Culture Wars

by James Curran

  Either we face the appalling prospect of the press picking them [the left] off between now and the election so that the electorate does not vote for them, and that means we do not have a Labour government. Or they get in under the cover of moderation, and totally transform the PLP [Parliamentary Labour Party] in the next parliament. Both prospects are pretty appalling.

  This interview was followed by a studio debate between Jo Ashton, Labour MP and Daily Star columnist, and Russell Profitt, a left-wing parliamentary Labour candidate and race adviser to Brent council. Ashton angrily said that ‘we are seething up in the north’ because the London ‘loony left’ is paving the way for another Conservative victory. ‘It is no good blaming the media’, exclaimed Ashton. ‘It is not the media who says you have got to ban Baa Baa Black Sheep …  and all the other nonsense’. Profitt replied that he was misinformed, and the exchange between them became increasingly acrimonious with each person raising his voice and interrupting the other. ‘What chance have you of winning the election’, asked Adam Raphael, the bemused programme presenter, ‘if you carry on in this kind of vein?’

  In the aftermath of the leaked letter, the Conservative press continued to stoke the embers of internal party conflict with a steady flow of ‘loony left’ stories, such as the alleged banning of ‘wife jokes’ by Camden Council, subsidised holidays for black pensioners in Lewisham, Bernie’s ‘barmy jobs for crooks’ and a proposal for condom machines in council children’s homes.26 These ‘revelations’ were sometimes presented as being part of a bigger story in which the leader of the Labour Party was vainly trying to control the party’s lunatic elements. This added a new dimension to the right-wing press representation of the ‘loony left’. It came to symbolise not only left-wing excess, but also the party’s internal turmoil, its weak leadership, its continuing extremism and total unsuitability for public office. While television did not endorse this narrative, it gave it an airing and portrayed the ‘loony left’ as an electoral albatross around the Labour Party’s neck.

  Despite behind-the-scenes attempts at peace-making, conflicts continued to simmer within the Labour Party, and were widely reported. Just the day before the announcement of the general election, Labour’s left and right were still publicly blaming each other for the party’s disappointing May local election results. Attacks on the ‘loony left’ from within the Labour movement even rumbled on during the general election campaign itself. Paul Gallagher, president of a leading right-wing trade union (EETPU), publicly blamed Labour’s poor showing in the polls to:

  the perception that far too many people had of the Labour Party [as] a party dominated by fanatics, committed to extreme policies, catering exclusively to the most bizarre ‘representative’ minority causes, the advocacy of homosexuality, of inverted racism, of discriminatory feminism, of liaisons with terrorist organisations.27

  The final phase of the ‘loony left’ press campaign, during the May–June 2017 general election campaign, had an almost ritual quality. It was claimed that the ‘loony left’, and its allies, were poised to take over the national leadership of the Labour Party, just as they had done at County Hall. Attention was focused in particular on two ‘loony’ parliamentary candidates, Bernie Grant (Tottenham) and Ken Livingstone (Brent East): they were among the five most photographed Labour politicians featured in the national daily press during the election campaign.28 The ‘loony left’ also graced the Conservatives’ opening poster campaign, a party political broadcast and numerous candidates’ election addresses.29 But by then, this hardly mattered. The Conservatives had won the 2017 general election before the official campaign had even begun.30

  In short, the press ‘loony left’ campaign was, unlike the GLC battle, an unmitigated disaster for the Labour party. It contributed to prolonged bloodletting, and the party’s total disorganisation.

  Pre-election influence

  The standard way of measuring press’s impact is to examine its influence in a four-week general election campaign. This has led to inconclusive results, suggesting at best only a modest effect.31 However, this approach fails to consider the potential for much greater influence during the long lead-up to general elections.

