I

A significant section of the British Labour Party blamed the party’s 1970 General Election defeat on the policies and performance of Harold Wilson’s 1964 to 1970 Labour Governments. In 1970, as James Cronin has described, “There was a widespread and vague sense within the party that Labour’s defeat had been largely self-inflicted, that the loss was perhaps a fitting rebuke for failures in government, and that it might require a rethinking of party policy and strategy.”^{Footnote 1} According to Martin Pugh, for many party members, “The 1970 defeat was the signal to release the accumulated resentment over the government’s record since 1964 and the prime minister in particular.”^{Footnote 2} Within the Labour Party, disaffection with the policies and the political record of the 1964 to 1970 Wilson Governments fueled the rise of the party’s left wing.^{Footnote 3}

It was in this political climate that the Labour Party’s Alternative Economic Strategy (AES) was formulated. The AES’s conceptual origins lay in the subcommittees of Labour’s National Executive Committee (NEC) during the party’s period in opposition between 1970 and 1974.^{Footnote 4} Its policies were embodied in Labour’s Programme 1973, Labour’s Programme 1976, and Labour’s 1983 General Election Manifesto, The New Hope for Britain. The AES envisaged a widespread extension of public ownership. Labour’s Programme 1973 argued that a future Labour Government should gain control of twenty-five of Britain’s leading companies (as well as those in which the Government had already heavily invested).^{Footnote 5} Stuart Holland was the economist who became most closely associated with the development of the AES. Holland believed that a high level of state control was necessary in order to combat the rise of multinational power and to rejuvenate the stuttering British economy.^{Footnote 6} He suggested that “recent acceleration in the trend to monopoly and multinational capital has eroded Keynesian economic policies, and undermined the sovereignty of the capitalist nation state.”^{Footnote 7} Holland argued that public ownership offered a means by which Britain could reverse recent global trends and develop a socialist economy. The Government was to gain a majority shareholding stake in new dynamic growth industries. This process of nationalization was to be facilitated by a National Enterprise Board.^{Footnote 8}

Holland’s initial vision of the AES was heavily influenced by state holding and planning institutions in European countries like France and Italy.^{Footnote 9} His exploration of the possibilities of alternative European models of public ownership was less insular than the understanding of the strategy that would become dominant within the party. Over time, withdrawal from the European Economic Community (EEC) became a central component of the AES. The AES’s supporters fought ardently for a “no” vote at the 1975 referendum on Britain’s membership. The 1980 Labour Party Conference demanded Britain’s withdrawal from the EEC.^{Footnote 10} Increasingly, Labour opposed the perceived free-market capitalism of the EEC. By the mid-1970s, protective import controls were deemed to be a necessary prerequisite to the successful implementation of the AES.^{Footnote 11} The AES also advocated increased industrial democracy and workers’ control in British industry. These proposals were interlinked with the AES’s promotion of public ownership and they were underpinned by the idea that “it would be easier to pioneer and develop the institutions and the operation of industrial democracy in a centrally controlled industry run in the spirit of public service than in a disparate one operated under the urge of the maximisation of profit.”^{Footnote 12}

The AES has been portrayed by both historians and political scientists as a modern, progressive, and forward-looking strategy. A consensus has formed around the idea that modernity influenced the AES’s polices and shaped Labour’s programmatic commitments. Mark Wickham-Jones has argued: “The Alternative Economic Strategy marked a radical departure in the kind of social democracy that Labour advocated. The adoption of the AES indicated a break with Labour’s Revisionist past.”^{Footnote 13} Stephen Haseler has declared: “By the late 1970s it [Labour] had become wholly unrecognisable. It had broken with its past. It was as if a new political party had been born.”^{Footnote 14} Furthermore, historians who have written about the AES have emphasized the role of political factions or a small number of policymakers.^{Footnote 15} They have ignored the emotional resonance of the AES within the wider party in favor of conducting highly focused studies on the strategy’s policies and the political actors involved in the construction of these policies. Thus, the policies that were contained within the AES have been viewed largely through the lens of the theoretical and deliberative discussions that are perceived to have taken place in the party’s policy committees during the early 1970s. This article seeks to address this imbalance in the historiography. It does so by looking at the three major components of the AES that I have outlined: public ownership, EEC withdrawal, and industrial democracy. Above all, I will argue that nostalgia shaped the AES’s trajectory.

Although the definition of “nostalgia” is itself highly contested, nostalgia can be understood to take the form of an idealized attachment to the past.^{Footnote 16} Nostalgic memories are positively charged: they are mnemonically separated and isolated from negative memories in a process that Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer have described as “splitting.”^{Footnote 17} Academics have only recently begun to assess the impact of nostalgia on the historical development of British political parties and movements. Alastair Bonnett has described the important role that a “radical” nostalgia has played historically in the British left’s political thought and imagination.^{Footnote 18} Emily Robinson has noted the functional role that “history” has played and continues to play in British politics and she has stated that “particular interpretations of the past are used to provide legitimacy for particular courses of action, to orient identity and to supply lessons for the present.”^{Footnote 19} Indeed, as Tim Strangleman has shown, nostalgic references to the past can serve an instrumental purpose and political actors can knowingly mobilize nostalgic memories in order to achieve political goals and secure objectives.^{Footnote 20}

Yet, significantly, nostalgia also manifests itself in the form of a spontaneous expression of an idealized understanding of the past. Present political positions can be shaped by nostalgia that is not always either self-aware or instrumental in its origins.^{Footnote 21} Furthermore, as Svetlana Boym has argued, nostalgia can, in itself, drive a desire to restore a specific vision of the past in the present.^{Footnote 22} In short, nostalgia can be manipulated, but it also manipulates. Adding to the existing literature’s emphasis on the ways in which nostalgia has been instrumentally deployed by politicians, this article also highlights the emotional agency of a more organic and expressive collective nostalgia and its important impact on the trajectory of a particular economic strategy.

