TONY MANWARING Militant Tendency was a secret entryist organization within the Labour Party who had had control of the Labour Party Young Socialists. By the mid-eighties they claimed to have over 4,000 members. It was deceptive and brutal and seen as ugly and evil. It was about intimidation and beating people up. It was wrong and the energy and the focus around it was Derek Hatton in Liverpool.
ANDY MCSMITH The big drama in 1985 was the moment when Neil Kinnock got up at the Party conference in Bournemouth and talked about ‘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’. Derek Hatton stood up and jeered. I had asked Billy Bragg and Pete Jenner to come and listen. And then the Labour backbencher for Liverpool Walton, Eric Heffer, stormed off the stage. He went past us and Billy applauded him. I was quite surprised but Billy said, ‘The guy stood up and said what he thought.’
PAUL BOWER I remember being tipped off that Kinnock was going to say something really explosive: ‘Make sure you’re watching on TV.’
ANGELA EAGLE I was up in the balcony in the big sweeping hall at the International Conference Centre and I could see Derek Hatton sat on the end shouting, ‘Liar, liar.’ We were all on our feet. It was an extremely electrifying moment and the turning point in our fight back to be able to be electable again. I had joined the Labour Party in Crosby as a teenager when it was being infiltrated by Militant. We knew what they were like: it was nose-to-tail follow you home and threaten your dog time. I knew what had to be done.
NEIL KINNOCK Even though we’d inflicted a serious defeat on them, the Militant Tendency had been running a campaign against the Youth Training Scheme which I agreed with because it was a bloody appalling system. But they were manipulating people in the same way the ultra-left always does. The advantage of embracing a doctrine is you’ve only got to make up your mind once in your life. I could never accept that because life is not like that. There was a concern of Militant infiltration into Red Wedge.
PETER JENNER There was a war between the Labour Party and Militant and they tried to fuck us up. If you were keeping out of that you were almost keeping out of politics. It was very tricky not being aligned with either and keeping communications open. There was a lot of suspicion from both sides. Our perception of us all being lefties together – ‘We’re all fighting for a better Britain’ – was being denied by the political structure, which was much more traditional rigid party line. The Young Socialists didn’t want anything to do with anything that wasn’t the party line.
JOHN NEWBEGIN The youth vote has always been a difficult one for parties to engage with because young people think of mainstream political parties as boring. And when people thought of Labour Youth they thought about Militant and a bunch of deranged nutters running around.
LARRY WHITTY There were those that felt Red Wedge was letting in the Trojan horse; that they were a threat or a front for some other organization. We were all worried about that. Paul Weller expressed views on occasion which people raised eyebrows at.
TOM WATSON Labour was a party in transition and split from top to bottom ideologically around personalities. That was physically personified on the second floor of Labour HQ, where you had the Young Socialists at one end of the room run by Andy Bevan, a revolutionary socialist, and then the other end you’d got the Students’ Office. There was a deadly struggle for who speaks to youth and all of a sudden here are these overwhelming creative people coming into the building suggesting new ways of doing things. Red Wedge didn’t do political nuance or political sectarianism. I remember saying to Paul Bower at Christmas, just before the first tour, ‘This sounds a bit daft but I just overheard Militant in the toilet talking about packing the next meeting to demand we support Liverpool Council.’
PAUL BOWER Tom was very upset and he confided their plan to me. I told him I would sort it out and then we packed the meeting with even more people than them. My fear was people like Gary Kemp would pull out if they thought Militant had anything to do with Red Wedge, and the Labour Party would understandably see the whole thing as too much of a risk.
ANNAJOY DAVID Militant might have occasionally turned up but they never had a hold because Red Wedge was operating outside of those organizing traditions. It was really successful at actually keeping the central message and the power and the control in young people’s hands that were doing creative things.
TOM SAWYER When Militant started to say ‘Comrade Bragg, if we don’t nationalize the top hundred companies,’ young people just switched off.
