Rethinking Labour’s Past 
Ed. Nathan Yeowell 
IB Tauris (2022) £17.99

“Firm principles and policies are open to objections
And the streamlined party image is the way to win elections.”

The editor and most contributors to this collection of essays appear to have taken the words of Leon Rosselson’s 1960s satire on the Labour Party as sound advice. The writers are drawn from a small group of institutions, who generally hail Starmer’s election as a reprieve and an opportunity. 

Its success, we are told, will depend on “craft(ing) a new narrative capable of defining a new future for country and party alike.”

They come to bury Corbynite “historical narratives” such as Ken Loach’s Spirit of ’45 or the 1983 Labour manifesto. They seek to revive “narratives” and “insights” of Wilson, Kinnock and “the early Blair.”

Hence the past the authors revisit is not one of salient facts, nor what policies were actually pursued and how well, but what certain leading figures said or thought or wrote or represented. 

The exception are those contributions which focus on some specific issues of “community,” feminism, race and foreign aid. 

One author in this section summarises but then discards an insightful comment by Marjorie Mayo and others in 1977 that the concept of community obfuscates real social divisions, and holds back the development of class consciousness. 

The concept of community is in fact central to the new ideological direction the authors propose. In place of the old “binary” narratives — of “romantic class rhetoric,” or public versus private ownership — the editor argues that history shows that Labour can connect with the electorate when it abandons “sectional interests” and “positions itself as an agent of progressive, consensual and fundamentally national change” (Yeowell’s italics). 

Belief in community and “community ethics” as defined by David Miliband is headlined, along with an “aspirational agenda” and a new social contract “tackling deep-rooted social inequalities and advancing opportunity, economic efficiency, climate and social justice.”

Readers can judge for themselves whether this nationalist-flavoured phrasemongering is dangerous or merely vacuous.