The Boyo and the Bolsheviks
Michael Foot’s leadership saved the Labour Party from splitting into two but was in all other respects a disaster. He was too old, too decent, too gentle, to take on the hard left or to modernize his party. Foot’s politics were those of a would-be parliamentary revolutionary detained in a second-hand bookshop. When roused (which was often), his hair would flap, his face contort with passion, his hands would whip around excitedly and denunciations would pour from him with a fluency Martin Luther would envy. He was in his late sixties during his time as leader – he would be seventy just after the 1983 election – and he looked his age. Contemptuous of the shallow presentational tricks of television, he could look dishevelled and was famously denounced for wearing a ‘donkey jacket’ (it was actually, he insisted, rather a smart green woollen coat) at the Cenotaph. His skills were for whipping up the socialist faithful in meetings or for finger-stabbing attacks on the Tory enemy in House of Commons debates. He seemed to live in an earlier century, though it was never clear which one, communing with heroes such as Swift, Byron or Hazlitt, rather than in a political system which depended on television performance, ruthless organization and managerial discipline. He was a political poet in a prose age.
Perhaps nobody in the early eighties could have disciplined the Labour Party or reined in its wilder members. Foot did his best yet he led Labour to the party’s worst defeat in modern times, on the basis of a hard-left, anti-Europe, anti-nuclear, if-it-moves-nationalize-it manifesto aptly described by Gerald Kaufman as ‘the longest suicide note in history’. Kaufman had also bravely but fruitlessly urged him to stand down before the election. The campaign which followed has gone down in history as one of the least competent, most disorganized few weeks of chaos ever arranged by a modern political party. Foot impersonated a late nineteenth-century radical, touring open meetings and making long semi-literary effusions from crowded platforms to gatherings of the faithful. It was as if he had not condescended to notice the radio age, never mind the television one. He appeared with the very Trotskyists he had earlier denounced and was clearly at odds with his deputy, Denis Healey, over such minor matters as the defence of the country. Labour’s two former prime ministers, Wilson and Callaghan, both publicly attacked Foot’s principled unilateralism. After all this, it was surprising that the party scraped into second place and held off the SDP-Liberal Alliance. It is a measure of the affection felt for Michael Foot that his swift retirement after that defeat was greeted with little recrimination.
Yet it also meant that when Neil Kinnock won the subsequent leadership election he had a mandate for change no previous Labour leader had enjoyed. ‘Enjoyed’ is perhaps not the word. Kinnock had won by a huge majority. He had 71 per cent of the electoral college votes, against 19 per cent for his nearest rival Roy Hattersley, while Tony Benn, the obvious left-wing challenger, was out of Parliament briefly, having lost his Bristol seat. Kinnock had been elected after a series of blistering campaign speeches, a left-winger by the standards of anyone who wasn’t actually a revolutionary. He wanted the swift abandonment of all Britain’s nuclear weapons. He believed in nationalization and planning. He wanted Britain to withdraw from Europe. He wanted to abolish private medicine and to repeal the Tory laws on trade union reform. And to start with, the only fights he picked with his party were over organizational matters, such as the campaign to force Labour MPs to submit to reselection, which handed a noose to militant local activists. Yet after the chaos of the 1983 campaign, he was also sure that the party needed radical reform.
Though the modern age of attempted ruthless control over the media is popularly believed to have begun with Peter Mandelson’s arrival as Labour’s director of communications, it actually began when Patricia Hewitt, a radical Australian known for her campaigning on civil liberties, joined Kinnock’s new office. It was she who began keeping the leader away from journalists, trying to control interviews and placing him like a precious stone only in flattering settings. Kinnock, for his part, knew how unsightly old Labour looked to the rest of the country and was prepared, if not happy, to be groomed. He gathered round him a rugby scrum of tough and aggressive aides, many of whom went on to become ministers in the Blair years – Charles Clarke, the burly son of a powerful Whitehall mandarin; John Reid, a wild former Communist Labour backbencher; Hewitt; and Peter Mandelson. Kinnock was the first to flirt, indeed to enter into full physical relations, with the once-abhorred world of advertising, and to seek out the support of pro-Labour pop singers such as Tracey Ullmann and Billy Bragg, long before ‘Cool Britannia’ was thought of in the Blair years. He smartened up his own style, ending the informal mateyness which had made him popular among colleagues, and introduced a new code of discipline in the shadow cabinet, a code which would have had him thrown out a few years earlier.
