CHAPTER SIX
‘The Labour Party is a very broad party, reflecting a wide variety of opinions from Left to Right. This diversity of view is a great source of strength and we must vigorously resist any attempt that is made to drive the Left or the Right out of the party.’
Tony Benn, speaking in Birmingham
at the May Day rally, 1979
In opposition the left once again found its voice. They better understood the unravelling of the post-war consensus and raged at the inadequacies of the centre-ground politics of the party leaders. Benn was clear who was responsible: the defeat ‘followed thirty years of anti-socialist revisionism preached from the top of the Labour Party’.1 The intensity of inner-party struggle during this period would produce the most profound constitutional changes seen since 1918. But the fallout from those years would see the Labour left put on the back foot for a generation – until 2015 and Jeremy Corbyn’s victory. The first pitched battle against the party machinery was on the question of inner-party democracy. After all, a radical transformative strategy required a radically transformed Labour Party.
Battle for Reselection
Following the election defeat, the party establishment was shaky but the left felt vindicated. Now was the moment to push for the constitutional reforms that would break up the PLP domination of the party. At the 1979 conference a major breakthrough occurred when the NEC changed its position and backed reselection for MPs. At the same time several major unions (TGWU, NUPE and the AUEW) had just passed motions in favour of reselection at their conferences. It was one of those rare moments where the rank and file, the leadership and the unions all seemed to align together. The conference carried the CLPD-inspired motion, though – as with many victories – it was based on a compromise.
Under the new rules each MP could face a trigger ballot if a certain percentage of the local membership backed it, and if that ballot was passed then a full reselection process would begin. Buoyed by the victory but wary of the power of the machine to block change, the left was spurred into action. The CLPD, the Labour Coordinating Committee, Socialist Organiser and others launched the Rank and File Mobilising Committee (RFMC) to keep up the pressure around three central democratic reforms: extending the franchise for leadership elections to unions and members; giving the NEC control over the manifesto; and mandatory reselection. In terms of left unity and its grassroots approach, the RFMC was unique and was instrumental in driving through the structural reforms that opened up space for the left to win ground inside the party.2
The specific question of electing the party leader was put to a special conference held in Wembley in 1981. The CLPD made a tactical decision to accept a compromise solution for leadership elections, agreeing to an electoral college of 40–30–30 (trade unions, PLP and membership). The old way of doing things was eroding and the idea that the constitution could be changed, even in faltering, compromise-laden steps, was a significant victory. Interestingly, the right-wing MP David Owen, soon to split with the right to form the Social Democratic Party (SDP), proposed a One Member One Vote system of elections with the PLP choosing the candidates. This would eventually be adopted under Ed Miliband 30 years later; it was the system that led to Corbyn’s election.
But for the left the price of victory was high. The RFMC unravelled under major differences in approach. The CLPD favoured behind-closed-doors deals with the union leaders and bigwigs. Others rejected this as unaccountable and bureaucratic, favouring a more activist grassroots-led approach. This divergence of opinion meant that once the constitutional reforms were achieved the RFMC broke down. Some activists went on to organise Benn’s Deputy Leader campaign a year later, others focused on the unions. The Labour left would not be so united for another generation.
The Left Bogeymen
The election of Michael Foot as Labour leader in 1980 and the defection of the right the following year to form the SDP were heralded by many on the left as a turning point in their favour. In fact it precipitated the beginning of a serious counter-attack from the right. Claims of ‘infiltration’ had been growing since 1976 when Healey had attempted to take the heat out of the IMF debacle by focusing attention on ‘Trotskyites’ and troublemakers in the ranks. Once again newspaper editors were only too happy to oblige in the witch-hunt, with regular articles condemning and ridiculing the left, a softening-up exercise before the actual purges began.3 By the time of the 1981 SDP split the centre-right and the soft left around Foot felt they had to prove to the public that Labour was not overrun by the left.4
It is a testimony to the rapid hegemony of Thatcherism that the narrative around Labour was so easily dictated by its enemies. The howling attacks on what would soon be known as the ‘loony left’ came to dominate discussions over strategy and electoral performance. This framing favoured the right against the left and pre-emptively rendered left responses illegitimate. It was during this phase that several ‘loony left’ media hate-figures emerged: Ken Livingstone at the Greater London Council (GLC); Councils like Hackney, Liverpool and Lambeth; Militant Tendency; Peter Tatchell (and LGBT rights more generally); Black Sections; Women’s Sections and several others. The loony left label became an insipidly lazy but very effective way of undermining the Labour left, a slur so ubiquitous in the right-wing media it even found its way into internal Labour Party communications. There was a media focus on the idiosyncratic personalities of left public figures – Livingstone’s newt collection came in for regular ridicule in the press – but also a potent attack on left policies, especially around gay and black rights. A nervous fear set in that the party was increasingly dominated by an obsession with so-called ‘minority issues’. Eric Hammond from the right-wing EETPU union summed up the view of the right: London Labour was full of ‘terrorists, lesbians and other queer people’.5
The Bermondsey by-election in 1983, where gay rights activist Peter Tatchell stood for Labour, was the scene of disgusting homophobic smears and outrageous bigotry. Despite Tatchell’s being picked to stand by the CLP in 1981, the NEC took over a year to approve the nomination. Foot later admitted that he blocked it as he was under tremendous pressure from the soon to be SDP wing of the party, not over Tatchell’s ‘vote losing’ sexuality but because he had advocated a campaign of non-violent civil disobedience against the Tory government.6 During the by-election itself he received very little support from the national party, and only a few organisers came to help from elsewhere. This lack of support only emboldened the bigots. In an interview about the election, Tatchell recalled: ‘I was deluged with hate mail, death threats, attacks on my flat and more than 100 physical bashings.’7 As he concluded: ‘Some Labour right-wingers wanted me to lose in order to strengthen their bid to ditch left-wing policies that had been approved by the grassroots members at party conference.’
