Abstract
In the internecine battlegrounds of the British Labour Party, the rulebook and the organisational sub-committee have, time and again, proven effective weapons for warfare. Leaderships, activists and trade unionists have repeatedly devoted time and energy to overhauling the party’s constitution, precedents and practices, before bludgeoning ‘comrades’ with their hard-won, spiky standing order. There is some logic behind this constitutional bloodletting. The party’s structures and precedents impinge directly on control over policy and are therefore inherently contentious. Moreover, as Henry Drucker once observed, the rulebook is central to Labour’s ‘ethos’: any changes risk an outcry.
It is this enduring controversy that makes Christopher Massey’s The modernisation of the Labour Party a valuable contribution to a rich scholarship on Labour in the late 20th century. Massey examines Labour’s profound organisational transformation between its 1979 eviction from government by an insurgent Margaret Thatcher and its 1997 landslide return under Tony Blair. He engages with wider debates on policy, ideology and electoral strategy. Nevertheless, Massey stays closely focused on the frequent organisational, constitutional and factional battles during Labour’s struggle to regain power.
The overarching narrative of Massey’s book an internal reformation to make Labour ‘electable’ will be familiar to Labour scholars. Nonetheless, as he notes, his book is the first to focus both on organisational battles and on all 18 of the wilderness years (pp. 7–10). Massey organises his account around six topics: ‘halting the left’s advance’ from 1979–83, the left’s ‘realignment’ in the mid-1980s, Labour’s Policy Review from 1987–92, the ‘One Member, One Vote’ (OMOV) controversy, the 1995 revision of Clause IV and the ‘Partnership in Power’ proposals. His research is based on both interviews and archival materials, especially the papers and journals of leading trade unionist and power broker, Tom Sawyer. It brings two main insights.
First, it foregrounds Sawyer’s centrality in Labour’s political journey over the 1980s and 1990s. Scholars have long recognised Sawyer’s role, including his split from left-wing tribune Tony Benn and design of Kinnock’s ‘Policy Review’. Yet, Massey draws from the under-used Sawyer archive to flesh out how this fiery veteran of the ‘Winter of Discontent’ became Blair’s general secretary. For example, he demonstrates the overlooked role of Dennis Skinner in alienating Sawyer from the party’s left (pp. 59–60).
Second, Massey precisely reconstructs the momentous ‘realignment of the left’. In a meticulous chapter, Massey convincingly dates the final split between the so-called ‘soft left’ (Sawyer, Michael Meacher, David Blunkett and others) and their former Bennite allies to February 1986 (p. 81). Massey does not dwell on the implications of his empirical demonstration. It is potentially revealing, though, that the left split nearly 3 years after Labour’s 1983 disaster, but still before their 1987 landslide defeat. One conclusion could be that election defeats, though important, were not as crucial as (say) the miners’ strike and the expulsion of Militant Tendency in re-shaping Labour’s politics.
Massey’s account, however, does harbour flaws. Some ideas could be further developed. Massey reflects on how the pluralist intentions of Sawyer’s ‘Partnership in Power’ reforms were derailed by Blair’s commanding rule (pp. 212–218). But I was left wondering what Massey thought of Eric Shaw’s 2016 article on Blair’s party management in Political Studies Review, which discussed similar themes through a more theoretical lens.
A more important weakness is that Massey sometimes casually reproduces partisan readings of Labour’s transformation, without nuance or evidence. Massey asserts, for example, that without Smith’s OMOV reforms ‘the party would have remained in the eyes of the public, in the pockets of the trade unions’ (p. 223). Massey elsewhere cites evidence on the block vote’s unpopularity among Labour members (p. 132) and newspaper editorial support for OMOV (p. 156), but his assertion about its centrality for the wider public’s impressions of Labour is left un-supported. This is not an isolated issue. Peppered through the book are uncritical uses of categories like ‘hard left’, even though these were the terms of Massey’s analytical subjects like Sawyer. The phrase ‘hard left’ may have been the least awkward. Still, it would have been best to acknowledge its loaded nature. Massey similarly describes the revision of Clause IV as a ‘fundamental break between Old Labour and New’ (p. 160) even though many have challenged the very idea of ‘Old Labour’.
This is encapsulated in Massey’s title and organising concept: ‘the modernisation of the Labour Party’. Massey does nuance this by defining ‘modernisation’ as ‘an accumulation of different organisational initiatives from different authors, across the party’s period in opposition’ (p. 17, also p. 223). Yet, it is dubious to stitch together several distinct and contingent phenomena, from John Golding’s selection ‘fixing’ to New Labour’s use of Cranfield management courses, and dub the resultant tapestry as a single process of ‘modernisation’. This distinctly resembles the framing of partisans, like Blair, who cast themselves as ‘modernising’ an anachronistic ‘Old Labour’. In fairness, ‘modernisation’ has (in this reviewer’s eyes, wrongly) become a synonym for ‘the rise of New Labour’ in much of the literature. Yet, at least other accounts have conceded that this convention parrots rather than carefully scrutinises the political assumptions of historical actors (i.e. that their opponents were somehow ‘backwards’ or ‘outdated’). Massey does not include a similar disclaimer.
By accepting without pause the framework of ‘modernisation’, Massey also passes over crucial constitutional reforms which had little to do with Sawyer, Kinnock and Blair. In her own account of Labour’s transformation, Meg Russell rightly highlighted the internal campaigns for feminist positive discrimination. Their successes culminated in Labour’s All Women Shortlist (1993), which in 1997 facilitated the largest single increase in female MPs in British history. Yet, in Massey’s account, this deeply significant (and deeply controversial) turning point is barely mentioned.
Despite these issues, Massey’s account makes a valuable contribution. His book scrutinises several key moments in Labour’s organisational history, convincingly demonstrates Sawyer’s importance and meticulously reconstructs the pivotal ‘realignment of the left’. Students and scholars will find it a helpful and stimulating resource.