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It is the internal dynamic of this socialism which constitutes the second basic problem of the Labourist movement. We have already seen the elements found within it, and their relationship. In the Labour Party, Fabianism became the dominant, right-wing leadership tradition, the source of the ideas governing most of the action of the party. Its leaders were all to be either avowed Fabians (Attlee, Gaitskell) or implicit Fabians, whatever their apparent background and orientation (Macdonald, Henderson, Lansbury). The Independent Labour Party became the Labour left wing, in chronic instinctive protest against the leadership but intellectually subordinated to it and incapable of effectively replacing it. Labourism, therefore, acquired from the beginning a peculiarly weak left. This is, in a sense, the intimate tragedy of Labourism—for the left has always expressed the most vital working-class elements, the most active and genuine socialist forces potentially able to develop their own hegemony over party and State. But expressing them in the fashion and under the conditions indicated, the Labour left has really completely frustrated these forces, putting them at the disposition of the right-wing reformists. It has been unable even to seriously influence the leadership, except under rare circumstances and momentarily. Hence, the Fabian-inspired leadership tradition, permanently supported by the trade unions, could acquire a great stability and continuity—a kind of dynasty, in fact, with its own characteristic internal procedures of recruitment and co-ordination, almost independent of the party in general. And this permanent, organic power in its turn of course obstructed any farther real evolution of the left wing—it is as if the Independent Labour Party tradition, which was apparently the beginning of a real British mass socialist party, was paralysed by entry into the matrix of Labourism and the conditions it found therein. Hardie and the other ILP leaders anticipated that they would be able to rapidly convert the Labour Party to socialism, their socialism. Instead, the conditions of Labourism, and their own weakness, transformed them into a mere permanent opposition, always urging the Labour Party to move left and always unable to make it move, only half conscious of their own position and its true meaning, unable to act within Labourism but unable to see any alternative to Labourism, oppressed by Fabian triviality and timidity but with no workable alternative to offer—such was the result of the ‘short cut’ to socialism which Labourism had seemed to represent. Such was the paradox of Labourism—the distinctive form of socialism which arose out of British conditions, and in effect prevented any farther socialist evolution from taking place.
Tom Nairn, "The Nature of the British Labour Party part 1", NLR Sept.-Oct. 1964
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