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 written in 1983, this one in 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. 

 

When I worked as a Labour Party official part of my job involved being sent off to by elections around the country - part of the central ‘machine’ that descended on the local constituency to ‘assist’, but in fact to take over the campaign.

For some time Labour had been very bad at by-elections, though that had begun to change and in April 1986 Labour won Fulham, regarded as a ’swing’ seat, from the Conservatives with a shift of more than 10% and a campaign regarded as slick. The Conservatives, who had suffered a mid-term trough emerged from the 1986 conference re-focussed and recovered their position in the polls. On Christmas Eve Guy Barnett, the Labour MP since 1971 died, leaving an unwanted by-election under Labour’s wilting Tannenbaum.

At Greenwich the same campaigning tactics were used in the Fulham campaign. The defeat by the SDP’s Rosie Barnes, now best remembered for her sweaty armpits at the by-election count, would end the illusion that Labour had recovered and that organisation, however slick, was a substitute for political change. Labour had failed to grasp the politics of aspiration, in particular in London and the south east.

I had written an article for Clause Four on the significance of this by-election before the campaign. After the result I wrote the following:

 

Greenwich and After (Having a Mean Time - Part 2)

So the media got their way after all, and, of course, were proved to have been right all along (see last mailing).

When all the bluster is brushed aside, however, there can be little to cheer and many lessons to be learnt (again) from the Greenwich result. But it is worth drawing together a few of the better points made in the aftermath. 1. Deirdre Wood’s politics, despite the ‘hard left’ tag, are very close to the democratic left/LCC/Clause 4[i]. 2. ALL of the issues most damaging to Labour in Greenwich are issues where C4 and the LCC were at one with Deirdre, to wit; Lesbian/Gay Rights, contacts with Sinn Fein (though here some of us would disagree on tactical questions) and the general ‘GLC/ILEA left’ label, equal opportunities job circus, etc, etc. 3. The campaign was managed well, after a sluggish start, through we were always on the defensive. 4. We complained rather too loudly about SDP dirty tricks - they actually kept the more rabid members of their team pretty well muzzled. 5. Those who have suggested that we would have been better off running a ‘bold socialist campaign’ similar to that with Benn in Chesterfield miss two key points - a) Benn was a nationally known politician of 25 years experience at or near the top. His views were well known to all, he had been an MP and, though a hate figure, he was good media and we could reasonably argue - “here is an obviously able ex-minister who will fight for you and who we all know can do the job.” b) Who the hell was Deirdre? c) Who the hell was Peter Tatchell? d) Answers to b and c - Anybody Fleet St want them to be - any advance on Lucrecia and Cesare Borgeia?

The political system in Britain as elsewhere will reflect the trends and conditions of society as a whole.

This is a sweeping generalisation, but one which most on the left, and indeed within all of the factions of the left, would find a large measure of agreement. The differences would, I suggest, be largely a question of semantics and dogma-based slogan swapping rather than of ideological or intellectual substance. Only those within the movement who have never been tainted with even the discussion of Marxian or post-Marxist economic and political thought would attempt to disagree. We should not, then, be at all surprised that Socialism and the Labour Party which proclaims itself as Socialist should be having a hard time. Those who fail to understand the durability of Thatcherism, even after eight years of economic decline and political incompetence, need to look to their theoretical grounding and seek rapid re-education.

Britain has been undergoing a major social change, and will probably continue to do so for many years to come. Partly this change is due to the long-term decline of the post-colonial economy and the state structure which was constructed to support the affairs of a major world power. Equally, however, changes in British culture and in social structures have led to a general cooling in the climate within which Socialists work. When coupled with the internal state of the Labour Party and the vagaries of the British electoral system, the climatic outlook for Democratic Socialism resembles the coming of an ice age.

In many ways, the result of the 1987 General Election will be irrelevant to this long-term process. In no way will the result of that election greatly alter the long-term economic prospect facing Britain, nor will it reverse the internal and inter-regional economic trends which form an important part of the picture, much less will it stand any chance of altering the prevailing winds of popular culture which have blown in over the last three decades and longer. Nonetheless, that election may form part of a process which makes Labour’s (and Britain’s) decline sharper than need otherwise be the case.

