HOW RH TAWNEY WOULD HAVE HATED NEW LABOUR
In the light of recent discussions about the ethics of politics following “Smeargate” , Phil at A Very Public Sociologist wrote an interesting article about the ethical views of John Stuart Mill.
Phil points out the limits of Mill’s outlook in locating ethics and morality as supra-historical and abstract principles. Therefore for the British Labour movement a more pertinent comparator would be the social philosophy of R H Tawney, who argued that the prevailing morality of society was that created by its economic and social system.
Tawney has been claimed, rather disingenuously, as laying the foundations for Blairism in Patrick Diamond’s 2004 anthology of Labour Revisionists “New Labour’s Old Roots”, so he is usually seen a major thinker on the right of the Labour Party.
He should not be so easily pidgeonholed, in the early 1920s Tawney supported the leftist Guild Socialists, such as GDH Cole; then he changed his position to write the Party’s gradualist 1928 manifesto “Labour and Nation”; during the 1930s he aligned himself with the hard left like Laski and Cripps, and in the 1950s he endorsed the rightist revisionism of Gaitskell and Crosland.
However, as Geoffrey Foote observes in his indispensible 1986 work “The Labour Party’s Political Thought”, the differences between Tawney’s political stances were in a sense superficial, because at each stage there was a remarkable similarity of Tawney’s underlying philosophy and goal. His tactical changes were only different judgements about what best suited the earliest possible realisation of his vision of a society based upon fellowship, rather than competition.
The bedrock of Tawney’s world view was his particular interpretation of Christianity. He believed that the differences between people were insignificant compared to the greatness of God, and therefore lack of equality between people was due to society having renounced an appreciation of the infinite greatness of God, compared to whom all people are infinitely small. He regarded the conventions of actually existing Christian Churches as empty rituals – and that Anglicanism had reduced the Kingdom of Heaven to a constitutional monarchy.
What made Tawney different, and an important figure in the labour movement, is that he located the defeat of what he regarded as true Christian fellowship with the rise of capitalism, and what he described in his 1921 book of that title as “The Acquisitive Society”. As such he reconciled a radical, non-conformist Christianity with conceptions of practical social justice at the political level. Tawney both recognised and opposed the deprivations and injustice of class society; and also supported radical and irreversible social change to overcome those injustices.
The importance of Tawney’s religious belief is that it meant his politics were founded upon the most sincerely held principles, and provided a moral basis for campaigning for equality that went beyond a desire for fairness.
Tawney regarded Capitalism as fundamentally immoral, because it is based upon individual gain and self-interest, rather than service to the community. Acquisitiveness becomes a primary goal in its own right, and the strong and powerful use others as mere objects for self advancement, and the weak and poor are encouraged to emulate the selfishness of the strong.
In contrast, Tawney regarded the communities of solidarity of the labour and trade union movement as especially virtuous, and the traditional labour movement priorities for overcoming poverty and unemployment to be moral. As such for Tawney, the industrial and economic struggle of workers against employers took on a moral dimension, because it was a struggle for power within the economy between profit driven selfishness, and collective social solidarity.
Even after he abandoned Guild Socialism, he wrote his most powerful political work, the 1931 book “Equality”. This is a blistering attack on the class system, and the inequalities in health, education and opportunity that flow from it. Tawney’s fundamental belief that all human beings are of equal worth led him to be irrevocably opposed to the selective privilege of private schools, and he described private health as grotesque and vicious. RH Tawney more than anyone won the Labour Party to promoting specific commitments towards a practical welfare state, as opposed to more idealist and vague propagandist promises to replace capitalism with something nicer.
His later support for the right wing revisionists of the party in the 1950s can be understood by the crisis of Labourism following the 1945-1951 government. The pre-war aspirations towards Morrisonian “corporate socialism” shared by both the left and right of the party had been largely achieved through the nationalisations, and the left effectively ran out of ideas. The leftism of Nye Bevan was arguably backward looking, nostalgic, and in Anthony Crosland’s description more socially conservative than a bench of bishops. Paradoxically, the revisionist right wing was more prominent in advocating bold action to solve social inequality, Tawney’s particular concern, while the left became sidetracked by fethishising public ownership as the end rather than the means.
With regard to modern politics, the astute observation of RH Tawney is that liberty is related to equality. If freedom is defined as absence of restraint, then liberty promotes inequality, because the more powerful in our society have less constraints upon them, and the majority of the population will always be unfree.
For Tawney, liberty is the freedom to act positively for the benefit of the community, and being empowered to resist the tyrannical demands of the rich and powerful.
It is absolutely clear that the preoccupations of New Labour with winning elections by spin and media management, is an abuse of their privileged access to communication in order to defend their own power, and thus relies upon a fundamental inequality. What is more, the New Labour strategy of triangulating around the hot issues that sway the undecided voters in marginal constituencies is immoral in the sense that RH Tawney would have understood it, because he believed that Labour politics should be purposive and transformative in order to develop a socially progressive consensus. For New Labour, holding and maintaining power has become the all-absorbing motivation.
But most importantly, if we look at the last few years of rampant consumerism, celebrity culture, bling and self-advancement, we see that New Labour has worshiped at the alter of the acquisitive society. The ethics of Tawney was that society should value collaborative and productive labour for the benefit of the community, not for selfish personal acquisition - what would he have thought of Jade Goody, the millionaire lifestyles of footballers and the WAG culture?
New Labour convinced itself that it was cool not to believe in anything, and now the electorate doesn’t believe in them.
Dave Osler also looks at Labour Party morality today, taking a rather less esoteric route than I have here.
Back in February 
