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News

How Labour forgot its roots to liberalise alcohol licensing

23rd September 2014

A paper published today by the Institute of Alcohol Studies charts the history of the Labour Party’s views on alcohol and asks how it was that a Party so heavily influenced by the non-conformist conscience and temperance movement could end up introducing the 24-hour drinking Act.

Historian Peter Catterall argues that the current Licensing Act, based on the delusion that liberalisation would reduce heavy public drinking and the attendant problems, was the logical outcome of a repudiation by the Labour Party in the 1930s of the temperance outlook of so many of its pioneers.

Catterall explains that while many Labour historians have written the alcohol question out of the Party’s history, it was in fact central to its origins and its early years. Keir Hardie, one of the founders of the Party, was a lifelong teetotaller and temperance man, as was Arthur Henderson, general secretary of the Party from 1911–1932, during which time he played a key role in steering the new organization into becoming a Party of government.

Catterall says: “The majority of Edwardian Labour MPs were teetotal. Combatting the alcohol question and the drink trade was held by many to be integral to building the new social order they aspired to create.”

However, cracks soon began to emerge within the Party. Catterall’s report shows that opinion was divided between prohibitionists and those who saw the answer in nationalisation of the drink trade. There was also an anti-temperance lobby centered around working men’s clubs, many of which depended on alcohol sales for their financial viability.

He says: “The interwar period saw temperance become an embarrassment for the Labour Party, as policy goals shifted towards promoting moderate drinking through improved public houses.”

Catterall argues that by consciously dropping alcohol as an issue and freeing itself from the dominant influence of the Chapel, Labour positioned itself for a straightforward fight with the Conservatives on economics rather than on an issue which had come to be seen as one primarily of personal morality.

Temperance, like pacifism, became in the course of the 1930s a faith of individuals rather than the policy of a political party. And so, argues Catterall, “the seeds were set for one of the most liberalising reforms of the licensing law in British history”.

‘Labour and the Politics of Alcohol: The Decline of a Cause’ was written by Dr Peter Catterall, University of Westminster for the Institute of Alcohol Studies. Please follow the link provided to read/download the report.

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