I’ve always preferred the pub to almost any other venue. It’s warmer than most meeting rooms, more truthful than most conferences and far better supplied with arguments worth listening to. The sweet ambrosia of alcohol also has a canny way of loosening the tongue and sharpening your point; nobody goes to a pub to be morally improved, and that is precisely its charm. Which makes it oddly fitting that one of the most bracing critiques of the Labour Party should turn to alcohol, and on the party’s habit of lecturing people whose lives it has no serious intention of changing.
Benjamin Tillett’s 1908 pamphlet Is the Parliamentary Labour Party a Failure? cost only a penny and was aimed at men who, barely a generation into Labour’s parliamentary existence, were already discovering the narcotic comforts of respectability. Tillett, a docker, an agitator and the founding father of what came to be called New Unionism, was not accusing Labour of insufficient moderation. Quite the opposite. His charge was that Labour had become frightened of looking improper.
It matters, before going any further, to say that Tillett himself was a deeply flawed figure. Alongside his ferocity and moral clarity about poverty sat an anti-Semitism that is ugly, inexcusable and impossible to airbrush away. None of what follows requires turning him into a saint. It requires only taking seriously the critique he made of a party that he viewed as preferring abstract moral issues to material confrontation.
The specific quarrel of this pamphlet was over drink. Labour MPs, some of them funded and feted by Nonconformist temperance organisations, were touring the country denouncing working‑class drunkenness while millions were unemployed. Tillett was incandescent. He called temperance a “red herring”, a displacement activity that allowed parliament to debate moral behaviour while avoiding the economic structures that produced misery in the first place. Unemployment, he insisted, was chronic to capitalism. To lecture the working class about the evils of drink while leaving wages, work and ownership practically untouched was not only stupid but a fundamental betrayal of the founding principles of the Labour Party.
What unsettles me about this pamphlet is not the language, which is extravagant, malicious and actually very funny, but how familiar the argument feels. Tillett is describing a Labour Party leadership that had already learned how to sound grave while doing very little. Activists were told to stop making noise, to abandon anything that looked dramatic, and to trust the slow choreography of parliamentary procedure. Urgency was equated to vulgarity. Anger to immaturity. Poverty became a problem to be managed, soothed, and talked around, rather than something to be taken on on the streets. This was not, in Tillett’s view, an ideological dispute between socialism and liberalism. It was a dispute about nerve. About whether a party founded by and for the working class was willing to make powerful enemies on their behalf. He did not believe that they were.
A century on, the specifics have changed but the mechanism has not. Temperance has been replaced by constitutional tidying, managerial competence and fiscal rectitude. Where the Labour Party once moralised about drink, it now moralises about responsibility. Where it once promised to offer dignity to the working class, it now promises to reassure the markets. The substitution is neat, and almost elegant, but the effect is the same: displacement away from wages, insecurity and the modern “bottom dog” – the worker in permanent precarity whose life is organised around temperamental work, insecure housing, and permanent low‑grade fear.
Listening to the rhetoric of the modern Labour Party leadership, and you can hear the echoes of 1908. Lay members are told that talking too much about redistribution of wealth makes us look unserious. Our anger about inequality must be tempered by respect for arbitrary fiscal rules, whose origins are treated as immovable facts of nature rather than political choices. The language may be different, and significantly less eloquent than J. Ramsay MacDonald – but the instinct is identical: better to be respectable than dangerous.
This helps explain why Labour repeatedly finds itself more comfortable talking about process than outcome. Electoral reform, House of Lords reform, standards in public life, constitutional housekeeping – all very worthy, all morally unobjectionable, all curiously bloodless. They signal virtue without threatening anyone who actually matters (my apologies to hereditary peers). They allow the Labour Party to appear serious without asking the most serious questions of all: who controls our work, who controls our time, and who gets to live securely, and with dignity.
The socialist Robert Blatchford had a phrase for the people that the Labour Party of 1908 were accused of forgetting while it chased these safer causes. He called them the “bottom dog”: those without the resources, stability or social capital to wait patiently for reform. For them, politics wasn’t an abstract debate about rules, but a daily calculation about rent, food and heat. To tell such people to calm down, to trust the process, to be patient for a better tomorrow, was not pragmatism – merely condescension.
This is why the Labour Party’s recurrent crises are so often crises of tone, rather than policy. The party can produce reams of well‑intentioned plans, and sometimes genuinely useful ones, but it still struggles to speak in a voice that sounds as though insecurity is understood as a lived condition rather than a spreadsheet problem. When challenged, the instinctive response is admonishment: don’t scare the horses, don’t over‑promise, don’t look irresponsible. It is the voice of an anxious party.
That makes it worth saying plainly that this Labour government has not left those that need support most empty‑handed. Pride in Place funding has been pushed into towns long accustomed to being noticed only at election time. The apprenticeship levy has been reformed to make it far more useful to people who actually need skills rather than slogans. The Employment Rights Act, though not the full version of what was once promised, does at least tilt the law back towards workers in an economy designed to keep them disposable. And the removal of the two‑child benefit cap decisively marked a break with a piece of moralised austerity that punished children. These achievements are not nothing – they matter.
But British politics has a peculiar talent for turning moral certainty into a substitute for courage, of confusing virtue with cleanliness. Tillett would have recognised this immediately. What he saw in 1908 was a Labour Party more interested in demonstrating its moral hygiene to polite society than in forcing a reckoning with poverty. What we see today is a party that too often treats economic caution as an achievement in itself, rather than a means to an end.
Tillett ended his pamphlet with a warning that still resonates today. If Labour would not confront capitalism directly, he argued, “new and better growths will supplant them”. Parties that forget what they are for create the conditions in which harder, angrier movements flourish.
None of this requires the Labour Party to abandon prudence or competence. It requires something more uncomfortable: the willingness to be thought of as impolite, and to say, repeatedly and without embarrassment, that permanent insecurity for the working class is a political choice rather than an economic inevitability. The party has so start to treating wages, work and housing as moral questions, not technical ones – to stop mistaking elite approval for evidence of seriousness.
I think about this most clearly in the pub. Not one of those places with reclaimed wood and a blackboard explaining why the IPA tastes crap, but a proper pub: sticky tables, carpets that gave up years ago and people who know exactly how little patience they’ve got left. Nobody in there is waiting for a white paper to rescue them. They wouldn’t read it anyway. They can tell, without much effort, when they’re being managed rather than spoken for.
Tillett, for all his sins, and there were plenty, understood that. Labour came out of places like this, or somewhere close to it. The danger for the party is not that it is too radical or not radical enough, it’s that it forgets where it came from – mistaking respectability for wisdom – right up to the point where the arguments get louder elsewhere. Enter stage right, Mr Farage.
[Further reading: British voters never get what they want]
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