by Tom Bower
Protected by state ownership, the competing unions guarded their restrictive practices and resisted flexibility, with the result that in 1980 the industry was losing £1 billion a year, at taxpayers’ expense. Yet that same year steelworkers went out on strike for a 20 per cent pay increase, and won. By the time they returned to work, victorious after a three-month battle, some customers had switched to permanent contracts with Continental European suppliers. Then Thatcherism hit the steel industry. Corbyn was outraged when the steelworkers failed to force a surrender and Consett was closed. The left vowed revenge.
On 8 March 1984, Arthur Scargill declared a national miners’ strike without calling a ballot. Ostensibly, miners in Yorkshire and Scotland were protesting against the threatened closure of seventy-five coalmines that the government considered uneconomic. Scargill, like Corbyn, was dismissive of the industry’s annual £1.3 billion subsidy from taxpayers (in 2019 terms, nearly three times that figure). They were equally uninterested in the barbaric working conditions endured by the miners, most of whom ended their careers with painful injuries or chronic medical conditions, or died prematurely from incurable illnesses. Protecting so perilous an industry made no economic or altruistic sense; but that was not the left’s concern.
To avoid the miners repeating their success against Heath, from as early as 1981 Thatcher had started to build her defences. In normal times the country stocked about six weeks’ supply of coal. Thatcher paid the miners overtime to build up six months’ worth of stocks. The coming battle would define her premiership, as she and Corbyn both knew.
Adopting John McDonnell’s self-proclaimed ‘fondness for violence’, Scargill dispatched miners from Yorkshire and Scotland – so-called ‘flying pickets’ – first to the Nottinghamshire coalfields, then across the country. Tasked to stop miners entering the pits by intimidation and assaults, the pickets persuaded the police not to protect working miners, and many pits closed. Infuriated, Thatcher ordered the police to enforce the law. Scargill counter-attacked with a show of might. On 18 June 1984, ten thousand miners surrounded the Orgreave steel mill in Yorkshire to prevent the delivery of coke and compel the plant to close. After a fierce battle with five thousand police, Scargill’s forces were defeated. With a renewed sense of purpose, union leaders called on dockers – the vanguard of the workers – to strike, reckoning that once all the ports were closed the country would be crippled. Alarmed, Thatcher demanded retribution against ‘the enemy within’. By then, MI5 had penetrated Scargill’s operations and discovered that he was receiving money from both the Soviet Union and the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. Scargill’s dishonesty was not condemned by the left: the Guardian journalist Seumas Milne was to write a book praising the miners’ leader despite Scargill’s secret acceptance of those funds. Even Neil Kinnock, fearful of losing the left’s support, refused to denounce Scargill outright. But the left misjudged the working class. The dockers refused to obey their leaders, and once again the Labour Party was split.
Corbyn naturally supported the striking miners, although, lacking any relationship with Scargill (a hardline pro-Soviet Marxist and not a floating Trotskyist), he did not stand on the picket lines or fight the police at Orgreave. Rather, he joined Livingstone and McDonnell in a show of solidarity by confronting the government over council rates. In late 1984 Livingstone led the way, unaware that McDonnell had meanwhile encountered a problem with Reg Race, whom he had employed after his defeat in the 1983 general election to oversee the GLC’s budget. Observing McDonnell, Race was impressed by his ‘Janus-faced’ manner, his mask concealing the truth: ‘He adopted a moderate position whenever necessary to smoothly reach out to bankers and say whatever was necessary regardless of his true intentions.’
Within months, Race discovered that the GLC was awash with cash. No less than 60 per cent of its budget of £325 million remained unspent, the consequence of incompetent bureaucrats failing to commission approved projects. The money lay in plain sight in the GLC’s bank account. McDonnell, the chairman of the finance committee, had proved incapable of managing the council’s finances.
