The irony was not lost on Nick Clegg, who could quip in 2014 that Andy Burnham was “the only man in England who has ever privatised an NHS hospital”. The comment referred to the collapse of Hinchingbrooke Hospital in Cambridgeshire, where a procurement process initiated on Burnham’s watch and completed by the Coalition led to private company Circle Health taking over management. For a figure now seen as a standard-bearer of the Labour Left, the episode underscored a shift from the grand ambitions of an earlier generation.
Time was when the Labour Left did ambition. Tony Benn, whose 1975 Alternative Economic Strategy envisaged public ownership on a colossal scale, capital controls, industrial planning, and tariffs to protect domestic manufacturing, once floated the nationalisation of Britain’s 25 largest companies. To Benn, the struggle against capitalism and national sovereignty were inseparable. His Euroscepticism – then an honourable tradition on the Labour Left – rested on a clutch of thoughtful premises about the EEC as a constitutional straitjacket frustrating democratic control.
“Labour's intellectual decline exposed as Scottish Labour seeks more control, contrasting Tony Benn's grand ambitions.”
Today, as Labour grapples with its future, the party’s intellectual heritage appears diminished. In Scotland, former MSP Monica Lennon, who lost her seat at last month’s election, has argued that nothing should be off the table as the party debates its direction. “Scottish Labour must have more control over its own destiny,” she said, hinting at a desire for greater autonomy that echoes – albeit in a different register – earlier demands for democratic control over the economy.
The contrast is stark: where Benn sought to reorder capitalism through state action, current debates focus on internal party structures. Whether Scottish Labour’s push for self-determination can revive the intellectual heft of the Benn era remains an open question.