SEVENTEEN YEARS ON FROM John Golding’s final words, Labour’s latest conference in sunny Brighton is now gone, as are Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Ed Miliband and two Labour general election defeats to David Cameron’s resurgent, yet unconvincing Conservatives.
As Christmas approaches, instead of licking our wounds, regrouping and learning the lessons of history, after a tumultuous, four-month-long leadership contest the party is plunged once more into uncivil war. Paris has been attacked, we’ve had an almighty row over air strikes on Syria, refugees stream by the million into Europe and a reckless EU referendum is almost upon us. And as if these are not challenges enough, Labour has endured 100 days of utter turmoil since the hard left’s Jeremy Corbyn won by a landslide to become our new leader.
A century now since the death of Keir Hardie, Labour’s first Member of Parliament, the barely democratic left is again ascendant, but not yet triumphant, and moderates are not about to give up the fight for the heart and soul of the party.
But as we survey the battles ahead, after all the years of ‘modernising’ and Tony Blair’s total capture of the party apparatus, what is remarkable is how much of the ground is identical to that mapped out by John all those years ago in the memoirs that became Hammer of the Left.
The importance of the trades unions, for all the attempts by successive leaders to ‘loosen the tie’, is one crucial constant in again righting the ship. Thirty years ago, negotiating day in, day out in the real world for their members, they were Labour’s anchor in the storm and, constitutionally, will need to play that part again if the party is to recover.
On the left, much of the cast list, too, is the same. Veteran agitator Jon Lansman, who peppers the pages of Hammer of the Left, stands glued today to Jeremy’s side. Ken Livingstone, meantime Mayor, then ex-Mayor of London, leads calls for the de-selection of MPs from the recalcitrant right. In the background, old Militants – Tony Mulhearn, Dave Nellist, Peter Taaffe and their offspring – are on manoeuvres.
So, for the right, is the redoubtable John Spellar, still the MP for Warley in the West Midlands, and familiar old allies. ‘This is a battle of the sexagenarians,’ one veteran says. ‘So many of the leading protagonists are still hanging around and we’re all pensioners now.’
As Labour history repeats itself, many of the key figures for whom John Golding, John Spellar and Roger Godsiff lined up their troops are, of course, no longer here. Tony Benn passed away – at eighty-eight – in March last year; his funeral service, at St Margaret’s Church in Westminster, ended with a rapturous rendition of ‘The Red Flag’.
For many moderates, his son Hilary – ‘a Benn, but not a Bennite’ – is now, with a certain irony, a leadership challenger-in-waiting. The Commons has not resounded to so much applause, following the shadow Foreign Secretary’s rousing speech this month backing Syrian air strikes – while Corbyn sat glumly on the front bench, arms folded – since Tony Blair took his final leave to a remarkable standing ovation from the whole House back in 2007.
Badger, too, the formidable Denis Healey, has also set his cudgels finally aside; he died peacefully in his sleep, a magnificent ninety-eight, at the beginning of October this year, three days after the close of a conference in which he would have taken no pleasure.
How ironic, too, at the first chaotic meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party a fortnight later at Westminster, that it should be Denis’s successor-but-one for Leeds East – the new MP Richard Burgon – who led the shouting match extolling Momentum, the new hard left pressure group created by Lansman from the ‘Corbyn4Leader’ campaign. A catchy name it might have, in the spirit of the times, but for many moderates ‘M’ still means Militant.
As for Jim, Baron Callaghan of Cardiff, it is now a full ten years since his passing, on the eve of his ninety-third and barely ten months short of the one hundredth birthday of the Parliamentary Labour Party. His daughter Margaret, Baroness Jay, reserved me a seat at the front of his packed farewell at Westminster Abbey, after I sent her John’s book with his fond words of her father.
Denis I last saw three years ago, over a half of Guinness at the Irish embassy, where he would still pop in to the annual Christmas or St Patrick’s Day bash. Frail, certainly, but at ninety-five still sparkling and razor sharp. As for Tony Benn, I never really exchanged more than pleasantries with him, in the corridors around the Commons Library, when – after eschewing a return to the Lords on his retirement in 2001 – he was granted (with Ted Heath) the ‘freedom of Westminster’.
With growing disillusionment at ‘political spin’ and revulsion over the Iraq war, Benn’s countrywide speaking tours and fresh burst of Diaries had conferred on him a reputation as a jovial grand-uncle of free speech and democracy. Often, though, I have reminded younger, misty-eyed Labour members of the deadly serious part he had played in nearly destroying the party – but for the efforts of John Golding and all who ‘dug in’ during those darkest of days.
Now, after Ed Miliband’s immediate resignation following Labour’s painful defeat in May, those members have just elected, in droves, the supposedly ‘token’ candidate of the hard left. Such indeed was Jeremy’s ambition, and support within the Parliamentary Labour Party, that before the leadership stalls opened in June, he failed, once again, in a backbench ballot for the Foreign Affairs Select Committee.
With the hindsight of history, laid bare by Hammer of the Left, the prickly questions now for a hugely sceptical PLP are: what to do? And how on earth, after New Labour and the bare-knuckle struggles a generation ago, did it ever come to this?
As for the latter, we could indulge in a stream of what commentators (and psychologists and Iain Dale, this book’s publisher) call ‘counter-factuals’. What if Tony Blair had not misjudged so badly the war in Iraq and its aftermath? What if he had, after his comfortable 2005 election victory, sacked Gordon Brown, carried on and not been pushed out two years later?
What if Brown had not imagined, by the force of his intellect, that he’d abolished the credit cycle, ‘boom and bust’ and human nature? So that it was Labour – not the bankers – that took the blame for recession and the growing government deficit after the 2008 financial crash. What if the party had, after our 2010 defeat, elected David Miliband instead – by the narrowest of margins, including my own vote – of his brother Ed?
These questions are not wholly academic and need to be asked of Labour’s record for the future’s sake. But the answer to how it came to this is plain: Corbyn won because he beat his three opponents, Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall, and by a huge margin.
