Duncan Bowie on not-so-dry Fabians
“Beatrice and Sidney Webb and Their World” by Michael Ward published by The Conrad Press
I wondered whether anything more could be published on the Webbs, given the number of previous studies and the publication of their diaries and letters. I was wrong. Royden Harrison never published the second volume of his authorised biography and it is significant that Michael Ward’s new study is sponsored by the Webb Memorial Trust. This new biography- at 569 pages, with a further 60 pages of notes, was a delight to read. It is a narrative study – from birth to death, and draws heavily on the Webb diaries and correspondence, but Ward has also gone back to the vast Webb and Fabian Society archives held by the LSE as well as a range of other primary sources not used in previous works and this gives an intimate flavour of the Webb’s lives -who were their closest friends and who they met.
The Webbs are often seen as dry Fabians – the writers of even tedious yet voluminous tomes of essentially boring subjects – like trade unions and local government. Ward steers clear of analysing the Webbs’ works – that has been undertaken by others. Instead, we get, as the book’s subtitle implies, a study of the Webbs’ circle, which included Liberals and Tories as well as Labourites and socialists of varying tendencies and intellectuals from a wide range of professions and disciplines. Their tea and dinner parties were legendary for bad food and stimulating conversation.
It should be remembered that the Webbs were Liberals first and only committed to the Labour Party from about 1911. It could be argued, though Ward doesn’t do that, that their influence on the Liberal party and the new liberalism of the late Victorian and Edwardian period of active intervention by the national and local state, was as important as their influence on the post WW1 Labour Party.
Apart from the introductory chapter, there is little analysis of the Webbs politics and their political influence, so any critique of their paternalism or their support for the authoritarianism of Stalinist Soviet Union is absent – this is a semi-authorised biography after all. While there is a section on Sidney Webb’s time in the London Couty Council, his focus is on Sidney’s work on higher and further education. Sidney’s influence was much wider.
His book The London programme was in effect the manifesto of the Progressive party who led the early London County Council. Sidney was in the Progressives leadership group, as well as active in the London Liberal and Radical Union writing a number of pamphlets on the LCC and being the leading advocate of redistributive use of the LCC’s taxation powers, which had a significant impact on socialist theory and practice on housing and planning. This is an odd omission given Ward’s experience as the last deputy leader of the Greater London Council (deputy to Ken Livingstone) before its abolition in 1986 and his subsequent career as founder of the Centre for Local Economic Studies and first chief executive of the London Development Agency (again under Livingstone). But maybe this is an unfair point, given the book is a narrative biography rather than a political study.
Those seeking an analysis of the Webb’s thinking and influence are referred to the academic biography of the Webb’s by David Reisman published by Routledge in 2022 in their series of studies of leading economists. Michael Ward’s book is highly recommended and being published in paperback is certainly worth its price in contrast with certain other recent biographies only available in hardback at considerable expense.