held up as the new gospel of the Labour right. Its influence can be seen in many aspects of Labour's election campaign. COLIN FOSTER reviews Hattersley's It is an interesting comment on the way pressures have built up in Britain that the right currently feels compelled to spell out a political philosophy. As Hattersley himself remarks: 'The Labour Party has been antiHuicicclud NOt so muCalE theory as in practice. became Benthamite movement which insisted that its members iccoznsc numar naoouess when they saw it and did not need anv theoretica favour of its exrension. infavour of its extension.' deed Hattersley points out: 'during Harold Wilson's leadership pragmatism was elevated into a major socialist virtue.
Hattersley claims Inal this was a grave weakness because it gave credibilițy to wnat he terms. in a typically generous and tolerant phrase: 'the of political riff-raff who in- Cl illy filtrated the Labour Party I trie lale sixties ana earl seventies. Hattersley has theretore explicitiv set out to provide a 1980s ideology for the Labour right the way that Crosland's The Future of Socialism provid1950s and 1960s. How does it measure up?
Actually, must be said, the tirst six pages ol the book are extremely im- ¡ving u to te rave reviews from Labour right wingers printed on the cover. Hattersley smashes into what ne terms: 'the nineteenth century view of liberty: the fallacy that it is no more than the absence of restraunt.' Hattersley rightly ridicules this tenet o' iberalism and its classic expression by those who deend the bible of 19th cenLurv iocraism. Joll o udrl Mill's On Liberty, by the claim that. I0Cily s il more than the absence of coercion.
Hattersley correctly makes the point that Irecaom only exss weed there is a positive possiblity lo enjoy ll- . without tnat it is a hollow sham. He writes ot the retorms ot the 1943 government that: 'We.. had not previously been denied the right health, education and decelll nousllg. ancie was IO statute which forbade us to live in a proper house or ac. cept adequate health care. In the decades before the war we nad simply been unable to afford the price of enjoying such advantages. It was because of that practical experience that 1 came regard the idea of icoalve ecuON as the absence of coercion — as a cruel 1oke.
On the grounds of the falsity of purely formal noeror purely lorma. 'equality' the old 11 plus exam: day, it seems impossible that anyone ever honestly believed that children from the slums • badly housed, badly fed, badly protected from disease and enjoying no acqualnlanice with books — could be said ROY HATTERSLEY's Choose Freedom has been to have acquired any sort of equality with their well provoed suburban contemporaries, just because they took the same examination on one or two mornings of their mutually twelfth year •.. Jean Flood, when Principal of Newnham College, Cambridge, described the situation scholastic clarity: "Social as witht DIUUCI well as academic selection is al work SCools.
This is another way of putting the famous phrase that: the law is open to all, just like the Ritz hotel'. But absolutely correct point ana a most central one of socialism - it was criticism of purely formal acnmnons or noerty and freedom that led Marx to become a Marxist.
Against the false, purely THE FUTURE FOR DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM