Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  At the beginning of the 1980s, a casual observer might have thought the Labour Party had a lot going for it. The last general election had not been a complete disaster; with 11½ million votes, Labour had actually attracted more supporters than in October 1974. It had a well-liked leader in Jim Callaghan, rumbustiously supported by his former Chancellor Denis Healey. And as Britain slid into recession, Labour was perfectly placed to profit from Mrs Thatcher’s misfortunes. In August 1979 it recaptured the lead in the opinion polls, and for more than a year it never looked like losing it. Since Labour had prevailed in four out of the last six general elections, many younger politicians assumed they would soon be back in office. After the election, Callaghan’s former Secretary of State for Prices, Roy Hattersley, agreed to take on a sideline as a columnist: ‘an interesting diversion’, he thought, ‘during my brief periods of enforced opposition’. He never held office again.22

  In reality, Labour’s apparent popularity masked some fearsome problems. Its share of the vote had fallen consistently since the mid-1960s, while its traditional heartlands, the industrial towns of northern England, Wales and Scotland, were in long-term economic and demographic decline. By appealing to first-time voters and skilled workers, Mrs Thatcher had made deep inroads into Labour’s potential support. Equally worryingly, polls showed that many Labour voters approved of her position on issues such as tax cuts, trade union reforms and the Right to Buy. ‘The people’s flag’, claimed the Observer, ‘has turned deepest blue.’ That was a bit of an exaggeration. But as the historian Eric Hobsbawm argued in Marxism Today, the spread of prosperity, the decline of class consciousness and the growing division between skilled and unskilled workers raised ‘very serious questions’ about the future of the Labour movement. The party’s activists still believed history was on their side. But less impassioned observers drew a much less rosy conclusion.23

  Labour’s party machine, meanwhile, was in a desperate condition. ‘Our membership was falling,’ recalled the Staffordshire MP John Golding; ‘there were fewer and fewer agents and Head Office organisation was a joke.’ The best estimate of Labour’s membership figures suggests that they had fallen to about 250,000 by 1979, down by at least two-thirds in thirty years. At most, just one in ten members bothered to attend meetings, fewer people than watched West Bromwich Albion on Saturday afternoons. In this respect, Labour was no different from countless other Victorian working-class institutions, from football clubs to working men’s clubs. Indeed, its ethos – ‘The Red Flag’, the Durham Miners’ Gala, all the talk of ‘brothers’ and ‘comrades’ – seemed like something from the days of Keir Hardie and Ramsay MacDonald. The former Labour MP David Marquand thought it a ‘product of the age of steam, hobbling arthritically into the age of the computer’. When Frank Johnson went to see Labour’s May Day concert at the Dominion Theatre, Tottenham Court Road, the musical fare was at least 40 years old. ‘In the dreary 1940s,’ Johnson wrote, ‘so much of that big band music must have seemed touched by stardust. At a Labour Party gathering of today it is spangled with dandruff.’24

  Later, looking back at Labour’s woes in the early 1980s, commentators were often fascinated by the issue of infiltration (‘entryism’) from the Trotskyist fringe, above all the Militant Tendency. Militant certainly became a serious problem for the Labour leadership, winning control of the Young Socialists and, most famously, dominating Liverpool City Council for four years after 1983. In the public imagination, Labour’s failure to deal with its puritanical, immensely disciplined cadres became the supreme symbol of the party’s inability to govern. Even so, Militant’s role in Labour’s ordeal is probably exaggerated. In 1979 the party had no more than 1,500 active supporters nationwide. Even at its peak in the mid-1980s it still had, at a very generous estimate, only about 8,000 members. As the Conservative MP Matthew Parris, of all people, argued in The Times, its success was ‘a consequence, not a cause, of the death of the old Labour Party. The infection spreads not because it is irresistible or uniquely virulent, but because the resistance of the host is low.’25

