Because these former mining valleys in the wilds of Glamorgan were the cradle of working-class politics in Britain. Revolutionary socialism is almost as old as the mining communities in these hills: the red flag of socialism was flown for the very first time in anger over the skies of Merthyr Tydfil in 1831. And, in time, this people and landscape gave rise to the British labour movement and the party that bears its name, a party that knew who it represented and what it wanted to change.

Keir Hardie, Labour’s founding father, was elected MP for the Merthyr and Aberdare constituency only a few years before he would oversee the transition from the Independent Labour Party to the more familiar abbreviated title in 1906. A former miner who first entered the darkness of the pits at just 10-years old, he knew first-hand the toils and struggles faced by these hardened communities, and never forgot them in Parliament, wearing a deerstalker and tweed jacket in place of the expected top hat and tails. But Hardie himself never lived to see the party he conceived in power. An idealist and a pacifist, he died a broken man in 1915, as his contentious objections to the First World War (on the basis of the working-class dead and war profiteering) went unheeded.

Just nine years later though, and 100 years ago this week, the Labour Party did form its first government. It was led, though, by a Scot, Ramsay Macdonald, later expelled as a traitor and a turncoat for his collaboration with the Conservatives. Throughout this fractious period, as the Labour Party split and reformed, mutated and reorganised, South Wales remained its natural home. It was here that institutions later synonymous with the party, such as the National Union of Miners, were first established. And the area produced the radical autodidactic streak that gave Labour’s second prime minister, Clement Atlee, his greatest lieutenant: Nye Bevan gained his education in the libraries and reading rooms of Tredegar’s Miners’ institutes, arguably the most impressive educational bodies promoting the socialist cause anywhere in Europe.

Nationwide, the party’s electoral fortunes waxed and waned after the war and into the Sixties. But, like working-class industrial regions across the United Kingdom, the party’s grip in South Wales was as firm as the iron smelted in the furnace-town of Hardie’s coronation. But now this relationship has been lost. A proud heritage has withered, and Labour means as little to these parts as “politics” itself. Understanding how such a bond could be neglected and dismantled is essential to understanding the story of Labour over the past century, and its origin can be traced to a single moment: the tragedy that stopped a school clock dead at 9.13am one Friday morning that became the moment of reckoning.

Some places are so synonymous with a tragedy that their very name becomes a byword for unimaginable suffering. Today, our own most baleful metonym is probably “Grenfell”, immediately evoking corruption, betrayal and the dereliction of state duty. But in the valleys of South Wales, a different tragedy bears a single name: Aberfan. That was the village where, on the morning of 21 October 1966, approximately 105,000 cubic metres of discarded coal waste slid into the community and engulfed the Pant Glas school and houses below. Half the town’s children were wiped out by the black avalanche that sped down the slopes, along with 28 adults.

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Aberfan had already been foretold through numerous warnings, and in previous slippages in both the village itself and nearby. But even as the slurry settled and the spoil began to be cleared, the story was only just beginning. Much as at Grenfell, those who should have been held responsible, the people this community had most faith in, were absolved of any responsibility. John Collins, whose entire family was taken by the black mountain, later said: “I was tormented by the fact that the people I was seeking justice from were my people — a Labour government, a Labour council, a Labour nationalised coal board.” This Establishment cover-up was fatal. As veteran BBC broadcaster Vincent Kane later added: “Half a dozen or so organisations or individuals should have brought help to those stricken people, but instead they betrayed them.”

The central figure in this episode was Lord Robens who, as Chairman of the National Coal Board, continually presented himself as a defender of coal, while overseeing widespread pit closures. His arrogance was matched only by the lack of compassion he showed towards the families of the bereaved. Insult piled upon injury as the official tribunal into the cause of the disaster was marred by misinformation, delays and attempts to obstruct the truth. And the victims could see it — as a father of one of the bereaved children cried out when giving evidence: “Buried alive by the National Coal Board. That is what I want to see on record. That is the feeling of those present. Those are the words we want to go on the certificate”.

