by James Curran
The Livingstone administration also found other ways of expressing the political message not conveyed by its advertising campaign. The range of services provided by the GLC for the community was advertised by ‘branding’ all buildings and vehicles with the GLC logo. Voluntary groups were asked to display ‘GLC-funded’ declarations as prominently as possible. Above all, the GLC’s press office sought to promote two key themes in its dealings with broadcasters: that the GLC offered important services to the community, and that these were threatened by the GLC’s closure. This public relations strategy met with growing success. The more the GLC was in the news – vilified by the tabloids, and championed in parliament – the easier it became to secure local broadcasting coverage of routine GLC activities.
This is borne out by media coverage of the GLC in a single week, 1–7 June 1985, during the height of the GLC battle.34 Although the GLC was still the target of tabloid attack (with six out of ten tabloid stories in this week featuring the GLC’s alleged left-wing excesses), the council was still reported very differently by broadcasting. Eleven out of sixteen items on radio, and five out of seven on television, were about GLC services to the community, some with a subsidiary theme that these services were threatened by the GLC’s closure. Some of these stories probably originated from County Hall’s publicity machine: for example, a ‘visual’ story about the GLC re-introducing owls into London as part of its policy of restocking the capital’s wildlife, or a report of the council’s visionary plan (in a context when the council was due to close in nine months’ time) to establish seaside homes for the elderly. Only one ‘negative’ story reported in the tabloids – about a plan said to be under consideration by the council for the twinning of London with the Nicaraguan capital Managua – was covered on broadcasting (BBC TV’s London Plus).
The effectiveness of these different forms of communication – political advertising, music-based public events, sponsorship of the voluntary sector and skilful public relations – contrasted with the results of more traditional left-wing methods of campaigning. The GLC organised a ‘Democracy Day’ of demonstrations, stoppages and meetings, which mobilised only a radical minority and generated predictably unfavourable press coverage. It attempted to stage a mini-referendum by causing a number of by-elections to occur at the same time. However, these were boycotted by the Conservative Party, and were widely viewed as a meaningless stunt; they resulted in a ‘GLC’ victory on a low poll. The council also distributed a regular free publication, The Londoner, which was negatively perceived as too political.35 In addition, the GLC organised a mass petition, which, according to one opinion poll, 36% of Londoners were asked to sign.36 This last at least provided an opportunity for GLC activists to put the anti-abolition case to Londoners on a one-to-one basis, even if it had very little wider impact.
However, the net effect of the GLC’s multiple forms of campaigning was only to stabilise its support during 1984–6 after its initial surge in the spring of 1984.
Government’s failure
Another way of viewing the battle over the GLC is to examine why the government failed to win more support. Six months after publication of its White Paper, which set out the reasons for closing down the GLC, the government had the backing of only about one in five Londoners. Nothing that the government did subsequently succeeded in reclaiming significant lost ground.
Yet, the government’s case was far from negligible. In essence, it was that the GLC did not do very much, cost a great deal for what it did and its functions could be easily transferred in ways that made for better and cheaper local administration. London borough councils were already responsible for social services and housing, while the Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) managed education. The GLC was relieved of its main responsibility, control of London Transport, in 1984. Indeed, the GLC was responsible, according to the government, for only 16% of total expenditure on local services in London in 1983,37 and ‘less than 11 per cent of services’ in the capital by 1985.38 Its small range of responsibilities did not seem to justify its large staff and overheads. Local government in London could be simplified, in the official view, by being concentrated in borough councils and their representatives.
This was not just a way of rationalising political sectarianism. A very similar case had been advanced in 1979 by an able, young councillor who declared: ‘I feel a great deal of regret that Marshall [1978 Inquiry] did not … say “Abolish the GLC” because I think that it would be a major saving and would have released massive resources for productive use’.39 He continued, ‘I do not believe you need two tiers of local government’.40 The young councillor’s name was Ken Livingstone. He became celebrated for arguing exactly the opposite opinion.
However, all the key elements of the government’s argument were rejected. Londoners were unconvinced, as we have seen, that the GLC was ‘unnecessary’. They were not persuaded that its closure would make for better local administration. In April 1984, 62% said that services would get worse after abolition, while only 9% thought they would improve.41 Similarly, 55% thought that abolition would make for less efficiency, compared with 14% who thought that it would result in more.42 Indeed, the government did not even communicate effectively its most basic argument – that GLC services would be transferred rather than abolished. In 1985, the most cited reason given for opposing abolition in an open-ended question – given by 34% – was that London would lose GLC services.43
Media logic
The government failed to get across its managerialist case for abolishing the GLC partly because it was seldom reported. Its case did not fit the populist agenda of right-wing popular newspapers. Thus, the Daily Mail rejected the anti-GLC article, which it had commissioned from the Environment Minister, Patrick Jenkin, on the grounds that it was too dull to publish. Right-wing journalists believed that their assault on the GLC was more persuasive than the government’s technocratic rationale. In any case, they sensed that their readers – drawn from all over the country – had little interest in the details of local government reform in London. Their jihad was more attuned to what their readers would find interesting – and angry-making.
