New Labour and Christian Socialism

Abstract

A photograph in the Independent on 30 September 1996 of the Blairs at the Labour Party Conference said it all. It showed the smiling couple walking from the rain towards a building with two men holding umbrellas over them. What the caption did not say was that they were going to the Conference service and that the two men with umbrellas (admittedly in mufti) were both priests, one Anglican (chairman of the Christian Socialist Movement [CSM]) the other Roman Catholic (the co-ordinator of the CSM). The omission by the newspaper of the religious context is characteristic of our society which ignores religious motivation, allegiance and institutions at both a popular and an academic level. So for example, Andrew Thorpe’s recent History of the British Labour Party (1997) offers a wholly secular interpretation. Yet Christian influences on the Labour Party from the beginning have been considerable. In order to understand the current revival of Christian Socialism and the indebtedness of some of New Labour’s leaders to its theology and moralism, we need to know something of its history since the mid-nineteenth century.