Permission of the People's History Museum

"Labour Inside the Gate": Campaigning cartoon, 1906. In this election Labour got a substantial number of MPs for the first time.

In the years immediately following the First Word War, Labour's election specialists had to decide how to build on their party's sudden and unexpected breakthrough at the polls. The solution recommended was based upon a frank appreciation of psephology. Labour could count on good and improving support amongst the urban working classes, but this would never be enough to ensure majority government. The party had to make inroads where it was presently weak, in rural areas and middle-class suburbs. Winning votes here was not going to be easy, but it could be accomplished if various principles were established. The party of course needed to ensure that adequate resources were at hand. Indeed, there was a strong case for actually prioritising less well-developed local organisations. But the most important requirement was an appropriate style of politics. In the recent past, too many had assumed that electioneering meant simply sloganising about capitalism's iniquities. This would no longer suffice. Labour must be more discerning about the electorate, accept that there was diversity of experience, and generate propaganda to suit. The point was made particularly cogently by the chief women's officer, Marion Phillips, in an article about how the party should set about attracting the newly enfranchised female voter:

She should be made to feel from the very beginning that the Labour Party recognises her position and knows her needs, and that on every side throughout the campaign women are given a prominent and honoured position. There is no greater error than to treat the wife as giving a vote automatically to whichever candidate her husband favours. The woman elector must be treated as a free individual responsible to herself alone for her decision and having special difficulties in her life for which Labour policy provides a remedy.

Don't denounce as parasites all who do not happen to be manual workers. The idea that those who don the black coat and high collar are 'snobs' is a mistake. To be well dressed, is, to one class of the community, as essential as the bag of tools and the overall to another.' The watchwords of effectiveness were care and sensitivity in everything, from policy right down to addressing envelopes.

In later years, many stressed similar themes. Labour would not prosper if it ignored social realities. Nor were solutions, as Harold Wilson told the 1966 party conference, to be found by communing with Marx's remains in Highgate cemetery. The need was always for a creative politics that responded to the spirit of its times. Yet talking about such a strategy was one thing, implementing it quite another. Part of the problem was financial for, unlike the Tories, Labour continued to be largely impecunious. The head office organisation raised funds from individual members and affiliated trade unions but found that this income was usually barely sufficient to cover minimum possible expenditure. Local parties were largely left to fend for themselves in financial matters and coped as best they could. In these conditions, it was all too easy to fall back on dogma and rhetoric when electioneering. Working long hours at low pay, party officials and agents struggled against heavy odds to maintain a public presence. At constituency level, the endless round of bring-and-buys, socials and whist drives inevitably sapped energy. Near poverty was not a condition that encouraged the imagination.

In addition to this, much of the party remained unsure about, or even opposed to, what was being suggested. Intransigence started at the top. Many Labour leaders broadly endorsed a progressive campaigning stance, but national executive members and senior MPs sometimes took an entirely different view. Left-wingers in particular continued to argue that protecting the party's spiritual integrity must always be given priority. Labour was nothing if not a moral crusade. The business of winning elections was really a secondary consideration. In a 1960 pamphlet reflecting on Labour's recent years in the wilderness, the MP Dick Crossman warned: 'politicians whose sole object, or even whose main object, is to regain office tend to be opportunists, to hedge and to equivocate in order to appease the voter'. If a socialist party thought only of the polls, he added, it would 'destroy itself'. Thirty years later, one-time minister Tony Benn declared in similar vein: 'We may win elections from time to time. But all that is worthless unless our thoughts and actions are firmly grounded in moral truth' (Tony Benn, A Future for Socialism, 1991, p. 64). The practical consequences that flowed from this fundamentalism were inevitably uncompromising. Left-wingers typically insisted that policy should reflect 'socialist principles', almost regardless of public opinion. A well-documented example occurred in the early 1970s, when the left-dominated National Executive Committee adopted sweeping nationalisation proposals even though it knew from specially commissioned research that these were only supported by a tiny minority in the electorate. Similar concerns marked discussion about the mechanics of electioneering. The left believed that its duty was to put over political truths as plainly and clearly as possible. This was best achieved through the spoken word, judged the most authentic medium for politics. Innovations like opinion polls and television broadcasts were frowned upon, distrusted because of their American origins and commercial connotations.

