by James Curran
It also appeared as if the political alignment of the capital had shifted. London had long been a barometer of the national political weather. In the June 1983 general election, for example, the Conservative lead over Labour in London was only two percentage points below that in the country as a whole. But between June 1984 and March 1986, Labour’s lead over the Conservatives in the capital surged to between thirteen and twenty-two percentage points above the national average.54 Some believed that London would become a flagship for a new kind of politics that was both progressive and popular,55 (a belief that was eventually borne out in the 2017 general election when Labour under Jeremy Corbyn won 55% of the popular vote in London compared with the Conservatives’ 33%, although much water was to flow under the bridge before this happened).56
Another seeming outcome of the GLC battle was that it brought into being a powerful political alliance determined to defend local democracy. This drew support from across the political spectrum: from councillors in all parties alarmed by the extension of central government control; from critics of ‘new right’ authoritarianism, among the liberal right as well as left; and above all from ‘constitutionalists’ who viewed the autonomy of local government to be a safeguard against democratic centralism. This last tradition was more strongly embedded within the Conservative Party than in the Labour Party (since the latter tended to defend centralisation as a way of securing uniformly high standards of public service provision across the country). Indeed, it was Conservative constitutionalists like Sir Geoffrey Rippon – a former Environment Minister who in 1984 called for the introduction of constitutional curbs against excessive state centralisation – who were, in some ways, the doughtiest defenders of local autonomy as a core principle during the GLC battle.57
In the event, these developments proved short-lived. The new urban left in London became discredited. The pro-Labour tide in the capital receded. Above all, the cross-party alliance opposing increased central government control fell apart. Indeed, senior politicians in all parties became reluctant to champion local government autonomy because it became such a tarnished cause. How all this happened is explored further in the chapters that follow.
Notes
1. Market and Opinion Poll Research Centre (MORI), Attitudes of Londoners to the Abolition of the GLC (London: MORI, October 1983).
2. Ibid., table 3.1, p. 65.
3. B. Worcester and L. Gilbert, MORI, ‘Voters in Greater London’, Confidential Memorandum to the Labour Party (14), 26 May 1983.
4. Harris Research Centre, Survey of Public Opinion in London (Richmond: Harris Research Centre, June 1983).
5. This analysis is derived from articles archived each day by the GLC Public Relations Department, and ‘Telex Monitors Radio and TV Log’ undertaken for the GLC by Radio and Television News Service for Record and Research (RTNS), London. The latter data set provides only a brief note about each programme item, and, to judge from our own research, omitted some current affairs programmes. But despite these defects, its log still provides a valuable insight into the news agenda of TV and radio reporting of the GLC.
6. Harris, Survey of Public Opinion (1983).
7. Interview with the late Veronica Crichton, formerly press officer to the Majority Party, County Hall, by the author.
8. However, the available broadcasting logs relate only to the last phase of the Cutler administration.
9. Interview by the author.
10. Interview by the author.
11. The difference between economic and social radicals during this period is a central theme of R. Waller, Moulding Political Opinion (Beckenham: Croom Helm, 1988). It was a long-term problem of the left which the International Publishing Group grappled with unsuccessfully when it tried to launch the pre-Murdoch Sun in the 1960s. (See J. Curran and J. Seaton, Power Without Responsibility, 7th edition. (London: Routledge, 2010.)
12. Cited in J. Carvel, Citizen Ken (London: Chatto and Windus, 1984), pp. 132–3.
13. The Hon. Sir Robert Carnwath, ‘The reasonable limits of local authority powers’, Public Law, Summer 1996.
14. Audience Selection, August 1981. Opponents of rate-funded transport fare reductions decreased to 43% by 1983, but still outnumbered those in favour (25%), according to MORI, April 1983. The surge in support for cheap fares thus took place later but was preceded by a significant reappraisal in 1981–3.
15. Harris Research Centre, London Attitude Survey (Richmond: Harris Research Centre, 1985).
16. Interview with Bill Bush, formerly head of the Leader’s Office, County Hall, by the author.
17. Interview by the author. Tony Wilson emphasised that this was an approximate estimate that took account of all forms of promotion, broadly defined.
