During much of the 1980s, for most of the time, the Old Right did what the right has traditionally done. They supported the leader, though in this case often through gritted teeth. Kinnock and the Old Right were not natural bedfellows. They helped deliver a Labour NEC that supported Kinnock and we all owe them a great debt on that account.

The Old Right not infrequently used some exceptionally traditional, familiar methods to get the votes in for Kinnock’s leadership. For them this was at least in part personal and pragmatic. They knew Kinnock was their best, maybe their only, bulwark against the Hard Left. But the Old Right were then almost entirely marginal to the new political thinking, the political renewal that was the essence of modernisation. Block votes and administrative measures in the end cannot fix what is going on in people’s heads.

Through the modernisation process Kinnock and the people around him had been able to navigate a fresh path which, at its core, had intellectual rigour and coherence. This developed into a virtuous circle, drawing large elements of the left to the modernizing cause. The result of the General Election in 1987 seemed to confirm we were on the right path although few could have guessed we would have to wait another ten years, nor that the man who started the revival would not, in the end, make the finishing line.

John Smith was of the Old Right but he was leaving them behind. When he became Leader he delivered the hugely important ‘One Member One Vote’ proposition but then called a moratorium on further modernisation, at least in relation to the machinery of the party.  The Old Right were the first to cheer and they cheered loudly. Symbolically this was drawing a welcome and for them a much wanted line under Kinnock and all his works. The Old Right’s tail was up. Normal service was being resumed. They felt they were back in their proper place, in Labour’s driving seat. Ironically elements of the Hard Left were also glad that a halt had been called to modernisation, that some stability lay ahead. Permanent Revolution can be tiring as well as unsettling.

However, elements of the Right and certainly John Smith had by the early 90s also been drawn to a realisation that something new was sorely needed.  Smith’s decision to establish the Commission for Social Justice was widely welcomed as evidence of his considerable earnestness in this regard. It is striking how many policies which surfaced in the Commission’s report during the period of John Smith’s leadership survived and were implemented when Labour won in 1997.

Nevertheless the Commission for Social Justice began its work against a backdrop of anxieties about likely outcomes.  Smith’s unwillingness to contemplate further reform of the party and its machinery was seen by some to betoken a conservative frame of mind which was likely to impede further political development. John Smith’s very obvious distaste for the more media driven, celebrity centred US style of politics which Neil had engaged with did little to dispel such fears.

Perhaps such views were misplaced and ungenerous, we shall never know, but Blair and his allies were worried. Tony went so far as to establish a small and essentially, ahem, secret group which had the express purpose of finding ways of keeping the modernisation project alive under the new conditions of John Smith’s leadership. None of the people in that group could have known the tragedy that would soon unfurl.  John Smith’s sudden and unexpected death would shortly put the reins squarely in Tony’s hands.

Marxism Today may not have been the sole ideological progenitor of the modernisers and its offspring, New Labour, but it was certainly one of the parents. Had Marxism Today not existed … Never mind. It did. Not everything that appeared in the pages of the magazine was of great moment or had any lasting value. Marxism Today’s eclecticism, at times its evident obsession with being iconoclastic, did occasionally grate as they seemed to chase, even become obsessed with any, every and all passing fads and fashions. However, undeniably its core purpose was serious and weighty.

Initially the links between Tony Blair and Martin Jacques appeared to be close. As a small illustration I remember being in a taxi going through the City one day when Tony rang me on my mobile. I cannot recall what he was ringing about but I do recollect that as we stopped at some traffic lights opposite Liverpool Street station I saw Jacques standing on the pavement waiting to cross the road. I asked Tony if he would mind hanging on a minute whilst I said ‘Hello’. Tony instantly snapped back that I should pass the handset to Martin right away because he had been trying to reach him all day, obviously without success. It was rather a comic moment as I suddenly leaned out of the window of an otherwise anonymous Black Cab to pass my phone to a startled Martin explaining that the future Leader of the Labour party wanted a word with him.

None of this is to say, of course, that Jacques or Marxism Today should either be credited with or damned for New Labour. Our children go off and fashion their own lives. We cannot be held responsible for all of their actions. In truth Jacques fairly soon began to express mounting horror. He felt New Labour was straying too far from the tree, abusing the liberty it had been granted. Estrangement set in and remained.

But my not wholly original point is that in an important sense New Labour was not a complete discontinuity. It was a continuity born of these earlier turbulent times. Tony and the people he gathered about him picked up the colours of the modernizing battalions and ran with them in their own special way, the way we all now know about both from the public record and the books which have appeared since the defeat at the general election of 2010. Yet there would have been no colours or flag of any kind to grasp were it not for the advanced guard which had been armed and prepared by others.

To mix military and agricultural metaphors, everyone in the Marquis of Granby that night, along with legions both inside and outside the Labour party, in one way or another played a part in tilling the soil out of which New Labour was to grow. Charles Clarke in particular, Head of Neil Kinnock’s office and John Reid, were two of the better known ones in our midst in the pub but there were several more.

I am happy to say that little talk of this kind took place at the reunion itself.  I believe a plurality are still engaged in Labour or leftwing politics if in the main less intensively than before. I am told at least one person who came on the night had voted Conservative at the last general election and another is a high office holder in the Liberal Democrats. Our very own coalition.

As to the slightly narrower question of the lasting impact or longer term significance of New Labour, as such, opinions were divided. In 2011 a new New Labour beckons. Many who were at the Reunion will be helping to shape it.

Overwhelmingly the Reunion was an evening in which we retold old war stories, cleared up the details of long remembered mishaps, spoke of absent friends and, well, drank a lot. Perhaps it was our advanced years but this was also the first gathering of the Broad Left in recorded history where songs were not sung which highlighted Comrade Trotsky’s many shortcomings and those of his tenacious but happily still shrinking band of followers.

There was an appreciation that we had been part of something dramatic and important. We helped Labour break with the 19th century outlooks and 1945 habits that were destroying us as a modern political force.

The Labour party and the trade union movement had always been an alliance of a variety of shades of opinion and interests which have somehow managed to rub along, to cohere sufficiently to get governments elected which all of the participants believed would serve the commonwealth. Christian Socialists, ethical syndicalists, right through to small ‘m’ marxists were all in there, as they had been from the very beginning of Labour’s history.

Thus, one way of thinking about those times was as a major transitional moment: the maelstrom of ideas and the intensity of the political conflict on the left had its roots in the uncertainties of a new world order that everyone was having to think their way through.  The notion of an epochal upheaval or moment which would mark a decisive break with the past and pave the way to the socialist paradise we all once dreamed of was fast fading from view and we were not at all sure where that would leave us.

Writing this at a moment when capitalism has never looked so shaky might appear to be tempting fortune but, whatever happens next, in the highly interdependent, global economy of the 21st century a return to Attlee-Bevan, much less Bolshevism, can probably be safely ruled out. True enough not that long ago we nationalised a couple of big banks but this was in order to save capitalism not to bury it.

In this blog I have revisited some of the more inglorious and painful episodes of Labour’s not-so-distant past. Politics today are very different, less tribal, certainly a great deal less ideological. It is pointless looking back wistfully to an age where choices were starker, the issues more clear cut, the differences between the parties sharper or even unmistakable. We are where we are.

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This was the third of three posts. The first was Reflections on a Reunion and the second Marxism Today and Labour

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Photo: Dominic Campbell