Labour’s support, since the 1920s, has been based on the industrial working class and the development within that working class of highly organised Trade Unionism. The numerical decline of that working class, of those trade unionists and the wholesale decimation of the manufacturing industries which supported them is well documented. However, it is not so much the economic decline, but the aspirations of many within that working class which initially propelled Thatcherism to political success.

Aspirations such as home ownership, democratic rights within trades unions and the like were seen to be resisted by a Labour Party increasingly out of touch with its voters and increasingly pre-occupied with internal battles of the sort which never fed one starving mouth nor put a single roof over a homeless head. Labour conceptions of the working class and its collective attitudes were and are more determined by the dogma of dead theorists and by the mysticism and mythology of middle-class activists than by any sound process of communication or opinion testing. The party of the Trades Unions was fast becoming the party of the school teacher and college lecturer (usually FE!). This is not, of course, to suggest that the Labour Party of the thirties and forties was to any extent a mass-organisation. Indeed, inspecting old minute books of local parties can be a depressing lesson in how little has changed and how Labour has always failed in its project of involving large numbers and becoming a part of the communities which it represented.

Mass organisations have developed successfully in Europe, but not on the left in Britain - why not?

Back to 1987. For me, moving to live and work in the South East was a major culture shock. This sounds a little silly - especially as I spent a long time at a southern university - but at college one tends to be separated from life round about, one also tends to be poor. Noticing the affluence and attitudes of the South East and understanding involves experiencing that environment, just as understanding the working class cannot be achieved by reading books or becoming downwardly mobile while mixing only with those who have passed the Trotsky-positive test. The thing I found most jarring about the South East was the differing prospect facing young people and the consequential difference in attitudes. I found a 17-23 age group whose level of car ownership compares favourably with that of the population as a whole in parts of the North, a working class reaping the benefits of the massive discounts offered on Council homes at a time of spiralling house prices - capital gains of almost £50,000 in six years are not uncommon, and a Labour Party further and further removed from the aspirations of these people.

The whole thing is summed up nicely for me by Tony Benn’s now infamous ‘brass coachlamp’ speech during the 1983 election. Nothing could sum up more the differences between the middle class party activists who didn’t really need socialism to help them and the working class who desperately wanted socialism to deliver precisely those brass coachlamps and new front doors.

The fact is that the Labour Party, outside of a diminishing number of urban enclaves, is sadly and painfully irrelevant in the South East in general. The party is weak in membership, the candidates it fields even at the highest level are a distinctly mixed bag - half of the PPCs in the Southern Region’s 77 seats[ii] wouldn’t last five minutes in debate with even the least articulate student union activist, let alone with their Tory opponents. The organisation creaks under the strain of its own bureaucracy - even holding regular meetings are an intolerable strain on some constituencies, and the level of political understanding in the party is utterly desperate. The decline has been staggering indeed. Hampshire is a very good example. Outside of the cities of Southampton and Portsmouth you would struggle to find many more than 250 active members, or more than 1800 paper members across the 11 constituencies, five of which are as good as dead and another three are on political life support. All this makes life pretty hard for the urban parties, besieged by hostiles with five figure majorities and no serious opposition, Tories can and do flock in from miles around and if the money isn’t there to provide Agents and the like their mutual aid scheme comes up with the finance - a system more ’socialist’ than anything the Labour Party has been able to manage.

All in all, the chances of a Labour recovery in the South are nil - at least not under the current terms of debate.

 

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[i] The Labour Co-ordinating Committee, a name selected to sound deliberately boring, had been set up as a Bennite ginger group but gradually emerged as the leading ground on the center left of Labour largely supportive of Neil Kinnock’s reform of the Party. Clause IV, the name selected to sound left-wing, was a smaller, tighter group set up specifically to counter the influence of Militant in Labour’s youth and student sections. It later developed as an intellectual current on Labour’s center left. Many leading figures from both groups, of which there was considerable overlap, became prominent figures in New Labour. The author was a member of both groups.

[ii] The Government office of the South East (GOSE) region as now is. Subsequently boundary reviews have increased the number of constituencies in the region even further.