18. MORI, Attitudes of Londoners to the Abolition of the GLC (London: MORI, April 1984).
19. Harris, London Attitude Survey (1985).
20. Ivor Crewe, ‘Has the electorate become Thatcherite?’, in R. Skidelsky (ed.), Thatcherism (London: Chatto and Windus, 1988).
21. Cited in Anthony King, ‘Rumours of a revolt in a land that’s not so free’, The Guardian, 8 November 1985.
22. Department of the Environment, Streamlining the Cities (London: HMSO, Cmnd 9063, 1983).
23. Cited in MORI, Attitudes of Londoners, April 1984, p. 6.
24. Cited in A. Forrester, S. Lansley and R. Pauley, Beyond Our Ken (London: Fourth Estate, 1985), p. 67.
25. Interview with Tony Wilson, former Director of Publicity, GLC, by the author.
26. Interview with Chris Powell, Senior Partner of Boase, Massimi and Pollitt, by the author.
27. MORI, Attitudes of Londoners, April 1984.
28. MORI, Attitudes of Londoners to the Abolition of the GLC, September 1984.
29. Interview with Ken Hume, former GLC Festival organiser, by the author.
30. This draws on the interview with Ken Hume, and Franco Bianchini, ‘Cultural Policy and Political Strategy’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Manchester 1995.
31. GLC Events Diary (34), Campaign Link Team, 25 February 1985 (summarising the following month’s events).
32. B. Pimlott and N. Rao, Governing London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) p. 35.
33. Computer printout of all organisations funded by the GLC on 28 February 1986, supplied to the author.
34. Same sources as cited in Note 5.
35. Harris, Survey of Public Opinion (1983).
36. MORI, Attitudes of Londoners to the Abolition of the GLC, June 1984).
37. Department of the Environment, Streamlining the Cities (London: HMSO, 1983), p. 4.
38. Kenneth Baker, Reporting London, Thames Television, 26 February 1985.
39. Cited in Forrester, Lansley and Pauley, Beyond Our Ken, p. 43.
40. Cited in Ibid., p. 103.
41. MORI, Attitudes of Londoners, April 1984.
42. Ibid.
43. Harris, London Attitude Survey, 1985.
44. Reporting London, 26 February 1985.
45. The GLC Abolition (The London Programme), London Weekend Television, 4 November 1983; The House of Lords and the GLC (The London Programme), London Weekend Television, 26 April 1985; A Week in Politics, Channel 4, 13 April 1984; A Week in Politics, Channel 4, 21 March 1986. The left-wing extremism versus local democracy framework was modified in the final stage of the GLC’s life to left-wing extremism versus the council’s struggle to preserve services after its closure.
46. Interview with former Environment Secretary, Lord Jenkin (Patrick Jenkin), by the author.
47. This is described in detail in K. Livingstone, If Voting Changed Anything, They Would Abolish It (London: Collins, 1987), pp. 308–35.
48. Interview with Nita Clarke, former press officer of the GLC Labour Group, by the author.
49. William Whitelaw, Reporting London, Thames Television, 25 October 1984.
50. ILEA was eventually closed down in 1990.
51. MORI London poll (June) reported in the Sunday Ti
mes, 27 July 1991.
52. 52Harris, Final Day Poll, March 1986.
53. The wording of the lead-in to a key set of questions in the 1985 Harris survey (London Attitude Survey) encouraged a positive response (‘I am going to read out some specific propositions which some people think might improve things in London. Could you tell me how strongly you approve or disapprove of each bearing in mind that any money necessary would have to come from rates and taxes.’) There was no comparable lead-in in the 1983 Harris survey (Survey of Public Opinion in London).
54. Waller, Moulding Public Opinion (1988), table 12.4, p. 86.
55. ‘Goodbye GLC’, New Socialist, 37, April 1986; Beatrice Campbell and Martin Jacques, ‘Goodbye to the GLC’, Marxism Today, April 1986; ‘The big yin versus carry on up the Khyber’, Tribune, 11 April 1986.
