‘But westward, look, the land is bright’: Labour’s Revisionists and the Imagining of America, c. 1945–64

Abstract

Of the Labour government elected in May 1997, David Marquand wrote that its ‘rhetoric is American; the intellectual influences which have shaped its project are American; its political style is American’.¹ Marquand highlighted the transatlanticism of Labour ‘modernisers’ so as to attack their neo-liberal bias, his own view being that they should, instead, emulate the apparently more collectivist western Europeans.² It is ironic, then, that Marquand formed part of a tradition within the Labour Party which beheld the United States with unprecedented favour. It was Marquand, indeed, who, while in temporary exile from the party, bemoaned Britain’s failure to produce its own ‘Roosevelt coalition’.³ While the America so admired was, in a number of important respects, another country located in a contrasting context, if Tony Blair and his cohorts are guilty of unduly falling under American influence, then many of their postwar Labour predecessors must also stand in the dock.