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Colm Murphy, "Futures of Socialism: ‘Modernisation', the Labour Party, and the British Left, 1973–1997" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
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Narrator/Announcer
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Colm Murphy
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Colm Murphy
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Marshall Po
Hello, everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Jacob Ward
Hello, everyone, I'm Jacob Ward and I'm here today interviewing Colin Murthy, who is a senior lecturer in British politics at Queen Mary's University of London, about his book, the Futures of Modernisation, the Labour Party and the British left, 1973 to 1997. Colin, it's a pleasure to have you on the podcast. Yes, please, just for our listeners, tell us a little bit about yourself and about the book.
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Colm Murphy
Thanks very much for having Me, Jay. I'm really looking forward to the discussion. So I'm Colm. I am a historian of politics and political economy and my first specialism is in social democracy and socialism in Europe, and particularly in Britain in this period, hence the book today. But I'm also interested in the politics of economic policy. So this book was based on my PhD thesis and I worked on it in the late 2010s and early 2020s. And it's really about the transformation of the British left, including, but not just the British Labour Party, over the late 20th century. And it begins when British politics starts to become particularly discombobulated and fractious in the early 1970s. And it ends in 1997, which is, I'm sure many of your listeners know already, a landslide for the Labour Party and the first election victory of Tony Blair and the remodeled New Labour Party, inaugurating a period in government until 2010. So the book is about the attempted transformation of the Labour Party and wider British left thinking at a moment of intense turmoil and upset and controversy. And that's what it's about. More particularly, it's about ideas as well. It's specifically about ideas about how the left should transform itself and the relationship of those ideas to political actors and political practice. And those are kind of the running themes. We'll talk about lots of these things in more depth over the conversation, but it's worth saying at the outset there are a couple of reasons why this was such a tumultuous and contentious time for the British left. The first is it was facing two existential political threats. One was Thatcherism and Margaret Thatcher and the reconfiguration of the coordinates of what was seen as acceptable in British politics. The fact that a Conservative government could win landslide elections with 3 million unemployed people was really quite shocking to contemporaries. And that was seen as an existential threat to their very assumptions. And also the Social Democratic Party, which was a schismatic party created in the early 1980s by some former Labour cabinet ministers and significant politicians who were concerned that Labour had become too left wing. And that's one of the origins of the Liberal Democrats today in UK politics. And that was equally seen as a very existential threat to the Labour Party and to left wing assumptions. And then there were these wider structural changes that underpinned that and gave the sense that, well, perhaps these. The froth of political controversy is reflecting something deeper, something more structural, more difficult to reverse. And they varied depending on the act I was talking about, but they included things like the Challenges of the nation state from above, from globalization and from below, from a decline of deference, de industrialization and the radical change in the labor market and all of the social and cultural consequences that that posed. The challenge of new ideologies, neoliberalism being the most obvious one, changing gender roles, the new politics of race and geopolitical change, including within my period, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. So that's what the book's about. It's about how these actors tried to respond to all of these challenges, the competing interpretations they came up with, and why some won out over others by the time we get to Blair in 1997.
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Jacob Ward
Well, I mean, that all sounds great, and a lot of those things we'll go into in more detail later. But I think, first of all, thank you for reminding me that this is your first book. I think it's a special pleasure to have the author of the first book on the podcast. So congratulations, I should say. But I think kind of taking a step back and thinking about, many of our listeners who might be listening to this podcast might think of themselves as socialists or social democrats or just have a broader sympathy to left wing politics. And you've talked so much about the challenges and struggles and transformations to left wing thinking across this period.
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Colm Murphy
So for people who do have those.
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Jacob Ward
Politics or interested in those politics, what would you say is the kind of big takeaway from your book for contemporary thinkers?
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Colm Murphy
Yeah, I think there are two takeaways actually, for left wing political activists and thinkers from different parts of the left as well. I hope this book is read by a political tradition that's famously internally can be a bit fractious. And I hope that this book is of interest to people across the left. The two takeaways are not allowing your worldview to pickle and to be pluralist, but also coherence. And they're in direct tension with each other. I should preface those remarks by saying the implication of my argument is of direct interest to left wing activists and their understanding of New Labor. New Labour was particularly in the 2010s in the UK during the Jeremy Corbyn era of his leadership of the Labour Party, but also across Western left wing politics. New Labour is a kind of case study of moving to the right, of becoming more pro market. And these are very contentious things that happened. And my argument is disruptive to the two, two more traditional understandings within left wing activism as well as the literature. One is salvation and one is betrayal. You speak to some people, New Labour Saved the Labour Party, right? They saved the Labour Party from all the things I was talking about. You speak to others. New Labour betrayed socialism with the changes they made. And my argument, which I know we'll get into in more depth, basically challenges both assumptions. New Labour was a contingent outcome of this intellectual renewal. Within that context, it was contingent, it was not inevitable. But because it partly came from that renewal, it cannot be reduced to neoliberalism or Thatcherism. Now, I think the political implications for activists today are firstly that while factualism is real and has real disciplining power and cannot be ignored in your ideas and in your thinking about policy, you cannot, you cannot cut yourself off from streams of thinking because creativity is not factional. That's a really key lesson, and one that in the UK context, I would say are diverse actors ranging from Zara Sultana to Keir Starmer. It's a lesson I think they should take quite seriously. But the other one is coherence. My book is partly about the political death of ideas, the choosing of some ideas over others, the narrowing down of agendas over time. And by the 1990s there is a limited but relatively coherent agenda and quite developed as well. And it was coherence. You might disagree with it, but it was relatively coherent internally. And I think that's also an important lesson now as left wing parties are trying to do incoherent things in government today in many countries and are coming up with incoherent ideas and opposition in other countries.