The government’s case was also marginalised, with one notable exception,44 in television current affairs programmes about the GLC’s abolition.45 These were framed in terms of the tabloid case that GLC was a threat to the public vs. the GLC’s argument that its abolition was an assault on local democracy. For example, presenter Gavin Weightman introduced the London Weekend Television’s The GLC Abolition (4 November 1983) by summarising the tabloid case for abolition: ‘Ken Livingstone’s GLC is perceived by Conservatives as a high-spending Marxist council, making free with ratepayers’ money to support strange causes like the IRA and lesbians’. He concluded by summarising the GLC’s anti-local democracy argument: ‘The view that the long arm of Whitehall will be reaching into every recess of local government is gaining ground … It seems likely that many more people will raise the cry that the passing of the GLC has heralded the arrival of a Ministry for London’. Within the main body of the programme, the government’s case was marginalised, and presented in such a condensed form that it would have been difficult to comprehend without background knowledge.
This TV marginalisation was partly a consequence of ‘media logic’. The tabloid case against the GLC was more dramatic and attention-grabbing than the government’s administrative rationale. Balancing the tabloid case against the GLC’s case also made for symmetry. The opposing arguments – lunacy vs. democracy – dovetailed with each other, and were easy to communicate and understand. It made for ‘good television’.
The second reason for the marginalisation of the government’s case is that the GLC won the news source battle. How TV journalists reported and commented on the news was very strongly influenced by the elite actors they spoke to. TV programmes about the GLC paraded a succession of prestige sources supporting the GLC. They included critical Conservative MPs and peers (including a former
Prime Minister, Foreign Minister and Environment Minister), senior opposition politicians, cross-bench peers, rebel Conservative GLC councillors, representatives of numerous London groups (of which the arts lobby was the most vocal) and accredited experts (notably local government academics and broadsheet journalists). By contrast, very few sources backed the government’s case, and these tended to be low status: loyal backbench Conservative MPs, London Conservative borough councillors and the Thatcherite Institute of Directors (but not the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) which stopped campaigning against the GLC, nor the London Chamber of Commerce which backed the GLC). In the chess game of competing sources, the GLC had most of the pieces.
The government was thus very badly served by the media. As argued earlier, press partisanship backfired on the government. Its case for closing down the GLC was made to look spurious: pretending one thing while the Conservative press expressed the real, undemocratic reason for shutting up ‘Red Ken’. In addition, the government’s claim that the GLC was a lightweight, almost functionless authority was implicitly contradicted by the tabloids’ representation of County Hall as a powerful, menacing Politburo-on-the-Thames. The prominence given to the GLC in the national press also rendered it more newsworthy, and made it easier for the council to secure extensive coverage from local radio and television.
Losing the elite debate
The only part of the media which extensively reported the government’s case was the quality press. Yet, the government failed to win over even most of these predominantly Conservative newspapers.
This was for four main reasons.46 The government did not prepare the way for change through the time-honoured mechanism of a public enquiry or Royal Commission. There was thus no prior elite consent for what it proposed.
The government was intellectually outgunned because it knew less about local government in London than GLC officials. For example, a reluctant civil servant supplied to the Environment Minister, Tom King, a ‘ballpark figure’ for the savings that the GLC’s abolition would achieve.46 This figure was then paraded by government spokespersons, only to be publicly withdrawn when it was revealed to be totally implausible.
The government’s third problem was that there were intellectual tensions at the heart of its case. Although the government made a technocratic case for cheaper, more streamlined local government, it was in actual practice trying to curb the ‘profligacy’ of the new urban left – a political objective. And while it argued for greater devolution of decision-making to the local borough level, it was also increasing central government control over local government. These contradictions were exposed in the heat of public debate.
The fourth problem was that there was an underlying intellectual case for having a central co-ordinating agency to manage a conurbation as large and complex as London. Academic experts repeatedly made this argument in the public domain.
In the event, five out of seven national quality papers either supported the GLC or asserted the need for a directly elected authority for the capital. This reflected a wider failure on the part of the government to win over informed opinion.
Failed counter-attack
The government belatedly attempted to mount a counter-attack. In January 1984, the Prime Minister’s Press Secretary, Sir Bernard Ingham, set up a committee to better co-ordinate the government’s anti-GLC offensive. This was followed in April 1984 by the launch of Efficiency in London, an anti-GLC campaign group led by London local borough Conservative politicians. In September 1984 Kenneth Baker, a more feline and populist politician than Patrick Jenkin, was drafted in as Local Government Minister. He replaced Jenkin as Environment Secretary in the following year.
