Building bridges, building walls: the two sides of the local left?

This has been a more difficult review to write than I had expected. For, if Hatherley is still not quite over the experience of the 2019 general election, then writing this review has revealed to me the extent to which I am not over Croydon: as a resident since 2014 until last year, as the subject of my academic research since 2017, and – most importantly – as the site of my activism within the Labour Party since 2015.

I raise this point partly because Hatherley’s own sense of himself as an activist (or, rather, as a non-activist) is a striking feature of both Red Metropolis and his interview responses and informs the types of possibility which he presents. As he claims, ‘I am less a veteran of the party’s bloody battles than you guys are, and maybe the book’s relative optimism comes from that distance’, and there’s a suggestion that his own optimism about an alliance with the ‘soft left’ – on which more in a moment – might be chalked up to his being ‘naive and inexperienced’. Something striking in this is the exclusion of the things which Hatherley does that – arguably – could be considered activism: his editorship at Tribune, for one, or the talk to Sadiq Khan’s aides which he mentions in our interview. It’s almost an inversion of that famous quote attributed to Morrison about socialism and Labour governments: for Hatherley, activism is whatever Hatherley does not.

This overlaps partially with the distinction in the ‘two sides of the local left’ which Hatherley sets out to bridge, ‘the local social democratic state that has improved the lives of millions for the better, through aggressive, top-down transformations of health, housing, leisure and work; and the local social movements that have brought in the unruly energy and the strong democratic commitment that the most radical bureaucrats can too often forget about.’ (p.3) Originating as an essay in the New Left Review – a journal described by Hatherley as ‘Mandarin Marxists’ – his distinction between bureaucrats and social movements overlaps with the other division which Red Metropolis intends to bridge, between a ‘soft left’ (represented by figures like the London Assembly’s Tom Copley) and the left proper (which Hatherley is generally unwilling to attempt disaggregating in Red Metropolis).⁷ In his book, Hatherley slightly favours the former group, the politicians and planners whose work his stock-in-trade as a writer, if only because of the tendency for most individuals seem to get collapsed into it under scrutiny.⁸ This risks succumbing to the division of society into ‘two parts’, described by Marx, which we referred to in our Bad New Times editorial – the reduction of the pedagogical to socialist educators ‘superior to society’.

It is in this affinity for top-down approaches that Hatherley parts company with Morris. In News from Nowhere, one of the first things which the Guest notices about the new London is its bridges. The ‘ugly suspension bridge’ by his house (that is, Hammersmith Bridge – which happens to be closed at the moment) has been torn down and rebuilt ‘of stone arches, splendidly solid, and as graceful as they were strong’.⁹ If Hatherley’s aesthetic differences with Morris are understandable, there is a metaphorical significance to this passage which goes beyond them – an expression of Morris’ willingness to dismantle and remake, of the possibility of communal and not private expertise. A corollary of Hatherley’s approach is that politics is seen as essentially about coalition-building – when perhaps there are some bridges which need to be burned.¹⁰

The differences between Hatherley’s approach and Morris’ are well expressed in the chapter which our editor josie sparrow contributed to the Alternative Guide, discussing Morris’ Red House and his work more generally. As she explains there, Morris distinguished between ‘making socialists’ and ‘building socialism’:

His was not a practice towards some rigid institutional form, later to be imposed upon others, who would soon learn to live according to its contours. He saw that all that was required for things to open up was a moment, an encounter – however brief, however flickering – that might suggest, subtly, another way to live. Another way to live, with and for others: birds, humans, trees. For Morris, the task – perhaps the duty – of those of us who had already experienced this moment of transformation was to create spaces within which others might do so, too.’

If the opening of encounters was well-attended in his invocation of Morris in 1889, Hatherley, chronicler of socialist buildings and socialists building, is nevertheless continually tempted by the desire to build socialists and not make them – in much the same way that Morrison might have sought to build the Tories out of London, Hatherley is keen to find ways of building socialists in. An emphasis on making rather than building socialists means an acceptance of the material which is to be worked with and a recognition that what we make (and the way we make) also makes us – it means a level of trust to which the pessimism that tempts Hatherley is inimical.

This comes through in Hatherley’s historical discussion – set out in what seems like a neat distinction between the first chapter on the LCC and Morrison, an ode to London’s bureaucrats (and a friendly trolling of the Labour Right), and its second, a discussion of the social movements involved in the 1980s GLC expected to appeal, as mentioned above, to the ‘new left’ constellations associated with Corbynism.¹¹ Both are marked, in different ways, by the limitations of Hatherley’s distinction, and by the pessimism which pulls Hatherley back and away from a socialist rather than social-democratic commitment. They are also both associated with what Hatherley describes as the geographical centre of social-democratic London, in the South Bank: home to County Hall, the old headquarters of the London County Council and GLC, the buildings associated with the Festival of Britain in 1951, the pet project of Herbert Morrison as a member of the post-war Attlee government, and the bold public entertainments offered during the 1980s.

