The question of working-class consciousness

In 1922 Jeremiah Wooley, leading officer of Preston's largest union, the Weavers', and the town's first Labour mayor, spoke of his vision of socialism. He defined it as a situation in which ‘a man should have work … he should be paid for his work … he should have a decent house … he should have sufficient leisure to enjoy life … he should have clothes fit to wear, and … he should have a little spending money in his pocket.’ This statement is a good example of the limited vision of the Labour movement, an instance of what many writers have seen as the characteristic of the Labour party in Britain: its embodiment in a defensive working-class consciousness. This interpretation owes much to the work of Ross McKibbin who argued that the party's rise was caused by ‘an acutely developed class consciousness’, but of a defensive and non-socialist kind. For many writers, examination of the Labour party revolves around showing the relationship between this defensive consciousness and its political institutions.

A similar emphasis has informed many of the most important sociological accounts of political change in modern Britain. Perhaps the most influential of these was the debate around Lockwood's arguments showing how different types of occupational and community relations gave rise to particular kinds of ‘Images of society’.