But he did so under a changed franchise light years away from the ‘electoral college’ compromise forged by the protagonists of Hammer of the Left, which had been used to elect every Labour leader since Neil Kinnock in 1983.
Fundamentalists may disagree, but it was not Ed Miliband’s election loss that leaves us where we are, but precipitate changes under his leadership to Labour’s boring, damned rule book, over which all those years ago the left and right had fought trench by trench, line by line.
Right now, the election post-mortem still unfolds, though the analysis so far accords pretty much with what we heard on the doorstep in my seat of Newcastle-under-Lyme (now much-changed and far more marginal than when John held it into the mid-1980s).
We were still, to many, the party of ‘deficit-deniers’; we couldn’t be trusted with people’s money; we lost because we were anti-austerity, not despite. We were seen as anti-business. We had no appeal to aspiration – that slice of the electorate, many self-employed, who asked quite simply: ‘What are you going to do for me?’ And we struggled to find an answer.
We were seen as ‘soft on immigration’, too, losing swathes of our core working-class vote to the populist United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), not on the scene in John Golding’s day. In 2015, for the first time in Newcastle and Labour seats everywhere, thousands of those voters didn’t return to us and just didn’t care if, by doing so, they let in a Tory.
By election day, though, a factor underplayed in much analysis so far is one largely, by then, beyond Miliband’s control. In the last fortnight, the comment ‘I know you, Paul, but I’m not sure about your leader’ (a polite way of saying, ‘Sorry, not this time, mate’) was replaced sharply and directly by: ‘What are you going to do about the Scots Nats?’
It was a sentiment ruthlessly amplified in the media by the Tories. After 2010, in my regional battleground, outside the main urban conurbations of the West Midlands and Stoke-on-Trent, we had just two seats left: Newcastle and my conscientious colleague David Wright’s in Telford. Needless to say, we were both high on the Tory target list, outspent by ten-to-one in the run-up to the election.
On 7 May, with the SNP ringing in our ears, in Newcastle we suffered a 1 per cent swing against us and, by a meagre 650 votes, I just kept my seat; in Telford, it was 2 per cent and David was swept away. Had the Scottish issue not played out so strongly south of the border, we can well speculate whether the Tories would have gained their twelve-seat majority and whether Ed Miliband would have quit so quickly, or at all.
David Cameron, who certainly didn’t expect his outright victory, has been the luckiest of Prime Ministers. He hardly foresaw that a situation of his own making – granting the Scots their referendum – would not only destroy Labour and the Lib Dems up there, but really nail us down here, too (he also bluffed his way through his vague EU referendum agenda, without getting pinned down on that in the election, either).
The damage from Labour’s rule book changes under Ed and his advisers, however, were entirely self-inflicted. The tinkering started in 2010, shortly after he took over, with Refounding Labour, a review of the party structure overseen by Peter Hain, the long-serving MP for Neath. This introduced a new category of ‘registered supporters’: non-members who would soon get a vote in future leadership elections after handing over a few quid. At first, hardly anyone did; before the election, indeed, I can’t recall anyone in Newcastle signing up, let alone helping us out on the streets.
One other thrust of Refounding Labour – changing the federated, delegate structure of constituencies in favour of ‘all member meetings’ – may yet prove significant, too. With a delegate structure, you know who’s coming and from where. Since the changes, though, meetings can simply be ‘packed’ by opposing camps, so it becomes a battle of the old-fashioned ring-round beforehand to elect someone in, turf someone out or get things through.
The real damage, though, was done by the so-called Collins Review in 2013/14, a knee-jerk over-reaction to an alleged constituency vote-rigging episode that went well beyond its brief.
Without troubling the lawyers, the facts are these. In 2012, Eric Joyce, a former army officer and MP for the mid-Scottish seat of Falkirk, resigned the Labour whip after going berserk in the Strangers Bar, flailing punches like a windmill during an argument with Tory MPs.
In the selection scramble that followed, the country’s biggest union, Unite, set about signing up new members to back its favourite, an office staffer of Tom Watson, MP for West Bromwich East and now Labour’s deputy leader. Some locals cried foul, an inquiry was launched, the constituency was suspended and the press had a field day.
The subsequent internal report pointed the finger at a few ‘over-enthusiastic’ individuals, Tom Watson quit his party campaign role in disgust and a row between Ed and Unite’s firebrand General Secretary Len McCluskey ensued. ‘Small war, not many dead, move on, a mere footnote,’ it would have been, but for the resulting party review.
Led by Ray Collins – a former TGWU and Unite official, Labour Party General Secretary and since 2011 Baron Collins of Highbury – this was Ed’s attempt to consign to history the ‘union puppet’ label pinned on him since his narrow leadership victory.
‘Ed’s central objective is to transform Labour so that it becomes a genuinely mass membership party reaching out to all parts of the nation,’ Collins wrote in the introduction to his report in early 2014, which was badged with the latest ad-man’s slogan: ‘One Nation Labour’.
It was billed, a mite ambitiously, as Ed’s very own ‘Clause IV moment’, taking on the unions, eliminating the last vestiges of the old ‘block vote’ and making Labour a Thoroughly Modern Millie.
During the 1980s, one of the left’s ‘holy grails’ had been ending the special position of MPs in leadership votes (the other – full-blown automatic reselections – I touch on again later). Since 1981, Labour had elected its leader through an ‘electoral college’. The make-up had changed slightly over the years, giving affiliates (the unions, mainly), constituencies and MPs a third each by the time of Blair’s election in 1994, but for thirty-three years the essential arrangement had endured – until the Collins Review.
In March 2014, his recommendations sailed through a Special Conference in the ExCel Centre in London’s Docklands, the electoral college was abandoned and, in leadership elections, it would be ‘one member, one vote’ from now on.
The result – as John Golding might have said – was a moderniser’s dream, but an old moderate’s nightmare. John Spellar, for one, opposed the changes tooth and nail, but in truth – once the row with the unions had settled down – there was no great, rallying hue and cry against Ed’s reforms, disastrous though they would prove to be.