Race calculated that, contrary to his superior’s dire warning of the GLC being compelled to cut £180 million of services, there was no need for any cuts – or at most, the maximum reduction would be just £11 million. That fact did not suit McDonnell. When the two men met, Race recalled, McDonnell was ‘very angry’. Ignoring his adviser, in early 1984 he announced that the GLC, because of the government’s directive, would impose cuts of £140 million. To keep up the pretence, he went around County Hall telling staff, ‘It’s going to be Armageddon.’ Even Livingstone was not told the truth. Instead, McDonnell urged the GLC leader to fight the cuts. ‘The whole point of our administration,’ he told Livingstone in a memo, ‘is that we are a challenge to the central capitalist state.’ Any surrender would ‘undermine the confidence shown in us by hundreds of thousands of socialists throughout the country’. Local government, he continued, was a ‘terrain of the class struggle’.
Unaware that McDonnell was fabricating the figures, Livingstone repeatedly declared that Thatcher’s orders would endanger London’s services. Many, including moderate GLC Labour councillors, disputed his warnings, and refused to break the law and face personal surcharges. Among those dissidents was John Carr, who publicly labelled McDonnell ‘on the far edge of the hard left’, with ‘dodgy’ political judgement.
The disagreement, carefully kept secret by Race and McDonnell, simmered as in October 1984 the Tories gathered for their annual conference in Brighton. Corbyn had good reason to feel uneasy. Despite the government’s clumsy resistance, the NUM was being defeated by the coal stocks, which were being resupplied with new coal produced by strike-breaking miners. Simultaneously, Labour’s championing of the white working class against exploitation was being eroded by Thatcher’s sale of council homes, education reforms and the statutory limitation of trade union power, while many heavy industries were closing after the government refused to subsidise loss-makers.
The destruction of Britain’s industrial heartlands made Corbyn’s hatred of Thatcher personal. The proof was an early-morning phone call he received on 12 October from Val Veness. An IRA bomb, she reported, planted at Brighton’s Grand Hotel, had killed five Conservatives and injured thirty-one others, narrowly missing its main target, Margaret Thatcher. Corbyn, a man who promoted himself as a compassionate pacifist, made absolutely no comment to Veness, either of shock or sympathy. He made no statement welcoming Thatcher’s emergence from the rubble, or praising her subsequent defiance. After rejecting police advice that she return to London, she appeared on stage in the conference hall and linked the IRA murderers to Scargill’s ‘organised revolutionary minority’. Her boldness, pitching traditionalists against extremists just hours after escaping death, inflamed Corbyn. Over the following days, he appeared impressed by the IRA’s daring. A Labour Briefing editorial would announce, ‘The British only sit up and take notice [of Ireland] when they are bombed into it.’ The following month, the paper published a supplement admitting that these words had ‘produced an immediate and overwhelmingly hostile response’ from readers. The editorial board dissociated itself from its own editorial. Corbyn denied any involvement in the original glorification of the attack, although in a later issue the paper praised its ‘audacity’ and, defying credibility, asked, ‘What do you call four dead Tories? A start.’ It also mocked the trade and industry secretary Norman Tebbit, who had been pulled from the rubble with his badly injured wife – she would prove to be permanently paralysed: ‘Try riding your bike now, Norman.’ That degree of hatred characterised the far left.
Two weeks later, before all those who died in Brighton had been buried, Corbyn invited two IRA terrorists to the Commons. They would discuss, he said, the prison conditions of convicted IRA murderers. In particular, he was concerned about the strip searches of IRA suspects. He later defended himself by saying that MPs had the right to meet anyone with a point of view, altho
ugh he never invited Ulster Protestants for discussions. Soon after, he flew to Belfast, where, hosted by IRA sympathisers, he condemned the British Army’s shooting of IRA bombers as ‘an act of terrorism’, and demanded that the troops should immediately leave Northern Ireland, regardless of the civil war that would surely follow.
In Corbyn’s lexicon, his support for the IRA, or for squatting and strikes, was all part of his role as a revolutionary. His new ideological lodestar was Mike Marqusee, a well-educated American Marxist living in Hackney, who reinforced Corbyn’s conviction about the power of the left. As a Jewish anti-Zionist, Marqusee had abandoned his own country to build socialism in Britain, while he also campaigned for the rights of Palestinians – and enjoyed cricket. He and Corbyn had hoped that the national refusal to cut council rates would overthrow Thatcher. But then they had had to face reality.
