The Fall and Rise of the British Left

Andrew Murray

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781788735148
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Radicalismo

The remarkable advance of "Corbynism" did not emerge from nowhere. It is the product of developments in socialist and working-class politics over the past forty years and more. The Thatcher era witnessed a wholesale attack on the post war consensus and welfare state, through a regime of deregulation, attacks on the unions, privatisations, and globalisation. However, at the same time, there has been a persistent resistance to the growing powers of neo-liberalism - yet this side of the story is rarely told as it was considered to be a history of defeat. Yet out of this struggle emerged a thoroughly modern socialism. This book is essential reading for those who want to know where Corbynism comes from: the policies, personalities and moments of resistance that has produced this new horizon. This includes the story of power struggles within the Labour Party, and the eventual defeat of New Labour. The movements outside it - trade unions, feminists groups, anti-fascists activists, anti-war protestors - that have driven the policies of the movement forward. And the powerful influence of international groups that have shaped the potential for a global progressive politics.

1

Class-War World

1973

MAJOR JIMMY ANDERSON [describing who his private army will target]: Wreckers … Communists, Maoists, Trotskyists, neo-Trotskyists, crypto-Trotskyists, union leaders, Communist union leaders, atheists, agnostics, long-haired weirdos, short-haired weirdos, vandals, hooligans, football supporters, namby-pamby probation officers, rapists, papists, papist rapists … Wedgwood Benn, keg bitter, punk rock, glue-sniffers, Play for Today, Clive Jenkins, Roy Jenkins …

REGINALD PERRIN: You realise the sort of people you’re going to attract? Thugs, bully-boys, psychopaths, sacked policemen, security guards, sacked security guards, racialists, Paki-bashers, queer-bashers, Chink-bashers, anybody-bashers, Rear Admirals, queer admirals, Vice Admirals, fascists, neo-fascists, crypto-fascists, loyalists…

ANDERSON: Do you think so? I thought recruitment might be difficult.

The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, 1976

A Tale of Class Power

In 2018 an obscure moment in Britain’s industrial history became the subject of a popular film. Nae Pasaran told the true story of a group of workers at a Rolls Royce factory in Scotland who in 1974 prevented the repair and return of aeroplane engines to their owners, the Chilean air force.¹ Their action was motivated by the fascist overthrow of the democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende on 11 September 1973, in a coup led by General Augusto Pinochet. Aeroplanes powered by the British-made engines had played a signal part in this outrage, bombing the presidential palace in Santiago as Allende made a last stand for democracy. The film explains the background to both the events in Chile and the solidarity displayed in East Kilbride. It reveals the powerful impact the workers’ action had, inspiring their counterparts in Chile and grounding the fascist air force plane by plane. The shop stewards who led the action are now heroes in contemporary, and more democratic, Chile and have been decorated for their efforts.

The workers’ democratic commitment to international solidarity was noteworthy, but what was remarkable was that their action succeeded: the engines were left to rust; the entire factory supported the initiative; no punitive action was taken against the instigators of the ban on returning the engines. Such was what the left liked to call ‘the balance of forces’.

Union-organized workplaces were once able to express their support for people in other lands, taking a form of industrial action – ‘blacking’² in the then-usage – without falling foul of the law or fear of employer reprisal. The strength of, and pride in, the union (the engineering union in this case) won out against the opposition. Organized workers had the capacity to translate democratic values into practical initiatives. Nae Pasaran displays the heights that the labour movement in Britain fell from. It speaks of a largely vanished world of working-class power.

It was also a world where battle lines were drawn, very much as indicated by the BBC’s satirical tormented middle manager, Reggie Perrin, and his military brother-in-law Jimmy Anderson, a deranged suburban Pinochet wannabe. Management writ did not run as unchallenged as they felt it ought to, nor did the ruling class rule undisputed. The class struggle was not a dogma or a fanciful formula. Far from being confined to sitcoms, it was on the television news most nights. The Jimmy Andersons of Great Britain – there being at least one in every saloon bar – faced twin enemies: trade union power and social liberalism, with a Jenkins (Clive or Roy) for each malady.

While the fascists throttled Chilean democracy, Britain was being engulfed by the strongest movement of industrial militancy since the General Strike of 1926. This was a time not just of strikes to protect living standards against the depredations of inflation, but of sit-ins to keep workplaces open, of solidarity action to build a powerful sense of class, of fighting the law and the law not winning, of projects to reorient production away from armaments, and of action to drive pay beds out of the NHS. In short, it was a period in which trade unions exercised broad economic and industrial influence.

