During the 80s and 90s I wrote a lot of articles on the issues and debates within Labour during its years in the wilderness. Clearing out some old stuff I came across three of them starting with this one written in 1983, 1987 and 1993. Each attracted controversy - I was variously denounced as disloyal, defeatist, treacherous and a wide-eyed maverick.

Whatever! Judge for yourself.

Re-reading them many years on it struck me that, for those who have never experienced either opposition or the political battles that take place in opposition, they might make interesting reading.  I’ve not changed anything, but added a few up-to date footnotes to explain stuff that time may have obscured.  

 

I could never sleep on election nights. I had spent 1979 in a local radio studio helping with a results programme and only recently saw the fascinating TV coverage on a BBC4 re-run. By 1983 I had was agent in the kind of place where Labour ought to have been a force were it to be forming a Government. As in most of the South, Labour came a poor third.

Working on the campaign was excruciating, not least because so many in Labour were seemingly deluded about their party’s prospects. One of the ways people in politics push themselves through situations where defeat is the only prospect is by going into denial.

Getting home at 3am there was nobody around and nobody to phone, nothing to do but write about it.

 

Boiling our Heads: Instant reactions to the 1983 General Election

The result of the election was determined several years before the results were finally declared. Although there has been a steady decline in the Labour vote since the 1966 election, it was difficult to imagine the scope of the June defeat. There is serious danger that in having won some two hundred plus seats Labour will write off this catastrophe, being only too happy to rely upon the curiosities of the British electoral system. To do so would prove fatal.

Whether or not the condition of the Labour Party is terminal will be determined within the next year or so. Robin Cook summed up the condition of the party in January, his words, more or less, were, “In 1970 we lost an election and failed to think of why it happened for one moment. In 1979 when we lost the party proceeded to carry out post-morta and recriminations for the best part of four years, by which time an election may well be a matter of weeks away.”[i] If the party, and in particular the non-Trotskyite left, fails to determine and carry through clear, decisive measures, Socialism in Britain may well become an academic bywater.

Socialism and Elections[ii]

It is worth referring to the role of elections in the context of a transition to socialism. Unless one accepts the likelihood of insurrectionary social change then elections must have a role in social change whatever reservations one may have about the credibility of Parliamentary democracy. My instant rejection, some ten years ago, of ’socialism by coup’ was and is based on the simple premise that an ideology which put forward the enhancement, socially and economically, of the majority, cannot be achieved without mass consent, the minimum expression of which is through the ballot box. Given the character of the forces of state in capitalist society the long-term victory of socialism depends upon far more committed support. However, the electoral starting point cannot be escaped.

Issues and Ideology

The Conservative victory in 1983 is even more remarkable than that of 1979 as a victory of an ‘ideology’ rather than a party programme based on a number of issues. The Conservative Manifesto throughout its 47 pages and 10,000 or so words fails to bring out any specific proposals of substance. The Conservative press conferences and the televised interviews with front benchers, most notably Margaret Thatcher, Norman Tebbit and Cecil Parkinson, very rarely went into detailed discussions of exactly what the next government will do or will not do. The Conservatives restricted their campaign to an attack on the policies of the Labour Party and the general promotion of abstract concepts of the new right - ‘Victorian values’, ‘Britain, strong and free’, etc, etc. Labour’s campaign dictated the issues, jumping around day by day from one to the other, but never did the party emphasise its own values or present any kind of vision of just what kind of society we want to see. As a result it has become very easy to attack socialism, after all nobody seems to know what it is. The image of socialism which exists in the minds of the British electorate has been created, almost entirely, by the Conservative Party.

