Culture Wars

by James Curran

  Phillip Gould’s role in the process is significant not just for its content but for what it tells us about the shifting balance of power in the party. For, parallel with the assault on the party’s left, went the growing ascendancy of the appointed over the elected, with power clearly moving away from elected politicians – as symbolised by Labour’s NEC – and moving towards the professional advisers.55 These advisers were located either inside the Leader’s office – Patricia Hewitt or Charles Clarke, for example – or appointed by Peter Mandelson (himself, at the time, an appointed official) to the Shadow Communications Agency.

  Apart from their expanding role, in terms of campaigning and communications, appointed advisors were also making a far greater input into the selection of by-election candidates. This followed what, for Labour, had been the twin disasters of the Bermondsey and Greenwich by-elections – in which safe Labour seats had adopted left candidates who then lost to Liberal or SDP candidates respectively. As a result, the party leadership created a new process for selecting by-election candidates, a process designed to ensure that only those candidates that could be seen as ‘media-friendly’ (in other words, demonstrably not of the left) were selected. And selection, although nominally in the hands of a small group of members of Labour’s national executive, was heavily influenced by the professional advisers who drew up the short-list of candidates for consideration and who also attended the selection interviews and provided advice. This new process led to a series of rows with local constituency parties (for example, in two areas seen as strongholds of the ‘loony left’ – Lambeth and Brent) in which local constituency activists found that they had candidates imposed on them who did not reflect their own political views. In a situation where Labour was seen by the leadership and the media as having a problem with ‘extremists’, attempts to rein in constituency parties and impose more ‘sensible’ candidates could helpfully be seen as part of a strategy of publicly defeating the ‘loony left’.

  Another change begun under the Kinnock leadership (and brought to fruition under Kinnock’s successor John Smith in 1993) was intended to wrest control of the machinery from the (mainly left) constituency activists. This was to be achieved by the introduction of One Member One Vote (OMOV), an initiative to expand decision-making, in terms of policy and elections to Labour’s National Executive, beyond the activists who attended meetings to the wider membership. One aspect of the change was that it gave considerably greater opportunity for the media to influence the result of these elections. In the past, decisions about which candidates to back had largely been in the hands of local party general management committees (GMCs) and, as often as not, the GMC would opt for one of the ‘slates’ – lists of candidates which had the support of one or other of Labour’s factional groups. In the 1980s activists tended to support the candidates on the left-wing slates. However, the introduction of OMOV made these elections much more public affairs and bore fruit (for the leadership at least) as the membership of the National Executive Committee shifted from being dominated by left wingers, largely unsympathetic to the Kinnock leadership, to its dominance by MPs who could be relied upon to support the party leader.

  In the run-up to the 1992 general election, the decision by the Conservatives to campaign around the ‘loony left’ issue was redolent of the fact that much of their campaigning in this period was based on exploiting perceived fears of the voters, a strategy that had served them well in the past. Their campaigns, in both 1987 and 1992, tended to focus on generating general fears about Labour which they combined with provoking specific fears about tax rises, trade union power and the ‘hard left’. But there was also an unspoken fear that ran through much of the Conservative’s campaigning and through Labour’s response, which was fear of the ‘other’ – the outsider, the alien, the ‘loony left’.

  It is commonplace to observe that a great deal of political attitude formation and electoral behaviour is driven by fear of the ‘other’ – whether the ‘other’ be immigrants, homosexuals, young people or whatever. Fear of the ‘other’, and the use made of it by the Conservatives, can be seen at its clearest when considering the way that the party used race and racism in its election campaigning. In 1968, a senior Conservative, Enoch Powell, was sacked from the front bench by the then party leader, Edward Heath, for a speech opposing further immigration dubbed the ‘rivers of blood’ speech.56 Ten years later in 1978, Margaret Thatcher then leader of the Opposition said that ‘people are afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people of a different culture’.57 And in 1995, the Conservative Party’s then Head of Research (later to become a cabinet minister), Andrew Lansley, wrote: ‘Immigration, an issue which we raised successfully in 1992 and again in the 1994 Euro-elections campaign, played particularly well in the tabloids and has more potential to hurt’.58 In subsequent campaigns, including the referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU, immigration and asylum have always been a presence – this has been the case from Michael Howard’s ‘Are you thinking what we’re thinking?’ campaign in the 2005 election to the latest findings from the British Election Study that it was one of the most important issue for electors in both the 2016 Euro referendum and the 2017 general election.59

  In some real, and some imagined, ways the spectre of the ‘loony left’ was a useful code for race. Bernie Grant, who originated from Guyana and was at one-time Leader of Haringey Council, and subsequently MP for Tottenham, was a frequent target for attack by the national press (and some sections of the local press too).60 Anti-racism was undoubtedly a key issue uniting the left (indeed it was an issue that united the whole Labour Party), and if voters perceived Labour and Labour’s left as being ‘in favour’ of anti-racism and supporting ethnic minorities, then this was an accurate perception. But there was also a more subconscious fear captured in the pages of the Daily Mail, the Sun and other newspapers – a fear that something essentially ‘British’, or for perhaps something essentially ‘English’, was being destroyed. In the 1950s, the American Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, talked of Britain having lost an Empire but not having found a role; Acheson was talking about British foreign policy, but it also resonated at a more parochial level. This sense of a golden age rapidly being obscured from view by a haze of multiculturalism was captured by Conservative Prime Minister John Major in his selective quotation from Orwell, evoking maidens on bikes, warm beer and cricket matches on the green.61

