by Andy McSmith
Woodrow Wyatt recorded in his diary: ‘Rang Margaret. She was put out by the Church’s report on the Inner Cities, but I told her not to bother as it was clearly a somewhat left-wing stereotype committee that had composed it. She said “There’s nothing about self-help or doing anything for yourself in the report”.’6
Conservative politicians were not the only ones to object to the direction in which Archbishop Runcie was taking the Church. On 3 December 1987, the biennial Crockford’s Clerical Directory – the ‘Who’s Who’ of the Church of England – came out, complete with an unsigned editorial by an Anglo-Catholic who denounced Runcie for his ‘elitist liberalism’. It accused him of systematically discriminating against Anglo-Catholics and Evangelicals in appointments to senior positions in favour of clerics from the liberal theological colleges or from the dioceses of St Albans and Canterbury. ‘His clear preference is for men of liberal disposition with a moderately Catholic style which is not taken to the point of having firm principles. If in addition they have a good appearance and are articulate on the media he is prepared to overlook a certain theological deficiency,’7 the writer alleged.
The piece went on to attack Archbishop of York John Habgood, in what looked like the opening salvo to prevent him from succeeding Runcie, who was to retire within three years. Habgood retaliated by saying: ‘There is a sourness and vindictiveness about the anonymous attack on the Archbishop of Canterbury which makes it clear that it is not quite the impartial review of Church affairs which it purports to be.’8 The controversy was all gleefully picked up by national newspapers, giving Crockford’s Clerical Directory more publicity than it has ever had before or since. The hunt was on to identify the author of the editorial. Dr Gareth Bennett, canon of Chichester Cathedral, a historian and eminent Anglo-Catholic, was repeatedly asked about the authorship by other Christians and by journalists. He claimed to know nothing, but on Monday, 7 December, he drove to a lonely spot, attached a hose to his car exhaust and gassed himself. Crockford’s then confirmed that he was the hunted author. Dr Bennett had been a man of great intellectual gifts, as emphasized by tributes from Runcie, Frank Field and others, and the terrible manner of his death threatened to turn opinion against Runcie and his allies. Dr Habgood tried to diffuse tension by blaming the media: ‘It needs to be recognized that media pressure does seem to have been a major factor that led him to his tragic death,’ he said, on BBC radio. One member of General Synod, Canon George Austin, retorted:
This is a terrible thing to say and quite untrue. My experience of the press is that they have behaved very responsibly. I believe Dr Habgood is trying to divert attention from his earlier remarks, which were quite indefensible. What he said about the preface must have added to Dr Bennett’s distress.9
If the late Canon Bennett’s intention was to prevent Habgood from becoming the next archbishop of Canterbury, in that at least he was successful.
Thatcher’s differences with Archbishop Runcie were, however, only a sideshow in her long-running battle with left-wing councils. Though she was the daughter of the former alderman mayor of Grantham, she displayed an intemperate hostility to local democracy. Her famous remark about the ‘enemy within’ was aimed as much at left-wing councillors from London and Liverpool as at the miners’ union, and her time in office was dedicated to marginalizing local councils and accumulating power at the centre. She appeared to win every round until the introduction of the poll tax, the f nal pyrrhic victory that was her own undoing. In her fervour to root out left-wing radicals, her government quite missed the biggest local government scandal of all, quietly taking place under their very noses. In Conservative-run Westminster, the council leader Lady Porter, who was one of Britain’s richest women (as the daughter of the founder of Tesco), was illicitly arranging for council tenants to be shipped out of marginal wards to be replaced by owner-occupiers, who were assumed to be more likely to vote Conservative. Some of the council tenants were decanted into a tower block infested with asbestos. When the scandal came to light in 1991, Lady Porter and others were ordered to pay surcharges originally set at £21m.
