Vernacular
social democracy and the politics of Labour
Social democracy has put down deep roots
in British popular culture; this is why Johnson’s government has instinctively
favoured social democratic responses to the Covid-19 crisis. This vernacular social
democracy is a potent resource which Labour can use to proclaim its vision of
the good society.
Last year I published a history of post-war England
focussed on the key political question of how people have reconciled the
competing claims of self and society in their everyday lives.[1] In Me, Me, Me?, I re-analyse personal testimony collected from more
than a thousand people in ten different social-science projects conducted
between 1947 and 2008. But because this is a book first and foremost about how
people made sense of their own lives across six decades of rapid social and
cultural change, formal party politics remains largely in the background. Most
of the social-scientists involved in these projects may have been intensely
political, but their respondents generally were not. Being faithful to their
world view meant framing the project through terms more deeply embedded in
vernacular usage than the totemic labels of party politics: terms such as
family, community, nation, and yes me. But if ‘social democracy’, or even
‘Labour politics’ are not concepts that tend to turn up randomly in popular
discourse, there is nonetheless plenty of evidence to support the claim that
post-war ‘social democracy’ put down deep roots in British popular culture, and
that these traditions remain potent resources for the Left to draw upon,
despite the reverses of recent years. In short, social democracy may find
itself in crisis, both here and abroad, but it is far from dead.
So what does vernacular social
democracy look like in modern Britain? It is often claimed that post-war
welfare politics were so deeply entwined with the nationalist myths of the
‘People’s War’ that they broke asunder when obliged to adapt to the transition
to a multi-cultural society. As we have seen in recent months, those wartime myths
certainly remain potent political forces, but they did not represent the
bedrock of popular social democracy in its heyday. When people talked about entitlement to
welfare in the 1950s and 1960s they conjured up folk memories of the hungry
thirties more often than they appealed to the blood sacrifices of the two world
wars. Crucially, most also worked with a narrowly contractual understanding of
welfare which appears to have been based on a deep-rooted internalisation of
the logic of Beveridge’s Edwardian National Insurance scheme, reinforced by
even older popular distinctions between the ‘hard-working’ and the ‘idle’ poor.
A heated debate about Enoch
Powell and immigration recorded between a group of Tyneside shipbuilding
workers in 1968 nicely captures this outlook. When one of the blacksmiths
claimed to support Powell, a workmate initially
appeared to agree before commenting ‘But if they work a year before drawing
National Assistance I don’t mind that’.[2] Twenty
years earlier, the eminent anthropologist Raymond Firth had found himself being
quizzed about welfare rights in his native New Zealand by two brothers from
Bermondsey. One declared himself disgusted at the inadequacy of British state
pensions, arguing that after a man had ‘worked for his country’ for more
than fifty years he deserved to be paid ‘enough to live on decently’ – the
government, he argued, ‘ought to see that he gets more’.[3] That is, if a man had
worked and paid into the system for fifty years then he deserved to live out
his last years secure from the threat of poverty. In addition, there was also a
strong sense that the welfare system existed to protect workers from the
arbitrary whim of rapacious employers. As one shipbuilding worker put it in
1968: ‘The workman doesn’t run when the gaffer comes now. A man of 50 isn’t
scared because the Social Security will look after him’.[4] For sure, all these
quotations could be spun to appear consistent with an ethno-nationalist take on
welfare politics, but in welfare politics of this vernacular social democracy,
anyone who contributed to the system by definition belonged to it. Ethnicity
was irrelevant.
But it was not just the idea
of collective social insurance that put down deep cultural roots in the
post-war era. Crucially, Labour also found imaginative ways to popularise the
idea of universal rights tied to citizenship, rather than only to financial
contributions. It did this most successfully in the area of health and housing
(in education there was less to be done - Labour needed only to broaden and
democratise established traditions of universal entitlement). Current party
battles over the right to be seen as the true champions of the NHS underscore
Labour’s exceptional achievement in the politics of health care, but in other
fields the idea of social entitlements linked directly to citizenship has been
severely eroded. Housing is now probably the most egregious case of state
withdrawal, but it is important to remember that historically it stood on a par
with health and education as the vital markers of a civilised, modern state. In
Me, Me, Me? we see this mind-set most
clearly in the testimonies collected in 1959 from residents of Britain’s first
post-war new town: Stevenage.
We see, firstly, that many Stevenage
residents latched on to the powerful idea that ‘They’ – those with power and
influence in society – were at last taking a keen interest in the well-being of
‘people like us’. A Labour-voting pensioner was struck that both the Queen and
the Prime Minister had recently visited the flats near his home to see how the
project was progressing, commenting: ‘they’re definitely taking more interest
in the working class people’.[5] Besides this
internalization of the idea that ordinary people’s lives mattered, it is also
striking how easily Stevenage residents appeared to reconcile the idea of
collective and individual (or more often family) advancement. In post-war
Stevenage the two went hand-in-hand. Grateful to have escaped the chronic
overcrowding of Greater London, people saw themselves as on a shared journey of
rising living standards and life chances with their fellow new town residents.
This reconciliation of
individual aspiration and collective social progress represents vernacular
social democracy at its best. It has some parallels with what sociologist Mike
Savage has called the ‘rugged individualism’ of industrial workers during the
same period.[6] According to Savage, many workers embraced trade union collectivism as the best
means of preserving their historic right to a measure of autonomy and
independence in the workplace (and also as the best way to improve their
family’s living standard).
