Bang!: A History of Britain in the 1980s (23 page)

Unhelpfully, the right-wing media indulged in the habit of casually lumping together the various left-wing factions as ‘Trots’ (Trotskyists) or – a particularly loaded
favourite of
The Sun
– ‘loony lefties’. This was misleading since they were neither of like mind nor of similar background. While the Militant Tendency tended to be proudly
working-class agitators who were generally suspicious of those whose hands were not worn by toil, CLPD activists were often university graduates. Many were intellectuals, at ease in the drawing
room of Tony Benn’s rather stately, classical-fronted house in Notting Hill (identifiable by its red front door). Although obsessed by processes and constitutional small print, they belonged
to the long tradition of pamphleteering, of debate and liberal inquiry. Jon Lansman, a 23-year-old unemployed Cambridge graduate, did much of the CLPD’s organizational legwork, churning out
commentaries and lobbying those in the Labour movement who were identified as influential figures. The group’s coordinators with the trade unions were Peter Willsman, a bearded official with
the public sector union NUPE, and Victor Schonfield, a former jazz musician and music critic.

Militant’s outspokenness could be as unhelpful to the CLPD’s careful preparations as it was menacing to party moderates. Realizing that the cause had to be won
step by step, by winning over middle-ground opinion, the CLPD believed the rule change it could get adopted was for Labour MPs to face mandatory reselection only once per parliament.
Militant’s demand that MPs face yearly reselection seemed exactly the sort of unsubtle, uncompromising approach that risked unravelling the whole initiative. Given the need for discipline, it
was a major achievement when Militant agreed to become one of the ten ‘rank and file’ organizations presenting a united front for the crucial special conference that would frame the new
rules for electing the Labour leader.

The conference met at Wembley Arena on 24 January 1981. Realizing that a defence of the prerogatives of MPs no longer impressed party delegates, Labour moderates like the so-called Gang of Three
– David Owen, Bill Rodgers and Shirley Williams – sought to outdo the ‘rank and filers’ in proclaiming the glories of democracy. For while the latter wanted only the
activists who attended party conferences to have a vote in leadership elections, the Gang of Three now proposed a far more sweeping enfranchisement – ‘one member, one vote’,
carried out by postal voting. This, it was calculated, would empower the moderate, but all too often silent or apathetic, majority of party members. It seemed a clever move and it was every bit as
self-serving for the right as the activist-centric proposals were for the left. This was its problem. The right’s transparent motives, belatedly adopted through fear rather than belief, were
never likely to win endorsement at Wembley. There, the majority opinion was determined that the left’s electoral college model should be adopted. The only question was how the spoils were to
be divided. Having been elected under the old rules, Michael Foot remained a committed parliamentarian who saw the dangers of adopting a system by which a leader the MPs did not want could be
foisted upon them.
¹³
To counteract this, he sought to retain half of the votes in the electoral college for his fellow MPs. Meanwhile, the CLPD
wanted to maximize the leverage of party activists, and the NEC backed a proposal to give a third each to the politicians, the union leaders and the activists. This did not please the trade union
leaders, who were pushing for a larger say for themselves. Their role was especially controversial since the way the votes were weighted effectively ceded massive power to the few general
secretaries of the biggest unions. While some of them did not presume to know their members’ minds and instigated union-wide ballots to ascertain majority opinion, others followed more opaque
methods of consultation. A few scarcely bothered with the inconvenience of taking soundings. In this way, persuading a tiny number of trade union leaders to switch their vote was potentially all
that was needed to determine a tight leadership race.

In the event, the block voting of the union leaders proved decisive in ensuring that the conference opted to reward them with 40 per cent of the electoral college and the
MPs and the activists with only 30 per cent each. It was the greatest flexing of union muscle since the Winter of Discontent two years before and it emphasized how little contrition the union
leaders felt about the power they exercised. Tony Benn was ecstatic at the result, noting in his diary: ‘No praise is high enough for the enormous skill of the CLPD, who worked tirelessly to
get constituencies and smaller unions to vote for the 40–30–30 option.’ As he walked around the hall, he felt a sense of satisfaction: ‘I refused all television and radio
interviews – except one for the Soviet labour magazine,
Trud
.’
¹⁴
The following day, Benn assembled his advisers and began
discussing with them the campaign to make him deputy leader.
¹⁵
For the Gang of Three, Wembley was the final straw. It meant, as Shirley Williams put
it, with only mild exaggeration, that the next Labour prime minister would be elected by ‘four trade union barons in a smoke-filled room’.
¹⁶
By the time the conference stood to wrap up proceedings with the traditional affirmation of socialist fraternity, the singing of
The Red Flag
, she was nowhere to be
seen.