PAUL BOWER One of the joys of Red Wedge was there wasn’t any real structure, which used to drive Militant mad. You couldn’t take it over because it was too anarchic. Pete Jenner would say, ‘Don’t worry about it, Paul. Just tell ’em to fuck off.’ I offered some mild criticism at a meeting once of Ted Grant, who was the leader and ideologue of Militant, and one of their members was screaming at me. It was as if you had criticized the Pope to a fanatical Catholic. Andy Bevan said, ‘Paul, what you’ve got to realize is some of these people are basically Conservatives.’
BILL GILBY NUPE helped to bring about Militant’s expulsion from the Party. They were almost like a religious organization. We started to take them on and were seen as organizing a witch-hunt.
ANNAJOY DAVID Red Wedge and the musicians were masterful at walking a tightrope to push all that out; it was like the parting of bloody Moses’ waves, so young people could come in and sound us and the politicians out. That was best displayed when Paul [Weller], Billy and I met Derek Hatton. There was a quite a rebarbative conversation about Liverpool and racism and we felt there was a sense of denial. My view of Derek was best revealed when he said, ‘We build council houses for our people.’ It was this very paternalistic view. Across Liverpool every single door was the same colour; any individuality or creativity was non-existent. It was important that Liverpool Council was defying the Thatcher government, but on their own failures to address issues of care, equality and race, Derek was silent. We found that troubling. It was about Derek Hatton. He loved the glamour and the glitz and was a bit flash. That troubled Paul. As far as he was concerned he was involved in an independent organization that was there to get young people involved in politics, to think about politics, and to be part of a wider counterculture against the government. On the other hand, the work that they were doing to shore up the council against the backdrop of huge government cuts was admirable and what was really important was that there was a collective voice against the government of the day. We felt that the Labour Party needed to understand some of the new and important cultural dimensions that express themselves first in culture and then permeate into civil society: gay rights, and what was happening to black people.
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KAREN JOHNSON Ten of us had set Riverside up as a collective with the purpose of providing a venue and facilities for local musicians and youth. After the riots in 1981, and again in 1985, the government wanted to be seen supporting young entrepreneurs – as Labour supporters, it was quite an eye-opener – and we got letters of support from Margaret Thatcher and were granted £150,000 for three years. Michael Heseltine pushed it though. It was quite a strange feeling. There we were very anti-Tory because of the Miners’ Strike and being young, but it was actually an old-school Labour council blocking us from creating a new project. It didn’t seem right, somehow.
BILLY BRAGG Very often, through the Young Socialists, Militant were using everything they could to exploit what we were doing for their own ends. In Derby the Labour Party said, ‘We don’t want Red Wedge coming here. We don’t have any young people!’
PAUL BOWER In Edinburgh, during the first tour, a journalist asked about the after-show gig with a new local band called Wet Wet Wet, and somebody piped up at the back, ‘It’s been cancelled.’ I said, ‘It’s not been cancelled.’ He said, ‘It’s definitely been cancelled.’ I said, ‘That’s a lie.’ I was really angry. I went down to the gig and they said the Young Socialists had been going round giving leaflets out saying it’d been cancelled. And then in Newcastle all hell broke loose.
KAREN JOHNSON I was the publicist and marketing person at the Riverside in Newcastle and the venue was booked on the Red Wedge afternoon for seminars and workshops by Paul Bower. It quickly became apparent that the local Young Socialists had hijacked the event and put the rumour out there was going to be live music.
We had been told that Day Events didn’t have live music, but the rumour mill had gone mad and the venue was absolutely rammed. There were at least 500 or 600 there and it was a very heavy, scary, intimidating atmosphere. Half the crowd were Militant Young Socialists, winding up the whole atmosphere of aggression and confrontation, and a few troublemakers all baying for a live band. Me and a colleague had been on the phone to Peter Jenner to say, ‘Can Billy help us?’ But then Red Wedge got offered the live music programme The Tube so they said, ‘We can’t do it.’ We said, ‘Oh God. There’s going to be a riot here if something doesn’t happen.’ The Tube was a two-minute walk down the road, so we were like, ‘Well, can’t you do both?’ We were really panicking.
