by Andy McSmith
In earlier times, the Labour Party could have absorbed this influx without difficulty because the party was consciously structured to make sure that the membership was excluded from any decision that mattered. Votes at party conferences were rigidly controlled by the block votes of the big unions. The general secretaries of the four biggest, the TGWU, NUPE, Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers (AUEW) and General Municipal Boilermakers and Allied Trades Union (GMBATU), held more than 50 per cent of the total voting strength; more than 600 constituency party delegates had barely 10 per cent. The big unions traditionally used their strength to support the party leader. The election manifesto was written in the leader’s office. The party leader was elected by MPs. The choice of who became Labour MPs was also effectively controlled by the regional secretaries of the big unions, through the paid delegates that they placed on constituency party committees.
However, this particular generation of rebels did not content themselves with exhorting their leaders to be more left wing, as previous rebels had. Even before the 1979 election, there was a well-organized campaign under way to overhaul the entire party structure and to increase the influence of the active party membership, which rapidly gained strength after the defeat. The campaign was aided by two political assets. The first was that, instead of being treated as intruders, the incoming student left ists quickly discovered common ground with many of the trade union shop stewards they encountered. The Labour government’s efforts to grapple with recession had hit their own natural supporters so heavily that several unions, including the TGWU and NUPE, had been driven left wards. The AUEW also had a powerful left-wing presence, leaving Callaghan with only one of the big four, the GMBATU, which he knew to be reliable.
Historically, the union block had acted like a vast battery of powerful guns at the disposal of the party leader. Now some of those big guns were turning around to fire in the opposite direction.
The Left ’s other great asset was a credible leader around whom they could unite. Tony Benn was the only British politician of the 1980s, apart from Thatcher, to give his name to a political ideology; the words ‘Bennites’, ‘Bennism’ and even ‘Bennery’ were part of the political language of the time. His had been an unusual political trajectory. Originally, he had been a liberal technocrat rather than a socialist, who played a role in the 1959 general election similar to the one that Peter Mandelson would perform in 1987, exploring ways to use television as a medium for campaigning. Soon afterwards, he made constitutional history by being the first hereditary peer to renounce his seat in the House of Lords and fight successfully to stay in the Commons. It was only after Labour’s defeat in 1970, when Benn was forty-five, that he started on a political journey that mirrored that of Keith Joseph. Whereas Joseph believed that the government had intervened too much in the free market, Benn proposed a huge increase in nationalization and state intervention.
Benn was unlike other tribunes of the Left, who had a habit of resigning from office to enjoy the freedom to speak out. Michael Foot held no government office until he was approaching the age of sixty. Neil Kinnock never held a ministerial office. Dennis Skinner would not even accept the chairmanship of a party committee. Others, including Eric Heffer, held office for a short time before resigning in a blaze of principle. But Benn was not a resigner. He stayed in the cabinet until the government fell, and was supported by Michael Meacher, Margaret Beckett and others who stayed on to the end. In opposition, he refused to run for a place in the shadow cabinet, but that was because his sights were set on securing the party leadership, which he could do only if the party rulebook was overhauled. His visible ambition made him a highly controversial figure who attracted quite extraordinary vitriolic abuse. ‘Some say Tony Benn is raving bonkers. But what really goes on in the mind of the country’s most notorious left winger?’, the Sun inquired, on one occasion. They fed some facts about Benn to a ‘top American psychiatrist’, who was reported to have reached a diagnosis without knowing the identity of the patient; though the psychiatrist subsequently complained that he had been ‘lied to, misquoted’.18 Actually, as David Owen observed, Benn ‘was not mad, nor was he a simple militant purist. He was a deeply ambitious politician.’19
The economic crisis of 1976, and the Labour government’s sudden change of policy, brought home to the average party member how little influence they had over their leaders. Organizations such as the ‘Campaign for Labour Democracy’ came into existence, and quickly learnt how to use an archaic party rule book to get the rules changed, achieving rapid success directly after the 1979 general elections. They wanted three major reforms, each of which would shift power towards those middle-ranking activists who were the foot soldiers of the Bennite Left. It was proposed that election manifestoes should be controlled by the party’s National Executive Committee (NEC); that all sitting MPs should be subjected every Parliament to a selection procedure in which they would fight to keep their jobs against other aspirants; and that instead of having the party leader elected exclusively by Labour MPs, the franchise should be widened to involve the party at large and its trade union affiliates.
