The first part of this series closed with the Keirs; Hardie, not to be confused with the famous Welsh writer Thomas Hardy as I did last week and Starmer. And, it is fitting that this continuation piece starts with Keir Hardie the acknowledged first leader and one of the founders of the British Labour Party. Incidentally, it is probably no coincidence that the current leader of the party is also called Keir because his parents were staunch, life long members of the Labour Party. It is unlikely that his parents had any premonition of his eventual destiny but giving this rare but iconic name to their child is strongly indicative of their strong commitment to an institution which has not only loomed large in their consciousness but has become part of long lived family tradition. It must be said however that there is no direct evidence to support the supposition that the current Prime Minister of Britain was named after Hardie but at least, it is romantic to think that he was.
The Labour Party was formed by necessity under rather inauspicious circumstances at the turn of the last century. This means that the party has been in the business of gathering votes for all of one hundred and twenty-four years. At the beginning, it had to depend on the help from the Liberal Party, the main opposition party in the British Parliament of the day, in order to gain some political relevance at a time when the Conservatives and the Liberals were the only parties standing. It was this alliance which allowed the Labour Party to enter Parliament in considerable number for the first time in the general election of 1910. It is perhaps necessary to point out that the party was not formed by men with deep pockets or those that have cast themselves in the mould of godfathers. On the contrary, it was financed by the contributions of men who earned only a few pennies from the dangerous work they did deep underground in coal mines or poorly lit factory floors. It was this money that was used to canvass for votes with which to send a few of them to parliament, there to plead their case before the world.
The pre-election pact between the two parties was mutually beneficial as it allowed them to inflict a crushing defeat on the Conservatives. Then as now, the Conservatives were reduced to a rump in parliament and the Liberal Party ruled the roost all throughout the period of the First World War, until 1926 when post-war situations forced the formation of a Labour minority government making it the first time that the Labour Party formed any type of government in Britain. The next time that the Labour Party formed a government was in 1945 in the immediate period after the Second World War when to the surprise of all political analysts, the Conservative Party of Winston Churchill was tufted out, to be replaced by a Labour government which was led by the principled Clement Atlee who had been Churchill’s unsung deputy during the Second World War. Why the Conservatives who were the most visible party during the war were rejected at the polls as soon as victory was secured has never been satisfactorily explained but that certainly was the way it was.
Looking back after all those many years it can be said that it was the Atlee government that laid the foundation for the modern welfare state that Britain is today. Perhaps the most talked about creation of the Atlee government was the National Health Service (NHS). For the first time in British history, healthcare was provided free of charge at the point of service. It has to be pointed out however that although service was free, it was only technically free as all taxable adults paid something towards making the service free for those who needed treatment for whatever ailed them. In other words, this was an elaborate, universal insurance scheme which was operated by the government. This is unlike what we have in Nigeria where services which are touted as free are only nominally so because nobody actually pays anything towards the provision of the services which various governments claim to provide free of charge. Here, the only thing provided free of charge is the announcement that such and such services are free. The funds necessary for the provision of such services are only conspicuous by their being withheld. The difficulties associated with free communal services are shown by the current state of the NHS. The first is that such schemes demand heavy taxation, especially of those who earn more money than others as you will find in Scandinavian countries where taxation has been used successfully as a means of social engineering which has eliminated extreme poverty at one end and fabulous wealth on the other. This left wing politics have helped to push or pull society towards the centre. It is becoming quite clear that in Britain today, the welfare system is in serious decline as even the much vaunted NHS is under great stress as it has always been under the Conservatives’ various governments but then, the Party of government in Britain has always been and perhaps, will always be the Conservatives with Labour only filling in at periods of interregnum.
