Les Huckfield pays tribute to the meticulous research and universalist message behind ‘Tomorrow is a New Day’ that brought the audience to its feet at Carnegie Hall, Dunfermline,

Readers may be familiar with several different periods in the life of Jenne Lee:

–      After the 1926 General Strike, Jennie, the miner’s daughter from Lochgelly, was elected in 1929, aged 24, as Independent Labour MP for North Lanarkshire after her time at Edinburgh University. She was the first women to represent a Scottish seat in the Commons, when women under 30 were still denied the vote.

–      Having broken in 1945 with Independent Labour, which opposed the War, Jennie was elected as Labour Party MP for Cannock in Staffordshire, where she represented many Fife miners who had been transferred when their pits had closed in Scotland.

–      Jennie was the wife of Nye Bevan, and was his confidant as he struggled to introduce the NHS in 1948, with his “lower than vermin” speech.

–      After he wrote In Place of Fear in 1952, Jennie differed with Nye throughout the 1950s, when he disagreed with those who marched each year from Aldermaston demanding nuclear disarmament.

–      During Harold Wilson’s 1964 Government, as Minister for the Arts, Jennie introduced her White Paper, “A Policy for the Arts”, and succeeded in setting up the University of the Air (the Open University) in 1969, just in time before the 1970 General Election 

–      Jennie became Baroness Lee of Ashridge in 1970

To cover even some of these events with a full cast would have been a daunting challenge. To cover the whole of Jennie Lee’s life with a cast of three and minimal scenery is a credit to the research, artistry, ingenuity and talent of writer Matthew Knights, director Emma Lynn Harley, actors Trish Mullin, Kit Laveri and George Docherty, and their supporting team.

There was frequent skilful switching of characters between young Jennie and older Jennie, often on stage simultaneously, one prodding the conscience of the other. There was also a convincing depiction of Jennie’s dad, in his tin bath after coming home from the pit, later doubling as Nye, Winston Churchill, a jack in the box interrupter and radio announcer, without leaving an audience puzzling what was going on. Really big political moments were poignantly portrayed. From Nye’s battle to found the NHS to Jennie’s OU mission there was an enduring message that health, care, arts and culture should be freely available to all, irrespective of money and background.

The play showed Jennie and Nye as MPs in an era when working class politicians found it difficult to neglect their constituencies, and their politics were well and truly fashioned before their arrival at the House of Commons – a contrast to many of today’s PLP members, some of whom only discover their politics ‘on the job’ through receiving text messages with “the line to take”, remaining almost politically invisible for a whole Parliament. Throughout Jennie Lee’s life, politics was based on class. By contrast, in the UK and throughout the EU, horizontal left versus right politics are now being sidelined by a vertical politics based on education, lifestyle and employment, in denial of the central message of universalism projected in the play.

After all of this, no wonder that many in the Dunfermline audience rose without inhibition for a rousing, well deserved standing ovation. With only two performances in Lochgelly and two in Dunfermline’s Carnegie Hall, one can only hope that Creative Scotland, OnFife, the Open University in Scotland – as well as trade unions, social movements, and grass-roots activists – will continue to support this timely political production and message. Tomorrow is a New Day, ​a play by Matthew Knights, was on at Dunfermline Carnegie Hall on Tuesday 12th and Wednesday 13th November.

Les Huckfield is a later-in-life academic and activist.