Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  To think our men died to let that lot in … They mugged an old lady here with a cataract who was helping a blind friend of hers back from church … Foreigners should live like us if they come here … They should go round and look for work, not riot … It’s our country and our Queen. Why should we be afraid to go out?52

  In Brixton, little changed. The council launched a campaign to revive local businesses, spent £100,000 to redecorate the town centre and invested thousands more in race-relations efforts and community projects. But when The Times’s Nicholas Timmins visited in the summer of 1982, he reported that Railton Road looked worse than ever, ‘seedy, run down and crime ridden’. Teenage unemployment, already horrific, had risen by a further 60 per cent, half of Brixton’s black residents were out of work and the waiting list for council housing still contained 17,000 names. In the press Brixton remained a byword for disorder, a place of ‘illegal drinking and gambling dens, where soft drugs are sold openly’. The police still proclaimed their determination to root out the drugs pushers on Railton Road; local people still seethed at what they saw as intrusive stop-and-search measures on the Front Line. And when, in September 1984, Lord Scarman returned to Brixton for a Channel 4 documentary, he found that the crime figures were still atrocious, unemployment was worse than ever and the cannabis dealers had moved on to cocaine and heroin. Even the local police commander, Alexander Marnoch, agreed that the prospects for Brixton’s youngsters were ‘abysmal’. The best advice he could give a young school-leaver applying for a job was to ‘put down his address as somewhere other than Brixton’.53

  Yet this was not the complete picture. For all the talk of intolerance and alienation, attitudes were, slowly but steadily, changing for the better. Decades later, documentaries about the summer of 1981 invariably remarked on the fact that, when the riots were at their worst, the number one record in the country was the Specials’ ‘Ghost Town’, set in a forbidding post-industrial landscape of abandoned shops, deserted clubs and menacing high-rises. Yet the success of a multiracial ska band like the Specials, inspired by Jamaican music, formed in Coventry and committed to fighting prejudice, itself told a more heartening story. The very name ‘2-Tone’, used for both the ska genre and the Specials’ record company, captured the group’s commitment to racial integration. So did the company’s black-and-white chequerboard motif, which appeared on everything from ties and T-shirts to hats and badges, and became one of the abiding emblems of early-1980s pop culture. ‘The Specials et al are by definition multiracial, anti-racist,’ wrote Garry Bushell in Sounds in October 1979, ‘and the message is conveyed by their irresistible coaxing of feet to dance steps and lips to song.’ Bands like the Specials, agreed the NME a year later, ‘have done more to expose and eradicate petty racial squabbling in the UK than any number of self-righteous, overtly political organizations’.54

  In fact, the Specials’ success in the early 1980s – two Top Ten albums, two number one singles and five more Top Ten singles – suggests that the gulf between black and white youngsters was not as wide as the pessimists often claimed. A survey by two London School of Economics researchers in the winter of 1979–80 found that most black teenagers’ ambitions were exactly the same as those of their white counterparts: a good job, a decent income, a happy marriage, a thriving family. Though they had harsh words for the police, they were generally positive about schools, colleges and even the media, and revealed ‘no fundamental sense of alienation from British society’. They were not a revolutionary mob in the making, any more than their white counterparts were all potential recruits for the National Front.55

  And while it is easy to find examples of prejudice in the early 1980s, it is equally easy to find examples of tolerance. Reflecting on life in Leamington Spa in 1981, the essayist Lincoln Allison noted that his neighbours now included ‘Sikhs, Poles, Italians and Spaniards’. About one in five people, he reckoned, was a first-or second-generation immigrant. Yes, youths sometimes threw stones through the windows of Indian shops, or daubed ‘Wogs Out’ on the walls. But among the young, relations often struck him as ‘tolerant and even friendly … Casual games of football and cricket or the walk to school in the morning know no colour bars.’ No doubt some readers would have accused him of complacency. Yet when the Mirror interviewed a selection of white teenagers two years later, many of their answers were a far cry from the usual skinhead resentments. ‘Black people aren’t any different from us,’ said 15-year-old Leigh Williams, from Chelsea. ‘I’ve got some good mates who are coloured.’ And 13-year-old Tanni Grey, a ‘wheelchair schoolgirl’ from Cardiff, spoke for many in rejecting the very idea of difference between black and white. ‘Just think of all the problems that racial differences have brought,’ the future Paralympics champion and baroness said scornfully. ‘Just because of a tenth of a milligramme of melanin which makes people black.’56

