class and the local state—a rejoinder to a reply

Class and the local state-a rejoinder to a reply by David Byrne

Stephen Ward’s critique of my article ‘Class and the local state’ is extremely interesting but seems to me to be misconceived and, with one important exception poorly founded. The purpose of my original piece was quite specifically not the identification of Gateshead as a ‘red enclave’ of the interwar period. Rather it was the outlining of a, necessarily, sweeping account of the formation of a political culture and of the interplay of that culture both with other political elements and with the system of production within which it has been located. Certainly the interwar years deserve more attention than I devoted to them and Ward is absolutely correct in identifying one major error in my description of the period. However, I find that having now reviewed the period in some detail I do not wish to change my broad interpretation of it and that the relationship between Gateshead Council and the North Eastern Housing Association post 1936 supports rather than challenges my general thesis about the nature of radical reformist labourism.

There is a general point of some substance which has to be made before turning to the specific. Ward asserts a ‘capital logic’ explanation of events, with capital’s logic being expressed through a fiscal crisis in the state. He sees the central state’s administrative apparatus (the location of list Q) as playing an important role but identifies the direct relations between the condition of local capitalist production and the balance of revenues available to the local state, as against its reproductive expenditure,as being of some importance. I could not agree more that in understanding developments at the political level and in relation to general historical development we must take account of these expressions of the logic of the system. They are of very great importance, but they are not all that was happening because there was also action, and in particular political action. Harris (1980) has very clearly specified that in any discussion of the relationship of the state to the economy we must deal both with action and with the logic of the system and he appositely criticized marxist consideration of the formation and content of social policy for its neglect of the latter element. I would extend t h s . I think that the ‘logic of the system’ can be profoundly influenced by political action as well as the other way around: that is to say we are dealing with a two-way relationship. Cer- tainly in my cursory treatment of the interwar years I said nothing of this, but my discussion of the local state and the peripheralized in contemporary circumstances

578 Class and the local state - a rejoinder to a reply

was very precisely premised on the interplay of the political and the economic. ‘Structure’ has its place but it cannot be treated as simply determinate.

I can perhaps best illustrate why that is so by challenging absolutely Ward’s dismissal of the role of the urban bourgeoisie in Gateshead in the interwar years. I assign very considerable importance to the local interplay of class forces. Ward says they didn’t matter. I would like to respond by addressing two issues. The first is housing policy and the second is the administration of poor relief. Let me deal first with housing. Between 1919 and 1939 2459 local authority houses were built in Gateshead. Table 1 gives the details of this construction.

Table 1 Gateshead local authority housing construction 1919-39 ~~ ~-

Flats Self-contained houses 2 room 3roorn 4 room ,Tot. 3roorn 4 room 5roorn Tot.

Started pre 1927 51 107 3 161 586 422 162 1170

Started post 1927 166 282 - 448 328 232 120 680

Source: Annual Abstract of Accounts, Gateshead CBC, 1939

In other words under Labour control (excluding the 232 houses built at Carr Hill under the 1919 Act which were started pre 1923) over 1100 houses were included in the new programme. The flats built under Labour were an inherited slum- clearance scheme initiated pre-1924. When the ‘Moderates’ regained control of the authority they allowed completion of the ongoing schemes but then shifted construction towards flats, or more accurately speaking tenements, in inner areas. The ‘Moderates’ did build some rather poor quality houses at Old Fold and Teams when the composition of Wheatley and Greenwood subsidies was available in the early 1930s but in the late 1920s they quite deliberately and explicitly abandoned high quality construction on the grounds that what was needed was cheap and adequate dwellings for the poor’.

The debate exactly paralleled developments in Tynemouth CB (see Byrne, 1980) with the difference that in the later 1920s Tynemouth CB with a Labour chairman of the Housing committee continued to build more high quality housing. In Gates- head the best site at Field House Lane was developed by the Local Authority in plots for sale to private builders and just as in the case of the Balkwell and Hunt Hill estates in Tynemouth the Local Authority offered grant aid under the 1923 Chamberlain Act as part of the package. This certainly suited some of the moderates e.g. Councillor and later Alderman Thomas Wakefield, Deputy Chairman of the Housing Committee, Director of the Prince of Wales Building Society and Builder, who regularly advertised dwellings for sale from his sites in the ‘Moderate’ Gates- head MunicipaZ News. It also suited the private landlords (who interestingly had been so blind to what Ward implied was their long-term interest as to object to the

‘Fifty years later the houses built under Labour are among the most desired of all Local Authority stock in Gateshead. The flats and houses built by the ‘Moderates’ are all ‘difficult to let’ apart from Field House Lane, which had been in Labour’s programme but was not built until 1930 after the LA had failed to sell off the site. (The pre 1927 housing construction figures in Table 1 include Field House Lane.)

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introduction of the water borne sewage scheme on the grounds that they had to pay half the cost while rents remained controlled) because as the Labour Herdd commented: ’People found that flats in the Avenues without bathrooms or garden or modern fuctures, were dearer when decontrolled than the bright, neat, easily worked council houses on the estates’ (no. 26 March 1931). The Avenues is a district of good Tyneside flats built (without water borne sewage) for the aristoc- racy of labour between 1890 and 1910. The owners of this stock had not been best pleased when the cream of their tenants began to move into Carr Hill, for example, and they were forced to let down market at lower rents.

Let me summarize here. I am making two points. The first is that the extra- ordinarily good quality housing built by the Labour Council of 1923-26 demon- strated the potential of radical reformist control, a potential not realized on a mas- sive scale until post 1945 but a potential nonetheless displayed. These are still the most popular estates in Gateshead and reflect what Swenarton (1981) described as a design/aesthetic cultural revolution in Homes fit for heroes. Interestingly they are better, especially in terms of layout and variation of house types, than the 1919 Carr Hill which was built in Swenarton’s particular period and is of very high quality itself. I cannot emphasize too much that it was precisely the ‘system break‘ in provision represented by these most important cultural elements - apart from the labour process, housing seems to me to be the most important material related element in working-class culture - which was significant. It is for this reason that Ward’s comparison of Gateshead in space with other authorities affected by the same political processes is not particularly useful. What matters is the comparison in time between Gateshead ‘example’ in the 1920s and the situation without radical reformist labourism pre 1914. The comparison in space I originally made between Gateshead and Belfast is relevant precisely because Belfast’s political culture developed on divergent lines from other UK industrial centres post 1920. In consequence Belfast with more than four times Gateshead’s population had built rather fewer public sector houses by 1939 and in fact built none at all after the postwar radicalism of the working class of that city had been contained by the development of sectarian politics.

My other point relates to the role of the urban bourgeoisie in Gateshead post 1926. It seems to me to be very clear that Gateshead’s local politics had developed into Labour versus non-Labour far earlier than was the case in Tynemouth, for example, where radical Liberals remained important. Thus politics polarized with the triumphant ‘Moderates’, triumphant be it noted in 1926, disbanding Direct Labour, facilitating owner-occupation, reinforcing the comparative position of the private landlord and reducing the quality and quantity of council housing provision to mere sanitary adequacy and tenements. And they could do this because they were there, because they argued ratepayerism at elections and because they won majorities on this programme which included a significant element of working-class votes of necessity because no majority was possible in Gateshead without such an element. Insofar as Gateshead’s comparative housing performance matters in this period ‘Moderate’ control of the Local Authority is the explanation for it.


And it is also a very important part of the explanation for the position in the 1930s with regard to poor relief by the Public Assistance Committee. The politics of poor relief in this period seems to me to be one of the most interesting areas for study by those concerned with the triumph of reformist over revolutionary politics in the UK and the Gateshead Guardians and PAC are particularly interesting. In 1926 there is no doubt that there were divisions within the labour movement with the Village Reds advocating one position and the Railway moderates tending to another. However even in inner Gateshead the Railway element did not dominate everything. Indeed the extremely important Gateshead Independent Labour Party contained many leftists who supported the pit village line, and it was this view which prevailed right through until the dissolution of the Guardians when they attempted to wipe out all debts still owing by miners’ families as a consequence of 1926 .*

After 1929 the Gateshead Poor Law Union was split in two. Gateshead County Borough under ‘Moderate’ control had its own PAC and the rest of the Union became part of the area of responsibility of Durham County PAC. Durham County was if anything in basal terms and consequent revenue/expenditure balance in an even worse state than Gateshead. Yet Durham PAC continued to pay high allow- ances and to resist implementing the household means test to the point where its functions were taken over by externally appointed commissioners. In Gateshead in contrast the ‘Moderates’ immediately upon acquiring control of poor relief tightened up on benefit administration and on levels of allowance and it must be emphasized that they remained in control of the system until after the transfer of the most important group of benefit recipients, the unemployed, t o the Un- employment Assistance Board in 1934.3 It was not a matter of Durham com- munists. In fact Durham County Council was firmly under the control of associates of men who were to provide the rightwing element in the National Union of Miners post 1945. The left in Durham was shattered in a specific emotional and cultural sense by the defeat in 1926. Will Lawther of Chopwell, the leading light of the left

