England and Labour. A series of seminars and discussions coordinated by the University of Winchester Centre for English Identity and Politics

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1 England and Labour A series of seminars and discussions coordinated by the University of Winchester Centre for English Identity and Politics February to April 2016 Deindustrialisation and the English working class Tim Strangleman Over fifty years ago social historian E.P. Thompson completed what was to become his classic The Making of The English Working Class. Thompson argued that between 1780 and the early 1830s a significant class consciousness emerged amongst English working people as a result of proto and early industrialisation. The book attempted to piece together fragmentary evidence left by this emerging working-class in contemporary England; a mixture of cultural and political writings, of observations and other ephemera including poetry and song. In his famous Preface to The Making he writes: I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the obsolete handloom weaver, the utopian artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience: and, if they were casualties of history, they remain, condemned in their own lives, as casualties (Thompson, 1963: 12). The importance of Thompson s writing then and now lies in the way he both allows access to, and values, the social experience of industrial change. Thompson s work still has resonance with the process of industrialisation; however, here I want to ask questions about what help it can offer us in understanding the contemporary process of deindustrialisation. The historical moment that Thompson was concerned with, the experience of communities emerging into an industrial age, can be usefully compared and contrasted with contemporary researchers studying communities experiencing deindustrialisation. These two historically discrete epochs can be thought of as two bookends of what was an industrial era. Thompson s subjects were drawing on a vibrant, independent stock of knowledge, of tradition and custom - a plebeian culture. When faced with the emergent values of laissez-

faire capitalism and of liberal political economy they did so not as blank slates, but rather with a resilient and robust pre-existing system of morals and values of their own which were not simply

2 faire capitalism and of liberal political economy they did so not as blank slates, but rather with a resilient and robust pre-existing system of morals and values of their own which were not simply swept away. If we were to visualise Thompson s study we might imagine it as seen in Figure 1. Figure 1 Thompson on Industrial Change Here we see an overlap between a preindustrial and industrial period. In the case of the UK this could be seen as occurring over many decades, even over a century. The importance of Thompson s work is that he showed how a preindustrial culture allowed people to cope with and interpret the process of industrial change in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He would say that it is not possible to understand working class industrial culture without appreciating it roots intellectually, socially, culturally and religious in a particular set of outlooks and beliefs. I want to add to Thompson s ideas those of Karl Polanyi s classic The Great Transformation written at the end of WW2. Polanyi s most significant conceptual contribution was his coining of the relational phrases embedded and disembedded to describe the link between the

3 economy and wider civil society. Polanyi argued that the new forms of capitalism and market liberalism espoused by a number of intellectuals at the time, most notably Malthus and Ricardo, undermined, or disembedded, existing social relationships of the eighteenth century. The distinction he made was between an economy embedded in social relations and social relations which were simply an add-on to a market. Importantly Polanyi was not suggesting that this separation had occurred, but rather this was a trend against which various groups reacted to during the early and later stages of industrialisation. As Polanyi notes: Our thesis is that the idea of a self-adjusting market implied a stark utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness (Polanyi, 2001 [1944]: 3). For Polanyi then a purely disembedded economy, one completely separated out from social institutions, was not possible, let alone desirable. Nonetheless the process of disembedding was disruptive and destructive of existing social relationships, mechanisms and structures. However, this process was itself a stimulus for new forms of social relationships as society at various levels sought to control the worst excesses of market fundamentalism. What Polanyi describes in his wide-ranging account was the way this pressure creates new forms of social relations emerging out of previous ones. These new forms were adaptations but speak to older forms of morality and order. In my work I research deindustrialisation and how work cultures are corroded or disappear altogether. I am attracted to Thompson s ideas as they allow us to think through what is happening with deindustrialisation in our own age. Imagine deindustrialisation as the other bookend to the process of industrialisation. This can be seen in figure 2.

Figure 2. Theoretical understandings of industrial change The question then is how do we conceptualise that space between industrial society and what follows?

4 Figure 2. Theoretical understandings of industrial change The question then is how do we conceptualise that space between industrial society and what follows? US Literary Scholar Sherry Linkon researches the cultural material which has emerged from the ruins of deindustrialisation poetry, visual and novels. She has coined the evocative phrase the half-life of deindustrialisation. This captures how industrial loss impacts not just those who lost their jobs in steel plants, coal mines, ship yards or factories but also subsequent generations sons and daughters and now grandchildren. This generation often face multiple complex social, economic and environmental problems, without the compensation of the industrial pay check. The notion of the half-life gets at the heart of the ongoing problems of industrial change, recognising these problems as deeply cultural and social as well as political and economic. The half-life allows us to understand the complex ways in which cultures adapt, change and stay the same over time. The Problem for Labour Ok where does all this get us in terms of the Labour Party and its connection with its grassroots? I think the models above offer some concepts for thinking through these issues. We can see that Thompson s subjects were drawing on their own preindustrial culture in understanding the new situation they found themselves in. They were in part reacting against the crude imposition of the free market which they took to be amoral. In many ways

5 the process of deindustrialisation displays similar features. Many of those who lived through the 1980s objected to Thatcherism on moral grounds one could think of Neil Kinnock s phrase about the need to deliver the British people from evil at the 1985 Labour Party conference. What many industrial communities objected to was the crude way in which market forces were let rip upon them. It seems to me that where labour went wrong was to not fully harness that sense of moral outrage while offering a coherent alternative. In the Blair years the pretty much completely uncritical adoption of market mechanisms in virtually every aspect of public life, didn t do anything to remedy this neglect, and could rather be seen to exacerbate the problem. In that period many former industrial working class districts were ignored and seen as something in Labour s past. The opposition to the uncritical adoption of the market in these sorts of places was equally dismissed as the irrelevant gasps of industrial dinosaurs. There was no appreciation of the skills and knowledge of industrial districts and how these attributes might be harnessed for new industry. There also seemed little appreciation that these communities were being disembedded from one type of economy but not then being re-embedded in another. To return to figure 2 above that space between the industrial economy and what follows is an intellectual, cultural and social space. Workers and their families caught up in industrial change draw on older understandings in facing the future; they face their situation by drawing on a past. It seems to me that Labour in the Blair years, rather than listening, appreciating and working with that grain simply left that space, or argued that more market was what these communities and individuals needed. It is no wonder, just as Thompson s nascent working class did, that people in these former industrial areas felt less connection with Labour. For me then the message is one of thinking about what embeddedness looks like in this era we now live in, and rescuing the contemporary working class from the enormous condescension of posterity. References Linkon S (2014) The Half-Life of Deindustrialisation: Twenty-First Century Narratives of Work, Place and Identity. Unpublished presentation to Deindustrialization and Its Aftermath: Class, Culture and Resistance, Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling / Scottish Oral History Centre May 1-4, Montreal, Quebec. Polanyi K (2001/1944) The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston: Beacon Press.

6 Thompson EP (1963) The Making of The English Working Class. London: Penguin. Tim Strangleman is Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent, Canterbury. This draws on a much longer piece about to appear in the journal Sociology titled: Deindustrialisation and the Historical Sociological Imagination: Making Sense of Work and Industrial Change

Kent Academic Repository

Kent Academic Repository Full text document (pdf) Citation for published version Strangleman, Tim (2017) Deindustrialisation and the Historical Sociological Imagination: Making Sense of Work and Industrial