Dangerous Hero

by Tom Bower

  ‘What next?’ Corbyn asked. Wounded by his defeat but pleased by the party’s imminent split, Benn decided to host a monthly discussion group with Britain’s leading Marxists on Sunday evenings at his home in Holland Park, west London. Among those invited to what he later called the Independent Corresponding Society were Ralph Miliband (the father of David and Ed), university teachers of sociology Hilary Wainwright and Robin Blackburn, and Tariq Ali. In the hierarchy of the left, Benn and Ali had inherited the political skills of the ruling class. They were also intellectuals – self-disciplined agents of social engineering – which Corbyn was certainly not. While Corbyn sat meekly as their NCO, a team player rather than a manager, their ideological theorising passed over his head. But he found comfort in their descriptions of the best tactics against the capitalists.

  In a series of debates, the group considered whether peaceful reform was possible through Parliament and what Tariq Ali called ‘class collaboration’ (the old Marxist notion that the bourgeoisie would eventually unite with the working class). Parliament only became relevant, Ali argued, when subjected to pressures from outside groups, and should eventually be abolished. Distrustful of elections, since the mid-1960s Miliband had preached that Parliament should be totally ignored. The masses, he argued, should disregard both the trade unions and the Labour Party, because socialism could be built only by armed struggle. ‘The elite always sells out,’ he told the gathering, and urged Benn to support revolution followed by the creation of democratic soviets, or communities.

  This was not yet Corbyn’s thinking. Although energised by disdain for Parliament and impatient with liberal democracy, he accepted Benn’s philosophy that ‘to change the world you need to join the Labour Party and work from within’. By hard work, Benn said, Labour’s Methodist roots would eventually be replaced by true socialism with no need for violence. While Benn’s programme for socialism lacked the historical and cultural perspective of Michael Foot and other intellectual worshippers of the great socialist heroes, he was obsessed by the need for democracy within the party. Structures and machinery were fundamental to his programme to transform Labour, and then the country, into a Marxist idyll. Without studying either economics or finance, Corbyn absorbed Benn’s slogans about ‘equality’ and ‘justice’, and adopted the belief that ‘The role of private capital should be ended.’ Beyond that, he was intellectually adrift. ‘He didn’t understand the relevance of Marxist theory about markets or a planned economy,’ said one of the participating academics. ‘You can’t be an unconscious Marxist.’ Corbyn’s ignorance did not diminish his passion for Marxism: he was totally committed to the confiscation and redistribution of wealth to produce equality – but knowing the philosophical explanation was beyond him. As he retold stories in praise of Salvador Allende to the group – his principal contribution to their discussions – he came across as the most committed of Marxists. Strangely, he never mentioned his experiences in Jamaica or Guyana.

  In later years, the impassioned discussions about Marxist dialectics and modern capitalism would be described as substitutes for Corbyn’s missed university education. They were hardly that. Nevertheless, he did learn from Benn and Miliband that socialism would be built by mobilising workers to take over the ownership and control of key industries, and the importance of organising people in their workplaces and housing estates to struggle against the capitalists. Thereafter, employees and their trade unions would negotiate government investment and production plans with the managers, rather than be subject to employers, bankers and Parliament. Tellingly, in 2017 Labour’s election manifesto would reflect Benn’s promise to give workers the statutory right to buy their own companies at discounted prices with taxpayers’ money. Thirty-six years earlier, in February 1981, Benn and Corbyn imagined Labour sweeping the Tories aside to implement just those policies. Their dream was encouraged in late 1981 by the miners’ threat to strike in protest at the government’s decision to close uneconomic pits. Fearing the same defeat as Heath, Thatcher surrendered. Soon after, Arthur Scargill was elected as the leader of the National Union of Mineworkers. The left felt further emboldened. Across the country, other militants similar to Corbyn were seizing control of Labour associations, galvanising the trade unions to replicate the miners’ industrial challenge to Thatcher, and giving the impression of engaging in subversion.

