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The lost world of the British Labour Party? Community, infiltration and disunity

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Abstract

Drawing on Benedict Anderson’s notion of the ‘imagined community’, this article examines the evolution of the British Labour Party’s sense of self as an organisation. Accordingly, the analysis interrogates the interrelated elements of history, culture, identity and party structure. It is argued that Labour has moved substantially from the collective class-based notions it once used to define its politics and effectively demarcate its boundaries. In place of these, an increasing focus has been placed on giving the party’s political practices an outward-looking, diverse and more individualistic focus. Consequently, Labour’s difficulties during the leadership election of 2015 and since are rooted in the combination of this prolonged push to build a new movement beyond its traditional borders and the persistence of historically grounded tribal concerns about the vulnerability of the party to infiltration.

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Notes

  1. For some notable exceptions see Black (2003), Drucker (1979), Fielding (2007), Lawrence (2007), Wickham-Jones and Jobson (2010) and Worley (2009).

  2. This material is drawn from a larger project on elite narratives and organisational change in the British Labour Party. Elites were selected for interview because of their close involvement in the design and presentation of organisational reform packages and their acute importance in episodes in which issues like entryism were of great concern. This material is used to elucidate and support the textual and archival material.

  3. For a thorough analysis of the various ways in which these different strands factionalised and engaged in Labour’s intra-party and organisational politics before the 1980s see Minkin (1978).

  4. For an analysis of the individualisation of democracy in British political parties and the increase in individual balloting at Labour Party conference, see the work of Faucher-King (2005, pp. 191–213).

  5. Research interview with Lord Whitty, 24th June 2015.

  6. For further discussion of this work, see Andersson et al. (2011).

  7. Research interview with Lord Kinnock, 13th July 2015.

  8. Research interview with Charles Clarke, 23rd July 2015.

  9. Research interview with Len McCluskey, 10th February 2016.

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Acknowledgements

This research is supported by the University of Sussex and funded by the ESRC (Grant No. ES/J500173/1). I would like to thank Emily Robinson, Paul Webb and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback on this article.

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  1. School of Law, Politics and Sociology, University of Sussex, Brighton, BN1 9QE, UK

    Jake Watts

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Watts, J. The lost world of the British Labour Party? Community, infiltration and disunity. Br Polit 13, 505–523 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41293-017-0057-5

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