  Much was changing in post-war Britain, and one of the most visible signs of change was in the ethnic make-up of the population, particularly in London. The municipal left saw race and race equality as important political, moral and electoral issues. The voting records of black and Asian electors had shown consistently high levels of support for Labour and, to some extent, their electoral support compensated for the decline in the white working class vote that had, in part, propelled Mrs Thatcher to power and, arguably, secured the referendum vote in favour of UK withdrawal from the EU some thirty years later.

  So, Labour activists saw black and minority ethnic voters as electoral friends but also, as representing an important area of political activity. The inspiration might not have been drawn directly from the ‘rainbow coalition’ of the American civil rights movement but there was no shortage of both political theorists and electoral strategists who were opining that, as class and political de-alignment speeded-up, the left should be seeking to build a new coalition covering leftists, feminists, blacks, gays, people with disabilities and so on. Hence, the left was seen as heavily identified with black and ethnic minorities, and this provided grist to the mill of Conservative politicians and newspapers who wished to suggest, indirectly, that support for Labour equalled support for its far left which equalled support for black people and the consequent ending of their idealised notion of a golden-age Britain.

  In 1986, one of Bill Clinton’s political advisers, Joe Napolitano, was brought over to the UK by the Shadow Communications Agency to ‘warn’ Kinnock that Labour was ‘seen a
s associated with extreme leftism racial worries and Labour’s affinity for perceived “undesirables”’.62 Almost ten years later (in 1995) another American pollster – Stan Greenberg, another of Clinton’s polling advisers – told the Labour leadership much the same thing. He declared: ‘One of the pre-occupations of Old Labour was a pre-occupation with what the public often saw as ‘bizarre’ issues: homosexuals, immigrants, feminists, lesbians, boroughs putting their money into peculiar things’.63

  It is not an uncommon political phenomenon that groups, particularly those who feel they are under some sort of pressure, identify themselves not so much by who they are, as by who they are not. In this case, we see a notion of ‘Englishness’ being formed in opposition to those groups that Labour’s left was seen to be representing – blacks, gays, trade union militants ‘scroungers’, travellers and so on – the ‘folk devils’ identified by Stanley Cohen more than thirty years ago.64 The combination of Labour weakness, the astuteness of Conservative campaigning and the enthusiastic endorsement of the Conservative-supporting press, created a climate in which Labour was seen to symbolise something unedifying, un-English, almost alien. As Eric Shaw observes:

  The real significance of the Tory and tabloid ‘loony left’ assault was its invitation to voters to define themselves as white and respectable rather than as working-class, to identify with the Conservatives as the party of whites and upwardly mobile – and to reject Labour as the party of minorities and the failures. This strategy was pivoted on driving a wedge though Labour’s working-class constituency, which effectively involved exploiting, politicising and sharpening existing cleavage patterns and rival social identities, dividing the more affluent, socially mobile and owner-occupiers from the poor, welfare recipients, one-parent families and so forth.65

  In his account of the rise of New Labour, Phillip Gould relates how, quite unconsciously, his focus group respondents associated Labour with ‘black’. He writes:

  For the next fourteen years [after 1983] indeed until the very last days of the 1997 election, Labour became a party to be feared. One woman said to me just weeks before the 1997 election ‘When I was a child there was a wardrobe in my bedroom. I was always scared that one night, out of the blackness, a monster would emerge. That is how I think of the Labour Party.’… Labour had become the party of the shadows; of deep, irrational anxiety. Only modernisation would save it.66

  The Labour leadership, consciously or otherwise, played to these fears. In the Party’s crucial positioning document ‘New Labour New Life for Britain’, published in 1996, there are more than two hundred of pictures of ‘ordinary people’. Of those who are clearly identifiable, 215 are white and just seven are black or Asian – all of whom are ‘unthreatening’ babies, children or students. Clearly Labour, in seeking to position itself for the forthcoming election, was deliberately distancing itself from black and ethnic minority adults.

  There is no suggestion that Labour was, at any time, deliberately ‘playing the race card’. What is being suggested is that the party, throughout this period, was acutely aware of what it took to be its vulnerability on this issue and sought to draw the sting out of the implicitly racist attacks that would almost certainly be made on the party by the right-wing press. The Labour leadership believed that the most effective way of countering these fears, (or at least so they were advised) was to establish Labour’s general ‘trustworthiness’ and then to hope this would act as a neutralising agent over issues such as race and gender politics.

