How to explain the persistence and apparent indestructibility of the British monarchy. More to the point, how to explain its desperate and paranoid response to the scrutiny of Parliament.
Secular moderns – rational British grown-ups, middle class people who feel a bit uncomfortable about the Monarchy but wouldn’t go so far as to call themselves republicans – mostly don’t get the whole Royal family thing. They classify the Royals as just another elite clan – albeit one with a bit of extra social media clout – and tend to understate their importance in the contemporary British polity. They classify them as just another ancien régime holdover; an inbred aristocratic tourist attraction; something we ought, at most, to ignore and leave to its own devices. They generally support the idea of demoting or defunding the royals but would never seriously suggest removing them all together. Consequently they think of the present crisis in the British Monarchy – the one involving the hideous sex-offender prick we’re no longer even allowed to call a Prince – as mainly a kind of show-business spat that will be resolved once the King has achieved the necessary public distance from his stupid and unpleasant younger brother.
What they’re missing, of course, is the absolute centrality of the Monarchy to Britain’s awkward constitutional settlement. Tom Nairn, one of the most important intellectuals of the republican spasm that came before this one, back in the nineties, called the arrangement the ‘Crown-Constitutional’ state. He describes, in his beautiful book The Enchanted Glass, the awkward but vital binding together of Parliament and Crown (the Executive is a third, less vital, element) in a formation that has, to a large degree, guaranteed the stability and resistance to unrest and revolution of the British state in the three hundred-odd years since it was all invented. He writes about the absolute necessity of the intimate but always at-arms-length relationship of our disputatious, deliberative elected assembly with the Monarchy.
The 1688 settlement, which is misremembered by most of us, and especially by the Whiggish liberal mainstream today, as a kind of bourgeois update to Magna Carta, didn’t abolish the Monarchy – it positioned it as the existential precondition for Parliamentary authority. Parliament became sovereign, but only once it had first been granted that sovereignty, sacramentally as it were, by a now non-absolutist Crown. The deal is that the Crown ceases to rule but it confers legitimacy upon the rulers. So Parliament is permitted to tax, legislate – even depose dynasties – but may not scrutinise the living body of the Crown as if it were a water company MD or an errant QUANGO or the Director General of the BBC. That’s the arrangement. It’s the hinge on which the whole settlement turns, in fact. We don’t behead Kings any more, we don’t exile them and we definitely don’t haul them before select committees. The Crown is not incidental to this system, it’s at the absolute centre – not powerful in the old sense but untouchable in the constitutional sense. And this is what defines this moment and what explains the conduct of the King and his court: because the Crown is the source of legitimacy in this system. Parliament cannot itself claim the right to interrogate the Crown. If it could, the source and recipient of power in the system would be inverted, and the 1688 machine would blow up. This is what’s behind the present panic. It’s not about privilege, or the ignorance and arrogance of a handful of MPs, or the conduct of the stupid and wicked former Prince: it’s about securing the constitutional reality of modern Britain.
Nairn explains that a condition of this agreement is that Parliament is forever prohibited from intruding into the lives and conduct of the Monarchy. And the only serious threats to the stability of the Crown over the centuries have always come at times when unruly Parliamentarians have disrespected the golden rule and developed an unhealthy interest in the business of the Monarch. At various points since the late 19th Century, for instance, articulate and often very effective legislators – mostly but not all from the left – took on the Crown, often with the protection of Parliamentary privilege from the chamber itself. In every instance these attacks have been publicly dismissed and often ridiculed but have been inwardly treated as genuine existential threats to the institutional arrangements. MPs like Charles Dilkes, who was a Liberal, and Willie Hamilton, a Labour MP who wrote a brilliant and funny book about all this (that would have got him hanged a couple of hundred years ago), were berated by monarchists and labelled traitors by the popular press. The list of MPs who have deliberately, consciously taken on the Crown is a short one. The British machine of state has always understood that this awkward and inherantly unstable relationship – Crown and Parliament – must be sustained at all cost because, despite its apparent fragility, it’s the only really durable guarantee of the state’s survival.
