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 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
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? 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
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.
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