At a stroke, not only did the union section disappear, but the privileged position of MPs, too. The baby – and the daunting PLP ‘block vote’ against the left – went out with the bathwater. The prize, over which so much of other buggers’ blood had been spilt before, was ceded pretty much by accident (though some, less forgiving, maintain it was very much by design).
In practice, leadership elections would not even be ‘one member, one vote’, but ‘not even a member, one vote’, with a further category of ‘affiliated supporters’, union members paying just a £3 affiliation fee, added to Refounding Labour’s new registered section (full members paid £46.50 – and MPs twice that – but flew, as far as voting was concerned, economy class as well).
As smart insiders realised, the changes really didn’t dilute union influence at all. They already held the party’s purse strings and paid the bills. Now, using their organisational muscle, they could sign up thousands of members as affiliated supporters to back a favoured candidate. Over the years, too, union mergers meant that the biggest – Unite, Unison and the GMB – had become ever more powerful in calling the shots.
The Corbyn campaign quickly grasped the potential, online and via social media, of the new system. By close of play, indeed, far more had chipped in their £3 to become ‘registered supporters’ than did through the unions and, of everyone, they were the most likely to vote.
Crucially, too, the Collins changes left Labour’s National Executive Committee to decide the all-important ‘freeze date’, by when people had to be signed up to be eligible to vote. For good reason, for selections of MPs and councillors, Labour’s rule book applies a six months membership rule; without it, you would just have rival candidates packing local parties with their supporters, families and mates.
In May 2015 – with Harriet Harman as acting leader – Labour’s NEC in effect agreed a four-month leadership election contest. After 2010, the Tories had used our similarly long-drawn-out contest to pin the blame for recession on Labour, chirping ‘maxed out of the credit card’ at every opportunity, like sparrows on a wire. This time many of us argued for a much shorter timetable, over ideally by Parliament’s July summer recess. Predictably, the unions resisted, as that left too little time for them to mobilise and their bloc remains the biggest on the NEC.
Nominations, still in the hands of the PLP, would close on 15 June (after Collins, thirty-five MPs were needed, 15 per cent of the PLP, against 12.5 per cent before), balloting would start in mid-August after a hectic summer of hustings and the result would be announced at a Special Conference on Saturday 12 September, a fortnight before the annual gathering in Brighton.
In its wisdom, the NEC agreed that the freeze date would be 12 August. That meant any Tory, Dick or Harry, anarchist or Trot could join up for the price of a pint right up to just two days before balloting started and less than a month before it finally closed on 10 September.
The conditions, in short, were set for a perfect storm – a frenzied virtuous circle, as the more the hard left realised it could win, the more Corbyn’s supporters signed up. The outcome was predictable, avoidable mayhem.
In Newcastle, before the end of May, membership had gone up from 250 to 350, mostly former members re-joining, new people who’d helped out and an influx of younger voters, stunned at the Tory victory. All very healthy – and it would have been entirely sensible for the NEC to have struck, exceptionally, a ‘three months’ freeze date, when MPs’ nominations opened in June – which would have allowed these new recruits to vote.
By the end of August, my CLP list had jumped to 750, mostly in the new categories coughing up three quid. By then the election had long been overwhelmingly lost; the idea that these souls were parting with hard cash to vote for anyone else but Corbyn was for the birds!
There was no real way, either, to check if, under the rules, they truly accepted Labour’s ‘aims and values’. Recruits were coming in batches of emails from Harriet at party HQ. To help my overwhelmed CLP officers, I gave each a glance while on holiday in France. It was as much as we could do. We picked out the odd troublemaker, rival party member, or someone who’d signed another candidate’s papers, but with most people we clearly could neither know, nor cry foul.
Back in 2014, it was (now Sir) Paul Kenny – the then General Secretary of the GMB – who voiced concerns about how the Registered Supporters Scheme, in particular, could be audited and policed – and how right he was. What a shambles! Whatever Falkirk had to do with electing a leader (nothing) was one thing. But, with the late freeze date, to treat a leadership election with less discern than the selection of any MP or local councillor was beyond me.
The rule book, after Collins, is still a mess. Explain to a new member (or a £3 supporter) turning up at a local branch meeting that they could vote for a leader, but not the selection of a candidate in the most hopeless, unwinnable ward, and you’re met with blank disbelief.
None of this would have mattered, had MPs only nominated a candidate they were actually going to vote for. Up to the final few minutes, Corbyn’s candidacy was touch and go. It was hardly surprising, as his was a last-minute ‘Buggins’ turn’ choice: long-time ally and now shadow Chancellor John McDonnell had had a go before, as had Diane Abbott in 2010, and neither they nor the rest of the tiny hard-left rump in the Campaign Group in the PLP fancied such a forlorn task again.
