Britain: When Labour went left

In 1970, just like today, the Labour Party seemed dead from the neck up. After six years of desperately disappointing government, Labour had been unceremoniously bundled out of office. The Tories were back, aiming to put the boot in to the working class.

From his photos, the 1964-70 Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson seems a quintessentially pipe smoking 'old Labour' figure. In fact he was like Tony Blair in many ways. He abandoned 'old fashioned' policies dealing with the class divide and inequality in Britain in favour of meaningless rhetoric about 'the white heat of the technological revolution'. As with Blair, it was all smoke and mirrors.

By 1970, six years of economic and political failure had left the Party a shell. By 1969  the swing against Labour meant that they controlled only 13 local councils in Britain. Young people abandoned party politics in favour of campaigning on single issues, particularly against the war in Vietnam.

As the world economy slowed down, the Tories under Heath came in determined to cut down the power of the unions. Precisely as a result of the impending crisis, the trade unions were turning left. Scanlon and Jones, dubbed the terrible twins, were elected leaders of the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers and Transport & General Workers Union. (These unions are now the core of the new giant union Unite.) The two began to mobilise the block vote of their unions, traditionally used as a bastion of the right, in support of left wing policies at Labour Party Conference.

Heath introduced a new Industrial Relations Act and jailed five dockers. This provoked a huge response from the working class. (See 35 years ago - Britain on the verge of revolution) After receiving a bloody nose from the miners, Heath called an election in 1974 under the slogan 'who runs the country - the government or the unions? The message he got back from the electorate was loud and clear. 'Not you, matey!' Labour was back.

Working class

And the right wing Labour leaders had to adapt to the mood of the working class. During the 1974 election Denis Healey promised, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, to 'squeeze the rich till the pips squeaked.' The election manifesto promised to achieve 'a fundamental and irreversible shift in wealth and power in favour of working people and their families'.

The 1974 Labour government coincided with the first general recession for world capitalism since the Second World War. Inflation, which had been on the rise throughout the post-War period was now galloping along at more than 20% a year in Britain. Wilson and Callaghan, both right wing Labourites to the marrow, determined to pull the chestnuts out of the fire for the ruling class. Wilson declared that 'one man's wage increase is another man's price increase'. The 'fight against inflation' was really a fight against working class living standards. The 'social contract' and 'incomes policy' really meant wage restraint. Grudgingly the trade union leaders accepted three rounds of this wage restraint. Working class loyalty to 'their' government was stretched to the limit. One of the achievements of the Wilson-Callaghan government was the biggest fall in the standard of living of working people since the War. In the year from mid-1975 alone wages were held to 14% while prices went up by 26%

Though the Labour government was doing the dirty work for the boss class, and doing it very effectively for a while, the capitalists did not show any gratitude. Britain, then regarded as the sick man of Europe, was losing out to other capitalist nations. This particular crisis of British capitalism overlaid the general doldrums the world economy was going through at the time. It manifested itself as a balance of payments crisis. Britain was importing more goods than it was exporting. 'We' could not pay our way in the world. In 1976 the International Monetary Fund stepped in and demanded cuts. The Labour government was humiliated. It had to shred its social programme to pay for these cuts.

Enough

Finally working class patience ran out. Workers had put up with Phases One, Two and Three of wage restraint with less and less optimism and support. By Phase Four, workers had had enough. There was an explosion of anger and strikes from low paid public sector workers. It was called the 'winter of discontent' and Labour were defeated in the 1979 election.

As in 1964-1970, the 1974-79 government was a right wing Labour government - and an even more abject failure so far as the working class was concerned. Like the previous administration, its failure led to the revival of the Tories at the polls. Thatcher swept to power in 1979, determined to settle accounts with the trade unions and roll back all the welfare gains working people had made since the Second World War.

Labour activists had become increasingly exasperated at the car crash that was the 1974-79 administration. But they had a problem. The establishment had set things up so the right wing had permanent, unassailable ascendancy over the Labour Party. Wilson and Callaghan had both been selected as leader by the Parliamentary Party alone, without trade unions or individual members having any say so.  The MPs became accustomed to their cosy life at Westminster and saw themselves as having a job for life.

