Seeking relief from the intellectual desert of Starmer’s Labour, I started browsing along my shelf of Left Book Club editions, generously bequeathed to me by an admirable trades union activist of the old school.
The Left Book Club
The Left Book Club was a valiant, imaginative and successful attempt by publisher/ entrepreneur Victor Gollancz to provide food for thought for progressive activists. The Left Book Club’s greatest success came in the 1930’s when Britain was in the doldrums economically and politically, and faced with a growing fascist threat at home and abroad. An era not at all unlike our present situation with a government hopelessly out of ideas on economic revival, and clueless as to how to navigate the rapidly changing and dangerous international scene.
Gollancz recruited some of the brightest progressive British writers of the age: George Orwell, G D H Cole, and John Strachey.
The range of authors and subjects was international, often taking in writers exiled by the Nazis, as well as international reporters like American reporter Edgar Snow, whose epic Red Star Over China remains a classic. The gap left by the demise of the Left Book Club has never been filled in Britain on such a wide scale, and its absence is glaringly obvious in today’s progressive movement.
There is no alternative
Fewer and fewer Labour representatives seem aware of Labour’s traditional values (though they often quote them in invisible inverted commas).
Nowadays, I even hear progressive discussions and alternative voices to the current “There is No Alternative (TINA)”, scorned by Labour representatives as impediments to winning the next election guided by focus-groups.
Scorned also by the media. Some time ago, at a rally addressed by Jeremy Corbyn, I overheard a television interviewer ask an NHS worker: “Isn’t this old hat ?”. The NHS worker responded tellingly “It might be to you, but I’ve never heard this stuff before”
The Labour movement activists from 1930 to approximately mid 1970’s were certainly guided by the letter and spirit of the Left Book Club.
Attlee showed Labour values in government
So I looked back in hope to offset my present anger. Browsing my shelf I spotted my cloth-bound edition of “The Labour Party in Perspective” (1937) by Clement Attlee, whose combination of pragmatism and principles eventually made him the most successful Labour Premier. Attlee, the model “chairman”, presided over a truly epoch- making shift in British policy by establishing the Welfare State, the National Health Service and he still had time for accepting Indian independence. All this based on Labour principals and led by a Cabinet made of an inclusive broad spectrum of Labour talent from left, right and centre.
Here is Attlee in his own words:
One of the most serious charges that can be made against Capitalism is that it fails to give any sense of security to the vast majority of people…The overwhelming number of people in every Capitalism country live in constant fear of losing their only means of livelihood through causes entirely outside their control…a comparatively short period of unemployment will use up the average working man’s savings, and leave him and his family without any means of subsistence except such relief as may be afforded by the State.
With the necessary more inclusive non-patriarchal vocabulary, this is as rational, lucid a statement as any to describe today’s Brexitland.
Other countries still have the ideals of equality
Though If I may add a final personal observation from my visits to the Baltic Social Democracies of Sweden, Finland and Denmark this summer, these countries have held on to their progressive ideals of equality and redistributive economics far better than recent Labour governments have. Faint Heart never won a fairer society.
This article first appeared on substack.com@mhindley
