Labour Party Policy Research Articles

The return of public ownership amidst neoliberal mutation

The pursuit of a distinctive agenda around democratic public ownership under the Corbyn leadership was symbolic of the departure from the largely neoliberal economic governance perspective that dominated Labour Party policy in and out of government during the New Labour years. In contrast to some of the more dismissive critiques of the Corbyn‐McDonnell moment, which either want to caricature it as stuck in a ‘hard left’ groove from the 1980s, or as identifiable as a more traditional social-democratic project of the post 1945 era, it argues that the proposed programme of democratic public ownership (DPO) was genuinely transformative in its framing around economic democracy as an alternative to neoliberal governance. It was different from past radical Labour programmes in its commitment to decentred and pluralist institutions and ownership forms, yet still concerned with achieving radical change through the state.

Labor leaders and an Australian Republic: 1999–2019

The creation of an Australian republic has been official Australian Labor Party policy since 1991. During the 1990s Labor actively campaigned for an Australian republic under the prime ministership of Paul Keating. Following the defeat of the republic referendum on 6 November 1999, Labor leaders have continued to support the issue with varying levels of enthusiasm. This article traces the attitudes of Labor leaders to an Australian republic between 1999 and 2019 and divides them into three broad camps: revivalists, denialists, and idealists. Based on their experiences, it offers three policy recommendations if a republic is to become a reality. The first of these is that strong leadership and personal commitment is required. The second is that a plebiscite on the model is vital to later referendum success. Finally, reconciliation must not be divorced for the republic issue.

The 2017 Labour General Election Campaign: Ushering in a ‘New Politics’?

In many ways, the British General Election campaign of 2017 marked a return to ‘old politics’ with the reaffirmation of a two-party system and levels of voter turnout not seen in 25 years. The Conservative Party, as in previous elections, relied to a considerable extent on negative campaigning and pledged to implement traditional conservative policies supporting grammar schools and blood sports. Yet, the campaign also appeared to be characterised by a ‘new politics’, embodied by the style and policies of the Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. This was a politics that largely relied on positive campaigning and mobilised grassroots activism to an extent rarely seen before, ensuring that it inspired new voters. This article focuses on the role of the ‘new politics’ in the election campaign before moving on to discuss the future of such politics under Labour in opposition and perhaps in power. It will be asked to what extent ordinary people can help shape Labour Party policy, questioning whether Labour can manage to liberate itself from its own internal party machinery and from its traditional reliance on the State in order to move durably beyond the ‘old politics’ towards a democratised ‘new politics’.

‘The Trojan Horse’: Communist Entrism in the British Labour Party, 1933–43

Entrism – the infiltration of political organisations by competitors – is typically associated with Trotskyism. Large-scale Communist entrism in the British Labour Party has been neglected by historians and reference in the literature is slight and impressionistic. Archival material permits reconstruction of a sustained attempt by the Comintern and British Communists to subvert Labour Party policy between 1933 and 1943. Documenting the development and dimensions of Communist entrism, this article establishes that, by 1937, 10% of Communist Party (CPGB) members were operating secretly inside British Labour, campaigning to change its policy on affiliation and engineer a Popular Front. Biographies of 55 such Communists provide new data and permit a typology of entrist activity. The episode sheds new light on Popular Front initiatives and the extent of genuine support for them within Labour. It illuminates the conspiratorial side of Stalinist activity at a time when the CPGB presented itself as a conventional British party.

