Can One Nation Labour learn from the British New Left?
| Author | Davis, Madeleine |
| Position | Guest editorial |
The early British New Left--a vibrant activist and intellectual current that flourished between 1956 and 1963 and whose brief lifespan encompassed the early careers of many of the most important British socialist intellectuals of the last half-century--has made an unexpected recent return to the political stage. In the ongoing discussion about ideological renewal within the British Labour Party, figures associated with the 'Blue' and latterly 'One Nation' Labour tendencies, particularly Jon Cruddas and his collaborator Jonathan Rutherford, have cited the ideas of prominent New Leftists, most often Edward Thompson and Raymond Williams, in support of their arguments for a politics that seeks to re-connect Labour traditions to English culture and society (Cruddas and Rutherford, 2010; Rutherford, 2011).
On 27 June 2012, a conference in Westminster brought representatives of these two currents together. With contributions from historians of the New Left and of Labour, as well as figures involved in policy-making or implementation, the conference explored commonalities and differences and posed the question: what, if anything, is of value in an engagement between these two intellectual traditions? This special issue reproduces revised versions of three of the contributions made to that conference, those by Jonathan Rutherford, labour movement historian Mark Wickham-Jones, and longstanding activist and intellectual of the New Left and founder-editor of Soundings, Michael Rustin. It also includes a fourth piece solicited subsequently from Michael Kenny, author of the key study of the early New Left's political thought, and currently working on a major study of the politics of English nationhood (Kenny, 1995). All would wish to acknowledge with gratitude the contributions to the day's discussion of a distinguished line-up of speakers, including Hilary Wainwright, Anthony Barnett, Maurice Glasman, Michael Walzer, Robin Archer, Nick Stevenson, Paul Nowak, Tess Lanning, Marc Stears and Jon Cruddas.
The New Left as a source for Labour's ideological renewal
At first sight the New Left may appear an unlikely source from which to draw inspiration for contemporary debates within Labour. 'A plague o' both your houses' described its attitude to the twin 'declining orthodoxies' of Stalinism and social democracy, and it produced some of the sharpest and best-known critiques of the Labour Party and its role in British politics. For the most part it viewed 'Labourism' (a term denoting the structural subordination of Labour within the British state and constitutional order) as a positive obstacle to the development of the authentically socialist politics it sought to foster (Miliband, 1961; Nairn, 1964a, b and c; Davis, 2003). Yet in none of its manifestations did it offer any lasting or definite resolution to the strategic and...
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