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Jacob Ward
Well, actually, I'm going to jump to something, an insight that you make at the end of the book, but I think touches well on this theme of pluralism and coherence. One of the most interesting developments that I found you discussing was the emergence of an ecosystem of think tanks outside, but connected to the Labour Party, like demos, like the Institute for Public Policy Research and so on. And one of the observations you make there is that having that ecosystem of think tanks which previously didn't exist, allowed unthinkable so called ideas to be voiced outside of the Labour Party, which people inside the Labour Party could adopt, but kind of selectively, right? So they could take the ideas they liked, but they could leave behind the ideas that wouldn't have been tenable within the Labour Party. And on the one hand, that seems like quite a positive development for kind of a more pluralistic open debate about what sorts of ideas the Labour Party could draw from. On the other hand, it seems like also quite a politically expedient development where some ideas that potentially could have been quite Useful. It allows them to be left behind because they originated from the outside, so to speak. So, yeah, is that something again, that we can learn from today when you talk about the kind of incoherence of left wing parties today, or is that just something that. How do you evaluate that development in terms of where political ideas come from and how they permeate political parties?
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Colm Murphy
Yeah, you put that out because that's for me, one of the key insights of the book and one that's not paid attention to as much because it's a bit more techy.
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Jacob Ward
Right.
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Colm Murphy
But it's about that relationship between ideas and practice that has to be concrete, that has to be discoverable in the archive. And what happened here, we should say, is that ecosystem emerged in direct response to what was happening in the 70s and 80s. So in the 70s and 80s a different kind of architecture was developed around policymaking within the Labour Party. The political scientist Mark Wickham Jones is really influential here and I want to kind of flag his work. He did some really important work on how this works in practice. And it was much more based in the party itself. So you had national executive subcommittees on industrial policy and they would co opt thinkers from outside, often academics, academics and so on. But because it was a party committee with party officials, representatives and MPs and ministers on the committee, it meant that every vote would go 7, 5, 7 pro leadership, 5 against leadership, or vice versa. And everything was voted on as a package. And that led to situations where you had what was called the alternative economic strategy in the 1970s, which was a very interesting and creative but very unwieldy program, which informed the 1983 manifesto, which is infamous in Labour circles. And then it also informed the policy review of Neil Kinnock, which created some hostages, Neil Kinnick being the leader of the Labour Party between 83 and 92. And it created a set of policies that Labour were committed to in the 1992 election that caused it problems, tax and welfare policies in particular. So that's why Neo Clinic's office quite consciously created the ippr. They felt they were hostages to fortune. So they wanted a space for policy generation, not just broad blue sky thinking, but policy generation that would not commit them, as you say. So that's the kind of prehistory and I think that is important. They were reacting to a problem. But as you also say, there's a trade off. The trade off is you empower the leadership of the party. You empower the leadership and you give them autonomy, which means they are less accountable to party Activists and they are less accountable to intellectual coherence as well. Now, what's the lesson for today? Well, I do think the difference in the 1990s was okay, these were autonomous institutions, the IPPR and Demos, but they were led by people who end up as cabinet ministers. So you have Patricia Hewitt, who had worked as Neil Clinics press secretary in the 1980s, works in the IPPR in the 1990s, then becomes an MP, joins in the Labour government and ends up a very significant cabinet minister. And David Miliband, who wrote the IPPR's Social Justice Commission and people might have heard of, who again ends up as a new Labour Cabinet minister. And they were quite directly plugged into what was going on in Labour leadership circles. So while they were more creative, they were also not that distant. So David Miliband works for the IPPR and then writes Labour's manifesto in 1997. He is the key author and I think that's a bit different today. It's not that the connections aren't there in the UK context. Thorsten Bell was leader of the Resolution foundation think tank, is now a significant figure in the treasury and the Labour mp. You can see for those in the know, in this very small world, you can see kind of former directors of the IPPR going into number 10 and so on. So there are, there are these connections, but I don't think they're quite the same. I don't think it's quite the same as having leading political figures who five years ago were writing the Key Commission. And that's the difference and that's what's been lost. And that means leadership is autonomous. They are not as in hoc 2 or vulnerable to factionalise NEC committees with all sorts of figures, from trade unionists to activists on it. And they have more flexibility, but they can come up with ideas without necessarily understanding them or they can switch randomly from one idea to the other. And over time this creates problems and accumulates problems for left wing governments and they get, get into, I think like today they're in real pickles because they're trying to do different things at once and they haven't thought through the fundamentals.
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Jacob Ward
Well, hopefully they thought about. But I would like to turn attention from the present back to the past, which is what your book concerns. And really, I think again, starting from a slightly broader perspective to allow us to zoom in, the key word in the book is modernization. Right. Modernisation of left wing thinking of the Labour Party, of many different things and decided that there are multiple modernisations is one of the key arguments of your book. But for people who might not be familiar with modernisation as a keyword of left wing British politics across this time period, what was modernisation? And I realise that's a hard question to answer because part of your argument is it wasn't one single thing. But now how's this become such a key word for the left in this time period? What does it mean in a broad sense, before we narrow down on the different meanings throughout the book?
