No Such Thing As Society
Page 34
He was bald with the little sore eyes of a newborn pig. Yet . . . I understand that seventy-six women in all were asked to embrace the erect forces of Healyite labour. His winning line was to ask the women not to withstand the onward and upward thrust of the progressive masses but to adopt a revolutionary position on this matter.19
The WRP split into pro-and anti-Healy factions, with the Redgraves on the pro-Healy side. Each claimed to be the official party; each brought out a newspaper called Newsline and claimed that theirs was the only Newsline.
Another offshoot of the same 1940s party was Militant, led by Ted Grant, who turned seventy in 1984. One weary leftist recalled:
You are at a meeting and someone with a fake Liverpool accent makes a speech demanding the nationalisation of the principle 253 monopolies. Well, what’s wrong with that? Why is everyone groaning? You’ll soon see. Half a dozen other people stand up and make the same speech, with the same fake accent and the same curious hand movements. Are they clones? No, you just met the ‘Militant’.20
Both groups had set out to infiltrate the Labour Party in the 1950s, but whereas Healy’s faction, including Ted Knight, was detected and expelled, Grant’s followers were not noticed until the 1970s, by which time they were so entrenched that they ran the Labour Party Young Socialists, giving them an automatic place on the national executive. In 1982, Michael Foot temporarily overcame his distaste for purges and expulsions and led an attempt to decapitate Militant by expelling Ted Grant and four others from the Labour Party. Yet in 1983, two members of Militant, Dave Nellist in Coventry and Terry Fields in Liverpool, were elected Labour MPs. More significantly, from 1983, Militant was a powerful presence on Liverpool Council. Hatton boasted: ‘The influence of, and input from Militant’s headquarters in London was immense. There is no getting away from the fact that the battles and campaigns being waged in Liverpool embodied Militant’s aims and objectives nationally.’21
Liverpool’s grant from central government was coming down year by year and the new administration was supposed to choose between cutting costs or imposing a huge rate increase. They adopted the unique strategy of doing neither. They set a budget that increased the rates by no more than the rate of inflation, but made no cuts, making it inevitable that after a few months the council would run right out of money. In 1984, the tactic worked. Patrick Jenkin, who had replaced Heseltine as environment secretary, ‘handled the situation with a mixture of bluster and concession’,22 but eventually stumped up an extra £20m, leaving Liverpool’s jubilant councillors in no doubt that they, and they alone, had found a way to beat the government.
Actually, the government’s tactic of cutting off the money supply was not preventing voters anywhere from using local elections to register their dislike of the government. In Sheffield the rates went up by 41 per cent in 1980 and 37 per cent in 1981; yet Labour was returned with a larger number of councillors than before, and in 1980 elected a new, more left-wing leader. This was the young David Blunkett, who had overcome the disadvantages of being blind from birth and losing his father in a nasty industrial accident when he was very young to become Labour’s leading authority on local government matters. He, too, was identified with the Bennite Left , though he never attracted the notoriety of Ken Livingstone or Ted Knight.
Unable to stop these high-spending councils by democratic means, the government decided in 1984 to pass the law to make it illegal for a council to set a rate higher than the government thought appropriate, a procedure known as ‘rate-capping’. This was an act of centralization that made even Conservative councillors queasy, particularly when it emerged in June 1984 that, of the eighteen councils to be rate-capped, only sixteen were Labour controlled; the formula had been devised so carelessly that it ensnared Conservative-run Portsmouth Council. This was the summer of the miners’ strike, when direct resistance was the order of the day. Leaders of the ratecapped Labour councils met in November, against a background of protest strikes by 100,000 of their staff , and agreed a tactic under which they would all hold their budget meetings on the same day, 7 March 1985, and would all refuse to set a rate. For a time, the show of unity was impressive, as hundreds of Labour councillors braced themselves for a confrontation, knowing that they risked being disqualified from office and personally surcharged, which could bankrupt them. However, as the months went by, the cracks opened up. For some council leaders, including David Blunkett, the point was to go to the brink in the hope of a better deal, but for others such as Ted Knight this was a political struggle, an opportunity to join the miners in galvanizing working-class resistance to the Thatcher government. As decision day drew closer, and with the miners heading for defeat, most of the councillors involved lost their nerve or were won over by government concessions. In March, South Yorkshire, Merseyside and Bradford councils and the ILEA all set a rate within the government’s cap. Then the remaining councils gave in one by one, until Lambeth was the only rate-capped council left fighting. Ted Knight’s majority was very thin, and one councillor’s resignation was enough to upset the balance; on 3 July the remaining councillors voted 32 to 31 in favour of setting a rate. David Blunkett thought that ‘Ted Knight’s tactical achievement in prolonging the resistance for so long had been remarkable.’23 The district auditor was not so impressed; the councillors were each individually surcharged £126,000, and disqualified from office.
