The Left at War With Itself
Civil wars tend to start with arguments about constitutions, which are always about raw power. Labour’s was no different. In its detail it was mind-dazingly complicated. It involved a host of organizations on the left, an alphabet soup of campaigns, coordinating committees and institutes run by people most of whom then disappeared from public life. It began with arguments which seemed merely about party rules, such as whether or not MPs should be able to be sacked by their local parties, and the exact percentage of votes for a Labour leader held by the unions, the party activists and MPs. It was nasty, personal, occasionally physical, and so disgusted the outside world that Labour very nearly disappeared as an effective organization. Those who mocked the smoothness and blandness of Tony Blair’s New Labour rarely remembered the voter-repelling punch-up that preceded it. This fight would be fought far from Westminster, in the bars and halls of Blackpool, Brighton and Wembley at Labour and trade union conferences. The issue was simply control – who ran the Labour Party and where was it going?
There was widespread bitterness about what was considered to be the right-wing politics of the defeated Wilson-Callaghan government, and the paltry number of conference decisions which had actually made it into Labour’s election manifesto. For years lobby groups had beavered away to change the party’s policy, then finally won some ‘historic’ conference vote, only to see the Labour leadership ignore it all, and then lose anyway. Callaghan, for instance, had simply vetoed an elaborately prepared pledge to abolish the Lords. At the angry Labour conference of 1979 the party’s general secretary, no less, told him he wished ‘our prime minister would sometimes act in our interests like a Tory prime minister acts in their interests’. One former Labour MP, Tom Litterick, angrily flung a pile of Labour handbooks whose pledges on Europe, housing, women’s rights, the disabled and so on had been ditched by Callaghan from the manifesto: ‘“Jim will fix it,” they said. Aye, he fixed it. He fixed all of us. He fixed me in particular.’
In this atmosphere, the left wanted to take power away from right-wing MPs and the traditional leaders and carry out a revolution from below. They believed that if they could control the party manifesto, choose the leader and bring the MPs to heel, they could turn Labour into a radical socialist party and then, when Thatcher’s economics destroyed her, win a general election. Some idea of their ultimate objective is clear from the agenda voted through at Labour’s October 1980 conference at Blackpool, which called for taking Britain out of the EC, unilateral nuclear disarmament, the closing of US bases in Britain, no incomes policy and State control of the whole of British industry, plus the creation of a thousand peers to abolish the House of Lords. Britain would become a North Sea Cuba. The Trotskyite Militant Tendency, which had infiltrated the Labour Party, believed in pushing socialist demands so far that the democratic system would collapse and full class revolution would be provoked. Benn, who thought that ‘their arguments are sensible and they make perfectly good radical points’, saw Militant as no more of a threat than the old Tribune group or the pre-war Independent Labour Party. Always a thoroughly decent man, Benn believed the left would end up with a thoroughly decent socialist victory. In fact thuggish intimidation in many local Labour parties by Militants was driving moderate members away in droves. In alliance with them were many mainstream trade unionists who simply felt let down by the Callaghan and Wilson governments; left-wing activists who were not Marxists, and those who were driven above all by single causes such as nuclear disarmament.
Shrewd tactics and relentless campaigning enabled a small number of people to control enough local parties and union branches to have a disproportionate effect in Labour conference votes, where the big and undemocratic union block votes no longer automatically backed the leadership. At the 1980 conference the left won almost every important vote, utterly undermining Callaghan, who quit as leader two weeks later. Because new leadership rules were not yet in place, awaiting a special conference in January, Labour MPs had one final chance to choose their new leader. Michael Foot, the old radical and intellectual who had begun his time in Opposition, characteristically, by composing a book of essays about Swift, Hazlitt, Paine, Disraeli and other literary-political heroes, was persuaded to stand. Benn would have had no chance among Labour MPs, many of whom now saw him as a menacing figure, allied with the Trotskyist sans-culottes outside who would take away their privileges. But Foot was a great parliamentarian and someone had to be found to beat Denis Healey. The former Chancellor, whose natural pugnacity and abusive wit made him plenty of enemies at party conference, had become the villain of the Labour left.
Early on Healey had pinpointed the fatal flaw in their strategy which was that if they did take over the Labour Party, the country wouldn’t vote for it. Activists, he told them, were different from ‘the great mass of the British people, for whom politics is something to think about once every year at most’. His robust remarks about what would later be called the loony left were hardly calculated to maximize his chances, despite his popularity in the country at the time. At any rate he was eventually beaten by Foot by 139 votes to 129. There are plenty who believe that Foot, who would endure much mockery as a party leader for his shabby appearance and rambling media performances, was actually the man who saved the Labour Party since he was the only leader remotely acceptable to both the old guard and the Bennite insurgents. It was a job that Foot took on entirely out of a sense of duty. With his old-style platform oratory, his intellectualism and his stick, he was always an unlikely figure to topple Margaret Thatcher. Worzel Gummidge against the Iron Lady; it was the stuff of children’s pop-up books. It was also the last blast of a romantic socialist intellectualism against the free market.
The left marched on. At the special party conference Labour’s rules were indeed changed to give the unions 40 per cent of the votes for future Labour leaders, the activists in the constituencies 30 per cent and the once-dominant MPs only 30 per cent. Labour’s struggle now moved to its next and decisive stage, with the left in exuberant mood. It was decided that Benn must challenge Healey for the deputy leadership the following year. This would signal an irreversible move. A Foot-Benn Labour Party was a very different proposition from one in which Healey had a strong voice. Both sides saw it as the final battle. Around the country Benn went campaigning with verve and relentless energy. At public meetings, Healey was booed and heckled and spat at. The vote was clearly going to be very close though with the complicated new electoral college system, no one knew how close.
At this point, two other characters need to be reintroduced, both miners’ sons, both left-wingers, both men who had made their names by attacking Heath, one on picket lines and the other on the floor of the Commons. They were Arthur Scargill, the NUM boss, and Neil Kinnock. The intimidation of anyone who would not back Benn was getting worse though Benn himself sailed imperturbably through all that, apparently not noticing what was being said and done in his name. Scargill was one of the most aggressive, enough to finally provoke Kinnock into deciding that he could not support Benn. Nor could he support Healey, a right-winger. So he would abstain. He announced his decision in the Labour newspaper Tribune. Kinnock had been slowly moving away from the hard left, and had taken a position as the party’s education spokesman. He had run Foot’s campaign. Popular in the party, he was regarded with increasing suspicion by Benn himself. But this open break with the left’s champion shocked many of his friends. At the conference in Brighton, Benn was eventually beaten by Healey by a whisker, less than one per cent of the votes. Kinnock and Scargill clashed angrily on television. The seaside town was awash with ugly scenes and talk of betrayal. Kinnock was involved in several scuffles and finally, when attacked by a man in a public toilet, ‘beat the shit out of him…apparently there was blood and vomit all over the floor’. It was the inelegant end to an inelegant revolt; after that the left would be powerful in the party but could never hope to seize it.