  In the long run, the future lay not just with Tanni and her peers, but with people like Harry and Nora Rose, a working-class couple from a council estate in Quinton, Birmingham. Both had left school at 14. Harry worked as a tea-boy, in the music halls and then as a British Leyland maintenance man, while Nora worked as a cleaner before retiring with emphysema. They had five daughters, one of whom, Debbie, became a teenage mother in 1978. The father of her two boys was her first boyfriend, Mervyn Lescott, whose parents had moved to Birmingham from St Kitts after the Second World War. At first Harry and Nora were taken aback. ‘She was nineteen, and like she’s always said, she didn’t want to marry him,’ Nora told the novelist Beryl Bainbridge.

  But the colour of Mervyn’s skin was never an issue. ‘There was nothing to be bloody embarrassed about, was there?’ Harry said defiantly.

  It was irrespective of whether it had been Japanese, Chinese, Outer Mongolian or whatever … she was pregnant by somebody, and I look at it this way, it takes two to make a bargain. And I mean with a person like your own daughter in that predicament, what are you going to do? You’re not just going to open the door and kick her out, just because she’s carrying a black child. And if you look at them two kids now, how could you turn your backs on anything like that? The only difference between them two grandchildren and the others is the colour of their skin. They’ve got the same thoughts as me, they call me Grandad like the rest of them, they’ve got the run of the house like the rest of them, they get pocket money off me and all them perks, and I expect when they’re grown they’ll look back and they’ll respect me for it, you know, irrespective of whether they’re black or white.

  Later, while little Aaron and Joleon were playing on the swing, Bainbridge wondered aloud whether their colour would count against them when they grew up. At this, Harry’s mind turned to recent history:

  They let them immigrants come in, which you can’t blame; they were asked to come in, they were brought in, they were transported in. They’ve got families of their own now and they’ve intermarried, and them two thousand or so who were here in the middle fifties have expanded to thousands and thousands. And as long as there’s stars in the sky those people will still be here. No good Maggie Thatcher or these other people offering them money to go home – they were born here, they were bred here, they’re black and they’re British.

  Two decades later, Harry’s grandson Joleon played football for England.57

  22

  Showdown of the Century

  We want to get out of the European Common Market. We want unilateral nuclear disarmament. We want to abolish the House of Lords. And above all, we want to abolish capitalism … The person who best epitomizes that is Tony Benn.

  Arthur Scargill, interviewed by ITN, 27 September 1981

  The news that Harry Perkins was to become Prime Minister went down very badly in the Athenaeum.

  Chris Mullin, A Very British Coup (1982)

  It is the late 1980s, and the polls have closed in the general election. For days the experts have been predicting a comfortable victory for the incumbent Conservative–SDP Government of National Un
ity. But as the first results come in, it is obvious that something has gone terribly wrong. South of the Wash, the Social Democrats are being wiped out, while Labour are piling up huge majorities. On television, the screen shows the Labour leader, Harry Perkins, a ‘stocky, robust man, with a twinkle in his eye’, exultant in victory. Then a commentator lists the policies that have won him the election: ‘Withdrawal from the Common Market. Import controls. Public control of finance, including the pension and insurance funds. Abolition of the House of Lords, the honours list and the public schools.’ On top of that, Perkins has also promised to scrap Britain’s nuclear deterrent, dismantle all American air bases and give serious ‘consideration’ to leaving NATO.

  In the Athenaeum Club in London, there are gasps of horror. ‘Man’s a Communist,’ says a retired banker. ‘Might as well all emigrate,’ agrees a newspaper magnate. Then, on television, Perkins starts speaking:

  Comrades, it is now clear that by tomorrow morning we shall form the government of this country.

  We should not be under any illusion about the task ahead of us. We inherit an industrial desert. We inherit a country which for ten years has been systematically pillaged and looted by every species of pirate, spiv and con man known to civilisation.