Votes at Work in Britain: Shareholder Monopolisation and the ‘Single Channel’

Abstract Why do shareholders monopolise voting rights in UK companies, and are trade unions the only way to get meaningful workplace representation? In 1967 a Labour Party policy document first coined the phrase that a ‘single channel’ for representation should ‘in the normal’ case mean trade unions. Since then, it has been said the labour movement embraced an ‘adversarial’ rather than a ‘constitutional’ conception of corporations, neglecting legal rights to worker voice in enterprise governance. This article shows that matters were not so simple. It explains the substantial history of legal rights to vote in British workplaces, and competition from the rival constitutional conception: employee share schemes. The UK has the oldest corporations – namely universities – which have consistently embedded worker participation rights in law. Britain has among the world’s most sophisticated ‘second channel’ participation rights in pension board governance. Developing with collective bargaining, it had the world’s first private corporations with legal participation rights. Although major plans in the 1920s for codetermination in rail and coal fell through, it maintained a ‘third channel’ of worker representatives on boards during the 20th century in numerous sectors, including ports, gas, post, steel, and buses. At different points every major political party had general proposals for votes at work. The narrative of the ‘single channel’ of workplace representation, and an ‘adversarial’ conception of the company contains some truth, but there has never been one size of regulation for all forms of enterprise.

'If I Ever Have to Go to Prison, I Hope it's a Russian Prison': British Labour, Social Democracy and Soviet Communism, 1919-25.

Through the inter-war period, the USSR became an example of 'socialism in action' that the British labour movement could both look towards and define itself against. British visitors both criticized and acclaimed aspects of the new Soviet state between 1919 and 1925, but a consistently exceptional finding was the Soviet prison. Analysing the visits and reports of British guests to Soviet prisons, the aims of this article are threefold. Using new material from the Russian archives, it demonstrates the development of an intense admiration for, and often a desire to replicate, the Soviet penal system on the part of Labour members, future Communists, and even Liberals who visited Soviet Russia. It also critically examines why, despite such admiration, the effect of Soviet penal ideas failed to significantly influence Labour Party policy in this area. Finally, placing these views within a broader framework of the British labour movement's internal tussles over the competing notions of social democracy and communism, it is argued that a failure to affect policy should not proscribe reappraisals of these notions or the Soviet-Labour Party relationship, both of which were more complex than is currently permitted in the established historiography.

Leo Strauss on Modern Political Science:Two Previously Unpublished Manuscripts

The two manuscripts published here for the first time were written by Leo Strauss: the first in 1956 and the second between 1957 and 1962. The first, entitled “Lecture in Milwaukee: Michigan Midwest Political Science,” was written for the Fourteenth Annual Meeting of the Midwest Conference of Political Scientists on May 4, 1956, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The second is an unpublished passage of “An Epilogue” Strauss wrote for Essays on the Scientific Study of Politics, published in 1962. Together these pieces improve our understanding of both the context in which Strauss developed his critique of the new political science and the audience to whom that critique was addressed. These two texts are of “biographical” interest. They are biographical in the sense that they clarify Strauss's thought and its evolution. The “Lecture in Milwaukee” clarifies the context in which Strauss's critique of modern political science was born: confrontation with the political scientists of the 1950s, here represented by Glendon Schubert who is not mentioned in Strauss's published writings. Without this lecture one might overlook the reference to “extrasensory perception” in the ironical discussion of “our man in Missouri” in “Epilogue.” The critique of Arthur Bentley, Bernard Berelson, Harold Laswell, and Herbert Simon by Strauss's students also takes on new meaning if read in the light of this lecture's references and Schubert's published article. Aside from Strauss's view of academia in the 1950s, his references in the lecture to the British Labour Party's policy toward Nazi Germany, to postwar American disarmament, and to prison reform and immigration policy in the United States provide rare and thus important information about Strauss's political views and judgment.

The Key to Affordable Housing

Rent controls are firmly back on the political agenda. At the national level the reintroduction of rent controls is now official Labour Party policy. At the London level Mayor Sadiq Khan calls for their reintroduction as well. Politicians, however, are in this case merely following a shift in the Overton Window which has already happened. In recent years, various high-profile authors, such as Owen Jones (2014) and Danny Dorling (2014), have made the case for bringing back rent controls in one form or another, as have various campaign groups and national media outlets. However, no matter how popular they are, rent controls are not and could not be a solution to the UK’s housing crisis. This paper will reiterate the theoretical and empirical case against rent controls, and will then move on to suggest an alternative which would genuinely address the problem of escalating rents. It will use the CWU report as a starting point. Most authors who call for rent controls do not present a detailed policy argument. They merely describe the problem of high rents, and then present rent controls as a self-evident solution. They tend to see the case for rent controls as so obvious that it requires no further explanation, and assume that opponents of rent control are either acting in bad faith, or are just not interested in the problem.

