Culture Wars

by James Curran

  Unsurprisingly perhaps, Labour lost the Greenwich by-election to the up and coming Social Democratic Party (that had split from Labour in 1981) and this led to the, now infamous’ ‘Hewitt letter’. This was the letter from Patricia Hewitt, then Neil Kinnock’s Head of Policy, that was leaked to the Sun (at the start of its career as the receptacle of choice for New Labour secrets). The letter and its aftermath, discussed in the previous chapter, was a dramatic demonstration of just how concerned the Labour leadership was about what they termed ‘the London effect’.31

  Hughes and Wintour suggest that the leak – which was headlined in the Sun ‘Gays put Kinnock in a panic: secret letter lashes loonies’ – had come from Kinnock’s office ‘to put a bomb under the London left’.32 And Heffernan and Marqusee are even more specific in their analysis of the Hewitt letter. They wrote: ‘At a stroke, the entire Tory and media campaign against local Labour councils’ equal opportunities initiatives were vindicated – by the Labour leadership itself’.33 Right wingers in the Labour Party seized upon the defeat at Greenwich to push home their advantage. They used the media to reinforce Patricia Hewitt’s warnings about a ‘London effect’. The Sunday Times reported, in March 1987:

  Senior Labour party moderates gave a warning yesterday that time was running out for Labour to avoid disaster at the next general election. They told the Sunday Times that unless Neil Kinnock acted immediately to curb London’s ‘loony left’, Labour would be humiliated at the polls and Mrs Thatcher would be guaranteed a third term in office. … Stuart Bell, Labour MP for Middlesbrough and secretary of the Solidarity group of Labour moderates, said he will be warning all prospective parliamentary candidates against manipulation by the left, particularly in London. … Moderates are alarmed at the prospects of the parliamentary party being dominated by the far left after the general election. Ken Livingstone, the former GLC leader and candidate for Brent East, is believed to be planning to run for the party chairmanship after the retirement of Jack Dormand, a veteran moderate from north eastern England.34

  The Greenwich defeat was undoubtedly traumatic for the Labour leadership. One of Kinnock’s close aides told the noted general election chroniclers David Butler and Dennis Kavanagh:

  What changed everything of course, was Greenwich and subsequent rows – all of which were peculiarly disastrous because they re-awoke fears which many potential voters still had about Labour extremism, divisions, unfitness for government and Kinnock’s own leadership ability’.35

  Hence, Labour went into the 1987 election as a bitterly divided party. On the ground, members, trade unionists and community activists still believed the Party to be a vehicle for achieving sweeping social change across a wide swathe of issues. Its economic policies were essentially redistributive, it favoured unilateral nuclear disarmament, the restoration of trade union rights and it was committed to an equality agenda covering gender, ethnicity, disability and sexuality. However, the party leadership viewed things somewhat differently. They fought a campaign based on convincing the electorate that the agenda of the grassroots was not shared by the leadership, that the Party in power would seek to represent the aspirations of middle Britain (a phrase not used at the time) and that it (rather than the SDP/Liberal Alliance) was the only viable alternative to the Conservatives.

  Hughes and Wintour (seen at the time as journalists close to Blair) in the almost ‘authorised version’ of the birth of New Labour wrote:

  Mandelson and Phillip Gould succeeded not because they exploited slick advertising and media management more effectively than the Conservatives, but because they forged between themselves an approach to political strategy which has never before been seen – certainly in the Labour party, and arguably, ever in British politics. They welded policy, politics and image-creation into one weapon.36

  In his perceptive analysis of the evolution of Labour’s campaigns and communications strategy, Eric Shaw concluded that this meant that the Party concentrated its communications effort on:

  maximising the saliency of those matters where it was most in line with popular sentiment, such as health and education, and strive as far as possible to neutralise or exclude from the agenda issues such as industrial relations and defence, where it had few hopes of evoking a supportive response.37

