‘Dear Pugin, I am in a regular fix respecting the working drawings for the fittings and decorations of the House of Lords, which it is of vital importance to me should now be finished … I know of no one who can render me such valuable and efficient assistance, or can so thoroughly relieve me of my present troubles of mind as yourself.’
So Charles Barry to Augustus Pugin, inveigling that brilliant architect, designer, aesthete, social critic, philosopher of urban living and Gothicist into a decade of often tortuous work into helping to design the Palace of Westminster. Of course, Pugin despised the compromises – ‘Tudor details on a classic body’ – but we who work in the House of Commons or Lords adore all its idiosyncratic historicisms.
That is the subject I wish to address: the relationship of medievalism and modernity, and how Pugin saw his architectural vision interact with all the complexities of modern, urban living. He grew to manhood during one of the most startling periods of social and economic change in British society – the Industrial Revolution and the establishment of a modern urban world happened here in Britain first. Pugin’s response to that revolutionary epoch was part of a broader aesthetic and intellectual confrontation with modernity which would go on to shape our cities and suburbs to this day.

It is, of course, a particular pleasure to be talking this evening as the Member of Parliament for Stoke-on-Trent Central. We in North Staffordshire have come to think of Pugin as our own: ST1 not SW1 when it comes to the Pugin inheritance. Of course, we have – thanks to the generous patronage of the ‘Romantic Catholic’, John Talbot, 16th Earl of Shrewsbury, John Talbot – the restored Alton Towers, Alton Castle and Cotton College, but most importantly of all the masterpiece at St. Giles’ Catholic Church, Cheadle. Pugin wanted it to be ‘as perfect a specimen as we can make it’: ‘the complete English parish church of the time of Edward I.’ And few could deny he succeeded brilliantly.
But in Stoke itself, Pugin made contact with a much more modern figure – the great Herbert Minton who, in the words of Rosemary Hill, ‘brought to the revival of the Middle Ages all the resources and the energy of the steam age.’ From his London Road factory – now, inevitably, a Sainsbury’s – he pioneered the production of encaustic tiles, through the firing of different coloured clay at different temperatures. Once the science was mastered, the results were an immediate success. ‘Practical, hygienic and authentically Gothic, encaustic flooring, most often in buff and red, was – and remains in thousands of churches, schools and domestic hallways – the essence of Victorian decoration.’ Indeed, you walked on its tiles here this evening. And Stoke-on-Trent is proud of the relationship.
One other introductory thought: this is a surprisingly rich year when we think about the modern urban world. For 1812 witnessed not just the birth of Pugin – but also Charles Dickens, who was equally drawn to understanding the impact of urbanisation. On the one hand, he enjoyed the energy, the wealth, the vibrancy of metropolitan life; on the other hand, he condemned the inequality, the depravity, the inhumanity of the Victorian urban world. And, above all, the lack of connection, the isolation of city living. The atomisation of society had left the individual utterly at sea. It was a world which Dickens embodied in the character of Jo the crossing-sweep in his London epic, Bleak House (1852-3). Gently undulating through the text, Jo cut an anonymous, almost transluscent figure sweeping his lonely way through the ‘faces never-ending’ of a crowded, bustling city.
Then this year we also commemorate the death in 1912 (aboard the Titanic) of W.T. Stead – the legendary editor of The Pall Mall Gazette who, in his famous article ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’, exposed the child sex slave industry of Victorian London and, by insinuation, the inevitable moral collapse of modern urban living. And 1912 also witnessed the death of Octavia Hill – the great housing reformer, protégé of Ruskin and FD Maurice, and co-founder of the National Trust who sought to counter ugliness of late 19th century London by breathing art and culture into her housing estates in Deptford and Southwark and getting them out into the countryside.

PUGIN AND CONTRASTS
All three of these thinkers clearly drew upon the works of Pugin. While he himself was inspired by the works of William Cobbett, Robert Southey and the Catholic Bishop John Milner, whose 1798 work The History of Winchester drew upon the German Romantic tradition to contrast a lost medieval world marked by social institutions and symbols of corporate faith with the civic decay wrought by the so-called ‘Age of Improvement.’
For the Age of Utility was transposing the city of guilds, town squares and monasteries with the iconography of individualism. The Poet Laureate Robert Southey on a visit to Manchester, the ‘shock city of the Industrial Revolution’, was drawn to contrast the city’s cotton warehouses to convents, yet he thought them ‘without their antiquity, without their beauty, without their holiness.’ Instead of vespers, there is ‘the everlasting din of machinery’, and when ‘the bell rings it is to call wretches to their work instead of their prayers.’
This, then, was the context for the zealous Catholic convert Pugin’s thinking on the city. To his mind, the reason 19th century cities were so ugly was because of an absence of true faith. The Reformation had undercut public faith and with ‘the growth of Protestant principles’ came ‘the fall of ecclesiastic architecture.’ Pugin regarded Birmingham as the pinnacle of this unedifying process, memorably describing it as ‘the most hateful of all hateful places, a town of Greek buildings, smoky chimneys, low radicalism and dissent.’
His response to the urban design of Nonconformist amorality in Birmingham was St. Chad’s – the first cathedral since Wren’s St. Paul’s. At the laying of the foundation stone, Pugin announced that he would not rest – in an interesting reversal of Southey’s critique – until the cathedral bells ‘drowned out the steam whistle and the proving of the gun barrels.’
But Pugin’s broader response to the state of the industrial city was, of course, his masterpiece Contrasts which contrasted the civic framework and institutional fabric of a ‘Catholic town in 1440’ with ‘the same town in 1840.’ The buildings and institutions of the medieval town present a harmonious and godly community, while the 1840 version exhibits all the faithless utility of an industrialised Victorian city.
What most obviously strikes the eye in the pictures is the contrast between the Church steeples and factory chimneys. The purpose of Contrasts was to show that medieval civic designs not only signified a harmonious, Catholic order but that it also emanated from deeply felt Catholic sentiments.
This was the foundation of Pugin’s Decorated Gothic aesthetic, his driving belief in Christian architecture. Pugin’s Gothicism was, in the words of Rosemary Hill, ‘a sacred style infused with inner truth, an architecture that did not merely evoke “Pleasing associations” but that embodied, in its very fabric, a metaphysical divine reality.’
And the enemy was Utility – the curse of the age. For Thomas Carlyle, the great author, journalist, and polemicist, the societal collapse he thought he saw all around him merely reflected a spiritual malaise. ‘Were we required to characterise this age of ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to call it, not an Heroical, Devotional, Philosophical, or Moral Age, but, above all others, the Mechanical Age…Nothing is now done directly, or by hand; all is by rule and calculated contrivance.’
What Carlyle intimated at was a change in the character of social relations which he attributed to industrial Britain’s loss of faith. With the Industrial Revolution came a new materialist age which was no longer united by any form of communal worship. Just as had happened to France during the Revolution, so Britain during the Industrial Revolution had lost its faith. ‘This is not a Religious age. Only the material, the immediately practical, not the divine and spiritual, is important to us.’

In place of faith, duty or affection inspiring man there was merely the pursuit of pleasure. And what gave the individual most pleasure was monetary gain. Mammon not God governed the industrial city. The philosophy of utilitarianism was the philosophy of urban life. A structured society of God-fearing people had been replaced by a collection of individuals all out for their own.
And it was these ideas about the nature of urban society which determined the shape of Charles Dickens’s greatest satire of urban-industrial life, Hard Times. ‘Coketown’ was such an awful, unnatural environment not primarily because of the physical pollution but because of its spirit. It was the embodiment of Carlyle’s age of machinery; utility stalked the city. Unusually for him, Dickens had great trouble coming up with the title for the book. Amongst the twelve possible options, he toyed with ‘The Grindstone’, ‘Prove It!’, and ‘A Matter of Calculation’ – all hinting at the utilitarian satire which forms the work’s polemical core.
Pugin’s architecture was the design accompaniment to Dickens’s Hard Times. The calling of the Catholic architect was to reconstruct the industrial city in such a fashion as to foster the old corporate spirit of community. A Catholic sensibility – and, with it, a medieval social morality of benign hierarchy in which each social class looked upwards for support – could only be furthered by Catholic architecture: by surrounding the people of Britain with some of the greatest Pointed designs wrought by Christian civilization. For Pugin thought, ‘it must have been an edifying sight to have overlooked some ancient city raised when religion formed a leading impulse in the mind of man, and when the honour and worship of the Author of all good was considered of greater importance than the achievement of the most lucrative commercial speculation.’ And through his churches, cathedrals, convents, monasteries, schools, and numerous houses, Pugin aimed to achieve just that.
But this was neither nostalgia nor the faux¬-medievalism of the Eglinton tournament: this was a forceful conviction that the ideals and values of the medieval, Christian past had something to offer the irreligion and atomism of the modern age. That was why Pugin – always hurrying to meet clients along the expanding railway network – was never afraid of the benefits of modernity. ‘There is no reason in the world,’ Pugin argued, ‘why noble cities, combining all possible convenience of drainage, water-courses, and conveyance of gas, may not be erected in the most consistent and yet Christian character.’ And so too with his growing enthusiasm for interior design. His true principles, as Rosemary Hill suggests, ‘had developed beyond antiquarian revivalism to embrace “any modern invention which conduces to comfort, cleanliness or durability.’ So at The Grange at Ramsgate there was plate glass rather than Gothic leaded lights; there were water closets and bidets. The intention was no longer to transport the inhabitants ‘back to the 15th Century’ but to show them the nineteenth century in a new light.
But, of course, the real irony of Pugin’s relationship with the modern was that a man who drew inspiration from the 15th century would underpin much architectural philosophy of the 20th century. For Pugin’s guiding principle that, ‘there should be no features about a building which are not necessary for convenience, construction, or propriety’, and that ‘all ornament should consist of enrichment of the essential construction of the building’ – seen to such effect in the Palace of Westminster – became one of the central tenets of modernism.

