The organisational focus for this group on the left was what in the end turned out to be the improbably named monthly magazine ‘Marxism Today’, an official organ of the Communist party. The brainy vanguard was led by the Editor Martin Jacques. It included people like Andrew Gamble, Tony Lane, Stuart Hall, Bea Campbell, Charlie Leadbeater, Doreen Massey, Suzanne Moore, Robin Murray, Sarah Benton, Geoff Mulgan and, say it with reverence and hushed breath, Eric Hobsbawm.

Most of these were never members of the Communist party. Some were in the Labour party, others were in no party. Another Broad Left. They shared a vision. All of our attachments to every manner of ancient verities were put under the microscope. Marxism Today became an ideas factory.

The huge growth in white collar service industries, the rise of aspirational consumerism, the weakening of class loyalties, indeed a great fuzziness over what the term ‘working class’ now meant and who was in it, the re-emergence of the women’s movement, multiculturalism, an assertive gay community that refused to stay in the closet, these were truths which could not be gainsaid or ignored by retreats into rousing choruses sung in praise of our martyrs dead.

Marxism Today saw the rise of Thatcherism signifying a new, anti-trade union, populist authoritarianism in which liberal values across the piece were threatened. In the way she went about her business in those early days Mrs Thatcher gave every appearance of wanting to prove them completely right. For all our sakes, it was argued, the left, the whole progressive cause, not only needed new ideas it also had to find new ways to do politics that were in tune with the zeitgeist. ‘Zeitgeist’ became a zeitgeisty word. We all had to ‘get with the project’.

The rising number of members of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds contrasted with and soon dwarfed the falling number of members of the Labour party. Whilst our feathered friends were becoming more captivating, we were becoming less. Seemingly not everyone shared our endless fascination with compositing procedures or for meeting mid-week in the evening in cold colourless, often smelly rooms, sometimes even in working men’s clubs or other places where women were not allowed unless they were signed in by an existing member.

Key adherents of and propagandists for the Marxism Today view of the world were active in student politics. This meant they were also active in the Broad Left in NUS. The Broad Left was an extension or part of the experiment, an exploration of exactly the sort of new thinking that was being mooted to replace the Attlee-Bevan 1945 model. It’s not that we had ringside seats, we were in the ring.

Dreams and possibilities flowed in all directions including directly into the Labour party through the National Organisation of Labour Students as well as through the constituency parties and the trade unions to which we belonged. They rippled more widely again through community organisations and campaigns we had already joined or would soon be joining.

We all felt we were part of a world in which optimism was still the norm. The horrors of the Soviet Empire and crass privations of the Soviet system continued to pose a major challenge to democrats everywhere.  Against that the victory in Vietnam, the end of fascism in Spain, the demise of Portuguese colonialism in Africa all reinforced a shared inner belief in the inevitability of socialism. Locally we might have hit a rough patch but it was temporary. The final outcome was not in question. Oh boy.

We could see the writing going up on the wall for male-dominated, mono-cultural, mono-ethnic, mono-anything. A new vision of a more nuanced and differentiated but still eventually socialist world was emerging. We were moving to or were already in the ‘post-Fordist’ age. White men sporting oil stained dungarees and mucky faces, spanners in hand, were not required to leave Labour’s stage, but they had to make room for others to join them. We needed to hold on to existing Labour voters but it was also imperative that we reached out to and embraced new constituencies or die, and our death would be bad news for everyone else who also needed Labour to win.

Some municipalities, perhaps noticeably the GLC, pioneered a new style of politics, experimented with new forms and instruments of delivering social justice and economic efficiency. In the main these were very much in line with and were a test bed for the sort of thinking being reflected in the pages of Marxism Today. For all that some of the GLC’s policies were then denounced as extremist, today they are considered commonplace and mainstream.

Within the Labour party an enervating and distracting civil war was going on and getting worse. The conditions for new thinking to come from outside ‘normal channels’ were therefore particularly propitious although this fact alone does not explain the singular impact or importance that Marxism Today was to acquire.

Internal party strife became particularly acute after Labour was defeated at the general election in 1979. Up until then matters were fairly simple. On the one hand we had what you might now call the ‘Old Left’, the ‘Tribune Group’ of MPs, congregating around the weekly newspaper ‘Tribune’. They thought of themselves very much as the heirs of Bevan, strongly associated with unilateral nuclear disarmament.

As the left started to grow so what we now think of as the ‘Old Right’ began to organise, principally through the ‘Manifesto Group’. Roy Hattersley, John Smith, Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams, Bill Rodgers and David Owen were among the first to join. The strong connections of this group to the Fabian Society meant that for a while the Fabians struggled to gain any acceptance or credibility for their work outside of rightwing Labour circles.