Worse was to follow: it was at the behest of the Labour Minister for Wales — the valleys-born George Thomas, later Lord Tonypandy — that the villagers themselves were required pay to remove remaining slag heaps still towering over their homes from the disaster relief fund. But this tragedy was to become the epicentre of a far greater conjuncture, where Wales began to reckon with all the false promises of industrialisation and unionism. If there is no history of South Wales without Aberfan, there is no complete history of the Labour Party which does not chapter the devastation and fury it sowed in this heartland. And, while the latter part of the Sixties was marked by the beginnings of a turn away from Labour, the following decade saw nothing arrive to replace it. Voter turnout in elections started to decline, while industrial action by the miners threw the country into darkness, a faction of the working class seemingly at war with the country — and, after the 1974 election, at war with a Labour government too.

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Labour’s hold here wasn’t immediately severed. A son of the valleys, the Tredegar-born Neil Kinnock, would later assume the helm as Margaret Thatcher instigated a very different kind of revolution. An impressive intellect and pragmatist, Kinnock’s accent and bearing connected the party back to its past. He could speak with genuine feeling of the strength of those communities, “who could work eight hours underground and then come up and play football”. But that would in part be his undoing: a conservative national press constantly mocked his “boyo” persona. And while he could give voice to South Wales through his own, it ultimately became the voice of political defeat, as the pits central to valley-life were shut and sealed, something the Labour Party proved powerless to stop.

The coming to power of Tony Blair offered a symbolic rupture from a party once grounded in working-class, Celtic regions. But he too had his ways of disrupting community life, for instance with his insistence that more children from deprived areas should be given the option to attend university. While many rightly welcomed the chance to escape, the continued lack of sustained investment in the South Wales valleys simply meant they had no reason to return. And, as Blair opened more of the country to the punishing writ of the free market, the last vestiges of industry petered out. The last of the pits closed, and some of the most prominent local employers such as Hoover in Merthyr and the Polikoff’s and Burberry factories in the Rhondda, dramatically cut their workforce, until their inevitable closure a decade or so later.

With the National Assembly for Wales established in 1997 following devolution in the Principality, the strength of support for Plaid Cymru, which had been gathering momentum since Aberfan, was now evident in the valley heartlands. By 1999 they would even manage to win seats in the once unimaginable ward of the Rhondda, where the old joke ran that even a Smurf would win should they be dressed in red. Blair’s appeal to Middle England was traded in Wales, and the party barely scrapes ahead of the Conservatives nationally now.

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Kinnock was probably the last leader of the Labour Party as it was originally conceived. But he was ultimately given the impossible task of trying to lead a party born in another age, a product of the dire need to have political representation to counter the exploitative nature of industrial capitalism. Now, it has lost its identity, just as much as the people it represented were losing theirs. As Thatcher transformed Britain and placed it at the forefront of the post-industrial neoliberal revolution, without the constancy of a manufacturing and industrial base, was there even any meaning to the term “labour”?

Today, as the party seeks to commemorate 100 years of its electable “progress”, it should turn is attention the places which gave the party its name and yet where poverty and abandonment persist. While you can be sure that disdain for the Conservative Party is still strongly felt, the Labour Party is regarded with something equally dangerous: an apathetic rolling of the eyes by a people whose rolling hills speaks to the layered memories of resigned weathering. Even as another Keir looks set to return the Labour Party to power, Ton and Pentre Labour and Progressive Club won’t suddenly reopen. Suspended in neglect, its rooms will remain empty as another electoral season passes. And all the while, what passes for progress will continue arriving at these towns from elsewhere, just explanations that try and fail to make sense of the greatest dereliction — the dereliction of the mind and soul of a people.

Fashion is never just about utility, and these first-day uniform anxieties would come to symbolise all the tensions at the heart of the first Labour government, all its neuroses of class, radicalism and ideological purity. To whom did it owe allegiance: its working-class roots, its intellectuals or its own party machine? Some of its members simply wanted to disprove Winston Churchill’s notorious assertion that they weren’t “fit to govern”, conforming to the standards of previous administrations in order to establish a beachhead in the British Establishment. Others were more impatient. They wanted to demonstrate that a socialist government owed more to its voters than dressing up. Ramsay MacDonald, the illegitimate son of a farmhand who had the previous day kissed hands as Prime Minister, belonged in the former camp. In an interview with the New Leader, he turned the argument against his critics:

“I have known people who showed vanity by the clumsiness of their clothes. A tattered hat and a red tie, a tone of voice and religious repetition of Marxian phrases, may be as indicative of a man who has sold himself to appearances as the possession of a ceremonial dress to enable him to attend ceremonies which are historical parts of his duties.”