Another divisive issue was Ireland. The Official IRA bombed the Aldershot barracks in 1972, followed by a mainland bombing campaign by the Provisional IRA shortly afterwards. The left was put in a difficult situation; many backed the cause of Irish self-determination and a united Ireland but civilian deaths were undermining the cause and making it deeply unpopular with the British electorate.8 Nevertheless, for some on the left it was a mark of honour to actively promote the activities of Sinn Féin politicians as a snub to the Tories (public) position that there would be no negotiation. In a move that sent The Sun into a tail spin, Livingstone invited Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams to the GLC and Lambeth Councillors parleyed with Sinn Féin councillors.9 Where the Labour left saw alignment with Sinn Féin was in their shared advocacy of bypassing a reactionary state legislature by focusing on local government and ‘community empowerment’.10 It was also in the context of the fight to promote Irish rights – in particular the campaigning for the release of the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four, men wrongly imprisoned for pub bombings – that a new MP named Jeremy Corbyn came to prominence.
But one man stood out in particular as the firebrand of the left – Tony Benn. The media perpetuated the image of Benn as the dangerous radical, considered public enemy number one in Whitehall. He was certainly moving to the left at a time when many of his contemporaries were surrendering to the integrationists. He had loyally served in Callaghan’s Cabinet throughout the 1970s, even after Wilson had crucified him following the Europe referendum. He stood in the tradition of Bevan and Foot, accepting the discipline of Cabinet responsibility in return for greater influence internally. During the heady days of class struggle in the late ’70s, however, his Cabinet post was an albatross around his neck, silencing one of the left’s key voices. The acid test was to see how effective he had been in his position when it came to influencing government policy; the conclusion would have to be that it did not add up to much.
In the early 1980s Benn was a household name, cast in the role of messiah or pariah by friends or enemies. By then free from Cabinet responsibility, Benn could speak his mind. He was less enamoured with Clause IV and the corporatist paternalism of the traditional labour left, instead looking to the new social movements to overcome the limitations of parliamentary socialism.11 He articulated a vision of a new Labour Party as a constituency of different social struggles, drawing on the energy of the women’s and black movements. This perspective was championed by figures such as Hilary Wainwright and implemented by Ken Livingstone during his leadership of the Greater London Council.
Benn’s commitment to socialism was a uniquely esoteric British vision. His version of a socialist society was really one of greater democracy, greater worker involvement in industry, and a more accountable political class. All fine things – though they added up to a curious mix of radical liberal values and workers’ control. Benn’s socialism was redolent of an older, radical tradition dating back to the Levellers in the English Civil War – popular democracy. In a speech to the PLP in 1980, Benn outlined his chief concern over the ‘blockages to Parliamentary democracy’, citing four major obstacles – the European Community, the IMF, the House of Lords and American military bases stationed in the UK.12 There was a class argument in there somewhere, but it always presented itself as a demand for genuine national sovereignty, leaving out the question of the capitalist class more generally. Why was the City of London not also one of the major obstacles?
But as with most things in the Labour Party, it is what Benn represented that mattered most. He may have been a constitutionalist political reformer but he was a threat to the interests of the establishment because when he spoke, many people listened. Benn joined the ranks of the Labour left MPs (alongside Corbyn, Heffer and others) who were also embedded in campaigns and struggles, from anti-apartheid campaigns, to CND, to strikes. He was a proponent of extra-parliamentary action, as long as it was not anti-parliamentary action, because although he believed the House of Commons was still the best vehicle for securing a plural and democratic society, he was aware of the limitations of representative democracy. He called this the mosaic of the socialist movement. The GLC used the term ‘rainbow coalition’. They meant the same thing: reaching out to the new left and social forces outside of the electoralist obsessions of Labour.
In this context, although the post was usually considered worthless, his bid for the deputy leadership position led to an almighty clash between different wings of the party. Competing against Healey, it was a hard-fought campaign between left and right, made especially vicious because the right had lost to Foot in the recent leadership contest and were desperate not to lose more ground. Benn did not shy away from accusations of being divisive but embraced them; he wanted to polarise opinion and speak for the many activists disappointed by Labour’s lack of socialist vision, arguing: ‘you can’t go on forever calling yourself a socialist party when you are not...’.13
Initial PLP support for Benn’s candidacy was limited. Foot and Benn fundamentally disagreed on the reform process in Labour. After years of refusing to do so, Benn joined the Tribune group of MPs to try and secure some parliamentary backing, only to see them throw their support behind the soft left candidate John Silkin. The Bennite MPs launched their own left organisation called the Socialist Campaign Group shortly after the election. Benn was also attacked by the union leaders for dragging out the ‘inner party democracy struggle’ even longer. He drew far more support from the rank and file in both the party and the unions. His campaign attempted to overcome the lack of political engagement with the millions of affiliated supporters in the unions. Benn took the Labour Party’s internal debates into the hearts of working communities, over the heads of the hostile union leaders, and won considerable support. His campaign focused on large public rallies, left caucus meetings in the trade unions, and fringe meetings at union conferences. His speaking tour took him to small pit villages where 300 miners would come out to hear him speak. Like the best parts of Bevanism, this breaking down of the traditional barrier between party and unions was a crucial component of the strategy of the new left, to forge a working alliance from below to push more radical demands.14 This made Benn public enemy number one for many union chiefs.