'Representatives'

Activists had always been to the left of their 'representatives' in Parliament. Ever since the 1950s all seven places on the National Executive Committee of the Party elected from the constituencies had been held by left-wingers. But they wanted their elected representatives and the leader to be accountable, and for the Party as a whole via the NEC to have control over the manifesto. Formerly dead Labour Parties were being taken over by activists with an agenda for change.

It was also time for a radical change in policy. At Party Conference, a resolution from Shipley was passed calling upon the next Labour government to nationalise the commanding heights of the economy.

And there were some changes. After Callaghan resigned, Michael Foot, an ex left -winger, was elected as leader by the Parliamentary Party. Still his deputy was the veteran right winger Denis Healey.

However a special Conference at Wembley in 1981 had accepted the case for the leader and deputy to be elected by the Party as a whole. The election was to be conducted by an electoral college consisting of MPs, Party members and the trade unions' block vote. The PLP still had 30% of the vote, but the constituencies had 30% and the trade unions 40%.

Tony Benn

In 1981 Healey was challenged for the post of deputy leader by Tony Benn, the representative of the left. The MPs of course mainly plumped for Healey. The activists rooted for Benn. The trade union block vote was the decider. The AUEW had by now been taken over by the right wing. Healey beat Benn by a whisker. This was the high water mark of the challenge to the right in the party.

For the ruling class it seemed the Labour party was starting to slip out of their control. They needed a safe second eleven to put into government when the Tories became discredited.

This was not an academic question. After Thatcher took over in 1979, her harsh economic policies helped push dole queues over three million. Whole swathes of British industry went under. At this time the Tories were miles behind in the opinion polls. Nobody thought Thatcher could be re-elected.

De-selection of unrepresentative right wingers was now possible. Every time democracy was exercised in this way, the press trumpeted that Labour was 'in a state of civil war.' So, as a master stroke, the establishment split the Labour Party. Leading right wingers such as Shirley Williams split away to form the Social Democratic Party. They were generals without an army. The split did not extend to the Labour ranks, but it was obviously demoralising. The SDP argued they had split because the Labour Party was now under the control of the left. Really they had split because they feared democracy coming to them in the Labour movement.

In fact the right wing had not disappeared from the Labour Party. Healey and the old right wing were still entrenched, but not in undisputed charge. The party was formally committed to nuclear disarmament and to getting out of the European Union as they went into the 1983 election campaign. On economic matters, the programme was to the right of the 1974 manifesto that had won the election then.

"Suicide"

Right winger Gerald Kaufman called the manifesto 'the longest suicide note in history'. It was a strange suicide. The right wing held a pillow to the Party's nose and mouth until breathing ceased. They conducted a policy of deliberate sabotage. They had decided a defeat for Labour was their best option. By putting the blame on the left they could re-take charge of the Party later on. Ex-leader Callaghan publicly came out against the non-nuclear defence policy in the middle of the election campaign. None of the right wing spokesmen were prepared to defend the policies Labour was campaigning on. At the same time they began organising to take back complete control of the Party.

The hapless Foot was not prepared to state on TV on the Panorama programme whether he would call for a vote for the official Labour candidate in Bradford North, Pat Wall a Militant supporter, or the de-selected MP, who was standing as an independent - as a spoiler for the traditional Labour voters. Foot was trying to hold together a Party that the right wing were pulling apart.

Falklands

Wrapped in the flag after the victorious war with Argentina over the Falklands islands, Thatcher was buoyed up by the 'Falklands factor.' Thatcher's victory left her free to deal one blow after another to the working class.

Labour's resistance to Thatcherism was enfeebled by election defeat. The SDP had achieved their main aim of spreading confusion.

The 1983 result was a catastrophe for Labour. They received the lowest share of the vote since 1918. Labour's right wing was not downcast. They were exultant. They were quite prepared to destroy the Party. They had made it seem that the 'left' were unelectable. Engineering the 1983 defeat was for them the first step in regaining unfettered control of the Party. If the working class suffered a decade of Tory attacks in the process, then so be it.

The working class will always move into action when the wages and conditions they have achieved are under threat. Their first port of call is the trade unions. But class struggle will also reflect itself in the Labour Party. Labour has gone left before. It will go left again.