As Ethel Snowden (Chancellor Philip’s wife) observed in The Spectator, had ministers attended Court functions “in hobnailed boots, with unwashed faces and collarless shirts”, they would “quickly have [attracted] deserved contempt and ignominy”. Meanwhile, MacDonald himself could see the bigger picture. And his account of a historic day betrayed both his shock at what had just happened, as well as his apprehension at what was to come: “Without fuss, the firing of guns, the flying of new flags, the Labour Gov[ernmen]t has come in… Now for burdens & worries. Our greatest difficulties will be to get to work. Our purposes need preparation, & during preparation we shall appear to be doing nothing – and to our own people to be breaking our pledges.”

This was prescient. Over the next nine months Britain’s first Labour Prime Minister would find himself battling on a number of fronts: for acceptance by voters, co-operation with not one but two opposition parties in Parliament (Liberals and Conservatives) and most of all for support from his own colleagues, many of whom were deeply uneasy that a party with only 191 MPs had taken office at all.

The Labour Party as represented in Parliament was complex. Its structure betrayed its chaotic inception, more a fusion of local bodies and ideological factions than a combined party under a unitary authority. The civil servant Percy Grigg described a “Trade Union element”, which was more interested in moderate “bread and butter” politics than the abstract economic and social doctrine favoured by the party’s faction of “intellectuals”. And this second grouping included both former Liberals and those who had emerged from the Independent Labour Party (ILP), a separate but affiliated group. Grigg called the ILP-ers “Montagnards” after the most radical political group during the French Revolution, and remarked they followed “the lead of the Clyde in Scotland and Mr. [George] Lansbury in England”. Inclined to be unhappy at the moderation displayed by the trade unionists and intellectuals, the Montagnards would only be satisfied with the building of the New Jerusalem.

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But for their political opponents and the press, Labour was singular, lumped together as the “wild men”. As it would turn out, they were far from wild, and that was part of their problem. After two months in government, Ramsay MacDonald — consumed by international as well as domestic affairs — grew concerned at the failure of his backbenchers to respond adequately to the “new conditions”. Some of what he called the “disappointed ones” had become “as hostile as though they were not of us”. He was thinking of malcontents like E. D. Morel, the campaigning journalist, and George Lansbury, a future Labour leader. “I am thoroughly distressed about the Party,” Lansbury had told Beatrice Webb in the middle of March:

“Everybody seems so thoroughly cheerful, and thoroughly content with what we are doing, and yet we are doing nothing that is of any real worth. I certainly think the fact that we are so very satisfactory to our opponents… and so very unsatisfactory to the poor devils on whose votes people like me got into Parliament, is a tragedy of the first water.”

Webb herself did not accuse MacDonald of treachery (“for he was never a socialist”) she saw him as “a believer in individualist political democracy tempered in its expression by utopian socialism”. Where he had “lacked integrity”, she added, was, “in posing as a socialist, and occasionally using revolutionary jargon. If he succeeds in getting a majority of the electors into this revised version of reformist conservatism embodied in the Labour Party machine, things will move forward.” It seemed doubtful that the Prime Minister would have regarded this as a criticism, for “reformist conservatism” was truly his whole aim in office, as it had been in opposition. This isn’t to say his short government was inactive. MacDonald worked hard to make John Wheatley’s housing legislation a reality, formally recognised the Soviet Union and brokered a new settlement between France and Germany, something he hoped would boost trade as well as soothing post-war wounds. But with only 191 MPs, and a ministry dependent on Liberal votes, he couldn’t do everything.

When ministers in the first Labour government pointed out this Liberal support was a necessary evil to remain in office, critics insisted “that it would be better to go down with colours flying than to lower the flag in the hope of keeping the ship afloat”. The MP Frederick Pethick-Lawrence occupied a “middle position”, sharing disappointment “at the apparent inaction” but also believing “the country would have been annoyed if the Prime Minister, having taken office, had almost immediately courted defeat”. This alluded to a strategy favoured by the Left of the party and feared by Conservatives like Lord Birkenhead:

“[Labour would] bring in a Budget, which might include a Levy on Capital, increase of Death Duties and Super-tax. This would, naturally, be defeated in Parliament and then Mr. Ramsay MacDonald would go to the country with what would be regarded by the mass of the electorate as the most popular Budget that had ever been produced. The Labour Party would sweep the country and be in office for the next 5 years.”

