The Christian Left. Anthony A. J. Williams

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СКАЧАТЬ part of her life away from the church after a deacon admonished her to choose between church and union – taking him at his word she chose the latter – it was her Nonconformist upbringing that provided the basis for her socialism and the campaigns against the exploitation of female shop workers such as she had been.⁹⁹ Bondfield’s aim was to see the Golden Rule – ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself’ – applied to economy and society, suggesting that this would involve state ownership of key industries and the financial sector.¹⁰⁰ Crucially for Bondfield it was not sufficient merely for industries to be nationalised, but that their priority should be service to the public rather than the pursuit of profit.¹⁰¹ Neither would state ownership go far enough if workers and consumers were not involved in the management of industry; while such a situation would be an improvement upon private ownership, it would not allow fully the spirit of co-operation to develop. Socialism, Bondfield argued, must involve ‘the reorganisation of society on the basis of both political and industrial democracy’.¹⁰² Another noteworthy figure is Ellen Wilkinson (1891–1947), distinguished by her role as co-author of the 1945 Labour Party manifesto, who declared the need to combat ‘injustice’ wherever it afflicted ‘human beings, the children of God’.¹⁰³

Lansbury remains among the best known of the British Christian Socialists. A committed Anglican, he was one of the most forceful and consistent exponents of Christian Socialism’s core concept of, as he phrased it, God’s ‘Fatherhood and the consequent Brotherhood of man’.¹⁰⁴ For Lansbury all the injustices and exploitation of capitalist society come as a result of humanity’s failure to live according to these universal principles; yet he never lost hope that people could unlearn the selfishness of capitalistic Mammon worship and live together as children of one Father.¹⁰⁵ Sadly Lansbury’s reputation has been tarnished by his unwillingness as Labour Party leader in the mid 1930s to countenance war against the Axis powers; he was ‘efficiently and brutally removed from the leadership in 1935’.¹⁰⁶ Lansbury committed himself to a peace crusade in the years leading up to the war, meeting with Adolf Hitler in 1937 in an ill-fated attempt to avert the inevitable and, as late as 1939, imploring Hitler by telegram: ‘All mankind is looking to you and Signor Mussolini for such a response as will lead all nations away from war and along the road to peace through cooperation and sharing territories, markets and resources for the service of each other.’¹⁰⁷

      It is easy from our historical vantage point to hold in contempt those such as Lansbury – a sincere and unyielding pacifist in any and all circumstances – who, even faced with such evil, sought peace at all costs. We need to remember that the Great War – the first total war, unprecedented in its bloodshed and carnage – was still fresh in the minds of those who hoped they could prevent another cataclysm. Lansbury in particular has been painted as naive, too saintly minded for the dirty world of real-life politics. This view is mistaken: it overlooks Lansbury’s hard-headed leadership of the Poplar Rates Rebellion in which many concessions were won for the residents of that impoverished borough; it cannot account for Lansbury’s achievements as the First Commissioner for Works in the 1929–31 government; nor does it give Lansbury enough credit for sustaining the Labour Party after the electoral disaster of 1931, ensuring, with Clement Attlee as his deputy, that there remained a genuine opposition to MacDonald’s Conservative-dominated National Government and an alternative vision for the country which could be put to the electorate in 1945.

We have already noted William Temple as one of the proximate architects of that vision. Another was Temple’s close friend and fellow Anglican Richard H. Tawney (1880–1962). Tawney, an economic historian and Labour Party activist, set out his view on the events of 1931 in a famous essay, ‘The Choice Before the Labour Party’, published in Political Quarterly in 1932. Tawney argued, while naming no names, that the Labour Party had been overly cautious, failing to commit itself to restructuring the social order and allowing itself to be satisfied with a few efforts to make capitalism more bearable.¹⁰⁸ Is it surprising, asked Tawney, given Labour’s lack of vision, if the electorate ‘concluded that, since capitalism was the order of the day, it had better continue to be administered by capitalists, who, at any rate – so, poor innocents, they supposed – knew how to make the thing work?’¹⁰⁹ In place of this noncommittal attitude Tawney called for ‘a serious effort […] to create organs through which the nation can control, in cooperation with other nations, its own economic destinies; plan its business as it deems most conducive to the general well-being; override, for the sake of economic efficiency, the obstruction of vested interests; and distribute the product of its labours in accordance with some generally recognised principles of justice’.¹¹⁰ Tawney was well placed to make such criticisms. He had drafted the 1929 manifesto Labour and the Nation, committing the party – at least on paper – to a socialism that he framed as a moral imperative.¹¹¹ If MacDonald’s actions in forming the National Government are a betrayal of socialism, then they are a betrayal of Tawney’s socialism.

      Tawney’s socialism was clearly and unapologetically Christian. For Tawney, the ‘essence of all morality’ is ‘to believe that every human being is of infinite importance, and that no consideration of expediency can justify the oppression of one by another’. But, he added, ‘to believe this it is necessary to believe in God’.¹¹² This remark, though, was made in Tawney’s private diary and only published posthumously. Some have suggested, on the basis of Tawney’s public writing, that he is rather more secular-minded than is often interpreted; some of Tawney’s key works – for example, most of The Acquisitive Society, published 1920 – keep rather quiet about any religious basis for socialism.¹¹³ This argument, though, is hard to square with the final chapter of The Acquisitive Society, which sets out unmistakably the Christian ethic driving Tawney’s argument. Tawney describes the anti-materialistic teaching of scripture, as exemplified in the Magnificat and in the life and teaching of Christ, as a ‘revolutionary’ creed with which the church can and should seek to remodel society. If taken seriously, the Christian message ‘destroys alike the arbitrary power of the few and the slavery of many’.¹¹⁴ Political historians Matt Beech and Kevin Hickson conclude that, ‘for Tawney democratic socialism is only possible because it flows from his Christian faith’.¹¹⁵

Tawney’s socialism is based on an ideal of service. At its most basic this is a call for a spirit of co-operation rather than competition, based on the concept of brotherhood. ‘A well-conducted family,’ argued Tawney, ‘does not, when in low water, encourage some of its members to grab all they can, while leaving others to go short. On the contrary, it endeavours to ensure that its diminished resources shall be used to the best advantage in the interests of all.’¹¹⁶ Here, Alan Wilkinson suggests, Tawney is drawing upon the Pauline image of the body (1 Corinthians 12:12–26; Romans 12:4–5) to say that all members of society are members of one body – each has its own function, but all must co-operate. More deeply, Tawney’s ideal of service is a call for the economy to be based on function rather than functionless property rights. He excoriates those who defend the rights of landowners who provide no service or function to merely receive payments for the use of their land – for example, the owners of coal mines who profited from the activity on their land through the payment of royalties, but play no part in the mining or distribution of coal, nor even the planning and management of the work. ‘Such rights,’ he says, ‘are, strictly speaking, privileges. For the definition of a privilege is a right to which no corresponding function is attached.’¹¹⁷ In place of an acquisitive society, which allowed such profiteering shorn of any contribution to the common good, Tawney advocated a ‘Functional Society’, which would aim at ‘making the acquisition of wealth contingent upon the discharge of social obligations’ and in which ‘the main subject of social emphasis would be the performance of functions’.¹¹⁸

Tawney was not opposed to state ownership if it allowed industry to be conducted in a spirit of service and with an eye to function rather than an eye to profit, particularly as state ownership need not necessarily involve direct state management.¹¹⁹ The key thing for Tawney was to cultivate a sense of professionalism, in which all workers – whether manual labourers or managers – would make service rather than profit their aim. Such СКАЧАТЬ