Bang!: A History of Britain in the 1980s (22 page)

Whereas these activists showed extraordinary tenacity and willpower, staying on for meetings that dragged on for hours, moderates increasingly showed little stomach for this attritional form of
warfare. They comforted themselves with the knowledge that the left could win as many conference motions or NEC seats as they liked, but ultimately the party leadership – answerable to the
parliamentary party if to anyone – would ignore their radical pledges, just as it had in the 1970s. Here was a complacent defence of the status quo, which would be blown away if the left
actually managed to rewrite the rules of the constitution. In making their case against the rule changes, moderates were handicapped by the language in which the debate was conducted. The left
could speak of wider democratic engagement. The right appeared to be justifying rule by the privileged few in Westminster. When right-wing MPs addressed constituency associations it was potentially
injudicious to spell out too bluntly what they really feared – that notionally wider participation would really mean handing over the party to the sort of narrow cadre of hard-left activists
who would transform a democratic socialist party into a latter-day cabal of Jacobin tribunes engaged in permanent bloodletting in a search for ever purer ideologues. On this view, the left’s
agenda amounted not to broad-based participation but to what the left’s champion, Tony Benn, approvingly described as ‘the democracy of the committed’.

A taste of revolutionary justice was soon being meted out to Labour moderates at party meetings. At a mini-conference to endorse a new NEC policy document on 31 May 1980, Callaghan was bluntly
told by one platform
delegate to retire to his farm. Healey strode up to make his speech serenaded by shouts of ‘Out! Out! Out!’ The former Foreign Secretary,
David Owen, attempted to defend the retention of nuclear weapons until such time as they could be negotiated away by international agreement and was jeered for his trouble. Dr Owen had spent the
previous months arguing that moderates should stay and fight within the party rather than cede it to the left, but his treatment on this and subsequent occasions made him wonder if there was any
point in hanging around if all it attracted was abuse.
²
Even greater hostility was meted out at the party conference which began on 29 September in
Blackpool. On the opening day, the delegates responded rapturously to Tony Benn who took it upon himself to announce from the platform that the next Labour government would have to abolish the
House of Lords ‘immediately’ (so that Parliament would become unicameral and the will of the Commons could not be challenged or revised). This constitutional innovation was necessary,
he declared, because within days of Labour regaining office there would need to be legislation passed granting the state powers of sweeping nationalization, control over financial exchange and
‘industrial democracy’. Since this was incompatible with continued membership of the EEC, Britain would quit within weeks of Labour taking office. ‘Comrades,’ he added,
‘this is the very least we must do.’
³

The comrades loved it. Later that day, it was Shirley Williams’s turn, speaking at a meeting of the moderate group, the Campaign for Labour Victory. Despite having recently been one of the
Callaghan Cabinet’s more popular ministers, Williams had lost her seat at the general election and was enduring her share of vilification from Trotskyite ‘entryists’ in her
constituency association, who were seeking to prevent her from being readopted as a candidate. She met fire with fire, rounding on her denigrators, whose bully-boy tactics she compared to those of
the fascists. The shafts of her peroration were, however, aimed directly at the silent majority in her party:

Wherever such people were hiding, it was not on the conference floor. At Blackpool, almost every vote went the left’s way: unilateral nuclear disarmament, withdrawal from
the EEC, Benn’s ideas on mass nationalization and sweeping socialist planning. Mandatory reselection was confirmed, as was the selection of the leadership by an electoral college. There was,
however, no agreement on the college’s composition. Benn originally wanted 50 per cent for the unions,
⁵
but was persuaded by his former adviser,
Frances
Morrell (deputy leader of the Inner London Education Authority and a member of the Greater London Council), to support a united pitch by the left which would stand a
better chance of being adopted: 40 per cent to the unions and 30 per cent each to the MPs and constituencies. When the NEC duly agreed to this division, Callaghan furiously retorted: ‘Well, I
tell you that the parliamentary party will never accept a leader foisted upon them,’ adding for good measure, ‘I’ll tell you something else, they will never have Tony Benn foisted
upon them.’ To which Benn snapped back: ‘Jim, you speak for yourself and nobody else.’
⁶
A special conference at Wembley in January
1981 was to determine who would command the big battalions – and with them the destiny of the Labour Party.