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This fanciful scenario, however, was never in MacDonald’s mind, and when Philip Snowden’s first (and only) Budget was unveiled in April, its provisions channelled Gladstone rather than Marx, attracting a chorus of approval from many Liberals and Conservatives. Hardly anyone noticed the absence of a capital levy (wealth tax), which had been the centrepiece of Labour’s manifesto in the December 1923 election. Instead, like the apostle Paul, the Labour Party put away such childish things and chose the moderate, constructive path. And although this made it, to quote Fenner Brockway, “a Social Reform Government rather than a Socialist Government, a Liberal Government rather than a Labour Government”, the fact remained that it managed to be in office as well as in power, which was the only means by which it could deliver anything at all.

The rest of the MacDonald story is well known. His first administration lost a confidence vote in October 1924 and took its case to the country, only for the fabricated Zinoviev Letter (which called for Communist sedition and therefore stoked fears of a “red menace”) to derail the election and drive voters back to the Conservatives for five years. In June 1929 Ramsay returned as the prime minister of another minority government, although this time Labour was the single largest party with 287 seats. In the midst of rising unemployment and a sterling crisis, the government agreed to resign in August 1931, but then the King persuaded MacDonald to head a “National” government. Labour’s National Executive Committee voted to expel all those who remained in office, and in the election that followed, the National government was returned with a majority of nearly 500 (mostly Tories) and the “official” Labour Party was reduced to just 52 MPs.

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This became known within the Labour movement as the “great betrayal”, and it took (as David Marquand has argued) some time for the Labour Party to get over its “complex” about MacDonald. Surveying events from the perspective of 1937, the future Prime Minister Clement Attlee did not doubt the “utility” of his party’s determination in 1924 to prove that Labour men and women could “administer the country”. And, he added cautiously, “the British elector is very sceptical of anything which he has not seen. The mere formation of a Labour Government and its existence for nine months registered a vital change in the political situation. Henceforth Labour was the alternative Government.”

Ramsay MacDonald and his colleagues had been dealt a very difficult hand which, for the most part, they played surprisingly well. This had not been guaranteed. The fledgling ministers might have been a disaster, spooking the City of London, offending the King and alienating moderate voters by attempting to pass “extreme” measures. The Labour Party might have been rendered unelectable. But that did not happen, in large part due to the skill of its leader. As a result, the “wild men” so feared in late 1923 had, within the space of an eventful year, shown they were competent men after all. Labour, contrary to Winston Churchill’s wounding assertion, were fit to govern. But this only begged the question that has dogged them since: who were they there to govern for?

To understand Labour’s seething discomfort about its first prime minister is to begin to understand why that great angst-ridden movement seems unable to drag itself into power without cries of treason being raised against its own leaders.

MacDonald is shunned because of his fateful decision in 1931, during his second stint as prime minister, to form a “national government” coalition rather than go into opposition with the rest of his party who wouldn’t back the spending cuts he wanted to balance the budget during the Great Depression. MacDonald had offered the King his resignation, but was asked to stay on at the head of a new emergency government. He accepted and when he was expelled from Labour, created his own “‘National’ Labour Organisation” which he led to the biggest landslide in British electoral history, crushing his old party in the process.

The problem for MacDonald was that the vast bulk of this new national government wasn’t his. There were 473 Conservatives to only 13 new “National Labour” MPs and 68 Liberals. MacDonald had, in effect, enabled a Tory landslide, leaving his old party with just 52 seats. No wonder the Labour party felt betrayed by MacDonald. Imagine if something like this had happened after the great financial crisis of 2008, with Gordon Brown creating a national government to impose George Osborne’s austerity programme.

To understand just how appalled Labour was — and still is — by MacDonald’s behaviour, you need only take a look at its official account of what happened. “The 1924 government lasted only a few months,” reads the quickfire history of its first prime minister published on the Labour Party website. “Five years later came the election of the second. Dominated by the world economic crisis, the following two years were focused on action to tackle the unemployment of the Great Depression. It was not an easy Parliament and the 1931 election saw only 52 Labour MPs elected.” I suppose “not an easy parliament” is a fair description.

The party’s refusal to even mention MacDonald’s break reveals far more than it conceals: both how uncomfortable it is about that first failure as a political party, when it proved itself singularly incapable of managing the crisis it faced, and about the dangers of its own kind abandoning the cause once in power. “The fear of the great betrayal starts with MacDonald,” one senior Labour figure put it to me. “It starts there and has never left us.”