’Ward’s account of Gateshead Labour politics needs to be questioned, not because there were no divisions but because he writes as if positions were constant from 1920 to 1950. The positions of individuals and factions need charting because they did matter and because they re- flected and influenced national and industrial politics. The defeat of 1926 mattered. Indeed it was the experience of that defeat which was the explanation for the development of ‘radical reformist’ rather than revolutionary politics as the overwhelmingly dominant element in working-class political culture in Gateshead. So did the victory (and background to that victory) of 1945. For example after the Labour Party NEC had declined to endorse Zilliacus’s candidature the Labour Party GMC in Gateshead voted 42-4 not to accept this decision, scarcely the action of moderates. Again it was a matter of interplay and change. 3See Briggs and Deacon (1974) for a discussion of the politics of unemployment assistance in this period but note that after the transfer of responsibility for the unemployed to the Un- employment Assistance Board in 1934 the local politics of relief lost their centrality. As Briggs and Deacon illustrate a major factor in the establishment of the UAB was the explicit intention of achieving this result. The post 1934 situation in Gateshead is a local illustration of this national development, although as Ward has reminded me the local authority retained some responsibilities until early 1937.

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in the Gateshead area in the 1920s, had already begun his rightward journey. Rather, as I indicated in the original article with reference to the contrast between Gateshead and Chester-le-Street Guardians, given the absence of a competing political force in County Durham the actions of the PAC were virtually inevitable. Of course, system factors mattered in the administration of poor relief in Gateshead in the early 1930s but the fact that the Moderates ran the Public Assistance Com- mittee was ultimately the determining factor.

Which brings me to the most important element in Ward’s criticisms, the relationship between Gateshead Council under Labour control as he rightly says and the North Eastern Housing Association post 1936. I wish I had known the reality and been more careful about checking that situation because it was an extremely important episode indeed (which is no excuse for my sloppiness in relying on a misinterpreted secondary source). Let me quote from the Gateshead Labour Herald of June 1936, which after, absolutely correctly in my view, identifying the short- fall in housing construction in Gateshead as a consequence of ‘Moderate’ policy in the late 1920s goes on to discuss the transfer of responsibility for new building (and not as I stated in the original article, all housing administration) to the NEHA in these terms:

Is it not contrary to socialist principles to hand over what ought t o be municipal work to a private association? There are two sides to the answer to this. First, as long as capital- ism is the system of this country, no socialist and no socialist municipality can avoid com- pomising their principles by working with capitalist concerns of one sort or another. Only a socialist industrial system will enable us to work on socialist principles.

Secondly, this association is not an ordinary profit making concern; it is actually run by a civil servant in consultation with the Local Authority, the Board being really figure- heads. Such a piece of machinery might well be denounced as socialist by a Tory. Actually it is neither socialist nor anti-socialist in itself, but is naturally suspect in the hands of the present government (no. 87).

One could not wish for a clearer identification of the radical reformist dilemma and of the notion of the nature of the state which has generally underlain it in practice in the UK. Radical reformism is about socialism in reproduction without socialism necessarily being achieved in production, although the programme has included production centred elements and these were particularly strong in the 1930s. It is not that radical reformism ignored production but that proponents have tended to assert that compromise in reproductive politics while we await control of production is not only necessary but can be progressive. The statement of the neutral character of the state and of associated bodies is also characteristic. Of particular interest is the assertion that the membership of the Board of the NEHA, composed overwhelmingly of members of the region’s old ruling class, is irrelevant. It is not that the writer of the piece from which the quotation is taken ignored the dilemma; rather in the face of necessity, ‘What else can we do?’, compromises became established as a habit of political action. Later practioners were to lose any grasp of the dilemma involved in compromise - witness developments around the inner-area partnership as described in the original article. I agree absolutely with Ward that the development of corporatist bodies in the 1930s, particularly


those developed in the northeast in part in consequence of the political import. ance of the old regional ruling class - see Benwell CDP (1 978), was of the greatest importance. What is interesting about the NEHA is that, uniquely in the 1930s, it served as a mechanism for the introduction of corporatist politics into reproduction.