Yet, nothing the government did seemed able to turn the tide. This was partly because the GLC consciously set about softening its radical image. By 1984, people in County Hall weeded out grant applicants that might afford easy targets for press attacks (but sometimes recommended informally that the organisations concerned might consider changing their names in order to improve their chances of securing a GLC grant). In 1981, Livingstone had boycotted the marriage of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer out of republican principle: three years later, he invited the Queen to open the Thames Barrier, spoke warmly of her ‘real sense of service to the people’ and claimed that she was on the GLC’s side. His press officer, Nita Clarke, arranged for Ken Livingstone’s royalist mother to meet the Queen, and set up heart-warming media interviews afterwards. When Livingstone opposed resistance to rate capping in 1985 (and fell out with his radical Deputy, John McDonnell),47 the resourceful Nita Clarke used this to portray Livingstone to journalists as a member of the ‘cuddly left’.48
Livingstone’s pragmatic radicalism elicited a rueful compliment from the Deputy Prime Minister, William Whitelaw. ‘There is no doubt’, he commented, ‘that Red Ken who, for years I thought was an invention of Conservative Central Office, has, in fact, really won practically every trick so far in the game’.49
Even the press assault against the GLC began to falter in the heat of battle. The Mirror group of newspapers backed the GLC in 1984, with the Sunday Mirror reversing its support for abolition. The London Standard also backtracked by supporting the creation of a directly elected London council. Even, the Mail on Sunday and Daily Express broke ranks and opposed the cancelling of the GLC elections. Among the dailies, only the Sun and Daily Mail maintained with undiminished vigour their anti-GLC campaign until the very end.
Victory in defeat
Worse still, the government faced a growing rebellion in parliament, fanned by the professional lobbying firm, with strong Conservative connections, employed by the GLC. The government’s first reverse was over its 1984 ‘Paving Bill’ to replace the GLC and the six metropolitan county councils with interim joint boards. A rebellion in the Commons, backed by senior Conservatives, and a still larger revolt in the Lords, forced the government to back down. Its next reverse was when it was forced to withdraw its proposal to close down the Inner London Education Authority.50 The final showdown was over a rebel amendment to the 1985 Local Government Bill abolishing the GLC.
The amendment proposed that the GLC should be replaced by a directly elected London authority. It was immediately dubbed the ‘son of Frankenstein’ by government supporters. Yet, the amendment was defeated in the Commons by only twenty-three votes, with over a hundred Tory MPs voting against their government or abstaining. This was followed by a fraught debate in the Lords where a similar amendment was defeated by only four votes. The government, with large majorities in both Houses of Parliament, only just scraped through.
But if the government, backed by parliamentary whips, eventually won the parliamentary battle, it lost the political argument. The most enduring legacy of the GLC abolition campaign was that it consolidated a consensus among Londoners in favour of an elected London council (see Table 4.1). In 1991, a MORI poll reported that 64% approved of an elected authority for London51 – a figure very close to the 62% who disapproved of the abolition of GLC in its last week in 1986.52
No less important, the GLC won elite political support for its resurrection. In 1983, the leaders of the Labour Party, Social Democratic Party (SDP) and Liberal Party had all been deeply hostile to the GLC regime, with the SDP being officially in favour of the council’s abolition. The SDP subsequently reversed its position, and all three parties on the centre-left rallied behind the GLC, while major rifts opened up on the right. Consent was not secured within the political class for London to be without a London-wide local authority.
In 1991, the Labour Party announced its intention to establish a new London-wide council. In 1998, the Labour government (elected in 1997) held a London Referendum, in which it recommended the establishment of a directly elected London authority. The proposal was carried by 72% of the poll. In 2000, the GLC (albeit in a diminished incarnation) was reborn as the Greater London Authority, and the role of GLC leader was replaced by that of directly elected mayor. The person first
elected, and then re-elected, as mayor was none other than Ken Livingstone.
The campaign on behalf of the GLC thus turned defeat into victory. It paved the way for its subsequent resurrection.
Blocked legacies
For a time, it also looked as if the GLC battle would have two further legacies. GLC policies became increasingly popular in the council’s last phase. Two surveys conducted by the Harris Research Centre in 1983 and 1985 reveal the remarkable shift that had taken place (although part of this shift might have been due to a change of wording in the 1985 questionnaire).53 In 1985, the majority of Londoners backed all the GLC’s major policies, with the exception of its anti-racism policies about which they had reservations and its pro-gay policies which they still opposed. The majority also said that they wanted the local council to generate jobs, protect the environment, hold the police to account and promote equal opportunities. What seems to have happened is that the GLC benefited from a ‘halo effect’. First, Londoners rallied to its cause, then they reassessed more favourably what the council was doing.