In the Commons he tried hard to discomfit Thatcher at her awesome best, which was not easy and rarely successful. The two of them loathed each other with a chemical passion. Labour’s dreadful poll ratings very slowly began to improve. There was talk of ‘the Kinnock factor’. But there were awesome problems for Labour which could not be dealt with by pop stars, friends in the advertising world or well-educated Australian ladies barking at journalists. The first of these was that the party harboured a substantial and vocal minority of people who were not really parliamentary politicians at all, but revolutionaries of one kind or another. They included Arthur Scargill and his brand of insurrectionary trade unionism; the Trotskyist Militant Tendency, which had been busy infiltrating the party since the sixties; and assorted hard-left councils, determined to defy ‘Thatcher’ (also known as the democratically elected government) by various illegal stratagems.
Kinnock dealt with them all. Had he not done so New Labour would never have happened and Tony Blair would have enjoyed a well-remunerated and obscure career as a genial barrister specializing in employment law. Yet Kinnock himself was a passionate man whose own politics were to the left of the new mood of the country. He was beginning an agonizing journey which meant confronting and defeating people who sounded not so different from his younger self; while moving steadily, but never quite far enough, towards the centre. On this journey much of his natural wit, his balls-of-the-feet, exuberant, extempore rhetoric and convivial bounce would be silenced, sellotaped and sedated (as he might well have alliterated). He had come into politics as if it was rugby, us against them, a violent contact sport much enjoyed by all participants. He found that in leadership it was more serious, drearier and nastier than rugby. The game was changing. Week after week, he was confronting in Thatcher someone whose principles had set firm long before and whose politics, love them or hate them, seemed to express those principles. Yet he was by necessity changing, a man on the move, who could not renounce his former beliefs nor yet quite stand by them. He was always having to shade, to hedge and to qualify, to dodge the ball, not kick it. The press soon dubbed him ‘the Welsh windbag’.
The first and hardest example of what he was up against came with the miners’ strike. As we have seen, Kinnock and Scargill loathed each other – indeed, the NUM president may have been the only human being on the planet that Kinnock disliked more than Margaret Thatcher. He distrusted Scargill’s aims, despised his tactics and realized early on that he was certain to fail. As the spawn of socialist Welsh miners, Kinnock could not demonize the strike without demonizing his own upbringing and origins, yet he knew it was a disaster. As the violence spread, the Conservatives and the press were waiting for him to denounce the pickets and to praise the police. He simply could not. Too many of his own side thought the violence was the fault of the police. As the strike hardened, one obvious tactic was to attack Scargill’s failure to hold a national ballot. Yet acutely conscious of the feelings of striking miners, he could not bring himself to attack the embattled trade union. So he was caught, volubly, even eloquently inarticulate, between the rock of Thatcher and the hard place of Scargill. In the Commons, white-faced, week by week, he was taunted by the Tories for his weakness. In the coalfields he was denounced as the miner’s son too frightened to come to the support of the miners. So he made lengthy arguments about the case for coal and the harshness of the Tories which were, as he knew full well, only adjacent to the row consuming the nation. These were impossible circumstances. In them, Kinnock at least managed to avoid fusing Labour and the NUM in the mind of floating voters, ensuring that Scargill’s utter political defeat was his alone. But this lost year destroyed his early momentum and damped down his old blazing certainty. It stole his hwyl – and a Welsh politician without hwyl is like a Jewish agent without chutzpah.