  During any election campaign the party leader’s itinerary is a crucial part of the planning process. This involves finding salient stories and strong pictures to illustrate the ‘campaign theme of the day’ – done effectively it means that the chosen theme will dominate the main television news bulletins and hopefully spill over into the following morning’s headlines. Those planning the leader’s tour were invoked to look for ‘suitable’ locations and interviewees. ‘Suitable’ meant finding upbeat televisual locations and ‘reliable’ (i.e. not associated with the ‘loony left’) local authorities and interviewees, in other word, avoiding, at all costs, anyone who might remind the electorate of what the Labour leadership saw as its negatives.38 In the words of Patricia Hewitt, in charge of the planning:

  we want places that are modern, that show the best of Britain and, in particular, the best of what Labour councils are doing, places that encapsulate Kinnock’s Britain. … We do not want any closed factories, derelict housing sites, run-down hospitals, industrial wastelands or other wrecks of Thatcher’s Britain … people – bright attractive people presenting an image of the broader base Labour has too capture – not people who present an image of old-fashioned Labour die-hards.39

  Recommendations for appropriate campaign visits by the leader reflected this desire to reflect the ‘new’ the ‘modern’ and avoid images and people associated with Labour’s past. For example, in the North East region, one of the recommendations was for a visit to Newcastle’s South Gosford transport interchange, which represented a good example of the advantages of an integrated transport system over a deregulated one. The report went on to note: ‘A visit to the control centre would afford an opportunity of seeing how the system works, talking with the employees and being seen in a modern computer-controlled environment, built by a Labour local authority’.40

  As the 1987 election approached, Phillip Gould undertook a series of presentations to leading Labour politicians (and then subsequently to MPs and candidates) outlining his analysis of why Labour was failing to capture public support.41 Those attending were, understandably, desperate to win and were looking to Gould for reassurance. Gould spoke fluently, and in a language that many of the participants found baffling but impressive; he was passionate and convincing about his research. He showed slides that diagrammatically showed the image of the party, its leader and its policies. The research looked authoritative and it was difficult not to accept the validity of his findings. Out of these findings a reality was portrayed which might, or might not have been, the reality that existed out in the country, but it became accepted by Labour’s leaders and thus became the new catechism.

  The very first slide Gould presented, ‘Key Findings from Research – Value Change’, read: ‘Shift from collective to individual values’ It reflected the success, Gould argued, that Margaret Thatcher had had in shifting the centre of political gravity away from collectivist values to more to individual ones. Yet, the annual British Social Attitudes survey (which began in 1983) has consistently shown that throughout this period the values of the British electorate remained resolutely ‘social democratic’ – committed to those very values that the Labour leadership were being told no longer resonated with voters.42

  The second slide presented by Gould was entitled ‘Mood of the People’ and reported findings that people felt personally better off but had long term doubts about the state of the economy and were worried about the quality of life. The third slide was ‘What the People Think About the Parties’ and indicated that the main finding about the Conservatives was ‘Fears About the Future’; for the Liberal/SDP Alliance it was ‘Untried but Inexperienced’ and for Labour it was ‘Fears About the Loony Left’. Thus, Labour’s sen
ior politicians were being told that the single most important issue they had to confront was people’s fears about the ‘loony left’. But if Gould’s research had been faulty in identifying a shift from collective to individual attitudes, then perhaps it was also inaccurate in its portrayal that fears about the ‘loony left’ were the single most important facet of the public’s perceptions of Labour?