The government’s first assault on the authority of local councillors was the legislation compelling them to sell council houses to any tenant who wished to buy. For years, there had been tension between council tenants who aspired to be property owners, and councillors – not necessarily Labour councillors – who argued that their duty to house the homeless required them not to deplete their stock of council housing. The Thatcher government cut through this argument by forcing councils to sell, at discounts of up to 60 per cent, and banning them from using the proceeds to build new council properties. They had to use it to repay debt. Norwich Council already ran a scheme that gave tenants the right to buy newly built homes, which preserved the stock of council houses, but the council’s attempt to fight the legislation in the high court brought them up against the wholly unsympathetic Lord Denning, Master of the Rolls. A million and a quarter former tenants took this cheap route to homeownership, raising £18 billion for public funds and turning hundreds of thousands of Labour voters into Conservatives, while for the first time in post-war memory, homeless beggars became a fixture on city streets.
Another government tactic, condemned in the Church of England report, was to reduce progressively the amounts that councils received in government grants. This process had started before the Conservatives came to office; Labour’s Anthony Crosland heralded it in 1976 with his famous warning that ‘the party’s over’. In 1976, two-thirds of all that councils spent came from a rate-support grant at a cost to the Treasury of more than £12.2 billion a year. The Labour government reduced the Treasury’s contribution year by year, until in 1979 the state supported 61 per cent of council expenditure, and the rates made up 39 per cent. Peter Shore, the environment secretary, imagined that the process would stop there, but successive Conservative environment secretaries, starting with Michael Heseltine, carried on where he left of . By 1986, the total rate-support grant had been reduced to below £8.5 billion, and covered only 46.4 per cent of all local government spending, with the larger part covered by the rates.10 Given the defiant mood within the defeated Labour Party, there was always a risk that a few left-wing councils would push their rates ever upwards and run a political campaign to transfer the blame to the Conservative government. Michael Heseltine, who was one of the cleverest and most ambitious members of the 1979 cabinet, foresaw this and tried to head it of with a concept called the ‘grant-related expenditure assessment’ (GREA). This was central government’s calculation of how much an individual council ought to be spending in a given year. Above that limit, councils received no grants at all. Most councils did their best to comply and between them they reduced their budgets by £196m; but a handful went in the opposite direction and produced £211m worth of planned increases, threatening to make Heseltine look foolish. The biggest culprit was the Greater London Council.
Conservative control of the GLC was swept away on the night of 7 May 1981. Until election day, the little group of Labour councillors who made up the opposition had been led by Andrew McIntosh, a market researcher, whose politics were traditional, mainstream Labour. However, after the group had swollen to fifty out of the ninety-two seats, he was supplanted by Ken Livingstone, then thirty-six years old, and very left wing. Labour had made an election promise that it would cut the cost of London’s public transport and increase the capacity. This was going to cost £69m in the first year, until it hit the penalty clause in Heseltine’s GREA scheme, which pushed the price for London ratepayers up to £119m. Faced with the unpalatable choice between abandoning their manifesto or doubling the rates, the newly elected councillors went defiantly ahead with the rate increase. The Conservative-controlled borough of Bromley, in south London, objected on behalf of their ratepayers, because the London Underground system does not extend to Bromley. It was highly unusual for judges to interfere when politicians were putting into effect the manifesto on which they had been ele
cted, but in November 1981 three high court judges, headed by the eighty-two-year-old Lord Denning, concluded that the Labour Party was breaking a law that required local authorities to protect ratepayers. ‘I realize that this must cause much consternation to the GLC. They will be at their wits end to know what to do about it, but it is their own fault,’11 Denning said, and he swept aside their excuse that the GLC had only carried out the manifesto promise on which Labour had won the election. ‘A political manifesto is not to be regarded as gospel. It is not binding . . . People do not vote for the manifesto,’ he added. His ruling was upheld by five Law Lords. It was eight days before Christmas, the central plank of Labour’s manifesto had collapsed and they were left without any guidance as to what fares they were supposed to charge to stay within the law. After some hesitation, the councillors followed the advice of their senior staff , doubled London’s fares and cut the number of buses and tubes, doing damage to London’s transport system and congested streets that would last for years.