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Colm Murphy
Yeah, yeah, I'm going to take an even further step back. Modernization is a really key word in modern social science, right? The classics, Weber, Marx, modernization, theory of post war American Cold War thinking. It's really quite a enduring idea in modernity. It's the idea that one must change something in order to be in tune with modern conditions. And that can be conceived in Marxist terms, changes in the relations of production and the mode of production, or it can be conceived in Weberian terms like changes in sociology and status in the spirits of the times. But in both it a disciplining force, like if one wants to do something effectively in the modern world, one must modernize. And I think taking that step back is crucial because historians in particular have long been deeply suspicious of that because it's a very ideologically charged way of reading the world and it's reliant on a teleological understanding of historical developments. Or put more simply, the idea that things are inevitable, that there's kind of an inevitable endpoint and things are moving, moving towards it, and that across different contexts, cultural and temporal, different kinds of societies are moving towards the same end goal, the end of history. Fukuyama and historians are very suspicious of that kind of idea when adopted by political actors in particular to justify contentious projects, because it makes your opponents seem not just wrong, but outdated, anachronistic. It's a really powerful political tool to say you are against modernization. Now that matters because within the UK Labour Party and the history of the British left, modernisation becomes a keyword. It becomes a keyword used by actors to explain some of the changes we've already discussed. New Labour understood themselves as the modernisers. They said that they modernize the Labour Party. And that language then gets taken up in the literature and there are books called the Modernization of the Labour Party or articles called Neil Pinnock and the Modernisation of the Labour Party Party. And that interpretation, I felt, ignored everything I've just said about the contentiousness of the very framework of modernization. It's a powerful political tool and here I'm Drawing on people like Emily Robinson who make a similar observation about progressive. Using the language of progressive is temporal blackmail. It kind of blackmails your political opponents, and that becomes a key feature of New Labor. So Tony Blair would talk about globalization as if it was the same as the seasons. Debating globalization for him was like debating whether autumn followed summer. It's inevitable. It's going to happen anyway. So with that context in mind, and knowing how important it is for competing interpretations of New Labour as either salvation or betrayal, the modernizers appear either as the saviour's understanding modernity and adapting to it, or. Or as a clique, a neoliberal clique. I noted that actually, if you go back to the archive and look at this period, a very wide range of political actors, including those directly opposed to the people that create New labor, are thinking about modernity. Because while it's clearly not true that there's one modernization and one way of responding to modern changes, it is also true, and I think most historians would accept this, that structural changes do force political actors and societal actors more broadly to adapt in quite directive ways at times. And the interesting thing for me was, okay, well, given all of the changes that are really interesting in this period, the challenge to the nation state's economic sovereignty, geopolitical change, the fall of the Soviet Union, sociological change, changing gender roles, a less deferential society, how did political actors respond to these? And what were the interpretations that they drew from them? And as you said, the book ends up finding multiple and competing visions of botanization. And then the research question becomes, well, why did some win over others? Why did we end up with New labor and not some of these alternatives?
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Jacob Ward
I'd like to follow up on what you said about this assumption of inevitability in some interpretations of modernisation, because I think it's very visible in two chapters, particularly of the book and two things you've already mentioned in your previous answer, which are globalization and gender and how these have sometimes unintended paradoxical effects when it comes to the actual when it comes to policy. So I'd start with globalisation and then I'll follow up with a question on gender. But because globalisation is really where you start the book, this idea that the global economy is changing and that means that the left need to rethink how they modernize the British economy. So what was the influence of globalization at the time? How were left wing thinkers thinking through globalization and what did that mean for how they interpreted and enacted modernisation?
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Colm Murphy
Yeah, so firstly we should say that the direct political context of this thinking is the disciplining of Labour governments by transactionally mobile capital. Now it's not as simple as that, there are loads of other factors, but if you're a left wing actor and you're seeing the Harold Wilson government struggling with the value of the sterling in the late 60s, and then particularly the Jim Callaghan government struggling with the IMF in 1976 during a currency run, it's not that mad to think about the continued viability of your assumed and inherited economic model. Because he assumed an inherited economic model was broadly national in orientation, the Labour Party nationalized the commanding heights of the national economy. Right here, the work of David Edgston is quite important. He does capture this quite nicely that in the 1950s large waves of British capital was national in orientation. You had such a thing as a British capitalist class, and you similarly then had such a thing as a British working class, and you had corporatist arrangements where British capital and British trade unions would negotiate with the British government. And that framework becomes increasingly challenged through a couple of things. Firstly, the rise of multinational ownership of production. And here on the left of the party in the 1970s, the academic and future MP Stuart Holland is particularly pioneering. He writes an interesting and influential book called the socialist challenge in 1975 where he says that actually the idea is that revisionist social Democrats in the 50s like Anthony Crosland rejected as old fashioned, like just nationalizing sways of the economy and just, you know, you can just have Keynesian welfare state and that's fine. That is in itself outdated in the 70s because of multinational production and multinational currency movements. And Holland basically therefore turns the modernization arguments against those who used to make it against the left and says in a more globalizing economy, we need to reassert the power of the nation state over the economy. We need to kind of regain control. And that's the underpinning argument for what becomes a totemic promise in the 1970s. Left to take controlling shares in 25 of the top 100 UK companies, to impose compulsory planning agreements on the rest, and then increasingly to introduce a systematic system of protectionism, quantitative import controls. This was the alternative strategy during the IMF crisis. Figures like Tony Ben said, we don't need to borrow from the imf, we just need to impose import controls. So the initial response is, okay, the global economy is changing. It's making it more difficult to do Keynesian deficit spending and to negotiate between capital and workers and come to an agreed solution. So we need to increase the control of the nation state. As you move into the 80s and the 90s, the analysis across most, although not all, of the left changes. And instead they decide that actually they need to abandon these post war economic tools and instead come up with some kind of alternative. And there are many, many reasons for that. But the two key ones are what happens to Francois Mitterrand in France? Some of your listeners will know Mitterrand was the French president for much of the 1980s and was crucially the first socialist president of the Fifth Republic. And he came sweeping in in 1981 with this coalition that included communists. And it was really exciting for the left across Europe, including in the uk. And you had pamphlets at the time writing, this is so exciting because we can see how a left wing economic strategy can be enacted in a modern European country. And the problem is it ends up being a disaster. This is still contentious today as to why this actually happens. But over the early 1980s, global capital movements discipline Mitterrand's government into reversing several of its of its policies, which included things like Nationalizing the banks. Right. So really quite significant left wing state interventions in the economy. But a lot of this agenda is abandoned over the 1980s. So that's the first one. And the second one is the changing nature of the European Community, which later becomes the European Union because of the influence of the French socialist administrator in Miceron's government. Government Jacques Delors, who starts talking about first the single market and he works with Thatcher and so on, on that. But then increasingly social Europe. The idea is once you have a European market, you're now the European social protections for trade unions and for workers. Now those two things mean that those exact thinkers I was talking about, instead of thinking right, we need to reassert the power of the nature state of the global economy. They think if we try and do this, we're going to cover cropper. Why don't we instead respond to globalization by creating a European social democracy? Maybe the nation state is too weak to take on the multinationals and global capital, but a European level state might have more weight in the global economy. And that's key for all sorts of reasons. It means the Labour Party, the UK Labour Party becomes more Europhilic rather than you're a skeptic party. A key change in this period and then you get to the 90s and by then globalization has become the term du jour. And aspects of what I just said influence new labor. But actually they also come up with a different interpretation which is much more restrictive. That globalization compels the economy to be competitive. You need to be competitive in order to join in with investment and to ensure jobs, which does enable certain investments which we might come onto later. So I don't think it's straightforward the neoliberal, but it does rule out other policies according to Blair and Brown. It rules out higher taxes, it rules out re empowering the trade unions, it rules out restrictive labor regulations. So that's the kind of story that a large wave of left wing thinkers were increasingly seeing the nation state as challenged by global capital. But the solution changes over my period.
