Britain: The Endless Shift to the Right

The great moving right show

Photo by Dixit Dhinakaran on Unsplash

Roy Hattersley, the Labour politician and former deputy leader of the Labour Party, passed away recently. Hattersley was a politician I had a passing knowledge of insofar as I knew who he was, but he’d already stepped down as deputy leader of Labour and left parliament before I was even born, so I didn’t have the same knowledge of him that someone born before me would.

You might at this point be wondering why I would open an essay with a point about Hattersley like this, and the reason is because I read a tribute to Hattersley in the New Statesman, which made a pretty interesting point about the man and his career both during and after his time in parliament.

For most of the time in which Hattersley held office throughout the 1970s through to the 1992 general election, after which he resigned from the shadow cabinet and his position as deputy leader, he was solidly a member of the Labour right. This is before Tony Blair became leader of the party and launched his whole “New Labour” project.

Despite being on the right of the party, Hattersley was still in favour of things like a strong welfare state, regulation of markets, etc. All positions which today would be associated with the hard left of labour or even the Greens. Hattersley even wrote a book, Choose Freedom: The Future for Democratic Socialism, which obviously argued for his vision of socialism, outlining some of the positions I’ve mentioned here.

As time went on, and as Labour moved in a more right-wing direction, Hattersley grew to be associated with the hard left of British politics. When Tony Blair was elected to be Labour leader and began pushing forth his vision for the party, Hattersley would even remark that Labour under Blair was “not the party I joined”. Hattersley had been a member of Labour for more than 30 years at this point, even having served as deputy leader, as I mentioned.

Rather amusingly, was by the 2000s, Hattersley was actually encouraging Labour to oust Blair from power and move in a more left-wing direction, a position which even Robin Cook, a member of Blair’s government and a member of the Labour left, didn’t take even in the wake of the Iraq war.

Throughout all of this, as Hattersley began to be more associated with the hard left, it’s important to note that his policy positions hadn’t changed at all. This is noted in the New Statesman article I mentioned and it’s something I find really interesting.

Another example of this that gets reposted a lot online is a letter to a newspaper from a Dr Stephen Watkins, who wrote about how he was originally a supporter of Harold Macmillan’s conservative government. MacMillan’s government was, in economic terms, quite progressive. MacMillan supported very high taxes on high incomes, massive building of council houses, a strong welfare state to reduce inequality, and a number of other policies.

What was crucial about Watkins’ letter was how he pointed out that he still supported all of these policies decades later, only that British politics had changed such that he moved from centre-right to hard left despite not changing on any of his positions. This is an exact parallel to what we see with someone like Roy Hattersley. Hattersley was consistently positioned on the right of the Labour Party, however as Britain shifted more and more to the right, Hattersley didn’t, which gave the illusion of him appearing more on the left than he really was.

All of this reminds me of an excellent essay from the great Stuart Hall, who talked about the rise of Thatcherism and the new right in The Great Moving Right Show. Hall correctly analysed these right-wing forces and how it was a sign of British politics moving more to the right than it had been in the post-war period. This trend of moving to the right has only continued, to the point where even Tony Blair and New Labour would be to the left of the current Labour government of Keir Starmer.

Hattersley and many on the social democratic right of Labour during the ‘70s and ‘80s frankly wouldn’t even get into the Labour Party today. Before the 2024 election, there were a number of high-profile cases of Labour MPs being prevented from standing as Labour candidates in the election. One such example was Faiza Shaheen, a very accomplished and well-respected economist who was a very talented MP in her own right.

Shaheen is a noteworthy example for this point because, especially since leaving office, she has spoken out more and more in favour of certain left-wing causes, such as arguing in favour of a wealth tax. Shaheen has also consistently positioned herself as critiquing our current system for the deep inequality it produces. It’s worth noting here that Shaheen isn’t proposing anything that would have been all too radical in the past.

Despite what some people might think, proposals for policies such as wealth taxes are not anything new; they’ve been around for a while. Various Labour politicians during the 1970s were proposing wealth taxes to deal with economic issues, such as Tony Benn and even Denis Healy, the latter of whom was on the right of the Labour Party for his entire career.

Given all of this, it seems really strange when people paint the likes of Faiza Shaheen as being super far-left when she really isn’t. Basically everything she proposes to tackle problems pertaining to inequality are just basic social democratic positions. It’s not like she’s out here calling for the abolition of capitalist social relations, the wage system, and the hanging of landlords.

Even though nothing being proposed by the likes of Shaheen or Hattersley when he became a critic of Labour during the Blair years is truly radical in any actual sense, it often gets framed as such because of how thoroughly entrenched Britain is in neoliberal ideology. Margaret Thatcher once remarked that “economics is the method, the goal is to change the heart and soul”, and she was probably right on this in a way more profound than she could have ever dreamed.

Neoliberalism has become so deeply ingrained in the public consciousness in Britain that what were once basic social democratic positions, which even many Tories, such as the aforementioned Harold MacMillan, believed in, are now seen as radical. The idea that there should be stronger regulations in the market or that the state should take a much greater role in the economy, especially as a means of combatting inequality, seems like radical Maoism to a country so deep in neoliberal dogma as Britain.

It’s funny because I’ve used the term “hard left” to describe the likes of Hattersley and Shaheen throughout this piece, but the term in this context is itself a misnomer. People actually on the hard left of British politics would be the likes of the late Tony Benn, someone who openly touted his desire to abolish capitalism and go further in areas such as nationalisation than even the government of Clement Attlee.

The great problem in all of this is just how thoroughly neoliberalism has become normalised in Britain. Someone like Andy Burnham gets framed as some left-wing hero, when the truth is that he’s as much a neoliberal as Starmer or any of the other PMs Britain has had in the last 50 years. Neoliberal propaganda has penetrated Britain so deeply that even people who advocate merely slightly less/softer neoliberalism are framed as dangerous radicals, a rather sad state of affairs.