It was victory for central government over local government, for Thatcherism over municipal socialism and, by the by, helped Neil Kinnock to secure victory over the Bennite Left . Kinnock had emerged from the Left and was trying to steer the Labour Party back to the political centre. He had a miserable time during the miners’ strike, pushed this way and that, condemned by the Left for not supporting the NUM without reservations, and by the Right for not condemning picket-line violence often enough. That he came from a mining family did not make his dilemma any simpler; but when the strike was over and the councils had capitulated, the more pragmatic members of the Bennite Left , such as David Blunkett, decided that there was no future in direct engagement with the government and that the Labour Party would have to start making the compromises necessary to win a general election. The break-up of the Bennite Left was first announced in New Socialist, a magazine published by the Labour Party, which had been seen as an intellectual vehicle for the Bennites. In May 1985, the academic Patrick Seyd announced that ‘a profound realignment of the Labour Left is taking place’ in which a ‘New Left ’ was emerging that placed a ‘heavy emphasis on party unity’, and rejected ‘the constant search for Judas figures’ and ‘the Bennite conception of laying the foundations for socialism in one country through the alternative economic strategy’.24 This ‘New Left ’, he added, believed that Militant and other Trotskyite groups could not be left unchallenged, an observation that did not bode well for the Militant caucus on Liverpool Council.
In June 1985, the council had raised Liverpool’s rates by 9 per cent, in line with inflation, without attempting to reduce their costs, leaving them with a £30m hole in the budget. This time, Patrick Jenkin refused to stump up, and as summer turned to autumn the cash duly ran out, and 31,000 staff were declared redundant. At this point, the main public-sector union, NUPE, turned decisively against Militant. Neil Kinnock seized the opportunity with a theatrical touch, during his long speech to the Labour Party conference in Bournemouth, when without warning he switched from attacking the Conservatives to exhorting supporters to promise only what they could deliver. He said:
I’ll tell you what happens with impossible promises. You start with far-fetched resolutions. They are then pickled into a rigid dogma, a code, and you go through the years sticking to that, out-dated, misplaced, irrelevant to the real needs, and you end with 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. I am telling you, no matter how entertaining, how fulfilling to short-term egos, you can’t play politics with people’s jobs
.25
As he spoke, the packed hall erupted. Derek Hatton rose to his feet, shouting ‘liar’. Two members of the National Executive who were on the platform behind Kinnock – Eric Heffer, a Liverpool MP, and Frances Curran, a member of Militant – walked off in protest; but the majority broke into prolonged applause. It was a turning point in Labour’s history. When the conference was over, the machinery was set in motion that led to the expulsion of Derek Hatton, Tony Mulhearn and other known Militants from the Labour Party. As in Lambeth, the district auditor imposed personal surcharges on the Labour councillors who had voted for a deficit, all of whom were barred from public office. A few years and dozens of expulsions later, Militant gave up trying to operate within the Labour Party and became the tiny Socialist Party.
The drama set up Derek Hatton for a career in local radio and inspired Alan Bleasdale to write another television drama series, called GBH, broadcast by Channel 4 in 1991. It had been ten years since another notable television play about local government, the last work written for television by Jim Allen, the master of socialist-realist drama, whose work was too left-wing for the Thatcher years. United Kingdom went out simply because the money the BBC invested in it had already been spent before the 1979 election, though it was held up while the corporation nervously negotiated with the new government over a proposed increase in the licence fee. It was shown, belatedly, on 8 December 1981, an experience that its director Roland Joffe (who was thirty-five in 1981) found so frustrating that he gave up on television and went on to direct two extraordinary films, The Killing Fields (1984) about the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, and The Mission (1986) about the destruction of a Jesuit mission in South America. United Kingdom was the story of council tenants organizing a rent strike, shot on an estate in Newcastle upon Tyne using mostly unknown actors recruited locally. The lead was played by Val McLane, whose brief fame would be eclipsed by her luckier and more ambitious brother, Jimmy Nail. The most daring piece of casting was to hire someone known to the police, the prison authorities and MI5 as a political subversive to play her husband. He was a former builder, who had served a prison sentence for intimidation on a picket line outside a building site in Shrewsbury in the early 1970s, and whose MI5 file classed him as ‘a political thug prone to violence’.26 On emerging from prison, he had been adopted by the revolutionary Left as one of their own despite a brief dalliance with the National Front when he was ‘politically naïve and poorly educated’.27 United Kingdom was his first opportunity to demonstrate a remarkable acting talent. He was Ricky Tomlinson, who went on to household fame in the television soap Brookside, and as the feckless father in The Royle Family. United Kingdom followed the pattern of left-wing drama in that the sympathetic characters were working-class activists, while the least sympathetic character was the Labour MP. In GBH, ten years later, the comic villain was the ultra-left revolutionary poseur, loosely based on Derek Hatton and played by Robert Lindsay; the hero, played by Michael Palin, was a school teacher whose politics were mainstream Labour. That cultural shift was one of the many changes that the 1980s had wrought.
