The Battle for the Labour Party

Second Edition

David Kogan, Maurice Kogan

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Reader
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781448217359
• eBook ISBN: 9781448217342
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política comparada

The Battle for the Labour Party was first published in 1981 and was referenced by Tony Benn in his 1980-1990 diaries as 'a valuable guide to the developments within the Labour party at this time'. This 1982 updated edition is an essential resource for all who are interested in understanding the history of the Labour Party from 1973-1982. The continuing power struggle within the Labour Party had raged for decades and had drastic effects on its popularity and credibility. At the 1982 party conference, the division between the Left and Right sharpened. Tony Benn's attempts to get into the shadow cabinet, the defection of members to the SDP, the Militant inquiry and the Tatchell affair all added to this general disenchantment. This 1982 edition accurately describes how these events developed. There are two additional chapters which deal with the activities of New Left groups in London boroughs, and with the fightback of the Right between the two party conferences. Interviews with major figures, including Shirley Williams and Roy Grantham, shed light on the events of the time. There is also more detailed insight into the GLC and events within London. For everyone interested or involved in the history of British politics, The Battle for the Labour Party provides an insightful and thought-provoking account of a fascinating piece of history.

1. The Labour Party in Turmoil

The Labour Party has undergone cataclysmic change. The power of the traditional leadership has been broken. The right of the Parliamentary Labour Party to elect Labour prime ministers and leaders of the opposition has been taken away from it. Members of Parliament must now account for their parliamentary actions to their constituencies, and their voting decisions in leadership elections are published. These changes, together with decisive changes in the Labour Party’s policy commitments, have driven leading figures of the Labour Party into forming the Social Democratic Party. By changing the patterns of deference and by reducing the opportunities of patronage, they have also limited the power of the traditional leadership.

How did all this happen? After 1970, when Labour lost power in a general election, the party embarked on a decisive move towards the left, triggered off by the discontent of some of its membership with the policies of the traditional leadership, supported by changing patterns of membership in the party at large, and spearheaded and organised by newly constituted groups of the Outside Left. It is to the work of these groups that we can credit many of the recent spectacular changes in the Labour Party’s organisation and constitution. By assiduously following legitimate and constitutional processes, and by aiming straight at their objectives while their adversaries were vague, complacent and confused, comparatively small numbers of barely known, mostly young, party activists wrought changes that may have a momentous effect on the future of British politics, and may herald the end of the traditional Labour Party.

Between 1973 and 1981 these groups sought to change the Labour Party’s constitution in order to secure their own policies. The left had long controlled the National Executive Committee (NEC) and had been able to get its policies taken up by Labour conferences. It could not, however, win the Parliamentary Labour Party’s approval of these policies. The campaign for constitutional change was waged by the Outside Left with the objective of gaining control over policy-making, and making the party in Parliament accountable to the party in the country.

Instead of mouthing slogans, left-wing activists put their energies into drafting constitutional amendments. In place of passing radical resolutions on the economy, effort was put into winning mandatory reselection of MPs and changing the method by which the party leader is elected. The emphasis was on changing the structure of the party in order to make the Parliamentary Labour Party more open to control by constituency Labour parties and conference.

This campaign was fought at a time of great tension between the parliamentarians and constituency activists: a time when the traditional conventions of deference to the party leader and cabinet were being discarded. As the Labour Governments of 1964-70 and 1974-79 failed to satisfy the demands of the left and national economic problems grew, so party activists blamed the traditional leadership for failing to carry out radical change.

At the 1979 conference they won mandatory reselection. This gave constituency Labour parties the power to discard sitting MPs if local party activists were dissatisfied with their performance. At the 1980 conference and the Wembley conference of 1981 the power to elect the leader of the party, and hence any Labour prime minister, was taken from MPs and given to an electoral college in which they were in a minority. At the 1981 Brighton conference the attention of the world was on this college and on the left’s nominee, Tony Benn, who came within 1 per cent of winning the deputy leadership (when he polled over 49 per cent of the votes cast by the electoral college).

It was only in 1982 that the right wing of the party, led by the trade union general secretaries, began to fight back. The creation of a register of groups within the Labour Party, the attempts to get rid of the Militant Tendency and the removal of the left from power on the NEC were a reaction to the fundamental constitutional changes which the left had secured in the previous three years.

