The Marquis of Granby is a pub not far from parliament. A couple of weeks ago in its upstairs room there assembled a motley crew. The common bond was student politics from the mid 1970s to early 1980s. From Charles Clarke to Dave Aaronovitch, with Sue Slipman and Trevor Phillips in between. It was a reunion. I was there along with about 50 others.

Invitations had gone out to people who had been active in the National Union of Students and were also part of the leadership of a caucus within it called the ‘Broad Left’.  The caucus consisted of three distinct entities: Labour students, of whom I was one, students who were members of the now defunct Communist party and, perhaps the majority, students who were in no group but were sympatico.

For a large part of our sojourn in higher education we had a Labour government which we criticised constantly for being hopelessly rightwing. Then we got Mrs Thatcher. She showed us what rightwing really meant. However, for these purposes what was truly interesting was the battle of ideas taking place on the left. Everyone at the reunion had been part of it.

The long boom was coming to an end. Britain’s competitive position internationally was being eroded. Rampant inflation, runs on the pound, balance of payments crises, all manner of economic woes were a persistent, dismal theme of the Wilson-Callaghan years.

People thought big business was not investing sufficiently in UK plc because of excessively high taxation and, among other things, lingering worries about the attitudes of Labour ministers who had recently been campaigning against membership of the Common Market on the grounds that it would help capitalism to work better. Er. Quite.

The productivity of British industry was forever being unfavourably compared with their US, Japanese and German counterparts. The closed shop and a variety of restrictive practices were not seen as helping, both generally within the private sector but particularly inside what were perceived to be massively loss-making, inefficient nationalised industries.

A user-unfriendly, bureaucratic welfare state seemed to have fallen victim to producer capture. A wage freeze was in place. In January, 1979, yet another strike by public sector workers brought us to a day when the dead could not be buried, meals could not be served to children in schools and rubbish, once more, was not being collected from the streets. In our heart of hearts we all knew the game was up. What we didn’t know then was the nature of the game that was going to replace it.

The phrase ‘It’s The Economy Stupid’ had yet to be invented but the British people were finding their way to it unaided. Labour was great at spending money. Not so good at making it. Our intimate relationship with the country’s major trade unions was believed to be hobbling us, restricting our freedom to act in the national interest because we were so obviously tied by kinship and money to a sectional interest. Most unjustly the Tories’ connections in the City and with industry did not receive the same degree of scrutiny. But two wrongs don’t make a right. Moreover, particularly when we were the government, it anyway sounded a bit whiney and defensive to try to excuse ourselves or wriggle off the hook in this apologetic way.

A few visionaries within the Labour party and the trade union movement, mainly clustered around Stuart Holland, were trying to devise an ‘Alternative Economic Strategy’ but much of it was lost in the background noise of mounting factionalism and approaching electoral defeat.

More recently we have hotly debated what Labour stands for. In the 1970s and 1980s there was little doubt. Virtually all Labour party members shared a strong commitment to social justice, felt an affiliation with the disadvantaged, with poorer rather than richer people, the oppressed as opposed to the oppressors. We used the word ‘socialism’ frequently and without embarrassment. We were anti-Imperialist and in relation to cultural questions we would in the main be liberal rather than illiberal. Some monumental struggles lay ahead on racism, sexism, homophobia and the like but we were starting from a predisposition towards equality.

The towering figures, for both left and right in the party, were still Clement Attlee and Aneurin Bevan. Born respectively in 1883 and 1897 they had grown up in a world which was almost unrecognisable by the mid and late 1970s. For Attlee and Bevan The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists was contemporary literature. For us it was a history book.

Of course, as now, in the 1970s there remained huge inequalities and injustices but the same levels of absolute poverty, the dire hardship regularly inflicted on the many not the few had all but disappeared thanks to Beveridge and the postwar settlement.

Attlee and Bevan were, literally, men from another century. Today they are men from two centuries ago. Part of the problem was that by the 1970s and 1980s the Attlee government had become the equivalent of a ‘Holy Object’. They had ascended into Labour’s hagiography and become an altar or shrine at which we were all obliged to perform a ritual obeisance. The Attlee government was the standard against which we judged ourselves and were judged by others, friend and foe alike.

Through this process of beatification the policies of the Attlee-Bevan era and the tools used to implement them had come to be viewed not only as expressing the enduring political values and beliefs of the Labour party but also to describe the ideal mechanisms with which to pursue them. These had given us Labour governments from 1945-51, 1964-70, then again from 1974-79. They couldn’t be so wrong could they?

Yet a new generation had arrived from the 1960s with no real or adult memory of these men, and certainly no experience of the times or conditions that had shaped them. Newsreels showing scenes from the General Strike and the Jarrow March were powerful and evocative but none of us had been there. Les événements in Paris, Grosvenor Square, Grosvenor House and the LSE were much closer to home. Jimi Hendrix not George Formby.

It was the fixation with mechanisms that was trapping us. Our values and beliefs, our thinking was being obscured or obstructed by it. Big municipal housing projects, every front door the same colour. Every door knob and letter box identical. Indoor toilets. Outdoor misery. Planning without the human touch. Three months to get a new telephone. Why weren’t more people just grateful to us? Look where ‘we’ had brought them from!

The unspoken but common view saw the UK as a stable two-party state in which Labour and Conservatives were aligned to immutable and eternal interests. All we needed was occasionally to freshen up our customary offering, maybe a tweak here, a slight adjustment or flourish there, sit it out and our turn would come again. Some thought we should be a bit more radical or bold, a bit more socialist, or a bit less, but the central tenets were not seriously questioned. Same old same old. Everyone is more comfortable with the familiar.

Regrettably declining Labour party and trade union membership linked to the gradual disappearance of the crafts, the trades, the large workplaces on which trade unionism and Labour had been built were telling a different story for those who had eyes to see.

Focus groups and private polling would later be derided by some as the appurtenances of politicians with no principles but, at this time, the painful realisation was dawning that large swathes of the party and the unions had become little more than highly uncongenial introspective battlegrounds. There was no looking out. We were all way too busy looking in, and snarling at each other.

The party’s connections into wider society had become so attenuated they had long since ceased to provide reliable mechanisms for developing an understanding of what was going on in the country, much less could they help develop answers that had a chance of being accepted by its inhabitants. Certainly in the short term the leadership had little choice but to find other ways of connecting with the electorate, reading their minds at scale and in a reliable way.

We learned that in fact almost nothing was immutable. Bits of the eternal looked extremely finite. We shopped at the Co-op. Everyone else was bunking off to Sainsbury’s. Nobody understood why. Nobody, that is, except Mrs Thatcher and her guru Keith Joseph.

Correction. Nobody except Mrs Thatcher, her guru Keith Joseph and a small group of intellectuals in and around the Communist party. They had spotted that Britain had changed and was set to continue to change at an ever faster rate. The old economy was dying under the impact of larger, powerful global forces. A new economy was being forged in the market’s usual haphazard way. This would have substantial political consequences. New social formations were emerging. The people in them had different perceptions of themselves and the world they lived in. Thatcher, Joseph and the Communists had read the runes.
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Read the second instalmant of Reflections on a Reunion tomorrow

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Photo: decogirl11