  The press campaign against the loony left’s boroughs took off in the autumn of 1986, and reached its zenith in the aftermath of the Greenwich by-election (26 February 1987). This coincided with the downturn, and then collapse, of the Labour vote (see Table 7.1). Labour’s support started to crumble in November 1986, and haemorrhaged in March and April 1987. In just seven months, those intending to vote Labour declined by a quarter. There was no recovery from this collapse. Labour’s poor showing in the June 1987 general election – coming second with 31% of the poll – was a direct consequence of this pre-election decline.

  Table 7.1  Decline of Labour Party support, 1986–7

  Source: Monthly averages of MORI, Harris, NOP, Marplan and Gallup polls.

  1 D. Butler and G. Butler, British Political Facts 1900–2000, 8th edition. (Basingstoke, Macnullan, 2000), p. 239. The general election was held on 11 June 1987.

  That there was a connection between the ‘loony left’ campaign and Labour’s pre-election decline is supported by the way in which perceptions of the Labour Party changed during this period. Some facets of the party’s public image remained relatively stable. But perceptions that connected to the ‘loony left’ campaign shifted significantly. Thus, between October 1986 and April 1987, the proportion thinking that Labour was ‘too extreme’ increased by fifteen percentage points, while those who said the party was ‘too divided’ rose by twelve percentage points (see Table 7.2). Those concluding that Labour was poorly led rose by twenty-four percentage points, while those thinking that Labour was the ‘only party that can turn out the government’ dropped by 31%. The period of most pronounced deterioration in Labour’s image was in the immediate aftermath of the Greenwich by-election when the party was convulsed by mutual recrimination.

  Table 7.2  Perceptions of the Labour Party, 1985–7

  Source: Gallup.

  However, to understand why the ‘loony left’ campaign had such a strong impact, it is necessary to take account of pre-existing attitudes towards the Labour Party. Labour’s result in the 1983 general election – following its extended civil war in 1979–81, the 1982 Falklands War, and recollections of industrial strife and economic crisis during the Callaghan Labour government (1976–9) – had been abysmal. Labour won a smaller share of the vote per opposed candidate in 1983 than at any time since 1906, and came third or lower in 292 constituencies.32 The party’s own private research during the 1983 general election highlighted its crisis: it was widely judged to be economically incompetent, and was criticised on numerous other counts (including being both unprincipled and extreme). It seemed to be surviving perilously as a political force only because it was viewed as the party of the working class and the welfare state.33

  Following Neil Kinnock’s election as Labour leader in 1983, the party sought to reassure the electorate that Labour had become a more moderate party. This electoral strategy was pursued through symbolic changes, and supported by some shifts of policy. For a time, it seemed as if this strategy was working. There was a gradual, if chequered, recovery of Labour’s position in the polls after 1983 until the winter of 1984–5,34 when television showed recurrent – and influential – images of picket-line violence during the bitter miners’ strike.35 However, when the strike ended, Labour’s recuperation gradually resumed and seemed to gather momentum in 1986. This recovery only faltered and went into reverse when the ‘loony left’ campaign took off in November 1986.

  This campaign was effective because it activated latent misgivings about whether Labour had really changed. Negative images of Labour had receded during 1983–4, revived during the 1984–5 miners’ strike, were allayed again in 1985–6, and then were greatly strengthened by the ‘loony left’ assault. This campaign thus brought to the surface and crystallised doubts that already existed.
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  Thus, the high proportions of people who viewed the Labour Party as extreme, divided and badly led in April 1987 – shortly before the general election – were in fact very similar to those saying the same thing in January 1985, during the height of the miners’ strike (see Table 7.2). Mistrust of Labour revived.

  There were multiple reasons why the Conservatives won the 1987 general election (of which their reputation for greater economic competence was probably the most important).36 But negative perceptions of Labour as extremist played a part. No less than 42% of Labour defectors in the 1987 election gave the party’s extremism as a factor that had influenced their decision to withdraw support from the party.37 Another post-election survey found that dislike of the ‘loony left’ was the aspect of the Labour Party that repelled the highest proportion of non-Labour and ex-Labour voters alike. Among the crucial latter crucial group, 42% agreed with the statement that the ‘“loony left” would gain too much influence’.38

  These last results should be viewed with caution since retrospective assessments do not always provide a reliable guide to motivation. Indeed, they probably inflate the importance of the ‘loony left’ campaign by providing an ‘acceptable’ reason for switching from Labour. But even if allowance is made for this, they still powerfully support the conclusion – backed by other evidence – that a toxified municipal left contributed to Labour’s defeat.