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There have only been three other elected Labour prime ministers — Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson and Tony Blair — each of whom faced repeated claims of betrayal, all of which were indelibly shaped by MacDonald’s memory. Throughout his premiership, Blair was, rather straightforwardly, accused of being “Ramsay MacBlair”. And Clement Attlee, despite loathing MacDonald for his actions, ended up being accused of treachery for introducing prescription charges.

Even Harold Wilson, who had made his name as a Bevanite man of the Left, was tarred, particularly during the depths of the “July crisis” of 1966, when he announced a fresh round of austerity to protect the value of sterling. To fend off such comparisons, Wilson used a centenary lunch that year, intended to mark 100 years since MacDonald’s birth, to claim Labour’s first prime minister had died in 1931 when he joined the national coalition and not, in fact, five years later when he actually passed away. An appalling assessment by any measure.

For some, the depth of their loathing for MacDonald has a lot to do with class snobbery. He was easily Britain’s most working-class prime minister. And as such, he could not win, assailed from both sides for getting above his station — for enjoying the company of the rich and the royal far too much. A century on, Angela Rayner must know how he feels. As ever, class remains the sedimentary rock of British life upon which all else is built. And much as I think this is true, the tragedy of MacDonald is far more profound. MacDonald could have rejected the King’s advances and taken Labour into opposition. But he could not have avoided the charge of betrayal forever, for it is the fate of all Labour leaders to campaign as liberals but govern as conservatives.

The conservative philosopher Maurice Cowling wrote that the essence of liberalism was the belief that “there can be a reconciliation of all difficulties and differences” in life (which he said was plainly false). In The Meaning of Conservatism, Roger Scruton argued that this was the liberal faith that lay at the heart of today’s “spirit of improvement” — the inclination of the liberal, as he put it, to “change whatever he cannot find better reason to retain”. Conservatives like Scruton and Cowling, by contrast, do not believe all difficulties and differences can be reconciled — or, in fact, should be. To govern is to weigh up competing goods and to make least worst choices based on incomplete information.

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The fate of all Labour prime ministers, then, is to campaign with the “spirit of improvement” but to be forced, once in power, to choose between options which you previously hoped could be reconciled. Harold Wilson promised to modernise Britain and to protect its global influence, but as prime minister was forced to sacrifice one to save the other — maintaining the value of the pound to protect Britain’s overseas commitments at the cost of dousing the flames of his very own “white heat of technology”. (In the end, of course, the austerity he chose to protect the pound did not work and he lost both his economic plan and Britain’s global influence.)

This Wilsonian attempt to reform Britain at home and conserve the country’s influence abroad lies at the heart of many of the Labour Party’s difficulties over the years. Tony Blair sought to protect British influence in Europe and the United States, but was forced to choose between the two when George Bush insisted on the invasion of Iraq. Clement Attlee was similarly forced to accept the reality of Britain’s financial restrictions after the war, forcing him to betray the Left by chipping away at the NHS’s founding principle of “free at the point of use”.

There is little reason to believe Keir Starmer can avoid the fate of his predecessors. In one obvious sense, he has already been tried and found guilty of betrayal by the Left for breaking the promises he made to secure the leadership. During the Labour leadership campaign, Starmer pledged to “reverse the Tories’ cuts to corporation tax” only to then order his MPs to vote against the Tories’ own decision to reverse their own cuts themselves. He also pledged to “defend free movement as we leave the EU”, only to then make keeping out of free movement a red line in any future relationship with the EU. But the fundamental challenge for Starmer is that it is impossible for him to reconcile all of the competing promises he has made to the wider electorate and so will, inevitably, betray someone.

In his speech at the Labour Party conference in October, he turned to the party’s history to illustrate the scale of his ambition: “If you think our job in 1997 was to rebuild a crumbling public realm, that in 1964 it was to modernise an economy left behind by the pace of technology [and] in 1945 to build a new Britain out of the trauma of collective sacrifice, then in 2024 it will have to be all three.” It was a neat formulation, connecting Attlee, Wilson, Blair and himself — and yet, what if these goals cannot be reconciled, but end up in competition with each other, as they did for Attlee, Wilson and Blair? What if, like Wilson, the truth is that Starmer will have to choose between his ambitions? Modernising the economy and rebuilding public services after the trauma of the pandemic might mean dramatically reducing the amount of money spent on sickness or old age benefits, for example. Good luck with that.

