For a long time, unless we were a left-wing student in the 1960s and 1970s and have never thought or read anything since except the Guardian (large parts of which seem to be written by sentimental survivors), most of us have realised that the vibrant idea of ‘Oh what a falling was there’ is historical nonsense: the belief that the early Labour movement was unequivocally Socialist and that parliamentary practices have watered it down, indeed put out the flame. Even if stalwarts realised that it wasn’t that way entirely, even if it ought to have been utterly, then old man ‘false consciousness’ was invoked—a concept that I would explain to unbelievers as like being drunk for a very long time, and not realising it.

Even in the 1960s I was quoting in lectures, to confuse simple souls, Ramsay MacDonald from his Home University Library Socialism of 1911: ‘The Labour Party is not socialist. It is a union of socialist and trade-union bodies for immediate political work ...it is the only political form which evolutionary Socialism can take in a country with the political traditions and methods of Great Britain. Under British conditions, a socialist party is the last, not the first form of the socialist movement in politics.’

MacDonald shrewdly pointed to the future because he knew that false views of the past confused the possibilities of realistic action in the present. Even the author of that locus classicus of socialist spin on Labour history, Ralph Miliband in his Parliamentary Socialism, began to concede in his last two books that bourgeois liberty was liberty none the less, however inadequate its extent, and that many groups, standing for many different causes, had fed into complex movements loosely allied for reform, or at least for deliberate change from the customary practices of an establishment.

Now historical revisions go much further. The idea of the early Labour movement as a pluralist coalition, even, needs considerable qualification. Many different campaigns tried their influence on the new Labour party, on the Liberal party, usually on both, according to opportunity and circumstance: constitutional reformers, electoral reformers, the women’s suffrage movement (itself a complex alliance moving at different speeds), educational reformers, disestablishmentarians, the Ireland Home Rule movement, and several majority charities who needed legislation not just money in the tin. The Labour Representation Committee and the radical wing of the Liberal party commonly worked together after the Gladstone–MacDonald electoral pact of 1903, and some mutual causes survived even after the disruption of the Liberal party during the First World War.

Andrew Chadwick’s opening chapter is a clear and most useful summary of the different assumptions and different preoccupations of recent ‘revisionist’ writings on the early history of the Labour party (and is ‘revisionism’ an ‘ism’, except in ideologists’ eyes, rather than simply sound history as an academic practice? I say to the ghost of Ralph that one does not have to be a bad historian to be a good socialist). Chadwick advances two main theses. First, that the use of ‘Socialism’ as a yardstick and the notion of an easy transition from simple ‘political democracy (“civil” and “political” citizenship)’ to ‘social democracy (“social” citizenship)’, have led to ‘an underestimation of the importance of constitutional reform in shaping the left’s political identity before 1924’. But ‘substituted in their place’, he argues, ‘should be a number of “yardsticks”—radicalism, labourism, socialism, feminism and, crucially, a discourse whose elements together combined in the form of what I term “radical constitutionalism” .’ The complexities and contingencies of these relationships need always to be kept in mind, he says (including today, I would add). Secondly, he argues—and sets out the evidence clearly in the rest of the book—that these independent bodies, neglected in the old accounts, were heavily intertwined and had in common a radical discourse and rhetoric of attack on the existing constitutional settlement. He makes his point convincingly that ‘radical constitutionalism’ brought many disparate causes together.

I think he suspects that this theme has never vanished, even if its continuing existence was obscured by both the weight of socialist writings, stressing and looking for social and economic themes in Labour’s programmes, and the kind of centralism associated with the Webbs and the Fabian Society; to put it crudely, how we use the state, not how we change it, is the question.

Perhaps Charter 88 was not as original as its founders believed, but for that reason more likely to be on the right track and to find support despite its perhaps overly ambivalent attitude to the Labour party, old and new (who else can deliver?) and despite its tendency to use a rationalistic ‘all or nothing’ rhetoric of either breakdown or a brand-new, systematic constitutional order (some former Marxists cannot live without belief in ‘the system’, nor radical liberals neither, growingly unhappy with the workings of the market economy—as it were, ‘the System’ bad, a new system good).

Perhaps when Pat Seyd and others began in the early 1970s to speculate amid heightened party quarrels and declining membership that a secular displacement from party to pressure group allegiance was taking place, we were looking at too short an historical period—the post-1944 and 1945 expansion of Labour party membership. Going back a bit, however, the picture is much more as Chadwick’s two theses would claim; and coming forward to the present, not so bad a contemporary description either. Most reforming groups, including now the ethnic minorities as well as the female majority, are not fully in either Labour or Liberal ranks, but mostly not fully out either (thanks to the Conservative party); and they see, however vaguely, hopes for reform as turning not just on party policies but, overall, on constitutional reform.

This badly over-priced book reads well, despite too many noun-clauses and unbalanced sentences that a good copy-editor should have removed (I mean queried). It is a most promising first book; the author seems a person to be reckoned with. We won’t have heard the last of him.

In the last special number of Political Studies on ‘Political Ideas and Political Action’ he writes on ‘A Public Political Discourse’. Here, once he gets away from methodological matters of puzzling relevance to either action or the public, he asserts that ideas are important in politics but must be found in the ordinary language and presuppositions of political debate and public opinion, not in formal books. This has been said before; but rarely attempted. I suspect that he could do it, and we would then have a very different kind of history of Labour and the groups that have circled around it; a history that would leave all factions chastened and aware that we have to live together, in proportion to need.