  In 1982, Corbyn, now thirty-two, ranked among the leaders of the left in the capital. Recognised by the Economist as London Labour Briefing’s ‘general secretary figure’ and by the Hornsey Journal as joint editor of its newspaper, he boasted that the organisation was ‘moving the leadership of most London authorities well to the left’. Reflecting that influence, he was elected as Hornsey’s representative to Labour’s regional executive, appointed the chairman of its finance committee, and also sat on a number of the London party’s subcommittees. For the next council elections, he had ensured that half the Labour candidates in Hornsey were associated with London Labour Briefing. All of them echoed his call for ‘a full-frontal attack on the government’, and obeyed his directive that they would vote to ‘defy the law and the unelected judges’ to increase rates, cut bus fares and back a twenty-four-hour general strike. Even so, within Haringey’s Labour caucus his supporters were still a minority. In a vote in February 1982, the majority blocked his attempt to break the law and act outside ‘the constitutional mechanism of Parliament’. They feared, however, that their victory was temporary, and that the ‘anarchists’, led by Corbyn, would stage a coup. Their anxiety was noticed in Westminster. Acting on Foot’s instructions, his lieutenants purged the far left from the NEC. Right-wing Labour MPs, led by Bob Mellish, the chief whip, dismissed Corbyn as a ‘middle-class Trot’ with little contact with the working class.The Bennites were forced to retreat.

  All those criticisms bounced off Corbyn, as did the endless complaints of Haringey’s residents. Their list was damning. Parents were angered when a go-slow by council bus drivers, supported by Corbyn, left their handicapped children stranded at home; the homeless protested that his refusal to accept government money for rebuilding houses meant that 1,500 council properties had been left unoccupied; a quarter of the council’s street cleaners were permanently absent on ‘sick leave’; buildings had been flooded after the rubbish on Haringey’s unswept streets had blocked the drains; and a Labour group report had exposed a ‘bonus racket’ rewarding council employees for not working. Haringey’s councillors admitted that they had lost control of their employees, mostly members of NUPE. Corbyn expressed no regret. Management and detail were of no concern to him. Nor was he sympathetic to the anger of white applicants for council jobs that Bernie Grant’s aggressive campaign against racism intentionally discriminated against them. In his world, immigrants’ interests were paramount. They were the victims of oppression. Any who disagreed, including Haringey’s disgruntled residents, were the enemy. Just as he was unable to deal with his own personal life, he was unable to resolve many causes of other people’s misery. He was an activist, not a manager willing to immerse himself in detail to improve the lives of all Haringey’s inhabitants.

  In spring 1982, as part of his single-minded quest to seize power, Corbyn was elected chairman of the Hornsey Labour Party, and immediately reignited his battle against the moderates. On 24 March a party meeting erupted in physical violence as he once again attempted to ram through Tariq Ali’s membership, despite the opposition of the national executive. Moderates erupted in anger that a notorious Trotskyist, contrary to the rules, was even notionally admitted to the party. Blows were exchanged, and eyewitnesses reported that ‘bedlam spilled out on to the street’. In the midst of these and other fights, Corbyn theatrically presented Ali with a party membership card. His conduct, according to George Page, London’s Labour Party leader, was ‘the most extraordinary study of bias and manipulation of rule and customs I have ever witnessed’. Corbyn wore that criticism as a badge of pride. After the national council elections in May, he believed, Brita
in would be one step closer to Michael Foot’s election as prime minister. Margaret Thatcher, he was convinced, could not recover from the deep unpopularity she had attracted during the previous months, following cabinet splits and an economic crisis – private polling by the Conservatives showed the Tories’ support had fallen to just 20 per cent. ‘The Tory vote will disappear,’ Corbyn predicted, ‘and I think we shall win.’ In his manifesto for re-election in Haringey he pledged ‘the smashing of the capitalist state’ – not an unusual declaration in those fevered times. ‘I don’t have any personal ambitions,’ he added. That was untrue, and struck his council colleagues as laughable.