The Manifesto and Re-evaluation

The first point must be that whatever inadequacies it may have had were merely those of party policy.[iii] It is fairly clear that unemployment, which it is commonly acknowledged was Labour’s best issue, had little effect upon the collapse of the Labour vote in the South of England, and even less upon our poor showing in the Midlands where most commentators expected the election to be won or lost. On the doorstep, all the feedback I received suggests that several aspects of policy were particularly unpopular. Council house sales, with the enormous economic incentives provided by the present Government, have had a marked effect on Labour’s popularity among its traditional constituency. In the South, the aspiration of property ownership has proved decisive in my opinion. Public ownership is vastly unpopular, and the current basis of publicly owned industry is a major contributory factor. Unilateralism, though not in itself unpopular, was presented in a woolly-hatted, woolly-minded, pacifistic blur which left our guard down and our chin out. The lack of a socialist approach to the question of income within and without the public sector and the manifest disunity and lack of ideas in this field went a long way towards destroying the credibility of our economic policies. Finally, this election at long last buries the possibility of withdrawal from the EEC, though I didn’t believe it attainable or desirable anyway.

Any re-evaluation of policy must be based upon an analysis of that to which wish to appeal, what the constituency of Socialism is, and what the character of the working class has become. Without such an analysis the argument will be reduced to ultra-left versus centre-right fisticuffs of the kind we can well do without. Where are we going and who are we going with is a question which must be faced.

Leadership and the Thatcher Factor

The Spectator, in its pre-election number, pointed out that in its bogeyfication of Margaret Thatcher the left had played entirely into her hands. This astute observation could not be more pointedly illustrated by the front page of The Sun on June 9^th which urged us to “VOTE FOR MAGGIE” alongside a cartoon of Margaret Thatcher as Britannia. A similar cartoon appeared in a ‘left’ newspaper (I forget which, there are so many) during the Falklands affair. No doubt ‘Maggie’ approved of both. The facts of the situation are that the Conservative government wasn’t anything like as ‘resolute’ as it made itself out to be and was pretty unsuccessful on all counts. However, the image was easily turned round by the Conservatives as a virtue completely in line with their ideology, and helped turn catastrophic failures into successes.

Against this background the Labour Party, and the left in particular, have encountered a serious problem of leadership. It is simple to be wise after the event, but Michael Foot’s biggest mistake was to take on the leadership in the first place. The problem, to come to the point, is not that an individual made errors, but that the party has failed to realise what the role of leadership is in a Socialist movement. Theories of betrayal and conspiracy dominate Labour left concepts of leadership; they provide a convenient scapegoat for the failures of the movement. Michael Foot took over the reins at a time when the party was unleadable, it is highly debatable if anyone else would have done any better.

In truth, the greatest problem of the Foot leadership was the image of the party under Michael. In the present situation this image is all important. The Labour Party has been successfully portrayed as old, deaf and tired. In the next party leader the image of a young, dynamic and forceful leader is vital. Equally important is the ability to command respect and achieve consensus in the PLP and at party conference. The fortunate absence of one Tony Benn[iv] makes the correct choice all the more likely. The hatred within the constituency section for anyone within the party leadership other than Benn leaves great doubts about exactly where the constituency votes will go. At present it is difficult to see any other contender than Neil Kinnock receiving nearly the full 30%. In the meantime the PLP has changed sufficiently since the last deputy leadership election to provide sufficient support for Kinnock only to need a few trade unions to secure the leadership.

Shooting Ourselves in the Foot

The remarkable capacity of the Labour Party in recent years to score own goals has surpassed the wildest dreams of the new right. The saga really started when the franchise for the leadership elections was widened. While everyone accepted that Labour MPs had no sole right to elect the party leader the method chosen was undemocratic and cumbersome. The electoral college was never going to work, and the proportion given to the trade unions was too high. In addition, the broad left which won the current albatross of a system made possibly the most ridiculous political error of the decade in arguing against a one person one vote ballot of members. The entire argument was conducted on basis of ‘on such a system the right will win’ with any bogus ‘democratic’ arguments about the ‘nature of the Labour movement’ to back up the desire to gain short term advantage. All the while, however, the left argued for more democracy, ignoring the fact that they were handing the leadership of the party to the Trade Union powerbrokers who had controlled the NEC and conference for many years. The concern of the left was not so much winning the party to socialism and winning the country to socialism, but capturing the party by coup and imposing socialism on an unwilling population as a result. A change to a one person one vote election would have been a more democratic move and would probably have prevented the SDP split[v]. What was initially hailed as the left’s greatest victory looks now, on reflection, to be its most costly error.