Nick Tiratsoo discusses the movement within the Labour Party to preserve its spiritual integrity and resistance to broaden the appeal of the party. (7:16 min)

In the party at large, attitudes were more complex though sometimes just as unhelpful to the development of an enlightened electoral politics. On the plus side, Labour activists were renowned for their keen sense of social justice. Many had first-hand experience of inequity and were determined to produce a fairer world. Two members of the Lowestoft constituency party in the inter-war years, a Mr and Mrs Harris, established such a reputation that they were subsequently remembered as 'saints'. The local stories about their concern for the under-privileged were legion:

The occasion Joe gave his overcoat to an unemployed man when it was raining heavily; the teas for the children of the poor; Mrs Harris' clothes cupboard at home, filled with garments wrung out of the better-off to be handed out to any needy callers; their work on the Board of Guardians.

Such selfless dedication was inevitably remembered at the ballot box. But activists could repel as well as attract. Running the Labour Party machine took time and effort, and sometimes became an end in itself. Rules and procedures dominated, leaving little time for other political activity. Visiting Nottingham in the mid-1960s, a Labour official sat through a general management committee meeting that developed into the epitome of tedium:

It took 30 minutes to dispose of the Minutes of the last meeting, 30 minutes for the report of the special emergency meeting, which was finally approved as Minutes, 21 minutes to discuss the letter from Head Office regarding conference decision that delegates from affiliated organisations should be members of the Party, 12 minutes to receive the report of the Labour Group meeting held in September, and 24 minutes to receive reports of Group meetings held in October and November. By this time it was twenty-nine minutes past nine. Standing Orders say meetings should close at 9.30pm, and the meeting refused to accept a motion for suspension of Standing Orders ... and the Treasurer had one minute to get the approval of the meeting to draw £250 from their reserve fund to meet outstanding commitments. (Organiser's report on 'Nottingham City Party, 9 December 1965', Catermole MSS 9/3/20/321, Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick.)

In addition, Labour activists often had their own repertoire of alienating prejudices. Male trade-unionists usually asserted considerable authority in local organisations and perpetuated a particular proletarian ethos. Their reference points were work and leisure, with a particular emphasis on drinking and sport. Argument could be brutal and unforgiving. Birmingham socialists of the inter-war years debated strategy in a city-centre café where it was not uncommon to hear comments like 'Your opinions are based on ignorance and are of no value whatsoever.' One recalled: 'if you could hold your own in this circle, then you could hold your own anywhere'. Members from other backgrounds were expected to fit in. The party as a whole was keen to recruit women and helped a good number to gain public office but progress towards equality of treatment and opportunity was slow. 'Why is it the woman member', a correspondent to the Labour Organiser asked in 1947, 'who is always chosen to wield the mop?' Middle-class socialists experienced similar problems. Some colluded in an 'inverted snobbery', mimicking what were conceived of as popular idioms. During the 1930s, undergraduates in the Oxford party apparently called each other 'comrade' and avoided being seen entering the most expensive restaurants. Another strategy was to remain aloof. John Strachey, the intellectual MP for Dundee, had, according to his wife, 'no energy for ordinary people, and no common touch'. When forced to visit his constituency at election times, Strachey would deign to campaign during part of the day but then retreat to the Royal British Hotel, dining in a private room screened off from his supporters. One of the Labour candidates for Luton at the 1970 election took a similar view, arriving in the town from Hampstead just ten days before the poll, and then publicly declaring that this 'was quite long enough for anybody'. Again, much of this simply appeared baffling or unattractive to both sympathisers and the electorate at large.