PUGIN TODAY
So where does all that leave Pugin today, in our modern world? First of all, a belief in the importance of ideas in architecture: a profound conviction that ideology, faith, and meaning was embedded in clock towers, arched ambulatories, high crested roofs and lintels. And that, as such, architecture deserved to be debated: a battle of styles was a good thing; rather than just the bureaucratic, corporate inevitablism of so much modern design. For Pugin, architecture could never be a trade – it constituted an altogether grander calling.
Secondly, a sense that cities matter – if there is something wrong with our cities, then there is something wrong with ourselves. In a complicated, modern, urbanised world, city planning was important – that civility, fellowship, humanism, and faith followed the design of buildings along clear Christian principles. And even in our secular age, that must translate into a broader belief in the beneficial results of good design, particularly in high-pressure urban environments with our modern mix of faiths, ethnicities, residents and businesses.
Thirdly, a respect for the past. Pugin was not particularly interested in restoration; he was a new build kind of man. But he did have an abiding admiration for the wisdom of his forebears and the social impulses that underpinned those designs. At a time of such progress and improvement, his was a voice that allowed medievalism to inform modernity.
And that is why the great age of progress was festooned in monuments to the past. At a time of such remarkable, urgent change the aesthetic of the day drew upon the long lost past.
Pugin’s legacy – in Manchester, Birmingham, London, and Stoke-on-Trent – was and is the fabric of the Victorian city. And in our own era of perhaps equal and unnerving change, the power of Pugin’s urban vision still speaks to us. In Stoke-on-Trent and Westminster; in ST1 and SW1.

On Tuesday, 6th December 2011, I delivered the Speaker’s 1911 Centenary Lecture.The subject was Tony Benn, a Puritan in Parliament.

A transcript of the speech can be downloaded here.

You can also watch the speech on the BBC iPlayer here.

I was honoured to deliver the Peterloo Legacy Lecture on Friday, 12th August 2011.  In the context of recent events, it was an interesting opportuity to explore the history, culture and politics of a society which, on the 16th August 1819, saw 15 people killed and 650 injured whilst protesting for democratic reform.

The full speech can be downloaded here or by going to www.tristramhunt.com/web/Peterloo.pdf

I had the great honour of delivering the 23rd Annual Raymond Williams lecture at the prestigious Wedgwood College in Barlaston. A copy of my speech is available at www.tristramhunt.com/RaymondWilliams.doc or you can read a transcript below.

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‘The Idea of Equality’

23^rd Annual Raymond Williams

Wedgwood College, Barlaston, Stoke-on-Trent

 

Thank you. It is a pleasure to be invited here to give this lecture.

It is also a great honour to be giving a lecture in the name of Raymond Williams, one of the great academic all-rounders of the 20^th century and undoubtedly a leviathan of the left’s intellectual history. In Culture and Society, his great work of 1958, he wrote that ‘the only inequality that is evil is inequality that denies the essential equality of being.’

In the course of this lecture, I hope very much, to argue for an understanding of equality of which, Raymond would approve.

In 2009, Professors Richard G Wilkinson and Kate Pickett published The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, contributing a new phrase to the political lexicon in ‘Evidence Based Politics’ and generating a crescendo of acclaim and controversy.

It demonstrated a significant correlation between levels of social inequality and no fewer than 11 major health and social problems:  the more unequal the society, the more likely they are to suffer from the corrosive effects of these problems. In short, equal societies are healthier, happier, more resilient, better educated and enjoy greater levels of social cohesion and well-being.    

 

Irrespective of the inherent complexity of moving from striking correlation to definite causation, the breadth and volume of the evidence on show cannot be denied. It is undoubtedly one of the most arresting pieces of political science research of our era and provides a significant shot in arm for those of us committed to creating a fairer, more equal society.

But if recent political history tells us anything it is that redistribution and public investment, in and of itself, will not guarantee a more equal society. To avoid the mistakes of the past, politicians must affirmatively answer one of the most enduring questions in the history of political thought: equality of what?  Precisely what is it, that we should be equalising?

This lecture has been billed as ‘The Idea of Equality – from the perspective of a historian and a biographer of Engels.’ However, perhaps a more accurate title would be ‘The Future of Equality’ – from the perspective of a historian and a biographer of Engels.  

Because, as a response to the insights of The Spirit Level and an answer the ‘Equality of What’ question, I propose to explore an unlikely alliance between the life and work of Friedrich Engels and the contemporary egalitarian philosophy of the Nobel Prize winning, Indian economist, Amartya Sen.

We begin, appropriately enough, with Engels.

 

‘If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich’

At the dawn of the new Millennium, the Canadian political philosopher, G.A Cohen published a collection of essays entitled, ‘If You’re an Egalitarian, How come You’re so Rich?’ written, not altogether without irony, from underneath the elegant spires of All Souls College, Oxford.    

Cohen’s main argument was that egalitarian principles of justice cannot be divorced from an underlying commitment to an egalitarian ‘ethos’; that it is not enough for egalitarians to simply wait for the creation of maximally just, egalitarian institutions. Rather a true commitment to equality must manifest itself at the level of personal moral choices. Individual behaviour, particularly when it involves satiating the desires of western capitalist excess, should be modified accordingly.

It is telling that the publication of this work effectively marked the end of Cohen’s long standing commitment to Marxism in favour of an idiosyncratic version of ‘luck egalitarian’ analytical philosophy – the belief that inequalities in how well off people are, are only permissible when they are caused by the responsible moral choices people make and not when they are caused by the unchosen, circumstances of luck, such as the conditions we are born into and even the individual talents we possess.

However, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels taught their followers to scorn all forms of moralising socialism. They argued that capitalism was bound to collapse under its own economic contradictions and that the abundance that would reign in the new, post-capitalist era would render questions of distributive justice irrelevant. For Engels, this was a particularly convenient position. He was the first, the greatest, and perhaps the most unapologetic champagne communist.

In 1890, just over 100 years before Cohen would publish his repudiation of such behaviour, Engels celebrated his 70^th birthday. He boasted to Laura Lafargue, the daughter of his old friend Marx, that ‘We kept it up till half past three in the morning and drank, besides claret, sixteen bottles of champagne – that morning we had 12 dozen oysters.’

This was not an isolated act of indulgence.  During the 1870s his Primrose Hill home had become a popular venue for socialist excess. One of his communist contemporaries, August Babel, recalled that   ‘On Sundays, Engels would throw open his house. On those puritanical days when no merry men can bear life in London, Engels’s house was open to all, and no one left before 2 or 3 in the morning.’ 

Pilsner, claret, and vast bowels of Maitrank – a May wine flavoured with woodruff – were consumed while Engels sang German folk-songs or drunkenly recited The Vicar of Bray. 

But Engels’s personal exuberance was not a reflection of a deeply conflicted temperament or a highly developed ability to compartmentalise his different roles. Engels did not lurch between bouts of sustained hedonistic debauchery and intervening periods of reproach or self-flagellation, for betraying his ideals.  For Engels, there was no conflict to resolve, no betrayal to reconcile. Rather his exuberance was an expression of his political ideology itself: an almost Rabelaisian belief in the capacity of socialism to fulfil human pleasure. It was an attractive, seductive approach to progressive politics, an approach which has, for the most part, been abandoned.   

The Kingdom of Freedom

Perhaps it was a reaction to a relentlessly prim childhood.  The son of a reactionary, God-fearing capitalist, Engels was brought up in the Rhineland town of Barmen destined to join the family textile firm.  But it was not long before the prospect of Calvinist piety and bourgeois self-reserve quickly lost its appeal. Sent as an apprentice to the more free-wheeling city of Bremen, Engels’s thirst for enjoyment quickly became apparent.  ‘We now have a complete stock of beer in the office; under the table, behind the stove, behind the cupboard, everywhere are beer bottles,’  he wrote to his sister Marie before going on to describe his hectic diary of dinner engagements, Beethoven concerts and fencing duels. 

In Berlin, where he was sent for military training, the partying continued as Engels fell in with the notorious Doctor’s Club of heavy-drinking, hard-philosophising Young Hegelians.  They smashed up beer cellars, poured over pornography and then debated the errors of Hegelian idealism long into the night. 

With the wine went the women.  Late in life, Engels would pen a celebrated tract – The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State – ridiculing the bourgeois hypocrisy of marriage and urging a more relaxed system of partner swapping and communal child-rearing.  He would also condemn prostitution as ‘the most tangible exploitation – one directly attacking the physical body – of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie.’

But he exhibited no such reservations in the mid-1840s as he indulged his passion for Parisian whores. ‘If I had an income of 5000 francs I would do nothing but work and amuse myself with women until I went to pieces,’ he wrote to the more monogamous Marx.  ‘If there were no Frenchwomen, life wouldn’t be worth living.  But so long as there are grisettes, well and good!’

By this time Marx and Engels had joined intellectual forces and one of their first works, The German Ideology, deftly elucidated communism’s promise of human pleasure.  As competition and private property gave way to communism men would regain ‘control of exchange, production and the mode of their mutual relationship.’ ‘The alienation between men and their products’ would dissolve.

In contrast to capitalist society, where the division of labour forced each man into ‘a particular, exclusive sphere of activity,’ communist society would regulate production and thereby ensure that ‘nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes … to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner.’  It was a leap, from the kingdom of necessity, to the kingdom of freedom. 

But just as that promise seemed tangible, Engels was hurled back to the rigid necessity of middle-class respectability.  After the failure of the1848-9 European revolutions, Marx retreated to the British Museum to write Das Kapital forcing Engels to take up a job at his father’s Manchester mill.  For the next twenty years he lived a double-life as cotton lord and revolutionary communist, finding the smug, dissenting prosperity of mid-Victorian Manchester a grinding bore. 

First, there was the unavoidable contradiction of his position as a mill-owning Marxist – ‘most beastly of all is the fact of being a bourgeois who actively takes sides against the proletariat.’ Then there was the provincial philistinism of a city wholly given over to cotton and cash.  ‘I drink rum and water and spend my time ‘twixt twist and tedium,’ he wrote in 1851.  Worst of all, ‘For six months past I have not had a single opportunity to make use of my acknowledged gift for mixing a lobster salad – quelle horreur; it makes one quite rusty.’