TOM ROBINSON The Tube had said, ‘Can you send a couple of people along from the tour to talk about Red Wedge,’ and me and Sarah Jane Morris were both desperate to be on telly so we said, ‘We’ll do it.’
SARAH JANE MORRIS Obviously, nobody wanted to miss out on The Tube exposure. It was my first time on TV and we did a version of ‘Tracks Of My Tears’. Jerry played keyboard. Jimmy and Billy did a verse each and I shared a microphone with Tom.
KAREN JOHNSON By this time it was about three, four o’clock in the afternoon, so we sent our head barman down to the Tyne Tees studios to see if he could nab somebody, and he found Elvis Costello, who had been booked to perform ‘Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood.’ He begged him to come down to the Riverside and Elvis said yes. When he arrived he asked for a pint of lager, a pint of orange juice and a guitar. And then he went on stage and said to the audience, ‘I don’t know where the fuck the others are,’ and started playing a wonderful rendition of ‘Shipbuilding!
RICHARD COLES ‘Shipbuilding’ sent a shiver down my spine: It’s just a rumour that was spread around town.
JAKE BURNS The beauty of ‘Shipbuilding’’s subversion was this gorgeous tune allied to this really heartbreaking and hugely political unpleasant lyric. It’s that great Tom Waits quote: ‘What I love is beautiful melodies telling me unspeakable things.’ It was a perfect indictment of Thatcher’s bravado in going into the Falklands War.
ANGELA EAGLE Elvis’s lyrics eloquently captured the inchoate rage that a lot of people who were disempowered by Mrs Thatcher felt about her: that powerlessness and disgust at what you couldn’t change. It was cathartic. It was about reviving the economy by having a war and was seen as a criticism of the jingoistic and political response and the way that Mrs Thatcher exploited the outcome of the Falklands to her own ends: ‘Just rejoice,’ and all that.
ELVIS COSTELLO The things that she visited on society as a whole we’ll never ever recover from; the dismantling of this society, that she said was ‘invisible’, was truly wicked and evil. It was beyond politics and into morality.79
KAREN JOHNSON Elvis played for about forty minutes and then Billy Bragg and Jimmy Somerville and Sarah Jane Morris and Jerry Dammers arrived. There were a lot of questions from the audience. It started off quite aggressive but everybody was cheering and happy at the end – and they did four or five songs themselves and got an amazing reaction.
TOM ROBINSON I’d just done a live interview on The Tube and the presenter Muriel Gray gave me a hard time about ‘patronizing and preaching to the converted in Scotland’ and, ‘Shouldn’t you be playing the Home Counties, because they’re the Tory voters?’ I had no answer. What could I say? I said, ‘Give us time. This has been a really good strong start.’
BILLY BRAGG People like Muriel Gray misunderstood what we were trying to do. The way we went into the Conservative south was through the NME and Melody Maker and Sounds and the Face. Part of our job was to go in to the heartlands where we could rally the troops after the Miners’ Strike and try and connect with the next generation. These were the Billy Braggs of 1979 who couldn’t tell the difference between Jim Callaghan and Margaret Thatcher. I was that soldier.
PHILL JUPITUS The greatest level of criticism levelled at Red Wedge was that we were preaching to the converted. That came home to roost massively in ’87.
PAUL BOWER There will always be people on the left that aren’t satisfied. ‘You’ve got Elvis Costello, but where’s Bruce Springsteen, you bastards?’
KAREN JOHNSON It was called Red Wedge. It wasn’t Blue Wedge. In Newcastle you felt disengaged, and actually having artists who came to do something and to connect with a younger audience using politics was great.