Judged by any standard, the Atlee government could point to some solid achievements within Britain in the five years in which he was in power. Equally important were his accomplishments in foreign affairs. His efforts in restoring peace to a battered global community was commendable but his efforts within what became the British Commonwealth was even more so. Britain emerged from the war, more or less intact but with many strains just under the surface. The important question was what was to be done with the unwieldy British Empire which had spread right around the globe. There was India, the jewel in the crown of the Empire; there were also the white ruled autonomous countries such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, which wanted independence as well as many countries in Africa and the Caribbean in which agitation for independence had begun. It is to his credit that Atlee began the systematic dismantling of the British Empire with such speed that India had been partitioned to give the independent nations of Pakistan and India as early as 1947 and conditions for granting independence to many African countries. Given these successes, it is a wonder that within five years the Conservatives under Churchill were back in power and the chaos caused by the Suez crisis of 1956 not to talk of the awful mess created by the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya. The only explanation for the loss of power by Labour at that point is that in a class ridden society such as Britain, the only party that could be trusted by the working class electorate was the party of those who had acquired the status of the privileged. In other words, the Conservative Party.
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When I arrived in Britain in 1973, the Conservative government was in charge but only nominally so as various Labour unions were making life very uncomfortable for the government. The most powerful union in this regard was the miners union which called out its members on strike making the generation of power next to impossible. It was soon clear that the government had lost all authority to rule and a general election could no longer be avoided. When it came very early in the New Year however, all that was achieved was a hung parliament in which the so called Labour majority was less than the fingers on one hand. The Tory government of the time tried to cobble together a new government with the Liberals but failed, thereby returning power to the Labour Party under the wily Harold Wilson, professor of Economics and consummate politician who once pointed out that a week in politics is a long time. How true this observation is is pointed out by the current state of American politics. This time last week, Donald Trump was still hauling insults at Joe Biden his putative opponent for the November election for the White House. Suddenly, the picture has changed dramatically and he is now scrambling around assembling insults with which to welcome the new Democratic Party nominee, the refreshingly effervescent Kamala Harris. Ask Trump and he will readily confirm that a week is certainly a long time in politics.
1974 was a year of two elections in Britain as another election had to be called in October to decide once and for all, which party could be trusted with the reins of power. This time the Labour Party came away with a substantial majority.
Edward (Ted) Heath who had led the Conservative Party to a quite unexpected victory in 1969 at a time when Wilson was at the height of his powers was still the leader of his party but, having led his party to two electoral defeats, his hold on the party slackened to such an extent that his leadership position was challenged by a young Margaret Thatcher who had earlier been promoted to a cabinet position by none other than Ted Heath. Under normal circumstances that challenge would have been swatted aside with something approaching contemptuous ease but those times were not normal and the young challenger was still standing after the first round of the leadership contest. Reading the writing on the wall, Ted Heath withdrew from the field leaving it open to Margaret Thatcher who became the first female leader of a political party in Britain.
As things stood in Britain at the time, the uncommonly cerebral Shirley Williams of the Labour Party had been favoured to become not just the leader of her party but the first female Prime Minister of the country. As things turned out however, those honourable distinctions fell to Margaret Thatcher. Interestingly, both women had an effect on the trajectory of British politics in the last fifty years and will continue to influence the same for many years to come. Whilst Thatcher moved the country to the right, Williams made a great effort to drag the polity to the centre even as forces of the left struggled to promote a left wing ideology. All those forces are still fighting for dominance and many would argue that Keir Starmer has been successful so far because he has adroitly promoted a centrist interest in the face of the right wing forces promoted by the Conservative Party. The annihilation of the right in the just concluded elections suggest that right now, there is a great deal of comfort to be found in centre politics but only time will tell for how long Starmer will continue to resist the pull of the left.
Whilst Margaret Thatcher succeeded in pushing Britain to the right as Prime Minister, Shirley Williams succeeded in her design by leaving Labour Party to help form the Social Democratic Party. By the time Thatcher became Prime Minister in 1979, the Labour Party under the leadership of Michael Foot had drifted so far to the left that people were talking of frank socialism which Williams and other members of the Gang of Four, Roy Jenkins, John Owen and Will Rogers could not support. They were all leading members holding very important posts within the Labour Party but in the face of their conviction, they gave up their positions within the Labour Party to form the Social Democratic Party which has formed an alliance with the Liberal Party. The alliance won 72 seats in the last elections suggesting that they are no longer on the fringes of British politics, testament to the quality of the vision of the Gang of Four.
To be continued.