  Six weeks later, after Labour had won the council elections, Corbyn moved once again to topple Robin Young, his key enemy among the moderates. On the fourth attempt, having at last gathered sufficient support after a succession of purges and deselections, he was successful. ‘I was persuaded to go,’ Young admitted ruefully. ‘They were a funny lot, the hard left.’ Mindful of the impending nomination of Labour’s parliamentary candidate in Islington North, Corbyn next marshalled Haringey’s twenty hard-left Labour councillors against the remaining thirteen moderates, and appointed Angela Greatley, an aspiring quangoist, as the council’s ‘patsy’ leader. He himself returned to chairing the uncontroversial planning committee, and awaited the next general election with confidence. The invasion of the Falkland Islands on 2 April dashed his hopes.

  Military dictators had ruled Argentina since 1976. To crush the opposition, thousands of civilians had disappeared in the so-called ‘dirty war’. Some victims, including socialists, had been pushed out of military helicopters over the Atlantic, their babies and young children then handed to childless supporters of the regime. By any measure, Corbyn should have opposed General Leopoldo Galtieri’s dictatorship, and welcomed the opportunity to liberate oppressed Argentines. Instead, he opposed Margaret Thatcher’s dispatch of a naval task force to recapture the islands as a Tory plot. In his hatred of America and Britain, he supported anyone who was their enemy – Stalin, Mao, Castro and now Galtieri. According to Corbyn’s logic, while he did not condone the dictators’ murders, they were not to blame for all the excesses that had occurred under their rule. That was the fault of the imperialists – America and Britain – for subjugating the poor. In Galtieri’s case, his crimes could be excused as the price for liberating the Falklands from Britain.

  Regardless of the islanders’ overwhelming wishes to continue the legal settlement established in 1833 that the Falklands were part of the UK, Corbyn demanded that Thatcher ‘pursue peace’ and negotiate their surrender to the Argentinean dictator. ‘We resent the waste of unemployed men who are being sent to the Falklands to die for Thatcher and Galtieri,’ he stated in a motion tabled in Haringey council, and continued, ‘A tide of jingoism is sweeping the country … It is a nauseating waste of money and lives.’ The ‘grotesque’ war, he said, was conceived to keep the Tories’ ‘money-making friends in business’. To explain why he ignored the rights of both the Falklanders and the Argentines to live in freedom, he declared that Thatcher was ‘exploiting the situation’. Allowing people to live under military tyranny, he said, was preferable to removing despots by force. The cost of the war would be better spent on housing, hospitals and wages in Britain, or to feed the starving in Africa. He saw no contradiction in his attack on the British armed forces rather than the Argentine dictator. ‘He’s always lived according to his principles,’ explained Chris Mullin, a sympathetic Bennite MP. To Corbyn’s dismay, in the Commons Michael Foot supported the government, and in a bravura speech blamed the ‘guilty men’ at the Foreign Office for the Falklanders suffering Argentinean oppression. Only a handful of Labour MPs voted against the dispatch of the task force.

  In Haringey, the consequence of rule by Corbyn was an accelerated exodus of businesses and residents. The escapees feared yet another 40 per cent rates hike to fund another 50 per cent increase in administrative staff. Among the 4,500 additional employees were two ‘anti-nuclear officers’, charged with ‘promoting peace’ in the borough. On Corbyn’s initiative, Haringey had been twinned with Grenada, then led by a Marxist government; and with his encouragement another large group of gypsies had moved onto the site of a pony club for handicapped children. The gypsies used the field as a dump for commercial waste. ‘It’s become a filthy rat-infested mess,’ complained Robin Young, ‘and the source of dysentery among schoolchildren.’ A year later, the council paid over £45,000 (£90,000 today) to clear the site. Once again, Corbyn refused to apologise. ‘The decision not to evict the people,’ he told the council, ‘was correct.’

  Haringey had become Britain’s highest-spending local authority, with the highest rates for residents and businesses. Its few remaining moderate Labour councillors, angry about the chaos, appeared powerless. Outraged by the discovery of another £1 million fraud executed by council employees who were supervised by the Public Works Committee formerly chaired by Corbyn, they were shocked by his reaction to a bomb explosion outside the local Labour Party headquarters which had severely damaged the door and outside wall. ‘He blamed the police for not being more vigilant,’ said a resident about the unsolved crime. ‘That’s the same Corbyn who criticised the police presence in Haringey as a threat to ethnic minorities.’ The critic was referring to his condemnation of the ‘increasingly repressive nature of London policing’. The blast exposed a familiar characteristic of Corbyn’s management: there was no correlation between recruitment and efficiency. Although he had presided over a record number of new members joining the party, the constituency was mired in debt and there was no money to repair the bomb damage. The party was forced to close the building.