This was by no means all that Livingstone and his fellow councillors did to draw the anger of middle-class ratepayers. Having set a high rate and been prevented by the judges from using it for its intended purpose, they used some of the money to extend the reach of local government into new areas. The GLC was the first council to create a women’s committee; London’s Gay Switchboard received a GLC grant in 1981, the first ever ‘gay grant’. The GLC staff committee also set out to make the GLC an equal opportunities employer. Its industry committee set up job-creation schemes around London. They also used the exterior of the GLC offices, located immediately south of Westminster Bridge, where it could be seen from the Houses of Parliament, to publicize unemployment. In January 1982, the first of a series of giant signs appeared above County Hall announcing that London’s of cial unemployment figure had reached 326,238. The sign was updated every month.
Livingstone’s worst offence, though, in the collective opinion of the tabloid press, was his incursion into the violent politics of Northern Ireland. With bombs going of in London’s streets, it might seem bizarre that London’s foremost civic leader should be expected to have nothing to say on the conflict, but councillors were expected to stay out of it and certainly not to say the things Livingstone said. He called for the IRA prisoners then on hunger strike in H-Block to be granted the political status they demanded. In July 1981, he met Alice McElwee, whose son Thomas had been sentenced to a total of 141 years for terrorist offences and who was on the forty-fourth day of a hunger strike. Speaking to Alice, Livingstone appeared to agree that British soldiers had been killing innocent Catholics in Northern Ireland. The next day, Mrs Thatcher told the Commons: ‘It is the most disgraceful statement that I have ever read. It is a totally unwarranted slur on our security forces, both the police and the Army.’12
From there on, it was open season on Ken Livingstone in the tabloids, but instead of capitulating under pressure, he kept his detractors generously supplied with reasons to be angry. In August, he moved on to the dangerous topic of gay rights. ‘Almost everyone has the sexual potential for anything,’ he told the Harrow Gay Unity Group in August 1981.13 In October, after the IRA had exploded a nail bomb outside the Chelsea barracks, killing one woman (who had a nail driven through her heart) and injuring thirty-nine others, Livingstone’s endless round of public engagements took him to Cambridge, where he told the Tory Reform Group: ‘If they were just criminals and psychopaths, they would be crushed. But they have a motive force which they think is good.’14 The next day’s issue of the Sun set aside half of its front page to a commentary under the headline ‘This Damn Fool says the Bombers Aren’t Criminals’, in which Livingstone was described as ‘the most odious man in Britain’. There was an unusual follow-up at Christmas, when a Sun photographer snapped Livingstone dressed as Santa Claus, which the tabloid then published under the heading ‘The Most Odious Santa in Britain’.
Early in 1982, Mrs Thatcher set a group of advisers and ministers the task of writing the next Conservative manifesto. One of the first ideas they threw up was to abolish the GLC outright, along with six metropolitan counties that had been created in the previous Conservative reform of local government in 1974, which had never attracted much popular support. Both ideas went into the 1983 Tory manifesto. The GLC fought back in style, showing a f air for presentation and making the most of the fact that the council’s demise would mean the creation of a series of unelected boards to run London-wide functions like the fire brigade. They conducted opinion polls, which showed that most Londoners, whether they approved of Ken Livingstone or not, wanted there to be an elected London authority. One poll showed that 73 per cent of respondents were opposed to abolition. Another was taken solely of voters in Margaret Thatcher’s constituency, Finchley, and showed 66 per cent opposed to abolition. Another clever move was to invite Buckingham Palace to send a member of the royal family to the formal opening of the new Thames Barrier in May 1984. The GLC suggested Princess Diana, but the message came back that the Queen herself would be delighted to officate. Her highly publicized appearance alongside Ken Livingstone fed rumours that the Queen privately did not like Margaret Thatcher. ‘By inaugurating this particular project at this particular time, the Queen is feeding every lurid persecution fantasy in Conservative central office,’15 the Economist commented.
When the bill to remove the GLC went before the Commons for the first time, in April 1984, thirty-nine Conservative MPs opposed their own government. When it eventually reached the House of Lords, a year later, a group of peers tried to amend the bill to create a new, slimmed-down elected council to replace the GLC, and were defeated by only 213 votes to 209. Given the huge Conservative majorities in both Houses of Parliament, there was never a realistic chance of saving the GLC, still less the other six doomed authorities, but as its power slipped away its defenders had claimed a kind of moral victory. The GLC went out of existence at midnight on 31 March 1986 in style. About 250,000 crowded on to the South Bank to join festivities that included a firework display costing £250,000. The government had hoped that this would mean about 7,000 of the GLC’s 22,000 employees would be out of work, but most actually found jobs with the London boroughs or other agencies.