With his nose for the good life, Engels found his release from the banality of the sewing thread business in riding out with the Cheshire Hounds alongside the Marquis of Grosvenor and Earl of Crewe.  Indeed, Engels stands as the revolutionary Left’s greatest blood-sports enthusiast, a patron of hare-coursing as well as fox-hunting.  ‘On Saturday I went out fox-hunting – seven hours in the saddle,’ he wrote back to Marx, festering away in Bloomsbury.  ‘That sort of thing always keeps me in a state of devilish excitement for several days; it’s the greatest physical pleasure I know.’ 

But such aristocratic excitement was entirely compatible with Engels’s political philosophy.  Both he and Marx always regarded the elimination of all social and political inequality as Utopian nonsense.  Engels, the Bohemian aficionado of the high life, was never a Leveller.  ‘Living conditions will always evince a certain inequality which may be reduced to a minimum but never wholly eliminated,’ he wrote. And perhaps most damningly, ‘The concept of a socialist society as a realm of equality is a one-sided French concept.’ 

Marx was equally adamant when it came to the issue of equality. According to Terry Eagleton’s new book, ‘He [Marx] was a sworn enemy of uniformity.’ In fact, he regarded equality as a bourgeoisie value. He saw it as a reflection in the political sphere of what he called ‘exchange-value’, in which one commodity is levelled in value with another. He regarded social levelling as ‘a negation of the entire worth of culture and civilisation’ And in the Critique of the Goethe Programme, he also rejected the idea of an equality of income, since people have uniquely different needs.

Instead, both Marx and Engels believed in cascading the pleasures of life – food, sex, drink, culture, travel – down to all classes.  Socialism was not a never ending committee meeting, but a life of satiated and unbridled enjoyment.  Occasionally, the British Left has managed to echo this ideal – from Nye Bevan’s reputed ‘nothing too good for the working class’ to Tony Crosland’s hope for ‘brighter and cleaner eating houses, more riverside cafes, more pleasure gardens on the Battersea model, more murals and pictures in public places.’ But for the majority of the 20^th century, the myriad factions that Marx and Engels inspired usually sucked the joie de vivre out of left-wing politics.

Yet more importantly, at least in terms of electoral consequences, 20^th century Labourism neglected serious dialogue about the importance of personal fulfillment, in favour, too often, of talking up the politics of envy.  As we emerge, staggering, from a particularly vicious recession, chastened by the palpably unfair sight of the bankers who caused that recession continuing to pocket large bonuses, there is every danger that this tradition will re-emerge.  This would be a mistake. Throughout the course of this lecture, I aim to show that the left must choose an equality sensitive to personal freedom. It must choose Engels over Cohen.

Labour in Government: Equality of What?  

Greater equality has long been one of the fundamental concerns of those on the left. Writers from within the Labour movement, R.H Tawney, Roy Hattersley and, most influentially of all, Anthony Crossland, all indentified the pursuit of equality – as opposed to public ownership – as the raison d’être of the Labour party.

Yet despite the regular identification of its importance, it is fair to say that little attention has been paid to the ‘Equality of What’ question. As the historian and former Labour cabinet member, Edmund Dell wrote in A Strange Eventful History, his magnum opus on the history of the democratic socialism:

‘The vague objective of greater equality proved to have a longer shelf life than the other objectives of democratic socialism. But equality was never defined and democratic socialists never made a serious attempt to achieve it.’

Dell’s evisceration seemed to have reached a final, resounding conclusion when, in 2009, David Cameron used his conference platform in Manchester to taunt Labour about its record on equality, arguing that the Conservatives were now the party best placed to tackle poverty and inequality. This may, in hindsight, seem faintly incredible but the failings of the coalition should not detract from the legitimacy of the questions that many have posed about Labour’s track record. After all, the financial crisis happened on our watch.

This is not the place for an exhaustive analysis of that record. But key lessons do need to be learned. Labour tolerated too much financial inequality and we were never clear enough about the sort of equality we should be pursuing.  Neither did we develop a rationale for prioritising which inequalities we most cared about addressing.

The broad answer to the ‘Equality of What’ question, provided by both Brown and Blair, was that Labour was concerned about ‘equality of opportunity’ as opposed to ‘equality of outcome’; that all should be afforded an equal opportunity to fulfil their potential, in the way that they see fit. But a clear strategy for mitigating the obvious existing inequalities of opportunity, other than through redistribution and public service investment, was never developed. We overlooked the corrosive effect of disempowerment; that public goods and resources are nothing without the power and the freedom to use them. Or to put it differently, it is no good giving somebody a tax credit if they feel disconnected from society and unable to access basic services.

This, coupled with a culture of obfuscation when it came to advertising the Governments redistributive aims, limited the effectiveness of its equality policy agenda. It also undermined the political case in support of it. 

It is far too simplistic to suggest that Labour completely failed on equality. As James Purnell has drily noted, ‘For a Government that was thought not to care about inequality, we certainly spent a lot of money on it.’ Labour’s record is frequently judged using unsophisticated resource based metrics such as the Gini coefficient. Such measures do not adequately capture non-cash public goods, such as the quality of education, health or the environment. On this measure, our significant investment in better public services is seen as irrelevant to levels of inequality. Clearly this is flawed; the pervasive, multi-faceted nature of equality’s impact is, after all, surely one of the main insights of The Spirit Level.  But, if you adopt an approach that tackles equality purely through basic resource redistribution, then it is perhaps no surprise that resource redistribution becomes the only measurement upon which you are judged.   

But how, philosophically, did Labour arrive at this juncture? I will turn now, to explore the austere worlds of Cohen, Sen and, somewhat inevitably, John Rawls. For if Labour’s idea of equality was confused then it was only reflective of the concurrent wider disagreements in academic political philosophy.

Rawlsian Equality of Opportunity

 

Without doubt John Rawls’s 1971 tome, A Theory of Justice, is the most important work of political philosophy for many decades, if not centuries. And at its heart it is an egalitarian theory.

Cohen, one of Rawls’s staunchest critics, wrote that ‘among what contributes to the greatness of A Theory of Justice, and of the entire Rawlsian achievement, is that, to put the matter as Hegel would have done had he agreed with me, John Rawls grasped his age, or, more precisely, one large reality of his age, in thought. In his work, the politics of liberal [in the American sense] democracy and social [in the European sense] democracy rises to a consciousness of itself.’

And indeed, one can view the Rawlsian project as partially an attempt to synthesise and reconcile the egalitarianism of European Social Democracy with the economic efficacy of free-market, Anglo-Saxon, liberal capitalism.

As such, despite its magnitude and the reverence within which it is held, it is a work riddled with internal tensions and, as a consequence, has been the recipient of much criticism from both the right and left. But to truly understand the debate, we have to go a step further back and apprehend the context into which Rawls crash-landed in 1971.

This was the dispute between classical egalitarians, such as Bernard Williams, and Libertarian theorists like Robert Nozick. Williams maintained the belief that egalitarian theories must distribute resources only according to need. For example, he maintained that it was a necessary truth that ‘the proper ground of the distribution of health care is health need.’

Nozick’s famous reductio ad absurdum retort is that if this is a necessary truth then it seems that, following the same logic, the premise, ‘the proper ground of the distribution of barbering care is barbering need,’ is also a necessary truth.  Of course this seems preposterous – in the case of ‘barbering care’ we feel that providers of the services should have a stake in any decision about who gets to use them. Nozick’s argument is that the same ought to be true even of health care providers. Why should they be forced to respond to need, rather than to criteria such as the highest bidder?

And so, pre-Rawls, academic political philosophy seemed perpetually ensnared in this tit-for-tat battle of assertion and counter assertion between egalitarian and libertarian theorists. It was if they were continually caught between the rock of freedom and the hard place of equality, unable to truly reconcile the strong intuitive appeals of each in a single theory. The false dichotomy that this presented had particularly negative political consequences for the left, as the right postured, effectively, as the true protectors of freedom.

Rawls response was not to argue for flat equality of outcome. His ‘first principle of justice’ is a commitment to the same equality of opportunity that exercised New Labour.  But to combat opportunity inequalities he proposed a second redistributive principle, the difference principle. The difference principle tolerates inequalities, provided that they benefit the most disadvantaged members of society. The whole point is to permit some incentives for individuals to be more productive, but link that to the benefit of all.  Crudely put, this means bigger salaries for socially useful work. 

 

Sen: Equality of Capabilities

 

Yet we have seen from first-hand experience that the pursuit of equality of opportunity only through a redistribution of resources does not sufficiently advance the cause of creating a society of equals.  But in the recent work of the Amartya Sen there is a more promising answer to the equality of what question: equality of capabilities. 

Sen was particularly exercised by Rawls’s answer to the question of what Cohen calls, ‘the currency of equality’ – what, do we measure redistributed well-being in? For Rawls, well-being should be indexed in terms of specific ‘primary goods,’ such as rights, liberties, opportunities, income and wealth. However, Sen was mildly horrified that Rawls’s ideal theory of justice seemed at best ambivalent to the plight of disabled people, who, assuming they were in possession of the primary goods and were not, by that measure, the most disadvantaged member of the whole society, would receive no extra help to lead a fulfilling life.

Sen’s suggestion is that when we come to evaluate whether or not someone is deserving of state support, when we make an assessment on how well that individual’s life is going, we should measure their capability to function and their ability fulfil themselves. In other words, we should not be measuring the resources a person possesses, or the levels of welfare, utility or pleasure they can derive from certain actions or life choices. Instead, we should be measuring what a person, in Sen’s words, ‘can do or be’ – whether they can obtain sufficient nourishment, enjoy a decent life-span and good health, acquire meaningful work, possess self-respect and so on.  A capability then, is the freedom to achieve particular functioning’s of a meaningful life, and are, Sen contends, what we should be equalising.

