Culture and character

83British historians have in recent decades become ever more interested in the relationship between politics and ‘culture’. What distinguishes a cultural approach to Labour’s thinking from one assessing its ideas on, say, economics, foreign policy or health? Firstly, the focus on a culture of thought suggests an interest not only in the more theoretical and systematic book-length formulations of social democratic discourse, but also on the much wider array of assumptions, outlooks and reflections by less self-consciously ‘intellectual’ Labour figures, which are often just as revealing as the former about the party’s most fundamental beliefs, mind-sets and dilemmas. A cultural approach thus reduces the risk, as Stefan Collini has advised, of a narrative which ‘reduces “ideas” to “theories”’. ¹ It is one in which the reflections of the pragmatic Jim Callaghan become of as much interest as the writings of the more overtly intellectual Tony Crosland, Tony Blair as much as Anthony Giddens. What unites the first of each of these pairings is that their thinking was based to a greater degree than the second on sustained experience of power at the highest governmental levels (Crosland occupied one of the three ‘great’ offices of state, the Foreign Office, only briefly at the very tail-end of his life), and thus offer particular insight into that meeting ground between more abstract ideals and actual practical reality, as well as, often, into the very ‘timbre’ of the particular historical moment, a sense of how society is changing and whether Labour is in tune with, or disconnected from that change. This is not to disparage the theorists, who still feature prominently in what follows. It is to argue that a fuller picture of Labour’s thought emerges when it is viewed in tandem with the empiricists, labourists and active political practitioners.