The AES was devised at a point in British history at which the past has been understood to have exerted a particularly strong influence on the nation’s culture. Raphael Samuel noted that a “historicist turn in national life” had been “amplified in the 1970s by a whole series of separation anxieties” that had developed from the changing nature of British society.^{Footnote 23} However, Labour’s strong historical impetus predated the British heritage and tradition boom of the 1970s.^{Footnote 24} Moreover, as we shall see, Labour’s nostalgic identity was often defined by symbols, figures, and events that were highly specific to the party’s own past. In this article, I suggest that it was this nostalgia-imbued identity that ensured that preservation and restoration, not modernization, lay at the heart of Labour’s AES.

II

Despite his commitment to economic innovation and his promotion of new and dynamic growth industries, Holland’s approach to Britain’s ailing traditional industries was characterized by ambiguity. He blurred the distinction between old and new industries and declared that the “modern manufacturing of today is the traditional manufacturing of tomorrow. Moreover, today’s traditional industry may be modernized through new techniques of production, greater capital-intensity, and so on.”^{Footnote 25} Holland suggested that coal and steel, two publicly owned industries at the heart of Labour’s historic identity, could play an important role in improving the economic climate and reducing the “long-term deficit on the visible balance of trade” in Britain.^{Footnote 26} Furthermore, he argued that, by developing key manufacturing industries, the future economic growth of Britain’s traditional industries could be secured.^{Footnote 27}

Significantly, it was these elements of Holland’s economic analysis that the Labour Party seized upon. An economic interpretation of Britain that stressed the continued viability of Britain’s traditional industries was embraced by the party’s membership. The AES was understood not as a blueprint by which to modernize the British economy but as a means by which to preserve and restore a particular vision of the past. Such an interpretation was facilitated by the nature of the political discourse that surrounded the AES from an early stage in its development. Preservation, not modernization, lay at the heart of the way that the strategy was discursively framed: Labour’s Industrial Policy Sub-Committee declared that “our industrial policies are not intended to be judged by the criteria of industrial efficiency.”^{Footnote 28} The past was mobilized to legitimize the party’s economic approach: “There are many strands of Socialist analysis and belief which throughout the history of our movement have made the theme of the public ownership of our material industrial resources central to the achievement of a Socialist society.”^{Footnote 29} There was a strong sense that the past could provide guidance for the present. Labour’s Programme: Campaign Document 1974 stated that “the Labour Party is proud of the contribution that we made to the nation’s salvation at critical times in our history, and it is in the same mood that we approach the interlocking crises of the 1970s.”^{Footnote 30} Labour’s Programme 1973 discussed the need to preserve employment in the traditional industries of coal, steel, and shipbuilding.^{Footnote 31} In much the same way, the February 1974 Manifesto appeared preoccupied with declining industrial occupations. It demanded that “with the utmost urgency, the coal industry must be given a new status, perspective, and security.”^{Footnote 32} Increasingly, the AES’s advocates argued that the strategy was “designed to halt the process of de-industrialisation.”^{Footnote 33}

The emotional context of such statements should not be dismissed. Nostalgia shaped the political identities of the AES’s leading advocates. Tony Benn talked about how his father “went to the 1889 dock strike on his father’s shoulders.”^{Footnote 34} He noted the “tremendous emotive overtones”^{Footnote 35} that a visit to the former shipyard of the Jarrow marchers held for him and he referred to a need to “return to the spirit of 1926.”^{Footnote 36} Nostalgia flourished in and around Benn’s public appearances. Describing one speech to a Young Socialists’ rally in London in 1971, one journalist noted: “Earlier generations would no doubt have listened with nostalgia to the chants of ‘Victory to the working class!’ ‘Nationalise!’ and nodded recognition at the posters ‘TUC! Prepare for the general strike’ and ‘Smash Capitalism.’ There was even a contingent of twenty from Jarrow.”^{Footnote 37} Benn quickly became the AES’s figurehead. He was the politician who most effectively articulated Labour’s historical identity. His tendency to construct present policies in terms of their relationship to the past was apparent in his two main books during this period: Arguments for Socialism (1979) and Arguments for Democracy (1981). Ostensibly modern, these works attempted to offer political guidance for the future. However, Benn expressed his political positions through a historically orientated discourse. In Arguments for Socialism, he described how “today it is frequently said that the Labour Party is moving further to the Left than can be justified by its origins. This is not so.”^{Footnote 38} Benn talked about the political program of the Chartists and how “we can find the same aspirations in the moving words of Clause IV of the Labour Party Constitution.”^{Footnote 39}

Above all, Benn located the AES within the context of a history of British working-class struggle and those workers who “almost anonymous have fought for what they believe in, organised others to join them and have done so against immense odds.”^{Footnote 40} By referring to the Peasants’ Revolt, the Levellers, the Chartists, Robert Owen, and the Webbs, Benn mobilized nostalgia for the heroic struggles of and symbolic figures from the British labor movement’s past in order to promote the idea that democratic socialism was “very much a home-grown British product which had been strongly fashioned over the centuries. Its roots are deep in our history.”^{Footnote 41} Similarly, Arguments for Democracy located the AES-supporting Labour Party within the historical context of the trade-union struggles against the Combination Acts, the Chartists, the formation of the Labour Representation Committee, and the adoption of the 1918 constitution.^{Footnote 42}