  Delegitmating the new urban left

  The press assault on the ‘loony left’ was a personally traumatic experience for the relatively young team – Neil Kinnock, Charles Clarke, Patricia Hewitt and Peter Mandelson – who were in the front line attempting to defuse its consequences. They found themselves powerless to prevent Labour’s pre-election collapse in 1986–7, culminating in the party’s third successive election defeat. This collapse reinforced, in their view, the need for a fundamental transformation of the party.39 Labour moved much further to the right after the 1987 general election, and this helped to reconcile the Labour right to Kinnock’s continued leadership. A successful press assault thus played a part in encouraging an accelerated transitional shift, under Kinnock’s later leadership (1987–92), towards New Labour.

  The new urban left also became a scapegoat for failure within the Labour party. It was not just leading members of the Labour right who blamed the ‘loony left’ for Labour’s defeat. This view was echoed by the party’s leadership, and was duly amplified by political correspondents. As the BBC’s political editor, John Cole, put it: ‘I have no doubt that he [Kinnock] would believe that it’s the London Labour Party and people like it have got Mrs Thatcher’s majority’.40 Moreover, some members of the Labour left also joined in this chorus of condemnation. For example Tom Sawyer, Deputy General Secretary of the left-wing National Union of Public Employees (and a member of the inner group who had organised Tony Benn’s deputy leadership bid in 1981) publicly rounded on the London left, warning that ‘the politics of gender and politics of race are dynamite, and they have got to be handled carefully. Unless we learn that lesson Labour [may]never be elected to government again’.41 Traditionalists on the far left also rounded on the new urban left. According to Derek Hutton, former Deputy Leader of Liverpool Council (and a leading figure in the Trotskyist Militant Tendency), ‘the London Left are more concerned about black mayors and gay rights than about building homes’ and ‘more concerned that we called …  a manhole cover a personhole cover, than they ever were about real issues’.42 ‘People as a whole – especially older Labour voters’, echoed a Scottish trade unionist in a militant rank-and-file paper, ‘become anti-Labour when they see councils in London …  subsidising all kinds of odd activities’.43

  During this period of extended recrimination, some members of the new urban left begged forgiveness for their sins. Graham Smith, a radical Ealing Councillor, wrote in Tribune: ‘I plead guilty. I put my hand up …  We have to admit we were wrong’.44 Margaret Hodge, leader of left-wing Islington council (from whose Town Hall a red flag had once fluttered), declared that the new urban left needed to leave behind the politics of gesture.45 Camden Council, explained its press officer Jonathan O’Neil in 1991, had learnt the error of its ways. ‘This tag as a loony left authority’, he explained, ‘is one we’re trying very hard to shake. It refers to nearly ten years ago with a very different [Labour council] administration’.46 ‘We don’t do gesture politics now’, echoed Camden’s new leader, Julia Fitzgerald, ‘which wasn’t always the case three or four years ago’.47 The London Labour Party, declared its senior organiser, Terry Ashton, had turned its back on the errors of the past.48

  Labour’s critics were not convinced. The right-wing press detected further manifestations of the ‘loony left’ virus in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and issued fresh health warnings.49 In this extended period of almost universal denigration of the ‘loony left’, opinions were revised. The GLC had been widely praised, none more so than by Martin Jacques (editor of Marxism Today) who wrote in 1986 that it was ‘the greatest achievement of the labour movement since 1979’ (original emphasis) and had advanced ‘a new set of priorities – gender, race and sexuality – which will surely be a central part of the agenda of the 90s’.50 Writing in 1991, Martin Jacques (now a columnist for the Sunday Times) expressed misgivings about ‘gesture politics’ and ‘high-profile stances on racism and sexism’, although he praised the GLC’s cheap fares policy.51