  The 1987 election can be seen as something of a watershed in terms of the supposed ‘loony left’ effect. By then, Neil Kinnock’s control over the party machine was well-established with the left apparently defeated in all Labour’s decision-making fora. Nonetheless, the ‘loony left’ remained a potent factor for the media, for the Conservatives and, perhaps surprisingly, for Labour as well. In the case of the latter, the ‘misdeeds’ of the ‘loony left’ were to be used to demonstrate just how far Labour had travelled since the days of Tony Benn’s leadership campaign. It proved a useful as a stick to beat a recalcitrant party back into line whenever it appeared to be straying off-message – back the leadership or face the prospect of the return of the ‘loony left’ and life in the political wilderness, was the implicit message of many of the battles that both Kinnock and Blair embarked upon (and usually won). As Lewis Minkin notes:

  There was an uninhibited enhancement of the routine management practice, began under Kinnock, of focusing publicly on what was going to happen to sources of opposition – groups to be weakened, institutions to be curbed etc. An exaggeration of the political blood spilt on the floor in any significant victory (said to be the Mandelson doctrine) was used to heighten the impression of supremacy.43

  Despite the popular conception of the 1980s as a period of left dominance of Labour, in fact the decade represented a period of retreat for Labour’s left. Two leading left activists of that period – Richard Heffernan and Mike Marqusee – claim that the high point of the left (in terms of winning votes at party conference and gaining seats on the National Executive Committee) was the party conference of 1980.44 The following year, Tony Benn lost his challenge for the deputy leadership of the party and, for Labour’s left, it was downhill from there on, as Lewis Baston has observed:

  The leadership had, by 1987, an exaggerated fear, even hatred, for the activities of the local left. This was a replay of the debates between Herbert Morrison and the supporters of Poplarism; Neil Kinnock feared that their antics would detract from Labour’s statesmanlike image, and alienate traditional working-class voters.45

  Labour’s defeat in 1987 was, for many in the Party, harder to take than the 1983 debacle. This time there were fewer excuses. To all intents and purposes, the left had been defeated, the party had gone into the election with Neil Kinnock very much in control of his party and on a manifesto which appeared to be acceptable to the traditional right in the parliamentary party. But Labour was defeated, and badly. Despite there being a brief moment when the party was ahead in the opinion polls – just a couple of months before polling day – it ended up still on the opposition benches, having only reduced the Conservatives’ majority from 144 seats to a still healthy 102.

  Labour’s defeat in 1987, unwelcome as it was, did enable the Kinnock leadership to ‘take on’ what they saw as the extremism of some (mainly London) local councils. Labour had done particularly badly in London in the general election (despite faring reasonably well in local elections in the previous year); although no seats in areas covered by the so-called ‘loony left’ councils were lost. The poor performance in the capital further strengthened the hand of the leadership in their battles to bring these councils into line. The leadership was also strengthened in this endeavour by what, for some, was the surprise distancing from the left of the Labour Co-ordinating Committee (LCC), seen as one of the key pressure groups on the party’s left flank. In an LCC pamphlet, called ‘Labour Councils in the Cold’, published in 1978, the LCC criticised some of their erstwhile colleagues, claiming: ‘They had come to see themselves as servants of local authority trade unions and professional groups, rather than the servants of their electors.’46

  After the election, the Shadow Communications Agency commissioned a research report – based on qualitative and quantative polling – entitled ‘Labour and Britain in the 1990s’. The qualitative focus group research found that the majority of the electorate were yet to accept ‘Thatcherite’ values, nonetheless, ‘Labour was too associated with the unions, the poor, the “disadvantaged”. Its greatest handicaps were its perceived “extremism” and “disunity”’.47 The quantative research claimed to have found that among non-Labour voters the most important reasons for not voting Labour were perceptions of Labour as a party of ‘extremism’ and ‘division’; the perceived dominance of the Party by the ‘loony left’ was found to be the primary reason why the Party was thought of as ‘extremist’.48 Phillip Gould recalls:

  The polling was clear Labour lost because it was still the party of the winter of discontent; union influence; strikes and inflation; disarmament; Benn and Scargill. It lost because people thought they ‘had left the party and the party had left them’. Labour and the voters were facing in different directions. The electorate looked onwards and upwards; they work hard; they ‘want to do better for themselves and their families’. Labour looked downwards: ‘Clawing back; turning the clock back; for Militant; anti-home ownership; strife; strikes inflation – not for me’.49

