Posts Tagged ‘looney left’

Activist or MP, it’s time to take a stand

23/11/2015, 09:17:56 AM

by Jonathan Todd

“Criminals were victims of the capitalist system. The police were agents of repression. Riots were popular uprisings against capitalist injustice.” These, according to Peter Mandelson’s autobiography, were commonplace views in the early 1980s vintage of London Labour.

“The three hate-ideas of the idiot savant left are capitalism, imperialism and America, or CIA for short,” Phil Collins wrote recently. The CIA are now as acceptable in Labour as they were in the 1980s.

Then Mandelson, “was part of Ted Knight’s increasingly Soviet-style Labour group on the (Lambeth) council”. He recalls making the case for moderation to the Labour group. “Ted would invariably open the next meeting by glaring in turn at me and other recalcitrants, and saying: ‘Certain comrades are misperceiving the situation…’ The atmosphere was very intimidating.”

Having experienced the Knight glower, I have some sense of the mood described. On a GC that was fiercely loyal to our MP, Tessa Jowell, Knight would sit at the back. The comrade who put the loony into Lambeth remained resolute, 30 years on. If you said something that he disagreed with, you knew about it. He was an imposing figure, even when much of the room was against him.

“The past isn’t dead,” as William Faulkner famously put it. “It isn’t even past.” The party still trawls through the bowels of the 1980s. We are re-infused with CIA thinking, as Knight, I am told (I moved away from the CLP earlier this year), has picked up his GC participation since Corbyn’s election.

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Was the “loony left” right?

20/02/2014, 04:46:21 PM

by Eliot Henderson

While researching the Southwark and Lambeth Labour parties of the 1970s and 1980s, I was struck by the importance of that generation of activists’ contribution to British political history. Dismissed as the ‘loony left’ by the media at the time, today the political priorities of those activists are firmly entrenched as mainstream vote winners: equal rights and representation for women, ethnic minorities, young people and the LGBT community. My findings illuminate how much public attitudes have changed in the last thirty years thanks to the interventions of those activists in the 1970s and 1980s, and help to challenge the assumption that the Labour party needs to warmly embrace neo-liberalism and pander to the popular press to win elections.

The new urban left that emerged in Lambeth and Southwark in the 1970s were political graduates of the social movements of the late 1960s and 1970s: CND members, anti-apartheid activists, feminists, Vietnam war protesters and racial equality campaigners. Events in Southwark and Lambeth in the 1980s highlight the beginning of a process that could hold the key to a Labour majority in 2015: the combination of Labour’s traditional politics of class with one of race, gender and sexuality – an old and a new politics of identity – to construct a new, inclusive political base for the party.

In Lambeth, this new urban left coordinated a vibrant local and national opposition to a Conservative cuts agenda under the leadership of the controversial but charismatic council leader, Ted Knight. Policies targeting inequality, poverty, racism and sexism through investment and positive discrimination united the large immigrant communities in the centre of the borough with the predominantly white working-class north, along with some sections of more affluent Norwood and Dulwich to the south. With no support from the Labour party leadership and the intense scrutiny of an antagonistic press to deal with, the rate-capping struggle of the 1980s was a rough and ready affair for the Lambeth left. One council meeting in July 1985 even had to be adjourned for 20 minutes after Conservative councillor “Dicky” Bird put Labour councillor Terry Rich in a headlock. Yet despite the overwhelmingly negative publicity, Lambeth residents nonetheless voted to increase the number of Labour councillors from 32 to 40 in the local elections of 1986, proving that a manifesto based on concepts like social justice, investment in deprived areas and positive action to end discrimination and redress inequality could unite voters in a diverse constituency.

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Is Labour going back to the future?

17/05/2013, 09:30:38 AM

by John Braggins

Back in the day if you were bored you could go to the pictures at 3pm for the first showing and stay there until they turned the lights off after the last showing.  The projectionist just kept running the films one after the other on a loop. These days politics is beginning to feel like it’s on a loop as well. The arguments Labour faced in the 1980s – Europe, unemployment, benefits, tax and spend and even leadership – are being rehearsed again.

This week, writing in the Guardian’s Comment is Free, Ellie Mae O’Hagan urged Ed Miliband to take Labour back to the time when ‘ordinary people’ voted Labour in the knowledge that Labour was on their side. Suggesting that people who no longer vote Labour would come back into the fold if only it was more left wing is surely to fall into the trap Labour faced in the 1980s.

Ms O’Hagan’s argument is based on the Joseph Rowntree Foundation report which states that ‘attitudes of the British public towards poverty have hardened and that the most marked shift has been among Labour voters. These days only 27% of Labour supporters cite social injustice as the main cause of poverty, down from 41% in 1986. Conversely, Labour supporters identifying laziness and lack of willpower as the main cause of poverty rose from 13% to 22% in the same period’.

Her take on it was that ‘perhaps some of those surveyed by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, who would have at one time classed themselves as Labour supporters, have been repelled by the party’s decidedly un-leftwing behaviour.’

Perhaps. Or perhaps not.

The 1983 general election defeat where Labour secured just 27.6% of the national vote – a mere 2.2% ahead of the Liberal/SDP vote and 14.8% behind the Tories – traumatised Labour and put an end to the fierce arguments that raged in 1981 about which direction Labour should go, symbolised by the election of Neil Kinnock and Roy Hattersley as leader and deputy at the Party’s 1983 conference.

Labour began its long journey back to power, but it took another general election defeat in 1987 before any serious research was undertaken to find out what it was Labour would have to do to get elected again.

There were two lines of thought: one, let’s put together a ‘rainbow coalition’ only comprising of those that still vote Labour, ethnic minorities, environmentalists and trade unionists and target our policies towards them, or two, let’s find out why those who had deserted Labour had done so and build a bigger coalition to include them.

It didn’t take a genius to work out that the first option was, in effect, double counting – a Labour voter concerned about the environment who happened to be black and a trade unionist, only had one vote and however that coalition was put together it could never get past 35%.

I was in the camp of ‘let’s find out why people had deserted Labour and see if we could get them back’ and despite reservations, I persuaded the London Labour party to pay for focus group research in Battersea to find out why popular local MP Alf Dubbs had lost his seat in 1987. The startling news in the report was that whilst everyone in the focus groups had either been helped by Alf Dubbs or knew someone who had, none of them had voted for him.

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