For the record, the thirty-six Labour MPs who nominated Jeremy were as follows:
Diane Abbott (Hackney North & Stoke Newington, 1987–, 2010: Diane Abbott)
Rushinara Ali* (Bethnal Green & Bow, 2010–, Diane Abbott*)
Margaret Beckett* (Derby South, 1983–, Ed Miliband)
Richard Burgon (Leeds East, 2015– )
Dawn Butler* (Brent South 2005–2010, Brent Central, 2015– )
Ronnie Campbell (Blyth Valley, 1987–, Diane Abbott*)
Sarah Champion** (Rotherham, 2012– )
Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North, 1983–, Diane Abbott)
Jo Cox* (Batley & Spen, 2015– )
Neil Coyle* (Bermondsey & Old Southwark, 2015– )
Jon Cruddas* (Dagenham & Rainham, 2001–, Diane Abbott*)
Clive Efford** (Eltham, 1997–, Ed Miliband)
Frank Field** (Birkenhead, 1979–, Ed Miliband)
Louise Haigh* (Sheffield Heeley, 2015– )
Kelvin Hopkins (Luton North, 1997–, Diane Abbott)
Rupa Huq* (Ealing Central & Acton, 2015– )
Imran Hussain (Bradford East, 2015– )
Huw Irranca-Davies* (Ogmore, 2002–, Andy Burnham*)
Sadiq Khan* (Tooting, 2005–, Ed Miliband)
David Lammy* (Tottenham, 2000–, Diane Abbott*)
Clive Lewis (Norwich South, 2015– )
Rebecca Long-Bailey (Salford & Eccles, 2015– )
Gordon Marsden* (Blackpool South, 1997–, Ed Miliband)
John McDonnell (Hayes & Harlington, 1997–, Diane Abbott)
Michael Meacher (Oldham West & Royton, 1970–2015, Ed Miliband)
Grahame Morris (Easington, 2010–, Ed Miliband)
Chi Onwurah* (Newcastle upon Tyne Central, 2010–, Diane Abbott*)
Kate Osamor (Edmonton, 2015– )
Tulip Siddiq* (Hampstead & Kilburn, 2015– )
Dennis Skinner (Bolsover, 1970–, Diane Abbott*)
Andrew Smith* (Oxford East, 1987–, Ed Balls)
Cat Smith (Lancaster & Fleetwood, 2015– )
Gareth Thomas* (Harrow West, 1997–, David Miliband)
Emily Thornberry* (Islington South & Finsbury, 2005–, Ed Miliband)
Jon Trickett (Hemsworth, 1996–, Diane Abbott*)
Catherine West (Hornsey & Wood Green, 2015– )
The annotations show the precariousness of Corbyn’s base in the PLP. Of the thirty-six, thirteen were new MPs from May, and only nine who said they voted for him were MPs before 2015; at least seventeen voted for one of the other candidates (marked with an asterisk* and three others, marked **, did not publicly declare); of the MPs at the time, only eleven had nominated the left’s Diane Abbott in 2010 and of these, seven also did not vote for her (also asterisked*, in the brackets).
Following the sudden death of Michael Meacher in October 2015 and talking to colleagues, I would put Corbyn’s core PLP support at no more than fifteen, out of 232 Labour MPs in all.
Among the thirty-six, it might be noted, three were seeking the Labour nomination for Mayor of London (Khan, Lammy and Thomas), where the influx of Corbyn supporters has been the greatest. And four were ‘consistent’– in a manner of speaking – in getting the left-winger onto the ballot paper in both leadership elections, while each time voting for a rival.
After the result, ‘consistent’ was not how some described those MPs who had lent their name, with no intention of voting for Corbyn. ‘Moron’ was the epithet used by former Blair adviser John McTernan on the BBC’s Newsnight in July, once the extent of Jeremy’s lead was clear.
It was a label Margaret Beckett, acting leader before Blair, freely acknowledged. ‘I am one of them,’ she told the BBC. ‘At no point did I intend to vote for Jeremy myself – nice as he is – nor advise anyone else to do it … We were being urged as MPs to have a field of candidates.’
Later, at a fractious PLP meeting at the end of November, two days before the vote on Syria, Margaret was the fiercest among Corbyn’s many critics. ‘We can’t unite the party, if the leader’s office is trying to divide it,’ she said. ‘This is about national security, about peace and war. It is not, Jeremy, about you.’
Ian Austin, meanwhile, the combative former Brown aide and MP for Dudley North, carries a list of the thirty-six around in his jacket pocket, like a latter-day tally of Charles I regicides. He was the bluntest at the welcome-back gathering of the PLP in October: ‘You should start behaving like a Leader of the Opposition, not as a president of a student union,’ he told Corbyn – but since then it has been a no-holds-barred case of join the queue.
Of the three PLPs Jeremy has addressed to date, the meeting before air strikes was the rockiest by far. After the terrorist atrocities in Paris, MPs and the shadow Cabinet were deeply split over retaliation against ISIL/Daesh in their Syrian base. While Corbyn mumbled from a prepared script, Hilary Benn was forceful in putting the case. As in the Commons two days later, he was in a succinctly different league. It didn’t change my mind – though I agonised – but it certainly swayed a number of undecideds.
That meeting was the longest (two hours) and most packed of all I have witnessed in my near fifteen years in the House. With two exceptions – for, against or unsure – MPs slated the leader’s antics in the run-up to the vote. Given the divisions following the shadow Cabinet the Thursday before, it was clear that the least damaging course was a ‘free vote’. With his rebellious record against the whip, Jeremy could indeed have made a virtue of it.
Instead, without telling a shadow Cabinet that had agreed to reflect over the weekend, his office selectively emailed members and supporters. In the coming days, MPs were bombarded by the far left inside and outside the party, including Momentum and Stop the War, an organisation that Corbyn co-founded after the September 2001 terror attacks in the US and controversially still courts. Before the shadow Cabinet and PLP that Monday, too, his office tried – unsuccessfully – to convene an emergency meeting of the NEC to put further pressure on MPs to follow his line.
Before and during the vote, the news bulletins were full of scenes of chanting mobs picketing the offices of Labour dissenters, like deputy leadership runner-up Stella Creasy, the MP for Walthamstow in north-east London. Neil Coyle, who beat the Lib Dems’ Simon Hughes in Bermondsey & Old Southwark – finally righting the loss of that terrible by-election in 1983 – reported death threats to the police. And he was one of the thirty-six who nominated Corbyn!
When Jeremy was elected, I told my local CLP he had to be given the opportunity to lead. On balance, I voted against air strikes in Syria, but respect colleagues who took a different view. Corbyn, instead, grudgingly allowing a ‘free vote’, said that the sixty-six Labour MPs who voted ‘for’ had ‘nowhere to hide’. For these reasons, I said publicly that he had failed that test of leadership, undermined any notion of collective responsibility and, if this behaviour continued, Labour had no chance of winning a general election. We would, therefore, simply be letting our voters down.
Another running source of controversy is the track record of people Jeremy has gathered around him. That started with the appointment of John McDonnell, the austere (though not in a fiscal sense) MP for Hayes & Harlington on the west London flightpath to Heathrow.