  That December, Corbyn faced a moment of reckoning when Haringey’s Labour moderates threatened to join with the Tory opposition to defeat his latest proposal to increase spending. ‘You are like little Hitlers,’ the Hornsey Journal accused Corbyn, Bernie Grant and their cabal. ‘Like him, you will eventually be rejected by forces of democracy.’ To Corbyn’s good fortune, the newspaper lacked the resources to publish a muckraking exposé. Nor could the editor penetrate the wall of secrecy surrounding Corbyn, who always refused to speak to the ‘capitalist press’.

  The major obstacle to Corbyn’s ambition to become a parliamentary candidate was his continued support of Tariq Ali’s membership of the Hornsey branch – endorsed on Corbyn’s insistence by the borough’s general committee. After the NEC rejected Ali’s third bid, Corbyn was warned that the branch would be disbanded if he issued him with another membership card. This was not the best time for Corbyn to oppose the party leadership, and at his request Ali withdrew his application. He would later describe Corbyn – quoting E.P. Thompson’s judgement on the socialist poet and textile designer William Morris – as ‘unsteady among generalisations, weak in analytic thought, his response to life was immediate and concrete’. And that was a friend talking. Corbyn was not a willing martyr, but he was vindictive. Max Morris (no relation), the chairman of the ward that was opposing Ali’s membership, was ousted by an influx of thirty Trotskyists at an ‘emergency meeting’.

  There was good reason for Corbyn to hasten the end of the saga. Unexpectedly, the Labour MP for Islington North, Michael O’Halloran, switched his support to the SDP. In the next general election, he announced, he would stand as their candidate. Most of the constituency’s moderates joined him in defecting, giving the left a sudden advantage. This was Corbyn’s chance. He badly wanted the seat, but accepted the advice of Val Veness, for some time now a powerbroker in the local party, that his nomination would have to be handled discreetly if he was to secure the support of both the party and the constituency at large.

  He approached Clive Boutle, a linguist and publisher, to organise his campaign for selection. Boutle left their initial two-hour discussion about strategy convinced that Corbyn was ‘left-wing, experienced and not self-important like others’. In the selection process, Corbyn was introduced as Val Veness’s pref
erred candidate. In exchange, she applied to be the Labour candidate in Hornsey, where his influence would be crucial.

  Corbyn’s emergence as a candidate surprised Toby Harris. Like others, he had not realised his ally’s burning ambition for national recognition. To Harris and other enquirers, Val Veness claimed that Corbyn was a ‘reluctant’ candidate who she had had to persuade to apply for the seat. ‘They seem certain to pick an extremist,’ a Labour moderate predicted, ‘who will be fully in step with the mad majority.’ Others reckoned that ‘left-wing revolutionaries’ like Val Veness were ‘unacceptable to Michael Foot’.

  In the final race, a month before the June 1983 general election, the choice was between Corbyn and Paul Boateng, a barrister educated in Ghana. Corbyn won the contest by four votes. Aware that Michael O’Halloran for the SDP could expect substantial support, he promised in his campaign to prevent mass unemployment following the inevitable recession if the Tories were re-elected. The working class, he was convinced, would be attracted by higher taxes, more powers for trade unions, unilateral disarmament and the renationalisation of shipbuilding, aerospace and steel. George Cunningham, the SDP MP for Islington South, urged electors to consider the reality of socialism. He portrayed Islington’s Labour council as resembling an East European communist authority. While council tenants waited ‘months’ for repairs to their homes, Labour officials spent huge amounts of public money to promote their political ambitions, and wasted more on illegal projects. ‘The Labour Party in Islington,’ Cunningham told the Commons, ‘has gone a long way down into the swamp of corruption.’ While chasing around the constituency, Corbyn ignored such criticisms.