By the 1970s, trade union power had grown to the extent that it was able to defeat the attempts both of the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson and of his Tory successor Ted Heath to impose legal restrictions on its operation. It was a time of work-ins, of which the most celebrated was at Upper Clyde Shipbuilders where workers successfully frustrated the shipyards’ closure. There were nationwide strikes by coal miners, won in part through effective mass picketing, and an expanding trade union presence in many workplaces (including in white-collar occupations), which led to management losing a degree of their traditional absolute control over the production process.

This appeared to portend an inversion of the wider social order. Of course, not everywhere in the early 1970s was like Rolls Royce East Kilbride – but much of industry was. It would shortly be argued in hindsight that labour’s power in the land was in fact already past its peak, but that was by no means evident at the time. It was a moment of global economic crisis, with the dollar having broken free of the gold standard in 1971, the quadrupling of oil prices by OPEC at the end of 1973 in protest at Western support of Israel, and inflation accelerating across the developed capitalist world.

The influence of the left wing of the Labour Party also intensified, again reaching a peak not seen since the days before the defeat of 1926. Socialists were buoyed by this rising working-class assertiveness and emboldened by the evidence that popular aspirations were considerably outrunning what Harold Wilson felt able to offer. Trade unions had shifted gradually, if unevenly, towards the left, with a strong militant trend ascending to leadership in the National Union of Mineworkers and a powerful shop stewards movement increasingly influential in the Transport and General Workers Union – the two unions wielding the greatest economic leverage. Even the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers, home to the skilled manufacturing elite, was more open to militancy than it had ever been (or was to be since). Given that the unions collectively accounted for around 90 per cent of the vote at the Party’s policy-making conference, this was of great importance.

By 1973, Labour’s National Executive was adopting the most left-wing programme the Party had ever agreed, proposing, inter alia, the nationalization of twenty-five leading manufacturing firms through a state holding company, over the objections of the Party’s right wing. The revisionist argument dominant since the 1950s – when a Gaitskellite right, with Anthony Crosland as its main thinker, had redefined socialism to exclude public ownership and class struggle in favour of terms amenable to a technocratic managerialism – was threatened in Labour’s leading counsels. The accumulating sense of working-class strength was allied to the growing disillusionment with the methods and results of Labour government hitherto. Labour in office had neither a plan for, nor even the intention of, advancing towards a socialist society, an omission that the left felt empowered to challenge.

These developments within the Labour Party and the trade unions, however, do not tell anything like the whole story. The spirit of 1968, even if it did not move as strongly in Britain as it did elsewhere, had incubated a new radicalism among youth, above all in the universities and colleges, now themselves accessible to far more working-class students than ever before. Second-wave feminism sought to extend the demand for women’s equality beyond the political/legal sphere into the workplace and personal relationships. The invention of the notion of ‘lifestyle’ seemed itself to be a radical interrogation of the existing dispensations. In the words of Sheila Rowbotham, ‘nothing seemed impossible. The experiences of 1968 opened your political eyes and ears. It revealed vulnerabilities within capitalist society which were making it possible for people to imagine socialism in different ways.’³

The expanding possibilities of the future were enriched by a past in which the working class could, and did, take a self-conscious pride. The Nae Pasaran militants, and active trade unionists and socialists throughout Britain, stood squarely in a tradition of struggle, self-sacrifice and internationalism. The Hunger Marches of the 1930s, the fight against fascism on the streets of Britain and in Spain, the ‘people’s war’ against the Nazis, the redemption for all the suffering that came with the 1945 Labour government, the establishment of the welfare state, the commitment to full employment and a large nationalized industrial sector – all this nourished the working-class confidence of the age.

The continuing advance of socialist ideas and movements for national liberation around the world also played a major part in establishing the new mood. Here the (eventual) victory of the Vietnamese people against US imperialism took pride of place. This had energized what was, at that time, Britain’s strongest ever anti-war movement, led by activists from outside the hitherto overwhelmingly hegemonic Labour/communist/trade union milieu. A new sense of emancipatory opportunity and of internationalism infused the left.

In aggregate, this was a constellation of possibilities that largely rested on an increasingly assertive rank and file in the trade union movement, with a sense of its own potential to change Britain and the world. The idea of socialism as a new society not too far in the future, with a basis in public ownership of the means of production and a new system of popular power, was still relatively unproblematic – the declining attraction of the Soviet system notwithstanding. With a massive strike wave engulfing industry as an aroused working class asserted its social power, socialism was easy to envisage.