  There was also evidence, not made available at the time to Kinnock, that his own persona was one of the main causes of Labour’s lack of popularity and there was also more than a hint of anti-Welsh racism in some of the coverage of Kinnock. A Sun headline during the campaign read ‘Get lost. Go spout to the valleys boyo’.50

  Speaking at a post-election Fabian Society conference Peter Mandelson, then the party’s campaign director, argued that ordinary voters felt alienated from Labour. Guardian columnist Terry Coleman reported Mandelson as talking about:

  people’s fear of Labour. Fear is his word. He says it. People said Labour’s not for them but for blacks, or for gays, or for losers. Labour too easily disqualified itself, and gave too many hostages.51

  The 1987 result reaffirmed for Kinnock, and the leadership, that they had to, not just to change the party’s image, but its ‘product’ as well. Thus began the attempt to refashion Labour’s policies known as the Policy Review. It was intended to bring the party closer into line with what Gould, and others, identified as the aspirations of ‘ordinary people’. There were to be no ‘sacred cows’, everything was to be examined. As Steven Fielding has observed:

  The basic object of the Review was to make the party more electable as the leadership believed Labour had to develop policies that appealed to those individualist values apparently embraced by many voters and distance itself from remedies that were overly reliant on the state. It is interesting to note that the Review was supposed to represent a clearing out of old and irrelevant policies to be replaced by polices that would make the party more acceptable to the electorate. But the Review was as much about changing the style, as the content, of Labour’s policies. This is demonstrable by the fact that the basket of policies that came to be encapsulated in the phrase ‘loony left’ – in particular the equality agenda – played virtually no role in the Policy Review’s deliberations or final publication. The only exception being the policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament, supported by an overwhelming majority of party members, and this was largely left untouched by the Review.52

  A series of policy review groups were charged with assessing ‘relevance and credibility of party policy’ not on the basis of any ideological blueprint but on the basis of ‘needs and concerns of voters’ as defined by the Shadow Communications Agency. Ordinary party members were under no illusions as to the purpose of the operation. Hughes and Wintour describe the mood of the 1987 conference that accepted the proposal to initiate the Review as ‘sullen … There was no enthusiasm from constituency activists who made it plain that they believed the whole enterprise was a cloak for sell
ing out’.53

  After a year-long series of consultations with party members and (a few) members of the public, the new policy proposals were put in place. The consensus inside party headquarters was that, given the radical nature of many of the changes, they should be launched in piecemeal fashion, so as to lessen the anticipated hostile reaction from left-wing party activists. However, Phillip Gould recalls, he argued for a different course of action. He wanted to introduce the new package of policies (which were being launched prior to the 1989 European Elections) in a blaze of publicity:

  I argued for a continuous five-month campaign … At its heart was a central strategic recommendation: do not trickle out the policy review; instead make one, big-bang presentation… This was in complete defiance of the previous consensus about the presentation of the review, which had been to do it late, and do it gradually, in order to minimise the possibility of backlash and dissent. My view was the opposite: people would shift to Labour only if they were sure that it had changed, and only bold, demonstrable change would convince them of that. Dissent in these circumstances did not reduce our electoral appeal, but heightened it. It was evidence of change (emphasis added).54

  This is a crucial quotation, central to the argument of this chapter, and reinforced in Minkin’s study of the Blair transformation of the Labour Party. Here was someone, a crucial ‘insider’, arguing that the Labour leadership needed the ‘loony left’ to be seen and heard in high profile and then seen and heard to be defeated. Thus, early in the process, confrontation with the left was sought, not avoided. This makes sense of how Labour handled the ‘loony left’ issue from the Greenwich by-election onwards, it also explains why Tony Blair subsequently appeared to go out of his way to ‘take the party on’ – whether over the very public abolition of Clause Four or the downgrading of the party’s internal democracy.