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British Class Consciousness and The Labour Party

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2014

Leon D. Epstein
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Customarily, the British Labour party has been regarded as the natural product of an advanced industrial society. Given a sufficiently developed economy, like Britain's in the early years of the twentieth century, it was assumed that a socialist working-class party was due to emerge as an increasingly large and effective force. In this democratized version of Marxism, the absence of such a party in the United States had to be explained as the result of the relative immaturity of American industrial society. Labor in the United States was on the same political road as labor in Western Europe, but well behind. Especially did it seem behind labor in Britain, “the country in which modern Capitalism first emerged to full growth — the country which was, therefore, the pioneer of Labour organisation.

That this entire approach needs to be reconsidered is now plain. Recent American political trends fail to support the expectation of a European-style working-class movement in the United States, and this type of party in Western Europe itself appears by this time to have had more of a past than it has a future. Socialism is hardly a thriving faith in advanced western nations, and the old class base for protest movements is being shaken as Western European societies share larger national products, assimilate increasingly their higher paid workers to bourgeois styles of life, decrease the proportion of manualists in the total work force, and provide wider educational opportunities. As Aneurin Bevan said deploringly of the new generation of British working-class voters, whose support Labour had failed to attract in the 1959 general election, “This section of the population has become thoroughly Americanized.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 1 , Issue 2 , May 1962 , pp. 136 - 150
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1962

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References

1. Cole, G. D. H., A Short History of the British Working-Class Movement 1789-1947 (London, 1948), p. 7Google Scholar.

2. Quoted in U. S. News and World Report, Oct. 26, 1959, p. 26Google Scholar. Bevan was writing of the “brash materialism” of workers buying their homes on heavy mortgages or buying domestic equipment on installment plans.

3. The generally high rate of mobility in industrial societies, including Britain, is made evident by Lipset, Seymour Martin and Bendix, Reinhard, Social Mobility in Industrial Society (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1959)Google Scholar, ch. ii.

4. Laski, Harold J., “The Personnel of the English Cabinet, 1801-1924,” Am. Pol. Sci. Rev., XXII (1928), 12–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The only sons of workers to achieve cabinet rank after 1905 but before the first Labour government of 1924 were John Burns, whose earlier independent working-class following commended him to the Liberal government of 1906, and Arthur Henderson, the Labour party's own representative in the coalition government of World War I.

5. Guttsman, W. L., “The Changing Social Structure of the British Political Elite, 1886-1935,” Br. Jour. Soc., II (1951), 122–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Much of Guttsman's thorough, insightful work is relevant to the present subject. See particularly his “Changes in British Labour Leadership,” in Marvick, Dwaine (ed.), Political Decision-Makers (Glencoe, 1961)Google Scholar, which appeared after this article was substantially completed. Another recent and useful analysis is by Bonnor, Jean, “The Four Labour Cabinets,” Soc. Rev., VI (1958), 37–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6. Matthews, Donald R., The Social Background of Political Decision-Makers (Garden City, N. Y., 1954), p. 23Google Scholar; Mills, C. Wright, The Power Elite (New York, 1957), pp. 400–02Google Scholar. Matthews assembled data relating to men who had been president, vice-president, or of cabinet rank from 1789 to 1934. Mills had information on the same officeholders plus speakers of the House of Representatives and Supreme Court justices from 1789 to 1953.

7. In an illuminating study explicitly devoted to Anglo-American career comparisons, but not limited to politics, Joseph Schneider found that among those achieving fame between 1600 and 1900, as established by entries in the Dictionary of American Biography and in the English Dictionary of National Biography, a significantly higher percentage of the Englishmen originated in elite families and a significantly higher percentage of Americans originated among yeomen and farmers. Schneider also makes the point that before 1900 those from various lower groups more frequently achieved fame through politics in the United States than in Great Britain. “Social Origins and Fame: The United States and England,” Am. Soc. Rev., X (1945), 52–60Google Scholar. See particularly Schneider's statement on p. 56: “The institution of political democracy contributed to the greater relative number of famous persons from the business, working, and farming groups found in the DAB. Politics was made a probable field of distinction for all in the United States without implying a necessary change in social status.”

8. An especially strong and cogent argument for the importance of feudalism in distinguishing European from American politics is made by Hartz, Louis, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York, 1955), as on p. 234Google Scholar, where Hartz remarks that everywhere in Europe, “in MacDonald's England hardly less than in Kautsky's Germany,” socialism was inspired considerably by a class spirit from a pre-industrial era.

9. Perlman, Selig, A Theory of the Labor Movement (New York, 1949), pp. 167–68Google Scholar.

10. Marshall, T. H., Citizenship and Social Class (Cambridge, 1949), pp. 57, 63Google Scholar; and Floud, Jean, “The Educational Experience of the Adult Population of England and Wales as at July 1949,” in Glass, David V. (ed.), Social Mobility in England (London, 1954)Google Scholar, ch. v.

11. Humphrey, A. W., A History of Labour Representation (London, 1912), pp. 188, 189Google Scholar.

12. Ibid., p. 97.

13. As Herbert Gladstone, a Liberal chief whip, said: “The long and short of it is that the constituencies, for social, financial, and trade reasons are extremely slow to adopt Labour candidates.” Quoted by Pelling, Henry, The Origins of the Labour Party 1880-1900 (London, 1954), p. 237Google Scholar.

