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Labour’s history in graphic detail
Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer we’ll keep the cartoons flying here, sings Tom Foot
THE dark history of the Labour Party is illuminated this week in glorious satire at the Political Cartoon Gallery, Bloomsbury.
The exhibition covers the highlights – and the lowlights – of the last 100 years of the party, which grew out of the trade union movement and the extension of the franchise to working-class men in the late 19th century.
The collection of the original cartoons by leading cartoonists past and present reveal changes in fashions, personalities, the loss of founding principles and the origins of New Labour.
Those on the Left look back at Old Labour with nostalgia. But the exhibition reveals the tensions that have always existed in the party, especially when it is in power.
Labour governments are often thrown into conflict with the workers who are its core constituency with repeated claims that Labour governments have been elected on manifestoes they have not carried through.
Francis Carruthers Gould, Will Dyson, David Low, Vicky, JAK, Strube and Illingworth, Peter Brookes, Steve Bell, Dave Brown, Steadman and Scarfe are the brief chronicles of the time.
“It’s the first complete cartoon history of any political party,” says Dr Tim Benson who opened the Gallery in 2004.
“It shows the struggle in the Labour Party between ideology and pragmatism.
“The trick is to find images no one has ever seen – other than at publication. Then they often appear prophetic.
“The exhibition shows how the party has always swung to the right. Did you know Atlee, a prime minister of a socialist party, spent £100 million developing the atomic bomb? There is a cartoon of Stafford Cripps being thrown out of the Labour Party for being too socialist.
“We had a great exhibition on Churchill’s and Stalin’s cartoonists. I’m thinking of doing a Tory one year. We’ve been trying to get David Cameron to come along. But I don’t think Alan Mumford is all that in to it.”
Alan Mumford, who has written a book called Did Cowards Flinch? has been a Labour Party member for 50 years.
He said: “I finished this book with a rather sad feeling. I guess a lot of people would take the view – as the cartoonist Dave Brown does on the book’s front cover – that the red flag has gone from red, to pink, to not very pink... and then there’s Tony Blair.”
The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated hardback catalogue with a foreword by Lord Kinnock.
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