So, whenever Parliament develops an interest in the Crown, whenever it steps out of its lane and threatens to intrude, there’s always a powerful reaction. In the present crisis, the threats of various uncooperative back-benchers and committee chairs to go so far as to summon the former Prince to Parliament have produced an equal and opposite reaction of surprising ferocity. The King can’t act against Parliament, of course – that’s prohibited – but the (almost) total expulsion of one of their own – the stripping away of titles and property and other oraments of power known to be so important to this very vain and thin-skinned man; action more severe even than that taken against a rogue who was already on the throne – has surprised many but when understood in this context, when seen as an attempt to repel an attack by an uppity Parliament that’s forgotten its place in the hierarchy, it all makes sense.
I’ve written about the Monarchy here before. In fact it’s beginning to look a bit obsessive.
The conventional wisdom is that Labour is the only major socialist party in the world that emerged directly from organised labour—every other important party—in the USA, Germany, France, Japan—was the product of an actual revolution or of a popular socialist movement. Labour founders Keir Hardie and Arthur Henderson had both been union leaders and many early Labour parliamentarians were well-known workplace leaders or campaigners for workers’ rights.
(note labour and Labour are used throughout, for obvious reasons).
RMT members on a picket line in 2022 – photo from the RMT
So there’s a logic to the statement that Labour is ‘the party of organised labour’ or ‘the Parliamentary wing of the trade union movement’. And to the reminders that it’s the unions who still largely fund the party and also to the shock and upset amongst supporters when Labour’s parliamentary leadership fails to support union action or even opposes it.
His Majesty’s loyal opposition
It turns out, though, that the will of those noble and undoubtedly courageous early Labour leaders – and of their comrades at the top of the union movement – was not to win a victory for workers, to challenge or overthrow the parties of power at the time, to replace or diminish the landowner and business elites, or even to offer a pro-worker counterweight in the Commons. The will of those leaders—as of the current generation—was always to gain access, to join the club, to get their bums on the green benches and to form a polite left-hand hump to the Crown-Parliamentary camel, supplanting the previous occupants of the less-favoured benches and becoming ‘His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition’.
We know what Keir Hardie would have done
This sounds cynical. I don’t mean for a moment to discount the contribution of those pioneer socialists to the pushing back of the multi-century stasis in Parliament. They were responsible, after all, for the epochal introduction into an ancient elite legislature of working people. And, of course, individual Labour members have provided the backbone to countless labour disputes over the years—but it is vital to be clear-eyed about this. Labour in Parliament, from its very beginnings, was not a workers’ party and, in the present day, it’s a progressive party, a party of the Parliamentary centre-left, but it’s not a workers’ party.
So there’s nothing new or surprising in the Labour party distancing itself from the interests of working people—do you remember the grim spectacle of Neil Kinnock making a flying visit to a miners’ strike picket, right at the end of the strike and at 5 a.m. so as to miss the reporters? (Of course you don’t, it was barely recorded. See if you can find a photo. There are none). During the long strike Kinnock never supported the strikers’ aims, repeatedly called for a national ballot and didn’t once ask workers to respect NUM picket lines. It was perhaps the greatest challenge that a modernising Labour leader could possibly face—and we know that Kinnock, the miner’s son, was unhappy about the position he had to take, but it became the most iconic—and relevant—statement of Labour’s labour ambivalence of the post-Thatcher era.
Going back further, almost to the origins of the party, during the First World War, Labour and the unions agreed an ‘industrial truce‘ in the national interest (Labour ministers joined both the Asquith and Lloyd George coalition governments). After the war, Labour continued to oppose all instances of labour militancy and, in the build-up to the 1926 general strike, as the climate worsened and employers tried to force through wage cuts, the Labour leadership mediated ineffectively. Ramsay MacDonald made grand speeches in Parliament, calling for reconciliation but, when the strike came, he opposed it.