Gang of Four – Bright Dawn over Limehouse

The following day, Williams joined David Owen, Bill Rodgers and Roy Jenkins for a photo shoot outside Owen’s house at Limehouse in east London. Like ageing rock stars
announcing their band was reforming for a comeback tour, the four grinned at each other, struck poses and quipped with reporters while the photographers snapped away. There was serious purpose,
however, behind what the newspapers dubbed the Gang of Four and their Limehouse Declaration. They were calling time on the Labour Party by launching the Council for Social Democracy. Its aim was
‘a realignment of British politics’, spearheaded by politicians ‘who recognize that the drift towards extremism in the Labour party is not compatible with the democratic
traditions of the party they joined’ and who, they hoped, would be supplemented by ‘those from outside politics who believe that the country cannot be saved without changing the sterile
and rigid framework into which the British political system has increasingly fallen in the last two decades’. The reference to two decades of failure was especially significant, and somewhat
surprising given how prominent a role the four in general, and Roy Jenkins in particular, had played in the politics of those years. Nevertheless, it hit a chord. A full-page advertisement in the
Guardian
on 5 February was answered by twenty-five thousand letters of support and £70,000 in pledges. This was promising, not least because without being able to tap the funding
reservoirs of either the trade unions or big business it
was the small subscriptions from a critical mass of well-wishers that would bankroll the cause. Emboldened, on 26
March the Gang of Four called a press conference in the Connaught Rooms to announce that their council was to be relaunched as an independent political party, the Social Democratic Party (SDP).

Nothing remotely comparable had happened since 1930 when Oswald Mosley quit the Labour government in order to form the New Party. The example of what had soon degenerated into the British Union
of Fascists was hardly one the SDP wished to emulate, and the fact remained that no successful party had been launched nationwide since Labour in 1900. The Gang of Four toyed with various names for
their group – including calling it ‘New Labour’ – but it was ‘Social Democrats’, with its continental European connotations, that stuck. At the same time, its
red, white and blue logo boldly proclaiming the SDP initials seemed patriotic, with a non-partisan appeal to the floating voter. Nevertheless, as Bill Rodgers made clear at the launch: ‘We
are not a new centre party, we are very plainly a left-of-centre party.’
¹⁷

Despite its claims to novelty, the SDP was a centre-left party committed not to radical change but to the preservation of the post-war consensus. By seeking to replace the first-past-the-post
system, which permitted Thatcher and Foot to take their parties in diverging directions, with a system of proportional representation, it hoped to encourage coalition administrations which would
gravitate towards centre-ground policies. By condemning ‘frequent frontier changes’ between the public and private sectors, the Limehouse Declaration made clear that the SDP believed
that Labour had settled the proportion of the economy nationalized by the state at about the right level in 1979. Subsequent policy announcements suggested that the tax burden would also remain
high by continental standards, and that an SDP government would bring back an incomes policy as its core anti-inflationary strategy. Supportive of continued membership of the European Economic
Community and NATO and the retention of an independent nuclear deterrent, the substance of what was dressed up as an exciting new force in British politics seemed remarkably similar to the agenda
upon which James Callaghan and Denis Healey had fought the 1979 general election. It was only dual disillusionment with Thatcher’s first two years in office and with Labour’s lurch to
the left that cast the SDP in a light especially favourable to uncommitted voters – for the Social Democrats seemed to offer what Labour might have delivered in the seventies if only the
party had not placed its trust in the trade unions and been infiltrated by left-wing activists. The most damning verdict on the new party’s philosophical outlook was actually delivered by an
academic sympathetic to its intentions, with Ralf Dahrendorf fearing that what the SDP really offered was ‘a better yesterday’.

