Reply to Stephen Meredith,‘Mr Crosland's Nightmare? New Labour and Equality in Historical Perspective’

It is now half a century since Tony Crosland wrote his magnum opus The Future of Socialism (Crosland 1956) and 30 years since he died suddenly while serving as foreign secretary in 1977. Moreover, it is more than nine years since New Labour was first elected. However, the debate over the nature of British social democracy and the extent to which New Labour has broken with ‘Croslandism’ continues unabated. It is within this context that Stephen Meredith has made an interesting contribution to the debate (Meredith 2006). He argues, contra Roy Hattersley and others, that it is the underlying continuity between Croslandite and New Labour versions of social democracy that stands out. The debate rests largely on what is conceived by the term ‘equality’ and Meredith argues that there are strong similarities between Crosland's conception of equality and the meaning attached to that concept by New Labour, as outlined most clearly in Gordon Brown's Crosland Memorial Lecture in 1997 (Brown 1999). The reason why this has often been overlooked, Meredith argues, is that New Labour has concealed its social democratic commitment in order to build and then maintain an electoral coalition capable of sustaining it in power for longer than one term. Meredith's article is written in an accessible and stimulating manner, but ultimately fails to convince me. No doubt this may be because I am an old-fashioned social democrat and New Labour critic and therefore am not capable of being convinced! However, it may also be the case that there is a need for greater clarity than is provided, especially in terms of the conception of equality and the relationship between ends (values) and means (policies) that is central to debates within social democracy. The aims of this reply are therefore to point to the main issues on which I disagree with Meredith and to suggest why it is still the essential discontinuity that stands out between Crosland and New Labour in these areas. ¹

The first issue in need of greater clarification is that of ends and means. The simple formulation of this position is to state that social democracy is committed to the realisation of given values (ends) which require governments to implement specific policies (means). This distinction between ends and means was formulated by Labour party revisionists, notably in theoretical terms by Crosland and Douglas Jay (Crosland 1956; Jay 1962), in order to reject the fundamentalist position of the Labour left, who continued to argue that public ownership was essential for the realisation of socialism. The early sections of Crosland's The Future of Socialism set out to reject such a fundamentalist position. The nature of economic activity had changed radically since Marxist doctrine had been formulated. Crosland identified four changes in particular. First, there had been a growth in the size, responsibilities and powers of the central state, not only through public ownership under the Attlee administration but also through the deployment of Keynesian techniques of economic management. Moreover, there had been a transfer of power from owners of industry to corporate managers, who ran large-scale corporations largely free from the control of shareholders. A third change had been the shift in power from owners to workers, a situation largely due to the growth of trade union membership in a full employment economy. Finally, the Marxist claim that a democratic government could not control free market pressures and institute a welfare state had been proven false. In turn all of these changes meant that socialism was in need of fundamental revision since most socialist doctrines had been made redundant with the passing of time. What emerged as the fundamental socialist objective was equality, in the pursuit of which further public ownership played only a part and in many cases a minor one. Public ownership was no longer deemed to be a fundamental objective but rather a means available to government if other policies such as comprehensive schooling and fiscal policy failed to foster greater social and economic equality. ²

In making this distinction between ends and means, several points can and should be emphasised. First, public ownership was deemed to be electorally unpopular and in arguing that it should be reduced in importance the revisionists were helping to modernise the Labour party and make it more capable of winning a subsequent election. However, the aim was not wholly, or even primarily, pragmatic, but rather was designed as a theoretical critique of the Labour left. In turn, the Labour left sought to show the revisionist claim as misguided—in other words to argue that further public ownership was essential for socialism—but this observer at least finds the Labour left arguments unconvincing since they were all countered by Crosland and others (see Crosland 1962; Beech and Hickson 2007). One other issue is that the commitment Crosland held to ends was crucial in distinguishing his politics (ideological) from a politics where reference to ends was minimal (pragmatic). In other words Crosland was a radical who wanted to see a different form of social organisation to that which existed under the post-war Keynesian welfare state.