After an exemplary campaign, Benn came within a whisker of winning, achieving 49.6 per cent to Healey’s 50.4 per cent. Benn had won 80 per cent of the CLP votes and 40 per cent of the union votes. The narrow loss was made even bitterer when the right MPs who backed Healey decamped to form the SDP only a few months later. Then the growing movement of Bennism came to a juddering halt in 1982 at a specially convened gathering at Bishops Stortford. It was a meeting of the great and the not so good – the NEC, the PLP, Trade Unionists for a Labour Victory, all together at the ASTMS country club. The SDP was used as a cudgel with which to beat the left – they were blamed for driving them out with the left’s incessant demands and disruptions. When the Labour right threatened an all-out war against the left that might destroy the party, Benn bowed to pressure and began to demobilise his followers. The agreement outlined a truce premised on ‘the election manifesto being based on the 1981 conference decisions, an acceptance of the current leadership of Foot and Healey and a moratorium on constitutional changes. In return there would be a cessation of witch hunts against the left.’15 Chris Mullins proposed the truce, backed by Lansman, who argued that ‘the left was at a low ebb. A truce was not a defeat.’ But Aubrey Wise disagreed, wanting to keep the fight up: ‘we had to activate the rank and file to defend their rights’.16 The truce perspective won out and the left stood down, waiting for the 1983 election to resolve the contradiction – a move that would prove fatal.
The Return of Municipal Socialism
With Labour out of power in Westminster, a number of party activists reoriented to local government. They were initially very successful, with elections in 1978 and 1982 seeing a number of councils fall under left Labour control. These successes heralded a potential return of municipal socialism. The idea was to utilise the institutions of local power to support social causes and workers’ struggles. This would widen democratic public participation in decision-making and open up the resources of local government to progressive and community causes. The new municipalists looked back to the decentralising traditions of 1920s and ’30s, like those associated with the Poplar resistance and even Herbert Morrison. On the London County Council in the 1930s Morrison had used the rates to redistribute wealth from richer areas to poorer. Livingstone and the GLC saw the opportunity to apply similar principles in relation to transport policy.17
The left were keen to develop a new relationship between the party and its base, and between local governments and the residents and workers they represented. As David Blunkett explained in 1982, Labour councils were good at public spending, ‘but they tend to be authoritarian: doing the right thing for people, rather than with them’.18 The municipal socialist strategy required resistance to Thatcherite laws, but the Labour machinery was inveterately hostile to such an approach. For them, respect for parliamentary law was sacrosanct, even when the laws were regressive and unjust.
The turn to local government achieved initial successes in London, South Yorkshire and the West Midlands County Council. Away from Westminster, it allowed the left to implement parts of the AES in the microcosm of local government. Municipal socialism concentrated on job creation through providing local services. In Lambeth for instance, the council opened Consumer Advice Centres for local residents. The GLC launched the Greater London Enterprise Board, a revival of the NEB in the capital. The economic strategy involved ‘outright public ownership of companies, equity stakes, part ownership with workers’ trusts, the creation of producer cooperatives and “enterprise planning agreements”...’.19 Moreover, Livingstone and his deputy – John McDonnell – opened up the GLC to social movements. They provided meeting spaces for liberation campaigns and involved community activists in committees to ensure a range of voices were heard and to break up political elites and local bureaucracies. This strategy was referred to as ‘in and against the state’.20
Radical newspapers like Socialist Organiser and London Labour Briefing were launched, seeking to coordinate and build a base among left councillors in the capital. But tactical differences emerged under the pressure of local administration. There was a fierce debate between Briefing and Socialist Organiser over whether it was acceptable for a Labour council to raise local rates to offset cuts – Organiser opposed the measure as an attack on working people. Nevertheless, Briefing achieved significant success with the election of Ken Livingstone to the GLC leadership in 1981 and winning left councillors across the capital. It subsequently played an important role in coordinating the initial resistance to defend local government from Thatcher’s attacks. But for the municipal socialist strategy to work it would take an iron-clad united front of councillors and councils across the country to beat Thatcher. When it came to the fight, as we shall see, the troops proved to be unreliable.
1983: The ‘Longest Suicide’ Myth
In her first administration, Thatcher was not performing well in the polls, despite her tough talk against the unions and the introduction of the right to buy council homes.21 Labour looked like it could do well if it united behind its manifesto and pushed for a radical opposition. But political events and Labourite opportunism conspired to deliver the party a historic defeat in the general election of 1983.
After every election defeat there is a process to establish the causes of it. Usually this is more an ideological battle than an objective analysis of voting intentions. The right of the party were absolutely clear on the reason for the 1983 defeat: Britain under Thatcher was moving to the right and the hard left of the party had sunk Labour’s electoral chances with ‘the longest suicide note in history’ – an epitaph provided by Gerald Kaufman MP. This became the standard mantra; in Wainwright’s words, the left now had the ‘mark of the devil’. The culture of the party changed as the right decided that the time for fooling around with ‘utopian’ demands was over. The 1983 defeat became incorporated into Labour Party myth, a scary story to tell the children at bedtime, a quick explanation to undermine any left arguments before they had even been made. ‘You want to take us back to 1983?’ was enough to shut down any criticism of the continuing right-wing drift.
Many blamed the Falklands War for Thatcher’s win. When Argentina seized the Falkland Islands, the mainstream press went into a frenzy to agitate for a military response. As Thatcher debated whether to send a taskforce, Foot made the fatal error of goading her in Parliament to send troops. In the initial debate Foot’s speech was essentially enthusiastic sabre-rattling. If the hope was that by appearing to be loyal military-loving nationalists, the party would be rewarded by the electorate, the reality was a cruel blow. Thatcher came across as a statesmanlike leader, Foot as an opportunist. The man associated with the Labour left since Bevan’s day, a founder member of CND, fell into line behind Conservative thinking. Thatcher had the satisfaction of seeing a left leader of the opposition submit and argue her own point of view. The subsequent rout at the 1983 election was in part the punishment for Foot’s failure to oppose the war.
