British Labor’s Self-Examination

Ever since the Labor Party came to power in England a decade ago, its achievements and shortcomings have been a subject of first importance for socialists, as indeed for everyone else interested in politics. Several articles in DISSENT—one by Stanley Plastrik in the first issue and another by G. D. H. Cole in the fourth issue—have tried to assess the Labor Party’s record. Nor does this need decrease because of the results of the recent British election. As part of this discussion, there follows an article in which a point of view considerably different from those of Plastrik and Cole is presented.—The Editors

The high hopes many people held for the British Labor Party after 1945 have, to some extent, been replaced by disillusionment. But the present difficulties of the Party are not to be explained by electoral defeat or the sound and fury of the Bevanite quarrel. These are superficial manifestations of a larger concern—the facts of mid-twentieth century society and their meaning for socialism. The last twenty-five years have brought changes in British social and political life which throw considerable doubt on the traditional beliefs and assumptions of British socialists and socialists everywhere. It is discussion about these facts, and not whether Britain should build the hydrogen bomb or nationalize the Imperial Chemical Company, which has caused the party publicly to harrow itself with argument about “The Nature of Socialism” (one would have thought that had been discovered by now) and “The Next Step in Socialism,” etc., etc.

The despair with which G. D. H. Cole (in “Is This Socialism?”) and Stanley Plastrik (in “British Labor in Retrospect”) have presented their own brand of disillusionment in DISSENT is, therefore, more interesting as an indication of the tenderness of socialists for their past opinions than as a guide to the needs of the movement. It is easy to toss the Labor Party aside as a tired failure or an agency of right-wing trade union leaders. But the Labor Party is more than an object of pity or a subject of disappointment; its situation raises the issues which face Western socialism today— as distinct from the late 19th century.

Britain today presents no likeness to the highly stratified and immobile society of the nineteenth century. Social mobility has changed the character and meaning of the British class structure, and, as D. V. Glass has shown in Social Mobility in Britain, the open society is a concrete and very palpable thing in Britain. Movement upward and downward on the social scale is much more free and easy than had been realized; Britain, it seems, is the most fluid society in the world—save the United States. This being so, the Labor Party has had to reckon with this society and has had to rethink the meaning of its ideal of a classless and equalitarian society. For the belief in the efficacy of a class...