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Once they were revolutionaries
In the heady 1980s Labour’s right wing plotted to recapture the party from the left in Kentish Town, writes Illtyd Harrington
Fightback! by Dianne Hayter Manchester University Press, £12.50 order this book
THIS is not a book I would recommend to those of a frivolous or light-hearted disposition. It is, however, a key document in understanding what happened in the Labour Party between 1980 and the advent of Tony Blair.
Written by Dianne Hayter who lives in Kentish Town with her husband, Professor David Caplin, it is an honest and ruthless account of how Labour’s right beat the left. Hayter was the general secretary of the Fabian Society, Labour’s only think-tank, who later ran the European Parliamentary Labour Party. She is a member of Labour’s national executive committee.
After the defeat of theCallaghan government in 1979 the Labour Party was shell-shocked. The left found a messiah in Tony Benn who when last seen was still proceeding steadily across the Sinai Desert to the Promised Land.
Gradually the rightwing trade union bosses pulled together, meeting secretly in the Edwardian quiet of the St Ermins Hotel, off Victoria Street. Not even Michael Foot as Labour Party leader knew of the meeting.
Later, a determined organiser pressed them to challenge the left. About five parallel rightwing groups mainly centred on Parliament seemed less effective. Their aim was to staunch the flow of right-wing Labour MPs to the Social Democratic Party and keep the left at bayby recapturing the machinery of the Labour Party.
Of course, there were overpowering egos the chief one being former chancellor Dennis Healy.
Hayter knew it was a tricky balancing act complicated by the leader being Michael Foot, a man of the left holding the centre.
After the defeat of Labour in the 1983 election, Hayter and her friends set about lancing the cause of the European Community, One Man One Vote, whilst opposing CND’s influence and resisting renationalisation without compensations.
Her account of trade union wheeler dealers is worthy of a chapter of the Cosa Nostra.
I had a hearty laugh when she remembers the hard-left amongst whom were union organiser Reg Race, now a staunch Blairite; Margaret Beckett, Tom – later Lord – Sawyer the future secretary of the Labour Party; and “hard left” Harriet Harman. My God, they’ve since run down the road to Damascus, rather than stumbled.
Camden was often the scene of the right’s public face. Mary, now Baroness, Goudie, wife of James Goudie QC, another one of Derry Irvine prodigies, played an additional organising role.
Kentish Town seems to have been at the heart of this counter-revolution.
Yet in 1983, two MPs, Blair and Brown, joined the left-wing Tribune group.
Hayter is even handed in her contempt for quitters such as Roy Jenkins and Bill Rogers.
With ‘right-wing views’ she remembers, she remained a stayer and stuck to her corner.
Not mine though. And Labour’s vote did rise from 27.6 per cent in 1983 to 38 per cent in 1987.
She draws an optimistic conclusion from that. Indeed she puts the counter policy of the left fairly.
It looked democratic to me but at the same time Thatcher’s wrecking legislation was rapid and dangerous.
Although modest about her role, she asked the vital question: What did she and others bring about?
Blair’s Commons majorities have made him more authoritarian than presidential and with a diminishing respect for Parliament.
Even as I write, he seems determined to leave his right wing imprint before he goes. The home secretary Charles Clarke, it is said, is under threat for being too liberal.
The late 1970s and 1980s were heady times – revolution was in the air.Who said in February 1983: “We are not interested in reforming the police, the armed services, judiciary and monarchy, we are about dismantling them and replacing them with our own machinery and class rule”?
No it wasn’t Madame Le Farge from A Tale of Two Cities, but MP Dianne Abbot, now seen cosying up with Michael Portillo on late night television.
No wonder that moderates like Hayter dusted down their muskets and set about taking their power back.
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