Whereas Hatherley presents the Festival of Britain as ‘the cultural showcase the laissez-faire city never had’ (p.21), other treatments have emphasised that it was ‘less the symbol of social democracy in action than an unleashing of talented professionals egged on by the Great and the Good’, with representations of social services, education, and working-class housing taking a marked backseat compared to town planning, scientific progress and culture.¹² It’s at points like these that Hatherley’s taxonomy of three Londons becomes most ambiguous. Whilst, earlier, Hatherley had acknowledged that a ‘pedant or enthusiast for Jacobean theatre’ (p.12) might elevate Southwark alongside Westminster and the City as London’s ‘third city’, the connection between this heterotopic London and his third, social-democratic one are not considered: an ‘other’ London which provides a mirror but also a masque for the other Londons across the Thames. It is not that Hatherley is unaware that the expansion of the state could be technocratic, paternalist and accommodating as well as explicitly socialist – he notes that even the interwar Conservative LCC ‘was surprisingly interested in the experiments of Vienna City Council under the Austro-Marxists’ (p.47) – but that he has chosen to make an argument in which, with the exception of the Greater London Assembly era, the connections between the ‘third London’ and both Westminster and the City are downplayed. Too often, Hatherley is content to reduce socialism to the ‘unleashing of talented professionals’, the technocratic paternalism of mid-century Westminster celebrated simply because it wasn’t laissez-faire. Again, Hatherley is not unaware of the left-wing critiques of this social democracy, but the framework adopted in Red Metropolis limits how far he can accept them, as he laments the fact that Morrison’s ‘name has usually been mud on the Labour left’ (p.62) – a problem when it is the Morrisons of Hatherley’s soft left that he sees as having ‘improved the lives of millions for the better’ of their own accord, the local social movements and the left proper confined, like the crowd at a Jacobean performance, to providing ‘unruly energy’ and a ‘strong democratic commitment’ from the pit.

Whilst there is a note, towards the end, that Sadiq Khan cannot be expected to behave like Morrison ‘unless he is put under enormous pressure’ (p.233), the section on the LCC seems wary of admitting that the sorts of pressure which Morrison faced – an independent, firm Communist Party, say, or the kinds of activism which had earlier characterised ‘Poplarism’ (or at least the memory thereof) – were a constitutive part of what made his variety of local social democracy possible. This has important implications: the later observation that ‘Members would be wiser to look to the example of George Lansbury than that of Herbert Morrison’ (p.243) is provided with a caveat (‘If any legal route to the redress of Londoners’ grievances is blocked…’) which takes the reader away again from the former figure and towards the short-term possibilities of the latter – as a bridge is built to those who’ll never see the legal route as blocked, a wall is built against those who argue that something like Lansburyism is required even when the legal route is ‘open’.

Hatherley’s defence of Morrisonian social democracy, of course, provides the grounds for his reservations about the criticisms of it which the new left of the 1980s GLC represented. Whilst prepared to accept that these criticisms were generally warranted, Hatherley is again keen to defend the broad sweep of Morrison’s social democracy – charging the GLC’s new left with overstepping the mark, short-sighted when it came to the full ramifications of their assault. This was an observation which was prevalent at the time that those left-wing criticisms of post-war social democracy were being made. As the first issue of the early 1970s underground paper Suburban Press declared: ‘Our fathers tell us of the horrors of the thirties and of the benefits of the present welfare state – so what? This is pessimism. Use history to change now. Don’t wallow in history’s pessimism.’

If Hatherley’s ‘two sides of the local left’ could be relatively easily identified in the Morrison example, however, in his discussion of the GLC it becomes more confusing. A case in point is his disdain for moves by figures like Ted Knight in Lambeth, for whom ‘All unelected municipal “fiefdoms” and power bases were under suspicion and to be broken up, even if they were demonstrably neither corrupt nor incompetent.’ (p.137) As Hatherley complains, ‘looking in the 2020s at what still looks good out of a century of council house building, it is almost always the product of departments that had a stable staff, sizeable (and perhaps unaccountable) power, and large budgets that stand out.’ (p.138) He sees the LCC’s Communist architects as ‘one of the few places where the extra-parliamentary left had significant input’ (p.76), and criticises Knight for alienating Ted Hollamby, the restorer of Morris’ Red House and a former CPGB member whose views could have been those of ‘a radical New Left critic of centralised, functionalist municipal housing’ (p.137) and part of ‘the softer side of the left’ who opposed Knight’s confrontational approach because they ‘had little sense of how high the stakes were politically from 1979 onwards.’ (p.138) So which way around is it? Is Hollamby the new leftist ally of the social movements, failing to work with the local political leader and running into the arms of the Docklands Development Corporation? Or is Knight the left-winger wrongly distrustful of expertise? Whilst Hatherley takes from the episode the lesson that we should avoid alienating groups like Public Practice, ‘people that we should have on our side’, it could equally be argued that the distinction which someone like Hollamby attempted to embody – between his professional work as an architect, and his political commitments as a (former) Communist – cannot be overcome by a politics which still takes that distinction for granted, and which ignores the fact that, whether advanced by Knight or Hollamby, critiques of post-war social democracy had a popular basis, and weren’t the naïve proposals of misguided activists.