It is said that the difference between being an Opposition politician and a Government one is that in Government you get up each morning and decide what to do while in Opposition you get up and decide what you are going to say. It is hardly Kinnock’s fault that in British politics he is remembered for talking. His critics recall his imprecise long-windedness, the product of self-critical and painful political readjustment. His admirers recall his great platform speeches, the saw-edged wit and air-punching passion. There was one time, however, lasting for just a few minutes, when Kinnock spoke so well he united most of the political world in admiration.
This happened on 1 October 1985 at the main auditorium in Bournemouth, the well-off Dorset coastal resort where Labour conferences never seem entirely at home. A few days earlier Liverpool City Council, formally Labour-run but in fact controlled by the Revolutionary Socialist League, had sent out redundancy notices to its 31,000 staff. The revolutionaries, known by the name of their newspaper Militant, were a party-within-a-party, a parasitic body nuzzled inside Labour and chewing its guts. They had some five thousand members who paid a proportion of their incomes to the RSL, so that the Militant Tendency had 140 full-time workers, more than the staff of the Social Democrats and Liberals combined. They were present all round the country but Liverpool was their great stronghold. There they practised Trotsky’s politics of ‘the transitional demand’ – the habit of making impractical demands for more spending, higher wages and so on, so that when the capitalist lackeys refuse them, you can push on to the next stage, leading to collapse and then revolution. In Liverpool where they were building thousands of new council houses, this meant setting an illegal council budget and cheerfully bankrupting the city. Sending out the redundancy notices to the council’s entire staff was supposed to show Thatcher they would not back down, or shrink from the chaos ahead. Like Scargill, Militant’s leaders thought they could destroy the Tories on the streets.
Kinnock had thought of taking them on a year earlier but had decided the miners’ strike made that politically impossible. The Liverpool mayhem gave him his chance. So in the middle of his speech at Bournemouth, up to then a fairly conventional Labour leader’s address, attacking the other parties and cheering up the hall, Kinnock struck. It was time, he suddenly said, for Labour to show the public that it was serious. Implausible promises would not win political victory.
I’ll tell you what happens with impossible promises. You start with far-fetched resolutions. They are then pickled into a rigid dogma, a code, and you go through the years sticking to that, outdated, misplaced, irrelevant to the real needs, and you end in the grotesque chaos of a Labour council – a Labour council – hiring taxis to scuttle round a city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers.
By now he had whipped himself into real anger, shouting yet also – just – in control. The best speeches are made on the lip of the curve of the track, an inch away from crashing into incoherence. Kinnock’s enemies were in front of him. All the pent-up frustrations of the past year were being released. The hall came alive. Militant leaders like Derek Hatton, a man with the looks of a recently retired footballer, stood up and yelled back. Boos came from left-wingers. Uncertain applause came from the loyalists. The pompous left-wing MP Eric Heffer (who had once begun a speech in the Commons with the immortal words, ‘I, like Jesus Christ, am the son of a carpenter’) stood up and stomped from the hall, followed by camera crews and journalists. This was drama of a kind even Labour conferences were unused to. Kinnock went on:
‘I’m telling you, and you’ll listen, you can’t play politics with people’s jobs and with people’s services, or with their homes.’
There was another huge outburst, now both of cheers and of boos. Kinnock insisted that the voice of people with real needs was louder than all the booing that could be assembled: ‘The people will not, cannot, abide posturing. They cannot respect the gesture-generals or the tendency tacticians.’
