Labouring under the influence
Andrew McNeil writes:
The Labour Government’s introduction of 24 hour licensing, together with its original plan for a similar free-for-all in relation to gambling, has led some commentators to accuse the party not so much of deserting its traditional moral outlook as deliberately trashing it. The accusation was given particular force by the now notorious text message “Don’t give a XXXX for last orders? Vote Labour” sent out during the 2001 general election campaign.
Nick Cohen in the Observer has complained that Labour’s Methodist conscience has been replaced by greed and insobriety. Melanie Phillips, having asked rhetorically who could have imagined a Labour cabinet minister (Tessa Jowell) posing beside a roulette table as if she were placing a bet in order to launch a casino culture in Britain, and claiming that this was an example of `social reform’, went on to lambast the Labour government for undoing the very social improvements that its Victorian ancestors worked so hard to achieve.
“For the Victorian reformers, the essence of being a progressive was to encourage people away from sexual promiscuity and the gin palaces. Indeed, the only reason the British public house became a relatively civilised place was because the Victorians introduced licensing laws which stopped unlimited drinking, which was perceived to be a major cause of drunkenness and disorder.
Now we are undoing that very reform. Instead of being progressive, we are going backwards. Rather than promoting self control and continent behaviour, we are encouraging unlimited licence.”
The non-conformist conscience
Famously, Methodism was a stronger influence than Marxism on the early Labour Party, and temperance, as one important aspect of the non-conformist conscience, was indeed powerfully represented in Labour ranks.
In the late Victorian era, professional labour leaders were convinced of the need for the working class to be industrious, thrifty and sober, as continued intemperance would stifle the opportunities and aspirations of the emerging labour movement. This perceived symbiosis between social improvement and personal virtue was expressed in religious as well as secular terms. Alfred Salter, a noted advocate of Christian Socialism said “If we are going to create a new social order wherein dwelleth righteousness, we can only create such a state through the agency of righteous men and women”, and for Salter and those who thought like him, strong drink did not promote righteousness.
Keir Hardy, the founder of the Labour Party, was a temperance man, as was his colleague Phillip Snowden. Snowden was the author of Socialism and the Drink Question and declared that alcohol “is an aggravation of every social evil, and, in a great many cases, the prime cause of industrial misery and degradation. Universal temperance would undoubtedly bring incalculable benefits and blessings.” In the 1920’s, Labour politicians were very conscious of the Party’s non-conformist origins and heritage. In 1929, Arthur Henderson, the secretary of the Party, wrote: “The political Labour movement, which developed out of the Trade Union Movement, and drew the majority of its early Parliamentary leaders from it, received much of its driving force and inspiration from radical non-conformity. It is a demonstrable fact that the bulk of the members of the Parliamentary Labour Party at any given time during the last twenty-five years had graduated into their wider sphere of activity via the Sunday School, the Bible Class, the temperance society or the pulpit.”
Yet strong though the links were between Labour and temperance, there was never a single view. How could there be, when masses of workers, and potential Labour voters, were dependent on drink and pubs for their social life? The nonconformist wing of the Labour Party saw alcohol as the enemy of working class improvement, but in 1924 a middle class Marxist like E. Belfort Bax could write in ‘The Labour Party and Puritanism’: “Even in their attempts to form Labour Clubs for social intercourse the same puritanical intolerance of alcoholic liquors is observable. Verily we need, not a Labour, but a Socialist Conference to decide on what is consistent with the Socialist outlook on life and what is not, and in so doing to sift the pure grain of socialism from the surviving chaff of bourgeois Puritanism….”
The period leading up to the turn of the 20th century was the highpoint of the alliance between Labour and temperance: during the early part of the new century it started to splinter. By the time Arthur Henderson was writing of Labour’s non-conformist heritage, the Party had already dropped its Committee on Temperance.
Historians have suggested that by the time Ramsey McDonald became the first Labour Prime Minister in 1924 there were three schools of thought evident in the Party in regard to alcohol. A faction still argued for total abstinence; a second group held that drinking and drinking establishments were an integral part of working class life, and the third urged that the Party should seek the nationalisation of the alcohol industry. This last view was put forward in a Party policy statement in 1923:
“It must be recognised, even by those holding diverse views as to the plan or method of temperance reform, that the enormous vested interest in the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages constitutes, in itself, a serious obstacle to every kind of reform. It can be forcibly argued that no effective temperance reform is possible so long as so great an interest as the liquor interest is in private hands. If, therefore, we do nothing on this point, we must look forward to a long period during which the efforts of private persons who desire any kind of temperance reform will be opposed by the money and organisation of one of the most formidable vested interests in the country. In fact, the political power of the ‘trade’ is now a standing menace to promoters of reform of any kind in Parliament or at Parliamentary elections.”
Also affecting Labour’s attitude to the alcohol question was a longstanding debate between, on the one side, temperance advocates, who attributed much poverty and other social problems to the depredations of the trade in alcohol, and on the other, socialist reformers who believed that it was the bad social conditions created by an unjust social order that were the cause of intemperance.
While this debate was never finally resolved, and Labour’s alliance with temperance, certainly in the restricted, total abstinence sense of the term, should not be exaggerated, old Labour was firmly committed to ‘temperance reform’ in a broader sense and to the support of what are nowadays described as strong alcohol control policies. To that extent, new Labour is indeed vulnerable to the accusation that it has more or less wholly abandoned its previous outlook, and is now pursuing policies diametrically opposed to those the Party favoured in the past.