The focus on capabilities can be seen, as indeed Sen does himself, as a natural extension and updating of Rawls’s concern with primary goods. Certainly the two approaches are close philosophical cousins. However there are four subtle, but important differences. 

Firstly, in shifting attention from goods to what goods do to human beings, Sen recasts the notion of what it means to be disadvantaged or advantaged in society so that it is less associated with resources and more associated with empowerment. ‘Rawls takes primary goods as the embodiment of advantage, rather than taking advantage to be a relationship between persons and goods. As Labour found out the hard way – public goods, or resources, are nothing without the power to use them.

Secondly, Sen’s theory is more pluralist than Rawls’s. Sen suggests that Rawl’s theory might be adequate ‘were human beings very like each other.’ However ‘there is evidence that the conversion of goods to capabilities varies from person to person substantially, and the quality of the former may be still be far from the quality of the latter.’ Or in other words, people require different levels of resources to fulfil their basic, more varied capabilities. But in using basic capabilities as the benchmark for equality, Sen also avoids the well known philosophical problem of ‘expensive tastes.’ Resources would not be redistributed to those, like Engels, who ‘have to be deluged in champagne and buried in caviar to bring them to a normal level of utility, which you and I get from sandwich and beer.’ People are free to pursue these expensive tastes, but the state should not subsidise them.

Thirdly, Sen’s conception contains within it a particular theory of responsibility. If one has the capability to achieve functioning, but neglects to do so, then one is responsible for one’s own situation and ceases to possess a legitimate claim against others for help.  This clearly contrasts with Bernard Williams’ paradigmatic claim that egalitarian distribution is applied according to need and can broadly be seen as a response to Libertarian objections, ranging from Nozick’s ‘distribution of barbering care’ to the Daily Mail’s attacks on benefit scroungers. 

Finally, his approach focuses on positive freedom. Positive freedom is a person’s ability to be or do something. This contrasts with negative freedom, the approach favoured by the right, which focus exclusively on not-interference in other peoples lives. Sen’s commitment to positive freedom is deeply personal, having witnessed thousands die in the Bengal famine of 1943. The negative freedom of the famine victims’ freedom to buy food was not affected. However, because they lacked the positive freedom to actively do anything they still starved. They lacked the power or the capability to exercise their freedom.

 

The Future of Equality

But how does all of this tie in with The Spirit Level and the lifestyle of Fredrich Engels? 

The first thing to say is that many people have mistakenly read The Spirit Level as being a political or a moral argument for the inherent value of equality. It is of course, neither. Rather, the conclusion of The Spirit Level is that equality is of profound instrumental value. It is valuable because it grants us better access to a staggering range of other desirable outcomes. More equal societies do not ‘do better’ simply because they are more equal. They ‘do better’ because they have higher rates of child wellbeing, or educational attainment, or social mobility, or levels of social trust and cohesion. 

Such multi-faceted problems require complex policy solutions; to reduce the focus of equality to abstract resource based measures such as the Gini coefficient is to miss the point and the real target of political concern entirely. Money remains important; its ability to enable people to expand their choices, horizons and opportunities should not be understated. However, beginning with Marx’s critique of commodification, the left has always argued, rightly, that everything of value cannot be reduced to money or measured by price. Sen’s capabilities theory of equality is helpful in encouraging us to consider a broader, more pluralistic, range of factors that enable people’s lives to go well.

And Engels? Once more, an insight from the Spirit Level is instructive. This time however, I turn to a particularly astute comment contained within the foreword:

“Yet unless it is possible to change the way most people see the societies they live in, this theory will be stillborn. Public opinion will only support the necessary political changes if something like the perspective we outline in this book permeates the public mind.”

 

This political challenge is not to be underestimated. To create a more equal Britain, a Britain that empowers people and works to create a society based on reciprocal, co-operative relationships, it is vital that we speak the language of personal freedom and individual aspiration. Whilst we acknowledge that an understanding of our shared fate and a more equal society benefits all, we must allow all individuals the real, positive freedom to pursue their idea of the good life. Otherwise, we will fall into precisely the false dichotomy that characterised pre-Rawlsian political philosophy and allow the right to monopolise the value of freedom, claiming it as their own. 

 

Conclusion      

 

It is often said that the relationship between contemporary political philosophy and the more prosaic realities of ‘real’ politics, is an oblique one.

 Yet it is almost possible to trace the recent history of British politics through concurrent developments in political philosophy. Most explicitly of course was Margaret Thatcher’s, ‘Hayek in the handbag’ government, with the economics of Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and the libertarian philosophy of Robert Nozick driving the deregulated, neoliberal agenda.

For Rawls’s reaction, and his attempt to infuse free-market liberal capitalism with European Social Democracy, read New Labour and the ‘third-way’; espousing, contra the libertarian ravages of the Thatcherite Neoliberals, an equality of opportunity, yet ultimately unable to mitigate against inequality with anything more sophisticated than resource redistribution.

This brings us to the current crossroads. It is clear that the coalition government, ideologically, offers merely a rehash of the libertarian Neoliberal ideology. If not Thatcherite, then at least Thatcher-lite.

On the left, we face our perennial challenge: how to offer a new political programme that offers greater social justice without restricting richer personal fulfilment to the point that it begins to impinge upon freedom.  The Spirit Level shows that at the heart of this programme must be a commitment to greater income equality. However, more importantly this commitment must be a component part of a far more sophisticated approach to equality in general.

In Amartya Sen’s capability theory, we have an approach that can focus us on the range of factors that empower people to lead a fulfilled and meaningful life, whilst at the same time articulating a positive conception of freedom that contrasts strongly with the limited sense that the right understand freedom.  An approach to equality that is simultaneously more empowering, responsible, pluralistic and that chimes with a chimes with our belief in empowering people with enough positive freedom to pursue their own sense of fulfilment. It is a theory that makes a strong and authentic affirmation to equality but one that would not preclude Engels’ enjoyment of claret, hunting with the Cheshire hounds or even purchasing a fine Black Jasper Vase, from here at Wedgwood.

I recently had the pleasure of delivering the Keir Hardie lecture in Merthyr Tydfil. You can download a copy of my lecture by going to www.tristramhunt.com/KeirHardie.doc, or read a transcript below.

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It is a great pleasure to be here, and particularly brave of you to invite me here given my role former role as a biographer of Friedrich Engels.  Engels and Hardie did not, it is fair to say, see eye to eye.  After the success of the London Dock Strike of 1889, Engels finally convinced himself that it was worth engaging with the British Labour movement, rather than his habitual stance of lofty dismissal.  He was excited by the likes of Johns Burns and Will Thorne from the London Trade Union movement, but after the formation of the Independent Labour Party he also realised the necessity of meeting Keir Hardie.  As Engels argued in 1893, ‘Since the bulk of its members are undoubtedly first class, since its centre of gravity lies in the provinces rather than in that hive of intrigue, London, and its programme is substantially the same as our own,’ it was worth thinking about joining forces.  So, Hardie began to attend that ‘Mecca of international socialism’, Engels’s house in Primrose Hill, North London where, on a Sunday, the cream of European socialism would gather. 

But, typically, within a matter of weeks, as a result of some disinformation from the vexatious figure of Edward Aveling, Engels had turned against Hardie, accusing him of demagogic ambitions, collaboration with the Tories, and financial irregularities.  By January 1895, Engels had grown out of love with the ILP and was dismissing Hardie as ‘a cunning, crafty Scot, a Pecksniff and arch-intriguer, but too cunning, perhaps, and too vain.’   Characteristically, Hardie himself was oblivious to this withdrawal of favour and remained adamant that both Engels and Marx would have endorsed the political development of the ILP.    

For an historian and Labour MP such as myself, Hardie is such a rich topic today: we could talk about Welsh home rule in light of the recent referendum; we could talk of the nature of the Labour movement beyond the confines of the Labour Party and how we recapture our own history of the Big Society; we could talk about the romanticism of Hardie’s socialism, and how our own brand of managerialism only managed in recent years to lose this inspiring impulse; we could even dwell on Hardie’s great political pragmatism, his disavowal of the limitations of party politics, and complex relationship with Liberalism. 

There is much we could  get our teeth into, but instead I wish instead to focus on Hardie’s relationship with a man he neither knew nor met, but one whose work had as powerful an influence on the development of the Labour movement in the 20th century.  This year we commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the death of Robert Noonan, or Tressell, the author of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, who was laid to rest in a pauper’s grave in Liverpool, trying to flee the country for a better life.  The novel he left behind – of a group of painters and decorators in Mugsborough, foolishly working to keep the capitalist state functioning and resisting the calls to socialism of their colleague Frank Owen – would convert thousands to socialism.  ‘Go into any meeting room of the working-class movement in Britain,’ wrote a contributor to the Marxist Quarterly in 1955, ‘and you will probably find at least one man present, who could say: “That book brought me into the movement.  That book made me a convinced socialist.  That book altered the whole course and direction of my life.”’ Eric Blair (George Orwell) was alerted to it by a conspiratorially friendly Leeds branch-librarian.  Jack Jones came across the book as ‘a young apprentice in Liverpool and it had a profound impression on me.  It also had a profound impression on many, many workmen in my time when I was an apprentice and since.’

Although, famously, not the girlfriend of the Sheffield socialist and future Prime Minister Harold Perkins in Chris Mullins’s great satire, A Very British Coup.  ‘In the front he had written with a red felt pen, “To a slightly Tory lady in the hope that she will see the light.”’  Molly was not overwhelmed by the gift.  ‘She struggled through the first 50 pages and then gave up.’

What I would like to do this evening, briefly, is dwell on some of the intellectual currents behind this work and to see where the socialism of The Ragged Trousered Philantropists fits in, if at all, with the socialism of Hardie.  For one of the great features of the novel – as a reflection of the era in which it was produced – is the multiplicity of socialisms on display in its pages.  The 1890s and 1900s saw a riot of ideas about the meaning and nature of socialism.  And while Slyme described socialism as a combination of atheism, materialism, and free love; Tressell offered a different view: everything from rigid Marxism to utopian socialism via Ruskin and Morris.  Tressell described one of the ambitions of his book as an attempt to show what socialism means and this continues to be one of the major attractions of the work.