These three proposals went before the annual party conference in Brighton in October 1979. Given that the TGWU and NUPE were going to vote with the Left, and the GMBATU were for the status quo, the future of the Labour Party was in the hands of the engineers. As it happened, seventeen of the thirty-four AUEW delegates solidly supported the Bennite Left and sixteen were reliable supporters of Jim Callaghan. In the event of a tie, the union’s general secretary, Terry Duffy, another loyal ally of Callaghan, had a casting vote. Therefore, everything came down to how the sole independent delegate chose to vote. This was Jim Murray, chief shop steward from the Vickers arms factory in Elswick, Newcastle upon Tyne.20 He voted with the Left and, to audible groans from the MPs, the proposal that they should undergo a contested reselection in each Parliament was passed by 4.008m votes to 3.039m. The next day, Murray again voted with the Left and control of the manifesto passed from the leader’s office to the NEC. But the most pressing issue of the moment was how to elect a party leader. This would decide whether or not Tony Benn had any chance of succeeding Callaghan, which he certainly could not do until the franchise was widened. Murray, however, thought that the best people to judge a potential leader’s qualities were the MPs, and he voted with the right, leaving the AUEW delegation split 17–17. Duffy deployed his casting vote, and the proposal to change the voting system was defeated by 3.033m to 4.009m.
The Left did not give up yet. At the next annual conference, in October 1980, they pushed through a decision that there would be a unique conference in January 1981 solely to agree a new system for electing the leader. In the three-month gap, while the old rules still applied, Callaghan resigned. In this way, he niftily and ruthlessly made sure that his immediate successor would not be Tony Benn. He anticipated handing over to Denis Healey, the most experienced, strong-willed and best-known member of his old cabinet. However, Healey was also a controversial figure – the man who had scythed through public expenditure – a powerful intellectual with a sharp tongue, and though he led on the first ballot, the MPs settled on Michael Foot.
Already sixty-seven years old, Foot would serve for three years as the best-loved and least successful of all the post-war Labour leaders. Though very well known within the Labour Party as a writer, anti-fascist campaigner, CND marcher and left-wing rebel turned cabinet minister, he was not a household name (like Denis Healey or Tony Benn). He was possibly not even the best-known member of the Foot family, given the eminence of his journalist nephew, Paul Foot. Private Eye certainly thought not; in November it ran a spoof report that Labour’s new leader was ‘Michael Spart, the hitherto little-known uncle of revolutionary leader Dave Spart.’ His public image was of a slightly dishevelled old gentleman, who used a walking stick and was unfairly accused of wearing a donkey jacket at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Day. Throughout his three years, Foot was buffeted by enemies and critics on t
he left and light. David Owen, on the right, and Tony Benn, on the left, declined to serve in his shadow cabinet. David Owen recalled: ‘Why could we not behave as he had done in the past, was his unspoken rebuke. We allowed you to govern when the Right was in control of the party, you are not letting us govern now that we, the Left, are in control.’21
Another person absent from Michael Foot’s team was Roy Jenkins, the former home secretary, who had once had a greater following in the country than any other Labour politician. He had never been as popular inside the Labour Party, though, and had left Britain in 1977 to be president of the European Commission, but his term of office was ending and he was thinking of a re-entry to British politics. He laid down a marker in November 1979 when he delivered the annual Dimbleby Lecture, which guaranteed him a primetime television audience and which he used to make an elegant case for proportional representation and coalition government. As Labour moved to the Left, Jenkins and Owen, independently, were increasingly attracted to the idea of a new party of the centre left, free from union control.