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Jacob Ward
It seems like in a sense there might be also even be something a little performative about the ways in which these thinkers are in the process of theorizing globalization and its potential effects on the modern economy and how to manage that. They actually end up making globalization happen in a sense. Is that a fair kind of interpretation?
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Colm Murphy
I think they definitely. So no description of economic changes is neutral. And it is true that some of the changes that actually happened in this period were the result of policy decisions and therefore are by definition contingent in the sense of political actors have direct control over whether they happen. Obviously everything is contingent at some level, but I think in this context that's the key difference. So multinational production is one thing, but that's ambiguous as to whether that actually constrains the nation states. I mean, you know, Holland's argument was challenged. What genuinely changes over this period, which is recognized as quite significant by a wide range of people, and that would include me, is the liberalization of capital flows, the removal of capital controls and exchange controls in UK first and then Europe and then later across the world. This is key to the Washington Consensus. Right. And that meet, that does mean that it is easier for global capital to move itself if it doesn't like a government's policy, particularly if it's not a reserve currency like the us. And that was partly because of political decision making, because of Thatcher, because of Miserand, actually, and because of the eu. So yes, absolutely, it's not a neutral descriptor and that's partly what I'm pulling out. And because there were multiple solutions to this problem, ranging from a sort of Euro socialist European Union to an extremely constrained, very consciously centrist economic strategy, that in itself also shows that these thinkers are performing and creating a certain narrative in order to justify themselves. And that's why we come back to modernization as a political weapon. But I do also think something changed that was quite important. It's a complicated argument, right? You're. You're trying to recognise structural change, which I do think actually did happen, while also noting that the political outcomes were plural and the reasons why some one over others, is because of this political work, of how you narrate it. What's interesting in that space is that those who continue to try and stress the autonomy of the nation states in some respects which did continue to exist, including a significant political actor for my book, Brian Gould, are marginalized. They're increasingly marginalized across my book, and that's not just because of changes that are unhelpful to them, or I do think that is important, but it's also because of rhetoric and argument and factionism and the creating a political coalition. So these very contingent things that us historians get very interested in.
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Jacob Ward
Well, you teed up a question about alternatives, so I will, I promise, get to my question about gender and social demographic change and modernization. But one last question on the economy and modernisation, at least for now, is about these alternatives that were closed off because in another chapter you analyse and interpret conceptions of economic modernisation that could look quite different to what we actually got. Things like stakeholder capitalism, for example. And I believe, if I remember correctly, Brian Gold features in these debates quite heavily. So could you tell us a little bit about these alternative economic organizations, about people like Brian Gould, about concepts like stakeholder capitalism, what they were, what they meant and what they could have been.
- [34:33]
Colm Murphy
Yeah, so Gould is a really good actor for my argument because he was a lifelong and still is, he's still alive and he's in New Zealand now. And he is a lifelong Eurosceptic and a committed Keynesian. He always thought the EU as it becomes was a, a capitalist club and was an unacceptable restriction on the sovereignty of the British state and the democratic sovereignty of the British state. And he also is an effectively unreformed Keynesian. He thinks that no deficit spending is fine, it's fine guys, we're going to be okay. Now that means that in New Labor's eyes, he is old labor times a thousand. He is the opposite of modernization. Now that's not true because as you just said, Brian Gould comes up with this incredibly. And it's not just him, there's loads of people, right, Marxism today, David Blunkett, some thinkers like Paul Hearst and David Marquant, but he's the most significant political actor, I think. And they come up with this really interesting interpretation of sociological Trends of the 1980s. So what they see is a Labour politics that's struggling. They note the long standing critiques of post war nationalization. So the long standing critique within the left is that this was top down very status for a Fabian, that you're just creating a state capitalism, right, and you're not actually empowering workers or empowering citizens. And they noticed that Margaret Thatcher builds political success partly by doing so in a way. So some of her key flagship policies, things like, right to buy a council house, like giving consumers of welfare services more autonomy to say buy a private bed in the hospital, giving people the opportunity to buy shares in the privatized companies like BT and the famous Tell Sid campaign in the UK context stuff that Amy Edwards has recently written about in a very good book. All of this is pitched by the right as empowering citizens against a bureaucratic, top down, oppressive, in some accounts welfare state. So Gould says, well, we need to modernize what the welfare state is and we need to modernize what a social democratic state is, one that does intervene in the economy. And his argument is we need to diffuse power, so we need to involve stakeholders of various forms much more directly in decision making and in delivery. So in the 70s, people like Stuart Holland, again on the left, but also Giles Ridici on the right of the Labour Party focused mainly on industrial democracy, on various versions of empowering workers in factory firm. The moderate one is a few worker representatives on boards. The radical one is Ken Coates and the Institute of Workers Control, which is basically syndicalism, but that's quite an influential idea. And they're responding to the rise in strikes and less deferential strikes as well, wildcat strikes against the trade union leadership as well as management. And they're saying, well, the way to respond to this more assertive younger generation is to involve them more. And they frame it as a modernizing argument in that way, right? In modern society you can't just expect people to follow orders, you need to involve them in decision making. As we move into the 80s, that broadens out to consumers of welfare services. So the argument is, well, the government needs to involve residents and tenants associations in its decision making at a local government level. It needs to have representatives of consumers of the NHS on NHS boards in the economy. You start also getting ideas. And here's where this is. Brian Gould in particular, he pushes this. You get ideas like, well, instead of the neoliberal version of share ownership, which is you privatize a publicly owned company and then you flog the shares, why don't we have employee share ownership plans? Right? So you have a company and then employees have a share ownership plan and they have a stake in the firm and therefore a voice almost like a shareholder power. And all of these ideas are talked about very much as responding to modern society. And this idea that the old style bureaucratic welfare state is not going to work anymore. And Brian Gould was a key figure in advocating that in the late 1980s. And he's drawing on lots of interesting ideas. And the most interesting thinker here is Paul Hearst, a former Altazerian in a previous life. So a former very distinct version of Marxist, but probably sensibly abandons that by the early 1980s. And he's writing in the late 1980s books called After Thatcher, saying the future is corporatism. And Brian Gould, when he's writing about this stuff, is saying things in his book called the Future of Socialism. There's many books called the Future of Socialism. In his book he's saying that an empowering socialism of this decentralized vision will overtake, leapfrog and outdate Thatcherism. So they're using that temporal language and saying we're more in tune with modernity, just like their opponents of New Labour do a few years. Let me, sir, one of the things.