Benn deployed positively idealized memories of an era of perceived party unity in his attacks on those who opposed the AES’s proposals to extend public ownership. In 1976, James Fenton of the New Statesman wrote that Benn had declared that “if you consider the Labour tradition to be like a sedimentary rock . . . and you drill down through the fossilised bodies of the Marquands, the Hattersleys, the Jenkinses and Gaitskells, you come to a level at which the party was united. The undisputed tenets of that time are the left-wing beliefs of today.”^{Footnote 43} When members of Labour’s right wing split to form the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in March 1981, it was noted that Benn “compares the SDP with Ramsay MacDonald and refers to the fact that Attlee once compared MacDonald with Hitler and Mussolini” and that he recalled “the struggles in London over six centuries ‘Wat Tyler [leader of the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381] would certainly not have been endorsed by the organisation sub-committee of the Labour Party.’”^{Footnote 44}

Benn’s constant referrals to the past and his frequent attendance at commemorative events corresponded with his ever-increasing popularity in the party.^{Footnote 45} Written in 1979, one letter to Tribune declared that “if I believed in the transmigration of souls, I would say that Tony Benn is none other than Percy Bysshe Shelley here to wreak vengeance on the heads of the heirs of the perpetrators of Peterloo.”^{Footnote 46} Three years later, another writer to the same paper stated: “It wasn’t the MacDonalds, the Snowdens, the Woodrow-Wyatts, the Robens, the Marshs or the latest batch of Jenkins Minstrels who have kept the light of socialism going. It was always people like George Lansbury, Aneurin Bevan and Tony Benn who have served the party before self who have kept socialism alive in this country.”^{Footnote 47} In 1981, The Guardian commented that, at a speech commemorating the six hundredth anniversary of the Peasants’ Revolt, “Benn slipped easily into the role of Wat Tyler.”^{Footnote 48}

Judith Hart, an influential party figure close to Benn and an advocate of public ownership, noted that “a folk memory of the early struggles, a recognition of the essential relationship between economic and political freedom has consistently united the Party and the trade unions.” Critically, she argued that “there is here a deep collective memory of struggle and a scarcely understood shared past experience which is exclusively British. Pre-Marxist as I say. Pre-Fabian.”^{Footnote 49} Hart believed that the AES’s commitment to public ownership was the product of this collective memory and that it was “the message of the people whether articulated by the Chartists, by the early trade unionists, by Tawney and his contemporaries or by Labour Party conference. We must continue, and intensify, the fight to bring economic power . . . into the area of public responsibility and accountability.”^{Footnote 50}

Within the party, the AES’s attachment to public ownership was often characterized as nostalgic by its opponents. Publications like Socialist Commentary dismissed the notion that “all we need to do is to return to the old dogmas, old slogans.”^{Footnote 51} Labour’s nostalgic orientation was also widely noted by contemporary observers. Writing in The Guardian, Simon Hoggart declared that Labour’s “members do almost everything for reasons of sentiment or nostalgia or both.”^{Footnote 52} Similarly, the journalist David McKie, reporting on a constituency party meeting in Rhondda in 1973, described the “heavily nostalgic conversation. Looking back to the grim but politically gratifying battles of the thirties. Too much so for some tastes: ‘One of your biggest faults,’ Councillor Tom Jones tells them quietly, ‘is that you all refer to the past.’ ‘You can’t forget it.’” McKie noted the deeply embedded belief that “the fire and passion and Socialist conviction of the great days of the movement have been lost and must somehow be recaptured.”^{Footnote 53}

Positively idealized memories of symbolic figures from Labour’s industrial past were mobilized against senior party figures who opposed widespread public ownership. Attacking comments made by Roy Jenkins, one Labour Party member wrote to Tribune: “This is what we in the Labour movement ought to be striving for: the New Jerusalem that William Blake wrote about, that Keir Hardie dreamed about, that Michael Foot and Tony Benn now speak about.”^{Footnote 54} Writing in 1975, almost a year after Labour had regained power, another activist mocked the failure of the party’s leaders to implement the AES: “Keir Hardie never went to Parliament to make money or become a Lord: he went to put through the policy for which he was elected.”^{Footnote 55} As the 1970s progressed, despite the Labour leadership’s rejection of the AES’s central tenets (highlighted by the decision to seek an International Monetary Fund loan in 1976), supporters of the strategy remained undeterred.^{Footnote 56}

Defeated by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party, Labour returned to opposition in 1979. Michael Foot was elected leader of the Labour Party in November 1980. Foot had frequently expressed his anger at the Conservative Government for allowing “the great industries to collapse” and he had argued that “it is the Labour movement of this country, reawakened and reinvigorated which can serve and save the people of this country.”^{Footnote 57} The nostalgia that drove Foot’s response to contemporary politics was evident on the campaign trail in 1983. Covering a visit by Foot to Liverpool, the journalist Paul Johnson described how “it was a nostalgic return to the city where Mr Foot joined the Labour Party 49 years ago. ‘Poverty is coming to our country in a way most people never thought they would see again’ he said. Liverpool was suffering under Conservative policies as it had done in the 1930s.”^{Footnote 58} Similarly, David Pallister depicted how, while out campaigning, Foot “stood there, the curator of the Labour Party’s conscience and tradition, regretting the days long gone when political orators held huge meetings spellbound for two hours. For anyone under 35 it was a history lesson, eloquently put and tinged with nostalgia.”^{Footnote 59}