  All we have won tonight is political power. By itself that is not enough … To win real power we have first to break the stranglehold exerted by the ruling class on all the important institutions of our country.

  Our ruling class have never been up for re-election before, but I hereby serve notice on behalf of the people of Great Britain that their time has come.

  ‘Scandalous,’ murmurs the banker. ‘South of France for me, old boy.’ From Trafalgar Square comes the sound of celebratory firecrackers. But as Harry Perkins is about to discover, the ruling class are not going to give up without a fight.1

  Chris Mullin first thought of Harry Perkins in the autumn of 1980, when he was coming home from Labour’s tumultuous Blackpool conference. A left-wing journalist in his early thirties, the balding, bespectacled Mullin was a close ally of Tony Benn, and effectively ghostwrote his books Arguments for Socialism (1979) and Arguments for Democracy (1981). Mullin also produced a pamphlet entitled How to Select or Reselect Your MP (1981), though many MPs thought How to Deselect Your MP would have been more accurate. Now, on the train, Mullin and his friends Tony Banks and Peter Hain wondered what would happen if Benn became Prime Minister, as they dearly hoped. The result was his novel A Very British Coup, published in the autumn of 1982.2

  A Very British Coup is nothing if not a Bennite fantasy. As Mullin told The Times, the premise was that the ‘ruling class’ was a much greater threat to parliamentary democracy than ‘any obscure Trotskyist group’. If the people ever elected a left-wing Labour leader, he explained, ‘senior members of the armed forces, the civil service, the intelligence services, leading businessmen, journalists and newspaper proprietors’, backed by the Americans, would intervene to push him out. This is what happens to Harry Perkins. A former steelworker, he looks nothing like the patrician Benn. But when Mullin showed his mentor the first draft, Benn pointed out that Perkins ‘drinks tea from a mug with a tea bag’, just as he did. Mullin duly took out the mug and the tea bag. In his politics, however, Perkins remains true to his model. Withdrawal from the Common Market, import controls, unilateral disarmament, abolition of the House of Lords: all this was pure Benn.3

  At the time, A Very British Coup made little impact. The Times enjoyed its ‘speed and great credibility’, but the Guardian afforded it just four lines, dismissing it as a ‘cartoon’. Only at the end of the decade, when Channel 4 and Alan Plater turned it into a successful mini-series, did it really strike a chord. By that time, Mullin had become an MP himself, while the prospect of Benn becoming Labour leader had completely evaporated. Perhaps it had never been very likely anyway. But what had definitively destroyed Benn’s chances was his role in one of the most melodramatic political campaigns in modern British history: his bid for the Labour deputy leadership.4

  For Benn, the elevation of Michael Foot to the Labour leadership had been a major setback. Even before the first ballot, some of Benn’s allies had warned that if Foot won the leadership, ‘he would hang on to it, and I would not do very well in the electoral college’. Benn was inclined to agree. After Foot’s victory, Benn told the new leader that he would like to serve in his Shadow Cabinet, ideally as Shadow Home Secretary. Unfortunately, his fellow Labour MPs had other ideas. In the annual elections he did not make the cut, pipped to the last place by Neil Kinnock.5

  Although, at this stage, relations between Foot and Benn seemed reasonably cordial, both knew this was just a temporary truce. To Benn, his new leader was a trimmer, an appeaser, a conservative in socialist’s clothing, who would never take a radical path if he could help it. And, to Foot, Benn was not just unreliable but deeply untrustworthy: a hypocrite, an opportunist, ‘unctuous’ and ‘calculated’. Even their wives did not get on. The press often presented them as ideological twins or suggested that Foot was merely Benn’s puppet, which was ridiculous. For, as Roy Hattersley remembered, his leader ‘never missed an opportunity, in public or private, to demonstrate his distaste for Tony’s behaviour’.6

  Benn had no intention of settling down as just another Labour backbencher. In early January 1981 he went down to Bristol to present a clock to a veteran Labour ward secretary, Bill Isaac, who was 80. ‘Thanks for the clock,’ Mr Isaac said. ‘My house is full of them. This one will do for the lavatory.’ The old man then proceeded to lecture Benn about how much better Labour councillors had been in the old days, gesturing derisively at one of Benn’s supporters from the Militant group. Then he leaned forward: ‘My advice to you, Tony, is to pipe down. People don’t know what you’re saying. They say you are a communist and a Marxist and they don’t know what you’re up to. What are you up to anyway?’