He has also addressed an underwhelmed PLP, before George Osborne’s Autumn Statement. Staring at an open goal after the Tories’ defeat in the House of Lords over controversial cuts to tax credits, McDonnell managed instead to fling his own ‘red book’ right into the Chancellor’s hands, quoting from Mao Tse-tung, the twentieth century’s biggest mass murderer.
Of course, John meant it as a joke, but Ian Austin’s comment about student stunts still echoes. Except that campus debating societies never make the News at Ten, and the image will linger long after the Tories have surreptitiously re-instated their cuts through the back door.
The appointments include Lansman, too, the reinvigorated demon of the right who helped run Corbyn’s campaign; new head of policy Andrew Fisher from the left-wing PCS union, who was suspended from the party, then re-instated after backing a rival, left candidate in the general election (against another Benn, Emily, in Croydon South); and spartan Guardian columnist Seumas Milne as director of strategy and communications, Jeremy’s new Alastair Campbell. Though a ‘true believer’, Seumas has only taken extended leave of absence from the paper to fulfil his new role!
In a largely hostile House, shadow Cabinet building was always going to be tricky. But Corbyn hardly got off on the right foot on ‘politically correct’ ground either. Taking a walloping over appointing no women to the ‘Great (shadow) Offices of State’ – Treasury (John McDonnell), Foreign Affairs (Hilary Benn) and Home Office (Andy Burnham) – he appointed the experienced Angela Eagle, in addition to her role as shadow Business Secretary, to deputise in his absence, rather than Tom Watson, who had won the deputy leadership.
Unfortunately his team hardly made a virtue of that, either, as his Chief of Staff Simon Fletcher – his campaign supremo and long-standing Livingstone aide – was overheard by the press outside his office, warning, ‘We are taking a fair amount of shit out there about women … We need to do a Mandelson. Let’s make Angela shadow First Minister of State. Like Mandelson was. She can cover PMQs. Tom knows about this. Do the Angela bit now.’
Since deputising effectively on her first outing, baiting George Osborne – Cameron’s successor-in-anticipation – with dry humour at PMQs in December, Angela has also now elevated herself along with Hilary in many a moderate mind as another challenger-in-waiting.
As 2016 beckons, after the Syrian vote, a limited shadow Cabinet reshuffle will come to tilt the balance more Corbyn’s way. So far, Yvette Cooper, Liz Kendall and other would-be leaders, including Chuka Umunna and Tristram Hunt from the 2010 intake, are sitting it out. Backers of Andy Burnham are hugging the leader close, serving for the moment.
But the concern is that the confrontational tactics over Syria will happen time and again – not least with a controversial vote over the renewal of Trident, Britain’s nuclear deterrent, looming in the New Year. The Tories can hardly wait.
So for the Labour Party, now to the first question, what is there to be done?
With Corbyn’s support so slim, fevered press speculation has centred on an imminent ‘coup’ inside the Palace of Westminster. Never, the argument goes, would MPs be daft or romantic enough to nominate him again. The 2015 conference tweaked the rules, too, to bring MEPs into the equation, so the numbers needed would be even higher.
Labour’s rule book, however, is ambiguous as to whether in the event of a challenge – where there is ‘no vacancy’ – the leader gets on the ballot automatically. The rules are explicit that potential challengers must garner 20 per cent of the combined membership of the PLP and EPLP (now fifty-one backers from a total 252), but mute on whether that would include Jeremy.
For good reason, the left have called for a clarification at the next conference to head off a plot. Aghast Blairites have already sought legal advice. Go back to 1988, they cite, when Tony Benn took on Neil Kinnock and both needed nominations. So should the NEC decide Corbyn’s automatic inclusion, challengers could go to the courts for judicial review.
This is all great speculation. It certainly fills up excited column inches, but most MPs believe it wishful thinking. And not just because the courts have shown themselves reluctant, for good reason, to get involved in the internal machinations of political parties. Also because a challenge needs a challenger, and nobody credible has yet stepped forward.
It is because of the basic arithmetic of Jeremy’s victory. Overall, he won a thumping 59.5 per cent share of the vote, over three times Burnham’s second-placed 19 per cent (Cooper and Kendall gained 17 per cent and 4.5 per cent respectively).
Among the 245,520 full members who voted, 121,751 backed Corbyn - 49.6 per cent, almost half on the first ballot, and more than twice as many as Burnham. Of the 71,546 affiliated union supporters, 41,217 (57.6 per cent) supported him and 88,449 of the 109,598 registered supporters, too – a whacking 80.1 per cent. These fervent Corbyn-istas were, by the way, far more likely to turn out (93 per cent) than full members (83.5 per cent) and affiliated union recruits (48.5 per cent).
In the face of the result, it would seem folly for the PLP effectively to declare war on its membership, let alone the trades unions, through any attempted coup.
It would lead, de facto, to the unworkable ‘middle way’ put forward by some – including Frank Field, the long-serving MP for Birkenhead – of having one leader of the PLP at Westminster, and one of the wider party in the country. That would mean incessant hostilities and gift the Conservatives the next general election at a canter.
Frank, by the way, is perhaps the most surprising name among Corbyn’s thirty-six. Having seen at first hand the wreckage visited by Militant on Merseyside, as John Golding recounts, he joined the moderate fightback in the early 1980s and backed Healey, not Benn in 1981. Later, he was to be a trail-blazing welfare reformer, who became too hot even for Tony Blair.
On the way to a Commons vote, I asked Frank why on earth he’d done it? The answer – ‘I got it wrong. I just didn’t realise the effect the leadership rule changes would have’ – is one common to many on the Corbyn list. But, just months after the result, a ‘coup’ is impractical and the reality is that there would be enough waverers that, whatever the arguments about the rules, Jeremy would almost certainly get on the ballot and win handsomely again.
That’s not to say a challenge, this coming year or in 2017, won’t happen – if this May’s local election results, including the London Mayor, Welsh Assembly and Scottish Parliament, are a disaster and the feared bust-up over a whipped vote on Trident materialises, too.
