John Prescott, who died on 20th November at the age of 86, was not given to philosophy, nor to philosophers. In 2005, when the cerebral David Miliband was appointed as a minister in Prescott’s office of the deputy prime minister, Prescott told anyone who would listen, Miliband included, that “the mekons” had arrived.
Yet he had no need to sound chippy. I recall, from my time as chief speech writer in Downing Street, the weeks when the prime minister had left the care of the building, and of the government, to his deputy. Suddenly, the 8am morning meeting, which was conducted briskly by Blair, rumbled on for an hour under the weight of Prescott’s long reflections on every item. Yet, 20 minutes into one of these monologues, something intriguing happened. Prescott offered a genuine insight into the location and exercise of power.
I realised that, though Prescott’s intelligence was not schooled and disciplined, it was acute. Talking was his way of thinking. And what he thought was unusual within the Labour party. Prescott probably didn’t read GDH Cole but he shared something with the first Chichele Professor of Political Theory at Oxford, an original Labour party mekon. He shared the conviction that the Labour party is divided between centralisers and federalisers and both Cole and Prescott, in their different ways, were federalisers.
George Douglas Howard Cole made his name, as a young Oxford academic, with an attack on Fabian collectivism in the name of participatory democracy. “The Collectivist State”, he wrote provocatively in Self-Government In Industry (1917) would be “the Earthly Paradise of bureaucracy”. Warming to his theme, Cole mentioned Sidney Webb by name and alleged that “Collectivism is at best only the sordid dream of a businessman with a conscience”. Instead of the central apparatus of a benign state, Cole imagined a guild socialism of decentralised association with its sites of citizen activity located in the workplace. This would grant to the people the freedom “to express their personality in the work which is their way of serving the community”. The central state, he thought, was fatally infected by the inequities of industrial capitalism: “in the society of today the State is a coercive power, existing for the protection of private property”.
Cole was convinced that Labour politics had to be about more than rearranging the pattern of income in the country. It had to offer freedom and control: “Poverty is the symptom; slavery the disease…. Socialists have all too often fixed their eyes upon the material misery of the poor without realising that it rests on the spiritual degradation of the slave”. Cole was also an early critic of state socialism, because it leaves open the possibility of tyranny—an argument that would become very current a decade later. He was no socialist anarchist and saw an important function for the central state in acting as a guarantor of civil liberties. The real power, though, will be exerted by free workers in enterprises that are democratically run.
Despite the racy curiosity that Cole wrote 29 detective novels with his wife Margaret, he was a remote figure even in his day. You can capture some of his peculiarity by watching the classic children’s television series Bagpuss, which was made by Cole’s nephew, Oliver Postgate. Searching for a model for a professorial woodpecker carved into a book end on the mantlepiece of the antique shop in which Bagpuss lived, Postgate combined the eccentricities of Bertrand Russell with the pious certainty of his uncle to make Professor Augustus Barclay Yaffle.
Compared to the Fabians, who were friends but intellectual rivals, Cole’s influence on the Labour party has been slight. He did not confine his work to the academy. In 1919 Cole took a job as the part-time secretary to the advisory committee established by Arthur Henderson, the leader of the Labour party, which was charged with writing a programme that would turn Labour from a pressure group into a serious party. He wrote regularly for the political press, publishing polemical pieces in the New Age and the Webbs’ New Statesman. Cole also had connections to Labour politics as a teacher. Hugh Gaitskell was his student and it was Cole who persuaded a young Harold Wilson to join the Labour party.
And yet, for all that, the Labour party owes more to the centralising Webbs than the federalising Cole. The most conspicuous federaliser of recent years, although of a different stamp to Cole, was Prescott. Despite coming to Labour politics through the trade union movement, as a steward, waiter and activist within the Merchant Navy, Prescott was no guild socialist. He was, though, an instinctive federaliser.
By the turn of the 20th century there were two fashionable styles for the Labour politician suspicious of centralisation. The first was the devolution of power to national assemblies, the policy most clearly associated with John Smith. The second option was the course for which Prescott spoke and which earned him a complimentary obituary from Michael Heseltine: regional policy.
It’s a strange passion to believe so strongly in regional assemblies, but Prescott really did. One of his first actions in government was to introduce regional assemblies consisting of delegates from local authorities, as a regulatory board to watch over Regional Development Agencies. It’s a much more bureaucratic form of federalising than Cole would have approved of but, in a centralising party like Labour, it counts as the dispersal of power.
Then, after Blair’s second victory, Prescott went further, or at least tried to. The elected regional assemblies in the northeast, the northwest and Yorkshire and the Humber, had they ever materialised, would have been made up of 25 to 35 members elected under a modestly proportional electoral system. The first referendum was scheduled for the northeast, where support was thought to be the strongest. Perhaps it was the strongest, but it certainly wasn’t very strong. The vote was lost by an overwhelming margin, with 78 per cent against. The plan was lost, and Prescott’s federal England was abandoned as a complete failure.
It is intriguing to ask where the Starmer government stands with relation to the impulse of Cole and the failed project of Prescott. “No movement can be dangerous unless it is a movement of ideas,” writes Cole. The prime minister has made plenty of noises about the devolution of power, but leaders of the opposition often say that, only to pull the levers of power once they win. There is also a mystery to be solved about the policy instincts of the deputy prime minister Angela Rayner, in some ways Prescott’s equivalent and now in charge of a department similar in scope and size to the one he commanded.
Professor Augustus Yaffle once told the story of the wise man of Ling-Po who just wanted to live in peace on his island with his friends the turtles. The wise man pleaded with the locals not to take his turtles for soup, but they laughed at him. So, he walked across the wooden bridge from his island to the land, smashing it as he went. The locals laughed harder. The wise man then appeared to walk back on the water. In fact, just beneath the surface, he was using the turtles as stepping stones. Cole and Prescott wanted to put down stepping stones. The Labour party has almost always sought to build a better bridge instead.