The Manifesto Group and its supporters were also keen Atlanticists, the heirs of Hugh Gaitskell. They were as fiercely against unilateral nuclear disarmament as their counterparts were in favour. Nuclear weapons and attitudes towards them were for several decades one of Labour’s great internal fault lines.

After the defeat in 1979 very rapidly politics within the Labour party started to get a great deal messier, more complicated, more vituperative, more unpleasant. The collapse of party membership, particularly in inner London and in Liverpool, had opened the door to 57 varieties of far left ‘entryists’, of whom the largest and most important grouping was ‘Militant’. They had revolutionary objectives which they sustained through a clandestine organisation: a ‘party within the party’. Militant’s version of recent history and proposed remedies for the future were playing well with sections of a demoralised rank and file in both the Labour party and the unions.

The Old Left started to crumble, particularly after the Benn-Healey fight for the deputy leadership in 1981. A Bennite ‘Hard Left’ emerged which distanced itself from Tribune. Their critique of the Wilson-Callaghan years was harsh. Their proposals for how we avoid a repeat were taking us into orbit. Credible rebuttals, different interpretations, alternative visions were thin on the ground. The centre left’s position was not holding. It was in danger of being swallowed up, overwhelmed or drowned out. The whole party seemed to be getting drawn closer to the outer edges.

After the Benn-Healey fight the Bennite ‘Campaign Group’  became the Parliamentary wing of the Hard Left. Dave Nellist MP was a member of the Campaign Group and remained a member until his expulsion from the Labour party in 1991 for being part of Militant’s organisation.

Almost anyone expressing any reservations about the Hard Left’s direction of travel was labelled a ‘right winger’. This meant you went on a list run by Hard Left groups like London Labour Briefing (Briefing), whose influence stretched way beyond the capital. If you were put on that list and you were already a Member of Parliament your life could be made miserable, unbearable. If you were seeking selection for the first time Briefing would mobilise against you and that could be decisive.

Aspects of Militant’s antediluvian ‘workerist’ politics meant they tended to keep their distance from or were shunned by Briefing and other elements of the Hard Left but only those with a nerdy fascination for left wing theology could spot some of the differences in their positions. For years Militant had enjoyed more or less unchallenged control of Labour’s youth wing, the Labour party Young Socialists. They even seised control of NOLS, although that only lasted for two years from 1973 to 1975. In 1975 Mike Gapes was elected chair. Militant never took it back.

In Liverpool adherents of Militant gained power on the city council, with Derek Hatton as their most visible and voluble front man. Liverpool was Militant’s strongest stamping ground but they had members and sympathisers all over the country.

With Derek Hatton and Militant in Liverpool, Ted Knight and Briefing in London, it was all looking pretty grim. A variety of bizarre beliefs and antics were set to harm Labour’s standing even further with the British electorate. From outside it looked ever so slightly as if the lunatics were taking over the asylum.

Indeed it was about now that the term ‘Loony Left’ entered the language. Sections of the media felt free to make up lurid stories which regularly had precious little foundation in fact, but too often there was enough.

The sad thing was there were legitimate grounds for concern at grassroots level within the Labour party, not only around particular policies but also in relation to how politics happened.

There had been some egregious examples of leading figures showing complete contempt for party members, the party’s machinery, indeed the party itself. De haut en bas. One such was Reg Prentice MP. He was a Labour cabinet minister.

When news broke that Prentice’s local party in Newham were beginning moves to deselect him 180 Labour MPs, more than half of the entire parliamentary Labour party, wrote in his support. It did no good. In 1976 the Newham North-East General Management Committee decided Reg Prentice would not be their candidate at the next general election. The party’s NEC found that Newham North-East had followed the rules meticulously. They declined to overturn the decision. Prentice appealed to that year’s Annual Conference but lost. Shortly afterwards he resigned from the Cabinet. The following year he defected to the Tories. The Conservatives found him a seat in Daventry. Prentice was returned as a Conservative member of parliament. Mrs Thatcher made him a minister in her government.

Prentice became a potent symbol of treachery at the highest levels. With so many Labour MPs having come out in support of him there was a suspicion that there were still plenty more like Prentice around, individuals whose attachment to the cause was a great deal thinner than their attachment to remaining as members of parliament. Prentice stoked the fires of rebellion inside the Labour party and in the unions although no one could have foreseen the conflagration that was to come.

The Campaign for Labour party Democracy (CLPD) had been established in 1973. CLPD took Labour’s multiple and varied ‘failures’ and boiled them down to one simple explanation: a lack of accountability on the part of MPs to their constituency parties, and a lack of accountability of Labour Governments and Shadow Cabinets to decisions of Annual Conference. ‘Lack of accountability’ in this context was a euphemism. What they meant was they didn’t trust anyone who was not in the pocket of or aligned with one of the factions that supported and was involved in CLPD: the ‘real socialists’.

Ironically CLPD had little or no involvement in the deselection of Reg Prentice. It was home grown in Newham, but Prentice was to become CLPD’s cause célèbre even, to retain the Gallic idiom, its raison d’être.

At first CLPD attracted support from a cross-section of left wing opinion within the party. However, the organisation was soon taken over by the Hard Left, mainly in the form of Briefing. It began a rapid descent into obscurity and irrelevance.

CLPD was emphatically not in the least bit interested in the battle of ideas. In those days, before mass ballots of party members became common, small groups of people could exercise disproportionate and essentially unaccountable power locally. It was putsch or be putsched. Not a pretty sight. Deselection  stories became part of the daily diet for the media, or at least that’s what it felt like.

Although comparatively few coups against sitting MPs in the end succeeded, the more prominent the MP being threatened with the sack the larger the media coverage. The public were left in no doubt that Labour was a house divided against itself. Big time. And they didn’t like it. Big time.

Those MPs who stayed in the Tribune Group by contrast became known as the ‘Soft Left’. However, both before and after the split the Tribune Group had proved useless as a rallying or organizing point within the party. By the 70s and 80s the Tribune Group saw its role almost entirely in terms of Westminster with an annual beauty parade at Conference. Tribune as a weekly paper had by then become largely an extension of this blinkered, London SW1 perspective.

During our time in student politics a number of Broad Left Labour party students, who had identified strongly with the Tribune Group of MPs, came to understand its fundamental weakness in terms of addressing the political crisis which was developing within the party. We created a new body called ‘Clause IV’ and when we ceased to be students the Clause IV network gravitated naturally towards and was deeply involved in the Labour Co-ordinating Committee.

The LCC was established in 1978. As with the early days of CLPD the LCC started off containing and reflecting many different shades of left wing opinion inside the party. Like everything associated with the left inside the Labour party the LCC was deeply affected by the Benn-Healey contest. The LCC came through it. The LCC became a continuation of Clause 4 and Broad Left thinking by other means, although clearly in this context it was impossible to maintain organisational links with any external political parties.

Through the LCC we hooked up with like-minded individuals who had not been students or at any rate had not been involved in NUS student politics. Nonetheless they shared our vision of what the Labour party could be and needed to be. I am pretty sure the first time I met Tony Blair was at an LCC event. He fell into this category.

Many MPs, Labour NEC members and trade union seneral secretaries were fully aware of what Militant and other ultra-left activists were all about. Quite cynically they were content for them to remain within our ranks, willing to defend them and work with them. Tactically they were allies in a shared mission to drive out or marginalise ‘the social democrats’. That covered practically everyone who had been in or had loyally supported the previous Labour government apart from Tony Benn. In a world where no new thinking is required politics is reduced to this. All that the ‘True Religion’ needs is faithful prophets. CLPD, Briefing et al were the vehicles seeking to deliver the new disciples.

On the other hand several MPs and activists on the Old Left of the Labour party, innocently but mistakenly, saw criticisms of Militant and those of a similar stripe as being no more than right wing attacks on ‘genuine socialists’ or ‘enthusiastic young people’.  Frank Allaun and Joan Maynard shared with Kerensky a simple view that they had ‘no enemies on the left’. Allaun and Maynard had not seen what we had seen down on the coalface of student and youth politics. We all know what happened to Kerensky. An article appeared in Tribune, jointly authored by two of my heroes, Ian Mikado and Jo Richardson, in which both dismissed concerns over Militant as ‘worrying about a tiny dog snapping at your heels’.

Lovely man though he was, Michael Foot’s election as Leader seemed to confirm that the dynamic within the party was all wrong.  I was not alone in failing to see this at the time. Hindsight confers a rare kind of wisdom. Shirley Williams, David Owen, Roy Jenkins and Bill Rodgers went off to form the ‘Social Democratic party’ (SDP).

The reasons the ‘Gang of Four’ left were not ideological. At the time you could barely put a cigarette paper between them and Hattersley, Smith, George Roberston and all the others who stayed with the Labour party feeling abandoned and betrayed. The Gang of Four left the Labour party because they became convinced the Hard Left was taking over and therefore Labour was shortly to become incapable of winning a general election ever again.