  It was a good question, and Benn, infuriated by Mr Isaac’s boldness, did not answer it. The fact was that since Christmas he had been planning to challenge Denis Healey for the deputy leadership. On Sunday 25 January, while the Gang of Four were drafting the Limehouse Declaration, he invited his closest allies to Holland Park. The mood, he recorded, was ‘victorious’, with plenty of ‘laughing and joking’ before they got down to business. With the left having carried the day at Wembley and the Social Democrats on their way out, they agreed to go for broke, cementing their power at the top of the party.

  ‘The nomination for the deputy leadership is the key,’ said the young London councillor Tony Banks. ‘We must link the issues, go for the deputy leadership and Tony [Benn] should make a statement now,’ said Mullin. ‘The framework for our campaign is the deputy leadership, and we need a person and a programme. We should link it all to Tony,’ said the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy’s Victor Schonfield. This was exactly what Benn wanted to hear. As he confided to his diary, he saw the deputy leadership as a crucial stepping stone, giving him ‘the right of succession to Michael Foot and hence the claim to be the next Labour Prime Minister after him’. And when his allies reconvened a week later, the only question was the timing. He should wait, they decided, until the Social Democrats had gone. Then it would be time to strike.7

  At Westminster, it was not long before rumours of Benn’s challenge reached the ears of Michael Foot. On 24 March, appalled at the prospect of yet another bruising battle, Foot called Benn in for a chat. A challenge, he said, would ‘lacerate the Party’. It ‘would be deeply divisive, would ruin the annual Conference and would make it much harder for us to be elected in the next Election’. But Benn was not deterred. ‘I don’t regard elections as being divisive,’ he said piously. ‘I regard them as being quite unifying.’ In any case, he added, ‘I haven’t finally made up my mind, but I think there is some support for a contest, and I will certainly take account of what you say.’ Foot did not believe him. ‘He was white and angry,’ Benn recorded, ‘as he always is.’8

  Foot was right to be sus
picious, since Benn’s diaries show that his mind had been made up for months. One problem, though, was that his reputation inside the parliamentary party had never been lower. ‘You are destroying the Labour Party,’ the maverick Leo Abse yelled outside the Commons chamber, so loudly that ‘everybody crowded round [and] the clerks in the Lobby heard every word of it’. Even Benn’s allies in the soft-left Tribune Group were horrified by the rumours. ‘What’s this I hear about you standing for the deputy leadership?’ his former Cabinet colleague Stan Orme asked him on 30 March. ‘It would be a disaster.’

  Benn promised that before deciding anything he would talk to Orme about it. But two days later, he told Foot he was definitely going to stand. ‘I think that is most inadvisable,’ Foot said grimly. At the very least, could Benn postpone the announcement for a week? It was only a few days since the launch of the SDP, and the publicity would be dreadful. Benn said no. That evening, when another Labour MP, his old friend Joe Ashton, begged him not to do it, he remained implacable. ‘I am not doing it for myself anyway,’ Benn said. ‘I am not worrying about what is going to happen to me but I think somebody has got to advocate Party policy in Parliament.’

  By now the Commons, packed for a three-line whip, was buzzing with excitement. It was gone midnight, but downstairs the Tribune Group were holding an emergency meeting, hoping to organize an open letter that would persuade Benn to think again. When Benn got word of it, he moved fast. Taking refuge in the Commons library, he sealed letters to his fellow MPs confirming his intention to stand, and sent a short statement to the press gallery to make it public. It was 3.30 in the morning, hardly the obvious time to launch a bid for the deputy leadership of the party. But Benn was hardly a conventional candidate. Half an hour later, the Tribune Group’s Robin Cook arrived at the Press Association’s office with a copy of their open letter. He was too late. Benn’s statement had gone out on the wires just minutes earlier.9