In February 1985, Reg Race once again presented McDonnell with documentary proof that the government’s rates cap was irrelevant to the GLC. ‘You have no financial problem,’ he said, handing him a memo presenting his calculations: his master’s threat of £140 million of cuts was bogus. ‘I hear what you say,’ McDonnell replied in what Race would call an ‘icily furious tone’, then ordered, ‘Shred the document. Destroy it.’ Race refused. ‘It was remarkable,’ he observed, ‘that McDonnell felt he could ask a civil servant to collude with him to falsify the council’s financial options.’ Yet he was not wholly surprised. As a member of three Trotskyite groups – the London Labour Party (LLP), London Labour Briefing and the WRP – McDonnell refused to allow the rates revolution to melt away. Shortly after, Race briefed Livingstone. ‘If these figures are right,’ Livingstone later told McDonnell in anger, ‘we are going to look like the biggest fucking liars since Goebbels.’ Nevertheless, for a brief time Livingstone chose to maintain the façade. On 6 March, at a rally in London for the last striking miners, he pledged to defy the law. Four days later he surrendered and agreed to the government’s command to fix a legal rate. Corbyn sat in the public gallery with Ted Knight in the decisive GLC meeting as Livingstone told Labour councillors that McDonnell had ‘deceived’ him, blaming his subordinate’s dishonesty on his ‘training as a supporter of the Militant Tendency’. Visibly outraged, Corbyn watched as Livingstone voted for a legal budget. But while Corbyn endorsed McDonnell’s defiance, he stepped back from illegality himself. He refused to break the rules.
Livingstone fired John McDonnell for his dishonesty. In the midst of divorcing his wife, McDonnell retorted that he would never forgive Livingstone because he had ‘bottled out’ to avoid disqualification from office, and had ‘betrayed the Labour movement’. It was a strange preference of one ethic over another. Livingstone snapped back that McDonnell was always going to lose if he failed to adopt a ‘more honest approach’. Later, the GLC leader would recall that Gerry Healy had approached him to try to save McDonnell from dismissal. In outright contradiction of the eyewitness evidence, McDonnell would subsequently deny having ‘any relationship with the WRP or with Gerry Healy, whom I have never met’. Lying in his self-interest came easily to McDonnell. He would never change his opinions. ‘A socialist society is my religion,’ he would assert. Shocked by McDonnell’s dishonesty, Livingstone reeled from the blowback. ‘I had no idea,’ he would later write, ‘of the bitterness that was about to break around me, or that a decade would pass before John or I would get over it.’ His publication of a long memo exposing McDonnell’s perfidy that was circulated to all Labour GLC councillors, he would later admit, had been a ‘tactical disaster’.
In Westminster, Corbyn acknowledged that the left was fractured. All London’s revolutionary councils, including Ted Knight’s Lambeth, also surrendered to the government’s order that they set a legal rate. The one stand-out was in Liverpool, where forty-nine Militant Tendency councillors led by deputy council leader Derek Hatton continued to defy Thatcher. Their illegal budget edged the city towards formal bankruptcy. As the district auditor prepared to issue surcharge orders against the councillors for voting to fix an illegal rate, 31,000 council employees were dismissed. The political apocalypse anticipated by Corbyn had evaporated. In Thatcher’s words, ‘the winter of discontent’ fuelled by ‘the enemy within’ had been routed.
By March 1985, despite arrests, injuries sustained in pitched battles with the police, and broken communities, nearly all the miners had drifted back to work. A victorious Thatcher initiated the abolition of the GLC. Under Livingstone, the authority had spent £8.87 billion in the previous three years, created many problems, and solved but a few. The main beneficiaries were minority groups – the Irish, peace groups and women’s organisations – and the advertising industry, which was enriched by the GLC to promote its leader. Sensing the public’s antagonism towards the left, Labour leader Neil Kinnock ignored Livingstone and, in a withering speech at Labour’s party conference in Bournemouth, humiliated Derek Hatton for orchestrating ‘the grotesque chaos of a Labour council, a Labour council, hiring taxis to scuttle round the city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers’. In anger, Corbyn joined Tony Benn and Eric Heffer in a revolt against Kinnock’s perceived betrayal of Marxist councillors and his purge of over a hundred Trotskyites from the party, the three men walking out of the conference hall in full view of the television cameras. On the eve of a general election, even some on the left condemned their display as ‘tactically idiotic’. In his defence, Corbyn complained to Keith Veness, ‘Kinnock never even said “Hello” to me.’ To some, he appeared out of his depth on the national stage. As a municipal politician he performed well, but in the party’s factional battles he had drifted away from influencing events, even in Antarctica North.