The actual cause of the defeat was a combination of factors. The first was the SDP, who split the Labour vote. Michael Meacher MP argued that it was not policies but internal politics that were responsible for the defeat. Commenting on Benn’s campaign for Labour Deputy Leader in 1981, he said: ‘It showed how bitterly the right will fight ... There was never less than half a page of vitriol in the press per day and the source was the right-wing of the Labour Party. They were feeding stuff into the press even though it did cataclysmic damage to the Labour Party. It was something like a bombing raid flattening everything in sight. It was more a cause of the defeat in 1983 than the Falklands.’22 Before the 1983 election, the Militant editorial board concurred, arguing that John Golding, a key right-wing witch-hunter, was ‘bleeding the party’s election prospects to death’ through his continued public attacks on the left.23
Meacher was right to point to the conflict between the left and the right of the party. The problem was that the leadership and principal spokespeople didn’t really agree with the manifesto. The right had succeeded in securing a majority on the NEC just before the election, removing key left-wingers, which didn’t help create a stable party united behind the election campaign. The campaign committee charged with building the campaign was dominated by the right and the centre, and included only a handful of left-wing figures.24 Those charged with selling the manifesto to the electorate did not believe in it. Paradoxically, the right-wing breakaway had pushed the party further to the right, as many Labour MPs tried to win back SDP voters by accommodating their views.
But the 1983 defeat also raises questions about the left’s strategy. Subsequent analysis found that, when it came to policies alone, the Labour manifesto was actually more popular than that of the Tories. From employment to inflation and government spending, even on scrapping Trident, the Labour manifesto scored more favourably than the Conservative one.25 But people won’t simply vote for left policies just by being presented with them, even if it is in their class interests. A radically different approach is needed, both patiently explaining the policies and creating the kind of social movement mobilisation that can generate the confidence to realise such goals. Benn’s election campaign successfully mobilised the grassroots of the unions, and this could have formed the basis for a movement inside and outside Labour, not just transforming the party but also coordinating workers to take action against Thatcher. Benn may have backed extra-parliamentary struggle but the Bennites lacked the determination to bring it about.
In order to contain the ‘wild’ left, the right pushed forward a centre-left candidate to replace Foot – Neil Kinnock. He was much younger than Foot and from a solid working-class background, the son of a miner like Bevan. Previously he had associated with the left but now presented himself as a pragmatic candidate who could appeal to all sides of the Labour alliance, a reliable pair of hands. He promised the party that he could win elections – perhaps a foolish boast, but one that many were desperate to hear. Kinnock was a moderniser who argued that his party had to change to be electable. In the post-1983 context, modernisation meant defeating the left.26
The Two Fronts: Unions and Local Government
Although on the back foot, the left was still a considerable force within the party, especially at CLP, conference and NEC level, but they had marginal support in the PLP. The non-parliamentary left was very active in CND, supporting the 1984–5 miners’ strike, and around various international initiatives. Crucially, it had strongholds that attracted national attention. Both Thatcher and Kinnock – for different reasons – knew that these strongholds had to be overcome and defeated, and be seen to be defeated. Emboldened by her election victory, Thatcher turned her attention to two bastions of socialism that now needed to be removed – the trade unions and the ‘municipal socialism’ of local government.
The second Thatcher administration proved a turning point. By passing a series of draconian anti-union laws in her first term, Thatcher clearly intended to go to war against workers. The unions were seen as a barrier to the principles of free-market monetarism, as obsolete institutions that frustrated wealth creation. As part of the reorganisation of British society, the unions had to be tamed – and the main enemy was the mighty National Union of Mineworkers, with their leader Arthur Scargill. The NUM occupied the nightmares of Tories after bringing down the Heath government in 1974.
To break the union, US-style policing methods were introduced, involving extreme violence unseen in generations against pickets and protestors. The Tories also prepared for the showdown with the miners by stockpiling coal and buying off other sections of workers in the run up to the fight. The threat of job cuts in the mining industry was seen by the NUM as a provocation which triggered a national strike that lasted almost a year. The grassroots of the Labour left threw themselves into solidarity work, raising money and food for the strikers and their families in addition to organising speaking tours around Europe and beyond. It also drew together women’s, youth and LGBT struggles in support – Labour women contributing with a successful campaign against the page-three girl in the miners’ newspaper. While conference delegates were supportive of the struggle, this did not translate into much support from MPs. Only the ‘usual suspects’, people like Corbyn, Benn, Skinner and McDonnell, threw themselves into the fight, visiting picket lines and using their public influence to back the strikers. But they were the minority – in January 1985, only 12 Labour MPs took part in a direct action protest where they refused to sit down in the Commons in order to force a debate on the strike. Campaign Group MPs took the lead, visiting picket lines and donating money to the miners’ relief centres, but it took ten months for the PLP leadership to eventually come out in support of the strike, broadcasting clear reticence and slowing down efforts by many members to publicise greater support. Kinnock first visited a picket line in January 1985.27
Alongside the miners there was the second front: the left in local government. After its initial success in the 1978 and 1982 elections, the ‘municipal socialism’ strategy collapsed when the local alliance between the hard and soft left fell apart over the campaign against rate capping. The Tories introduced rate caps for several councils, limiting the amount that could be raised through local taxation and forcing cutbacks in services. The resistance strategy involved each local authority that was ignoring the rate cap (there were 16 in all) in budget setting – forcing a political crisis and a governmental U-turn. But early on in the campaign Livingstone broke ranks, organising the soft left councillors at the GLC to vote with the Tories to set a rate. His Deputy and Chair of Finance, John McDonnell, was furious that Livingstone had taken the GLC out of the fight so early on. As the threat of legal action mounted, many of the councillors in Town Halls across the country began to peel away from the fight. Within four months, only two councils remained, Liverpool and Lambeth. Their councillors were eventually surcharged and forced from office – but not before the image of left-wing figures like Liverpool’s Derek Hatton and Lambeth’s Ted Knight had been burned into the public consciousness. Their tenacity of resistance was largely helped by their local implantation – both Militant Tendency in Liverpool (who were influential on the Council) and the radical left in Lambeth had built community solidarity campaigns, mobilising them alongside local trade unions to back the fight. Ultimately, without a national intervention by the Labour Party or a firm unity between the councils, it was impossible for a couple of local authorities to resist Thatcher’s attack. The rate cap was introduced, eventually forcing Labour councils to pass on massive cuts to services during the late 1980s. Many on the soft left rounded on the councillors that had fought the cap, accusing them of gesture politics in an attempt to appease the Kinnockites.
