1960s been replaced by The Thing which sought in less direct ways to manipulate society and the opinions and views in it.
This was hardly a conspiratorial view of things since just as Thompson had detailed in The Making of the English Working Class how people rallied and organised against Old Corruption from below, and the Freeborn Englishman asserted himself and his civil rights. Thompson and others addressed a similar agenda in modern times.
In 1983 he wrote a substantial pamphlet for Merlin during the Election campaign of that year titled ‘The Defence of Britain’ which focused largely on the issue of the parties attitudes to British nuclear weapons, but also made some wider historical points.
His general drift was that the things that had exercised voters over time at General Elections should and were likely to influence them still: ‘we are not well fitted by our history to be the kind of people who just lie down & give up the ghost’ (p75).
He suggested that a symbol for a left approach to a General Election should be George Cruikshank’s Freeborn Englishman who found himself in 1820 with a padlock through his mouth (p85).
Thompson saw a perpetual battle for liberties which he situated in the Norman Yoke, the invasion of the Norman French in 1066 and the struggle ever since then to maintain a democratic framework in the law and in politics.
Writing in A Psessay on Ephology (New Reasoner 1959) Thompson argued that ‘we may have done away with rotten boroughs, but the rotten candidates and the rotten policies remain’.
But balanced against this as he noted in Peculiarities of the English, a response to Perry Anderson’s perspective that the left was stronger elsewhere in Europe than in Britain, of ‘certain strengths and humane traditions in British life which Other Countries, including those whose airports are superb, whose Marxism is mature, and whose salesmanship is high powered, do not always display’.
Writing in State of the Nation, Thompson trod a fine line between the threat to democracy and liberty and the possibility of defending it, and few moments placed that struggle into a sharper focus than General Elections.
At the next Election Thompson wrote a diary for the London Review of Books (published 7th May 1987). It was probably his last published thought on a British General Election (he died in 1993).
He wrote then of the 1945 Election, held almost 80 years ago this May:
One is not supposed to say anything good about British things these days, and writing all this down makes me feel old. I have to say that I find the NHS to be both decent and humanely socialist, but I dare say it won’t last much longer. Every tree we planted in those almost-democratic years is coming under the axe.
‘I’m a member of the Labour Party … that’s just like being a member of the human race. You accept it without enthusiasm’. 1962
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