Most of the details are there. Those wishing to know the exact composition of the TUC which met Ramsay MacDonald to protest against the Labour government's proposed cut in unemployment benefit have only to turn to page 213 of Martin Pugh's Speak for Britain. But a "new history of the Labour party" needs to be far more than a catalogue of names and events. Pugh certainly has opinions which, irrespective of their merits, make welcome additions to the narrative. Michael Foot, whose failings as a leader are cruelly if accurately described, would have been consoled by the discovery that Pugh believes Attlee should have made Aneurin Bevan his foreign secretary and that Hugh Gaitskell was "an elitist who failed to understand the [Labour] movement". But most of Speak for Britain (one exception is constitutional reform) lacks analysis. As a result it informs without teaching the lessons that Labour needs to learn.
When, on 23 August 1931, the Labour cabinet voted in favour of cutting unemployment benefit "by a perilously narrow majority of 12 to nine", every minister faced a dilemma that illustrated the burden which progressive governments bear. To restore international confidence it was necessary to demonstrate that Labour ministers had abandoned their most cherished principles. Even the dissidents – having not been told that devaluation would soften the blow – thought that the choice was between austerity and bankruptcy. They simply argued that it was better to leave the cuts to the Conservatives. MacDonald chose to sacrifice the party rather than what he saw as the national interest. I think he was wrong. But his error was more than what Pugh describes as "the blunder of an arrogant leader". Political life is more complicated than that.
Historians ought to have a point of view. So I mean no offence when I describe Pugh's opinions as often representing the cynicism about successive leaders that so debilitated the party before the early love affair with Tony Blair. It is true that, under Neil Kinnock, the party abandoned its commitment to wholesale public ownership. But there was no agreement that "full employment could no longer be a serious goal". Nor was the party suffering from "intellectual demoralisation". Perhaps we should have been. For another defeat awaited us. But we believed in the eventual triumph of our ideas. One of them was devolution – not, as Pugh claims "the best means of blunting the nationalist challenge and thus burying the case for Scottish independence" but a way of passing out power from London.
Despite devolution, Pugh finds Labour guilty of failing to treat constitutional matters as a priority. He asserts that Attlee, typical of all Labour leaders, illustrated a willingness to accept the status quo by supporting Baldwin against the king when Edward VIII proposed to marry Wallis Simpson. The notion that a social democratic party should seek to depose the elected government by siding with the hereditary monarch – Pugh's preferred course – is at least original. It is justified by the explanation that Edward wanted "to do the decent thing by marrying his sweetheart". Pugh does not quote Attlee's letter to Baldwin which explained that, in the parliamentary party, support for the king was confined "to a few of the intelligentsia who could be relied on to take the wrong view of everything".
Some things have changed. Margaret Bonfield, Pugh tells us, was only accepted as a cabinet minister in the second Labour government because of her motherly persona. She knitted in meetings. Labour has lost its fear of dominant women. It has also abandoned its puritanical streak. In 1906, the leadership voted against the Street Betting Act. Fifty years later Harold Wilson called premium bonds a squalid lottery. Gordon Brown's maximum popularity coincided with his cancellation of plans to build a "super casino" and he began to decline in public esteem when he authorised the development of 12 regional gambling houses. Even the bare facts of its history confirm that Labour is at its strongest when it is visibly a party of strong belief.