  The broader issue, of which Militant was merely a symptom, was the enormous turnover of Labour members. With local membership figures plummeting, the tone was set not by the skilled manufacturing workers of old, who preferred to spend their evenings watching, say, Open All Hours; but by the teachers, lawyers, lecturers and social workers of the Muesli Belt. Columnists often mocked them as the detritus of Britain’s polytechnics. But as Dawn Primarolo proved in Bristol, they were effective. Articulate, energetic, fired with ideological enthusiasm, they swept in and left nothing untouched. ‘We used to have a lot of old people come to meetings,’ explained one Islington councillor. ‘The middle-class student types just laughed at them and mocked them, and so they stopped coming. In the old days we had meetings and then went off to the pub afterwards. These new people started coming in with sandwiches and flasks and the meetings went on until two or three in the morning.’26

  For older Labour supporters, steeped in the values of the working men’s club, this radical new left came as a shock. In Bristol, Tony Benn recorded that Primarolo and her husband had ‘breathed vitality’ into his constituency party, ‘organizing surgeries, a city farm and so on’. But not everybody saw it that way. For the secretary of the Labour group on the city council, Primarolo and her friends were ‘middle-class “trendies” … well educated, impatient, eloquent, inexperienced, and suffering from indigestion brought on by swallowing theories whole’. And for members who had been working behind the scenes for decades, the advent of an impassioned, ambitious young woman from London was not entirely welcome. In 1979 Primarolo stood against Benn’s octogenarian constituency secretary, Herbert Rogers, who had been Sir Stafford Cripps’s local agent and had held his post for sixty-one years. She won. ‘People were shocked,’ Benn wrote, ‘though they had half expected the result.’ Later, Rogers asked to see him. ‘I’ve just come to tell you that I’ll never come back again,’ he said bitterly. But he was history now. Primarolo was the future.fn127

  The revolution that swept through the Labour Party was a victory for the radical spirit of the 1960s. Most of the new activists had gone to college or university, often studying politics or sociology, before taking jobs in the public sector. Hostile to authority, impatient with tradition, they saw themselves as an enlightened vanguard, appointed by history to lead the ‘gormless battalions of voters brain-washed by the media’, as The Times mockingly put it. In an increasingly irreligious age, their socialism had a markedly religious flavour, complete with messiahs, prophets, heretics and apostates. Like all millenarian groups, they believed fervently in a promised land: in this case, socialism. Indeed, many saw Mrs Thatcher as the equivalent of the Beast in the Book of Revelation, whose advent marks the beginning of the end. As the Labour MP Eric Heffer wrote in the Daily Telegraph, of all places, her ‘right-wing, laissez-faire policies’ would inevitably end in disaster. And then, Heffer said happily, ‘it will not be too long before capitalism is swept aside’.28

  As with many apocalyptic religions, the new socialism of the early 1980s was shot through with more than a hint of paranoia. In every meeting the stakes were sky-high, the emotional intensity at fever pitch, the mood swinging between wild euphoria and utter despair. Capitalism might be doomed, but it would not go down without a fight. ‘There is an increasing awareness, even an alarm, at the way the State is clearly preparing to handle any unrest the 1980s might bring,’ explained Peter Hain, formerly an earnest Liberal demonstrating against South African sporting tours, now an even more earnest fixture of the Labour left. As Hain saw it, the formation of the Metropolitan Police’s Special Patrol Group (SPG), the aggressive policing of the Grunwick strike in 1977 and the Prevention of Terrorism Act in 1974 were clear signs that the government was about to introduce martial law. ‘The State is prepared to become authoritarian,’ he said darkly. ‘It has taken the gloves off.’ Some people might have thought this paranoid. But to the activist left it was comm
on sense. Had not Marxism Today defined Thatcherism as ‘authoritarian populism’, determined to crush the power of labour once and for all?29

  No wonder, then, that as the heirs of the 1960s contemplated Britain’s future, they were seized with a sense of dread. ‘We are in a fearful age, fear for one’s job, fear of the Bomb,’ explained Martin Crocker, a ‘spare young man with a neat beard’ who ran the Darlington Arts Centre in County Durham. ‘A place like this … we feel it,’ he said, gesturing at a ‘group sitting quietly round a girl playing gentle guitar in one corner’. A more sanguine observer might have taken heart from the centre’s enormous range of activities, ‘chess clubs, canary fanciers, potters, silk screeners, water colourists, etchers and embroiderers, jazz and folk and pub theatre enthusiasts, songwriting groups’, which reflected the underlying contentment of what was still a very prosperous and peaceful country. But Mr Crocker saw things differently. It might seem ‘fanciful’, he said, ‘to talk of a new Dark Ages, with Arts Centres acting as sanctuaries, as repositories of a culture that thrived in civilised prosperity, like the monasteries were in the real Dark Ages’. Then he paused. ‘Fanciful, but maybe not far-fetched.’30