The balance sheet so far was that Thatcherism had abolished the largest councils in England, taking over their powers centrally, and had set severe limits on how those councils that remained could raise or spend money, and yet that was not enough. An Education Act was also passed, enabling schools to transfer themselves from council to government control by taking on direct grant status, but surprisingly few were enticed to take this option. Local government still functioned after a fashion, and because voters tended to vote against the government between general elections, fewer and fewer councils remained under Conservative control. Domestic and business rates were still set, collected and spent at the behest of locally elected Labour councillors. Some might call this local democracy, but Mrs Thatcher and those of like mind knew better. Thatcher’s friend Woodrow Wyatt told her in one of their many telephone conversations, after the 1987 general election, ‘Local government is not democratic at all. It should all be run by Whitehall with local administrators with a fixed budget from Whitehall.’28 She thought his solution might be a step too far, but did not dispute the premise.
The argument that local government was ‘not democratic’ was based on the fact that there were people who could vote but did not pay the rates, because they lived in shared accommodation or were too poor, and there were others who paid rates but had no vote, because they ran businesses but did not live in the same local government district. Thatcher stated in her memoirs: ‘Many people had no direct reason to be concerned about their council’s overspending, because somebody else picked up all or most of the bill. This lack of accountability lay behind the continued overspending.’29 A Conservative MP, Cecil Franks, stung by having been voted off Manchester Council, expressed the same thought more bluntly during a Commons debate on local government. He complained: ‘We have experienced the virtual death of democracy in local government. Those who were the dross of society, who contributed nothing to, but took everything out of society, had a vote, whereas those who were putting something into society did not.’30
In Scotland, a quirk in the law required that every five years all properties had to be revaluated for the purposes of the rates. The revaluation went ahead in 1985, producing a huge shift in the burden from businesses to householders, with the latter seeing their bills go up by about 20 per cent, for which they squarely blamed the government. At the 1987 general election, the number of Conservative MPs in Scotland dropped from twenty-one to ten, out of seventy-two, the lowest number ever. It was a ghastly warning of what might happen if a rates revaluation were conducted further south. ‘We can’t have a revaluation in England, it would wipe us out,’31 Mrs Thatcher told her ministers.
Instead, at a meeting at Chequers in March 1985, the elderly Victor Rothschild, a veteran political adviser, arrived with a new idea. Instead of sending bills of different sizes, one to each householder, they would bill everyone on the electoral register for the same amount, regardless of income. Everyone would then have an equally powerful motive to vote for a council that would keep the bills down. The only person at that meeting who was against the idea was the minister from the Treasury, speaking on behalf of Nigel Lawson. There were other Conservatives besides Lawson who saw that the idea might go seriously wrong, including Michael Heseltine and Peter Walker, but generally the Conservative party loved it and wanted the reform introduced straight away, particularly in Scotland. Originally, it was proposed to make the change gradually, but at the Conservative annual conference in 1987 Thatcher listened to an impassioned contribution from Gerry Malone, an ex-MP who had attributed the loss of his Aberdeen seat to the rates. She saw the audience’s reaction, leant over to her friend Nicholas Ridley, the secretary of state for the environment, and whispered: ‘We shall have to look at this again, Nick.’32
As the new tax reached Scotland, with effect from 1 April 1989, legislation went through to extend it to England and Wales. It was piloted by Ridley’s deputy, Michael Howard, with great encouragement from the new Scottish secretary, Malcolm Rifkind, who reported back to the cabinet that in Scotland ‘it was all working out pretty well’.33 Almost as an aside, the government also abolished the local business rate, replacing it with a standard levy paid to central government. Simon Jenkins observed: ‘The centralizing of the business rate in 1990 was the biggest single act of true nationalization ever undertaken by a British government. Yet it passed almost unnoticed.’34
What followed took Thatcher and her senior ministers quite by surprise. They set out expecting that the average bill would be around £278 per head; by March 1990, when inflation had started rising again, wage settlements were higher than before, and council treasurers seized a one-off opportunity to put their accounts in order – they were forced to revise that figure up to £370. The official name, ‘community charge’ never caught on; everyone called it the ‘poll tax’. The public failed to see it as a ‘charge’; they saw it as a profoun
dly unfair tax, under which ‘the duke paid the same as the dustman’. The Duke of Westminster, whose inherited fortune was reckoned to be about £3 billion, saw the rate bill of £11,745 on his two large homes near Lancaster and Chester replaced by a charge of £1,187. He found this so embarrassing that he paid all his tenants’ bills as well.35
The poll tax produced the biggest protest movement since CND, with thousands pledging to go to prison rather than pay. Terry Fields, the Militant MP for Liverpool Broadfields, actually did a spell in jail in 1990. When Haringey Council, in London, set a figure of £572, fighting broke out in the town hall. In Norwich, Southampton and Thamesdown protestors invaded the council chambers. In Nottingham, they came dressed as Robin Hood and his Merry Men and prevented the council from meeting by hurling imitation custard pies made from shaving cream; the meeting resumed after the police were called, and set a poll tax of £390.36 Outside the Bristol council chambers, there was an ugly fight between demonstrators and police, which ended with twenty-one arrests; after a five-hour debate, councillors set a poll tax of £490.37 More than 3,000 people turned up to protest outside Hackney town hall, where a riot broke out and shops were looted. In March, there was a by-election in Mid-Staff ordshire, after the sitting Tory MP John Heddle had committed suicide; he left behind a majority of 14,654, which was swept away in a wave of popular feeling, handing the seat to Labour with a swing of 21 per cent.