One effect of the rate-capping defeat was the rise of Socialist Action. Isolated at the GLC, with few friends on the left, Livingstone surrounded himself with members of the Socialist Action organisation – a split from the International Marxist Group who wanted a long-term orientation to Labour. Socialist Action developed a notoriety for being a somewhat clandestine organisation. Fearing they would fall victims to a purge of the left, they officially ceased to exist, instead maintaining themselves as a network of socialists allied to well-known left figures in the party. Their entire strategy was to adapt and ingratiate themselves with the Labour left, in order to influence it from within. They became passionate advocates of self-organisation for women and black Labour members, as well as supporters of third world anti-imperialist struggles.
The defeat of the miners and the collapse of the local government front happened within a few months of each other. Militant were singled out for particular vitriol by Kinnock, who used his 1985 party speech to crucify the Liverpool councillors – an event that has come to symbolise the Kinnock crusade against the hard left.28 As Kinnock ranted, Eric Heffer, the long-time left MP for Liverpool Walton, got up from his seat on the NEC table and walked away in protest. David Blunkett was reportedly in tears afterwards – the hope of an alliance between the hard and soft left was slipping away.
Modernisation Begins
Kinnock reorganised the party in 1985, establishing the powerful Campaigns and Communications Directorate, headed by Peter Mandelson and answerable to Kinnock directly, thereby circumventing the NEC. Mandelson wanted a new direction: media savvy, working with focus groups, and recruiting people from advertising. The public relations guru Philip Gould was brought in with the aim of making the party more appealing to the middle classes. The more Labour worried about the Tory spaniels in the press, the more panic at Labour’s HQ on Walworth Road grew and voices clamoured for the need to silence the socialists in the party.
One central aspect of Kinnock’s leadership was the co-option of parts of the soft left into the agenda of the right. The alliance between soft and hard left broke down as the former accepted Kinnock’s integrationist strategy and turned on their ex-comrades. The Tribune magazine and parliamentary group became ardent supporters of Kinnock, after Tony Blair and Gordon Brown played a prominent role in ensuring that the group in Parliament was loyal to the integrationist wing. Tribune attacked Benn’s call for a general strike to support the miners, siding with Kinnock over Labour’s (non-)strategy towards the strike.29 They sought respectability and responsibility because they were the most shaken by the 1983 election defeat, making them susceptible to the demands for ‘party unity’ by way of disciplining the left to accept the perspectives and policies of the centre-right. They saw themselves as the moderate wing of the left who were best placed to tackle ‘extremism’ and undermine polarisation.
Similarly, the Labour Coordinating Committee, which had started off on the left of the party, went from advocating extra-parliamentary activity to being leading proponents of the ‘legalistic’ Kinnock regime. They removed left leaders, ousting George Galloway who had been central to their operation in Scotland. It was time to build a ‘broad democratic left’ and to expunge the ultra-left’s leaders who had undermined the party’s electoral chances with their ‘gesture politics, sectarianism and opposition to new thinking’.30 Kinnock skilfully peeled off the soft left leaders, Michael Meacher, David Blunkett and Tom Sawyer, by convincing them that the ‘hard’ left were too abrasive in their style, too narrow-minded, too dogmatic and would drive away Labour voters. The Labour leadership looked to break up the Socialist Campaign Group of MPs by promising its members instant promotion in the PLP, so long as they broke publicly and issued denunciatory statements in labour movement journals like Tribune.31 Some of the soft left backed Kinnock because they believed that it was better to influence him from within his camp than outside of it.32 The belief that Kinnock was a ‘prisoner of the right’ turned out to be misconceived – Kinnock had gone over to the right and shared many of their views.33
Despite hopes of a turnaround in electoral fortune, 1987 delivered another stinging defeat for the party. The policy review post mortem concluded two years later that removing left policies from the manifesto would help modernise the party and win the centre ground. The assumption in Labour leadership circles was that the right-wing shift in the popular mood was unstoppable – all that could be done was to find ways of accommodating it. As such, ‘modernisation’ became the new slogan with which to fight an old war. The 1989 conference, under pressure from the modernisers, agreed to remove the commitment to renationalisation of privatised industries, to not restore trade union rights and to scrap unilateral nuclear disarmament, something Kinnock himself had until recently publicly championed.34 The shadow of Nye Bevan was behind him in the conference hall.
The party was being out-manoeuvred by the Tories, they were compromising excessively and conceding too much ground. Thatcher and the mainstream media taunted the Labour leaders for their socialism, goading them that the handful of cases where socialists in the Labour Party had managed to organise a fight back against the Conservative juggernaut were evidence of the extremism of Labour more generally. They persuaded the Labour right that they had to defeat the left to have any hope of winning. Thatcher had not just won the argument in the country, she had won the argument in the Labour Party too.
Back in 1984 Denis Healey had campaigned for Tony Benn in the Chesterfield by-election to get Benn back into Parliament. He famously compared the unity of the party with figure skaters: ‘Healey and Benn are like Torvill and Dean – I can’t get the bugger off my back’. Back then the sense of being a united party with different wings who at least had to tolerate each other still had resonance, even with the right, but by the late 1980s this broad church was being demolished.