56. J. Colombeau, ‘The 2017 General Election – the numbers behind the result’, figure 3, London Datastore (Mayor of London) available in: https://data.london.gov.uk/apps_and_analysis/the-2017-general-election-the-numbers-behind-the-result/ (accessed December 30, 2017).
57. For example, Sir Geoffrey Rippon interviewed in A Week in Politics, Channel 4, 13 April 1984.
5
‘Not funny but sick’
Urban myths
Julian Petley
Latter-day folk devils
Attempts by right-wing British newspapers to demonise sections of the left are as old as the left itself. Long before Mrs Thatcher so egregiously labelled the striking miners of 1984–5 as the ‘enemy within’, the majority of Britain’s press had perfected a way of representing the ideas and personalities associated with socialism as so deranged and psychotic that they represented a danger to society. Thus defined as modern incarnations of folk devils and placed outside the parameters of what many politicians and most papers would be prepared to recognise as ‘proper’ and ‘acceptable’ political debate, they have been rendered effectively illegitimate and other, and consequently fair game for what can be described only as sustained editorial hate campaigns (see Figure 5.1a and b.)
FIGURE 5.1 Conservative-supporting newspapers have habitually used grotesque caricatures as a means of demonising and de-legitimising the left. “I don’t know what effect my troops will have on the enemy, but by God, they frighten me!” by Michael Cummings. (a) 1 October 1973, Sunday Express, courtesy of Express Syndication Ltd. (b) 8 February 1987, Sunday Express, courtesy of Express Syndication Ltd.
Within weeks of Labour winning control of the Greater London Council on 7 May 1981, its leader, Ken Livingstone, was regularly being described by newspapers as ‘barmy’ and ‘loony’ and GLC policies were being stigmatised as ‘crazy’. This line of attack was gradually extended to include various Labour-controlled local councils in London; for example, Islington earned the sobriquet ‘Bananas republic’ in the Sunday People (13 March 1983) and was featured as ‘The mad mad mad mad world of Islington’ (Mail on Sunday, 13 February 1983). But this kind of rhetoric did not really gain momentum and crystallise around the alliterative phrase ‘loony left’ until after the Tories’ vindictive abolition of the GLC in 1984. Significant moments in what was, in effect, a prolongation and intensification of the campaign against Ken Livingstone and the GLC were the London local council elections of May 1986, the Greenwich byelection of February 1987 (in which Rosie Barnes won Greenwich for the Alliance from Labour) and the runup to the general election later that year. After that the torrent of stories gradually slowed, although the phrase has since become firmly embedded in press (and by no means simply tabloid) parlance and still surfaces quite regularly. For example, in the Sun (3 July 2017) in an article headed ‘Corbyn mob rule will spark a Labour war’, Trevor Kavanagh warned that ‘the loony left are out of control, hysterically raising their fists against a democratically elected Tory government’. Its decline from the heady days of 1986–7 can at least partly be explained by changes in Labour policy and image after its 1987 defeat (changes not unconnected, of course, with the party’s desire to lose the ‘loony left’ tag), although the stories may also simply have lost their novelty value and been replaced by equally ideologically loaded myths about the Human Rights Act 1998 being a ‘villains’ charter,1 the European Union ‘imposing’ all sorts of crazy regulations on Britain2 and Muslims allegedly demanding the banning of Christmas, Easter and piggy banks.3
‘Loony left’ stories in the press have two prominent themes: Labour councils are irrationally obsessed with minority and fringe issues, and in particular are paranoid about racial and sexual ‘problems’ which do not actually exist outside their own fevered imaginings. This characterisation enables their policies, and especially their antiracist and equal opportunities ones, to be dismissed as ‘loony’, it strips councillors of their legitimacy as elected representatives by reducing them to the status of unrepresentative freaks, and, by thus denying their democratic status, it facilitates their portrayal as authoritarian ideologues attempting to impose their crazed views on the public. Significantly, many of the ‘loony left’ stories are about children – that section of society least able to defend itself from indoctrination and most vulnerable to unscrupulous manipulation.