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PHILL JUPITUS There were people who wanted to fuck Bower and Red Wedge over. Before we arrived in Newcastle somebody rang the university and said Weller was going to do the after-show party. Why would that happen? We were quite a tight ship and very well organized. One possible explanation is an event promoter thought, ‘If I bill it they’ll have to come.’
JONA COX I was the social secretary at Newcastle University and I also got a call from Paul Bower two weeks before, saying, ‘We’re organizing a special end-of-tour party for Red Wedge after the evening show as a benefit for Miners’ Solidarity. And we want to bring 500 miners down from Ashington NUM and some of the bands are going to come across and play.’ I said, ‘Paul, OK, but we sell out every Friday night so you cannot announce this.’ I was having a bit of hoo-ha with the police so I was being very careful with my licence. I said, ‘Who’s going to be coming?’ It was just, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just get a PA in and we’ll be there.’ Three days before, I saw an advert in NME saying all the tour regulars including Madness and Tom Robinson would be attending and possibly Sade. I phoned Bower and went mental: ‘What the fuck are you doing?’
NEIL SPENCER Weller found his name being advertised on these flyers and he was expected to show up. That was blackmail. I received a letter from Ken Smith, Militant’s press officer after the tour had finished, but dated the same day as Newcastle, which said, ‘We believe that Red Wedge has a vital role to play, along with the Labour Party Young Socialists, the Youth Trade Union rights campaign and NUS, in winning the support of young people for the much-needed Labour victory at the next election.’ The Trots played dirty and were always trying to sabotage what we did.
PAUL BOWER I remember Weller stony-faced saying on the bus, ‘What’s all this about, Paul?’ I said, ‘I’ve got no idea, but I think I know who might be responsible for it.’ Militant were on a recruiting mission and telling people we’d let them down. They wanted to make Newcastle the next Liverpool.
NEIL SPENCER I went down to the university after the main City Hall show and there was a lot of fucking people there.
PHILL JUPITUS There’s footage of Bower onstage in front of this baying crowd who were expecting the Style Council.
PAUL BOWER People were heckling: ‘Where’s Weller?’ And some wanker called me a ‘class traitor’.
JONA COX It was due to kick off at eleven. Junior turned up and was heckled off. Nick Brown, our local MP, was there, and Peter Mandelson with his beard. I was going absolutely ballistic. Outside the union a mob had come up from the concert and was trying to climb over the wrought-iron gates. Cowboy fights were breaking out. I’m in this corridor and I said to Bower, ‘Where is everybody?’ He goes, ‘Sorry, mate, everybody’s a bit tired and gone back to the hotel.’ I lost it then and started punching these metal lockers: ‘Tired! You’re jeopardizing my fucking licence. You can’t do this.’ I held him out with one arm and handed him to one of my Ents crew and then turned to Mandelson and Brown as the colour was draining from their faces: ‘He’s going to be locked in my office and if you’re not back in an hour with some artists I’m going to feed him to the crowd.’ Suddenly, one of my mates runs up and says, ‘Jona, Billy Bragg’s just walked through the back door.’ I said, ‘Fucking hell.’ I threw my house keys at him and said, ‘Go and get my guitar. Now. Run.’ I went down to see Billy and explained the situation. He said, ‘Get me a cup of tea. I’ll be ready in fifteen.’ I walked back through the dressing room and came onto the side of the stage to watch and this little scouse Militant bloke said, ‘Fuckin’ sell-out.’ I was absolutely flying on adrenalin and had the power of ten men and launched him with one arm over the barrier.
RICHARD COLES Two thousand angry people were on the verge of rioting. Cue the courageous Billy Bragg who managed to not only pacify them but send them home happy with an impromptu performance.
JONA COX He played for two hours. It was half one when he finished and all these miners were leaning over the barrier and pinning their NUM strike badges on him. After, I wrote Billy a letter with a big marker on student union paper and it just said, ‘Thanks for saving my bollocks, Big Nose.’ He said he pinned it above his desk in his house.