There had been nothing in the Conservative manifesto about abolishing the Inner London Education Authority, but the electorate had the impertinence to make it a Labour-led ILEA and therefore it, too, disappeared, on 31 March 1990. County Hall, which had been the headquarters of both the GLC and ILEA, became the property of a government agency called the London Residuary Body, who sold it for £90m to a Japanese property company, which converted it into a hotel, restaurant and aquarium. These elected authorities were replaced by quangos, quangos and more quangos. In London alone there were fifty, including the London Residuary Body, set up in 1985 to sell of GLC assets, which was headed throughout by a former Tory councillor. The new London Fire and Civil Defence Authority, which had a budget of more than £180m a year, was coordinated by a government office for London. All this demonstrated, to quote the journalist and occasional quangocrat Sir Simon Jenkins, that ‘it was not less government that Thatcherism wanted, just less local government’.16
The GLC was by no means the only council that the government regarded as obnoxiously left wing. Even before Livingstone’s head was above the parapet, a determined character named Ted Knight, who in his youth had been a member of the Trotskyite group that became the Workers’ Revolutionary Party (WRP), was elected leader of Lambeth Council. His administration faced the disagreeable choice between cutting services or running up the penalties imposed by Heseltine. Lambeth’s rates went up by more than 49 per cent in 1980, with an even greater rise in prospect for the following year, though in March the Labour councillors relented somewhat and settled for a rate rise of 37.5 per cent.
In May 1983, Labour took control of Liverpool Council from the Liberals. The new, nominal leader of the council was a man named John Hamilton, who had once been expelled from the Labour Pa
rty for being too left wing, but was soft-hearted and easily bullied – a ‘nowhere man’, in the ungenerous opinion of his flashy deputy, Derek Hatton: ‘With his V-necked pullovers, his overcoat, battered trilby, and specs, John looked every inch the retired bachelor schoolmaster . . . bumbling his way through life’.17 The real leaders of Liverpool were Hatton, its finance committee chairman, Tony Byrne, and a political operator named Tony Mulhearn.
What happened in Liverpool in the early 1980s is a rare example of Trotskyists having an impact on British public life – not people who were crudely accused of being ‘Trots’ by their opponents, but Marxists whose ideology was genuinely drawn from the writings of Leon Trotsky. In the 1940s, there had been only one British Trotskyite party; thirty years later, three main of shoots had sprung from its disintegration – the WRP, the Socialist Worker Party and Militant, each with a leader old enough to be drawing a pension, respectively Gerry Healy, Tony Cliff and Ted Grant.
The WRP, of which Ted Knight was a former member, had a large following among the actors’ union, Equity, including Vanessa and Corin Redgrave, and in its propaganda the party lauded Colonel Gaddaf of Libya and Saddam Hussein in Iraq as great progressive leaders. It had access to large sums of money, which allowed it to run a daily newspaper, called Newsline, a printing press and a publishing company. Ted Knight and Ken Livingstone used its press to bring out a weekly newspaper called Labour Herald. After the party imploded in 1985, in circumstances that added greatly to the gaiety of the nation, internal documents came to light demonstrating, to no one’s surprise, that the WRP had been receiving subsidies from Libya and had solicited money from the Iraq government. The rift that destroyed the organization burst into the open in October 1985, when it was sensationally announced that the WRP’s seventy-one-year-old founder, Gerry Healy – one of the original nineteen apostles of Leon Trotsky who had launched the British movement almost fifty years earlier – had been expelled from the party for having breached ‘the revolutionary morality governing the conduct between men and women comrades’.18 He had bedded at least twenty-six female comrades, possibly many more. ‘He stood hardly an inch above a naggin bottle,’ one former WRP member, Brian Behan (brother of Brendan Behan), wrote after Healy’s death in 1989: