by Frederick Cowell
In late 1995 the BBC produced an incredible four-part documentary entitled Labour the Wilderness Years. All Labour party members should watch it, particularly if the party is contemplating electing Jeremy Corbyn as leader.
What makes it an astonishing documentary is that by 1995 the Tory government were exploding – in the summer of that year Major had infamously resigned and fought and leadership battle with John Redwood as the Conservative parliamentary party fell apart. Off the record briefings given to Hugo Young between 1995 and 1996 showed that top ministers knew that a Labour party led by Tony Blair was about to annihilate them. Yet this documentary was produced and it told in excruciating detail Labour’s long civil war after its 1979 defeat. What makes it wonderful is that is a documentary told without out the subsequent teleology of Blair and his victories. This makes it the most vital piece of political introspection ever produced.
Listen to Roy Hattersley’s doom laden assessment of the period after 1979 – “for a number of years the Labour party was in opposition to itself” – and you get a sense of just how disastrous things became. The divisions were so bitter during those years that the party ceased to be a meaningful force in British politics.
It is Peter Shore’s assessment at the start of the first episode, that the Labour party must take “responsibility for its own failure” and he was clear that Thatcher and Thatcherism, was a result of the Labour party being ridiculous. This is perhaps the most damning verdict. Shore was a veteran left-winger but even he could see that the endless internecine warfare had created a world where Thatcher was free to win election after election by essentially being the only meaningful political choice on offer. As Hattersley continued, “we must feel some guilt” about not coming to the assistance of the most disadvantaged in society.
As much as it is possible to loathe the SDP for splitting from the Labour party they were a symptom not a cause of Labour’s civil wars in the early 1980s. In 2013 at the time of Thatcher’s death I wrote a blog noting that two men – Geoffrey Howe and Tony Benn – were responsible for Thatcher surviving the first three years of her first term. Tony Benn’s decision to trigger a sixth month deputy leadership election in 1981 was a masterful piece of political solipsism, that achieved little except to make Labour look increasingly marginal as unemployment soared and riots tore cities apart.
In the second episode John Goulding makes it clear that the 1983 ‘longest-suicide -note-in-history’ manifesto was a collection of Benn’s policy shopping list. Even Michael Meacher, who is currently blogging for Jeremy Corbyn, lays the blame for the 1983 defeat squarely at the feet of Tony Benn.
The series has eerie echoes for today. The belief among Labour members that internal fights mattered more than defeating the Tory party and implementing progressive policies is growing among some on the left of the party.
“If Tony had been right,” Dennis Healy sardonically observed about Tony Benn “Thatcher would never have been elected”. Corbynites may wish to reflect on that – if George Osborne was so evidently evil and the electorate so evidently left wing, why is there now a Tory majority government? But equally the Labour right may wish to study Dennis Healy’s increasingly haughty, detached and condescending campaign for the leadership in 1980. It put MPs off as he told them “they didn’t matter”.
Kendallites may want to watch and re-watch episode one as the story of one of the greatest leaders that Labour never had is told. Healy sat back and let his obvious advantage and merits drift away, in a mixture of inaction and belligerence.
Every Labour member, every affiliate should be forced to watch this documentary before voting in the forthcoming elections. They should also read Edmund Dell’s wonderful book “A Strange Eventful History: Democratic Socialism in Britain” for an overview of socialist failure and complacency in the Labour party. Dell is highly critical and deeply cynical of the Labour party during the early 1980s and the obsessions that caused it to divide and turn in on itself. But he also notes that the hard left failed in the long run as more democracy actually helped the cause of those who wanted to advance Labour electability. Dell is keen to note the endless distractions that Labour sought to claim were important in the late 1970s and 1980s weren’t actually important to the electorate at large.
The Wilderness Years is painful watching not least because the last episode, which details the end of the 1992 campaign, details the pain of that era.
It is also worth noting that every columnist worth their salt in the summer of 1992 was banging out pieces speculating about permanent one party in the UK and endless Tory majorities – then black Wednesday happened.
The future is uncertain for Labour for now but it is worth just remembering Hattersley – someone who is anything but ‘Tory-lite’ –and his sombre warning that “my constituents … poor, underprivileged … needed a Labour government.” In 1995 – 16 years after the first tory victory in 1979 – he reflected on the failure of the party he was deputy leader of to provide that – it would be genuinely tragic if he was correct again in 2025.
Fred Cowell is Councillor for Thurlow Park Ward, Lambeth
Tags: far left, Frederick Cowell, Jeremy Corbyn, Roy Hattersley, Thatcherism, the Wilderness Years
So rather than persue policies based on core beliefs and a solid political position, you prefer the idea of a totally vacuous amoral party, that is little more than a shape-shifter geared around winning at any cost.
And you don’t think the electorate will reject that?
How strange.
Bit presumptious of any Labour stalwart to say that ‘their constituents needed a Labour Govt’. Its up to the electorate to decide if they need a Labour Govt. Unfortunately in May they decided they didn’t.