On 15 October 1980, less than two weeks after the excitement at Blackpool, Callaghan announced he was resigning the leadership. In doing so, he intended that his successor would be elected under
the existing, MPs-only, rules. Although he did not endorse anyone, it was reasonably assumed that Callaghan wanted Denis Healey to succeed him. With his florid cheeks and bushy eyebrows, Healey had
one of the most familiar faces in Britain, and he wasted no time in making it clear that he would be running for the top job. Healey combined a competitive, bullying nature towards his colleagues
with an affable and amusing turn of phrase in public, of a kind that offered an effective foil to the hectoring and humourless Thatcher. But his efforts as Chancellor of the Exchequer to bring the
budget deficit under control by cutting spending and trying to impose a tight anti-inflationary incomes policy had made him a hate figure to the left, whose leader of choice was Tony Benn. Timing,
though, was everything – and Benn was dissuaded from standing at a meeting, at his own house, attended by a roll-call of the left’s finest tacticians,
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who persuaded him that it was still too soon to be sure of victory and that he ought to sit this vote out in favour of another socialist candidate who could garner support
from a broader swathe of Labour opinion. This, they concluded, would be Michael Foot.
⁷
Meanwhile, other left-wingers on the NEC, including Eric Heffer
and Neil Kinnock, voted to suspend the election altogether until a more equitable voting procedure could be introduced, but they could not overturn the Parliamentary Labour Party’s right to
carry on regardless under the existing system. Foiled, some on the left requested that the leadership candidates should announce that they would serve only as a caretaker, pending reelection under
the new electoral college rules in January. Such attempts were doomed. Even Foot was content to regard victory under the existing
rules as a sufficient mandate, and when he
announced his candidature Benn dismissed ‘the whole thing’ as ‘shabby and calculating’.
⁸

Foot was a candidate of the left who promoted a clear socialist agenda on all the main issues. He wanted to nationalize more of British industry, he believed the state should direct
comprehensive planning of the economy, he intended to withdraw the country from the EEC and unilaterally scrap its nuclear deterrent. But, unlike Benn, he enjoyed a high reputation at Westminster
and cultivated few personal enemies, for Foot was famously courteous to friend and foe alike. He was a man of unimpeachable integrity and intellectual curiosity, whose character commanded respect
on both sides of the House of Commons – an institution he continued to hold in esteem, despite the demands for caucus politics of the hard left. Some wavering centre-ground Labour MPs
concluded that Foot might be the best compromise candidate. He alone might be able to hold together both wings of the party, whereas Healey’s instinctive pugnacity courted all-out civil war.
This, indeed, was Healey’s great drawback. Like Callaghan, his solace was his family. Politically, he was a loner with few real friends. While he was clearly the candidate who could make
Labour re-electable, he was also the man most likely fatally to split the party.

Labour’s parliamentarians cast their votes amid rancour and suspicion. The left-wing Labour Coordinating Committee even tried to force every MP to take his or her ballot paper to the local
constituency association and, after listening to the opinions of the activists, publicly mark the paper in front of them. The principle of the secret ballot was good enough for the electorate but
not, it seems, for the elected. On the first ballot, Healey came out top, with 112 votes to Foot’s eighty-three. Two left-wing candidates, John Silkin and Peter Shore, got thirty-eight and
thirty-two votes respectively. They dropped out and recommended their supporters to vote for Foot in the second, concluding, ballot. In this contest, announced on 11 November, Foot squeezed home
against Healey by 139 to 129. Among the leading moderates, David Owen and Bill Rodgers witnessed each other voting for Healey (no longer MPs, Shirley Williams and Roy Jenkins could not vote), but a
subsequent study of voting behaviour has suggested that at least five – and possibly more – of the MPs who subsequently joined the breakaway Social Democratic Party deliberately voted
for Foot, knowing that he would be such a disaster that it would stiffen their resolve to quit the party and would encourage others to join them in a new political formation.
⁹
By such narrow calculations was the fate of the Labour Party in the eighties sealed. After all, if Healey had won the leadership in 1980 and had succeeded in asserting
himself over the hard left, it seems improbable that Owen, Rodgers or Williams would have quit the party. Roy Jenkins might have gone ahead regardless and formed his own centre party, but there
would have been little rationale for many Labour MPs to join him in a venture that would have seemed little more than a personal vanity project, without traction with the
wider electorate.