The problem with the split between Knight and Hollamby – whichever side we assign to them – is, for Hatherley, that when housing ‘was handed over to “the community”, as in the 1980s, the results were often twee and flimsy – much more concerned about ensuring that a house “looked like a house” rather than the more complex questions of whether that house was well-built and integrated with pleasant public spaces.’ (p.138) Similarly, Hatherley complains about the exclusiveness of the GLC’s Coin Street development: ‘a wonderful enclave, providing good, genuinely affordable social housing in the centre of the metropolis, if you can convince its gatekeepers that you’ll be a good member of the co-operative. What was attractive about LCC housing was it was universal, and you had it by right. The importance of this was too often lost on the GLC New Left, missed through their insistence upon participation in all things.’ (p.130)

I have several issues with this. It is not quite correct to say that there was a right, or at least nowhere near an absolute, unconditional right, to council housing, as the homelessness scandals of the 1960s and the 1970s – as well as the widespread squatting which Hatherley correctly links to the rise of the new urban left – well attests. Indeed, the growing objections to council housing in the 1970s were informed by the fact that it wasn’t a right: rents were arbitrarily raised, allocation was according to desert and not need – a statutory right to housing for homeless people wasn’t introduced until 1977 – and the right to housing did not extend to the right to do what you wanted with it.¹³ Hatherley’s complaint that popular antipathies to actually-existing council housing provided material for Thatcherism and the expansion of Right to Buy are, undoubtedly, correct – but by assigning responsibility for these antipathies to the new left and not to Morrison, Hatherley abandons the possibility of making something from this material in favour of council housing’s ‘rigid institutional form’.

True, there are good criticisms of the emphases on co-operatives which have sometimes characterised Corbynism, and in particular a tendency to emerge from it which has been excoriated by Mary Robertson for New Socialist. As Hatherley notes, this is a tendency with markedly less appeal on the younger, organised Labour left – admittedly in part because of its inclination towards conformism, sometimes labelled ‘Stalinist’ – than amongst the remnants of the struggles of the 1970s and 1980s. The focus on co-operativism forms part of a ‘market socialist’ tendency which surrenders the goals of socialism through the limitations of its process – sacrificing the necessities of a broader struggle for the possibilities of piecemeal, local change.¹⁴ To the extent that this was a tendency to which the new left activists conceded ground, though, it was because of the bridges which they built with the ‘bureaucrats’ and not the ones that they burned.

Further, as the label which Robertson applies to her own tendency – ‘participatory socialism’ – implies, the problem is not the problem of ‘participation in all things’ which Hatherley diagnoses. It is true – possibly truer than Hatherley even argues, since he claims slightly optimistically that the GLC ‘insisted upon working out whether each bit of their money was going’ (p.123) – that the GLC handed power over to people who didn’t always use it wisely or use it in ways that were as ‘radical’ as when political radicals did so themselves directly. But the problem there is not too much participation from the people (or the ‘social movements’), but too little real participation from those handing over the power – an acceptance that the people are how they are, a left-wing version of ‘the customer is always right’. What’s an issue is not listening too much to the people, it’s refusing to speak with them; it’s accepting the division between ‘bureaucrat’ and ‘social movement’ as fact and assigning to them different roles and responsibilities, refusing the process of the mass line which I attempted to describe in my piece on ‘strategy and tactics’. I think Hatherley’s comment in our interview – supporting ‘a real alliance and dialogue and creative process (…) between the architect and the resident’ – is an improvement over the pessimism which sometimes dominates in the book, although the architect/resident distinction remains and looming behind it is the limit to how far that process can be allowed to go.¹⁵

As a result, although Hatherley sets out to dispel the pessimism which set in easily after the 2019 general election, his optimism about short-term possibilities belies a much greater pessimism about socialism in the longer one – an unwillingness to embrace the struggle without guarantees.¹⁶ This failure is wrapped up with the distinction which Hatherley does make, between his ‘two sides of the local left’, a distinction which he allows to be bridged but not overcome, and which both expresses and conceals the greater one – between those who, in Morris’ terms, can build but cannot make, who Hatherley places in command, and the people themselves, kept behind walls.