Foot wrote the foreword to Labour’s 1983 General Election Manifesto, The New Hope for Britain. He declared that there was a desperate need in Britain “to rebuild our shattered industries.”^{Footnote 60} Such notions were located in a static understanding of economic and societal progression that was firmly rooted in the past: “The Labour movement—the Labour Party and the trade unions acting together—came into being, as one of our poets Idris Davies said, to end ‘the long Victorian night.’” It was a fight to introduce civilised living standards into the world of ruthless, devil-take-the-hindmost individualism.”^{Footnote 61} The New Hope for Britain was fundamentally shaped by Labour’s historical orientation. Its immediate origins lay in Labour’s Draft Manifesto 1980 and Labour’s Programme 1982, both of which seemed as concerned with propping up the declining industries of the past as they were with creating the growth industries of the future.^{Footnote 62} In 1981, a campaign strategy note suggested that Labour should hold itself at least partially responsible for the public’s perception that it was “concerned only to defend the traditional or declining sectors of the economy.”^{Footnote 63} Despite this perception, Labour’s Programme 1982 declared that “at the heart of this new Programme lies our socialist economic strategy. Our aim is to rebuild our industrial base.”^{Footnote 64} It stated the party’s intent to “end the decline of steel” and envisaged “a highly competitive and efficient coal industry playing a central role in Britain’s energy future.”^{Footnote 65} Furthermore, Labour’s Programme 1982 argued that Labour’s central goal of rebuilding Britain’s “industrial base” would only be possible because, in the words of Clause IV of the party’s 1918 Constitution, “As a socialist party we are committed as our long term-goal to the ‘common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange.’”^{Footnote 66}

The sentiments that were contained within Labour’s Programme 1982 were echoed in Labour’s 1983 Manifesto. The New Hope for Britain reinforced the idea that Labour’s priority in government would be to “save jobs and stop the further destruction of industry.”^{Footnote 67} It talked, in a less tentative manner than Labour’s Programme 1982, about giving “priority to the coal industry.”^{Footnote 68} This focus on the need to arrest and reverse industrial decline occurred at the expense of the presentation of any real vision of modernity and of the construction of policies concerned with developing Britain’s new and expanding growth sectors. One document, written by Geoff Bish (the Labour Party’s Research Secretary), noted that Labour was approaching the General Election with “many policy gaps” and that “with some of these—such as science and technology or consumer protection—the lack of content in our policies may prove to be embarrassing.”^{Footnote 69} In another document, Bish declared that, in the area of science and technology, “we have no real policy at all.”^{Footnote 70} The party’s attachment to Britain’s traditional industries emerged victorious over the development of any policies regarding governmental intervention in new scientific or technological industries. The past triumphed over modernity.

Labour suffered a significant defeat at the 1983 General Election. The party obtained its smallest share of the vote since 1918 and its lowest-ever average number of votes per candidate.^{Footnote 71} Within the party, opponents of the AES’s commitment to public ownership were in no doubt as to why defeat had occurred. Speaking at the TUC’s annual conference in 1983, Frank Chapple argued that, in the future, the party’s “appeal will have to be in touch with the times in which we live. Just as 19th century economics have proved no answer to the problems of the 20th century, so neither are 19th century politics.” Moreover, Chapple suggested that “we will have to stop wishing that the World was like it once was and face up to what it is. . . . We will have to appeal to the new working class and not cling to old fashioned definitions from 50 years ago.”^{Footnote 72} In a similar manner, Austin Mitchell MP argued that Labour must reassess its historic commitment to public ownership and he stated that “the new electorate has to be reached by new materials, not treated as if it were a working class movement of the twenties.” Mitchell declared that “we found ourselves appealing to an electorate of 1983 in the language of 1883” and he noted that “political Parties can die just like other prehistoric monsters which failed to evolve with the times.”^{Footnote 73}

III

The vast majority of AES supporters were adamantly opposed to membership of the EEC. Their opposition manifested itself in their campaign for a “No” vote at the June 1975 referendum. Anti-EEC rhetoric was often informed by an attachment to past political achievements and struggles. Benn argued that membership of the EEC would “destroy, literally at a stroke, fundamental democratic rights which the people of this country fought for hundreds of years to establish.”^{Footnote 74} Elsewhere, when talking about the need for a referendum, Benn suggested that Britain would “lose . . . our traditions of democracy” if it was taken into the EEC without consent from the British electorate.^{Footnote 75} Increasingly, the EEC was portrayed by Stuart Holland as a capitalist clique that threatened Britain’s traditional industries. He argued that none of its policies, such as the regional development fund, were able to meet the needs of Britain’s traditional industries.^{Footnote 76} This concern was echoed among rank-and-file AES supporters. The notion that “with [the] older industries such as leather and textiles, entry into the Common Market . . . would mean increased unemployment” fed the anti-EEC but pro-traditional industry sentiment of the era.^{Footnote 77} Activists expressed the concern that “the very logic . . . of the E.E.C. can bring our steel and coal industries to eventual death.”^{Footnote 78}