There are certainly the numbers needed – and precedents. In 1989, Sir Anthony Meyer, Welsh MP for West Flintshire, stood as a doomed stalking horse against Margaret Thatcher, putting a marker down against the Iron Lady. She was gone, after the poll tax and arguments about the EU, the following year as the Tories saw re-election prospects disappearing down the pan. He, though, was immediately de-selected by his local party, joined the Liberal Democrats and died in 2004.
It is hard to see any leading Labour figure – moderates still dream of Alan Johnson, postman become Home Secretary – wishing to end their career in similar fashion, unless he or she is already planning an exit, with the next election in 2020 still so far away.
Nor, with the 1980s still seared in the memory, is any SDP-type breakaway in prospect. After coalition with the Tories, in the Commons the Liberal Democrats are currently reduced to a rump of eight, so there is no ready-made third force on hand for a threatening 1980s-style Alliance. And Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system would again ruthlessly punish a split, to the Conservatives’ happy advantage.
The immediate future is likely to be rather more boring and prosaic. Again, it is remarkable how the history, recounted – committee by committee, conference by conference – in Hammer of the Left, looks set for a repeat because the basic building blocks of Labour’s constitution still remain firmly in place. The spadework, indeed, started immediately at Brighton and the return to Westminster a fortnight later.
Since Tony Blair, Annual Conference had long been thought irrelevant. CLPs, indeed, often agreed – outside the hotbed of London – that anyone eager to undertake the annual, expensive chore could just go, if they bothered sending anyone at all. No longer: every spring, delegate nominations will now be hard-fought, as the various left groups seek to achieve a once-in-a-lifetime dream to seize all the party organs, from bottom up, as well as leadership down.
In 2015, despite Corbyn’s sweeping win, the left hardly had it all its own way. Conference is still the supreme decision-making and policy-endorsing body, with the party administered by the NEC, which is in turn elected by its constituent groups (the unions, other socialist societies, CLPs, the PLP, MEPs, Labour councillors – a total, with the leadership and officials, of thirty-three).
The annual agenda, in turn, also still lies in the hands of the Conference Arrangements Committee (CAC), made up of two CLP nominees and five from the unions.
‘Labour First’, in which John Spellar is still intimately involved, has long organised the moderate slate for internal elections. On the left, since 1998 - when John Golding finished these memoirs – the job has been done by the so-called Grassroots Alliance, comprising the familiar Campaign for Labour Party Democracy (CLPD) and soft left Labour Reform.
At Brighton, the CAC elections were a landslide for the moderates under the ‘Labour First’ banner, with the poll topped by Gloria de Piero, the popular MP for Ashfield in Nottinghamshire (and a Kendall supporter in 2015), and Mike Cashman, the engaging former MEP and ex-EastEnders actor, now in the House of Lords.
Defeated in the 2015 general election were Katy Clark, the left-wing ex-MP for North Ayrshire and Arran – who lost in May’s SNP landslide and is now back at Westminster as Corbyn’s political adviser – and Lansman, now plotting through Momentum to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
The moderate duo will serve until 2017, a key counterweight to early left attempts to get radical policy and constitutional changes on the agenda. As ever, though, all depends on the unions, who should neither be written off by either side, nor taken for granted.
The NEC results were more of a mixed bag, with four of the six CLP places taken by the Grassroots Alliance. Their slate included, tactically as ever, the diligent Ann Black, whom many moderates back and who has just joined the launch of a new centre-left group, Open Labour, as a counterweight to Momentum (unlike which, it only admits party members).
Again, though, the key to success lies within the unions – with twelve of the thirty-three seats, they have the NEC’s largest bloc. After successive mergers, and a few walk-outs, Labour officially now has just fifteen affiliated unions (in reality now only fourteen, following the GMB’s takeover last year of my own local ceramics union, Unity, in North Staffordshire). Their section, though, is dominated by the ‘big four’ – in order: Unite, Unison, the GMB and the shop workers of USDAW – with their combined membership of nearly 4 million.
Eight of their dozen seats were claimed by unions that had supported Jeremy. After the carve-up, there was undisguised fury at the first PLP as, right in the middle of a steel crisis, the industry’s moderate community union – which supported Yvette Cooper – had been booted off the NEC in favour of the bakers, food and allied workers, who had nominated Corbyn. ‘Unite and Unison simply used their muscle in the union section to turf the steelmakers out – no solidarity, just as simple as that,’ one old union soldier told me afterwards.
There was anger, too, at the abrupt replacement of Hilary Benn, one of three front-bench MPs on the NEC, by another Corbyn supporter, Rebecca Long-Bailey, the new MP for Salford & Eccles. By right, that decision lay with the shadow Cabinet, but in practice it had long been exercised by the leader. ‘There’s no mystery. Jeremy’s office rang Hilary, who was standing in at the NEC in place of Harriet, told him what they wanted and Hilary went along with it,’ one senior shadow Cabinet member said. ‘In the recent past, there’s been no argument about such niceties as whose decision it really should be. That’s all changed from now on.’
As a result of the changes, Corbyn can now normally expect to command a narrow majority on the NEC, but on policy that does not mean he automatically has it his own way.
In Brighton’s highest-profile early skirmish, indeed, Corbyn was firmly rebuffed by both the unions and constituencies in his attempts to open up a debate on Trident. I was on the front row at conference’s opening on the Sunday, with 100-year-old Jack Hood and his family from Newcastle. Jack first joined Labour in the 1930s, when the international brigades went off to battle General Franco, and a few years before he was one of the first to sign up to fight Hitler.
Patiently we sat for Jack to receive one of two annual National Merit Awards, a feel-good presentation at the start of every conference. But we were kept waiting and waiting, as speaker after speaker from the left seized the platform to challenge the CAC report, which kept Trident off the agenda.
