Peasants’ Revolt: Two, the Left
We have seen the peasants’ revolt of the right, but there was another too, from the left. This would be publicly associated with Tony Benn, the face of the left in Labour’s highest circles. But it was a wide and a deep political force, with complicated roots. The Communist Party of Great Britain had almost collapsed, so great was the disillusion with the Soviet system to which it pledged undying and largely uncritical obedience. By the seventies it was riven by arguments of the kind that split most declining organizations. Further left were a bewildering number of Trotskyist groups, all hostile to the Soviet Union, all claiming to be the true party of Lenin, all denouncing one another over ideological and tactical detail. They tended to be dour and puritan. Only two had any real following: the Socialist Workers’ Party, or SWP, and the Militant Tendency. Each had descended by political split and fusion from earlier groups which had first organized in Britain in the forties.
Militant would later cause a huge convulsion in the Labour Party. Wilson complained a lot about ‘Trots’ trying to take the party over but in the seventies he was largely ignored and Militant built up strong local bases, particularly in Liverpool. The SWP, outside the Labour Party, campaigned on specific issues such as strikes and racism. Their distinctive clenched fist logo and dramatic typography appears in the background of countless industrial and political marches, pickets and rallies. The SWP’s single biggest influence was in combating the rise of the National Front.
The NF, under its tubby would-be führer Martin Webster and the bullet-headed John Tyndall, had been founded in 1967 after the original British National Party and the old League of Empire Loyalists joined together. Electorally it was struggling, though Webster polled 16 per cent in the West Bromwich by-election of May 1973 and in the two 1974 general elections the NF put up first fifty-four and then ninety candidates, entitling them to a television broadcast. More important to their strategy were the street confrontations, engineered by marching with Union Jacks and anti-immigrant slogans through Bangladeshi or Pakistani areas in Leeds, Birmingham and London. A more extreme offshoot of the original skinheads attached themselves to the NF’s racialist politics and by the mid-seventies they too were on the march. The SWP determined to organize street politics of their own and bring things to a halt and formed the Anti-Nazi League in 1977. The League drew in tens of thousands of people who had no particular interest in the obscurities of Leninist revolutionary theory, but who saw the NF as a genuine threat to the new immigrant communities. And the young flooded to their rallies, marches and confrontations, during which there were a couple of deaths as the police weighed in to protect the National Front’s right to march. Beyond Militant and the SWP, other far-left groups inside and outside the Labour Party would achieve brief notoriety because they were supported by a famous actress, such as Vanessa Redgrave, or through influence in a local party or borough. Eventually the ‘loony left’ would come to the boil, enjoying enough influence, particularly in London, to shred Labour’s credibility. But in the seventies, this was still a slowly developing, obscure story.
Much more important then was the influence of socialists who were not working for secretive Trotskyist or communist parties, but had simply wanted to bring down Wilson and were now gunning for Callaghan and his friends. Like Thatcher and Joseph, they believed the old consensus politics was failing. Some of their thinking was also shared by the right – they were mostly hostile to the European Community, for example, opposed Scottish and Welsh nationalism, and were hostile to America. But that was where the similarities ended. The Labour left wanted to deal with world economic chaos by pulling up the drawbridge, imposing strict controls on what was imported, taking direct control of the major industries, and the City too. The left thought planning had failed because it was too weak, and should therefore be dramatically extended. Any strongly held political view which is excluded from the centre of power tends to develop a conspiracy theory. The Powellites believed Heath had lied to the British people. The Labour left believed Wilson, Callaghan and Healey had been captured by international capitalism, as had many MPs. The answer was to make them accountable to ‘ordinary people’, as the obsessive meeting-attenders of Labour politics innocently believed themselves to be. So the siege economy or ‘Alternative Economic Strategy’ and mandatory reselection of MPs became the two main planks of the left.
Tony Benn became the voice and leader of Labour’s peasants’ revolt. His enthusiasm for workers’ cooperatives and a National Enterprise Board had already made him a figure of ridicule in Fleet Street. Later he would become a kind of revered national grandfather, a white-haired, humorous sage whose wry memories of Attlee and Wilson would transfix audiences of all ages and views. His unbending hostility to nuclear weapons, American and British war-making, and market capitalism would inspire hundreds of thousands deep into the years of New Labour. But between the eager-beaver Anthony Wedgwood Benn, champion of Concorde, and the paternal Grandpa Tony, came the turbulent years of ‘Bennism’, the central phase of his political life. Radicalized by his children towards the politics of feminism, anti-nuclear campaigning and much else, he became increasingly detached from his colleagues as the Wilson-Callaghan government staggered towards collapse. Benn had come close to leaving it over his opposition to Labour’s deal with the Liberals, and he fell out badly with the other notably left-wing cabinet minister Michael Foot over parliamentary tactics on Europe.
His general attitude to the party is well caught by his diary entry for 15 January 1978: ‘The whole Labour leadership now is totally demoralised and all the growth on the left is going to come up from the outside and underneath. This is the death of the Labour Party. It believes in nothing any more, except staying in power.’ Benn was in the curious position of still being a senior member of the government when he wrote this, attending intimate gatherings at Chequers, hobnobbing with visiting Americans, hearing deep military and security secrets, while at the same growing the eyes and ears of an outsider. He was on the side of the strikers who brought much of the country to a halt and his new friend Arthur Scargill, the miners’ leader, was telling Benn he could be the next Labour leader himself. Though it seemed a fantasy in 1978, within a few years Benn would come within a hair’s breadth of winning the deputy leadership on a left-wing socialist ticket, during the middle of a vicious and deeply damaging Labour civil war.