Yet, it was a moot point whether the likes of Owen, Rodgers and Williams could have successfully bolstered Healey against the foot soldiers of the left. A Healey victory would certainly have
been a red rag to the socialist bulls, with the prospect of internecine warfare attending every effort to drag the party back to the centre ground. NEC meetings and conferences would have become
even more acrimonious. Healey would certainly have endured a rough relationship with the pipe-smoking Ron Hayward who, as general secretary of the Labour Party since 1972, had showed himself to be
a brooding irritant to successive parliamentary leaders. As early as 1974, Hayward was confiding to Anatoly Chernyaev, the Soviet Union’s contact man with the British left, that it was his
intention to force the Labour leadership to obey conference votes and be subservient to the NEC, and that he was ‘committed to developing links with the CPSU’.
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Hayward, Chernyaev noted in his diary, ‘prepares young people, puts them in the right places, helps them to become prominent’.
¹⁰
During the seventies, a steady stream of fellow travellers, from Marxists and Trotskyites to Maoists, joined the Labour Party – even though they did not share its
democratic values – as a means of infiltrating it. Their ‘entryism’ was made possible by the NEC, which, in 1973, had abolished Labour’s list of proscribed associations. One
group whose adherents were thereafter able to join the party was the Militant Tendency. Militant’s roots were in a Trotskyite faction, the Revolutionary Socialist League. Its activists shared
with the extremists of the right a vocabulary that was muscular to the point of being overtly violent. The system needed to be ‘smashed’. Judges, policemen, Tories, the Labour
leadership . . . no distinction needed to be made, for those in power were all the same self-serving betrayers of the working class. ‘Winning the streets’ was among the ambiguous
phrases regularly deployed in an argument suffused with the rhetoric of class war and propagated monthly in their newspaper,
Militant
. Their organizers included Ray Aps and Pat Wall, the
latter subsequently becoming an MP and a gift to Tory propagandists. In reality, Militant’s roll-call may not have exceeded ten thousand, but this was not insignificant given their energy and
indefatigability in a party in which no more than twenty-five thousand members were considered politically active. In this way, Militant became an irritant in many constituencies where moderate MPs
were struggling to retain authority. The faction was especially successful in gaining influence over the party’s youth section, the Young Socialists, whose national organizer, Andy Bevan, was
a Militant member happy to
announce: ‘I am proud to be called a Marxist.’
¹¹
As national youth organizer, Bevan
had an office at Labour’s headquarters where he remained – while his own youthfulness gradually deserted him – until 1988.

The media, particularly the Tory-supporting newspapers, made much of Militant’s destabilizing pugnacity, yet it was not the most successful group within the Labour Party. Less menacing in
tone and far more adroit in tactics were the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy (CLPD), the Labour Coordinating Committee and the Rank and File Mobilizing Committee. The common goal of these three
groups was to make the party leadership the servant and not the master of the broader Labour movement. Their seer was Vladimir Derer, a grey-haired, bespectacled and rather austere-looking man, who
looked older than his sixty years. Derer was a Czech-born admirer of Trotsky who had fled the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939 and sought sanctuary in Britain. By 1964, he had decided that
it was through the vehicle of the Labour Party that his adopted country could best be guided to socialism. His wife, a polytechnic lecturer, thought likewise and together Vladimir and Vera Derer
had been masterminding the activities of the CLPD from their Golders Green home since 1973. Derer’s great insight was that the multitude of left-wing pressure groups, arguing between
themselves about often minor differences of policy, were unlikely to achieve any of their ideological goals unless collectively they prioritized changing Labour’s constitution so that they
could gain control of the party’s policy-making apparatus. Despite being run on a shoestring, the CLPD made headway and by 1980 enjoyed the fully paid-up affiliation of four hundred
organizations, including 107 constituency parties and 112 trade union branches.
¹²