  One obvious problem with this kind of thinking was that it was very hard to rebut without outing yourself as a fascist. In righton circles, it was not done to point out that there were no easy answers to issues such as inflation, deindustrialization or Northern Ireland, let alone to mock what Grimsby’s Labour MP Austin Mitchell called ‘Play School Marxism’. To doubt the bankruptcy of democracy, the corruption of the media or the sanctity of the trade unions, wrote the former chairman of London’s St Pancras North constituency Labour party in 1981, was absolutely taboo. There was, he added, a ‘growing appetite for conflict, demonstrated in violent rhetoric, street marches and the clenched fist salute; Parliament and the rule of law are frequently denigrated’. Under the influence of groups like Militant, even the left’s vocabulary had become increasingly aggressive. Pamphlets were always calling for supporters to ‘smash the system’ or ‘smash the Tories’, who were, of course, ‘scum’. And in the constituencies, moderate members often complained of being jeered and booed, ‘being mobbed after meetings, receiving nasty telephone calls and being threated with physical violence’. It was no wonder, then, that many stayed away.31

  Although the new activists loathed Margaret Thatcher, their favourite targets were closer to home. Chief among them were Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan, the guilty men who had torn up their manifesto commitments, betrayed the working classes and sold Britain to the EEC, NATO and the IMF. Many Labour MPs considered these accusations outrageous. Roy Hattersley called them ‘lies’. But were they lies? In fact, Wilson and Callaghan had ignored their manifesto commitments. In February 1974 the Labour manifesto had promised ‘a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families’, which had patently not materialized. There had been no wealth tax, no massive nationalization drive, no return to full employment; instead there had been spending cuts and incomes policies. Even Tony Benn’s grandiose interventionist plans at the Department of Industry had been cut short when Wilson pulled the plug and exiled him to Energy.

  It did not take a conspiracy theorist, therefore, to conclude that Labour had got into the habit of saying one thing in opposition and doing something different in power. Even Callaghan’s former Trade Secretary, Edmund Dell, thought the activists had some justification in feeling betrayed. Successive leaders, he wrote, had not had the courage to tell their members that socialism in one country, insulated from economic change and international competition, was a ‘mirage’. Instead, they had pandered to their activists, whipping them into a lather of anti-capitalist outrage. Then, in office, they miraculously discovered that ‘circumstances had changed’, or that ‘not enough money was available’, so they could not fulfil their promises after all.32

  But the activists’ patience was not inexhaustible. In the summer of 1973, a small group on the hard left had set up a Campaign for Labour Party Democracy (CLPD). As they saw it, Labour MPs should be spokesmen for a wider movement, reflecting what their activists thought. If the activists voted to nationalize Britain’s twenty-five largest companies, scrap nuclear weapons and get out of the Common Market, then the MPs should make it happen. And the CLPD went further. It was outrageous, they argued, that the Labour leader could veto what was in the party’s manifesto. In 1979 the National Executive had drawn up plans for the abolition of the House of Lords, only for Callaghan to strike them out at the last minute. Clearly he had let his role go to his head. He was the movement’s chief servant, not its dictator. Still, this was what happened when the MPs alone chose the leader. The Labour leader should be elected by the whole movement. That way, they might get a socialist for a change.33

  The CLPD’s most incendiary idea was that Labour MPs should no longer have a job for life. Instead, they should be forced to submit themselves for reselection during each Parliament, enabling local supporters to replace them if necessary. This, the CLPD claimed, would make for much more lively local politics. And as even the sceptical Austin Mitchell admitted, it was not an automatically outlandish idea. Many European social democratic parties had some sort of mandatory reselection, just as many European parties gave members a say in electing the leader. Some Labour MPs were corrupt, unresponsive or downright idle, just as some Tories were. And when the CLPD’s critics accused them of being intolerant fanatics, they pointed to Reginald Prentice, Wilson’s Education Secretary. After a long battle with his constituency party in Newham, east London, Prentice had been deselected in 1975, only to jump ship to the Conservatives. Here, said the CLPD, was proof that some Labour MPs really were just Tories in disguise. Would it not be better to get rid of them all, and have a genuinely socialist party?34