These substantial constitutional victories were accompanied by major shifts in Labour Party policy. The Labour conferences of 1979-82 rejected previous Labour Governments’ policies and demanded withdrawal from Europe, an alternative economic strategy and unilateral nuclear disarmament. Any speaker who argued against these policies or defended the 1974-79 Government was received with, at best, patchy applause and, more usually, outright abuse.

The Labour Party, stabilised by established procedures and with a tradition of deference, was suddenly forced to change its ways. A new style of small group politics, long present in the French Socialist Party and the major American parties, but unknown in Britain, came to dominate the party.

Traditionally, the party had always deferred to the leadership of the prime minister or to the leader of the opposition elected by the Parliamentary Labour Party. Until the beginning of the 1970s no one had challenged the party leader’s right to select his cabinet. The authorship of the party manifesto had always belonged, constitutionally, to the annual conference but, by convention, was in the hands of the leader of the PLP. Attempts made by conference to instruct a Labour cabinet or shadow cabinet on policy had always been brushed aside. But, by 1979, the constitutional fabric and hence the psychology of deference had been eroded as new assumptions about the election of the party leader and the appointment of MPs made their way into accepted Labour Party practice. By 1981, only the decision over who should control the drafting of the manifesto remained in the balance.

Left-wing activists not only argued successfully against received constitutional arrangements, but demonstrated to the political world in Britain that nothing is forever. They showed that long-established power structures can be changed by small groups working on the due processes of a major political party.

The new groups of activists

The new groups call themselves the ‘Outside Left’, because they consider themselves to be outside the traditional bastions of power. They distinguish themselves from the traditional left of the party which is rooted in Parliament and the Tribune Group, and is known as the ‘Inside Left’. The Outside Left was determined that the hegemony of the traditional leadership should be demolished. It was to this end that it insisted on an extension of the franchise to elect the leadership and constructed a college to do this, and secured mandatory reselection procedures for all sitting members. However, it struggled and failed in 1981 to make the National Executive Committee, rather than the Parliamentary Labour Party, responsible for drafting election manifestoes. In some of its aims it was united with the ‘Inside Left’, but, as will be seen, this unity did not hold for mandatory reselection, and the divisions between the two groups – almost a difference of political generation – became irreconcilable.

The Outside Left sought to change the balance of power in the party, so that their policies might come into effect when Labour again took office. Many of those we interviewed repeat that the Outside Left emerged from disillusionment with the behaviour, as well as the policies, of past Labour Governments. They assert that the Wilson and Callaghan style of parliamentary leadership was responsible for the left’s mobilisation. The Outside Left’s discontentment had been sharpened by conflicts over two sitting MPs. The difficulties experienced in Lincoln by the constituency Labour party in removing Dick Taverne, after votes of no confidence had been carried owing to his support for entry to the EEC, and, later, the difficulties experienced by the constituency party in Newham North-east in removing Reg Prentice, confirmed the belief of those on the left that constituencies needed to have power to deselect MPs.

A wide range of left organisations emerged in the 1970s, some primarily concerned with policy and others with constitutional change. From our point of view, the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy (CLPD), founded in 1973, is the most important. It was the CLPD which developed sufficient expertise and contacts within the party for the campaign for constitutional change to be launched and sustained. Alongside them the more widely known Labour Co-ordinating Committee (LCC), founded in 1978, concerned itself with such matters as Labour’s industrial policy and withdrawal from Europe.

There were other bodies which displayed entirely different styles and evinced different motives from those of the CLPD. The Militant Tendency was composed of Labour Party activists who operated mainly in local constituency parties, advocating Trotskyist policies and attracting a reputation for vehement and sometimes intimidatory methods of persuasion. It was only in 1980 that the Militant Tendency and a similar Trotskyist organisation, the Socialist Campaign for Labour Victory, joined the other Outside Left groups in the Rank and File Mobilising Committee (RFMC), an umbrella organisation led by CLPD members and devoted to changing the constitution. But this new-found unity among the groups on the Outside Left proved to be short-lived.