14. Ibid., pp. 68-69.

15. Hamilton, Mary Agnes, Arthur Henderson (London, 1938), pp. 29–30Google Scholar.

16. Bealey, Frank and Pelling, Henry, Labour and Politics 1900-1906 (London, 1958), pp. 30, 128Google Scholar.

17. Poirier, Philip P., The Advent of the British Labour Party (New York, 1958)Google Scholar, ch. x.

18. For comment on the way in which a labor politician rises with his group, see Mannheim, Karl, Essays on the Sociology of Culture (London, 1950), pp. 202–03Google Scholar.

19. Pelling, Henry, A Short History of the Labour Party (London, 1961), p. 16Google Scholar.

20. Ross, J. F. S., Elections and Electors (London, 1955), pp. 412–14Google Scholar.

21. That only 11 cabinet members, and 14 of 24 junior ministers, were of proletarian origin was a source of parliamentary complaint. Lyman, Richard W., The First Labour Government 1924 (London, 1958), p. 104Google Scholar.

22. Two important early party leaders not in the Labour cabinet had similar backgrounds. They were Keir Hardie, already dead, and Robert Smillie, who refused office in 1924. Hardie, the son of a ship's carpenter, had started work at age six, and Smillie at age nine. See Fyfe, Hamilton, Keir Hardie (London, 1935)Google Scholar, and for Smillie the 1931-40 Dictionary of National Biography sketch by Hamilton, Mary Agnes, pp. 813–15Google Scholar.

23. Data on the lives of these and other Labour leaders are from the appropriate volumes of the Dictionary of National Biography, occasionally from other biographical or autobiographical works, and, where necessary for later figures, from the British Who's Who or the Times Guide to the House of Commons.

24. Others, for whom biographical material is readily available, are George Tomlinson and Emanual Shinwell. See the biography by Blackburn, Fred, George Tomlinson (London, 1954)Google Scholar, and Shinwell's, own Conflict Without Malice, (London, 1955)Google Scholar. Aneurin Bevan portrays some of his self-education in In Place of Fear (New York, 1952)Google Scholar.

25. Quoted by Bullock, Alan, The Life and Times of Ernest Bevin (London, 1960), I, 69Google Scholar.

26. Morrison, Lord, Herbert Morrison (London, 1960), p. 20Google Scholar.

27. Lipset and Bendix, cited in n. 3, pp. 82-83.

28. The difficulties created by the absence of up-from-the-ranks labor leaders, when all talented working-class children will have achieved upward mobility through university education, are tellingly and amusingly depicted by Young, Michael, The Rise of the Meritocracy 1870-2033 (London, 1958)Google Scholar.

29. Ross, cited in n. 20.

30. Data on Labour M.P.s in the 1950's come from the Nuffield studies by Butler, D. E., The British General Election of 1951 (London, 1952), pp. 38, 39, 41Google Scholar, and The British General Election of 1955 (London, 1955), pp. 4l, 42, 43Google Scholar, and by Butler, D. E. and Rose, Richard, The British General Election of 1959 (London, 1960), pp. 128, 129, 130Google Scholar. The basis for classifying by educational levels in the Nuffield studies apparently differs from Ross's (n. 20 and n. 29) since in 1951, for which year both have data, Ross's percentage of Labour M.P.s with only elementary education is much higher than Butler's. For this reason, no direct comparison is made here between Labour M.P.s of the 1950's and those of the earlier period.

31. This accords with S. M. Lipset's observation: “In a society with aristocratic origins where norms derivative from a pre-industrial social system still retain force, and where they have often been accepted in part by the new upper class of industrial society, there is, of course, greater emphasis on the propriety of class-consciousness or identification with one's own stratum.” “Trade Unions and Social Structure: A Comparative Analysis,” mimeographed 1961.

32. Schumpeter, Joseph, “Social Classes in an Ethnically Homogeneous Environment,” in Imperialism and Social Classes (Oxford, 1951), p. 145Google Scholar.

33. Himmelweit, H. T., “Social Status and Secondary Education Since the 1944 Act: Some Data from London,” in Social Mobility in EnglandGoogle Scholar (cited in n. 10), ch. vi.

34. Matthews (cited in n. 6), p. 48.

35. A broader manifestation of the same general tendency has been found in a careful comparative study of political activism in Norway and the United States. Norwegian citizens of little formal education and of lower social-class status were more active in politics than similar citizens in the United States. The more statuspolarized party system of Norway, it was believed, was more likely to be congenial to active working-class participation. Stein Rokkan and Campbell, Angus, “Norway and the United States,” in a symposium on “Citizenship Participation in Political Life,” Int. Soc. Sci. Jour., XII (1960), 69–99Google Scholar.

36. It has been pointed out, in a wider context, that upward mobiles in Western Europe are more likely to retain political links with their class of origin than are American upward mobiles. Lipset and Bendix (cited in n. 3), p. 66.

37. “Diffusion of power linked with comparatively free social mobility and open entry to all positions of power,” Guttsman has observed, “reduces the pressure to enter the political elite.” ”Social Stratification and Political Elite,” Br. Jour. Soc., XI (1960), 148Google Scholar.