British Labor Party Struggles With Identity: Has It Lost Its Working-Class Roots?

One question haunted the Labor Party’s political metamorphosis here: Is it losing its socialist soul?

The party of the working class has embraced moderation and modernity with a passion that is disturbing some old-timers.

There is less talk of socialist struggle these days than of electoral strategies.

The red flag of revolution has been replaced as the party’s emblem by the red rose of peaceful growth.

Restoration of public ownership now takes second place to promotion of private industry. The welfare state cedes priority to investment.

The trade unions that previously financed and controlled the party are being increasingly sidelined.

The party of the underdog has disavowed its high-taxes-high-spending policies. It is now committed to living, as a government, strictly within its means whatever the social hardships.

Party leaders deny any retreat from the basic socialist goal of a fairer and more caring society. They argue that they are simply adapting to the times.

But a new survey of 5,065 party members has reaffirmed a strong commitment within the ranks to traditional socialist values, feeding suggestions that the reforming leadership is not in tune with many members.

Ernie Roberts, a delegate attending his 45th annual Labor conference, said: “During those 45 years I have seen many attacks on the democracy of our party. . . . We must stand firm for our democratic rights to amend the policies and statements of our party.

“The combined intelligence of the delegates to a Labor Party conference is greater than that represented on the (leadership) platform.”

Another delegate, Val Dunne, of the bakers’ union, complained that middle-class and technical recruits to the party are increasingly dominating policy-making.

She said: “These comrades . . . have this disproportionate influence, but above all they don’t represent the working class and the poor people.”

“It is one thing to devolve electoral tactics onto a small number of leading members, but quite another to devolve onto them responsibility for our political direction in the long term. That would be both unfair and, in the long term, a disaster.”

Picking up the whiff of dissent, the political editor of the pro-Conservative Daily Mail, Gordon Greig, noted that there was “a gut feeling (among delegates) that it might be time to make a stand against a leadership whose star appears to be guided by the polls rather than principles.”

Even the pro-Labor Guardian noted that three largely symbolic votes against leadership plans on the conference’s opening day “served as a reminder that the acceptance of (party leader Neil) Kinnock’s reform package by many unions and activists still leaves Labor’s heart in intermittent conflict with its head.”

If, in the midst of radical change, the Labor Party needs to be reminded of its deep working-class roots it could meet in no more fitting venue than Blackpool.

This resort was built on the notion of “wake’s week,” when blue-collar industries would close for summer vacation and the workers would come here from the mines and mills of England’s industrial northwest to clean their lungs and fill their stomachs.

Their pleasures were as simple as they were cheap: a walk along the pier, a ride on the carousels or a day on the beach when it was sunny; a gamble of pennies in the arcades or a sing-along in the pub when it was wet. Their diet was as basic as it was repetitive: fish and chips, or meat pie and mashed potatoes.

They were from real cloth-cap-and-clogs backgrounds. They were the very stuff of the early blue-collar Labor Party.

Today their grandchildren and great-grandchildren still come here in the tens of thousands from nearby industrial towns for the same simplest of pleasures.