Whatever Happened To The Labour Party?

Far more right than wrong, Peter Hitchens writes:

Some contributors last week asked two important, linked questions. One was this from Mr Mulholland: ‘I don't see how Labour's socially conservative wing and the social and cultural conservatives of the Tory party can ever be reconciled to creating a 'proper conservative party'.’ This point is extremely important and I wonder if you or anyone else would care to elaborate on who these groups are. I'd probably find myself in the more economic-populist wing of this party but these divisions won't seem to resolve themselves. Peter Hitchens ignores this salient truth, his 'true conservative' party would probably have some tough economic choices and I wonder how he'd seek to please both groups.’

The other was from 'Steve A' who, like many people, continues to believe that New Labour is a 'right-wing' takeover of the Labour Party by crypto-Tories.

But before I turn to these issues could I refer 'Mev' (and any others still afflicted with doubts about the need to thrust the Conservative Party headfirst down the nearest U-bend and jump on the soles of its feet) to two previous posts? He should be able to locate them by Googling ‘Peter Hitchens’ and ‘The Tories are still useless’ and ‘Peter Hitchens’ and ‘What is wrong and how to put some of it right’. In general, these answer all the objections raised against my campaign for the destruction of the Tory Party, and of course the frequent and false claim that I 'never put forward anything positive' and 'have no manifesto of my own'. I really feel I've had these arguments for now (though they'll need to be rehearsed at the election) and they're what archives are for.

Now, to the Labour Party. What was it before Blair, and what is it now? The first question is crucial. And I should say, not just 'before Blair' but also 'Before Callaghan'.

For what is now forgotten, and in many cases not even known to people who write boldly and emphatically about politics, is that the current Labour Party was formed mainly by struggles in the 1980s. These battles were themselves efforts to resolve conflicts that had been going on very much longer. The laziness, stupidity and ignorance with which they are described by most of Fleet Street and the rest of the media still has to be seen to be believed.

Labour had a 'Right Wing' in the pre-Callaghan era. In general this was based not upon economics or social questions but upon those in the Labour Party who opposed the Communist Party and its fellow travellers. It mainly fought on the issue of nuclear weapons, NATO and the American alliance. So it was perfectly possible to be on 'the right' and to be in favour of trades union rights, the nationalisation of the railways (though probably not of the steel industry or of road haulage) and a sizeable welfare state. Some right-wingers, notably Hugh Gaitskell and some of his followers, were also opposed to the Common Market. Others were not. Its importance was not widely understood (though Gaitskell grasped it immediately and so did the pro-Market Roy Jenkins) and its threat to British independence was distant and remote, while the Soviet threat was pressing and urgent. Owing to the time lag between action and effect, several other pivotal issues - the sociological treatment of criminals, easy divorce, the relaxation of restraint in the arts, the great expansion of welfare under Harold Wilson, the destruction of the grammar schools - simply had not assumed the size or shape they have attained now. And we still had an industrial working class, employed in an industrial sector mainly composed of hard-grind jobs for life, performed by men - and in general heavily unionised.

Labour also had a left-wing. This consisted partly of middle class pseudo-intellectuals (and sometimes real ones too), many of them teachers, utopian nuclear disarmers, anti-colonial campaigners, all the usual herbivores, wide-eyed, woolly-hatted, utterly naive about the world; and partly of rock-ribbed Stalinist veterans from the grimmer end of the trade union movement. Some but by no means all of these were actual Communists. The Communist Party in Great Britain (as I have so often tried to explain) was partly dissolved in the Labour Party and the Trades Union Congress, and the boundaries between them were often very vague. Work still proceeds on uncovering just how many Labour MPs, trade union leaders etc were in fact actively working for Moscow. But it is safe to say that many more of them were doing so than was obvious, and that their actions had huge influence on Labour party policy.

In the background was the Jenkins-Crosland formation, radical social liberals whose case was set out in those two crucial books, The Labour Case written by Jenkins in 1959, and The Future of Socialism, penned by Crosland around the same time. Both men correctly grasped that the 1945-51 Labour government had delivered Labour's original 1918 programme in its entirety, and that the party needed a new purpose to survive. They found it in social liberalism, egalitarian education and the sexual revolution. Crosland, like many of its advocates, simply didn't know what he was doing with comprehensive education. (This is plain in The Future of Socialism, in which he derided those who said it would lead to mixed ability teaching and a general decline in standards.)