  Most Labour MPs were terrified by talk of mandatory reselection. In effect, they were being told that they had to reapply for their own jobs every few years, a prospect people rarely greet with delight. Even Tony Benn conceded that the issue had created great ‘fear in the minds of many MPs’. He had the security of inherited wealth, but most others depended entirely on their salaries. ‘MPs are people. We’ve got wives, we’ve got kids, we’ve got mortgages, the same as you have,’ the Nottinghamshire MP Joe Ashton told the party conference in 1979, begging them not to throw aside men who had ‘given fifteen or twenty years to a constituency’.35

  But it was also a question of principle. Moderate Labour MPs were horrified by the thought of being reduced, as Mitchell put it, to ‘a team of denim-clad puppets’. Even the left-wing Michael Foot was appalled by talk of reselection, often quoting his hero Edmund Burke, who had argued that an MP should never be asked to sacrifice ‘his unbiased opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience’ to his electors. As Foot explained, MPs had to represent all their constituents, not merely their most impassioned activists, who were hardly typical of the ordinary man and woman in the street. In practice, the left’s ‘democracy’ would mean that policy was decided by ‘tiny groups of extreme left-wingers’, passing endless resolutions about Palestine, Chile and Nicaragua, about which ordinary people could not care less. ‘More people believe in flying saucers than attend constituency management committees,’ wrote the Sun’s Jon Akass in 1980. ‘To regard these good people as grass-roots democrats, representing the millions who vote Labour, is as daft as regarding every saucer spotter as an astronaut.’36

  By now, though, the momentum was almost irresistible. To many young Labour supporters, the MPs looked like an elitist cabal, jealously refusing to share power with the rank and file. Perhaps more significantly, the left now commanded considerable support in the unions, which controlled nine out of ten votes at the party conference. They were particularly strong in white-collar public sector unions such as the National Union of Public Employees (NUPE) and the Association of Scientific, Technical and Managerial Staffs (ASTMS). And when NUPE or ASTMS activists looked
at Jim Callaghan, many did not see him as a working-class trade unionist who had done his best in terrible circumstances. They saw an arrogant grandee who had squeezed their wages and let them down.37

  The CLPD were not household names: people like Vladimir Derer, a Czech socialist who had fled to Britain in 1939, or Jon Lansman, a young Cambridge graduate, could have walked down any high street in Britain without being noticed.fn2 But they worked day and night to exploit Labour’s arcane rulebook. They were ‘superb “fixers”’, thought John Golding, who loathed everything they stood for but marvelled at their ability to organize slates, draft resolutions and fix conferences. In particular, they persuaded dozens of local Labour parties to submit conference resolutions calling for mandatory reselection, creating an impression of irresistible energy. By 1979 no fewer than seventy-seven constituency Labour parties had signed up to the CLPD, up from just four in 1974. History really was on their side. Yet for all the CLPD’s efforts, they would never have done so well without a fluent, charismatic and inspirational figurehead. They needed star quality. That was where Dawn Primarolo’s friend Tony Benn came in.38

  At the turn of the 1980s, Tony Benn was one of the best-known politicians in Britain. Appropriately enough, he had first come to public attention in the 1960s, first by fighting a long battle to disclaim his peerage, and then as Harold Wilson’s modernizing Postmaster General and Minister of Technology. But after Labour’s defeat by Edward Heath, Benn had undergone one of the most spectacular conversions in political history. Seized by the radical spirit of the age, he reinvented himself as the tribune of the plebs, carrying the gospel of socialism to every corner of the land. By the time he returned to office in 1974, he was the most reviled politician in the country, damned almost every week by the press as a ‘Bolshevik’, a ‘commissar’, a ‘madman’ and a ‘maniac’. During the European referendum campaign in 1975, The Times seriously warned that he was a ‘dangerous politician who stirs up and exploits political forces that will first bring Britain to economic ruin and then possibly use the rubble as the foundations for a collectivist regime’. And when the Mirror ran an interview giving Benn the chance to deny that he was a ‘Dracula-like bogeyman’, the front-page headline said it all: ‘BENNMANIA’.39