A united front was established to defend the left in 1986. Labour Left Liaison was made up of the campaigning left organisations in the party, including the Labour Women’s Action Committee, the Labour Committee on Ireland, the LGBT and Black Sections, Socialist Organiser and Socialist Action. It published a semi-regular bulletin called Witch-Hunt News, detailing all of the expulsions and disciplinary procedures that were mounting against comrades. But the incredibly low vote that Benn and Heffer achieved in 1988 when they challenged Kinnock and Roy Hattersley for the Leader and Deputy Leader positions showed that even Benn’s star was waning. Despite his high profile and notorious reputation as a still potent left firebrand, he secured only 11 per cent of the vote. Kinnock saw this as confirmation of his own course and doubled down on his efforts to transform the party.
The Fight for Self-organisation
One point of conflict with the modernisation agenda was over the struggle for self-organisation within Labour during the 1980s. At a time when the NEC was driving to control and streamline the image and governance of the party, self-organisation was viewed as a dangerously destabilising interruption. Women’s groups had been active in Labour for years, though they were primarily limited to infrequent, uncontroversial social gatherings. That began to change in the late 1970s when feminist campaigners made contact with party members. Concerns over women’s representation in the party structures began to grow. By the mid-decade a more radical organisation, the Labour Women Action Committee, was launched. LWAC formed alliances with parts of the left in Labour, intent on promoting left policies alongside more women representatives on committees and in Parliament. LWAC had emerged from the CLPD, a case of women on the left realising that self-organisation was necessary even to get their own comrades to recognise their political equality. They campaigned for the Annual Women’s Conference to have some sovereign decision-making power and to be recognised as such by the party. Some gains were made. For instance, after 1984 every CLP had to have a women’s officer. But still the problem of bureaucracy within Labour and the intransigence of those with the power to concede positions to ‘uppity’ women dogged the women’s fight for much of the 1980s.
One crucial aspect to the struggle was that, in contrast to CLPD’s line of giving trade unions more influence in Labour – bureaucracy and all – LWAC wanted to challenge the union leadership as well.35 Their challenge to the power structures in the party was also a challenge to the men in charge of the movement. The right-wing officials of the unions were contemptuous of these moves; ‘the problem is feminists and Militant’ was the view of one at the time.36 But they were actually two separate problems – Militant itself was opposed to separate sections or self-organisation in the 1980s, seeing them as distracting from class issues.
Even more controversial was the Black Sections campaign. Black voters had overwhelmingly voted Labour, loyal to the party that had facilitated the post-war Windrush generation’s emigration to Britain. In addition the anti-colonial and anti-racist campaigning of some left MPs had made a lasting impression. Most of the migrants were working class and therefore saw Labour as their natural party, even if the actual number of black faces in Labour was often very small. Black members in London branches – prominent among them councillors Sharon Atkin, Linda Bellos, Narendra Makanji, Martha Osamor, Diane Abbott and Bernie Grant – started to organise black caucuses and wanted to network them more formally together to deepen Labour’s presence in Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) communities. For the activist Marc Wadsworth, then a figure in Lambeth Labour politics, the urban uprisings in the early 1980s – in Brixton, Liverpool, Birmingham and Leeds – which involved large numbers from the black community, were ‘a wake-up call to a society that was either indifferent or hostile to the demands of disenfranchised and disadvantaged black people’.37 Just as women were doing, black members wanted more representation and – crucially – more policies aimed at supporting their communities. There were no black MPs, few black councillors and no black members on Labour’s ruling National Executive. In the face of police violence, stop and search, and systematic discrimination in schools and in employment, Labour should no longer be allowed to rely on black votes without also dealing with black concerns.
By the late 1980s there were 35 Black Sections, mostly in London and the Midlands, but the workerist Militant Tendency in Liverpool were fiercely opposed, accusing sections of dividing the working class along colour lines. More significantly, Black Sections quickly ran into a huge fight with Kinnock’s right-wing party-modernisation agenda. An NEC ‘Positive Discrimination’ sub-group, chaired by Jo Richardson MP, produced a report that supported Black Sections, but it was squashed on the grounds that such a move would create ‘apartheid’ in the Party. Undeterred, Black Sections lobbied for Black and Minority Ethnic parliamentary and council candidates in places where there were large numbers of African, Caribbean and Asian voters. This was a clear and present threat to Kinnock’s plan to ensure that people loyal to him became MPs. Because the Black Sections worked closely with socialists, they were viewed with suspicion by the Kinnockites.
By 1987, being associated with Black Sections could result in a party member being disciplined. Three members of Roy Hattersley’s Birmingham Sparkbrook CLP were expelled for setting up a Black Section. The first national explosion was over the removal of Sharon Atkin, a left Labour councillor in Lambeth, who was selected to stand in a parliamentary by-election in Nottingham East. She was the Black Sections chair. The NEC and local MPs responded vehemently – opposing any statements or organisation by the Black Sections and calling for a Birmingham public meeting (addressed by Atkin and Bellos) to be cancelled. When Atkin made comments that were critical of Labour’s record on combating racism in response to an anti-Labour heckler at the meeting, they were used by the NEC to justify removing her as Labour’s candidate.
Kinnock had Atkin removed and a leadership-friendly candidate imposed who subsequently lost the seat for Labour. After the NEC meeting Benn furiously condemned Kinnock’s actions as ‘judge, jury and executioner ... I’ve heard of one member one vote but I did not know that meant that the leader was the one member and his was the only vote.’38
There was success in the 1987 election with the election of Bernie Grant, Paul Boateng, Keith Vaz and Diane Abbott, the first black woman MP, after a hard fought campaign in Hackney North. But the left-wing black Haringey councillor Martha Osamor was removed as a candidate in the 1989 Vauxhall by-election because of her association with Black Sections and the hard left, and Kate Hoey manoeuvred into place as a way of neutralising the left in Lambeth. Although there were some victories in the form of the historic new cohort of four black MPs, the Labour Party nullified the more radical demands of the campaign, including its ‘Black Agenda’ document, diverting it into a case of mere representation and ignoring many of the more radical political points that black members were raising. Marc Wadsworth concluded that ‘though the Black Sections managed to get “black faces in high places”, the movement itself was destroyed from within by the machinations of an unforgiving Labour Party and some shortsighted opportunists’.39 Respected Black intellectual Darcus Howe was more critical, arguing that the Black Sections were essentially a ‘quest of the black, professional middle class for power-sharing with its white counterparts’.40 The Black Sections were also inevitably pulled into the machinations of internal Labour politics instead of turning outwards into the urban communities being blighted by Thatcherism.