Labour pretended in October 1964 that comprehensive schooling would mean a 'grammar school education for all', when the truth (readily available if anyone had looked at the USA, where it had been pioneered many decades earlier) was that it offered a secondary modern education for all but the rich. Most of these things had to be either misrepresented or hidden to be achieved, or responsibility had to be dodged. Jenkins's 1959 programme was enacted between 1964 and 1970 almost entirely as a series of private members' bills for which the government denied responsibility (though it provided much private help to them). Divorce reform was one of the few major social revolutionary changes that was actually pushed through by the government under its own colours. Hardly anyone seems to have realised that it would lead to difficulties on the scale we were to experience.

By the 1980s several things were happening. One was the 1960s revolution, which had been confined to a very small part of the population when it began, beginning to spread into the whole of society. My own generation began to have political importance. I am actually at the tail end of what used to be known as 'the bulge' and is known in the USA as 'the baby boom', those born from the post-war marriages in that time of optimism and relative prosperity, as the 1939-45 war receded into the past. We were also the generation of first expansion of the universities, thanks to the Robbins report - this greatly enlarged Oxbridge as well as creating the plate-glass universities such as Kent, Sussex, York and Lancaster. Less well-known was the Wilson expansion of teacher training, which greatly widened the profession and changed its character permanently.

By the mid-1970s, tens of thousands of the sixties generation were beginning to fan out into the schools, journalism, the civil service, advertising, the arts. Few had been hard-core revolutionaries. Many had been affected and influenced by the revolutionary ideas taught and generally accepted at their universities and colleges - and also by the cultural revolution then under way on British TV and in publishing. They were also active in the white-collar unions and in the Labour Party.

At the same time, British industry, in fact the entire British economy, was in increasing trouble. The history of how and why the country plunged into a long war between employees and employers has yet to be written. I think there's no doubt that inflation, probably caused by the Vietnam war, the increasing threat to traditional jobs in shipbuilding, mining, railways, steelworks etc, the increasing failure of British car manufacturers to compete with Italian, French, German and Japanese makers, then the rising prices resulting from Common Market membership (and fanned by decimalisation of the currency in 1971), made a lot of people worried about their standards of living, and made it easy for unions to press for what would once have seemed absurd wage-claims.

I've also no doubt that the Communist Party's industrial organisation, a professional and secretive network run by a full-time officer in the CP's then HQ in Covent Garden, took advantage of this. Why? Because the CP cared so much about the working conditions of the British (all far superior to the conditions in which their opposite numbers toiled under Soviet rule)? Or perhaps because of some other reason. I don't know, because we've yet to see the documents. But I can guess. But it was certainly the case that the Labour Party, which could once have relied on the unions to help it into office and cooperate with it when it got there, was no longer on good terms with the union machines and being thoroughly destabilised by their actions.

That led to the breach between Harold Wilson and the unions (in which the left-winger Barbara Castle sought to tame the unions and failed). And it then led on to the second breach when Jim Callaghan, who had sided with the unions against Wilson, was in 1979 destroyed by the monster he himself had helped create. And those union machines had developed an amazing system of near-autonomous shop-floor bargaining, which they could always claim that they could not control. I've never been entirely sure that this was true. But the system certainly made attempts to regulate strikes by law extremely difficult, since there was nobody to whom to serve writs. And it would be years before anyone dreamed up an effective method of regulating this mess. By the time they had, the crisis was largely over, because British industry itself was largely over too. I'm less and less convinced (and I was there) that the Thatcher-Tebbit reforms - clever as they were - were the main thing that crushed union power. I think it was mainly down to the decline of industry.

All this for a bit of background, to show how many currents were flowing through Labour by 1980. I might also add that the Communist Party and its fellow-travellers were still surprisingly willing to show open sympathy for the Soviet bloc. This showed partly in their renewed campaign to commit Labour to scrapping the British nuclear bomb (Gaitskell had defeated this, following his famous 'fight, fight and fight again' speech in the early 1960s) and partly in the TUC's pitiful refusal to support Polish Solidarity in 1980. My 2009 book The Broken Compass (shortly to be reissued with a new chapter on the Tories, and retitled The Cameron Delusion) describes this grisly moment.

By the early 1980s, there were a lot of forces in the Labour Party, operating both through the unions and through the constituencies, which were seriously left-wing. The least important of these was the body known as the 'Militant Tendency', a trivial sect of finger-jabbing Trotskyist dogmatists, based upon a faction called the Revolutionary Socialist League, which probably never numbered above a few hundred members and was mainly concentrated in Liverpool. Most other Trotskyists, notably my own International Socialists, to which I belonged from 1969 to 1975, the International Marxist Group and the Socialist Labour League (all of which later changed their names) preferred to work outside the Labour Party.