Mass-Observation, Left Intellectuals and the Politics of Everyday Life

Abstract This article examines the careers of a number of left thinkers who broke with the Communist Party of Great Britain in the late 1930s, committing themselves instead to a ‘politics of everyday life’ based on social investigation. Central to this moment was the social research organisation Mass-Observation, the sociologists of which argued that democracy should be built around the vibrancy and irreverence they identified in ordinary culture. This ambition gained its fullest application during the 1940s, as a number of former M-O researchers became influential in the social reconstruction effort, in Labour Party policy circles and, later, in post-war academic sociology. By tracing the sociological arguments of unaligned left intellectuals from the 1930s to the 1950s, this article emphasises the rich plurality of influences at play within British progressive thought in the mid-twentieth century—influences which spanned the worlds of far-left activism, literature, art, the social sciences, town planning and parliamentary politics. It also helps us to reassess the genesis of the first ‘New Left’ in 1956. This is often hailed as the moment when British socialists first started to appreciate ordinary culture, freed from political dogmatism. In fact, left intellectuals had been engaging with the politics of everyday life for at least two decades previously. Indeed, the nostalgic accent which some New Left writers placed on the traditional working-class group was but one facet of a more heterogeneous political tradition—one concerned to think beyond ‘class’ altogether, and to examine how culture operated at the level of the individual.

Sir Peter Geoffrey Hall

Sir Peter Geoffrey Hall

Labour and the battle of ideas

This article engages with recent Labour Party policy reviews and writings which have sought to develop the project of 'One Nation Labour'. It focuses on four elements of Labour's emerging policy debate: the Jon Cruddas and Jonathan Rutherford's pamphlet One Nation: Labour's Political Renewal; One Nation Fizz, a book edited by Roberta Blackman-Woods, Diana Johnson and Barbara Keeley in which Labour shadow ministers set out their positions; the Local Government Innovation Taskforce's The Case For Change, published by Labour's Policy Review (on localism); and Andrew Adonis's Mending the Fractured Economy: Smarter State, Better Jobs, an independent review carried out for the Labour Party and published by Policy network. Through doing so, I evaluate key aspects of the party's approach to the post-crisis political conjuncture. The article concludes by outlining the importance of shaping antagonisms which seek to go beyond an acceptance of austerity.

The limits of socialism: the New South Wales Labor Party and the proposal to nationalise the gas industry

In 1910 the New South Wales Labor Party came to office committed to the nationalisation of the gas supply industry. Instead, it created a regulatory system which was to stay in place throughout the twentieth century, even during long periods of Labor governments in New South Wales. This paper looks at the reasons behind the failure to carry out a long-established Labor Party policy. In particular it identifies the Party's satisfaction with the effects of regulation and its growing commitment to alternative areas of public expenditure such as transportation, health and education.

British Codetermination and the Churchillian Circle

Why do shareholders monopolise voting rights in UK companies, and are trade unions the only way to get meaningful workplace representation? In 1967 a Labour Party policy document first coined the phrase that collective bargaining was – and should be – the ‘single channel’ of representation. Since then, it has been said the labour movement embraced an ‘adversarial’ rather than a ‘constitutional’ conception of corporations, neglecting legal rights to worker voice in enterprise governance. This article shows that matters were not so simple. It explains the substantial history of legal rights to vote in British workplaces, and the competition from the rival constitutional conception: employee share schemes. The UK has the oldest corporations – namely universities – which have consistently embedded worker participation rights in law. Britain has among the world’s most sophisticated ‘second channel’ participation rights in pension board governance. Developing with collective bargaining, it had the world’s first private corporations with legal participation rights. Although major plans in the 1920s for codetermination in rail and coal fell through, it maintained a ‘third channel’ of worker representatives on boards during the 20th century in numerous sectors, including ports, gas, post, steel, and buses. At different points every major political party had general proposals for votes at work. The narrative of the ‘single channel’ of workplace representation, and an ‘adversarial’ conception of the company contains some truth, but there has never been one size of regulation for all forms of enterprise.