- [39:51]
Jacob Ward
That I'm really glad you highlighted in that answer is that the changes that these figures are dealing with are not just kind of, you know, exogenous global economic changes that are changes, so to speak, are coming from inside the house as well, with the British public, with society. Right. You talked about the rise of a less deferential public, a more activist public. And part of that, as you mentioned, is with unions and with consumers, but it's also with other social groups, particularly with women, and with, as you highlight in another chapter, black and British Asian communities as well. So I'd like to pivot to talking about what modernisation meant not just in an economic context, but also in a kind of social and cultural context. And in asking first about what that meant in terms of gender, I'd like to also bring in something you've mentioned earlier about how modernization at times has an air of inevitability about it and that sometimes is used as a weapon and sometimes it has unintended consequences. And I think you highlight that especially when you talk about gender policies developed or not developed in response to theories about modernisation on the West. So let's start there, please.
- [41:02]
Colm Murphy
Yeah, so one of the chapters, as you say, is about the rise of what I call a gendered interpretation of modernization. And here the key actors are people like Patricia Hewitt, who I've mentioned before, but also Harriet Harmon, the pioneering Labour MP who when she was elected, had a young child and that was quite a significant moment. And also some feminist policymakers and thinkers like Anna Coote and Anne Phillips and the Communist Party member Beatrix Campbell, a writer for Marxism Today. So quite an interesting cast of characters. And what's very interesting is they're a small group, but a very well connected group and also well connected with each other. They don't all like each other, but they know each other very well and they're very active within left wing groups of different factional varieties and party varieties as well. As I said, Campbell's a communist, not a labor person. But they're also quite active in the post women's liberation movement feminist scene. So many of your, many of the listeners will know very well that in 1970 you have a new type of feminist activism captured by the women's liberation movement, which is very influential over time in left wing spaces. That's not an immediate relationship. The initial relationship is very conflictual. But eventually many of these activists are joining local labor parties in the 70s and early 80s and therefore, the tenor of activist discussion over gender relations is changing quite significantly. Now this particular group develop an interesting modernizing argument in that they argue that if you look at social trends and also trends in the economy, British society is changing in quite significant ways. So family models are pluralizing as divorce becomes more normalized, as contraception becomes more widely available, family models are more diverse than they used to be in aggregates, like there's always been cases, but in aggregate, more people are in non traditional families also. And this is related, more women, including married women, are working in paid work, not just in reproductive labor, the unpaid work that feminists were talking about in the 1970s. And both of these things have implications for feminism, but they also have implications for mainstream social democracy because they challenged the premises of left wing social and economic policy. It's well known that the Beveridge welfare state assumed a working man and a stay at home brother. In its kind of basic framework, it's well known that the trade union movement was dominated by sectors that were male heavy in their compositions. So steel, coal mining, classically in the bid mid 20th century. And these changes were both challenging those very premises. And they demanded new kinds of policies from the left in order to appeal to this increasingly important part of society, both politically at the ballot box and also in industrial contexts as well. And the ballot box was particularly important because unlike today, for much of the post war period, women were more likely to vote Conservative than labor. And that gets this group of people a bit of influence and voice right in the office of the leaders of the opposition. Neil Kinnock, we've already said Hewitt was Kinnock's press secretary. But they have direct influence on the Labour Party leadership because of the electoral context to all this. Anyway, they developed this argument. It reaches its peak in the early 1990s in a series of IPPR pamphlets and also books published by these people. Harmon's is quite significant. It's called the Century Gap and it literally frames it temporally. It says that women are in the 21st century already and men are catching up and policy needs to reflect that. And we need to have policies like protections for flexible and part time workers to allow working mothers and to ensure that working mothers and working parents, and they say fathers too could draw on this if they want to. Working parents would not suffer from the inequalities that they currently suffer from in terms of employment rights and so on. And they also point to things like welfare reforms, welfare policies that are favorable to mothers and children. And they frame it as inevitable. They say society is Changing and the only thing you can do is catch up. Now that's very politically powerful. And I think that does actually shape New labor. Not, not as much as they wanted it to. But New Labour, following this irons, brings in the Ministry for Women in 1997. Harman has an unhappy early period as a cabinet minister and then there's a resignation because she clashes with the more socially conservative minister Frank Field. But Patricia Hewitt remains influential and you can see in policies New Labour enacted in government like surestart, the direct influence of this thinking on government policy. But that's all pretty moderate and restrained compared to what they were actually saying in the 1980s and 1990s. These were far more radical revisions of social policy that would allow people to, for example, be much more flexible in working time. Very, very generous maternity and paternity leave paid for by the state, all of these things to try and respond to this new modern constituency in society. And I think that's partly because they chose and really went for the modernization framework. The implication of that is that these changes are inevitable. So surely that implies that policy just needs to work with the grain of change rather than do something too disruptive. It's going to happen anyway, right? So just follow the trends, don't lead the trends. And I think that was unintended by these actors. They did not intend to do that, but and you know, they made a political trade off and a political choice. They saw that they had potential to influence an influential set of primarily male actors and they took that chance and they partially succeeded. So there's an argument for what they did. But nevertheless, the choice of aligning themselves with their modernization framework in such an obvious way in order to gain influence on a particular faction and the choices intellectually they made to frame it in that way themselves, I think had unintended consequences in moderating their platform at Capella University.
