Why the extraordinary Scot who created Open University can help us respond to Trump’s victory

Saturday evening in Lochgelly, and the streets are quiet, here in what was once the heart of the Fife coalfield. Inside the Lochgelly Centre, though, there is a buzz and a sense of occasion, as an audience gathers to see a new play about the life of Lochgelly’s most famous daughter, the Labour politician Jennie Lee. Born in the town 120 years ago this week, in 1904, Jennie Lee grew up in neighbouring Cowdenbeath, as a coalminers’s daughter, and a passionate socialist.

She was a brilliant girl, sent to Edinburgh University on a raft of local bursaries; and in 1929, aged only 24, she became the youngest woman ever to sit in parliament, when she was elected the Independent Labour Party MP for North Lanarkshire. Jennie married her Westminster comrade Nye Bevan, from the Welsh valleys; and became his mainstay through the Second World War, until the moment in 1948 when, as health minister, Nye Bevan became the founding father of the UK’s National Health Service.

Then after Nye’s death in 1960, Jennie Lee was appointed to Harold Wilson’s 1964 Labour government as Britain’s first-ever arts minister; a role in which she tripled cultural spending, campaigned passionately for wider access to the arts, and presided over the founding of the Open University, perhaps her proudest single achievement.

Trump’s stunning victory

The story of Jennie Lee and Nye Bevan, in other words, is an extraordinary tale of successful progressive politics pursued against all the headwinds of 20th century history, including a global war against fascism, and a brutally hostile UK media.

So when the news broke, on Wednesday, of Donald Trump’s stunning victory in the US presidential election, one of my first thoughts was to try to imagine how Jennie Lee would have reacted to such a crushing defeat for all the values, principles and policies she held dear, including her passionate belief in the equal rights and dignity of women. And it struck me that despite a century of profound change, there were at least three aspects of their politics that might still help us to respond effectively to the rise of the far-right.

Labour politician Jennie Lee and party colleague Aneurin Bevan leave the Bloomsbury Registry Office in London shortly after their wedding in 1934 (Picture: HF Davis/Topical Press Agency) | Getty Images

Vital reality-check

The first is to remember how strongly their politics was grounded in grassroots, working-class political organisation, and in the labour movement. Today, of course, trade unions are less powerful than they once were. Yet the focus of trade unions and other grassroots organisations on the real material circumstances of people’s lives – on rates of pay, conditions of work, on what we need to live decently and safely, and on the human solidarity and exchange of ideas that enables people to band together in the fight for improvements – remains a vital reality-check in a world of lies and disinformation, and an indispensable source of strength in building political resistance to the lies and hate-mongering of the far-right.

The second thought is that alongside their constant, well-grounded focus on making actual improvements to the lives of working people, Jennie Lee’s generation of Labour politicians succeeded in evolving a legible plan for improvement which people could understand and support; so that in 1945, the Labour party was swept to power on a postwar tide of enthusiasm for the implementation of the wartime Beveridge Plan for a cradle to grave welfare state. In the neoliberal years since 1980, centre-left parties have gradually abandoned such clear-cut plans, preferring to compromise with the growing power of international capital, and relying on mood-music, marginal adjustments, and vague promises of “change”, to hint at their good intentions in terms of social justice.

Far-right’s false solutions

Kamala Harris’s well-intentioned but failed presidential campaign, though, perhaps marks the bitter end of that road. It seems that in future, parties of the centre-left will need legible plans that directly addresses the economic concerns of voters, on pay, employment, prices, and housing – even where these involve a direct challenge to entrenched corporate interests – or they will risk driving voters in their millions towards the populist parties of the far-right, with their high awareness of voters’ angry concerns, and their false solutions to them.

Then finally, those who believe in progressive politics will have to learn – as Jennie Lee and Nye Bevan did – to build imperfect but effective alliances with anyone prepared to get on side for a defence of democratic institutions, and a broad commitment to freedom and justice.

During the war, for example, Jennie Lee accepted an invitation from Churchill’s munitions minister Lord Beaverbrook to work in the Aircraft Production Ministry, although she cordially detested the politics of both men; and in 1945, she abandoned her old dyed-in-the-wool loyalty to the Independent Labour Party to become a Labour MP. The title of Matthew Knights’ s new play about her is Jennie Lee – Tomorrow Is A New Day; and it captures both the hopeful nature of her politics, and her willingness to shrug off the loyalties and grudges of the past in the interests of getting things done, and moving on in a positive direction.

For Ukraine, for Gaza, for democracy

And what is clear is that there will be no “new day”, after the present dark moment in global politics, until the various shades of the left and centre re-learn the discipline that was so hard won in the 1930s, the discipline to turn their fire on the far-right enemy in plain sight, and to work together to defeat those forces.

History shows us that – like the building of strong, realistic grassroots movements closely linked to the political process, and the development of clear, progressive political plans that will attract hard-pressed voters – this can be done. And now, we had better set about the task of proving that we can do it again; for Ukraine, for the people of Gaza and the Middle East, for democracy, for freedom, and for all of our futures, on this good Earth.

Jennie Lee: Tomorrow Is A New Day will be at the Carnegie Hall, Dunfermline, 12-13 November.