The New Statesman has published a “call to action” from the Labour Growth Group. It paints a bleak picture of the state of Britain and calls for “disruption over caution…. We must smash the status quo…. We stake claim to the politics of strategic disruption…”
The call for action is not all rage and destruction. The authors identify what they call “the five modern giants strangling Britain’s economy and society”. One of these will be familiar to anyone who has read the Foundations essay, inspired by free market think tanks of Tufton Street: “Building banned: A planning and delivery system so clogged that Britain cannot build the homes, transport links, and infrastructure a modern economy demands.”
We need economic growth and I have no objection to a group of Labour MPs drawing on the ideas of “thinkers from across the political spectrum”. I just wish the ideas were good ones, not the planning liberalisation pursued by the last government for 14 years that failed to do much either for development or growth.
What I do object to is the Labour Growth Group invoking Attlee, Bevan and Crosland to support a policy programme that, they say, is to be “measured by a single standard: does this serve to make the working people of Britain better off?”
A single standard? Everything? The only thing that matters is improving living standards? Apparently everything else is secondary, including nature, beauty and the quality of people’s lives, not to mention the fight against climate change. Even Thomas Gradgrind might blush at this.
Clement Attlee came to socialism through John Ruskin and William Morris. In 1950, as prime minister, he opened the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow and praised his hero. Morris, Attlee’s biographer, Kenneth Harris writes, “saw life in aesthetic terms, of beauty and ugliness. Mankind should seek what was beautiful, in art, in nature and in human relationships…. The aestheticism and fellowship which Morris preached were essential to Attlee’s conversion to socialism.”
According to Harris, Attlee saw “much of William Morris” in Aneurin Bevan. “He cherished the poet, the artist, the companion, the natural aristocrat in Nye.” As housing minister in Attlee’s government, Bevan consciously put the quality of new homes above numbers. “While we shall be judged for a year or two by the number of houses we build, we shall be judged in ten years’ time by the type of houses we build.”
He condemned “the monstrous crimes against aesthetics by… private speculators in house building” and said he wanted to go down in history “as a barrier between the beauty of Great Britain and the speculative builder who has done so much to destroy it”.
In The Future of Socialism, Anthony Crosland condemned Labour’s philistines and utilitarians (“total abstinence and a good filing system are not now the right sign-posts to the socialist Utopia”) and called for “a greater emphasis on… culture, beauty, leisure and even frivolity”. On planning, he wrote: “In the field of cultural values, what is mainly, indeed desperately, needed is determined government planning – to preserve what beauty we have left in Britain, and to help create a little more.” Like Bevan, from the other wing of the Labour Party, he thought people needed beauty, as well money.
The Labour Growth Group are not wrong to put growth and a strong economy at heart of their politics. They are the precondition of “making the working people of Britain better off” and that is an important goal. But it is not the only goal, as Attlee, Bevan and Crosland could have told them. Nor is following the prescriptions of free market, anti-planning think tanks, indifferent to nature and beauty, the best way to achieve growth. Labour MPs, particularly those who draw on the party’s history to boost their case.
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