While the temperance influence waned over the years, a residual non-conformist conscience was evident even up to the late 1980’s in the then Labour opposition’s response to the, by New Labour’s standards, extremely modest licensing reforms contained in the Conservative Government’s 1988 Licensing Act. Until 1997, it was unthinkable that, in government, Labour would itself introduce 24-hour licensing, let alone attack, amongst others, its own founders, as Tessa Jowell has recently done, for “strict Edwardian laws (denying) children real access to the world of pubs..”, which, according to Ms Jowell, “made a rod for our own backs”.
It is difficult to be sure of the nature of the thinking that underlies this determination to encourage children into bars, but whatever it is, it would be anathema to the early Labour leaders. They did indeed support the measures Ms Jowell dislikes, and did so in order to protect children from the abuses to which they were subject during the Victorian era. The early Labour leaders might also wish to point out that the measures of which Ms. Jowell complains did in fact succeed in preventing for most of the 20th century the problems of underage drinking and teenage alcohol abuse that have now become so conspicuous, as the Edwardian controls have come to be seen as outdated relics of a bygone age, and steadily whittled away.
New Labour, New temperance?
New Labour might, of course, wish to claim that it has not abandoned the Party’s historic commitment to ‘temperance reform’, merely adapted it to current social realities which are wholly unlike those known to its predecessors. Has not New Labour devised a National Alcohol Harm Reduction Strategy?
The persuasiveness of this claim depends on the view taken of the circumstances of the Strategy’s preparation as well as its content. Arguably, the pressure to produce an Alcohol Harm Reduction Strategy of some kind was becoming irresistible as national alcohol consumption and the health and social harm caused by alcohol, continued to climb steeply under Labour.
Since Labour came to power, total alcohol consumption in the UK has climbed to levels not seen for generations. The steady reduction in drink drive deaths has been halted and put into reverse, and the total number of deaths caused by alcohol is accelerating. Hospital admissions for alcoholic liver disease have virtually doubled since New Labour took office.
Then there is the question of the content of the Alcohol Strategy and, in particular, the fact that its basis is a partnership between Government and the alcohol industry, the very vested interest New Labour’s predecessors regarded as blocking any prospect of progress.
The new Licensing Act is presented as a major component of the Alcohol Strategy, yet it was devised at the behest of the alcohol industry, principally the big pub companies and the British Beer and Pub Association (BBPA). Indeed, some meetings of the Licensing Advisory Group set up by the Government to advise on the legislation actually took place at the headquarters of the BBPA.
It is generally accepted that the Alcohol Strategy was especially adapted to accommodate the views and interests of the alcohol industry. Here, as also in the Government’s White Paper on public health, the only ‘alcohol misuse’ agency deemed worthy of mention was the alcohol industry’s Portman Group, an important part of the function of which is to lobby against alcohol control measures such as alcohol taxes and other controls on alcohol availability, the very measures which the research evidence suggests are the most effective in reducing alcohol related harm.
One commentator, Professor Robin Room, observed: “Having offered its arguments for steering away from price and availability (of alcohol), the Strategy continues: ‘So we believe that a more effective strategy would be to provide the (alcohol) industry with further opportunities to work in partnership with the government to reduce alcohol-related harm.’ No evidence is offered of why this would be ‘a more effective strategy’; again, the evaluation research literature would not support the belief. My reading of this sentence is that it must have been written with a wink, essentially as a statement that ‘our political masters decided that the Strategy’s approach would be to work with the alcohol industry, and vetoed recommendations on matters like price and availability which would upset the industry.”
Similarly, when in 2002 the Government announced that it was reneging on its proposal to lower the drink drive limit to 50mg%, a House of Lords committee noted that the Government’s position “coincides with that of the alcohol industry but is opposed by local authorities, the police, the British Medical Association, the Automobile Association, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, the Transport Research Laboratory and the Parliamentary Advisory Committee for Transport Safety.”
Recently, Tessa Jowell repudiated as ‘stupid’ the ‘Don’t give a XXXX..’ text message, saying that “It portrayed what is in fact a serious piece of legislation intended to improve quality of life and curb crime as some kind of advert for hedonism.”
Labour’s problem is that disowning a slogan, however belatedly, is likely to prove a good deal easier than disowning the consequences of its policies. Few people other than Ms Jowell and the British Beer and Pub Association believe, or bother to pretend they do, that the new Licensing Act will improve anything other than the big pub companies’ profits. As it emerges that, in anticipation of the new Act, managers of pubs “are being offered bonuses worth up to £20,000 a year if they beat targets as the industry moves to exploit Britain's binge drinking culture”, it looks even more probable that the new licensing laws will exacerbate problems of binge drinking, crime and disorder rather than solve them.
Old Labour’s policies may have been good or bad, right or wrong, but at least it was clear what kind of social values underlay them. They were motivated by a desire to bring about social improvements, particularly to the lives of working people, by tackling drunkenness and the poverty and disease that it could cause, to protect children, and to bring a potentially dangerous drink trade under public control. With the full effects of 24-hour licensing still to be seen, the values and principles that inspire New Labour are not perhaps so obvious.