Alliteration, then eruption. Most of those interviewed said it was one of the most important and courageous speeches they had ever heard, though the hard left was venomously hostile. The newspapers, used to kicking Kinnock, were almost delirious with praise. David Blunkett, the blind socialist leader of Sheffield city council, who would later serve in the Blair cabinets, organized a climb-down on a Militant-sponsored motion, much to Kinnock’s annoyance. But the speech was a genuine turning point. By the end of the following month Liverpool District Labour Party, from which Militant drew its power, was suspended and an inquiry had been set up. By the spring of 1986 leaders of Militant had been identified and charged with behaving in a way incompatible with Labour membership. The process of expelling them was noisy, legally fraught and time-consuming, though more than a hundred were eventually expelled. As important, there was a strong tide towards Kinnock across the rest of the party, with many left-wingers cutting their ties to the revolutionaries. There were many battles with the hard left to come, and several pro-Militant MPs were elected to the Commons. Newspaper stories about ‘loony left’ councils allegedly banning black bin bags on the grounds of racism and ordering teachers to stop using nursery rhymes for the same reason, would continue to be used to taunt Labour. Yet by standing up openly to the Trotskyist menace, as Wilson, Callaghan and Foot had not, Kinnock gave his party a new start. It began to draw away from the SDP-Liberal Alliance in the polls and do much better in local elections too. It was the moment when New Labour became possible.
Yet neither this, nor the new fashion for better-controlled, slicker and sharper management that Kinnock brought it, would do the party much good against Thatcher in the election that followed. Whatever glossy pamphlets, well-made adulatory films and carefully planned photo-opportunities could do, was done. Mandelson, a former student leader and television producer whose grandfather had been Herbert Morrison, became the best-known of the modernizers. Prince Charles greeted him as ‘the red rose man’ for his role in ditching the old red banner as Labour’s symbol and substituting a long-stemmed rose. Mandelson was certainly a single-minded and devoted reformer, cajoling and bullying a generally anti-Labour press. But he was not the only one. The red rose had been suggested by others, a copy of European socialist party imagery. Yet symbolism could not mask the fact that in its policies, Labour was still behind the public mood. Despite mass unemployment Thatcher’s market optimism was filtering through. Labour might have ditched the red flag but it was still committed to renationalization, planning, a National Investment Bank and unilateral nuclear disarmament, a personal cause for both Kinnock and his wife Glenys over the previous twenty years.
The mid-eighties were a time when, after ferocious arguments about disarmament and the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, then a spate of espionage cases, the Cold War was finally thawing. In the White House President Reagan, scourge of the ‘evil empire’, was set on creating ‘Star Wars’, the orbiting satellite and anti-missile system intended to make the United States invulnerable to Russian attack. Yet he was ready to talk too, as the famous summit with Gorbachev at Reykjavik showed. There the Russians agreed to big missile reductions and the Americans declined to scrap ‘Star Wars’. It was not a time for the old certainties. Yet for Kinnock, support for unilateral nuclear disarmament was fundamental to his political personality. It was the reflex response to those who accused him of selling out his socialism. It was a source of some of his best rhetoric. He therefore stuck with the policy, even as he came to realize just how damaging it was to Labour’s image among swing voters.
He was clear about it. Under Labour all the British and American nuclear bases would be closed, the Trident nuclear submarine force cancelled, all existing missiles scrapped and Britain would no longer expect any nuclear protection from the United States in time of war. Instead more money would be spent on tanks and conventional warships. Kinnock was forceful and detailed about all this, and the more he spoke, the more Labour’s ratings went down. He set off gamely trying to sell the CND line as no kind of surrender when in Russia; and something wholly compatible with Nato membership while in Washington, where on his third visit Reagan’s team humiliated him with a twenty-minute meeting, followed by a coldly hostile briefing. All of this did him a lot of good among many traditional Labour supporters; Glenys turned up at the women’s protest camp at Greenham Common. But it was derided in the press, helped the SDP and was unpopular with just the floating-voter, middle England people Labour desperately needed to win back. In the 1987 general election campaign Kinnock’s explanation about why Britain would not simply have to surrender if threatened by a Soviet nuclear attack sounded as if he was advocating some kind of Dad’s Army guerrilla campaign once the Russians had got here. With policies like these, he was not putting Thatcher under the kind of pressure which, perhaps, she needed.