Unfortunately, they did not get on personally. Jenkins considered himself to be the new party’s natural leader, the only person with the political and intellectual stature to make it credible. Owen, who had been foreign secretary at the age of thirty-seven, had the ability and limitless self-belief to lead, but did not have the necessary following either in Parliament or among the voters. He did, however, have an ally in the shadow cabinet in Bill Rodgers, who although virtually unknown in the country, had good contacts in Labour’s northern heartland, whereas Owen and Jenkins were obvious southerners. None of these three, however, could match the popularity, inside Parliament and out, of Shirley Williams, who was judged to be essential to the enterprise but was very reluctant to cut her ties with the Labour Party. Nevertheless, Owen and Rodgers plotted to draw her in, hoping that she would be leader of the new party, in name, while they actually ran the show. Jenkins and his friends, meanwhile, schemed to bring Williams, Owen and Rodgers into a new party led by him.
On 18 January 1981, Jenkins invited the other three to his house in the picture-postcard village of East Hendred in Oxfordshire, but when Shirley Williams read an account of the upcoming meeting in that morning’s Observer, written as if the leader, back from exile, was summoning his generals to his side, it made her so angry that she refused to go. After an exchange of telephone calls, the meeting was transferred to Bill Rodgers’ London home. Williams turned up late and was highly displeased to discover that the press had got there before her. Despite a frosty start, the four politicians and their advisers managed to knock out a draft statement, which was no more than a call to Labour to reform itself.
The statement was very rapidly overtaken by events: this was the week of the special one-day Labour conference in Wembley to discuss the changes to the leadership election procedure, which came to a result that no one expected. The next leader of the Labour Party was to be chosen by a complex electoral college, in which trade unions held 40 per cent of the voting strength, with the rest divided equally between Labour MPs and constituency parties.
This was too much even for Shirley Williams. It raised the possibility that there could be a Labour government facing another ‘winter of discontent’, with the additional hazard that the striking unions would use their voting power to remove the prime minister from office. The ‘gang of four’, as they were now called (with reference to the power struggle in China that followed the death of Chairman Mao), met again on 25 January, in David Owen’s home in Limehouse, east London. They finalized a document that became known as the Limehouse Declaration, which ended with the portentous words: ‘We recognise that for those people who have given much of their lives to the Labour Party, the choice that lies ahead will be deeply painful. But we believe that the need for a realignment of British politics must now be faced.’22
From there, the four were propelled forwards by the expectations and latent public support generated by the publicity given to the Limehouse Declaration. An advertisement in the Guardian produced 8,000 replies, two-thirds of which contained donations, giving them a cash reserve of £25,000. A steering committee was formed, dominated originally by Labour MPs, though its membership was widened later to include David Sainsbury (from the family that owned the grocery chain), who would be a major source of funding; the journalist Polly Toynbee; Roger Liddle, who would later work for many years as a political adviser to Tony Blair; and a lone Tory, Christopher Brocklebank-Fowler.