The Outside Left maintains that it was created by the spontaneous and genuinely participatory pressures of rank and file members of the party. The right maintains that the Outside Left was generated by Trotskyist and Communist infiltrators seeking to undermine the democratic structure of the Labour movement. Neither version entirely fits the facts. As we shall seek to show later, it would not have been possible for small groups to have accomplished these changes without the active support of many Labour Party members who perceived the leadership as oligarchic and distant. Equally, however, these massive changes would never have happened without highly skilled and astute strategies and their tactical application.

The Outside Left managed brilliantly to domesticate the issues of power and the constitution: these became matters of debate and discussion throughout the party. It established contacts with constituency Labour parties. It provided the model resolutions which the constituencies could bring forward for annual conference. It worked with the Broad Left (a formal left alliance incorporating Labour, Communist and other groups on the left) and with sympathisers within the trade unions.

Most of its actions were first discreet and tactical. It was only later that the media began to pay attention to what had been happening. Suddenly terms such as ‘model resolution’, ‘electoral college’ and ‘accountability’ became part of the normal political lexicon.

Throughout this period the figure of Tony Benn represents the central enigma. To describe the movement for constitutional reform as ‘Bennite’ is a fundamental error and misrepresents what has actually happened. Those who worked hardest on the Outside Left reiterate their dislike of the cult of personality. They do not all accept Tony Benn’s views on certain policy issues and some of them dislike the moves that he has made on particular tactical issues. They protest that it is policies and not personalities which interest them. Benn, however, became the figurehead of the movement led by the CLPD and the umbrella organisation, the Rank and File Mobilising Committee, which members of CLPD formed and shaped. His role is examined in detail in Chapter 8, which covers the battle for the deputy leadership in 1981.

Until the right regained the initiative in 1982, the new strength and organisation of the left-wing groups, and their ability to unite behind Benn in his campaign for the deputy leadership, contrasted sharply with the ineffectiveness of those on the party’s right. For a long period their reaction was primarily that of bewildered incomprehension. Even the most sophisticated and doughty opponents of the Outside Left found it difficult to untangle the identities and tactics of the groups which were facing them. Many of them now recognise that they had stood out against more participation within the Labour Party for too long. By the 1981 conference even such unlikely figures as Denis Healey were talking of the importance of democracy and participation in the Labour Party.

Even though, in 1982, the right took an absolute majority of places on the NEC, the principal innovations introduced by the Outside Left – the electoral college and mandatory reselection – were not challenged. The right has not pursued the arguments projected through the Campaign for Labour Victory and the Labour Solidarity Campaign: that, if participation and democracy were to be introduced into the process of electing the party leader, it must be in the form of one member, one vote. The right has regained power at the national level, but none of the constitutional issues on which it fought the left has so far been promoted.

By 1982, the attention of the right was focused on the activities of the Militant Tendency, and its main objective was the expulsion of Militant from the party. At the same time the left was becoming less certain of its objectives and increasingly incapable of maintaining unity among its disparate groups.

The right, as we show in Chapter 9, is fighting back, but, because the successes of the Outside Left in 1979-81 were so sweeping and the changes to the constitution so far-reaching, the attempt to reverse them will be a major task. Only rarely do small groups in British politics cause massive change. The Outside Left did so with puny resources and over a remarkably short period. Its success raises fundamental questions of political theory and doctrine. Is it undemocratic to develop power in the way that the Outside Left did? What are the prospects for the distribution of power between the left and the right, and between the parliamentary leadership, MPs and constituency parties as MPs come up for readoption, or deselection, or as MPs retire and their successors are chosen? Where will the balance of power between left and right in the Labour Party come to rest? What will be the impact of new Labour Party practices on the voting procedures within the trade union movement?

These issues now dominate discussion in the Labour Party and look likely to do so until one side or the other is decisively defeated.

2. The Evolution of the Outside Left

The tradition of dissent

The Outside Left inherited a long tradition of dissent within the Labour Party. But never before the late 1970s had a dissenting group gained such dominance within the party.

From the earliest days of the Labour Party there have been tensions between the constituency Labour parties (CLPs) represented at conference and the parliamentary leadership. There is a long history of conflict between those who believe that conference and the National Executive Committee (NEC) should have the power to order MPs how to vote in Parliament and the PLP, which believes that MPs have sufficient mandate to exercise their own judgment by the process of parliamentary election.