- [47:47]
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- [48:18]
Jacob Ward
It'S unfair to describe it this way, but I want to use it as an opportunity to pivot from, from this question to the next question. But it seems like in a sense people working with modernization and Gender flew a little bit too close to the sun of modernization. Whereas another group, who perhaps the sun of modernization didn't shine on enough that you highlight in the book, were black groups forming black sections in the Labour Party. And here you suggest or you argue that there was a lot of work happening within the left and within the Labour Party on kind of trying to advance representation for black Britons and for British Asians as well. But that, unlike gender, modernisation is a keyword. Doesn't seem to have come up as much when referencing those developments. Why was that? Why was it that when it came to kind of ethnic and minority groups, modernisation wasn't such a key word compared to gender? And how did that influence the progress, I suppose, of these causes in the left and in the Labour Party?
- [49:23]
Colm Murphy
Yeah, to list the veil a bit, or to speak a bit more like a political scientist, they have hypotheses that they test. Right. They're far more rigorous about these things than us historians. That violated my hypothesis. I went into the project thinking I would find loads of stuff about race and botanization and multiculturalism and modernization. And I did that because in the 2000s and 2010s, they were very strongly linked, and not just in the Labour Party, but increasingly in David Cameron's Conservative Party as well, that a modernized Conservative Party will be more multicultural. So I expected to find loads of stuff and I just didn't. You know, you always piecing together fragmented evidence. As a historian, we're detectives in that way, and you always got to be a bit careful that you're not finding the story you want to find. And I think that that's a tension in all of my chapters, like it would be for any historical work. And I welcome other scholars to look at the same evidence. But while in the others I could find clusters of people that advanced interpretations that in some way shaped the Labour Party, like that one I just described. And therefore there's a story I could tell, and you contextualize and make sure you don't overstate them, but there's a story I could tell, I just could not find it. I found references to modernity and race. I did, particularly expressed by Stuart hall, the Gramscian theorist in the 1980s, and then in political actor terms, Ken Livingston, the contentious but very interesting leader of the Greater London council in the 1980s and future mayor of London. Both of them argued that Labour's electoral base was changing because of deindustrialization, and while Labour did have ethnic minority voters, it couldn't take them for granted.
- [51:07]
Jacob Ward
Anymore.
- [51:08]
Colm Murphy
And it needed to kind of create a sort of rainbow alliance. I'm slightly caricaturing that. That's the Jesse Jackson term, but that's the quickest way you can describe it. They need to create a rainbow alliance of the oppressed, the unemployed, ethnic minorities and so on. And that's Labour's new social base. It's base work. It's not the traditional working class. So you could have, and I could have written a chapter that sort of worked that up. But the problem is that was scattered and infrequent and that never made it really to the Labour Party itself, to leadership documents. And therefore the question is why? Well, one of them is because, as you say, there was this really significant, but also it's in crucial distress, incredibly bitter debate about representation of black people and Asian people in the Labour Party itself. The black sections debate. This is now widely accepted within the British left that you have positive discrimination in internal party structures that are able to be based around race and ethnicity, as well as other things like gender. In the 1980s, this was incredibly controversial. Neil Kinnick, the leader of the Labour Party, called the segregation, which, when anti apartheid activism was as prominent as it was, was a very, very charged thing to say. And that's simply one reason that the debate about race got caught up in this really quite nasty debate about whether on the one side you're kind of marking people by their race and dividing socialists by race by creating black sections, and on the other, the. The experience of black members, which was often to experience direct racism and even indirectly and more structurally, they're systematic underrepresentation. There were lots of Labour seats which had growing numbers of ethnic minorities, all represented by white men. The deputy leader of the Labour Party, Roy Hattersley, infamously would talk about my Asians in his Birmingham Sparkbrook community. So that's one reason the debate got caught up in this particular issue, which I'll talk about in some depth, depth in the chapter. And I found very interesting. There's lots of things you can say about it, but there are other reasons too. One is intellectual modernization, as we said earlier, is part of a particular intellectual way of looking at the world and this kind of classic sociology. But what we didn't say is that's very Enlightenment, post Enlightenment Eurocentric intellectual tradition, right? I said master, I said Weber. I talked about all these classic European thinkers and the issue there is, as you get into the 90s and 2000s, thinkers like Stuart hall, who in the 1980s were talking about modernisation and black sections and race become increasingly influenced by post structuralism and also increasingly influenced by postcolonial thinking. Not just Gramschki Marxism, they were always reading around, but those intellectual traditions become more important and they start seeing modernization as opposed to multiculturalism, because it's imposing these Eurocentric ways of understanding the world onto the world. And that is an awkward relationship that I think also pushes against a developed connection between modernization and multiculturalism. And the final reason is the modernization thinkers I talk about, and people like Hewitt and so on find this issue incredibly awkward. So they do talk about racial equality, ethnic equality, but they view it very much as an equality issue and a civil liberties issue and a human rights issue. Increasingly, the argument to frame is less about temporal matters and more about normativity and basic rights. So you wouldn't read them saying, well, now that we're more modern society, we can give black people more political rights. They would react horribly against such an interpretation. They would say, no, we do that because from first principles we think that all citizens should have equal rights. And I think that's the reason too. So, yeah, it was a failure in a way. I failed to find what I thought I would find. But I think that actually led to one of my favourite chapters in the book, because I did not anticipate that being absent. And the absence has an implication, as I argue right at the end of that chapter in that New Labour infamously had a very Janus faced relationship to multiculturalism in all sorts of contentious ways. And I think it's because they went to government with a developed sense of what they were going to do in economic policy, in social policy and in constitutional reform, but they did not have a developed understanding of multiculturalism. So they did contradictory things.