The ends/means distinction was to resurface in the development of New Labour's social democracy from around the mid-1990s. In his pamphlet The Third Way, Tony Blair (1998) argued that his politics was defined by principles, without which he argued governments would become rudderless. He argued that the ends of social democracy had remained unaltered but that the means designed to realise them had been revised fundamentally in light of changed circumstances. Policies such as a higher rate of income tax on higher earners, a policy favoured for a long time by social democrats, were relegated to a means and, according to some accounts, a rather insignificant method of redistribution and income equalisation. ³

Arguably this simple distinction between ends and means is inadequate as a framework for social democratic politics. The argument that ends can remain unaffected while policies can be revised endlessly, or simply abandoned in the case of a higher rate of income tax, is unsustainable. A more complex relationship between ends and means in fact exists (see Plant 2004). A change of means will impact on ends unless an alternative policy is found to realise the stated objective. Hence, the traditional social democratic objectives of greater equality and social justice are fundamentally challenged by the nature of New Labour's policies, including greater educational selection and specialisation and the maintenance of income tax rates on higher earners inherited in 1997. Indeed, the policies which Hattersley criticises are disapproved of because they undermine the traditional ends of social democracy, a point which Meredith misses in arguing that Hattersley has become fundamentalist in terms of his commitment to outdated social democratic means. If Meredith wishes to convince the ‘self-styled’ traditional social democrats then he needs to formulate a clearer position on the relationship between ends and means than that offered by David Lipsey in arguing that revisionism is a ‘state of mind’ (quoted in Meredith 2006, 247). Social democrats revise means in light of changed circumstances in order to meet established ends, or else they revise those ends, in which case they could at least be honest about doing so.

The other major issue brought to light in Meredith's discussion is the complex meanings that can be attached to equality. Meredith is right that the more straightforward notions of equality—equality of opportunity and outcome—are insufficient in defining what Crosland meant by equality. In fact these conceptions are in themselves far from straightforward and it has been a traditional social democratic argument that equality of opportunity is not possible without a greater measure of equality of outcome (income and wealth). Indeed, this was one reason why Crosland argued famously that equality of opportunity, although superior as a form of social organisation to aristocracy, was ‘not enough’. This is in fact the same argument as Hattersley makes against those such as Mandelson—equality of opportunity is limited by underlying social and economic inequality. This debate is discussed by Meredith, but one is left wondering if he thinks Hattersley is wrong in making this argument in which case he should say why. Crosland made this argument in the 1950s when the social dimension of class was still plain to see but income inequality was narrower in broad terms than today and so it would seem that this argument is even more relevant now.

The essence of New Labour's commitment to equality is to equality of opportunity defined in terms of a commitment to lifelong opportunities, to be realised largely from employment, with government provision of extensive training programmes the main policy in reducing unemployment. This requires greater state intervention in the economy and higher levels of public spending than neo-liberals would accept. Therefore we can see a ‘social democratic supply-side’ model of economic organisation. However, there would seem to be one further crucial distinction to be drawn between Crosland's conception of equality and that of New Labour's supply-side framework. This is ‘social justice’. The meritocratic argument developed by Michael Young (1958) and endorsed by Crosland would suggest that those who benefit most from supply-side policies are not necessarily deserving of higher incomes and other benefits that would result from subsequent employment. Equally, those who fail to obtain higher incomes and better prospects on the successful completion of training programmes are not necessarily at fault (in contrast to the frequent statements along the lines of the ‘undeserving poor’ by New Labour ministers). The economy requires a pool of lower-skilled, lower-paid workers and the economic prospects of individuals depends in general on genetic inheritance, family background, the wider social and educational context and so forth: that is to say a range of factors beyond the control of the individual. The key difference between what Crosland termed ‘democratic equality’ and New Labour's ‘strong equality of opportunity’ would therefore seem to be in relation to social justice and the compensatory redistribution of income and wealth needed to alter the excessive reward or non-reward that a market economy provides, even if there is a genuine equality of opportunity framework instituted by government. Again, this argument is at least implicit in the critique of New Labour offered by Hattersley.

In summary this reply has, necessarily briefly, sought to show that there are still fundamental differences between the conceptions of equality offered by Crosland and New Labour. It is these differences that validate the critique of New Labour offered by traditional social democrats. There has been a revision of both ends and means.