None of the Gang of Four had played a greater role in shaping that land
of lost content than Roy Jenkins. As Home Secretary from 1965 to 1967 (and again in 1974–6)
he had pushed through the key measures of what he applauded as the ‘permissive’ society, and his period as Chancellor of the Exchequer, from 1967 to 1970, was widely considered one of
the more successful post-war tenures at the Treasury. It was his idealism about Europe that led him to resign the Labour deputy leadership in 1972, over Harold Wilson’s tactical opposition to
Edward Heath’s EEC entry legislation. Jenkins’s principled stand did him no favours with the party he still wanted to steer. Badly defeated when he stood for the leadership in 1976, his
subsequent disillusion was such that he resigned as an MP in order to become president of the European Commission. It was from Brussels that he began to compare unfavourably Britain’s
adversarial politics with what he took to be European success through coalition-building. He emphasized this contrast when he delivered the BBC Dimbleby Lecture in November 1979. Entitled
‘Home Thoughts from Abroad’, it was an appeal for proportional representation to end Britain’s ‘queasy rides on the ideological big-dipper’, and contained Delphic
references to how a new moderate party could strengthen ‘the radical centre’. His term in Brussels expired at the end of 1980 and he was lined up for a directorship at Morgan Grenfell
when, on 29 November of that year, David Owen ventured over to his Oxfordshire country house at East Hendred to sound him out over what those still fighting the losing battle within the Labour
Party were formulating. In particular, Owen left Jenkins in no doubt – just in case he entertained his own ideas – that what they proposed was ‘not a centre party, but a
“Socialist International” party’, and that Shirley Williams ought to be its leader.
¹⁸
The implication was that Jenkins was welcome
to become the fourth member of the Gang of Three – but only on their terms.

As conspiracies go, the Gang’s plot to break away from Labour was not long in the planning. Williams, Owen and Rodgers had been in only occasional contact throughout 1980 and it was not
until after Foot became leader that they began seriously discussing the logistics of taking a collective leap into the unknown. Until late in the day, Williams dallied with leaving politics
altogether – lecturing on the subject seemed a lot less unpleasant. Dining with Jenkins over Christmas, Rodgers assured him he would not leave the Labour Party. Yet that evening, retiring
early to bed with a back problem, he changed his mind while reading a biography of George Orwell. It reminded Rodgers of his own late father: ‘He was always true to himself, and when I went
into the House [of Commons] I remember him saying something about preferring to see me stay on the back benches rather than abandon the things that matter to me . . . That was when I crossed the
river.’
¹⁹

Nonetheless, the formation of the SDP naturally fostered allegations that its founders were publicity-seekers with no regard for the party that had
given them office. Yet
of the Gang of Four, only David Owen had not been nurtured from childhood in Labour’s traditions. A Cambridge graduate, it was while training to become a doctor at St Thomas’s Hospital
that he had been drawn towards Labour politics. From that moment on, he wasted little time, becoming an MP at twenty-eight and only ten years later serving as Callaghan’s Foreign Secretary.
Bill Rodgers and Shirley Williams had been at Oxford together and had both been secretaries of the Fabian Society. Rodgers had gone on to hold several ministerial offices under Harold Wilson before
finally serving in Callaghan’s Cabinet as transport secretary. Williams had grown up in a liberal-socialist intellectual environment. Her mother was Vera Brittain, author of
Testament of
Youth
. A Labour Party member while still a teenager, Williams fought her first campaign as a Labour candidate when she was just twenty-three. While few might have guessed it from his rather
pompous mode of speech and reputation as a
bon viveur
, it was actually Roy Jenkins who enjoyed the most impeccably socialist background. The surname, rather than the accent, was the clue to
his South Wales roots. His father, Arthur Jenkins, had gone down the mines aged twelve, before becoming a Labour MP and Clement Attlee’s parliamentary private secretary. Arthur Jenkins
desperately wanted his intelligent son to get into Oxford, and thanks also to Abersychan Secondary School he did so. At Oxford he emulated another bright Balliol scholar from relatively humble
roots, whose biography he subsequently wrote, for, like Herbert Asquith, Jenkins was an active debater in the Oxford Union and graduated with first-class honours. In 1948, he was elected to
Parliament, aged twenty-seven.