As Ken Morgan wrote, for Hardie, ‘There was no finite form of socialism. It was constantly evolving with the growing complexity and size of modern industrial society. Either state socialism or free, voluntary association might prove a viable system.’

But what I hope to prove is that we should have more faith – and I use that word advisedly – in Hardie than Noonan; in ‘Trapper,’ as Keir Hardie’s nickname went, rather than ‘Tressell’ – Robert Noonan’s nickname and then penname. 

Let me begin Tressell’s accounts of socialism, with one of the most dominant ideologies of the 20th century but one which, in the early 1900s, had highly limited influence. 

John Nettleton described his initial encounter The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists thus.  ‘I first heard it when I was on a ship.  These few pages [the celebrated chapter 21 explaining the Great Money Trick] are still done at branch meetings and they still are done in what they call the ‘hut’ at building sites whenever they’re rained off, because it is as relevant today as the day he wrote it.  I know lads who have got that off by heart.  And every new apprentice who ever comes on the building site on the Liverpool Cathedral, that’s his first lesson.  And he learns that before he learns about the trade; he learns that and that’s the way it should be.’

Frank Owen’s explanation of the Great Money Trick was, of course, his go at popularising Karl Marx’s theory of surplus value.  For Marx’s greatest achievement was not a prescription of future society but one of the most clear-headed, brilliant analyses of the mechanics of capitalism.  And at its crux stood the theory of surplus value (which Engels regarded as Marx’s second monumental discovery after historical materialism), which was the Alchemist’s equation for explaining precisely how class exploitation occurs in a capitalist economy.  For Marx, the enforced sale of the worker’s labour-power for less than the exchange-value of the commodities produced by his labour-power was the ratchet by which the bourgeoisie were progressively enriched and the proletariat steadily alienated from his own labour and humanity.    This mode of production was unnatural, historically transient and violently inequitable and the great hope of liberation promised by Das Kapital was that this form of capitalist iniquity would be destroyed by a class conscious proletariat.

These were the esoteric concepts which Tressell so masterfully put names, faces, and places to.  How much easier it was to understand Owen’s pounds and papers than the intricacies of surplus value. 

We know Tressell was a member of Henry Hyndman’s SDF – an organisation which Friedrich Engels displayed a scarcely concealed contempt for – and he probably learned much of his crude Marxist economics from there.  Das Kapital was working its way into British political circles from the late 1880s – mainly thanks to French rather than German editions – but also due to Hyndman’s popularisation.  But beyond the money trick – and its explanation of how the capitalist system necessarily robbed the workers of the full fruits of their labour – one can clearly see other Marxist strains throughout the book.

In his lunch-time lectures to his fellow painters and decorators, Owen begins his critique with a radical cry against 1066 and the ‘Norman Yoke’ which transferred public property into private hands.  But his is a supremely materialist, Marxist interpretation of the levers of the past:  Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries only further entrenched the inequalities of ‘landlordism’ before the Industrial Revolution ushered in modern class inequalities. 

But The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is, in many ways, a negation of Marxism: for revolution to occur, a sense of working class consciousness – a realization of the historical function of the proletariat – is necessary.  Unfortunately, the management structure employed by Rushton & Co. went a long way to answering Ross McKibben’s famous question, “Why was there no Marxism in Great Britain?”  There could be little more effective deterrent to class consciousness than the continual struggle for survival instilled by Misery and Rushton, the decorators’ employers.  With all workers at daggers drawn fearing the sack, there could never be any question of solidarity. For one of the great, humbling humanities of the book is Tressell’s stark question:

If you, reader, had been one of the hands, wld you have slogged?  Or wld you have preferred to starve & see your family starve?  If you had been in Crass’s place, wld you have resigned rather than do such dirty work?

As Jon Cruddas put it in a recent lecture in Liverpool, Tressell does not judge.  He blames the system rather than the sinners. His is a more generic working class experience – fragmented and localised – small scale, not unionised, prevented from an awareness of class consciousness by a daily struggle to survive.   A simple story of a small town, ordinary men, ordinary lives. Painful experience, loss of honour, loss of dignity, loss of a meaningful life.

Central to the Marxist analysis was the alienation of the worker from his labour.  Man was reduced from an autonomous personality in control of their productive capacity to a proletariat with no sense of their species being and at the whim of an exploitative bourgeoisie.  In his later years, John Ruskin, aesthete and founder of the Guild of St. Matthew, shared precisely those sentiments.  In his own epic, The Stones of Venice, he demands: ‘And the great cry that rises from our manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace blast, is all in very deed for this, — that we manufacture everything there except men; we blanch cotton, and strengthen steel, and refine sugar, and shape pottery; but to brighten, to strengthen, to refine, or to form a single living spirit, never enters into our estimate of advantages.’

And there is little doubt that Tressell’s socialism was heavily indebted to the thought of Ruskin and his wayward protégé William Morris.  For Robert Noonan always regarded himself not as a day labourer, but as a skilled artisan in the pre-industrial tradition.  His vision of the craftsman honouring his skill by carrying out work to the best of his ability powerfully informed his social and political views.  One fellow painter described him as, ‘a brilliant scenic painter and signwriter … He loved Art for Art’s sake.  He shared with William Morris and Walter Crane a desire to give to the world the best that was in him, so that the beauty of his work should be an inspiration to all in striving for that which is most beautiful … Nothing distressed him more than the scamping of his work.  He, like the rest of us, was not permitted to do his best.  Everything was sacrificed to the god of profit.’

That tradition of socialism – drawn from Ruskin and traceable back to Thomas Carlyle – which values the innate dignity of labour is fundamental to the book.  Like Marx and Engels, Ruskin and Morris blamed the Industrial Revolution for the collapse of craftsmanship and the alienation of the individual from his labour.  It was this degradation, as John Ruskin put it, ‘of the operative into a machine’, this alienation of the individual from his labour thanks partly to his separation from the means of production, which destroyed work as a creative enterprise.  Craftsmen were transformed into ‘hands’ suitable only for what William Morris termed ‘slave’s work – mere toiling to live, that we may live to toil.’  This emphasis on the hypocrisy of modern liberty for the English workman is a recurring theme through the book. 

“They were for the most part tame, broken-spirited, poor wretches who contentedly resigned themselves to a life of miserable toil and poverty, and with callous indifference abandoned their offspring to the same fate.  Compared with such as these, the savages of New Guinea or the Red Indians are immensely higher in the scale of manhood.  They are free!  They call no man master; and if they do not enjoy the benefits of science and civilization, neither do they toil to create those things for the benefit of others.”

The Rushton job on ‘The Cave’ is, of course, a terrible symbol of the collapse of that dignified tradition of workmanship.  With cold fury, Tressell highlights the destruction of craftsmanship, and with it the self-respect of the individual workman, which such a profit oriented system demanded.  Scamping, sloshing, and botching are all the employees of Rushton & Co. are allowed to perform.  Those foolish enough to take time over their work or show a degree of pride in the product are swiftly dismissed.  Only Owen’s superior technical skills allow him to hold fast to the values of craftsmanship he had been taught as an apprentice.  When he is given the task of designing and decorating a more elegant section of the house, he approaches the work with almost Ruskinian ardour.  For a brief while, Owen experiences the deep satisfaction of worthwhile labour.  ‘From one till five seemed a very long time to most of the hands, but to Owen and his mate, who was doing something in which they were able to feel some interest and pleasure, the time passed so rapidly that they both regretted the approach of evening.’  Yet this is an exception.  It is the shoddy strictures of capitalism which typically dictate the working day and foster the pervasive unnaturalness of the outwardly wealthy, contented Mugsborough. 

Part of the purpose of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists was to demystify socialism; to suggest it wasn’t all pie in the sky and outline the practicality of its implementation.  And in ‘The Great Oration’ chapter, Barrington spells out in quite some detail the nitty-gritty vision of the Co-operative Commonwealth. 

Here, again, Tressell draws on competing traditions within the socialist cannon to fuse both ethical and economic schools of thought.  Echoing many on the more Puritan wing of the socialist movement, Tressell drew attention to the needless, egregious waste generated by capitalism.  The commercial system created an unnatural demand market for futile, luxury goods while millions went without the basic necessities.  ‘”If you go down town, you will see half a dozen draper’s shops within a stone’s-throw of each other – often even next door to each other – all selling the same things.  You can’t possibly think that all those shops are really necessary?”’

This unedifying diversion of labour and energy would be instantly curtailed in a co-operative commonwealth where full employment and abundance could be secured for all.  The solution was, as the Social Democratic Federation had it on the membership card, ‘The Socialization of Production, Distribution and Exchange.’  The nationalization of the means of production, the forcible return to public ownership of the wealth and property of the people illegally seized over the centuries, would necessarily result in an equitable distribution of all the necessaries of life. And there is no doubt that Barrington’s schema is pretty comprehensive – including mines, railways, canals, ships, shops, restaurants, factories and the establishment of an Industrial Civil Service.

However, Owen was also drawn to the ethical socialism of William Morris who was deeply contemptuous of some of the mechanistic, economic socialism of his fellow ideologues.  Owen followed suit and outlined a socialist vision which was not simply a question of steady labour, state machinery and increased wages.  What socialists wanted, Owen suggested, was not more work, ‘but more grub, more clothes, more leisure, more pleasure and better homes.  They wanted to be able to go for country walks or bicycle rides, to go out fishing or to go to the seaside and bathe and lie on the beach and so forth.’  Unfortunately, the majority ‘often said that such things as leisure, culture, pleasure and the benefits of civilization were never intended for “the likes of us.”’  The co-operative commonwealth of the future would show that it was by generating a deeper sense of spiritual development and human fulfilment. 