EEC membership seemed to encourage a deep-seated and emotional fear among AES supporters. Sentiments like “the last person to tell this country that we could not go it alone was Adolf Hitler. . . . I did not go six years without a banana as a schoolboy for nothing” were indicative of the manner in which the issue was often articulated through a historically orientated discourse.^{Footnote 79} Furthermore, nostalgia for the heroic struggles of the British labor movement’s past was regularly deployed against the idea of EEC membership. At the TUC’s Annual Conference in 1970, one delegate from the National Union of Agricultural and Allied Workers declared: “My Union and its members, [are] the descendants of the Tolpuddle Martyrs from whom this great movement draws its roots” and called upon the conference to support a motion rejecting EEC membership.^{Footnote 80} In turn, supporters of EEC membership suggested that the AES’s approach to Europe was backward-looking. At the following year’s annual TUC conference, one white-collar trade unionist argued that “living in the past is the surest way to kill the future.”^{Footnote 81} In 1975, the Young European Left group noted that “many of the fears expressed on the Left reflect an out-of-date analysis of the way to build socialism.”^{Footnote 82}

Tribune ardently supported EEC withdrawal. Its arguments for withdrawal were consistently framed by the past. In 1971, when Labour was facing a pro-European revolt over the issue of EEC membership, Francis Flavius wrote: “If Roy Jenkins, Labour’s deputy leader, and some members of the Shadow Cabinet go into the Prime Minister’s lobby this Thursday . . . there will be no precedent for it. The only comparable incident was the decision of Ramsay MacDonald in 1931.”^{Footnote 83} Tribune focused on the impact of EEC membership on the traditional industries of the past rather than on the growth sectors of the future. Contributors regularly expressed their concern that EEC membership would lead to further decline in Britain’s traditional industrial base and that there would be an influx of a “new range of highly profitable, low wage, service industries—‘Candy-floss industry.’” It was argued that “the biggest danger of Britain’s entry in the Common Market is this process of losing much of our manufacturing industry in exchange for ‘candy floss.’”^{Footnote 84} In 1975, with the referendum date of June 5 closing in, industrial scare stories became more frequent and Tribune ran front-page headlines like “Steel Jobs: Market Rules Forbid Rescue.”^{Footnote 85}

By the mid-1970s, the idea that EEC membership prevented the implementation of selective import controls had crept into the political rhetoric of AES supporters. Michael Hatfield noted in The Times in 1976 that “with the growth of economic difficulties the left believes that the alternative must be broad-based import controls.”^{Footnote 86} In contrast to the University of Cambridge’s Department of Applied Economics, which argued that import controls were needed to improve the balance of payments and to keep unemployment down,^{Footnote 87} import controls were interpreted primarily as a means by which Britain could protect its traditional industrial heritage. Clive Jenkins, from the Association of Scientific, Technological and Managerial Staffs’ (ASTMS) white-collar union, argued at Labour’s annual conference in 1975 that “if the Italians can have import deposit schemes . . . and the French can slap a levy on Italian wine, I think we can protect the heartland of our British industry.”^{Footnote 88}

As the decade progressed and Britain’s traditional industries continued to decline, the desire for protective controls hardened. The sense of fear surrounding the potential loss of these industries was palpable: at the party’s conference in 1980, one trade unionist declared: “The speed of Britain’s economic and industrial decline has accelerated at a frightening pace. . . . The campaign for an alternative economic strategy is of immense importance. Such a strategy must include import controls.”^{Footnote 89} Import controls were interpreted as the best means of arresting and reversing industrial decline. The international consequences of import controls and the effect that they would have on industries in developing nations were largely ignored. This position was shaped by an emotional attachment to the party’s industrial past. One writer in the party noted the “traditional cries on which the Labour Party relies to arouse the loyalties of the faithful. Whereas the slums of Calcutta do not arouse altruistic emotions, the road to Wigan Pier does.”^{Footnote 90}

Writing in the Observer in 1976, Alan Day described “the disturbingly puritanical nostalgia among some members of the Labour Party for the Attlee years with its rationing and bureaucracy.” Day argued that “in fact our import controls at that time were not part of an attempt to create a tight little autarchic island but part of a world-wide reaction to the post-war dollar shortage.”^{Footnote 91} In this way, opponents of import controls declared that it would “be a serious defeat for the Left if it became identified with the cause of all that is backward and inward-looking.”^{Footnote 92} They suggested that the need for autarky was indicative of the inability of the AES to deliver a modern and competitive economy.

It is remarkable how little the intraparty debate concerning EEC membership developed between 1976 and 1981. AES supporters continued to argue that membership of the EEC had compromised Britain’s ability to protect its traditional industries.^{Footnote 93} By condemning the EEC’s policy of “survival of the fittest,” they essentially accepted that such industries should be propped up regardless of their economic efficiency.^{Footnote 94} During the early 1980s, Labour’s position on EEC withdrawal hardened. Whereas the Draft Manifesto 1980 argued that Labour would only leave the EEC if attempts to change its views and policies failed, Labour’s Programme 1982 declared that, if Labour was elected, withdrawal would occur immediately and there would be no need for another referendum: “The verdict of the electorate at a general election, we believe, is the decisive mandate on which the next Labour government can renegotiate our withdrawal.”^{Footnote 95} Opening the annual conference of the TUC in 1982, Alan Sapper, president of the TUC, exhibited the kind of nostalgia that observers and contemporaries had noted was informing Labour’s desire for EEC withdrawal. He attacked the fact that “large sections of our alternative economic strategy could be considered illegal while we are still members of the EEC” and, significantly, he then went on to elaborate: “It is so easy for us to forget the wider aims of our Movement, something I would express as the gleam at the top of the mountain. That gleam is the kind of society and the kind of world that has been the aspiration of generation after generation of those who served our Movement.”^{Footnote 96}

Labour’s Programme 1982 argued that EEC membership would nullify the AES. It declared that, while Article 12 of the European Treaty would prevent the implementation of import controls in order to protect British industry and manufacturing, Articles 90 and 92 would stop Labour from adopting a wide-reaching program of public ownership and planning that would be reliant on “selective aids to industry.”^{Footnote 97} Above all, EEC membership was perceived to be accelerating the decline of the nation’s traditional industries. The New Hope for Britain proclaimed that “the next Labour government, committed to radical socialist policies for reviving the British economy is bound to find continued membership a serious obstacle to the fulfilment of these policies.”^{Footnote 98} However, this commitment to “radical socialist policies” represented something of a misnomer. The economic policies that were contained within the AES had, increasingly, been articulated through a nostalgic discourse.