Leave it to the Rotary Club
When the Jarrow crusaders marched to London ten years later they had to depend on a strange alliance of churches, rogue trade unionists and the Rotary Club for food and support along the way—the TUC and the Labour party didn’t turn up (local MP Ellen Wilkinson was a charismatic exception). 20th Century history is studded with examples like this. Even earlier, when Churchill moored a battleship in the Mersey to bring a little jeopardy to the 1911 Liverpool dockers’ strike, the Labour party, already a force in Parliament, was nowhere to be seen.
Wal Hannington. Activist (and my great aunt) Emily Rothery waving her hat in the foreground)
In the rough years between the wars there was an explosion of labour activism and confidence—in the face of the great depression, active government repression, blacklisting and a hostile judiciary. Wal Hannington’s National Unemployed Workers Movement, started by the Communist Party in 1921, moved mountains—organising big marches and actions all over the country. Its leadership was smeared and persecuted. They were convicted under ancient mutiny laws and imprisoned—right at the sharp end of the workers’ struggle—but for Labour it was a bit too Communist. The party stood back.
Likewise, the local councils who defied ancient, repressive laws to hold down the rates and to protect the poor did so without the support of Labour in Parliament. In 1921 dozens of Poplar councillors—mostly Labour, including future leader George Lansbury—were imprisoned for their defiance. The Party leadership opposed their action (in the nineties, you’ll remember, Neil Kinnock scolded Labour councillors prosecuted and surcharged for not paying the poll tax).
After the second world war, you might have thought Labour could take for granted the support of working people (even voters in the armed forces supported Labour in 1945), the party opposed dozens of strikes and other actions – actually sending in army blacklegs on more than one occasion.
You’re on your own, ladies
What we’ll do is show to support you on week 40 of your strike
When in government the party has always found it even harder to support strikers. The Grunwick workers, whose long strike was about union recognition, were defeated and humiliated while the governing Labour Party withheld support, although in scenes familiar to us now, individual MPs, including cabinet ministers, showed up at the picket line (the record shows that Shirley Williams et al waited until the strike was 40 weeks old and essentially already crushed to offer their calculated solidarity, though). The underpaid women at Ford’s Dagenham plant were left high and dry by a serving Labour government, winning only partial parity, after a long dispute, with the equally-calculated support of then Secretary of State Barbara Castle.
If the Tolpuddle Martyrs were to come back to life and join the Labour party tomorrow morning, the party would have issued a statement, suspended their memberships, conducted a disciplinary and kicked them out by lunchtime.
Castle’s own contribution to labour relations was to lay the foundations for 1974 legislation that withdrew important workers’ rights. It was this law that first introduced the requirement for strike ballots – and when the Tories introduced their own anti-union legislation in 1992 it essentially just tidied up Labour’s (the title of the act artfully just adds the word ‘consolidation’ to the name of Labour’s 1974 law). When Blair came to power he moderated but did not remove the Thatcher ‘reforms’ and actually introduced new limits on legitimate action to meet the requirements of his new backers in business and the media. His government’s 1999 legislation on union recognition had essentially been neutralised by employer lobbying by the time it was on the statute book. There was so much Third Way promise in the New Labour programme that optimists (including, for instance, me) convinced themselves of an imminent renaissance for British trade unions after the 1997 landslide – of something like the enduring social settlement that had sustained growth and prosperity in post-war Germany. It didn’t happen.
Hopeful postal workers, 1971
Some of the biggest actions of the entire Labour period are now essentially forgotten. During the 47-day seamen’s strike of 1966 the Labour government’s response was drastic: Harold Wilson imposed a state of emergency (although its powers were never actually used) and singled out ‘communist agitators’ among the strikers. His government’s opposition to a decent settlement ultimately scuppered the strike and sailors went back to work with minimal concessions from employers. A few years later, another enormous and consequential strike took place right at the heart of the state—in its very guts you might say. The now mostly-forgotten 1971 postal workers’ strike lasted for seven weeks and had overwhelming support from Post Office workers who had been almost uniquely badly-treated in the post-war period.