Finally, there were more than a few Labour activists who used the cloak of politics to pursue their own nefarious purposes. Some branches and council groups were little more than vehicles for patronage and personal gain. Local 'barons' controlled decision-making, and reaped the benefits. Malpractice could be extensive. In a confidential review of the late 1970s, Glasgow District Council Group was forced to admit: 'One of the most disturbing aspects of housing allocation is that many people are convinced that it is crooked. Many tenants maintain that they know of irregular house lets ... [and] there is a general atmosphere of mistrust.' (Glasgow District Council Labour Group, 'New horizons for housing', February 1978, p. 2, Kelvingrove Constituency Labour Party Records, Mitchell Library, Glasgow.)

Elsewhere, the threat came from far-left groups determined on their own conspiratorial agendas. Most Communist and Trotskyist parties attempted 'entryism' at one time or another, with the semi-clandestine Militant organisation using the tactic particularly successfully in the 1970s and 1980s. When Labour loyalists fought back, the outcome was frequently chaotic and acrimonious. Conflict between Militant supporters and their opponents in one of the Newham seats eventually led to a court case, where the presiding judge, Lord Denning, provided a vivid picture of what had ensued:

There are within Newham North-East a number of small branches of the Labour Party. They send delegates to the local general committee ... The rules prescribe the number of delegates ... Usually there are only about 150 to 200 delegates present. Some favour one faction. Others the other. They are fairly evenly divided. So a switch-over of a few delegates may alter the whole pattern of voting. Each faction strives hard, therefore, to increase its own delegates and reduce those of the other faction ... Each faction has done this to some extent by 'infiltration'. That is, the faction will bring in a newcomer to live in the constituency. He joins the local constituency Labour Party. He is active as a branch member and becomes a delegate. Other newcomers do the same. Just a handful of such newcomers may make all the difference to the voting and the result.

Where such conditions prevailed, normal political activity was obviously almost impossible, and the party's reputation suffered as a result. Shaped by these various pressures, Labour's actual performance at elections inevitably tended to be uneven. The party was good at mobilising its activists' enthusiasm, and there were some extraordinary feats of campaigning. In the record year of 1951, Labour distributed 14 million leaflets and manifestos, and allegedly canvassed as many as two-fifths of all households. But there were also enduring weaknesses and blindspots. The party remained addicted to voluntary effort and suspicious of any measure that involved bringing in expert advisers. Fairly typically, a comprehensive report on organisation in 1955 rejected developing 'a streamlined professional machine' because it would be 'offensive' to party traditions and principles ('Interim Report', Report of the 54th Annual Conference of the Labour Party, p. 65). As a result, Labour continued to be poor at planning and organisation, often amateurish at developing activity. After attending a campaign committee meeting shortly before the 1959 election, Tony Benn wrote in his diary:

The simple fact is that they had not thought out tactics for the next months at all and were just muddling through without proper documentation or briefing. There was no co-ordinated plan of any kind and everyone was junking in with their own schemes (Tony Benn, Years of Hope. Diaries, Papers and Letters 1940-62, 1995, p. 306).

Nick Tiratsoo explores the cost of Labour's distrust of modern polling techniques in the 1950s. (3:39 min)

Moreover, innovations in electioneering techniques were rarely applied to their full potential. The party was inept at marketing itself and relatively slow to appreciate opportunities offered by the electronic media. Only sporadic use was made of opinion polling. Finally, the targeting of voters was never carried out systematically. Labour activists were always happiest campaigning in working-class constituencies, where they could focus on familiar themes like housing and employment. On the other hand, the need to win support in the more affluent suburbs was sometimes acknowledged but rarely systematically acted upon. There was a widely held suspicion that anybody who owned a house was likely to vote Tory. Assessed as a whole, therefore, Labour's record was hardly dazzling. Outside commentators often remarked upon the party's shortcomings. Writing in the wake of the disastrous 1983 defeat, the psephologist Peter Kellner was particularly scathing: 'Almost nothing went right for Labour ... In virtually every respect--personal, political, tactical, organizational--the campaign was a disaster' (Peter Kellner, 'The Labour campaign', in Austin Ranney (ed.), Britain at the Polls 1983. A Study of the General Election, 1985, p. 65).