Why Britain’s new political party sounds very old

This is not unusual for left-wing movements. Having been excluded from official accounts of national history, they tended to develop very strong cultures of memory. Labour, and the union movement that surrounds it, is no exception. It is built on a history of past struggles and martyrs.

That is part of the reason why so many arguments in the Labour Party boil down to who can make a better claim to their heroes and who can paint their opponents as heirs of traditional villains.

In the UK, the top trump in this game is, of course, Clement Attlee, the founder of the welfare state. And pity anyone who can be painted as the heir to Tony Blair – a truly career-limiting comparison.

But there’s a tension, too: politics is about controlling the future. And left-wing politics is about transforming it. So the rhetorical game is to find a way to sound forward-looking while claiming to be the intellectual heirs to a group of (largely) men born (largely) in the 19th century. Once you see that tension, you can understand a lot about the Labour Party.

Look at Blair’s argument in 1994 when he proposed that Labour drop its commitment to nationalising industries – something that had been part of Labour’s constitution since 1918. Blair presented the reform as a battle between past and future, between – as he would later put it – “the forces of progress and the forces of conservatism”.

But – knowing the rules of the contest – Blair also argued that the proposed change was true to a more authentic Labour tradition of social liberalism, dating back to before the drafting of the party’s constitution in 1918. Much use was made of the words “re-establishing”, “re-foundation” and “regain”. Own the future, but claim the past.

Or take the arguments around the formation of The Independent Group of MPs, a new breakaway party formed in the past few weeks. Eight of its 11 MPs have come from Labour.

On the one hand, they presented a classic “moderniser” argument – forward not back, upward not down, and so on. They were seeking to shock the party out of adherence to an ideology they characterised as “old-fashioned”, “outdated” and “locked in the old politics of the 20th century”.

On the other, they depicted themselves as the true representatives of Labour’s “traditional values”, which had now been “abandoned” by a party “changed beyond recognition”. Several prefaced their remarks with stories about their working-class backgrounds, labour movement roots and decades of service.

This came straight from the Social Democratic Party playbook, the last significant split within Labour. As Bob Maclennan put it in 1981: ‘‘I am not leaving the Labour Party; the Labour Party which I joined and to which I have been proud to belong during 15 years of public life has left me and many others like me.’

The SDP rooted themselves in a lineage stretching back through recent divisions, seeing themselves as the party of Gaitskell and Bevan – deceased heroes of the right and left of the party respectively. But also back to the foundation of the party and beyond.

Yet the SDP also went to great lengths to appear modern. They were the first party to use helicopters, computers and to take subscriptions by credit card. Unwilling to conform to old patterns, they held a “rolling conference” on a train, rather than in a tired seaside town, and refused to tie themselves to specific manifesto commitments for as long as they could. Their future thus remained an open possibility, much as TIG’s does today.

Both in 1981 and today, the response to this from the Left was to attack both claims.

Modernisers? Forward-facing? No. They were beholden to an empty vision of modernity, unable to envision a future different from what had gone before.

Both breakaways took place at a time when social democracy was seen to be in disarray and modernising centrism discredited. This left them open to the accusation of being throwbacks; a rather less creditable label than traditionalists.

This balancing act is no less fraught for the Left. They might have an easier time establishing authenticity, but to be “traditional” comes dangerously close to being “conservative” – an accusation that has been thrown at the Left throughout its history.

That creates a strange rhetorical dynamic inside the party. The Left, which wants the most change, is depicted as reactionary, while social democrats, who have done most to shape Labour’s history as a party of government, can be cast from its “true” traditions.

The truth is that these are not really battles between tradition and modernity, so much as contests between different visions of the future and different understandings of the past.

In 2006, Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, now the Labour party leader and economic spokesman, both spoke at an event commemorating Labour’s centenary as a parliamentary party. They lamented the betrayal of its traditions and its current malaise.

The party had, just the year before, won its first ever third term in government. But this was contrasted unfavourably with the 1970s and 1980s when “the Party had plenty of activists and good campaigns although it lost elections”. Different understandings of the past underscore radically different understandings of what the Labour Party is and the role it should play in British political history.

The idea that Labour leaders are bound to betray their party is a tradition in itself, dating back to Ramsay MacDonald, Labour’s first Prime Minister, who left his party in 1931 to become head of a Conservative-dominated National Government. As we’ve seen, this has been inverted by both SDP and TIG defectors claiming that the mass party has betrayed its parliamentary representatives – a rather different way of approaching Labour politics.

Fights within the UK left may revolve around a limited number of historical heroes and villains. The truth is, though, that these characters have different roles in each faction’s stories, pointing to deep disagreements about the kind of party Labour has been and should be in the future. What they share is a strange Labour argot, where everything is an argument about history.

The author is a senior lecturer in politics at the University of Sussex

All photographs by Getty Images