Labour, charity and voluntary action
Labour, charity and voluntary action
The myth of hostility
This chapter overturns the simplistic characterisation of the twentieth-century Labour party as antagonistic to voluntarism. As it sets out, while opposition to voluntarism has indeed been a theme throughout Labour's history, particularly on the hard left, the notion of a broad and consistent antagonism is largely a myth, based upon a confusion of charity and philanthropy with other forms of co-operation, mutual aid and active citizenship. Instead, what Attlee called ‘the associative instinct’ has been an overlooked, but nevertheless important, constant in Labour's social thought, from Attlee's experiences as a young man at Toynbee Hall, through the promotion of active and local democracy in the 1940s and the revisionist turn away from macro-economics, and towards quality-of-life issues in the 1950s and 1960s, to the ‘rainbow coalition’ partnerships between local Labour administrations and voluntary groups in the 1980s.
Keywords: Labour party, voluntarism, mutual aid, active citizenship, co-operation, associative instinct, Clement Attlee
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