  Hence, from 1987 onwards Labour’s campaigning teams focussed on the goal of convincing the British people that they were not ‘extremists’ and could be trusted to run Britain in the way that it had always been. Gould recalls:

  As soon as I returned to London from the 1992 Democratic victory I wrote a long document … Labour was perceived to be looking downwards not upwards and backwards not forwards; it was for ‘minorities and not the mainstream’ and it was ‘not trusted to run the economy properly’.67

  Patricia Hewitt, who was then Neil Kinnock’s Head of Policy, wrote at the time:

  The essence of making Labour electable, is trust. Trust in Labour’s leadership, in the team, in Labour’s ability to manage the economy competently. Trust that Labour knows where it is going – and trust in the policies to take it there.68

  Labour went into the 1992 general election campaign far more confident than it had been in 1987. It had continued the process of change begun in 1985; the party’s decision-making structures, its policies and – it hoped – its image, had all undergone wholesale change. The spectre of the ‘loony left’ appeared to have been banished. But as election day approached, the Conservative-supporting press returned to the fray. Phrases such ‘the loony left’s bully boys’,69 ‘It’s the loony left again’ and ‘antics of the “loony left”’,70 began to appear in the right-wing press. In the months prior to the poll the Sun, for example, then the UK’s largest circulation paper, on the day before the election, devoted its first ten pages to a slew of personal attacks on the Labour leader. Beginning with a front-page headline ‘Nightmare on Kinnock Street’ and ending with a full-page advert for the Conservative Party, the coverage included a psychic asking famous dead people how they would vote – Tory leader John Major received the ‘votes’ of Winston Churchill, Elvis Presley and Queen Victoria whilst Kinnock had to content himself with the ‘support’ of Mao, Marx and Stalin. The following day, the Sun’s front page consisted of a picture of Kinnock’s head in a light bulb with the headline ‘If Kinnock wins today will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights’. According to the Daily Mail’s post-election analysis:

  ‘Far from making advances in the South, Labour were repulsed in nearly all the seats they thought they could capture. Clearly the ‘London effect’ of the so-called Loony Left still haunts voters who have had to put up with some of their crazy ideas’.71

  David Hill, who was Labour’s Director of Communications in 1992, agreed with this analysis. He told a post-election seminar:

  Immediately after the election I said that the main reason why, when it came to the crunch, people felt that they could not vote Labour, was because they were concerned about Labour’s history … The problem for Labour has was that people had very long memories. Our canvassers discovered … that people on the doorstep were remembering 1979. They were also remembering the arguments that took place in the Labour Party in the 1980’s. These memories were fostered by the newspapers in particular. And people recalled, or thought they recalled, that Labour had a history of internal conflict and a history of chaotic government. As people saw it, they could not be confident that they could trust Labour … they felt that Labour was a party which was no longer in tune with them that the Labour Party’s approach to life was not consistent with third own perception of their aspirations, their outlook and their wish for success, for themselves and their families.72

  However, the Butler and Kavanagh series of general election studies tells a somewhat different story. In their study of the 1987 general election, the term ‘loony left’ received seven index entries; the volume looking at the 1992 contained none. And the psephological analysis of the 1992 result appeared to question the Labour’s leadership’s belief that the main cause of their defeat was their failure to shake off the ‘loony left’ label. In a pre-election analysis in The Times Ivor Crewe investigated whether there was a ‘loony left’ effect at work – as the Conservatives had been claiming. Crewe reported that there was none, with London showing an above-average swing to Labour of 8%.73 His view was supported by Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher whose post-election analysis in the Sunday Times demonstrated that: ‘Only four regions saw significant changes in the party profile of seats, with London accounting for more than a quarter of all Labour’s net gains. The “loony left” image, which so damaged the party in 1987, has almost disappeared’.74

  Notes

  1. T. Bale ‘Managing the Party and the Trade Unions’ in B. Briva
ti and R. Heffernan The Labour Party: A Centenary History (Basingstoke: Macmillan 2000).

  2. L. Minkin The Blair Supremacy: A Study in the Politics of Labour’s Party Management (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2014), pp. 58–9.

  3. A. Finlayson Making Sense of New Labour (London: Lawrence and Wishart 2003), p. 19.

  4. Ibid.

  5. Ibid.

  6. See Minkin op cit for the most comprehensive account of this process.

  7. One of the earliest descriptions of this process can be found in G. Mazzoleni, & W. Schulz ‘Mediatization’ of Politics: A Challenge for Democracy? Political Communication, 16(3), 247–61, 1999.

  8. Based on Gaber’s personal experience whilst working as a journalist at ITN.

  9. James Thomas Popular Newspapers, the Labour Party and British Politics (London: Routledge 2005), pp. 90–1.

  10. Daily Mail 25 April 1979

  11. Quoted in Owen P. (2010) Michael Foot: a life in pictures (obituary) Guardian 3 March 2010.

  12. K. Morgan Michael Foot: A Life (London: Harper Perennial 2012), pp. 384–5.

  13. Ibid.

  14. C. Horrie and P. Chippendale Stick It Up Your Punter: the rise and fall of the Sun London, Heinemann p. 140

  15. James Thomas, pp. 80–1.

  16. Horrie and Chippendale op cit, p. 140.

  17. Quoted in Thomas op cit, p. 90.

  18. Sambrook, D (2009) What if … Neil Kinnock hadn’t tripped? New Statesman 24 September 2009.