New Left Review I/8, March-April 1961
Ralph Miliband
Footnote to Labourism
Lord Morrison of Lambeth. An Autobiography:
Odhams Press Ltd. 336 pp. 30s.
labour leaders do not write good Memoirs, and Herbert Morrison’s Autobiography is no exception to the rule. The story is told engagingly enough, and the personality which emerges from it is a great deal more agreeable than that of many of Morrison’s contemporaries, but as a contribution to history in general and to Labour history in particular, his book is virtually worthless, with the possible exception of the chapters on the London Labour Party, which Morrison led in the thirties; and as personal account of politics-as-lived, it is scarcely better. Why then bother? Because Labourism needs to be better understood, and because Morrison’s story, for all its deficiencies (in some ways because of them) affords some help to that better understanding.
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