In this sense, vernacular social
democracy in Britain has always been shot through with a powerful streak of popular
(small L) liberalism. This tradition has much deeper historical roots which can
be traced back to the religious struggles of the seventeenth century and
struggles for democracy and reform in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. At its heart this popular
liberalism revolves around the defence of individual liberty, family privacy and
the importance of personal autonomy. It is, in essence, Savage’s workplace
‘rugged individualism’ worked out across the culture. As Moritz Föllmer has argued,
Labour needs to reclaim this strand of demotic individualism for the left if it
is reconnect with large swathes of the public. In doing so, it will also be
reconnecting with a long history of serious Left engagement with the idea that
individuality can only flourish when people are freed from the scourge of
poverty and insecurity.[7]
It should also be stressed
that the strength of this popular liberal tradition is also Labour’s best hope
in combatting the Right’s inevitable efforts to reignite a culture war between
the party’s newly-consolidated metropolitan strongholds and its traditional
areas of support in the former industrial regions of England, Scotland and
Wales. The powerful hold of a quiet, non-assertive
liberalism rooted in long-established ideas about ‘fair play’, ‘live and let
live’, and the right to privacy and personal autonomy, should embolden Labour’s
leaders to believe that the gulf between the new identity politics of the
metropolitan cities and the social values of its once loyal supporters is far
from unbridgeable. They need to label attempts to sow social division for what
they are: cynical Trump-style populist diversions intended to distract voters from
the real issues that blight people’s lives wherever they live in Britain.[8]
In addition, Labour also needs
to rediscover the emotional dimension at the heart of its historic appeal: its
emphasis on self-respect, equality and above all the dignity of labour. That was what the party signalled by calling
itself the party of ‘labour’ in the first place. This radical, egalitarian credo
put moral flesh on the idea that advancing universal social rights, and
ensuring public provision of essential services for all, was about upholding
the equal worth and the personal dignity of all citizens. It was, in short, a
way of demonstrating that for Labour each individual mattered because all mattered.
But the
party should take succour from the current state of British politics. Firstly,
it should note that in Scotland the SNP has demonstrated that a broadly social
democratic policy platform can provide the basis for building a robust,
cross-class political alliance. For sure, this has been harnessed to a powerful
national story about not being like mean-spirited, ‘tory’ England, but in a sense
that’s the point: by constructing a strong national narrative the SNP has
transformed a political culture which once delivered clear Conservative electoral
majorities north of the border into one that appears to be anchored firmly on
the (soft) left.
Labour should also take heart
from the Conservative Government’s instinctive responses to the current Covid-19
crisis. From the furlough scheme to emergency shelters for rough-sleepers these
have represented a sort of kneejerk social democracy precisely because
ministers and their advisers were quick to recognise that that was where
popular sentiment lay. Ministers acted as they did because, in a crisis, the public,
and indeed much of the right-wing media, expected the state to act to protect
individual well-being in the name of social justice. Far from being inevitable
– many societies have followed different courses - this was the power of vernacular
social democracy in action. Labour needs to proclaim these instincts as its own
and double down on them when Johnson’s Government seeks to unwind the
universalist ethos of its current interventions.
We all know that Labour has a
mountain to climb in 2024. Even regaining all of its lost ‘Red Wall’ seats
would not give the party a majority, especially since the long overdue
redrawing of constituency boundaries is bound to make the challenge even
greater. Labour needs to rebuild the sort of broad-based coalition that brought
it power in 1945, 1966 and 1997. In this regard, there is much to learn from
the strategies pursued by Attlee, Wilson and Blair. Above all, Labour needs to
develop a new political narrative that can build on the instincts and values of
vernacular social democracy. What the SNP has done for Scotland Labour must do
on a pan-British scale. At its core Labour needs a clear story of renewal that
is unashamed to use the language of family, place and nation – the bedrocks of
identity within popular culture. On these firm foundations it can then
construct a powerful vision of the good society – one in which individuals and
families flourish precisely because they can rely on a safety net of universal social
rights.
Jon Lawrence
University
of Exeter
NOTES
[1] Jon Lawrence, Me, Me, Me? The Search for
Community in Post-war England (Oxford, 2019).
[2] Shipbuilding
Workers, Box 1, File 3, ‘Observation notes on blacksmiths,’ p. 23, Modern
Records Centre, University of Warwick
[3] Firth Papers,
3/1/1 Field Notebook 1, pp. 21-22,
London School of Economics Library.
[4] Shipbuilding
Workers, Box 1, File 3, p. 63.
[5] Ruskin Papers, Stevenage
Survey, RS1/306, ‘Continuation of interview in Stevenage with X,’ pp. 6-7,
Bishopsgate Library, London.
[6] Mike Savage,
‘Sociology, class and male manual work cultures,’ in John McIlroy et al. (eds.), British Trade Unions and Industrial Politics: Volume Two: the High Tide
of Trade Unionism, 1964-79 (1999).
[7] Moritz Föllmer,
‘Why the Labour Party should reclaim individualism’, OpenDemocracy, 17 June
2015 https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/why-labour-party-should-reclaim-individualism/
(last accessed 6 July 2020).
[8] Jon Lawrence, ‘Labour must stop believing myths about ‘left behind’ Britons, The Times, Red Box Comment, 2 March
2020, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/labour-must-stop-believing-myths-about-left-behind-britons-r3tbjl66t
(last accessed 6 July 2020).