Such a critique seems to align two traditions within the socialist tradition: Marx and Engels’s acceptance of modernity – of the value of technology, progress, and innovation, but a criticism that the distribution of property rights meant that such riches were only available for the few.  And, at the same time, the pastoral socialist tradition which was emerging through the work of Robert Blatchford and the Clarion group of socialists – how the deeper riches of nature and society should be shared by all.  This was a tradition of socialism which would later be given voice by Crosland. In his 1956 revisionist classic, The Future of Socialism, he argued for ‘liberty and gaiety in private life, more open-air cafes, brighter and gayer streets at night, later closing hours for public houses, more local repertory theatres, better and more hospitable hoteliers and restaurateurs, brighter and cleaner eating houses, more riverside cafes, more pleasure gardens on the Battersea model, more murals and pictures in public places… and so on ad infinitum’.

If Tressell’s vision of a socialist future seemed to resemble heaven on earth, it was meant to.  For although one of the recurring themes of the novel is the nefarious influence of the Christian church and its markedly unchristian ministers, the socialism which Frank Owen preaches displays a profound religiosity.  As such it was a representative reflection of much late nineteenth century socialist thinking. 

From its first emergence in the credal vacuum of the French Revolution, socialism had proffered itself as a new religion, a new Christianity to fill the void left by the Roman Catholic Church.  The utopian socialists – Charles Fourier, Henri de Saint-Simon, Robert Owen – as well as the Young Hegelians (amongst whom Marx and Engels once counted themselves) turned socialism into a religion of humanity: an ethical philosophy determined to implement harmony and fellowship on earth. 

While Marx and Engels later regrouped under the banner of ‘scientific socialism’, the spiritual tradition within socialism continued through the nineteenth century.  And when socialist politics came alive again in 1880s Britain it did so as an almost religious revival.  Many were drawn to socialism from Nonconformity and the currents of moral Protestantism which were powerfully at work in Britain’s urban centres.  Raphael Samuel once noted the extraordinary affinity between the Salvation Army and the socialist missions of the 1890s.  It was impossible to overestimate, he suggested, both the closeness of socialism’s relation to Christianity and also the way in which socialists conceptualised themselves very much, as late Victorians did, as making war against an evil, contaminating world.

It is this religious context which goes some way to explain the unrelenting zeal of Frank Owen.  For not only is he, in sharp contrast to the official ministers of the church, a true Christian in his charity, forgiveness, and ascetic holiness, he is also best understood as a missionary operating in the darkest, most heathen terrains.  Owen is placed amongst the sensuous, childish working class to bring enlightenment, to promise them the wonders of a socialist ‘civilization.’  There is no sense in this configuration of socialism arising organically from the working class.  Rather, it is the product of leadership, middle-class leadership which is able to bring the philanthropists out of the darkness and into the light.  A situation which becomes all the more apparent with the emergence of the supremely middle-class Barrington as a fellow socialist apostle in the second half of the book. 

There is, I think, no way of avoiding this issue.  For a ‘working-class classic’, the proletariat is cast as condescendingly inert and only able to be aroused politically when the middle-class vanguard descends upon them.  At one point Owen even announces of his fellow workmen, ‘They were the enemy.  Those who not only quietly submitted like so many cattle to the existing state of things, but defended it, and opposed and ridiculed any suggestion to it.’  All for failing to appreciate their class consciousness. 

Needless to say, all of this made the work of conversion a lonely, thankless business – a veritable Pilgrim’s Progress – but Owen regards it as his calling.  It also seems a fairly Old Testament style of induction for when the sheep stray from the path Owen’s fury becomes as consuming as his own accelerating illness.  And it is the sense of weakness within the working class, their moral laxity and failure to appreciate the truth of socialism, which accounts for the pessimism which pervades the work.  But also the chance for revelation which inspires the final chapter, whence 

“Mankind, awaking from the long night of bondage and mourning and arising from the dust wherein they had lain prone so long, were at last looking upward to the light that was riving asunder and dissolving the dark clouds which had so long concealed from them the face of heaven.  The light that will shine upon the world wide Fatherland and illumine the gilded domes and glittering pinnacles of the beautiful cities of the future, where men shall dwell together in true brotherhood and goodwill and joy.”

And I do think it is noteworthy that the book became known as “The Painter’s Bible” – passed around like a samizdat text amongst pioneering socialists like early Christians.

And here, at last, the philosophies of Tressell and Hardie begin to intersect. Hardie too was profoundly influenced by the work of Ruskin and especially, of William Morris whom he called ‘the greatest man whom the Socialist movement has yet claimed in this country.’

And Hardie also draws deep on reserves of an all-consuming, evangelical zeal to inspire his socialism – something which found a natural home here in South Wales, with its proud non-conformist traditions. In a celebrated 1910 speech, Hardie explored the similarities between Labour and Christianity:

“… the impetus which drove me first of all into the Labour movement, and the inspiration which has carried me on in it, as been derived more from the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, than from all other sources combined … To the Socialist and Labour man in particular Christ’s teaching should appeal with irresistible power … The Kingdom in Christ’s mind did not refer to a heaven in the future: the Kingdom of God meant the establishment right here upon earth of a condition of things in which human life would be beautiful and free to develop along Godlike lines … The Labour movement in its very essence is essentially religious.”

As Ken O Morgan has written of Hardie, ‘The march towards the socialist utopia was an eternal one, with the socialist as the human agent in the quest for a terrestrial reflection on the divine life.’ It would be the Kingdom of God on earth, based on universal principles of beauty and perfection, with Hardie as its prophet and evangelist, proclaiming the glory of the Christ that was to be.’

This prophet-like sensibility of Hardie’s was frequently commented on by his contemporaries, As the journalist WB stead remarked of him,

 “Mr. Keir Hardie is one of the few prophets who have found their way into the House of Commons. He belongs to the order of the seers. If the major and minor prophets of the Old Testament and the fisherfolk who became apostles in the New Testament were to rise from their graves and enter the House of Commons; they would probably find themselves more at home in the company of Keir Hardie than in that of any other member of the House. It is his distinction to be a prophet among politicians, and a politician among prophets. And the strange thing is that the prophet has not spoiled the politician, nor the politician the prophet.”

Indeed, Hardie was never above politics – happy to embrace the art of the possible.  Hardie’s trade-union organising background never let him lose sight of the impact small, practical changes could have. He dedicated significant effort to campaigning for incremental reforms such as the eight hour day or wages that were flexibly linked to output levels of production.

He even attempted to forge a pragmatic understanding with the more radical elements of the Liberal Party. But not unlike their Liberal Democrat heirs today, the Victorian Liberals simply could not jettison their commitment to an economic policy that prioritised maintaining the status of capital at the expense of the poor.  Even as the political philosophy of New Liberalism surged, the ideology of the Liberal Party remained incapable of apprehending the brutal social consequences of a doctrinaire, laissez-faire economics.  

Looking at the life and work of Keir Hardie, it is as if the very goal that The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists set out to achieve, to demystify economic socialism and fuse it with the ethical socialist tradition of William Morris and John Ruskin, finds in the figure of Keir Hardie, a unique, embodied expression. 

This connection is, I think, something we have to a certain extent lost in the contemporary Labour party. The academic Mike Kenny has described it as the loss of ‘the vision of radical politics that should sink roots into local soil.’  It speaks of a lost tradition which questions the idea of progress for the sake of progress itself. 

We have stopped telling ourselves the stories behind the political struggles that won equal rights, the welfare state, the national health service, our children’s education; and in more recent times, the minimum wage, peace in Northern Ireland, devolved powers for Scotland and of course here in Wales.  

We are entering profoundly dangerous times, faced by a government that is deliberately destroying the civilizing, progressive achievements of recent decades.  They intend to alter the fabric of the country and, disconnected from the tradition of Ruskin, Morris, Tressall and Hardie, we have weakened our ability to resist them.

But there is a difference between Keir Hardie and Frank Owen that is just as compelling: while Owen patronised the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and sought to convert them to socialism, to lead their fallen souls into the light, Hardie sought to inspire.  His romantic, creed of socialism shared much of Owen’s inspiration, but far more frankly one of fellowship and solidarity, community and belonging.  It was a socialism born of understanding, more than frustration with his peers. 

As Ramsay Macdonald wrote of him, “He was one of the sternest champions which his class has ever produced, and yet his was no class mind. His driving and resisting power was not hate nor any of the feelings that belong to that category of impulse.”

Perhaps this is to be expected of a man who continued to use the sobriquet ‘Trapper’ when writing in the press, in recognition of his 13 years working in manning the trap door that ventilated the mineshaft. 

In 2011, that difference remains important. For all its brilliance, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is a didactic text, dragging the benighted into the truth of socialism.  It ultimately came down to a matter of them understanding reality.  Hardie’s approach was more subtle – yes, powerful, prophetic and insistent, but also rooted in an electoral pragmatism able to compromise with the voters. A compromise motivated first and foremost, by the desire to improve the lives, however incrementally, of labouring people. 

We lost the 2010 General Election, and lost it badly.  As we begin to battle back to office, we must choose the Trapper not Tressell.  Yes, we need to rediscover inspiration of socialism; but also to appreciate that our politics must be based in electoral realities; – and, however frustrating those ragged trousered philanthropists can be, the people are never wrong.

You can download a copy of my speech to the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery on ‘Heritage and Regeneration in The Potteries”.  Download a copy at www.tristramhunt.com/PMAG.doc or read the transcript below.

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Great honour to be here this evening at what A.N. Wilson rightly described as ‘the greatest museum in the world.’  It helps to house the collective memory of The Potteries and, in doing so, preserve the identity and pride of Stoke-on-Trent during periods of great change and trouble.  We are entering another such period with government cuts feeding through to local authorities and thence to museums, and I want to pay tribute to the way in which you are managing those unwelcome decisions. 

And it is the management of the past with which I wish to begin this evening.  As so often, when it comes to thinking about the history of Stoke-on-Trent, my meditations begin with a Fred Hughes column in The Sentinel.  There, Fred made the controversial case for preserving the great, looming, steel gas storage structure that stands on the edge of the new Etruria estate not far from here.  With characteristic eloquence and sophistication, Fred said the structure was an important part of our industrial history and a civic icon in a part of Stoke-on-Trent which has suffered such abrupt transition.  It was a signifier and identifier of the past – and if we lost site of these anchors of memory, then the city would soon enough feel like anywhere and nowhere. 