The electorate are always right; even when they are wrong.
We could try slogans like ” All power to the Soviets”. ” Nationalise everything” “Kill the bourgeoisie” and other polcies based on core beliefs and principals. Or not as the case may be.
If you don’t win then you can’t implement the policies you want.
Daily Mash sums it up nicely:
http://tinyurl.com/onor8tq
Swtntra, the have nots needed a Labour government, the homeless who can’t vote aren’t registered,those left on trolleys in leaking hallways at NHS hospitals, there waiting lists on the NHS for 2 years,
Tafia,it was our fault labour lost,by being reductions,it was those who weren’t going to benefit, by some unrealiatic socialist utopia ,Benn was suggesting that was never going to happen, that lost us those elections,the ones who couldn’t help themselves, unemployed with no chance of moving to a area to get a job, who went without due to the Toeies winning,yet the public couldn’t vote for us,due to our stupidity,that prevented us from being realistic about winning, that caused us to lose,
Would the electorate reject us for junking principles, these alleged principles,were to quote Neil Kinnocks in 1985′ based totally on out dated ideas
There are differences though. Today you have in your Progress camp really weird PR teams citing your language and positioning, “One London”, “One Council”….One bloody big mistake of talking weird.
Your Party both on the Left AND on the Right have gone down a rabbit hole.
Your Leaders are incestuous and weird, you cannot call yourselves defenders of equality because you have divorced yourselves from truly objective equality and fairness to minority tangents of bias and discrimination. Your mindless flunkers (not thinkers obviously) can no longer distinguish between minimalism and reductionism and often defer to the lowest common denominator. They are in language, pursuing the agendas of seperate minorities at the cost of the majority in a manner which is overall contradictory and so resulting in double speak and in a way that turns away majority of voters who are not prejudiced and just see unfairness being promoted. Your Party is dominated with minds that either belong in a museum or are young but isolated from the real working profesional world and trying to desperatly compensate by attacking democracy and trying to make their meaningless superficial lives “professional”. They are vacuous and occupy positions of “leadership” in your party and you are stuck with them.
There is no escape from this Limbo because whoever wins your leadership will continue to drag your party into irrelevance….where quite frankly it deserves to be for dragging it backwards in a regressive, purile and backwards fashion.
The Conservatives are embracing the modern world they are refreshing and you are history.
Politics is a business, you have a product that you are trying to sell to the electorate, or in business terms the “customer.”
Using British Leyland as a metaphor, Labour are still try to sell the Morris Marina, Austin Allegro and the Austin Princess.
The world has moved on, Labour are stuck in a time warp and creating a political museum for themselves. Labour should move their headquarters to Highgate cemetery.
Labour – One Political Anachronism.
Well not really, its different from 1995. Corbyn is the only candidate with any weight even though he is loony left, Cooper = Balls so unpopular with electorate, Kendall = Kendall who?, and Burnham is just an arse licker not a leader. More importantly we don’t have a “new labour/third way” gimmick to sell the public. All we have is competing with the Tory party at being tory which will not bring any new votes. So Corbyn or not its wilderness years ahead for Labour I’m afraid.
All the Corbyn haters are actually failing to address the real problem – Corbyn, like him or loathe him, is a far better and far more credible candidate than the other three.
Corbyn might not win a General Election, but the other three definately won’t.
Thankyou for posting the link to the Wilderness years. Even having only watched the first episode, it’s striking how the rhetoric used against the moderate wing of the party is exactly the same as now. Those urging change so Labour could win an election were branded as TORIES.
Am watching the Wilderness Years and it’s fascinating viewing. The problem is, like most things in life, things don’t seem to ever meet in the middle. The section on the overbearing power of the conferences is most certainly a worrying issue, but we now see the opposite where the rank and file are ignored and the Political Class have rewritten the rules in their favour. Who knows what lies ahead, but either way it’s an excellent documentary and worth watching.
The four episodes of Labour :The Wilderness Years are available on Youtube
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcueuIEuwzRQmBGqtfBAskN1R4ft_gkJi
Peace unto
These same people produced “Playing The Race card”(1999)
it needs to be realised and remembered that the Windrush Horror highlighted between 2014 and 2019 speaks to The Racial Contract subjecting nonwhite bodies to this epistemic closure and ideological violence along with the accompanying policing (surveillance). It is this context of captivity that has to be challenged for it creates this condition of global terror:
“the only workable method of controlling immigration from the Commonwealth without either bringing such immigration to a virtual standstill or ostensibly discriminating against immigrants on a basis of colour […it] would apply equally to all parts of the Commonwealth, without distinction on ground of race and colour, in practice it would interfere to the minimum extent with the entry of persons from the ‘old’ Commonwealth”
Source
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/jun/16/windrush-scandal-the-long-betrayal-archived-documents-david-olusoga
https://cambridge.academia.edu/omalone1