Nevertheless this split divided the anti-Tory vote and helped to keep Conservatives in power for almost 20 years. Paradoxically in the long run it might also have been what saved the Labour party. Some prominent Broad Left people from the NUS went with Owen, Williams et al. Sue Slipman and Sue Robertson were perhaps the two best known. Sue S jumped straight from the Communist party, Sue R from Labour.

The general election result of 1983 could hardly have sent a clearer message. We went to the people on a Manifesto that was accurately described by Gerald Kaufman as the ‘longest suicide note in history’. Labour came within a whisker of receiving a smaller percentage of the popular vote than the arriviste SDP. That would surely have been a mortal blow. We were in big trouble. Within the party a recovery led from or by the Old Right was impossible.

This is where Marxism Today played an especially significant, I would say historically decisive role. They showed it was possible to be on the left and yet also be willing to examine critically the positions, traditions and practices on which the Labour movement had prospered hitherto. Where these were found to be out-dated or harmful, and were therefore holding us back, they said so. Marxism Today was not alone in doing this but they were pivotal.

Crucially Marxism Today gave everyone on the left permission to question everything about the nature of radical politics. Years later, in the early 90s, a rehabilitated Fabian Society produced the seminal paper ‘Southern Discomfort’. Its effect was electrifying. Some saw ‘Southern Discomfort’ as a psephologically informed description of the core messages of Marxism Today as encapsulated, for example, in their idea of ‘New Times’. Psephology matters to Labour.

‘Mondeo Man’ and ‘Worcester Woman’ were to become familiar to us all. The attention Labour gave to these notional characters was criticised by some, again so-called friends and foes alike, as a triumph of marketing over conviction politics. The latter, of course, were morally and in every other way superior to the former, even if it meant Labour never got elected. Glorious, self-pitying defeat was much to be preferred. Intoxicating, high flown romantic rhetoric, perhaps with an Eisentein movie flashing across our synapses, was safer. As long as we felt OK with ourselves what did it matter that new nurseries would not be built, hospitals would be starved of investment and industry would continue its flight from these islands?
Others saw Mondeo Man and Worcester Woman as challenges. How do we shape Labour’s message, Labour’s values and, in this highly visually literate 24/7 media age, Labour’s image to the prevailing conditions of our time?

The characterisation of these new approaches to Labour politics as a ‘betrayal’ or a ‘sell out’ in my view is profoundly wrong. Many saw them as doing the best we could to take Labour and its historic interests forward into the 21st Century. Nothing stands still forever. Refusing to change can be seen as betrayal of another kind.

Back to the 1980s. I have another distinct memory. The 1983 Labour party Conference. Neil Kinnock was still not party leader but this was only hours away. Neil is speaking at a huge meeting which his people had organised. He is quoting wholesale and with evident approval directly from a copy of Marxism Today which he had in his hand on stage. Specifically Neil is quoting from an article by Eric Hobsbawm in which Hobsbawm did a reprise of ‘Left Wing Communism an Infantile Disorder’.  Indeed Hobsbawm was also on the platform speaking to the theme of ‘The Forward March of Labour Halted?’ Rarely can worshipper and idol have been in such close proximity.

The juxtapositions, the coded message was easy to decipher and not accidental. We were to hear echoes of this evening again when Neil made his famous speech at Bournemouth in 1985. Thus, what began as an intensely intellectual undertaking fostered by a small number of people in a politically irrelevant and powerless grouping eventually found its way through twists and turns into the day to day reality of mainstream UK politics.

These times spawned a new respect for the role of intellectuals, not something for which ‘This Great Movement of Ours’ was famed. The Institute of Public Policy Research was born out of this invigorating climate. Independent of the Labour party, definitely, but then very much of it nonetheless. Demos came from the same stable although its links to Labour were far more slender.

Put crudely, there could have been no Tony Blair leadership, no New Labour or New Labour government without Neil Kinnock. Kinnock began the process of modernisation that would make Labour electable again. He did it from the left. Neil opened us up to notions that would be adopted as New Labour’s signature tunes. What New Labour would finally become is, as they say, something else, another story for another time.

To put it in a different way, the fact that Tony Blair’s government would eventually do some things one might not wholly agree with emphatically does not mean the entire basis on which the party changed itself and its messages was wrong, bad or unnecessary. Without Kinnock setting us off on the path of modernisation there would have been no party worthy of the name to worry about. Of that I am completely certain. Does that mean we got everything right in terms of how and what we modernised within the party? No it does not but that also is another story for another time.

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Read the last instalment of Reflections on a Reunion on Monday, and read yesterday’s here