The Coup de Grace Against Militant
Militant Tendency was singled out for destruction during the late 1980s by Kinnock and the NEC. The growth of Militant in the mid-1970s had been of concern to the party apparatus. The clashes between left and right in the National Organisation of Labour Students became a regular feature of NUS conferences. The right-wing regularly picked fights with Militant, staging walkouts and protests. Exposing the depth of anti-Trotskyist feeling, the right opposition named themselves Operation Icepick – a reference to Trotsky’s assassination by a Stalinist agent. At the 1981 Labour conference a number of Militant delegates had their credentials revoked and weren’t allowed a vote. Outside the student movement, Militant expanded its operation, establishing strong bases in some unions. They offered simple and popular arguments on nationalisation and trade union militancy, to be achieved through a Marxist-led Labour party.
With Militant influence spreading, Reg Underhill returned to his role as witch-finder general in the fight against entryism, compiling a collection of documents he claimed proved Militant’s semi-clandestine activity. The left on the NEC – Heffer, Benn, Jo Richardson and others – were opposed to publishing Underhill’s report and used their majority on the organisational subcommittee to block it on the grounds it would provide fuel for a witch-hunt. Right-wing stalwarts like John Golding led the charge, supporting publication of the report and arguing for a return of the proscribed list at almost every NEC, despite being knocked back repeatedly. Eventually Golding’s tenacity paid off. His opposition in the party and pressure from the media to control the left pushed the leader and the soft left to agree to an inquiry into Militant. Foot meekly added the proviso that there should be no witch-hunt.41 The NEC voted 16 to 10 to begin the rehabilitation of the proscribed list, this time revamped as a ‘register of approved organisations’ which was agreed at the 1982 conference. The unions had no appetite for a witch-hunt and stood firm against immediate expulsions, but at the same time they agreed to the register, which would later be used as the basis for the purge of the left.42 The register had been a compromise proposal from the soft left, but it served the right’s interests, beginning the process of rooting out organised oppositional tendencies.
Militant’s editorial board was instructed to provide details of ‘its aims, officers, employees, membership and accounts’. This would supply the evidence of a ‘party within a party’ as well as a hit list for expulsions. Despite Militant’s reputation on the left as a sectarian organisation that was hard to work with, a number of left organisations, including the CLPD and the LCC, initially refused to register in defiance of the witch-hunt. This solidarity did not last long however. The purge became possible in the mid-1980s because many of alliances that the soft left had built around Benn were fracturing. By then a number of Tribune MPs, in alliance with council leaders like David Blunkett and the LCC, were working together in pursuit of a more moderate left strategy in the party. The LCC had defended Militant in 1982, but by 1985 they were handing over ‘dossiers’ of evidence to the NEC to help expel Militant activists from the party. The NEC expelled Ted Grant and four other Militant editors in 1983 on the eve of the Bermondsey by-election. In response, Militant’s conference in Wembley was attended by over 3,000 people, including 1,600 Labour delegates.
The party investigation into Militant activities in Liverpool in 1986 was damning, effectively concluding that it was a Mafia-esque operation that was bringing the party into disrepute. Militant were vulnerable to the attack as their local support base had been eroded. During the rate-capping struggle, they had unintentionally broken their crucial alliance with the local trade unions when Liverpool Council terminated the contracts of many in the council workforce under legal advice. This action was intended as an escalation by the council, meant to expose the full extent of the implications of Thatcher’s attack on the city. But the unions and workforce were furious. When the councillors were surcharged the planned ‘general strike’ of workers in Liverpool failed to materialise.
Eventually key members of the Liverpool District Labour Party were hauled up for questioning. They were confronted with various charges, including intimidation and violence and mismanagement of Council funds. The more serious charges of violence were largely ignored; most were expelled merely for being associated with Militant. Larry Whitty drew up charges against 12 members of the Liverpool District Labour Party; Militant responded by lodging an injunction in the High Court against the proceedings on the grounds that they did not conform to natural justice. As the Labour Party is a members’ institution, however, they can organise their own internal affairs, including riding roughshod over democratic rights. The NEC ignored the ruling by the judge that natural justice was advisable in such a situation, promoting a walkout by the left NEC members. The war of attrition ground on for months, until eventually the political forces of the right managed to marshal the strength and determination to expel several members – some key leaders like Hatton alongside other rank-and-file activists who had merely published articles in The Militant.
Nobody witnessing the hearings could have concluded they were imbued with impartiality or natural justice. Eric Heffer described the scene:
I went along with Derek Hatton as a witness to his interrogation by the inquiry team and I must say that from the behaviour of one person [inquiry chair Charles Turnock] in particular, it wouldn’t have been out of place for him to have been wearing jackboots. As a former chair of the Organisation Sub-Committee, I have conducted a number of such inquiries in various areas, but I have never seen anything like this person’s behaviour. It was disgusting, nothing but a McCarthyite inquisition.43
More expulsions followed and entire CLPs were targeted for suspension and reorganisation in a repeat of the 1950s. By 1991, 215 people had been expelled, but their wider political influence was also neutered. The key turning point was the attack on the LPYS, Militant’s main base of support. The NEC cancelled the youth conference in 1987 and then reduced the age limit to cut off the Militant leadership of LPYS. Militant kept a brave face as their entire project of transforming Labour into a socialist party began to collapse under the hammer blows of the right. They hoped that any serious witch-hunt would only strengthen them, as party members would side with them against the bureaucracy. This did not materialise. Abandoned by many on the soft left, Militant’s operational capacity to remain in the party was severely limited. They split in the early 1990s, Peter Taffee leading most of the members out to form the Socialist Party, while Ted Grant remained with a rump of those committed to carrying on.