This demonisation of Labour councils contained a powerful, though initially implicit, call for retribution: the government should ‘do something’ – curb their spending, curtail their antics or transfer their powers to ‘responsible’ central government. Both implicitly and explicitly, singly and together, these various stories represented calls for the diminution of the powers of local government, and thus echoed Tory policy at the time. So, for example, and as described in the subsequent chapter, the controversy over positive images of gays and lesbians in Haringey was exploited as evidence that local education authorities had far too much power over what happened in individual schools, and was utilised to reinforce the argument that those powers should be largely redistributed amongst a combination of parents, school governors and, of course, central government.
In this chapter, however, we are concerned not with such a ‘grand narrative’ but with a number of smaller stories published in 1986–7. These are typical of a vast number of similar stories4 published in the press during the period in question: we have simply chosen some of the more prominent. We investigated each of these stories in detail, examining the background to the reports, talking to the sources quoted in them, and, wherever possible, to the journalists concerned.5 It has to be admitted, however, that as far as this last task was concerned, we were largely unsuccessful when it came to the national press in particular. Often stories were not bylined – hardly surprising since so many were straight lifts from other papers. But even on the few occasions we managed to track down the authors of stories, most of them simply refused to answer our questions. Unfortunately, the motto of far too many journalists on national newspapers is ‘never apologise, never explain’, leading Will Hutton to remark in the Observer (17 August 2003) that ‘Britain’s least-accountable and self-critical institutions have become the media – and the way they operate is beginning to damage rather than protect the society of which they are part’. Thus, whilst in their ‘loony left’ stories (and elsewhere too) journalists have endlessly harped on about the importance of transparency and public accountability in every institution about which they write, they are habitually utterly unwilling or unable, when challenged, to subscribe to these values in their own profession. We did occasionally encounter responses along the lines of ‘I’d like to talk to you but it’s more than my job’s worth’, and this, of course, explains why so many critical books about the British press, such as the recent Mail Men,6 are chock-full of anonymous quotes from journalists. However, the climate of fear which seems to prevail amongst the employees of most of Britain’s national newspapers sits extremely oddly and uncomfortably with those papers’ endlessly repeated claims to represent the Fourth Estate.
Haringey, and especially Bernie Grant, Britain’s first black council leader, were favourite targets of the press, and they fe
ature prominently in several of our selected stories.
The ‘racist’ bin liner
The first of these concerns an allegedly ‘racist’ bin liner. Under the headline ‘The racist bin liner is blacked’, Chester Stern claimed in the Mail on Sunday (2 March 1986) that ‘black bin liners have been banned at Bernie Grant’s leftwing Haringey Council because they are “racially offensive”’. This was supported by a statement from an anonymous ‘storeman at the North London council’s central depot’ and by a quote from a councillor who said that ‘there was no written ban on the use of black sacks’ – but added that the council had ‘a strong antiracist policy’. Stern ended his piece thus: ‘The council has now changed over to grey sacks – to avoid offending West Indian workers in the cleaning department’.
The report, notwithstanding the citing of a typically anonymous source, is quite without substance. In short, the council had not banned black bin liners at all. Indeed, days after the article appeared, and as a council minute confirms, the Civic Services Committee had accepted a tender from a local supplier of black liners, since these were the cheapest on offer. Of course, Stern could not have known about this decision, since it was taken after he wrote the report, and, atypically, he did in fact discuss the story with us, accepting that he was in error to claim that the banning of black bin liners was Haringey policy. However, he added that his story was ‘not wholly false’. It was based, he said, on a oneoff incident when a storeman at the council’s central depot in Hornsey High Street refused to accept an order for bin liners from two parks department staff because the order contained the word ‘black’. The storeman claimed the black bin liner ‘ban’ was council policy. The park staff complained to their local (Labour) councillor, Brian Bullard, who recounted the incident at a subsequent council meeting. When we spoke to Bullard, he stated that the story had come to him from a park attendant, who had been informed by another staff member of the remark allegedly made by the storeman. Bullard’s own retrospective opinion was that the story had originated in a joke which had been misunderstood, and that the whole affair was entirely without foundation.