‘Keep Left for Israel’: Tribune, Zionism and the Middle East, 1937–1967

This article provides the first detailed analysis of Tribune's approach to Zionism and the Arab-Israeli conflict from the year of the socialist weekly newspaper's establishment in 1937 through to the period of the 1967 ‘Six Day’ war. It analyses the nature of Tribune's enthusiasm for Zionism in this period, locating it within a contested pro-Israel tradition in the British Labour movement. The article argues that the debate inspired by Tribune's Middle Eastern coverage provides a valuable insight into the dilemmas faced by left-wing journalists and intellectuals bidding to shape Labour Party policy towards the Middle East, and casts fascinating light on the development of the anti-Zionist positions which became increasingly influential among left-wing activists later in the twentieth century.

Coming Out and Fitting In: Same-Sex Marriage and the Politics of Difference

This article argues in favour of same-sex marriage, but only under certain conditions. Same-sex marriage ought to be introduced in the Australian context in order to remedy the formal inequalities between lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) citizens and their heterosexual/cisgendered counterparts. One common method of justifying the introduction of formal same-sex relationship recognition has been via the promotion of LGBT "normalcy." This article explores such a trend by analysing popular media and advertising, since media representations and coverage have been shown to affect the way the general public "learns, understands, and thinks about an issue" (Li and Lui 73). This article finds that the promotion of normalcy can, in fact, perpetuate hetero-norms, and only offer LGBT people an imaginary social equality. Such normalisation, it is suggested, is detrimental to a wider goal of gaining respect for LGBT people regardless, not in spite of, their identity and relationships. Yet, this article maintains that such imaginary equality can be avoided, so long as a plurality of possibilities for one’s intimate and familial life are actively legitimated and promoted.

Red Tory and Blue Labour: More Theology Needed

Phillip Blond's Red Tory project has been widely credited with influencing the policies of the Conservative Party under David Cameron, and especially Cameron's "Big Society" thinking. Maurice Glasman has, meanwhile, been a key voice in rethinking Labour Party policy in the post-Blair/Brown years—the so-called Blue Labour programme. Both make space for religion, and Christianity in particular, within the core narratives of their projects and both have sought to build alliances with church bodies. The two projects are united in their critique of liberal assumptions, and this leads to significant congruences between them. Yet the place of Christianity and religion in their thinking is surprisingly different, reflecting the political genealogy of their projects in Burkean Toryism on Blond's part and Alinskian Community Organizing on Glasman's. Nevertheless, the attacks which both have suffered at the hands of social and economic liberals suggest that their ideas have traction. Both, however, are deficient in that their focus on communities as sources of virtue refuses to acknowledge that Enlightenment liberalism has any virtues to its credit. This is fundamentally a theological, rather than just a political, error, since it fails to capture the essential both/and embedded in Christian orthodoxy and the importance of corrective perspectives in Christian practice this side of the eschaton.

The government's relations with the voluntary sector: what next? An interview with the Right Honourable Alun Michael MP

Alun Michael was one of the key figures in the development of the Labour Party's policy towards the voluntary sector that was embodied in the 1998 Compact between the government and the voluntary and community sector. He is currently the chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Civil Society and Volunteering. In the interview presented in this article, he reflects on the extent to which the Compact led to a change in the culture of the relationship between the government and the sector, and some of the difficulties involved in developing a partnership model. He then discusses the way in which public services are commissioned and assesses the impact of the current government's localism agenda. Finally, he suggests how the relationship between the government and the sector can be strengthened in future.