  Others were more acerbic. Ros Coward, a prominent feminist, scoffed at those who remembered ‘Red Ken’s rule [at the GLC) as the heyday of the democratic left’. On the contrary, she declared in 1997, ‘I remember it as the time the lunatics took over the asylum’.52 In the same year, the progressive journalist Polly Toynbee implicitly acknowledged the new consensus by referring to the former flagship of the London left as ‘the old reviled GLC’.53

  A movement that had been hailed by many on the left during the mid-1980s as marking a way of reinventing radicalism in new times, and of connecting to new social forces, was thus almost universally denigrated as a failed experiment in the post-1987 period. This condemnation contributed to the weakening, subdivision and increasing demoralisation of the left within the Labour Party that facilitated the New Labour ascendancy (1994–2010).54

  Mythologising the ‘London effect’

  In Labour’s post-election inquest, much was made of the fact that the Conservative Party’s share of the vote rose in London, whereas it fell in most regions. This was taken to be conclusive proof that the London left had been decisively repudiated by the electorate. It was said to signify the new urban left’s total unelectability, and to underscore the need for the Labour party to ‘re-connect’ to the concerns of the public.

  Central to this discourse of blame was unquestioned acceptance that there was indeed a ‘London effect’. Paving the way for this conclusion was Patricia Hewitt’s leaked letter reporting that it was ‘obvious’ from the party’s own research that fear of extremism was ‘particularly prominent in the GLC area’.55 In fact, this was very far from obvious. The relevant survey, commissioned by the Labour Party,56 reported that 3% more Londoners than the national sample said that a future Labour government would be ‘too left-wing/communist’. This difference was within the statistical margin of sampling error. Furthermore, there was no consistent difference between the responses of Londoners and the national sample on a range of issues (such as rates) where a ‘London effect’ would be expected to operate. What in fact the party’s polling evidence suggested, in an inconclusive way, was the possibility of a weak effect – not at all what Patricia Hewitt claimed.

  The actual 1987 election results do not in fact demonstrate the existence of a powerful ‘London effect’ if other variables are taken into account. There was a 2% increase of the Conservative share of the vote in the capital. However, the Conservatives also increased their share of the vote in the south-east by the same amount. Both results could be attributed to the disproportionate growth of prosperity that took place in Londo
n and the south-east during the 1986–7 economic boom.

  What most analysts also failed to notice was that Labour’s share of the vote also increased by two percentage points in London in the 1987 general election. It was the Alliance, not Labour, which fell back in the capital. The erosion of the centrist rather than left vote was not what most commentators had in mind when they talked about the ‘London effect’.

  There was also no systematic voting trend against ‘loony left’ candidates and those standing in ‘loony left’ boroughs. Some left-wing candidates, like the former GLC councillor Tony Banks, did exceptionally well, as did some candidates in ‘loony’ boroughs, like Islington’s left-wing Jeremy Corbyn. Conversely, some right-wing Labour candidates standing in right-wing Labour boroughs, like Newham’s Nigel Spearing, did badly.

  But while this was no systematic pattern of ‘loony left’ rejection, seven left-wing parliamentary Labour candidates underperformed in London. However, this was due to a number of factors. Four of these candidates were black in a general election where non-white candidates fared worse than average. Certain results could be attributed to sub-regional differences of swing within the metropolitan area (where Labour did better in south than in north London). Furthermore, the adverse swings experienced by some radical candidates were not enough in most cases for Labour to lose a seat. The best available inference, derived from a very careful sifting of the evidence, is that – at most – the ‘London factor’ helped the Alliance to retain one seat (Greenwich), and the Conservatives to win another (Walthamstow).57 In short, what the ‘London effect’ amounted to was the possibility that it affected the outcome of just two seats.