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Even Starmer’s neat account of Labour’s record of government is, on closer inspection, as incomplete as the party’s account of MacDonald’s second spell as prime minister. Did Wilson really modernise an economy left behind by the pace of technology, as he promised? That’s certainly not how it looked in 1966, when he abandoned economic planning to protect the pound. “The 1964 Government had been elected with the slogans of ‘purposive’, and ‘scientific’ planning held high,” writes the author Ben Pimlott in his largely sympathetic biography of Wilson. “Wilson had believed in planning, and built his rhetoric upon it. Now planning… had to be set aside. A hole was created in Labour’s raison d’être which, arguably, has never been filled.”

Pimlott published this in 1992, five years before Blair became prime minister. But Blair did not seek to return Labour to any sort of Wilsonian economic planning either. Instead, he largely accepted the structure of the economy built by Margaret Thatcher and attempted to fill the hole left in Labour’s raison d’etre by using the proceeds of this new economy to improve public services and reduce poverty. The problem for Starmer is that even this option has now gone, blown apart by the financial crash of 2007/08. And so what is left?

Today, Labour’s economic plan remains markedly empty. Rachel Reeves’s £28 billion a year green investment package has already been scaled back. Labour does not plan to rejoin the EU, its single market or customs union — and nor does it show much appetite for a trade deal with the United States. If anything, Reeves’s “securonomics” offers more barriers to growth in order to offer the country more security of supply. Today, it is very hard to see how Labour can fulfil its pledge to make Britain the fastest growing economy in the G7.

The obvious danger for a future Starmer government is that without an economic strategy, there won’t be enough money to build a new Britain or fix its crumbling public realm. Instead of doing all three of the missions Starmer set himself, he will not be able to do any. And so difficult choices will follow. Should this happen, it will not be long before the ghost of Ramsay MacDonald once again starts to haunt the Labour party.

If the British working class was more reformist than revolutionary, it was partly because of the lessons it drew from its social superiors. In France, a bloody revolution in 1789 helped to inspire the Paris Commune of 1871, in which butchers and bakers took over the running of the city. If lawyers, merchants and bankers could oust the nobility, then working people could overthrow these people in turn. The French government’s response to this social experiment was to slaughter large numbers of its participants.

In Britain, however, we do things rather differently. Here, the middle class seized political power without the need for an eye-to-eye confrontation with the aristocracy. On the contrary, it was shrewd enough to make use of that patrician culture to consolidate its own power. Church, monarchy, country estate, hierarchy and tradition weren’t so much abolished as appropriated, so that Penny Mordaunt could walk in stately fashion before the king at his coronation. Hence the image of the nation as wedded to compromise, moderation and the middle way. When in doubt, the British think of a pendulum. If truth exists at all, it exists somewhere in the middle, pitched prudently between extremes. If we change to driving on the right hand side of the road, we shall do so gradually.

And yet, there was nothing in the least moderate about the Highland clearances of the 18th century, the brutal industrial exploitation of Victorian England, or Britain’s later attempts to crush nationalist uprisings in Asia and Africa. But it suited our rulers to see themselves as temperate, pragmatic types, in contrast to the insurrectionary fanatics across the Channel. Extremists are always other people.

Unlike its French counterpart, then, the British working class inherited no revolutionary legacy from the middle classes. Even so, it wasn’t always as docile as some might have wished. When industrial agitation broke out on Merseyside in the early 20th century, gunboats entered the river Mersey with their weapons trained on Liverpool. The years surrounding the First World War were awash with working-class rebellion, a current which survived at least as far as the miners’ strike of the early Eighties.

Generally speaking, however, there is some truth in the claim that the British labour movement inherited a distaste for insurgency from those perched above it. If France had the Paris Commune, we had the Fabian Society. Mutiny in Britain sprang not so much from workers as from women. It was the Suffragettes, and the feminists who followed in their wake, who sustained the radical traditions of the nation. While socially ambitious workers were becoming respectable trade union officials, the Pankhursts and their progeny were being force-fed in prison and denounced as whores in the press.

It wasn’t that trade unionism was an easy option. The ferocity with which the British state tried to destroy such resistance makes for chilling reading. There were plenty of occasions when demanding a living wage meant risking serious injury, victimisation, deportation or even death. No doubt there are some Right-wing oddballs who would rejoice to see Mick Lynch carted off to Australia like the Tolpuddle Martyrs.

