Labour lost the 1959 General Election quite heavily and won the 2024 Election with a significant majority. Yet the structures of the Party, while tweaked and changed over time, remain structured by its position of reforming market society incrementally.
The extract below was written by E P Thompson in the New Reasoner in Autumn 1959. The journal merged with Universities and Left Review to become New Left Review in 1960.
Some details have changed- CND still exists as do nuclear weapons, but marches to or from Aldermaston are part of social history now.
The extract fits with Gareth Stedman Jones 1983 essay Why is the Labour Party in a mess, where he argued that the structure or shell of Labour remained in place to be occupied by each new generation. Different aims and policies might be pursued but the structure maintained.
The difficulty the left has had and has, a frustration shared by Thompson, is whether the framework can in part be occupied by the left with some positive result, or whether its possible to construct an alternative.
Thompson was writing this contemporary political comment at the same moment he was researching and writing the Making of the English Working Class and echoes of his points about political leadership can also be found in the Making
We may have done away with the rotten boroughs, but the rotten candidates and the rotten policies remain. Most of the people at the top of the Labour Party are professional politicians, very much at home in the conventions of capitalist politics. These are a very bad and untrustworthy sort of people. We all know this, but some fetish about ” unity ” prevents us from saying it. We should say it now since – being professional politicians and sensing which way the wind blows – some of them may start to try out a leftish ” image “in their speeches. We should not believe them until we see some Aldermaston mud upon their boots. People who proclaim their adherence to principle, ” though in muted terms,” are people with-out principle. Such people tell us that we must ” start to fight the next election now.” But we hope that we may never have to fight their kind of election again.
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