Until the emergence of Tony Benn as the standard bearer of the Outside Left, no established parliamentary figure had taken the conference view that MPs should be deprived of the power to elect the party leader. In 1900 the Labour Representative Committee, at its foundation conference,¹ adopted in its policy statement the following phrase: ‘a distinct Labour group in Parliament, who shall have their own whips, and agree upon their policy.’ The issue flared up in 1907 when Keir Hardie declined to take advice, let alone instruction, from conference on such matters as women’s suffrage. In 1935, when George Lansbury sought the support of conference for his pacifist policies, he offered to resign if it did not back him, thus seeming to place the moral decision with conference. Ernest Bevin destroyed the hope of this somewhat inverted mandate by saying. ‘It is placing the Executive and the movement in an absolutely wrong position to be hawking your conscience around from body to body to be told what you ought to do with it.’

Clement Attlee, Prime Minister in the first post-war Labour Government, showed deference to conference until his famous clash with Harold Laski in 1945. Laski, as chairman of the NEC, had said that the Labour Party would not be bound by any foreign policy commitment made by Attlee as a member of the Coalition Government. Churchill made play of this in the 1945 election campaign by warning the electorate that to vote Labour would mean voting for a party at the beck and call of an extreme and unelected body. Attlee refuted this charge by insisting, in a letter to Churchill, that: ‘At no time ... has the NEC ever sought to give, or given, instruction to the Parliamentary Labour Party.’ He is then said to have written to Laski, in a phrase that his successors as party leaders must continue to cherish, ‘a period of silence from you would be welcomed.’

Hugh Gaitskell, as leader of the opposition, also had his conflicts with conference. He had failed in 1959 to persuade conference to get rid of Clause Four, which committed the party to the nationalisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange. He had to fight hard to secure, in 1961, the reversal of the 1960 conference decision in favour of unilateral nuclear disarmament. His early death meant that the independence of the cabinet and the PLP would not be put to the test until the late 1970s.

Gaitskell’s successor as leader, Harold Wilson, was able, for a time, to depend on the deference of the party. In 1964 he came to power with strong party support built on the hope that a new Britain, technologically buoyant and eschewing the faded liberalism of the Macmillan era, would emerge. The slimness of Labour’s parliamentary majority reinforced party loyalty, and Wilson enjoyed strong personal support as the leader who had brought Labour out of 13 years in the wilderness.

The Wilson administration had supreme self-confidence. He brought his own followers into positions of influence at 10 Downing Street and seemed set to rule forever. But, by 1968, in spite of his massive victory at the polls two years earlier, the public’s belief in Wilson’s ability to generate a technological revolution had faded, economic problems had proved obdurate and the enthusiasm of Labour voters had been eroded.

As his troubles grew after 1967 Wilson faced opposition within the PLP over his economic policies, but there was no effective rank and file pressure in the country. Dissent was restricted to Parliament and there was little apparent pressure on MPs from party activists. But the seeds of future divisions were being sown. In discussions with us, members of the Outside Left have testified to a long build-up of discontent with the behaviour of the party leadership. The Wilson Government of 1964-70 had disappointed many on the left. Wilson was seen as having failed to undertake radical change, and, by 1967, his critics on the left viewed the electoral victory of 1964 as a false dawn of socialism. His economic policy had proved a great disappointment. His foreign policy, which included acceptance of American involvement in Vietnam, was severely criticised. And the attempts to reconcile the Labour Government’s incomes policy with trade union power, as expressed in In Place of Strife, had further ali...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Index of Abbreviations
• 1. The Labour Party in Turmoil
• 2. The Evolution of the Outside Left
• 3. The Campaign for Labour Party Democracy (CLPD) Emerges
• 4. Groups of the Outside Left
• 5. The Left Grows in Power (1979-80)
• 6. Unity on the Outside Left (1980)
• 7. ‘We have had every major group against us but we have won’: Triumph at Blackpool and Wembley
• 8. Testing the Electoral College: the Benn Campaign
• 9. The Right Fights Back
• 10.  ‘London’s Ours’: the Triumph of the Outside Left in London
• 11. The Battle for the Boroughs: ‘Let’s Run London Our Way’
• 12. Not a Revolt but a Revolution
• Epilogue
• Footnotes
• Index
• A Note on the Authors
• eCopyright