Today, when TV journalists report on a strike, they begin not by asking about the issues at stake but about the disruption it might involve. They still haven’t learnt that to complain of industrial action causing inconvenience is like complaining that rain is wet. Nor do they note that the only real weapon that the working-class movement has in its armoury is an essentially negative one: the withdrawal of one’s labour. The governing class, by contrast, has a formidable array of means to curb dissent, and has just pushed through an anti-protest law which constitutes a dire threat to democracy.

Yet trade unions are still essentially defensive institutions, and as such are as much part of the landscape of capitalism as flood barriers are part of the natural landscape. The task of both is to contain potentially destructive excesses. What does trade unionism defend itself against? One could do worse than answer: class war. And how is it faring? Throughout the world, an increasing number of states are demolishing public services, selling off public assets, imposing draconian cuts in public spending, systematically spying on their citizens, abandoning regulations that protect working people, restricting civil liberties (not least the right to strike), and dispensing with constraints on profit-hungry corporations. These are not matters which can be rectified by the Starmers of this world.

At the same time, trade unions depend on the capitalist economy; they simply want its fruits to be shared more equitably, and are reluctant to make moves which might deprive them of golden eggs by killing the goose that lays them. Such institutions aren’t constituted to bring about radical change, and neither are social democratic parties such as Labour, which began life as the political wing of the labour movement.

The Labour Party has always numbered socialists in its ranks, but despite the lurid protests of some of its critics, it has never been a socialist party. Over the years, the clause in its constitution that committed it to public ownership became as decorative as a fairy on a Christmas tree. Labour leaders have therefore had to invent more and more persuasive ways of placating their Left-wing members while simultaneously selling them out, one of which is to insist that you can’t change the world unless you can grasp the levers of power. The problem with this logically impeccable case is that grasping the levers of power usually involves abandoning the vision which makes it worth doing so. Labour leaders like Keir Starmer are like men trying to manoeuvre a parcel of precious goods through a narrow door. Frustrated by the effort, they end up throwing the parcel away and step through the door with a triumphant cry of “Task accomplished!”.

As for Tony Blair, he wasn’t a renegade. He had absolutely nothing to betray. Nobody ever imagined that he was a socialist, or even at times a social democrat. Instead, as a sheep in sheep’s clothing, he remained true to his lack of principles from start to finish. Hugh Gaitskell, by contrast, was a man of conviction; it was just that he clung with commendable passion to a set of anti-socialist beliefs. Harold Wilson started off Left of centre but ended up to the Right of it, a typical Labourist trajectory. Keir Starmer, a natural-born petty bourgeois, has retreated from one Left-wing policy after another and would ban his own MPs from breathing if he thought that it might imperil his entry into Downing Street.

“You can peel an onion layer by layer, but you can’t skin a tiger claw by claw,” was R.H. Tawney’s view of reformism. What, though, is the alternative? Surely you have to start where you are, in an actual world rather than an ideal one. Otherwise you may end up as an ultra-Leftist, a syndrome which Lenin described as an infantile disorder. Ultra-Leftists regard any truck with the existing political system as a squalid compromise. Parliaments, political parties, trade unions, social reforms and civil society all become fatally contaminating. In the Seventies, when the Left was riding high, some Left-wingers used to test the purity of each other’s commitment by asking such questions as “Would you write for the bourgeois press?” or “Would you use the bourgeois law courts if your partner was murdered?” The true ultra-Leftists were those who were able to return an unequivocal “No” to the question: “Would you call the bourgeois fire brigade?”

Yet the choice between reformism and ultra-Leftism is surely false. All revolutionaries are reformists. Just because you believe in a thoroughgoing transformation of market society doesn’t mean that you don’t see the point of civil marriages or a minimum wage. Besides, what bridges the present and a potential future is the working-class movement itself. Its values of co-operation rather than competition, solidarity rather than selfish individualism, and mutual responsibility rather than individual self-interest need to be extended into social life as a whole. In this sense, the future is not some fuzzy utopia parachuted arbitrarily into the present, but something which is active there already, in however shadowy and imperfect a form. You can’t adequately portray the present without taking account of what it might become.

When asked what the future might look like, one postmodern thinker replied: “The present — with more options.” But an eternal present is an image of hell, however many options may distract us from this horror. With a few judicious additions and subtractions, this present is Keir Starmer’s sterile conception of politics. It will take more than this to end the class war currently being waged against the working people of the world.