roy jenkins « Labour Uncut

Posts Tagged ‘roy jenkins’

When we were giants

22/01/2020, 10:27:35 PM

by Kevin Meagher

The year is 1976. Harold Wilson has just resigned as prime minister and Labour leader. The race is on to replace him. Step forward the strongest field of candidates to ever seek the leadership.

A veritable ‘who’s who’ of Labour greats. Serious, heavyweight figures from every section of the party.

James Callaghan, currently foreign secretary, but also a former home secretary and chancellor. The eventual winner, he is still the only person to have occupied the four great offices of state.

Next, Roy Jenkins, home secretary and another former chancellor. He would go on to become the President of the European Commission and eventually split off to form the SDP.

Denis Healey, current chancellor and former defence secretary. A future deputy leader, he would lend vital credibility to the party’s fightback through the long, fruitless years of the 1980s.

Then there was Anthony Crosland. A reforming education secretary who pioneered comprehensive schooling, (after the NHS and benefits system, the greatest Labour achievement in office). While his book, ‘The Future of Socialism’ became the bible of moderate reformers in the post-war era.

From the left of the party came Michael Foot. Employment secretary at the time and a renowned orator and journalist. (He became deputy leader under Callaghan and later succeeded him as leader).

(more…)

Posted in Uncut | 13 Comments »

Self-definition is the first task of Labour moderates

07/11/2018, 10:44:37 PM

by Kevin Meagher

Of all the problems facing the sensible wing of Labour politics, perhaps the most elementary is how it refers to itself.

Whoever let the dial settle on ‘moderates?’ The term is a counsel of despair. It summons up a drab, middle-of-the-road minimalism, perennially splitting the difference. Not so much a political vision as an anti-vision. An abdication of belief.

As Antonio Gramsci pointed out, if you control the language you control the debate. So this is where the reinvention of sensible Labour politics must begin: self-definition.

‘Social democrat’ would perhaps be the technical description, but it’s a bit jaded and abstract.

‘Democratic socialist?’ I’ve always thought this a slightly jarring phrase, meant to distinguish us from the undemocratic variety? (Although that great social democrat, Tony Crosland, was said to prefer it).

‘Right-wing’ is problematic for obvious reasons. While ‘centrist’ just conjures-up Roy Jenkins’ smug countenance.

He famously described his politics as the ‘radical centre.’ The times we’re in demand firm, concerted action, just not the impossibilism offered by the hard left. So what about dropping the ‘centre’ bit and embracing radicalism?

(more…)

Posted in Uncut | 19 Comments »

Uncut review: “Limehouse” – Egos, emotions and lessons for today

10/03/2017, 12:01:12 AM

by David Ward

“Labour’s fucked!”

The very first words of this play take you immediately into a political drama which feels both historic and immediate.

Following hot on the heels of Headlong’s This House about Labour’s travails in Government in the late 1970s, Steve Waters’ new play brings us the next episode. Limehouse re-imagines the events leading to the 1981 Limehouse Declaration which led four Labour MPs to form the Social Democratic Party.

Going behind the scenes to an apparently faithful replica of David Owen’s 1980’s kitchen, it is a fascinating exploration not just of the period but of politics and politicians behind closed doors.

First there are the personalities. Roy Jenkins, the donnish champion of a broad left/liberal tradition with a taste for fine food and wine, brings to mind some in our current generation from Mandelson to Tristram Hunt. Roger Allam, who many will recognise as Peter Mannion from the The Thick of It, brings him to life along with excellent comic timing.

Shirley Williams is the indefatigable stalwart of Labour’s right resisting the Bennite left on the NEC. Torn between the worsening situation and the party she has grown up in and inherited from her parents. Bill Rodgers is portrayed as a mild mannered political fixer, comfortable across the union movement or CLP tensions and reluctant to step down from a left leaning shadow cabinet.

While Owen is the “hot-head” desperate for action not words, distrusted by the others for his ambition and middle class professional background. Williams even suggests the Owen’s kitchen is too bourgeois. At least he didn’t have two. Yet these accusations would become familiar to Blair only a few years later.

Then there are the issues it raises, many of which call to us down the ages.

(more…)

Posted in Uncut | 8 Comments »

Centrists need new ideas and purpose, not a new party

15/12/2015, 11:40:32 AM

by Jonathan Todd

Phil Collins comments in the Times on speculation within Labour of an SDP type breakaway. Those favouring this move believe that, “the volatility of politics makes 2016 a more propitious moment for novelty than 1981.” Collins, who remains a Labour member, is unconvinced. “The only reason to stay (in Labour),” he wrote a few weeks earlier, “is that it (the Corbyn leadership) can’t last.”

“Corbynism for a decade?” asks Stephen Bush in the New Statesman. “It no longer sounds ridiculous”. In the sense that it was until very recently a widely unanticipated outcome, which would leave many, not least the likes of Collins, distraught, it still sounds pretty ridiculous. But what Bush means is clear.

“Many more than the 66 (Labour) MPs who did vote for airstrikes were convinced on the case for extending British bombing against Isis from Iraq into Syria,” reports Bush, “but pulled back due to pressure from their constituency parties”. CLPs, which MPs need to support them if they are to remain so, are increasingly under the grip of Corbynism.

If MPs are prepared to place political self-preservation before voting with their consciences on Isis, there’s probably nothing – no indignity, daftness, or nastiness – that they wouldn’t endure to extend their political careers. If in the dark nights of their souls, they affirm that this makes them happy, we can only wonder about their souls.

They might read how Tom Harris is happier as an ex-MP than he was as an MP. And Harris got out before Corbyn began. You get the sense that he doesn’t envy Ian Murray, Labour’s only Scottish MP.

(more…)

Posted in Uncut | 26 Comments »

Labour needs a new Roy Jenkins

04/09/2015, 11:55:09 AM

by Jonathan Todd

I am a liberal social democrat in a country full of liberal social democrats with no liberal social democrats to vote for. I briefly hoped that this would not be so after the general election. That Labour would turn away from the defeated soft leftism of Ed Miliband. Not to an arid New Labour that leaves even ardent Blairites cold. But to something more vibrant, contemporary yet classic, what I call liberal Labour, in tune with the increasingly liberal, broadly socially conscious UK that Jeremy Cliffe’s work for Policy Network charts.

There is no love for Conservatives in this country. They won the general election in spite of themselves. But they still won it. There is no route to Labour recovery that does not confront that. Yet paradoxical claims persist, which the Miliband years should have tested to destruction, including that Labour can win with the votes of non-voters.

The Conservative victory came in the country that we are, not the country that we might want it to be. We wish that non-voters voted and all voted – contrary to the experience from Australia’s compulsory voting system – Labour. But that’s not the country we live in.

The disjuncture between the portrait painted of the UK at Labour’s spring rally and the actual UK shocked me. If Labour elects Corbyn, we will have chosen to keep believing what the rally wanted us to believe and not the hard truths that defeat ought to have had us confront.

The spring rally wasn’t Corbyn’s rally. The pretence that it peddled wasn’t his. It was Miliband’s. From whom the silence deafens, as Corbyn rallies proliferate, based on a similarly sharp break between the UK lived outside the rallies and the UK believed at the rallies.

Corbyn threatens to become the leadership bullet that Labour ducked with Tony Benn, one of Miliband’s early employers. During the Glasgow Hillhead by-election of 1982, Roy Jenkins recalls, in his autobiography, Benn having some noticeable meetings. “His appearances in the constituency at once exciting those present and alienating those not.” Based on the chilly reception for Corbyn witnessed in Newsnight’s focus group of ex-Labour voters, we must worry that Corbyn is another divisive presence.

(more…)

Posted in Uncut | 12 Comments »

They may be an idiotic rabble: but they’re still family – sort of

24/09/2011, 09:00:26 AM

by Kevin Meagher

THE late Roy Jenkins, grand-daddy of “the radical centre” must be turning in his grave. That’s assuming, of course, that the late and never knowingly under-lunched apostle of Lib-Labbery has room to manoeuvre.

His abiding belief was that the schism between socialists and liberals at the start of the twentieth century needlessly gifted decades of political hegemony to the Conservatives. As a former chancellor, his maths were spot-on. The Tories governed for seven decades out of ten. The forces of the centre-left were divided and impotent for two-thirds of the last century.

There are grand theories about why this happened. But here is an altogether simpler explanation. If you turned on your television this week you would have seen them in all their glory. The loons, crackpots and pedants of the Liberal Democrat party. How on earth could we ever work with these people? (more…)

Posted in Uncut | 1 Comment »

No to PR, Yes to AV

04/05/2011, 08:07:14 PM

by Tom Watson

When Roy Jenkins recommended a change in the electoral system twelve years ago I helped lead the campaign to defeat it and preserve the first past the post system. I was dead against any form of proportional representation then and I still am now. But whilst I remain as firmly opposed to proportional representation as ever, I have become convinced that our current first past the post system is in need of reform and upgrading. That is why I am supporting the campaign to introduce the alternative vote and will be voting Yes in tomorrow’s referendum.

The main objections I have to proportional representation do not apply to the alternative vote system. One of my main concerns has always been that PR would give the BNP a greater chance of gaining representation at Westminster. But that is even less likely with AV than FPTP. That is why the BNP have come out to say they will be supporting a No vote in the referendum. AV is the anti-extremist system. With AV, no-one can get elected unless most people back them. Therefore the risk of extremist parties being elected by the back door is eliminated.

Another of my traditional objections to PR was that it will lead to unstable government. But hung parliaments are no more likely with AV than with first past the post. As the recent election showed, first past the post has not given Britain any special immunity to hung parliaments. The result at the last election was not an exception. It is the result of long-term changes in our voting patterns here in the UK which means the current voting system can no longer be relied upon to deliver a clear-cut result with a strong and stable single-party system previously the strongest argument for preserving first past the post.

The last of my major objections to PR, and to the hybrid system Roy Jenkins put forward, was that it was too complicated and alien to the way we have always voted. But AV, in contrast, couldn’t be more straightforward. It simply allows you to choose your candidates in order of your preference. It is literally as easy as 1,2,3. For voters, it simply means swapping an X on your ballot paper for a 1,2,3. And if you still want to vote for only one candidate you can.

So the alternative vote doesn’t have the disadvantages I have always associated with PR. But it does offer advantages that I believe will help change the way we do our politics for the better. (more…)

Posted in Uncut | 10 Comments »