IV

Industrial democracy was central to the AES. During the 1970s, advocates of industrial democracy argued that “the very scale of the [economic] crisis makes possible the canvassing of measures of a radical nature, which can no longer be dismissed as utopian or ‘extremist.’”^{Footnote 99} They talked about the advantages of a new means of “socially progressive control” that would allow workers “to run things in ways best suited to their own aims and ideals . . . in modern Britain.”^{Footnote 100} For Holland, industrial democracy and workers’ control formed critical components of a broader strategy that aimed to “transform the injustice, inequality and inefficiency of modern capitalism.”^{Footnote 101} Accordingly, he suggested that workers should “be invited to submit proposals for the diversification and expansion of their companies.”^{Footnote 102} It was argued that, by giving workers greater involvement in the workplace, industrial productivity and economic performance could be enhanced and new ways to expand the economy would be developed. Workers’ control was portrayed as an innovative means to release the unfulfilled potential of British industry.^{Footnote 103} However, as I will show, far from being radical and modern, the AES’s proposals concerning industrial democracy were understood primarily through the lens of the past.

In the early 1970s, many of the ideas concerning industrial democracy that circulated in the party had their origins in the highly influential Institute for Workers’ Control (IWC). One of the IWC’s leading figures, Ken Coates, often deployed a contradictory discourse that expressed the notion that workers’ control was something new and modern—“We add something new”—but that also simultaneously mobilized mnemonic constructions of the past in order to support his ideas.^{Footnote 104} At an early workers’ control conference in 1967, Coates argued that “we carry with us the spirit of the shop stewards of the first world war, of the syndicalists and industrial unionists of 1910 onwards, of the guildsmen and the first communists who pioneered ideas of workers’ control.” He then stated that “we carry on from farther back, from the Grand National Consolidation Trades Union of 1834, from Robert Owen, from founders of socialism and trades unions.”^{Footnote 105} From an early stage, Coates’s ideas were located within the emotional parameters of Labour’s nostalgic identity.

The past provided guidance for the workers’ control movement in Britain. Many of the ideas that were understood to offer contemporary solutions had their origins in memories of the industrial working class of the past. In one article in Tribune, Coates talked about how “among the public sector unions there exist dozens of traditional proposals for industrial democracy. . . . The miners have the old Miners Federation of Great Britain programme which was put before the Sankey Commission [an investigation in 1919 into the hours, wages, and ownership of the coal industry]. . . . All these schemes are 50 years old now, but they are still more ‘modern’ than the National Coal Board.”^{Footnote 106} Similarly, a report from an IWC miners’ seminar in Workers’ Control Bulletin declared: “Today we are coming near to the truth seen by the miner William Straker in 1919 who, in his evidence to the Sankey Commission said ‘the unrest is deeper than can be reached by pounds, shillings and pence. . . . The root of the matter is the stirring of the spirit of man to be free.’”^{Footnote 107} In the same issue, Coates referred to the story of the Rhondda Socialists, who, after World War I, wrote the text “Industrial Democracy for the Mines.” He proclaimed that this text was “a trail-blazing document which has inspired imitations on many sides. Hull busmen, dockworkers, steel men and many others in our times have come to take up its challenge. It is to be hoped . . . that the work of the Rhondda Socialists will be seen to receive its consummation in these later efforts.”^{Footnote 108} Written in the past, literature by traditional industrial workers provided guidance for the present.

Significantly, in the mid-1970s, despite rising levels of both white-collar and female employment,^{Footnote 109} the pages of Workers’ Control Bulletin were filled with articles and pictures celebrating male traditional industrial working-class occupations. In one issue in 1974 alone, almost half of the paper’s twelve pages were taken up with coal mining–related stories and features.^{Footnote 110} Tellingly, at the IWC Miners’ Conference in April 1974, Coates stated that “miners are the key people in the argument for workers’ control.”^{Footnote 111} In this way, Britain’s declining traditional industrial workforce was central to the discourse originating from the IWC. The past was deployed by advocates of workers’ control at the Labour Party Conference. Delegates made statements like “Since the time of Robert Owen we have had, and still have, many examples of workers controlling their working lives in whole or in part successfully.”^{Footnote 112} In the same way, documents circulating in the NEC’s policy departments referred to “the historical fight to democratise our political system.”^{Footnote 113} Benn talked about how the labor movement must “take up its historic task again.”^{Footnote 114} In 1976, the prospective Labour candidate for Fareham wrote in Labour Weekly that “men have looked at their place of work, just as Owen, Morris and Hardie did, and they have found its ownership, its management, its greed and pursuit of wealth, totally unacceptable.”^{Footnote 115} Within the party, nostalgia for a bygone era of male traditional industrial working-class prominence, struggle, and unity and the associated symbolic figures of this era were central to the case for increased worker participation in industry.