Needless to say, this provoked a furious response in the letters page.  Some residents wanted to know whether Fred would like to live next to such a dominant landmark; others complained about the large fragments of paint which flaked off it.  But a third correspondent made a deeper point.  Under the letter headline ‘We should not glamorise the past,’ Mr Ian Bradley suggested it was, ‘no wonder that Stoke-on-Trent never gets on the starting line when it comes to attracting inward investment from government organisations.  I cannot believe that anyone could glamorise both the appalling environmental living conditions and the economic need for people to work in Dickensian work places, which was evident across most large cities in the Midlands as recently as 40 years ago.’  Mr Bradley went on to argue that, ‘Stoke-on-Trent needs to have a progressive vision which is attractive to inward investment and therefore might create quality employment & prosperity.  In my opinion the gasholder epitomises the smoke-stack past.’

What I wish to do is respectfully take issue with Mr Bradley and argue that the past, rather than an hindrance to our economic growth, is absolutely fundamental to it.  We should be seeking to exploit Stoke-on-Trent’s heroic past – and those signifiers of it which still exist – much more effectively.  We must begin to think more creatively about heritage and its cultural and economic function and make sure, in these straitened times, we make the past pay for us in the future. 

PERILS OF THE PAST

 

Of course, Mr Bradley is right in one sense – we should not over-glamourise the past.  The way in which Stoke-on-Trent grew during the 19^th century was dangerous, dirty and frequently deadly.  I never like to miss an opportunity to quote Friedrich Engels, and he was particularly scathing about working conditions in The Potteries.  Drawing in testimonies contained in the Children’s Employment Commission, Engels used the pages of his 1845 classic, The Condition of the Working Class in England to describe how children in the ceramics industry are, ‘with scarcely a single exception, lean, pale, feeble, stunted; nearly all of them suffer from stomach troubles, nausea, want of appetite, & many of them die of of consumption.’  ‘But by far the most injurious is the work of those who dip the finished article into a fluid containing great quantities of lead, & often of arsenic, or have to take the freshly-dipped article up with the hand.  The hands & clothings of these workers, adults & children, are always wet with this fluid, the skin softens & falls off under the constant contact with roug objects, so that the fingers often bleed, & are constantly in a state most favourable for the absorption of this dangerous substance.  The consequence is violent pain, & serious disease of the stomach & intestines, obstinate constipation, colic, sometimes consumption, &, most common of all, epilepsy among children.  Among men, partial paralysis of the hand muscles, colic, & paralysis of whole limbs are ordinary phenomenon.’

 

Thus, the great kingdoms of Spode, Doulton, Wedgwood, and Minton were born.  And in our GP surgeries, hospitals, and my own constituency surgery, we are often still battling with the unhealthy legacy of these industries. 

And nor should we kid ourselves that the Industrial Aesthetic was always as beautiful as Fred Hughes might have us believe.  When JB Priestley arrived in The Potteries on his celebrated English Journey in 1934, he was scathing about Stoke-on-Trent’s urban environment:

“I do not know what Nature originally made of it, because nearly all signs of her handiwork have been obliterated.  But man, who has been very thorough here, has not made of it anything that remotely resembles an inland resort … To begin with, it is extremely ugly … The small towns straggle and sprawl in their shabby undress, following the ugly fashion of industrial small towns.  They are neither old and charming nor bright and new, but give the impression of having been hastily put up 70 or 80 years ago, like frontier outposts or mining camps, & then left to be sooted over … the general impression is of an exceptionally mean, dingy provinciality, of Victorian industrialism in its dirtiest & most cynical aspect.’ 

 

This criticism, of course, fed into Priestley’s broader analysis of British society.  In Priestley’s schema there existed contrasting Englands.  The first, the ‘real, enduring England’ of agricultural, rural, predominantly southern England.  The second was the

19thC., industrial England: ‘of coal, iron, steel, cotton, wool, railways; of thousands of rows of little houses all alike, sham Gothic churches, square-faced chapels, Town Halls, M.I.’s, mills, foundries, warehouses, Family and Commercial Hotels, Literary and Philosophical Societies, back-to-back houses, Grill Rooms, railway stations, slag-heaps and “tips”, dock roads, Refreshment Rooms, doss-houses, Unionist or Liberal Clubs, cindery waste ground, mill chimneys, slums, fried-fish shops, public-houses with red blinds.’  And this England, ‘had found a green and pleasant land and had left a wilderness of dirty bricks.  It had blackened fields, poisoned rivers, ravaged the earth, and sown filth and ugliness with a lavish hand ….  What you see looks like a debauchery of cynical greed.’ 

Of course, this was not a particularly novel contention.  The Industrial Revolution and its consequences in cities such as Stoke-on-Trent had its critics from the get-go.  Amongst the most vociferous was John Ruskin, in his great work The Stones of Venice.  ‘And the great cry that rises from all our manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace blast, is all in very deed for this, – that we manufacture there everything except men; we blanch cotton, and strengthen steel, and refine sugar, and shape pottery; but to brighten, to strengthen, to refine, or to form a single living spirit, never enters into our estimate of advantage…’

 

For Ruskin, architecture and design were the reflections of a nation’s morality, faith and purpose.  And he failed to see how you could have good architecture in industrial Britain.  In 1864, Ruskin was invited to judge a design competition for a new Wool Exchange in Bradford.  He turned up to deliver to the merchants and entrepreneurs, civic leaders and municipal worthies a savage sermon.  ‘I do not care about this Exchange because you don’t!’ he began.  He then scolded the audience for their slavish obedience to the ‘great Goddess of “Getting On”’: ‘She has formed, and will continue to form, your architecture, as long as you worship her.’  It was their reverence toward this false idol which had produced the bleak, functional mills dominating Bradford’s cityscape, ‘a quarter of a mile long, with one steam engine at each end, and two in the middle, and a chimney three hundred feet high.’  To punish the city’s moral incapacity, Ruskin then melodramatically refused to judge the entries. ‘You cannot have good architecture merely by asking people’s advice on occasion.  All good architecture is the expression of national life and character; and it is produced by a prevalent and eager national taste, or desire for beauty.’   None of which Bradford, or indeed any other industrial city, seemed to possess.  And so was it any wonder that modern design was in such poor state?  Eventually, Ruskin came to the conclusion that in fact ‘for a city, or cities, such as this no architecture is possible – nay, no desire of it is possible to their inhabitants.’  

Ruskin’s influence was two-fold.  On the one hand, it endowed the modern conservation movement with a guiding ethos.  For Ruskin, buildings were a testament of morality, of something outside of ourselves and part of their wonder was their sheer longevity.  In an industrial age of trains, gas, electricity and vulgarity, the wonder of buildings lay partly in their antiquity: the value of an historic bulding lies in its sheer age, the continuity of its material over time.  “For, indeed, the greatest glory of a building is not in its stones, not in its gold. Its glory is in its Age, and in that deep sense of voicefulness, of stern watching, of mysterious sympathy, nay, even of approval or condemnation, which we feel in walls that have long been washed by the passing waves of humanity.”

The intellectual inheritor of this mantle was the great interior designer, novelist, aesthete and radical socialist, William Morris.  In 1877 – in response to plans for the restoration of Tewkesbury Abbey, Morris set up the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings and so the modern conservationist movement was born. 

For Morris, like Ruskin, progress meant moving beyond the money-wage economy, it meant spurning mass production and specialization, rejecting machinery and the modern institutions of the state.  Old buildings were signs of what freely given, unalienated labour could achieve, celebrations in stone of the pleasure of life as expressed in useful work, the very antithesis of a commodity.  Protection was an act of defiance against capitalism, a defence of pleasure and humanity, a gesture of hope and possibly also of real practical value to generations to come.  In Morris’s socialist future historic buildings are the germs from which a Socialist art wld spring. 

But Ruskin’s other influence was more intriguing.  For, ironically enough, he had had an enormous impact upon popular architectural style in the latter half of the 19^th century.  He transformed Venetian Gothic into a central component of Victorian urban design.   ‘Never’, the art curator Charles Eastlake wrote, ‘has the subject of Gothic architecture been rendered so popular in this country, as for a while it was rendered by the aid of his pen.’   Ruskin himself became horrified by the effect of his work as a tide of Venetian Gothic designs swamped even his house on Denmark Hill.  ‘I have had indirect influence’, he wrote in 1872, ‘on nearly every cheap villa-builder between this and Bromley; and there is scarcely a public house near the Crystal Palace but sell its gins and bitters under pseudo-Venetian capitals copied from the Church of Madonna of Health or of Miracles.  And one of my principal notions for leaving my present house is that it is surrounded everywhere by the accursed Frankenstein monsters of, indirectly, my own making.’

And here in Stoke-on-Trent, of course, we can see that influence at work.  The Wedgwood Memorial Institute in Burslem is, for example, a riotous display of Venetian Gothic design, displaying a clear imprint of Ruskin’s thinking.  The iconography of the pottery industry which illustrates the building is a lovely example of Ruskin’s urge that buildings shld be legible – to read the history and morality of the society that produced the building.  Matthew Rice draws and describes it well in his wonderful new book, The Lost City of Stoke on Trent: ‘With its terracotta panels, mosaics and polychrome brickwork, it is one of the city’s most striking buildings.’ 

And here is the great irony of Ruskin’s legacy.  Those buildings which, to him, signified greed, individualism and immorality do now – in the interval of 150 years – say to us now something rather more noble: the dignity of work, the worth of industry, the pride in manufacturing.  Not symbols of greed, but of a proud, confident urban civilization. 