But the Media, ever on the look-out for something simple, missed the fact that while Neil Kinnock was noisily 'defeating' the fatuous Militant with bombastic speeches, the party itself was falling into the hands of the broad, namely pro-Communist Left (this tendency, a semiofficial Labour-Communist front, had operated for years in the National Union of Students under the name 'the Broad Left'. Few university-educated Labour politicians can have escaped dealings with it). The organisations involved in this were called the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy and the Labour Coordinating Committee (sometimes ludicrously described as 'moderate' by those political journalists who had heard of it at all). This was particularly felt among Labour MPs, who were purged for any signs of moderation, through the new system of compulsory reselection. The old 'right-wing' Labour, socially conservative, pro-NATO, was virtually wiped out in this period, through the huge constitutional revolution which robbed Labour MPs of the exclusive power to elect the party leader.

If they still had that power, I think Gordon Brown would now be gone. As it is, any new leader must be chosen through that 1980s monstrosity, the union and activist-dominated 'electoral college'. It is fear of what the 'college' might choose that prevents Labour's top table from dethroning Mr Brown. Almost all Labour leaders since it was brought into being have in fact been chosen unopposed.

This in turn led to the (premature) defection of the SDP, which took with it a large chunk of the old Labour 'Right' - notably the least famous of the 'Gang of Four', William Rodgers. Rodgers was the man who had - through an organisation called the Campaign for Democratic Socialism - defeated the nuclear disarmers at constituency level by standing up to them in an organised and well-briefed fashion. Had the Gang of Four only waited a little longer, and allowed Tony Benn to defeat Denis Healey for the Deputy Leadership of the Party, they would probably have taken most of Labour's old right with them, including a number of unions, and Labour would have been shown up for what it is, namely a party of the hard left. Meanwhile it's worth noting that the SDP did not entirely die. I am told that there are more former SDP members in David Cameron's Shadow Cabinet than there are in the leadership of the Liberal Democrats. And some of the loudest journalistic cheerleaders for Mr Cameron are ex SDPers. I'm not quite sure why, since he's way to the Left of David Owen and Bill Rodgers. Maybe they're lonely Jenkinsites, or followers of the delightful but wrong Shirley Williams. But that's another story.

And then the Soviet Union collapsed. This left the Labour Party in a very odd position. The chief aim of many of its members, namely aiding the USSR's foreign policy, was gone. The old model of socialism - state-owned industry in a command economy, was shown to be an utter failure, beyond all doubt. At the same time, the chief reason for voters to turn away from Labour, its willingness to disarm in face of the Red Army, was also gone.

By dropping its plans to strip the country’s defences, and by abandoning what was already an empty pledge of 'common ownership', Labour was able to claim to the dim Nigels in the Golf Clubs of Britain that it had abandoned the Left . Alas for Labour, it could only do this if it gave the same message to the equally dim Kevins in the student unions, the Labour clubs and the comprehensive school staffrooms.

And that's where it's been ever since. And yet we are told that a party is 'Right Wing' which has levied some of the heaviest taxes in history, which has increased the size of the state sector to unprecedented levels, which controls industry through regulation more tightly (and with less accountability) than it ever did in the days of nationalisation, which is wholly devoted to political correctness, known as 'equality' and 'diversity', and has handed over the government to a foreign power; that a party is 'right-wing' which is fanatically dedicated to comprehensive schools (and increasingly to comprehensive universities), to handing over Northern Ireland to gangsters, to stripping the armed forces, to attacking individual liberty, and that a party is 'Right Wing' which has placed every employer, from hairdressers' shops to BP under the authority of employment laws that 1970s shop stewards could only dream of.

This is helped by the belief among a lot of not-very-bright Tories that Margaret Thatcher's economic liberalism (combined with an almost total failure to combat the cultural revolution, worse in many ways, an active pursuit of that revolution especially through Sunday Trading) was a period of triumph, when in many ways it devastated conservative Britain.

I think there are many acres of common ground on which those excluded by this particular sort of 'right-wing' (ha ha ha) government might gather. Since my main desire is to undo harm and to reverse and dismantle wrong, I think we could now agree that mass immigration was an error and should be halted; that integration is better than multiculturalism; that crime should be punished hard from the start, and disorder prevented; that the poor should have access, through merit rather than money, to the best schools and universities in the country; that national independence is essential for proper national debate and for any real change; that council housing was better (and cheaper) than housing benefit; that men need to work; that families need to be married and permanent, that industry needs to be protected from unfair foreign competition. I could go on. I trust some people will get the message. My apologies to any clever Kevins and brilliant Nigels out there, who already have got it.