As they demanded rejection – a ‘reference back’ in the arcane language of Labour gatherings – and a full ‘card vote’ of delegates, I was reminded again of John Golding despairing in the bad old days. I hoped anyone watching TV in their pyjamas would be tuned to another channel. The shenanigans would be as incomprehensible to the British public as they were to John, and to Jack’s waiting family.
In the vote, just a sliver – 0.16 per cent – of the union section swung the left’s way. They have members to answer to and lots of jobs hang on Britain’s nuclear deterrent, as they will when Parliament confronts the long-delayed decision over a third runway at Heathrow.
The left was backed, too, by just 7 per cent of the constituencies, always a thorn during the Bennite campaigns of the 1980s. The Lansmans will draw comfort, though, that most CLP delegates had been selected well before the Corbyn rush, and all is to play for in conferences ahead.
Leaders matter, but so does policy. Since Tony Blair’s heyday, the reality has been that, within bounds, the leader has effectively had a veto when it comes to the manifesto, whatever worthy documents emerge between elections from committees and consultations.
Formally, however, the decision lies with Labour’s Joint Policy Committee, a tri-partite steering group made up of the shadow Cabinet, NEC and the party’s National Policy Forum (NPF) – chaired since 2011 by the combative Angela Eagle. And both she and her twin sister Maria, appointed – until a reshuffle at least – to shadow Defence, have already shown themselves to be no shrinking violets in reminding Corbyn of what is current party policy.
One step back, two steps forward, the battle over Trident has certainly not gone away. There was head-shaking again after Brighton with the appointment of Ken Livingstone, a dyed-in-the-wool anti-nuclear campaigner, now resurrected by CLPs to the NEC, to co-chair Labour’s defence review with Maria. ‘The left has stepped back on policy for now, but not for long, in favour firstly of changes of personnel. This is classic Livingstone, because people mean policy,’ one key NEC watcher says.
Getting your people in place, of course, is crucial all round. And at Westminster, shadow Cabinet moderates have been bolstered by a clean sweep in elections to the seventeen PLP backbench departmental committees. Hitherto obscure – I can’t remember when I last turned up to one – these groups can be used as a base to develop or challenge policy.
Under standing orders, the backbench chairs of these form the backbone of the PLP’s representation on the NPF – a further battleground, in the left’s sights for a shake-up, where the Labour First and Grassroots slates shared the spoils with twenty-five seats apiece before Brighton.
As both sides manoeuvre, it is that damned, boring rule book that will occupy the old smoky backrooms as the New Year approaches. The left are likely to push, in the constituencies and on the NEC, to clarify the leader’s automatic inclusion on the ballot if there’s a challenge. Red Ken, indeed, has called for the abolition of the nomination thresholds among MPs and MEPs in future leadership elections anyway – harking back to the days when the likes of Benn could challenge leaders like Kinnock at whim, with the slenderest of PLP support.
The right, of course, will resist, but – with boundary changes looming – it is that second ‘holy grail’ of the left, parliamentary reselections, that is now uppermost in mind. To date Corbyn has rowed back from pushing ‘automatic mandatory reselections’, tactically most moderates think, as it would be a declaration of open war. But there are other ways to skin this particular cat.
After 2010, Labour spent enormous energy fighting boundary changes from the Tory–Lib Dem coalition to cut the number of MPs from 650 to 600. By equalising constituency electorates more closely, they would have scythed through Labour’s advantage in Wales and Scotland – before the SNP wipe-out – and cut seats in urban areas, where electorates are smaller, but not the population, as people are less likely to register.
In North Staffordshire, the only pond of red in a sea of surrounding Midlands blue, we stood – and still stand – to lose one of the four local seats. In 2011, we spent months fighting the mother of all campaigns to stop the historic Newcastle-under-Lyme constituency being sliced in two, with little heed of history or community ties.
After an inquiry by the Boundary Commission, the watchdog that oversees the process, we won our case – but only for neighbouring Stoke-on-Trent South to suffer the same prospective fate. All that precious time was spent before the Lib Dems finally came to their senses; realising they would be hammered, too, they pulled the rug from under Cameron after rebel Tories scuppered their grand plans for House of Lords reform.
At the Boundary Commission, though, the Conservatives still have an off-the-shelf scheme, ready and waiting for when they fire the starting pistol again in 2016. As electoral registers have changed, we’ll still have to go through the onerous process again. But the prize is now within Tory grasp, making it a far higher mountain that Labour, in 2020, has to climb.
For the left, it is also an opportunity to savour. Rather than awaiting retirements, or picking off the odd, unpopular, too-long-in-the tooth MP between elections, boundary changes offer the prospect of dog-eat-dog battles between MPs of different persuasions to hold their seats, or new candidates coming through the middle.
Since 1990 under Neil Kinnock, before each general election Labour MPs have gone through what is known as the ‘trigger ballot’. In this process, each CLP branch has a vote to re-affirm their support for the MP or opt for a full reselection contest, as do union branches and other recognised socialist societies affiliated to the constituency. Should the MP get a majority of these, he or she is automatically reselected. Only if they do not is a full reselection ‘triggered’, open to all comers, in which each body again has a nomination right, but voting is only open to full members.
It has been a halfway house, not always perfect, to keep MPs accountable without for ever looking over their shoulders. In practice, unless there is a concerted conspiracy, or the incumbent is deeply unpopular, the trigger is usually straightforward to negotiate. Again the unions are key, as they often affiliate more branches than CLPs have – and the decision has often lain with their influential regional secretaries or national political officers.
Over the last twenty-five years supporting MPs in trigger ballots, it has been a key stabilising role of the unions, particularly where CLP memberships have been small and meetings susceptible to ‘packing’. It hardly takes a genius, therefore, to conceive rule changes – increasing the affirmation threshold to two-thirds, for instance – to upset the apple cart short of reintroducing full ‘mandatory reselection’.
Boundary changes introduce a whole new, mouth-watering variable. When these happen, as they will wholesale shortly, MPs who have a ‘substantial territorial interest’ in the new constituency – defined as 40 per cent or more of the electors from their old seat – automatically go forward to be considered. If there is only one such MP, the ‘trigger ballot’ applies, not a full contest. If the interest is less than ‘substantial’, the NEC has wide discretion as to who can stand.