THE BEAUTY OF STOKE

 

What I so admire about Matthew Rice’s book is his ardour for the city, and his discovery of beauty in the buildings and urban fabric of Stoke-on-Trent.  ‘There is a loveliness about the raw, rude utilitarianism of buildings whose main claim to fame is fitness for purpose,’ he writes of our ceramics architecture.  ‘The super-functionality of these buildings lends them a specific innate architectural dignity without any actual self-conscious architectural input, but despite the purist’s desire for utter and uncluttered functionalism the addition of decoration can raise that industrial building to the sublime.’

As such, be brings to mind the great eulogist of The Potteries, Arnold Bennett.  ‘On a little hill in the vast valley was spread out the Indian-red architecture of Bursley,’ Bennett wrote of Burslem in 1872, ‘tall chimneys and rounded ovens, schools, the new scarlet market, the grey tower of the old church, the high spire of the Evangelical church, the low spire of the church of genuflexion, & the crimson chapels, and rows of little red houses with amber chimney pots, and the gold angel of the blackened town hall topping the whole.’  In 1897, Bennett went further.  ‘If it were an old Flemish town, beautiful in detail and antiquely interesting, one would say its situation was ideal.  It is not beautiful in detail, but the smoke transforms its ugliness into a beauty transcending the work of architects and of time.’

Bennett was writing at the peak of The Potteries, but the majority view was going to belong to Priestley – a growing conviction that the Industrial Revolution was a terrible excrescence, a moment of terrible rupture in the history of Britain.  Take, for instance, J.L. and Barbara Hammond whose The Village Labourer, 1760-1832 and The Town Labourer continued an analysis stressing the human costs of laissez-faire and the rapaciousness of industrial capitalism.  ‘The history of England,’ they wrote, ‘at the time discussed in these pages reads like a history of civil war … Surely, never since the days when populations were sold into slavery did a fate more sweeping overtake a people than the fate that covered the hills and valleys of Lancashire and the West Riding with … factory towns.’  As they described it, the Industrial Revolution created ‘a profane and brutal system that spared neither soul nor body, and denied to men and women the right to human treatment,’ and gave rise to slavery on a scale comparable to ancient Egypt, the Roman Empire or the American plantations.  This was part of a growing consensus about the horror of industrialisation. 

 

 

As a result, there was less and less enthusiasm about retaining its urban and civic legacies.  In the post-war years, as Britain’s industrial base began to feel the effects of global competition and our international competitiveness edged away, there emerged a growing hostility toward the memories of the industrial past.  The collapse of the mining or the steel industry soon enough led to attempts to bury the architectural memory of those industries.  The trauma of loss necessitated the elimination of evidence. 

Of course, at Ironbridge, or the Gladstone Museum, or Quarry Bank Mill, the Industrial Revolution began to be preserved, but only when the trauma of loss began to fade could the cultural value of the Age of Steam be more properly appreciated.  In 2001 those dungeons of industrial horror, Saltaire (outside Priestley’s Bradford), Robert Owen’s New Lanark, and the Derwent Valley Mills, including Arkwright’s own Cromford Mill, joined the Blaenovan Industrial Landscape and the Ironbridge Gorge on Britain’s list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites.  As it should be.  For I think we forget how important this cultural legacy is. 

Today, much of the developing world is undergoing the historic shift from agriculture to industry.  The emerging markets of the so-called BRIC economies – Brazil; Russia; India; and China – are experiencing a similar process to that which Friedrich Engels first recounted in this city: break-neck industrialisation transforming social relations, destroying old customs, turning villages into cities, and workshops into factories.  In one of the largest mass migrations in history, since 1980 some 120 million Chinese peasants have made their way from the country to the city.  To read accounts of contemporary urban China – from the slums of Dongguan to the steel mills of Shenzhen to the monster garbage heaps of Chongqing – is to be thrown straight back into the cityscape of Engels.  As China now claims the mantel of ‘Workshop of the World’, the pollution, ill-health, political resistance and social unrest prevalent in the Special Economic Zones of Guangdong and Shanghai appear eerily reminiscent of 1840s Manchester, Glasgow and Stoke-on-Trent. 

For this is the point: it happened here first.  North Staffs and the North West offers an unrivalled, historic insight into the seismic changes affecting the world today.  And Stoke-on-Trent has it all: first of all, the intellectual origins of the Industrial Revolution, with he Lunar Society world of Wedgwood, Darwin and the other great thinkers of the English Enlightenment.  And then the terrifying, Niagra-like enormity of its impact.  The mechanisation; the technology; the exploitation of raw materials and energy sources; the class divides; the social immiseration; the employment of women and children; the riches; the culture; the solidarity – all the events going on today in Bangalore, Belo Horizonte, Shenzhen, and Jakarta happened here first. 

And, with it, came the urban culture that Priestley disliked so much: the civil society of Mechanics’ Institutes, Friendly Societies, Athenaeums, and Lyceums; the vibrant, working-class culture of sport, pubs, street-life; the rational recreation of Libraries, Galleries, and, above all, parks (in turn, inspiring the design of parks around the world ); culture and patronage; municipal self-government; and, above all, civic pride so richly evident in the architecture and design of the town halls of Burslem, Fenton and Hanley; the King’s Hall; the Wedgwood Institute and many others. 

This is the authentic heritage of the region: a vibrant, exciting urban civilization, consciously different from southern English effeteness, but one which stands shoulder to shoulder with the Bruges and the Ghents, the Florences and Venices, the Hamburgs and Frankfurts.  Hence Bennett’s analogy.

And contrary to Ruskin’s belief that none of these cities could produce good architecture, when we look over the road at The Potteries Water Board building, or the Old Telephone Exchange in Hanley, we know this not to be the case.  So, we do now need to use Ruskin’s language of conservation and preservation, of the meaning and morality of architecture to think about rescuing those buildings which he would have decried as emblematic of The Great Goddess of Getting-On. 

MORE THAN BUILDINGS

But this is more than conservation for the sake of it.  This is because Stoke-on-Trent’s future demands not a denial of its past, but a richer and more competitive appreciation of it.  For the world is not flat: every city, region, culture and country has its own history and identity – and the exploration and marketing of that past is increasingly essential to building competitive advantage. 

For Stoke-on-Trent has been more guilty than most in seeking to deal with the trauma of industrial decline by erasing the memory of it.  As the mines and steel have gone, so have the shafts and the mills.  And as the ceramics sector has shrunk from 50,000 some 30 years ago, to c.6-7,000 today, we have sent the pile-drivers into our pot-banks and oven-kilns.  The Potteries has sought to deny its very identity by destroying one of the most remarkable urban environments in Britain – a veritable Manhattan of kilns and chimneys.  Such desecration has to stop: we are not Bracknell Forest or Corby, Stevenage or Basildon, but The Potteries – an internationally recognised city famous for design, innovation, skill and entrepreneurialism.  In today’s world where authenticity and urban branding are everything, that is a profound asset.  Not locked into the past, but working out how to utilise it as an asset.

The past has something else to offer us.  The American urban economist Edward L. Glaeser has a very brilliant new book out on The Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier.

The key chapter is ‘Why Do Cities Decline?’  Glaeser’s focus is on the post-war history of New York, Boston and Detroit.  Although few now associate Boston with heavy industry and New York with the garment industry, each city was in fact more dependent upon those sectors than ‘Motor City’ was on the automobile.  Indeed, in the 1950s New York employed 50% more works than the auto industry did in Detroit.  However, Boston and New York managed to overcome the decline of their industrial cores and Detroit didn’t.  Why?  Because, those cities ‘returned to their old, preindustrial roots of commerce, skills, and entrepreneurial innovation’ says Glaeser.    

Glaeser makes a fascinating point about the social costs to a city dependent upon single industries.  Like the deadly Upas tree, when that industry goes sour it can poison an entire urban ecosystem around it.  ‘Big, vertically integrated firms may be productive in the short run, but they don’t create the energetic competition and new ideas that are so necessary for long-term urban success.’  And the terrible irony, or tragedy, of Detroit is that it was its small, dynamic firms and independent suppliers which gave rise to the gigantic, wholly integrated car companies, which then became synonymous with stagnation.  

Meanwhile, New York and Boston managed a successful post-industrial transition by focusing on competition, connection, and human capital.  And we too should focus on what made us a success to begin with.  Before the pottery firms got too big and too arrogant, outsourced too much and failed to sustain their engineering supply chain, it was the entrepreneurialism, design, marketing, innovation and human capital which turned North Staffs into The Potteries.  This 18th century, pre-industrial model of sustainable economic diversity is what we should be trying to rebuild – which means a renewed focus on skills, craftmanship, technology, and brand development.  In modern policy terms, that means keep going with the University Quarter and school improvement programme; making the case for research and development tax breaks; working to keep energy costs competitive; providing capacity and assistance for new entrepreneurs (such as in the Spode site in Stoke); marketing the city’s businesses; keeping our transport infrastructure well-maintained; and making sure our other sectors – heritage tourism, education, hospitality, leisure, engineering, construction, logistics, manufacturing, biomedicine – retain their economic dynamism.  

Will it all work?  Edward Glaeser concludes with a sobering note.  ‘The path back for declining industrial towns is long and hard.  Over decades, they must undo the cursed legacy of big factories and heavy industry.  They return to their roots as places of small-scale entrepreneurship and commerce.’

CONCLUSION

So, to return to Mr Bradley’s fears of the past.  I would argue that we need to embrace both its physical legacy and commercial inspiration.  We are gifted with the remnants of an unique, world-historic urban civilization and we should, at all costs, seek to retain its physical footprint, while making it workable and liveable.  It is a vital part of what can attract people to this city.  Every week-end our hotels are full.  But why are they all heading out to Alton Towers and not spending enough time amongst our own thrills and spills?  We need to market ourselves more effectively; exploit our heritage brand; and celebrate the great urban-rural, city-country experience of North Staffs.

Secondly, we must rediscover the original inspiration for the founding of the city.  Not the North Staffs clay or coal seams, but the entrepreneurialism and innovation of the pioneering Potteries. 

The danger of the past lies not in history, but in nostalgia – a self-comforting wallowing in the past.  Instead, we need an icy plunge the cold water of history and re-emerge refreshed, ambitious, and prosperous.