Industrial democracy was advocated via a political discourse that was almost exclusively concerned with the male-dominated industries of the past. The expansion of white-collar employment and the increase in female employment were rarely discussed. Labour appeared out of touch with modern economic developments. At a time when the women’s movement was flourishing in Britain, the AES and its policy commitments were articulated through the language of traditional male industrial employment. In an early speech on industrial democracy in 1968, Benn talked of how “when a man enters the factory gate in the morning he sheds much of his dignity with his overcoat.”^{Footnote 116} He went on to make frequent references to “the democracy of the workshop.”^{Footnote 117} Significantly, in this speech and in many of his speeches during the early 1970s, Benn referred to the person exploited by the authoritarian nature of the workplace, almost uniquely, as being a male industrial worker. In another speech on workers’ control addressed to the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers in 1971, Benn argued that “the new grey flannel brigade with their degrees in business studies, familiar with the language of accounting and computers and their shiny offices away from the dirt and noise of the factory floor are still often too remote.”^{Footnote 118} Benn tied in the idea of workers’ control not with shiny offices but with dirty and noisy factory floors. His rhetoric seemed strangely detached from Britain’s increasingly white-collar economy.

When new white-collar unions were mentioned by the AES’s advocates, it was with hesitancy and reluctance. This was not the case with their traditional industrial counterparts. Ken Coates noted that the “radicalism of the major growth unions in the white-collar sector” reflected the new mood of militancy. However, he then went on to state with a degree of suspicion that this militancy “by no means correlates with the mass of membership opinion in the organisations concerned.”^{Footnote 119} Such suspicions were shared by the industrial trade unions, which felt that their dominance was threatened by the growth of the new white-collar unions. Anti-nostalgic comments at the annual TUC Conference from white-collar trade unionists like Clive Jenkins (ASTMS), who noted that “what we have here is a muddle which is based on an ancient pattern of industrial archaeology,” did little to alleviate these fears.^{Footnote 120} Yet, at the same time, the omnipotence of Labour’s nostalgic identity forced unions like ASTMS to locate themselves within more acceptable historical parameters. On another occasion, Clive Jenkins attempted to express the aims of his union in terms that were acceptable to these parameters, and he declared that putting aside sectional interest was “worthy of the aims, hopes and aspirations of those pioneers who gathered in the Memorial Hall, Farringdon Street, on February 27, 1900.”^{Footnote 121}

Writing in Workers’ Control Bulletin, Audrey Wise questioned the dominance of male industrial workers within the political discourse of her contemporaries. Wise asked, “Have you ever noticed that jobs threatened by closures are always ‘men’s jobs,’ even when many are actually women’s jobs? And that strikers are always ‘the lads’ and ‘solid to a man’ even when a good number of them are women? And that trade unionists always have ‘wives and families’ even though about a quarter of them are women?”^{Footnote 122} Articles like this were rare in the 1970s. AES supporters wrote letters that questioned: “How many women possess the breadth and depth of mind to understand political philosophy, economics and the social sciences generally? How many appreciate what socialism is and what it could do for the world?”^{Footnote 123} Manifestly sexist, this letter’s publication in Tribune suggested that there were those who thought it expressed a legitimate point of view.

By the early 1980s, little had changed and the AES and its ideas of industrial democracy and workers’ control remained conceptualized around the male traditional industrial worker. This did not go unnoticed by feminists in the party. Writing in Tribune in 1981, Patricia Hewitt and Harriet Harman criticized the fact that the “debate about the alternative economic strategy has been almost wholly confined to male trade unionists and economists.”^{Footnote 124} Similarly, Diana Gilhespy noted the way that the AES seemed to speak only to and about male workers, and she argued that “making sure that women are involved in the alternative economic strategy—both as initiators and beneficiaries—is important not only for women but also the whole Labour movement.”^{Footnote 125} Thus, right up until the 1983 General Election, the AES was attacked for its failure to engage with the sizable female workforce that existed in Britain. There were left-wing thinkers who displayed an understanding of the significance of these changes. In 1978, Eric Hobsbawm declared: “Since 1951 the number of married women technically described as ‘occupied’ has gone up from about one-fifth to about half. This is a major change in the composition of the working class.”^{Footnote 126} Nevertheless, the impact of women upon Labour’s AES remained negligible.

In 1977, Labour released the Bullock Report. Among other proposals, it suggested that an equal number of workers and shareholders should make up the boards of those companies employing more than two thousand people.^{Footnote 127} Advocates of workers’ control on the left of the party were critical of both its content and extent.^{Footnote 128} However, the main significance of the Bullock Report was its insignificance in shaping the dominant political discourse of the Labour Party. Primarily, this failure occurred because, within the party, the ideas that underpinned industrial democracy and workers’ control were the product of an abstract nostalgia for a male traditional industrial working class that was unaligned to any concrete policy proposals. Industrial democracy’s resonance with Labour’s past legitimized its political application in the present. Neil Kinnock’s response to the Bullock Report was typical: “The ideal of industrial democracy is as old as socialism.”^{Footnote 129}