Tinkering with the rules here, therefore, holds the prospect of fully changing the landscape: ‘Leadership rule changes should be resisted, and mandatory reselection has not gone away,’ one NEC insider says. ‘But the key things to watch, with boundary changes, are any attempt to lower the 40 per cent territorial interest rule or how the NEC exercises discretion. And any moves, of course, to allow the £3 supporters to vote in constituency selections, as well as for the leader.’
Since Jeremy’s election, Lansman’s efforts to convert the ‘Corbyn-4Leader’ database into an effective force across CLPs, through Momentum, has generated frenzied headlines. The PLP is largely un-factionalised these days. Tribune folded in the mid-1990s and a later re-launch never got off the ground. The Campaign Group is tiny and the Blairite Progress and Brownite Compass groups have always been more about conferences, magazines and the press than ‘parties within the party’. So anything that smacks of infiltration, or M for Militant, is bound to set hackles rising.
Complacency, clearly, would be crazy. But it would be daft, too, not to welcome the surge in Labour’s membership. It is, too, far from evenly spread, focussed heavily around London and universities – ‘Exactly the coalition John Golding warned of years ago: intellectuals, idealists and metropolitans,’ one wary MP warns. But I’ve met many a Corbyn supporter, bright people who’ve rolled the dice in frustration, knowing it’s likely to end in tears, but who’ll have no truck with hard-left fratricide, infiltration or attrition. Organisation also needs organisers and six people in a pub doesn’t make a revolution. Calming nerves, indeed, it was new deputy leader Tom Watson who swiftly warned Lansman off mandatory reselection and called Momentum ‘a bit of a rabble’.
I came into Parliament with Tom in 2001 and worked closely with him on the Culture, Media & Sport Select Committee, pursuing phone-hacking at Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World. Just turned forty-nine, and a former Cabinet Office minister, he is steeped in the unions and three decades of Labour organisation.
People close to Tony Blair still bristle at his role in 2006 in a round-robin backbench letter, prompting Labour’s most successful Prime Minister to name the day for his resignation. But he still won the deputy leadership convincingly, gaining 50.7 per cent on the third round of voting, against four other quality candidates (in results order: Stella Creasy, Caroline Flint, Angela Eagle and Ben Bradshaw).
Hardly of the left, Tom voted for air strikes in Syria (he, too, has ‘nowhere left to hide’), but with his intimacy with the unions, especially the biggest, Unite, he has been a key balancing force in the first 100 days of Corbyn’s leadership. And, as Hammer of the Left demonstrates, it is the unions, still, which are key to the battle for the Labour Party’s heart and soul.
Nearly thirty years ago, when I first joined the party and went to conference for the first time, like John Golding I used to scour the confetti pamphlets of the left. The most useful by far were the voting guides, circulated daily by the CLPD. They were drawn up, as I recall, by Peter Willsman, another Grassroots veteran now on the NEC. Whatever CLPD advised, namely, moderates just did the opposite – very handy, indeed, and not matched by any public literature from the right.
Now, late at night in December at Westminster, rather than write my members’ Christmas cards, a blow-by-blow guide to the Brighton conference catches my eye. I must get out more. It is from the ‘Labour Party Marxists’. ‘Two years to take control,’ runs the headline. ‘The bureaucratic right is still running the show, but by 2017 all that could change.’
For Labour to have a fighting chance at the next general election – or the one after, heaven forbid – members in the party and the unions with a modicum of common sense must make sure that doesn’t happen. And in the fightback, we have one unlikely ally.
Any Conservative government, in the straits we’re in and with such a slender majority, would normally repeal the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act, so the Prime Minister – free from the Liberal Democrat corset – could once again call an election at the time of his choosing. But David Cameron, having pre-announced his own departure, hardly has the inclination. Otherwise, his own side would be pushing him precipitately out of the door before he’s served, like Tony Blair, his own ten years. So it looks like Labour, accidentally, might have more time than we might reasonably have expected.
To relief all round, we have recently held on to Oldham West & Royton in the new parliament’s first by-election, with a 10,000-plus majority. But it was a safe Labour seat, won by a popular, young, moderate local council leader Jim McMahon, for whom great things are rightly expected. And, as history and Hammer of the Left show, one good result does not necessarily beget another – take Darlington before 1983.
During 2016, on top of divisive boundary changes, we are almost certainly set for another vote, which is far more crucial to the country than who – for the moment – leads the Labour Party: the referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union.
The best result by far from our conference in Brighton was that, after prevarication, Corbyn was pushed into not sitting on the fence until Cameron makes up his mind which side to back, nor bickering over an EU renegotiation ‘wish list’ of his own. As a result, the respected Alan Johnson remained in place to lead Labour’s campaign, come what may, to stay.
Though many good people are up for a fight, and there’ll be plenty of hard-left provocation, no doubt, it would be dreadful if a leadership challenge – forlorn or not – were to divert the party’s attention from the battle for Britain’s future in Europe.
There’s another important reason, too, while slogging in the trenches, not to go ‘gung ho’ over the top. In 2015, party members decided whom they wanted to be party leader. But they have yet to see, with their own eyes, the evidence – through the ballot box – of how the wider country judges the prospect of Jeremy Corbyn becoming Prime Minister. They have not had enough time to draw conclusions, therefore, about what lies in store for Labour under his leadership at the next general election.
Unless something goes spectacularly wrong for David Cameron over Europe, ahead of 2020, each May the great British public will vote in elections across the country. It is their verdict, this spring and the following, at least, that Labour and the leadership need to heed. In the meantime, we have to hope that all else is not simply damage limitation – that it is not, to quote John Golding from this book’s Introduction, a further five years’ hard labour inflicted on innocent bystanders.
PAUL FARRELLY
MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT FOR NEWCASTLE-UNDER-LYME
DECEMBER 2015