The strike became a template for Tory government opposition to industrial action—Royal Mail’s monopoly on delivering letters was suspended in an effort to circumvent the strike’s enormous impact on the UK economy. The strike ended without agreement—a dispiriting defeat. The workers were awarded a backdated 9% pay increase and some changes to working patterns after an inquiry but this didn’t even match what they’d been offered before the strike. No one was happy. Individual Labour MPs, including Tony Benn, who’d been Postmaster General under Harold Wilson in the sixties but by this point was on the back benches, supported the strike. Wilson himself, from the opposition front bench, walked a familiar line, saying that the union’s demands were not unreasonable but advocating independent arbitration by a court of inquiry. He opposed the strike.
The one big win
The extraordinary sequence of slow-downs and strikes that brought about the three-day week and the infamous powercuts in the early seventies is still the only industrial action that has ever brought down a UK government. Heath’s battle with miners and power workers was surely the high-water mark for labour activism in Britain—bringing together workers, party members and movement in a way not seen before or since. It was a highly-effective action, using modern communications to coordinate the strikes and winning significant public support for the cause.
The workers won and so did Labour. The Parliamentary Labour Party, while in opposition under Harold Wilson, actually supported the pay claims of the miners (often in House of Commons debates) and, once in office, agreed two 35% pay rises for the miners in the space of two years. In the 1974 election Labour ran on a manifesto that promised to “bring about a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of wealth and power in favour of working people and their families” but did the party support the strikes that brought about their victory? What do you think?
The series of strikes we now know as the Winter of Discontent, in 1978 and 1979, was triggered by a Labour government’s imposition of wage control—a 5% cap on pay increases. The subsequent industrial action took the form of a battle between state and workers – something we now see only when NHS workers seek to take their disputes up to the national level, bypassing their nominal employers. Fascinating, of course, that the present round of disputes (I wrote this post during a flurry of industrial action that began in 2022) is, at least in principle, more diffuse, pitting workers against dozens of individual employers—many in categories that did not even exist in the last era of union militancy—but that, even in the absence of a government-imposed wage cap, the state is still profoundly present.
The next generation
In the era of platform capitalism and zero-hour contracts, the strikes, walkouts and protests by gig workers, outsourced workforces and workers resisting ‘fire and rehire’ policies might seem to offer a useful opportunity for Labour to reconnect with labour, by making an association with a new generation of workers and with an updated labour activism for the social media era—with vivid new causes that have revived support for workers in Britain, especially amongst the young. No chance.
No chance, mate
I’m not a historian (no shit, Steve) but it’s been an instructive exercise this, searching for Labour support for striking workers over the years of its existence. For me a fascinating and quite urgent reminder that Labour’s role across the modern period has been much more about achieving and sustaining a position in the Westminster constitutional fabric—holding on to what still feels like a wobbly foothold in the institutions at all cost—than about actually transferring power to working people, or even improving their conditions of work or their pay. The choice was pretty simple: take a polite role in the ancient theatre of the Parliamentary system or work for emancipation, popular sovereignty and worker control. You know the rest.
(Can you think of a time that Labour officially supported an industrial action, in or out of office, in the party’s entire history? Leave acomment).
And my scan of the party’s history suggests that it would really be wrong to expect more from the current leadership while in opposition or in government. For Starmer to even acknowledge what looks to many like an important shift in the terms of the national argument in favour of working people and organised labour would be not only to risk a monstering from the Tory press and the bond vigilantes but would also defy literally the entire institutional history of his party. He leads an establishment party that must, almost as a condition of its existence, retain an even and unsupportive distance from its own organised labour wing.