Thatcher herself was brought down by a combination of internal Tory divisions over Europe and her catastrophic Poll Tax – a supreme piece of legislative hubris from a government that thought it couldn’t be beaten. Socialists both inside and outside Labour helped launch a mass non-payment campaign. The Labour left organised a 20,000 strong demonstration in Glasgow and coordinated a series of resolutions across CLPs condemning the tax and urging a campaign of non-payment. Pressure was brought to bear on the remaining left-run councils to refuse to collect it, or to find ways of sabotaging collection. Although only 15 Labour MPs backed the Anti-Poll Tax Federation, it was clear that serious numbers of rank-and-file members and – most importantly – the wider public supported a very dynamic campaign. Tommy Sheridan, a Militant member from Scotland, was made the chair of the Federation, triggering his expulsion from the party. Kinnock was inevitably hostile to any protests and serious mobilisations against the tax, instead proposing an unwieldy alternative local tax system. Outside of Parliament the tactics of the socialist left succeeded, and after a huge protest in London where the police lost control, the Poll Tax was shelved. The Labour left had scored a huge victory against one of the most reactionary pieces of legislation dreamt up in the modern age, and the protest movement they helped organise did more to stop Thatcher’s policies than all the meek arguments in Parliament from Kinnock. Her flagship policy crushed and with little internal support left, Thatcher tearfully tendered her resignation to the Queen.
Victory For the Right, But at What Cost?
It was a testament to how far the party had come under Kinnock after 1983 that the 1992 manifesto didn’t mention the word socialism once. In 1974 the party had declared it had ‘Socialist aims and ... [was] proud of the word’ – under Kinnock it was ashamed. The red flag was hauled down and replaced by the less radical looking red rose as party logo. These changes didn’t do much good. John Major’s Tories won the 1992 election, with a much reduced majority but nonetheless big enough to form a government. The resignation of Kinnock after the unexpected election defeat should have gone down as a mark of the failure of his strategy – instead the party chiefs redoubled their efforts to move the party to the right. Voter research from Kinnock’s media department found that Labour lost because it ‘was still the party of the winter of discontent; union influence; strikes and inflation; disarmament, Benn and Scargill’.44 Kinnock’s legacy for the left was a deeply damaging one, even more so for the fact that as a young man he had been one of them. Now, like Michael Foot before him, he was another monument to the tragic fate of left-wing MPs who became party leaders. When Kinnock visited Eric Heffer on his death bed in 1991, the veteran Liverpudlian MP – bitter and angry at the man who had trampled on his life’s work – told him, ‘It’s you who should be dying, not me.’
The general political and organisational retreat of the left under the hammer blows of the right had given Kinnock a free hand to dispense with remaining troublemakers. The NEC became adept at witch-hunting and smashing the left wherever they were influential. Left candidates for elections were removed by the NEC, to ensure the party had ‘the right message’ for the electorate. Lol Duffy in Wallasey was rejected by the NEC panel in favour of Angela Eagle, despite being the clear favourite of the local party. Socialist Organiser and the Black Sections were banned, and Lambeth Council had its Labour leaders removed by the NEC in 1991. All fell under the sword of internal investigations, deselection, expulsions or suspensions. The party centralised like never before, policing its ranks and purging dissent as the right secured their position in the apparatus and wielded power mercilessly against socialists.
Despite the fatalistic claims that the drift to the right in the 1980s was inevitable and nothing could be done but find new ways to surrender, there were alternatives. The miners did nearly win – on at least two occasions when workers linked to the coal supply chain threatened strike action Thatcher thought she might lose. There were other opportunities, for instance the strikes by dockers in 1986 or of the print workers in 1987. Labour did little to support these actions both because they reflected the passivity of the TUC and were convinced trade unionism was unpopular. Faced with the most powerful regiments of the working-class movement being picked off one by one, the official leadership of the movement did precious little to save its forces. Kinnock and Labour offered no alternative. But the left at least grasped at something in those days – that there was resistance, and that if it was generalised and given a clear national leadership then a different course of history might be arrived upon. But as with the 1926 general strike, Labour was stuck fast by electoral gravity to its parliamentary orientation, and the Labour left, occasionally heroic and self-sacrificing, were unable to escape the stranglehold of the right of their party.
The isolation of the left through the purging of policies and people was driven primarily by the desire of the integrationist right to accommodate to the demands of British capitalism for a new consensus, championed by the Tory Party and relayed in the editorials of the right-wing newspapers. This whip of accommodation led to some unsavoury decisions concerning inner-party democracy and representation. By the time Kinnock quit as party leader, the conference was a hollowed-out affair, lacking in real debate, setting the scene for the stage managed events of later years. Manifestos were in the hands of the Policy Forum and carefully selected review committees that guaranteed the policies the leadership wanted.
But for the new right, these changes did not go far enough. They wanted a new strategy, one that not only appealed to the populist right-wing agenda of Thatcherism, but that properly subsumed Labour into an emerging neoliberal consensus in a way that the older social democratic generation couldn’t do. The problem for the Young Turks on the right was that Kinnock did not go far enough, he was not bold enough in fundamentally altering the nature of Labour’s relationship to the unions and capital. Kinnock couldn’t offer them anything new. It was this realisation by a group of Labour MPs around Blair and Brown that spurred them on to radicalise the ‘modernisation’ process and try to change the very nature of the Labour Party itself.