Five days after Kinnock’s speech, riots erupted in Broadwater Farm, the housing estate in Tottenham owned by Haringey council. Both the councillors and officials of the self-proclaimed ‘People’s Republic of Haringey’, the debts of which had now soared to more than £700 million (£2.8 billion today), had failed to remedy the sordid, poorly maintained, and crime-ridden complex of buildings. Among the neglectful councillors had been Corbyn. The riots started after a black woman, a suspected illegal immigrant, died during a police raid. Bombs were thrown at firefighters and police. A police constable, Keith Blakelock, who was protecting the firemen, was hacked to death by a mob.
The horror divided politicians. Thatcher called it murder, adding: ‘This new terrorism in our midst is like a cancer – and similarly it must be overcome.’ Corbyn blamed police intolerance for creating the volcanic frustration of the rioting black youths, who, he pronounced again, were ‘at the sharp edge of the class struggle’. Bernie Grant, by now Haringey leader, also blamed the police: ‘What they got was a bloody good hiding.’ Later he added, ‘Maybe it was a policemen who stabbed another policeman.’ Corbyn’s proposed solution to the mayhem was to spend billions of taxpayers’ pounds on the inner cities; but he never offered a detailed plan to improve Broadwater Farm. Thatcher opted for private initiatives, including the endorsement of a proposal by Canadian developers to transform London’s derelict Canary Wharf docks into a new financial centre. Her championship of capitalism, not least building dockland office blocks rather than homes, offended Corbyn as much as her vow to destroy the trade unions after the miners’ defeat. In early 1986 he witnessed all those strands come together in an audacious coup orchestrated by Rupert Murdoch. Acting with the prime minister’s blessing, the Australian newspaper tycoon pitched himself into the front line against the left.
For decades, the printers and other employees of Fleet Street’s national newspapers had threatened or sabotaged – financially and physically – most nights’ production. Some printers registered for a second salary under fictitious names like ‘Mickey Mouse’, while others slashed the paper rolling into the presses until that night’s demand for an additional payment was approved. Not only did the unions blackmail the owners for outrageously high wages; they prevented the introduction of computer technology embraced by vi
rtually every other newspaper across the world, threatening strikes unless Fleet Street continued to use the nineteenth-century hot-metal process. To overcome the Luddites, Murdoch had secretly built a modern printing plant in Wapping, in east London, staffed by electricians who opposed the print union leaders. On 24 January 1986 the printers declared an immediate strike.
The next day, Murdoch’s first computer-produced newspapers, using 90 per cent less labour, appeared on Britain’s streets. Taken by surprise, the printers rushed to blockade Murdoch’s plant. Jeremy Corbyn was roused to join the siege of ‘Fortress Wapping’. Early every morning for nine months he stood for two hours outside the gates with the pickets, seeking to prevent trucks entering or leaving. Daily, the violent clashes – the pickets threw darts at the police horses – confirmed to Corbyn that the police were Thatcher’s tool to destroy the working class. ‘The News International dispute,’ he told the Commons in December 1986, ‘was an example of an oppressive government which paid thousands of police officers to keep five thousand people out of work.’ Corbyn was well aware that the printers had repeatedly rejected Murdoch’s offer for them to operate a computerised printing plant; he simply opposed any modernisation. His anger at the establishment was aggravated by the conviction of three men for the murder of PC Blakelock, based on evidence concocted by the police. After a six-year campaign all three would be released. At the same time, he was also campaigning for the release of the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six, both groups wrongly convicted of involvement in IRA bomb plots in the 1970s. All those miscarriages of justice reinforced his alliance with Thatcher’s enemies.