Gig workers strike in London
The party’s establishment orientation is so durable that it comfortably survived the Corbyn insurrection, living on inside the party in the administration and the political bureacracy. The machine had the confidence to take on both leadership and membership – essentially ignoring two leadership elections – and, after almost five years, ultimately deleted the entire experiment as if it had never happened (try searching the Labour Party web site for the name of its last leader). Corbyn and his programme left essentially no trace in the party. Starmer was able to pick up essentially where his predecessor did in 2015.
So it seems obvious that Starmer, Reeves et al will not have any difficulty resisting calls to expand the reach of organised labour. Nor in finding good, sensible, tactically-savvy reasons for withholding support from strikers once they’re in power too. The difficult truth for the leadership of a progressive party in Britain is that there is literally no circumstance in which it is tactically correct to support a strike.
This post could have been a lot longer. There are dozens more important union actions that were opposed by the Labour leadership, in or out of power. Today it’s the Birmingham bin workers and the junior doctors, after the Atlee landslide it was gas and steel workers.
Many now think that the huge imbalance of power between owners and workers that’s arisen in recent decades must urgently be corrected. We know that Rachel Reeves has ambitious ideas about what she calls ‘securinomics‘, something that sounds a lot like a rebalancing, but scour the party’s web site as much as you like, you’ll find much about renewing our democracy and rebuilding the economy but no mention at all of organised labour, of unions or of union legislation.
Wal Hannington wrote several books. He’s a brilliant example of a phenomenon of workers’ politics in the 20th Century – a self-taught labouring man who came to speak for millions and to defy capital and the social elite. You can still find his autobiography, Never on Our Knees and other political works like this terrific pamphlet Black Coffins and the Unemployed, written for Raymond Postgate’s FACT monthly.
UPDATE April 2022: I wrote this in January 2009, right at the beginning of the expenses scandal and several months before the Telegraph began the week-by-week disclosure of hideous abuse of the system after hideous abuse of the system – duck houses and moats and multiple flipped second homes and families on the payroll etc. But still, the naivety!
I don’t agree with my MP about much, but I want to treat him as an adult. I’d like to extend to him approximately the level of trust I extend to my work colleagues and friends. I don’t want to probe and inspect him. I don’t want him to live in a climate of small-minded, invasive overscrutiny.
I expect there’s a reasonable chance he’ll turn out to be a bit cheeky with his lunch bills or even that he’s a giant scumbag and charges various indolent family members to the public purse, so I’d like there to be better rules about what it’s OK to charge back and what he has to pay for himself (the current rules are shoddy and inconsistent) and tougher automatic sanctions for rule-breaking.
But exposing MPs (and other public servants) to this kind of increasingly corrosive scrutiny is almost certainly a bad thing. Everyone knows that trust breeds trust – and that the inverse is true too. There’s no evidence that MPs are more or less bent than the population.
This doesn’t mean we should stick to the shady old secret model, though. We should be inventive and not just grumpy. MPs could be provided with simple tools to voluntarily publish itemised expenses, in a standardised, comparable format. Parliament.uk could host expenses pages and the media, I’m sure, would enjoy highlighting the most honest or interesting or apparently cooked up.
That’s the kind of initiative that could produce a snowball effect. We might find that publishing your expenses becomes the kind of public mark of honesty and transparency that MPs will embrace. Some will definitely go for it. Trusting our legislators might actually make things better.
Richard Tait in FT Creative Business on the likely parliamentary clash over media ownership rules and the so called ‘Murdoch Clause’. Written before Lord Puttnam announced his intention to oppose “in every respect” the relaxation of the rules designed to permit Sky to buy Five (link to Tait’s article requires FT.com subscription or a free trial).
Simon Hoggart is a treasure and if he ever actually leaves The Guardian the paper will turn to dust immediately. Today’s sketch on Blair’s performance in The Commons yesterday is brilliant.
My guess is that Alastair Campbell has had a silicone chip installed in Mr Blair’s Y-fronts. In his Downing Street office Mr Campbell has one of those revolving switches, as if in the cab of old railway engines. Usually he leaves it in the “slow” position. Now and again, just for fun, he swivels it round to “max”, if only to see what happens.”