- [56:04]
Jacob Ward
And perhaps because of that, turning to New Labour and their economic policy around modernization, you do show in quite kind of depth that New Labour's economic policy around modernisation also had a social element to it in terms of thinking about British society, educating British society, thinking about human capital, as you call it. So it's not that, at least based on my reading, it's not that New Labour's kind of vision of modernisation is purely economic, but it's a different kind of social to the multiculturalism that you talk about being developed in the 1980s to what figures working on gender policy in the 1980s perhaps would have wanted as.
- [56:51]
Colm Murphy
As well.
- [56:51]
Jacob Ward
Well, but it is also one of the, I guess, defining features of New Labour. People think about the ways that New Labour focused on education, attempted to transition Britain to a service economy, which necessarily involves Thinking about the people offering those services and performing those services. So how did these come to be such defining features of New Labour's plans for economic modernization, particularly education, given the struggles that especially higher education is having now?
- [57:23]
Colm Murphy
Yes, it's kind of ironic to read this back actually, given that context, but yes. So the answer to your question is we have to begin with deindustrialization, which was important for all sorts of reasons, including electoral and sociological, but in a way that's I don't think, well understood outside those of us who spend our time reading economic strategy documents that are 50 years old. Manufacturing used to be the central sector in labor technocratic economic thinking. And here we're talking about a variant of social democracy that will be familiar to many people, the Fabian top down tradition where the role of the web esque policymaker is to intervene in the economy and make it more efficient. And once you do that, you create more welfare that you can then redistribute to people. Now they don't just think that, they do also have, you know, they want to empower people. You know, the web's famously winched in industrial democracy and so on. But nevertheless, that's a really influential framework in a strand of center left and left thinking that persists right from the beginning, I would say, of modern socialism. Now in the mid 20th century to the 1970s and 1980s, the assumption was that the manufacturing sector was key because it led to more returns. I'm trying to put economies of scale, right? So there's only so much you can do with services, there's only so many services you can do. But if you are more efficient, you can make more and better cars at an increasing scale. Right. The second reason is because of the critical importance of the time in macroeconomic policy for the balance of payments and for exports and imports. And the idea is that the UK paid its way with manufacturing exports and if it failed in that area then it would have problems like in 67 and like in 76 because of changes in the global economy like the liberalization of capital flows and because of de industrialization. Over my book, that vision very slowly and very unevenly dies among center left in particular policymakers. And I say slowly and unevenly because it doesn't fully die and it's still there today. Actually if you look at some parts of the left but among the economic thinkers influencing the leadership, they abandon those assumptions and they instead think about, well, now that the UK is becoming a services economy, what is the key sector now? What do we need to intervene In. In order to stay competitive in the global economy and ensure that the economy is more efficient so that we increase overall welfare and that we can redistribute it through the tax system. How do we ensure that? And increasingly it's human capital. And here human capital has a. It's the idea that, you know, workers are a key part of the economic production process, but you could invest in the workers just like you would invest in capital through things like healthcare and education. And there is a neoliberal variant of that argument. But where the New labor thinkers were getting it from was actually the states and Democrat economic thinkers that end up in Clinton's government. Some people like Robert Reich a bit. Larry Summers as well, who's been in the news recently for more nefarious reasons, but particularly Robert Reich and his idea that as globalization takes hold, capital is mobile but people are fixed. So what the nation can do is invest in its own people to stay competitive. An argument that's dated, I think, quite a lot since we've seen migration movements and never quite works at the time. But there's an element of truth in it too. If you think that you've lost control over the industrial part of economic policy because of globalization, what remains within your power, investing in your own people so that you're more competitive. And these actors therefore argue that while the UK is increasingly a services economy, it needs to remain competitive in that space. We need to have workers that are adaptable to the changing economy. Therefore we need to invest heavily in education, heavily in education and also in trading, and they follow through. There is one thing you can say about New Labor. They invested heavily in education and training all the way from early years up to the university sector. And that is true even once you take into account things like the introduction of tuition fees. It's just clear in the stats. And I have to confess something here in that I remember this. I emigrated from the Republic of Ireland when I was very young. So I was schooled in the uk and I remember joining schools and then during my time there in the early 2000s, watching interactive whiteboards be rolled in and that terrible television that used to be wheeled out for VHS tapes get gradually retired and the books improving, the porter cabins being replaced by an actual building. I remember the investments and I called the chapter White Heat to interactive whiteboards, to refer to that for Harold Wilson's white heater technology to this kind of new vision of a technocratic modernizing economy. And that's a massive part of New Labour's economic strategy and one that influences its successors, including the Cameron government, too. And I thought it was interesting and explains a lot of their policy decisions and was not captured by the reductive argument that it was simply neoliberal. So I thought it was important to, as you say, in some depth to pull out where this came from and why it was so influential that you modernized the economy by investing. To quote Tony Blair and Gerhard Schwerde in their the Third Way or Denoi Mitter pamphlets, they say directly, the most important task of modernization is to invest in human capital. And I needed to explain where that came from. And that's where it came from.