However, the history of the NEHA is worth pursuing post 1945 because it illu- strates the distinction between radical reformism’s implications for reproductive politics on the one hand and production centred politics on the other. Post 1945 in Gateshead, as in almost all authorities in which it had been active, cooperation was withdrawn from the NEHA and housebuilding was carried on by the Local Authority itself. In contrast there was neither questioning of nor withdrawal from the corporatist bodies concerned with production. Indeed the Northern Regional Executive of the Labour Party is currently devoting a large part of its effort to promoting a new supercorporatist Regional Development Agency as a solution to deindustrialization and this is in line with the entire postwar trend of its actions in this area. What is interesting perhaps is not so much the distinction between COT-

poratism’s acceptability in production as compared with reproduction - witness the acceptance of corporatist forms in the health service, although this has always been resented - as the particular political contingency of housing in the political culture sustained by radical reformism. Thus the recent (i.e. post 1975) shift in Local Authority attitudes to housing association involvement in new housing provision in their areas, w l c h has involved a revived N E W inter alia, was very much forced, What else can we do but we don’t like it’. This certainly does illustrate the validity of Ward’s comparison between the 1930s and contemporary circumstances and I would very much agree with any explanation of the similarity which centres on the impact of fundamental changes in the productive system upon the political framework within which reproductive politics are conducted. Crisis is always an occasion for restructuring at all levels.

But none of this allows us to disregard the political. It matters in explanation post hoc and it matters most of all because politics is how we act. That was why my original article, without denying the importance of the logic of the system, emphasized the political and its potential for transformation. I skated over the interwar years because I wanted to emphasize the beginning and end of a process. In so doing, as Ward rightly emphasizes, I made a major factual error in relation to one specific point. My conclusion that a proper understanding of that incident rein- forces my general analysis in no way excuses sloppiness, but neither does that sloppiness invalidate my conclusion that we will not understand the politics of reproduction without understanding the processes whch have contributed to the formation of class culture in specific circumstances and locales.

Acknowledgement

I am very grateful to Stephen Ward for his comments on this rejoinder and wish thzt circumstances had allowed me to take more account of them.

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References

Benwell CDP 1978: The making of a ruling class. Benwell. Briggs, E. and Deacon, A. 1974: The creation of the Unemployment Assistance

Board. Policy and Politics 2(1), 43-62. Byme, D. S. 1980: The decline in the standard of interwar council housing in N.

Shields. In Melling, J., editor, Housing, social policy and the state, London: Croom Helm.

Harris, L. 1980: The state and the economy. Socialist Register 1980. London: Merlin Press.

Swenarton, M. 198 1 : Homes fit for heroes: London: Heinemann.

Un accord g6n6ral est note dans cette reponse sur 14nsistance de Ward sur l’importance de la ‘logique du syst2me’ dans la compr5hension des developpements historiques dans ldtat local mais le r6le du ‘politique’ est souligni une fois de plus et illustr6 avec une refirence specifique au retentissement ‘culturel’ des differences de politique 2 Gateshead entre le parti travailliste et son opposition dam les annees d’entre-guerre. Finalement, 1’intCrEt d’une autorite contr61Be par le parti travauiste dans les politiques corporatistes 1 la fin des annkes trente est examine e t vu comme une illustration precoce de la contradiction essentielle dans le 16- formisme radical. Cette reponse a kt6 t r b amelioree par la critique utile de Stephen Ward SUT la redaction provisoire.

In dieser Erwiderung wird Wards Betonung der Bedeutung der ‘Lo& des Systems’ zum Ver- standnis geschichtlicher Entwicklungen im lokalen Zusammenhang allgemein zugestimmt; es wird jedoch wieder die Rolle ‘des Politischen. hervorgehoben und mit besonderer Bezug- nahme auf die ‘kulturellen’ Auswirkungen der politischen Meinungsverschiedenheiten veranschaulicht, die in den Jahren zwischen den beiden Weltkriegen in Gateshead zwischen Labour und der Gegenseite bestanden. Schlielllich wird die Roue einer von Labour geleiteten Lokal- behorde im Rahmen der Gemeindepolitik gegen Ende der dreaiger Jahre besprochen, wodurch die wesentlichen Widerspriiche im radikalen Reformismus veranschaulicht werden. Diese Erwiderung hat aus Stephen Wards positiver Kritik des urspriinglichen Entwurfes erheblichen Nutzen gezogen.

En esta replica se registra un acuerdo general con la importancia que concede Ward a la ‘ldgica del sistema’ para la comprensidn de 10s acontecimientos histdricos en el estado local, per0 una vez mds se seZala el papel de ‘lo polftico’ y se ejemplifica con la referencia especffica al impact0 cultural de las diferencias polfticas en Gateshead entre 10s laboristas y sus adversarios durante 10s aZos de entreguerras. Finalmente se trata del compromiso de la municipalidad controlada por 10s laboristas en la polftica corporativista a finales de 10s aKos 30 como ejemplo temprano de la contradiccidn esencial que supone el reformism0 radical. Esta replica ha aprovechado considerablemente las crfticas constructivas hechas por Stephen Ward a la redaccidn original.

class and the local state—a rejoinder to a reply

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