Nevertheless, there was another side to the picture. There was no automatic read-over from industrial militancy to political action. While labour’s fortunes had risen in the workplace and in terms of union organization, the Labour Party’s share of the vote in elections had declined – its victories in 1974 were won on less than 40 per cent of the poll and owed everything to a renewed Liberal Party draining Tory support. The Labour left that had emerged in the early 1970s had conquered many positions, but it controlled the leadership of neither the Party nor the Trades Union Congress. These remained in the hands of a right wing allergic to the new militancy and committed to the postwar mixed-economy consensus, wishing to manage capitalism the better not to replace it. As a result, the retreats and broken promises of Labour in office had alienated many young people (above all over Wilson’s refusal to oppose the Vietnam War), and the ‘In Place of Strife’⁴ attack on the trade unions drove a wedge into working-class support for Labour.

Even in the context of the 1970s the notion of union strength can be overplayed. Aside from the two miners’ strikes of 1972 and 1974, the most-recalled dispute from that decade was the fight for union recognition at Grunwick, a north London photo processing plant staffed mainly by low-paid Asian women. The workers, though supported by the majority of the labour movement, were defeated by a legal and political campaign orchestrated from within the Tory opposition, even while Labour was in government and union leaders Jack Jones and Hugh Scanlon were supposedly fixtures beside the Number 10 fireplace.

There was additionally a lack of strategic perspective. The crisis of the capitalist system was also a crisis for the venerable tradition of British labour reformism. The core assumption that a combination of parliamentary majorities and the power of organized labour in the workplace and society would be sufficient to lead to socialism, or something which could be thus described, had been hegemonic since the defeat of Chartism in 1848, with occasional bumps along the road.⁵

This perspective had always had its critics, in the Communist Party for many years (although the CP later adopted key aspects of this outlook) and in far-left groups more recently. The leading ‘New Left’ academic (and the father of a later Labour Leader) Ralph Miliband was long one of the most trenchant critics. Reflecting on the experience of the Wilson government in his main work Parliamentary Socialism, he derided the idea that the Labour Party could be ‘turned into a suitable instrument of socialist change’. Its leaders, he insisted,

are not socialists who for some reason or other have lost their way and who can be brought back to the true path by persuasion or pressure. They are bourgeois politicians with, at best, a certain bias towards social reform. They have no intention whatsoever of adopting, let alone carrying out, policies of socialist transformation in Britain. On the contrary, they must be expected to resist with the utmost determination all attempts to foist such policies upon them.

While excoriating the view that ‘the Labour Party will eventually be radically transformed’, Miliband acknowledged that there was no other party in existence corresponding to his perspective. Nevertheless, ‘the absence of a viable socialist alternative’ was no grounds for resignation or for clinging to unrealistic hopes: ‘On the contrary, what it requires is to begin preparing the ground for the coming into being of such an alternative: and one of the indispensable elements of that process is the dissipation of paralysing illusions about the true purpose and role of the Labour Party.’⁶

This outlook, while undoubtedly able to draw on some empirical support, nevertheless led Miliband himself into the promotion of various abortive initiatives. It turned out that there was no easy way to circumvent a party deeply rooted in working-class communities, culture and organization. Indeed, it was precisely those roots that made the Labour Party, in spite of all the flaws and failures Miliband and others had identified, such a menace to the ruling class in the 1970s and 1980s.

For sure, the labour movement was threatening enough in the early 1970s, even without an overt revolutionary purpose. As events on the other side of the world were to show, pacific intent was in any case no guarantee of a happy outcome. Capitalism was not prepared to go quietly. Jimmy Anderson was not (just) a joke.

Neoliberalism with a Bullet

The question of neoliberalism did not feature in Nae Pasaran. If not unknown, it was unnamed in 1973, at least in public discourse. At the time, anti-fascism was the issue for the Rolls Royce workers. Nor did neoliberals get a mention in Reggie Perrin’s ranking of the undesirables who might sign up to join a right-wing private army. But Pinochet’s coup opened the door to the first sustained imposition of a new economic order that came to be so described. That was not an inevitable consequence of the military takeover – the generals’ ambitions were simply to crush the working-class movement and thereby restore a social order resting on large-scale private property, not necessarily to embark on a radical free-market experiment. But from 1976, advised by the ‘Chicago Boys’ – a coterie of economists from the University of Chicago (some of them Chileans on Washington-funded courses) headed by Milton Friedman –...