- [63:25]
Jacob Ward
Well, thank you. I really like that we're even running close to time here, so I'd like to finish with just one more question, which is in your answer you've just given, you've shown again how often the meaning of modernization was changed and revised over time. So by the time it gets to New Labour, modernisation is investing in education, which wasn't visible when modernisation first becomes a topic of debate in the 1970s. And I think you end the book with, for me, what I find quite an interesting, intriguing conclusion, which is about what this tendency to revise actually means, what this revisionism is as a feature not just of these debates about modernisation, but of social democracy more broadly. Right. That it is that revisionism is maybe baked in to what social democracy is, and that's something that can be problematic, but maybe it's also something that we can work with if we want to update social democracy for the 21st century, even for the 22nd century. So as a way of closing this interview, I'd love to hear more for myself and for our listeners about your interpretation of revisionism and social democracy and what that means for the future.
- [64:37]
Colm Murphy
Yeah. So social democracy is partly the comparative term we use. So Labour calls itself a socialist party, but it has a quite strange definition of socialism in a comparative context, in that it's always been influenced by ethical and Christian socialism was comparatively less influenced by Marxism, although it's not true to say it was not influenced by Marxism. That's not true. So partly when we say social democracy, we just mean that cluster of that party family across, particularly the European and particularly the Western European context. But we also mean an intellectual tradition. And they're not the same thing, but they're clearly organically linked. And that intellectual tradition, I would say, foundationally began by revising something. Him think about Bernstein, he's revising Marx, he's saying that, well, is it true that the Crisis is just around the corner. Is it true that we need a dictatorship of the proletariat in the sense meant by some of my comrades? Actually, isn't the expansion of democracy quite helpful? And we move towards, to quote his book title in English, evolutionary socialism. And then, you know, and here I'm doing the kind of fast forward thing, but fast forward in the UK context, but a book that was influential beyond the uk. We have Tony Crossland, who I began. He was critiqued by Stuart Holland. But Tony Crossland wrote a book called the Future of Socialism, saying, well, we used to think we needed to nationalize large parts of the economy, but we've done a good bit of it back. Good a bit. You know, we've nationalized quite a lot now after 1945, and things seem to be fine, to be honest. We have a mixed economy, we're able to keep full employment with Keynesian welfare. So why don't we focus on other things, like making life more pleasurable, improving social policy, liberalizing society in some areas like abortion, like homosexuality. And my having done all this research, and of course it's shaped by the fact I was looking for this stuff, but nevertheless, I do think there's something core to the intellectual tradition of social democracy, of revisionism, the idea that you take some existing framework of understanding the world, particularly on the left, that you look at conditions in society, in the economy, intellectually, culturally, and you revise the framework in order to come up with a more compelling and ideally a more effective political strategy and social reform policy. And I think that's partly because of its origins in Marxist and Weberian sociology, but particularly Marxist. The whole premise is responding to some kind of structural reality. You respond, I think that's partly it, but I think it's had an intellectual life of its own. A lot of people who are social democratic thinkers today have at some point they'll have read some of this stuff or have come across these debates and it kind of sticks and it's a very compelling and very attractive way of understanding the world. Now that's double edged inheritance. The risks and rewards to a modernization framework, which I hope has come out in our discussion, are both very present. So the risks are overconfidence, unintended consequences. You could also really alienate people. It can lead to an almost messianic overconfidence in your agenda that you're the only one who's in tune with modernity and everybody else is just an outdated dinosaur that's incredibly alienating political tradition or political position to hold and you can see in New labor at its worst, that absolutely they alienated increasing swathes of their own coalition, let alone their opponents, and that won. The tide receded in the late 2000s with the global financial crisis of 2008. That really made that political tradition vulnerable. And you cannot understand Jeremy Corbyn, the mid 2010s, without understanding that messianic overconfidence. And I think also they neglected parts of their own electoral base with long term consequences that we're grappling with today. Way. On the other hand, I also think it's a source of irrepressible intellectual creativity. And at a time where intellectual influences on politics are in large swathes, our political culture actively discouraged for various reasons, due to a short form media culture and a very fragmented media culture due to a very volatile electoral strategy and due to the dominance of polling and electoral analysis of politics, which is crucial, don't get me wrong, it's always been crucial, but it really does dominate political strategy at the moment. I think there is a virtue in having a tradition that remains influential and that actively and constantly and irrepressibly is looking around itself and reading the latest books and thinking, God, am I completely wrong? Do I need to rethink everything? I think that's a good thing. So we've done cautiously and in a balanced way and with a conscious understanding of the risks involved. I think it's a positive inheritance of one that arguably left actors across the spectrum and perhaps actors more broadly would do well to imitate.
- [69:49]
Jacob Ward
Well, hopefully that's an optimistic note to finish the interview on. And thank you again, Colm, for your time. And thank you. Thank you listeners for sticking with us. It's been a wonderful interview. Again, if you're interested in reading the book, It's Futures of Socialism by Colm Murphy with Cambridge University Press. Colm, thanks again for your time. I really appreciate your patience with all of my questions and the depth and generosity with which you've answered them. So I think. Any last words for our listeners?
- [70:20]
Colm Murphy
Thanks very much. I've really enjoyed the conversation and I'm honored to be here.
- [70:23]
Jacob Ward
Oh, wonderful. Thank you. Okay, well, in that case, we'll draw the interview to a close here. Thanks again and speak next time.
- [70:44]
Colm Murphy
And Doug, here we have the limu.
- [70:46]
Marshall Po
Emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug.
- [70:59]
Colm Murphy
Uh, limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us. Cut the camera.
- [71:03]
Marshall Po
They see us.
- [71:03]
Colm Murphy
Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty Savings Ferry unwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.