On 2 March, twelve Labour MPs resigned the Labour whip and declared that they now sat as Social Democrats. The new party, called the Social Democratic Party (SDP), with a logo in red, white and blue, was formally launched on 26 March. The launch event was an unqualified success because of the huge and generally sympathetic media interest. The reception in Parliament at Prime Minister’s Questions that afternoon was not so comfortable. Replying to Mike Thomas, one of the new SDP MPs, Mrs Thatcher said:
I recall hearing a comment on the radio this morning about the new Social Democratic Party being a new Centre party. I heard someone say that such a Centre party would be a party with no roots, no principles, no philosophy and no values. That sounded about right, and it was Shirley Williams who said it.23
Her remarks did not stop more MPs from defecting. In all, twenty-eight Labour MPs and one Conservative MP switched to the new party. Each defection generated another flurry of publicity that was good for the SDP and bad for Labour. In September, the support for the two Centre parties – the Liberals and the SDP – was so high that David Steel told the Liberal Assembly: ‘Go back to your constituencies and prepare for government.’24 By October 1981, the SDP had more MPs than the Liberals and membership was approaching 78,000, which may have exceeded the number of Liberal Party members. Meanwhile, belying his reputation as a man averse to taking risks, Jenkins showed himself determined to get back in the Commons at the first opportunity. That arose when the Labour MP for Warrington resigned. This was a solid Labour seat, where even in 1979 the party took more than 60 per cent of the vote, and Labour’s candidate was an experienced campaigner, a former MP named Doug Hoyle. Even so, an opinion poll by the Sun suggested that if Shirley Williams, who had been out of Parliament since the 1979 election, were to stand as an SDP candidate, she would win, whereas Roy Jenkins would lose; but she was not confident of winning and announced that she was not interested. Jenkins leapt boldly in and cut Labour’s majority from 10,274 to 1,759 in an astonishing 23 per cent swing to the SDP. He lost, but he proved that the SDP could tear huge chunks off the Labour vote and take from the Tories too. David Owen ruefully concluded that Jenkins’ boldness, and Williams’ hesitancy, cost her the party leadership.25
The next by-election on British soil was in the Conservative-held seat of Croydon North West. This time, the Liberals insisted on running and the SDP had to stay away. The Liberal candidate quadrupled his share of the vote and took the seat. Next, there was Crosby, in November 1981, where the Conservatives took 57 per cent of the vote in 1979. Shirley Williams insisted that it was her turn. She almost wiped out the Labour vote and took nearly a third of the Conservatives’ to win convincingly. Jenkins had to wait until the following March, when he seized a chance to take Glasgow Hillhead from Labour, just in time to put himself forward in the first election to the leadership of the SDP, which he comfortably won against David Owen. Jenkins was already thinking in terms of an eventual merger with the Liberals, which Owen adamantly opposed. For the time being, Jenkins and Steel reached a pact under which – had it worked perfectly – there would have been either a Liberal or an SDP candidate in every constituency in the 1983 election, but not both. It broke down only in one seat, in Liverpool Broadgreen, handing victory to the Labour candidate, Terry Fields. Roy Jenkins was put forward as the Liberal-SDP Alliance’s prospective prime minister.
Though it was not obvious at the time, the SDP had already peaked before Jenkins assumed the leadership. The MPs who joined it were repeatedly taun
ted for not resigning their seats and calling by-elections to allow their constituents to decide whether or not they wanted to be represented by the SDP. Owen and some of the others would have been willing to do so, but Bill Rodgers talked them out of it. Rodgers was vindicated when one defector, Bruce Douglas-Mann, insisted on calling a by-election, which was held in the heat of the Falklands War in June 1982. It produced a huge shift of votes from Labour to the SDP, which let in the Conservative candidate, Angela Rumbold, who held the seat for fifteen years. After that, there were no more defectors. For all the excitement it generated at the time, the SDP turned into one of the great non-stories of the 1980s.
Tony Benn did not accept the validity of the 1980 Labour leadership election and wanted to make use of the new electoral college. He could not produce a clear political case for challenging Michael Foot, but there was plain daylight between party policy, as determined principally by Tony Benn, and the known view of Denis Healey, whom the MPs had elected as Foot’s deputy to compensate for denying him the leadership. As Benn went around collecting the necessary nominations to challenge Healey for the deputy leadership, word reached Neil Kinnock, Robin Cook and others of the Left whose loyalty was now to Foot, and who thought that a bitterly fought deputy leadership contest would be like an oxygen tent for the SDP. They planned to get fellow left-wing MPs to call upon Benn to back off, but he forestalled them by arriving in the parliamentary press gallery at 3 a.m. on 2 April to give a press release, announcing his candidature to the astonished gallery reporters working the night shift.