What's left? Not much!

Mike Phipps reviews What's left by David Powell, published by Peter Owen, price £22.50.

When at the last meeting of my CLP General Committee, I delivered a closely argued critique of the Blair Government's first year in office, I was accused by one right-winger of indulging in -- in Nye Bevan's words -- "an emotional spasm." The context, you may recall, was the 1957 Party Conference when Bevan, having been appointed Gaitskell's Foreign Secretary, voltefaced on a decade of opposition to Atlanticism and denounced unilateral nuclear disarmament. Just two years earlier, Gaitskell had spoken privately of the "extraordinary parallels between Nye and Adolf Hitler."

Colourful stuff, faithfully recorded in David Powell's What's left, which comes with a thoughtful foreword by Tony Benn: "The Russian Revolution failed because it never managed to develop the democratic traditions that were needed to make it durable. But the Social Democrats failed too, because they finally capitulated to the pressure of market forces and became apologists for capitalism themselves."

These class contradictions are the key to any understanding of Labour's history. Powell's weakness is that, idealistically, he sees "the central dilemma of socialism" as the choice between being a party of dissent and a party of government. This is a common misconception: that Labour only sells out when it's close to power. In reality the record of capitulation goes much deeper. The outbreak of the First World War illustrates this. Thirty eight million working days were lost through strikes in 1912; Ernest Bevin was right to suggest that, had war not broken out, there would have been "one of the greatest industrial revolts the world has ever seen."

The Parliamentary Labour Party overwhelmingly supported the war, despite its opposition beforehand. In a series of pathetic cave-ins, opposition to war became opposition to conscription; this in turn was reduced to opposition to conscription of married men, itself approved by the PLP in 1916 as long as it was accompanied by "the conscription of wealth." Long before it got near government, Labour's leadership had adopted a policy diametrically opposed to the interests of the working class. Nor can such betrayals be explained away on account of the war's popularity: the leadership was equally willing to court mass contempt in pursuing a capitalist policy, as the huge benefit cuts of 1931 and the adoption of monetarism in 1976 show.

From being detailed and engaging at the outset, Powell rushes through the last 35 years of the Party's history in as many pages. Not surprisingly, this has its imbalances: for example, the author seems almost as obsessed as the leadership and the media with the negligible role played by Militant in the Party's move to the left in the early 1980s. Equally his focus is often on the sharpness rather than the substance of internal disputes. While it's a truism that divided parties don't win elections, the political basis of unity is of capital importance, as the last few years show. A brave attempt, but a flawed book.

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