The came the Benn bombshell. Totally out of the blue, entirely of his own volition and without any pretence to consult those who had supported him in the past, Tony Benn put himself into the deputy leadership election against Dennis Healey. In doing so the party went into five months of public self-flagellation and another batch of SDP defections followed rapidly. Many of the reluctant supporters of Benn mistakenly argued that, in standing, Benn had made reforms in the constitution secure and shown that the system could work. In fact the deputy leadership campaign discredited the system. The T&GWU consultation process made the whole affair an absurd mockery of democracy[vi]. What was worse, an entire new generation of party members recruited in the militancy of the mid seventies (1972-74) knew very little else but internal debates about how to make the leadership accountable.

Following the election campaign, support for Labour fell in the polls and the SDP achieved lift-off in an opposition vacuum. After several by-election defeats the Labour Party was tottering, then came Bermondsey. In what had been a fairly unremarkable local takeover by ultra-leftists in the Borough of Southwick, the Bermondsey General Committee selected the entirely unsuitable Peter Tatchell to fight the parliamentary seat. Tatchell was subject to shoddy treatment from the Fleet Street press, but was entirely unable to handle the glare of the by-election. He was merely an unremarkable GC activist who had been forced to bite off more than he could chew. The real own goal was scored by Foot when he was carefully and clinically set up in the House of Commons to refuse endorsement to Tatchell. (Foot had never met him and it is highly debatable if he knew who Tatchell was.) After that incident, the by-election was always lost. Even allowing for all of the organisational slackness of the campaign, Tatchell looked all wrong and the NEC had dug itself into a bunker.

Shortly following Tatchell was the Militant affair. The whole business was badly handled. There are only two choices in such a situation and with such a group - either no action and political denouncement as irrelevant and unrepresentative, or mass expulsions[vii]. The dreadful compromise of the register was hot air, the left was foolish not to end the argument by supporting the register, and the rather pointless expulsion of the ’so called’ editorial board was neither relevant nor practical. The affair bore the stamp of an ACAS compromise and further categorised Foot’s leadership as ineffectual. Simultaneously, the purging of the NEC showed that Foot could not achieve any consensus.

Following this lot, the election campaign itself was lacklustre and without subtlety. Callaghan’s[viii] knee-jerk and Mortimer’s[ix] hit wicket-vote of confidence demoralised the campaign and finally wrote off any unlikely chance of recovery, however partial.

The Alliance Vote and its Implications

The total collapse of Labour in the south of England effectively reduces Labour to a regionally based party. Under the present electoral system there is little prospect of recovery in the region. It is difficult to defend an electoral system which produces the result which emerged on Friday morning of 10^th June. Ironically enough, it would not have been Labour who would have suffered most by the election being conducted through a roughly proportional system. Sooner or later the party may have to reconsider its attitude to P.R. of some sort, particularly if the proportion of the popular vote slips further. The second major implication is that all of the arguments for devolution and effective regional government are strengthened by the results.

Until now, Labour has argued for the current system largely on the basis of the benefits bestowed upon us by its inbuilt curiosities. In the future, we may well find the system working against us, an unpalatable yet unavoidable conclusion we must draw from the results.

Prospects and Priorities

The short-term priorities are three: to halt the decline in the popular vote, to democratise the party and correct some earlier errors and to transform the party into an effective political machine capable of arguing for an ideology based on consensus and consent of party members rather than coup.

To attempt to sum up necessary action, these are some points worth thinking about:

1. The leadership situation must be cleared up quickly. If it must come under the electoral college then so be it.
2. The nature of the party’s ideology must be examined. We must decide what socialism means in 1983 for Britain. Less talk about dead people and more attention to modern class structure and social aspirations is needed. Woolly-hatted idealism and muesli eating will not solve the problem that the great British unwashed do not subscribe to the view that wealth, home owning, Ford Cortinas, Burton suits and mortgages are sinful.
3. The party must argue its ideals rather than a shopping list of policies, and must argue against the Conservatives on a political level rather than by elevating an incompetent, blundering and shallow Prime Minister to the level of a minor antichrist. Such personalisation works against socialism and for Margaret Thatcher.
4. The presence within the party of a variety of ultra left sects, none of whom have anything much to offer, has seriously hampered the party’s organisation and aided the moves towards internalism. During the Militant affair, I witnessed much hypocrisy from people who would have loved to see a party free of democratic centralism on grounds of ‘democracy’. I too want to see a truly democratic party where dissent rather than conformity is a virtue, but it is entirely legitimate that a political party should have distinct parameters on its membership. The parameter for me is Leninist organisation. It is impossible for non-Leninists to work against such groups without employing anti-caucus caucuses of which I and many other socialists are tired. I did not join the Labour Party to spend my time locked in small smoky rooms working out the best way to win some irrelevant vote against a bunch of bible-bashing evangelists whose only effect is to discredit the left and stage pointless demonstrations in nostalgia for the barricades of 1917.
5. The resources available to the party must be examined. We need an efficient machine, in particular in political education. The funds available to the shadow cabinet must be more effectively used and Trade Union support reassessed.
6. The party must speak in a language to which people relate. We must lose the archaisms of the nineteenth century and bring our methods up to date. We must enjoy, enliven and celebrate our socialism.

Conclusions - Halting the Slide

On the eve of the fall of Saigon an American general was asked by a journalist if he could describe the current situation in terms, “acceptable to a family audience in the United States.” He replied that he could not. I would currently react similarly to a question concerning the state of the Labour Party. Even so, I do NOT believe that the situation is irredeemable, provided that the party accepts its gravity and acts upon it, and provided that the non-Leninist left is prepared to swallow it false principles on a number of issues. Unity around the basic principles of socialism is needed, fierce and cohesive intellectual argument for their support essential, and an image of competence, skill and determination imperative.

Tony King’s[x] assessment that the Labour Party must go back to the drawing board is valid to a certain extent. What is unquestionable is that the consequential architecture must be completed rapidly and conclusively if we are to regain the lost faith which resulted in a second term for Margaret Thatcher’s Government. It was argued that after the 1979 defeat the problem was that our policies were wrong, and the people whom we claim to represent didn’t believe we could or would carry through socialism. It should now be evident to all but the most bigoted that not only is there no confidence in our ability, but there is no belief in our goals.

In the next five years the emphasis must be on changing minds rather than constitutions. We must prove able to deliver the goods to those in our heartland and to the majority of the British people. Their patience with the Labour Party appears to be running out fast.

 

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[i] The late Robin Cook was fond of private meetings to chew the fat on Labour’s desperate plight. He said this at one such gathering on a Sunday in London. I remember thinking that his jeans didn’t fit him at all well.

[ii] Crazy as it might seem now, the relevance or otherwise of the electoral process was the stuff of regular discussions at Labour branch meetings in the early 1980s. There was little option but to engage with this madness.

[iii] Dennis Healey, who was still demonized within Labour ranks at the time, had not at the time of writing described the 1983 manifesto as “the longest suicide note in history”.

[iv] The 2nd Viscount Stansgate had lost his Bristol South East seat, doubtless he would argue due to boundary changes, but the psephology showed otherwise.

[v] Shirley Williams, the most credible of the SDPs leaders within the Labour Party was at pains to point out to me when I had interviewed her eighteen months earlier that she had not left Labour over policy, but over the method it had chosen to elect its leader. 

[vi] The Transport & General Workers’ Union, then the largest union in the UK, held a consultative ballot of its members that by a clear majority supported Denis Healey. The T&G delegation meeting at Labour’s 1981 Party Conference in Brighton decided that the Union’s vote should go to Benn. It did and was almost enough to reverse the result.

[vii] The penetration of Labour by Militant was extensively documented later in the 1980s, most notably by Michael Crick. At the time those who saw themselves as on the left of Labour agonised over the right response. Large scale expulsions were favoured by some, myself included, but this was very much a minority view at the time.

[viii] Former Labour PM, James Callaghan, had dissented from Labour’s unilateralist policy during the campaign.

[ix] Jim Mortimer, Labour Party General Secretary. In those days the GS appeared on the evening news regularly - usually not in a good way.

[x] Professor Tony King, then and now of the University of Essex.