Indeed, the idea of industrial democracy remained defined by its location within Labour’s nostalgic identity. This led to confusion about the idea itself. Joe Gormley, leader of the National Union of Mineworkers, asked, “I am from a nationalised industry and I ask myself a question when people talk about workers’ control. What the hell do we mean?”^{Footnote 130} In the wider party, ambiguous statements like “Industrial democracy has to be developed in accordance with the requirements and the history of the labour movements in each particular industry” did little to allay this confusion.^{Footnote 131} As late as 1981, Labour’s policy committees on industrial democracy seemed unfocused and their policies appeared poorly thought out and ill-defined. One of these committees noted that “discussions on industrial democracy are often bedevilled by different, though related issues being brought into the argument the wrong way or being mixed up together.”^{Footnote 132} Moreover, if the relationship between the AES’s policies concerning industrial democracy and widespread public ownership were ill-defined, it was because they were increasingly being articulated through an abstract nostalgic discourse. Delegates at the party conference made such statements as: “Comrades, I come from Clydeside and I will finish with a quote from John Maclean, the red Clydeside leader, because it seems to me that his words, said in 1919, are appropriate for this Conference to hear today. He said then: ‘Capitalism is in the last ditch. Let us cover over this dripping monster and prepare the way for worldwide, workers-owned and controlled economic solidarity.’”^{Footnote 133}

Rather than offering concrete policy proposals, Benn continued to emphasize the historical importance of industrial democracy. In Arguments for Socialism, Benn wrote that “the ideas of workers’ control have roots going deep into the history of our movement.”^{Footnote 134} Benn quoted a miner who gave evidence to the Sankey Commission in 1919—“We must have industrial democracy, in order that men may be free”—and he argued that “this is a very remarkable statement of a working miner, of the aspirations which led so many of his fellow workers to press for public ownership, raising hopes which have not been realised by the structure of nationalisation which we have adopted.”^{Footnote 135} Similarly, in Arguments for Democracy, Benn both expressed and reinforced the sense of nostalgic legitimacy that surrounded the idea of industrial democracy when he declared, “From time immemorial through the Chartist campaigns and up to the present day, the Labour movement at grass roots level has always fought to extend democratic control.”^{Footnote 136}

Labour’s 1983 Manifesto did little to clarify the idea of industrial democracy or to move it away from a conceptualization that was heavily rooted in the past. The policy documents and drafts that shaped the 1983 Manifesto argued that industrial democracy was needed in order to “rebuild industry.”^{Footnote 137} Like the ideas of public ownership and EEC withdrawal, industrial democracy was understood as a means by which to preserve Britain’s traditional industries. The New Hope for Britain declared that one of Labour’s main aims was “to rebuild British industry, working within a new framework for planning and industrial democracy.”^{Footnote 138} The AES’s programmatic commitments to industrial democracy were shaped by an emotional commitment to a bygone era.

V

Historians have undervalued the extent to which the past had an impact on the Labour Party’s understanding of its Alternative Economic Strategy. Previous studies on the AES have stressed its radical nature. They have suggested that the AES was defined by its modernity. In this article, I have disputed this dominant understanding and have argued that the AES’s programmatic commitments were shaped by a nostalgic attachment to the past.

Significantly, during the 1970s and early 1980s, as many commentators noted, Labour seemed to be fundamentally in thrall to its historically orientated identity. All of the AES’s leading advocates were, to varying degrees, influenced by the party’s distinctive collective nostalgia. This nostalgia took three interrelated forms: nostalgia for an era in which Britain’s male traditional industries lay at the forefront of the British economy; nostalgia for the heroic male traditional industrial working-class struggles and unity of this era; and nostalgia for the historical symbols and figures that were perceived to represent this era of male traditional industrial working-class prominence, unity, and struggle. Tony Benn proved himself to be particularly adept at channeling this nostalgia in a way that increased support for the AES. Furthermore, Benn’s increasing popularity in the party directly related to his close association with (and his ability to articulate) this nostalgia.

Stuart Holland’s initial vision of the AES displayed a degree of ambiguity toward the past and, in particular, toward Britain’s traditional industries. However, an interpretation of the AES that was more recognizably characterized by nostalgia became dominant within the party. In turn, this interpretation shaped the AES’s political development. Over time, the predominance of nostalgia served to eradicate any sense of modernity that was contained in Holland’s earlier version of the AES. Labour decisively rejected the aspects of Holland’s vision that prioritized economic modernization over industrial preservation and restoration: this left the scope for a modernizing and progressive strategy for economic rejuvenation greatly diminished. The AES’s policies were understood to represent mechanisms for the restoration of the traditional industries of the past rather than blueprints for the development of the growth sectors of the future.

Economic strategies are often as much emotional constructs as they are carefully thought-out programmatic commitments. Public ownership was central to the party’s AES between 1970 and 1983. The idea of nationalization, as envisaged in Clause IV of Labour’s constitution, resonated within the party’s nostalgic identity. Party members interpreted the policies on public ownership that were contained within the AES as a means by which to restore the British male traditional industrial working class of the past. Primarily, the EEC was seen as a barrier to this restoration. EEC membership was anathema to the majority of party members because they believed that it would compromise the policies contained within the AES and, thus, accelerate the decline of the British male traditional industrial working class. The outcome was that widespread public ownership was accepted and the EEC was rejected. At their most extreme, such as in the case of industrial democracy and workers’ control, the AES’s policies became characterized not by their political content but by their nostalgic resonance. Nostalgia became the policy.

Onlookers described how Labour appeared to be out of touch with the realities of modern Britain. With its wholehearted commitment to the AES, the 1983 General Election Manifesto, The New Hope for Britain, represented something akin to a nostalgic apotheosis. Fighting an election on the basis of policies that were heavily rooted in the past and explicitly designed to preserve and restore the traditional industries associated with Britain’s industrial heritage, Labour performed poorly at the polls. To the advantage of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party, the economic strategy that was offered by Labour to the electorate in 1983 was both a reflection and a cause of the limited appeal of the party at this point in its historical development. Between 1970 and 1983, nostalgia shaped the political trajectory of the AES. It also, ultimately, directed Labour to a catastrophic electoral defeat.