‘Conflicts of Loyalty’: The Australian Labor Party and Uranium Policy, 1976-82

The Australian Labor Party (ALP) has periodically been enveloped by 'conflicts of loyalty' as a result of being forced to choose between representing its supporters in the trade unions and social movements and paying heed to powerful business groups whose investment decisions underpin the capitalist economy. This paper explores this dilemma through a case study of uranium mining policy from 1976-82. It is proposed that the party's initial policy of opposition to the mining and export of uranium was overturned, despite its wide appeal among party members and constituents, because of the anticipated backlash from powerful commercial interests in a climate of economic downturn and the increasing globalisation of capital. This policy outcome also needs to be seen in the context of the desire on the part of federal ALP leaders to resurrect the party's economic management credentials in the years following the dismissal of the Whitlam Government in 1975. The case was symptomatic, moreover, of the fading energy for fundamental political change increasingly afflicting social democrats worldwide.

The Anglo-Irish Treaty 1921: The Response of the British Parliamentary Labour Party and Labour Press

The British Labour Party became increasingly aware after the First World War that it was potentially an alternative government in waiting. In opposition the party was generally supportive of Irish nationalism. It supported Home Rule and was adamantly opposed to the partition of Ireland contained in the 1920 Government of Ireland Bill. As the demands of Irish republicans became more radical and their tactics more extreme the Labour parliamentary leadership became wary of the electoral damage that could ensue if it was perceived by the British public that it was sympathetic to revolutionary Irish republicanism. Despite the fact that the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 was inconsistent with Labour party Irish policy cementing as it did the partition of Ireland as well as hardly being an exercise in “self-determination”, both Labour MPs in the debate on the Treaty as well as the Labour press supported the Treaty as it offered a way out of the Irish imbroglio and a return to rational class-based politics. The overriding concern of, in particular, the parliamentary leadership of the Labour Party by now was to prove to the British electorate that it could be as protective of British state interests as its rivals. The article argues that that this pragmatic about turn was adopted as many members of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) in particular were acutely aware that the party needed to be seen as patriotic, moderate and responsible if it was to stand any chance of being elected to power. The article traces this reversal in policy by reference to contemporary parliamentary debates as well as through the columns of the contemporary Labour Press. These are the only sources evidencing this change in Labour Party policy. Recent literature on the Labour Party in the 1920s does not address this issue. There is no reference to the Anglo-Irish Treaty either in the minutes of the PLP nor in the papers of the two major players in Labour Party policy on Ireland, the leader Ramsay MacDonald or J. H. Thomas, later Colonial Secretary in the first Labour Government with responsibility for Ireland. [Author]

Challenges to liberalism: The case of Australian energy policy

This paper considers liberal and nationalist economic policy approaches to the ownership and development of Australian energy resources (oil, gas, coal and uranium). In the two decades prior to 1983, Australia pursued economic policies in relation to its energy resources which could broadly be described as ‘nationalist’. Governments of the day intervened in development decisions in an effort to enhance the ‘national interest’. From 1983, along with the deregulation of the Australian economy as a whole, policy relating to energy resources was liberalised. Development of energy reserves henceforth occurred according to the dictates of the market. This paper argues that recent Australian energy policy initiatives reflect an increase in nationalist influences and a retreat from the liberalisation agenda that dominated energy policy making in the 1980s and 1990s. Three examples are discussed where policy has been influenced by a nationalist framework: (1) the domestic gas reservation policy in Western Australia; (2) Australian government efforts to promote a ‘value adding’ nuclear processing industry and (3) Australian Labor Party policy giving preferential financial incentives for gas to liquids projects. The re-emergence of nationalism in Australia is occurring either because policy makers now favour it as a path to energy security or in some cases because they believe that appeals to nationalism will generate political support.