The reaction to recent attacks on Progress shows Labour has no desire to return to the 1980s

You cannot help but to have noticed the recent row over the motion at GMB conference seeking to isolate and expunge Progress. First, the National Executive Committee went into an emergency session lasting three days. Split between left and right, it resolved to establish a register of prohibited organisations. Next, the party leader was jeered and booed by the Monday PLP meeting. Then Progress-supporting MPs were put on notice that they would be deselected at the next election. Copies of a pamphlet, How To Deselect Your MP, were circulated to CLPs. It is all heading for an almighty row at conference, with dark rumours of a breakaway party led by prominent former Labour cabinet ministers and  a deputy leadership contest.

The fact that none of the above happened in the wake of the GMB resolution tells you a great deal about the state of the Labour party. The intent of the GMB, and Unison after it clambered on the bandwagon, is purely political. Some in their ranks want to isolate and discredit moderates within the Labour party – people like Ed Miliband, Ed Balls and Harriet Harman – who know the next Labour government will not restore every Tory cut, nor allow public sector pay to spiral. The GMB has 610,000 members. How many have even heard of Progress? It is about creating space for the GMB leaders to argue for their politics, which are to the left of the leader, shadow cabinet and conference. That is politics, and entirely to be expected.

The party’s reaction has been rightly measured. One outcome has been an increase in Progress membership, with people signing up at the solidarity rate of £10. One or two of my acquaintances have torn up their GMB membership cards. But the party has not returned to the bad old days of sectarian warfare, when groups of activists would face each other across a general management committee, firing resolutions and amendments at each other.

The assault on Progress during the National Executive Committee elections made no difference whatsoever to the political balance. Throughout the period of Labour in government after 1997, the constituency representatives have been mostly from the hard-left: people such as Mark Seddon, Peter Willsman and Ken Livingstone. One, Liz Davies, wrote a book published in 2001 about her time on the NEC, surrounded by rightwing betrayal and a sell-out in every cupboard. She was elected in 1998 alongside three other hard-left candidates in the constituency section.

In this year’s elections, one Progress-supporting Unite member who is also a Labour councillor was defeated, and replaced by another. It was a shame that Luke Akehurst lost his seat. He has fought back from incredible adversity to tread his political path. No one works harder for Labour. In Hackney, even the paper-sellers of Labour Briefing afford him grudging respect. Peter Wheeler brings an authentic voice of northern Labour to the London-centric NEC table. He has already done six years on the committee. Unique among its members, he lives in a local authority property.

Once, within the memories of anyone aged over 45 in the party, the GMB resolution about Progress would have seemed positively lily-livered. Labour’s decade between the mid-1970s and the mid-1980s was scarred by disasters, schisms, blunders and silliness. From the defeat in 1979, Labour endured the defection of the Social Democratic party, the deputy leadership election contest between Tony Benn and Denis Healey, the rise of the ultra- and hard-left inside the party machine, the Wembley conference, and, of course, the 1983 election defeat when Labour lost support during the campaign itself. Anyone who had served in government was deemed a traitor, one of the guilty men.

Healey recalls Jim Callaghan, a former holder of all of the ‘big four’ government jobs, being subject to a ‘barrage of the most offensive personal abuse both in public speeches, and perhaps even more wounding, in the private meetings of the National Executive Committee’. During the 1983 election campaign, the NEC was so riven it could only produce a statement, neither condemning nor endorsing, but merely confirming that Michael Foot was, indeed, leader of the Labour party.

During the deputy leadership contest Healey talks of ‘orchestrated attempts to howl me down by extremist mobs of Trotskyists and anarchists, whom Tony Benn did nothing to discourage or condemn’. Benn’s supporters, according to Healey, included the ‘Posadists’ who believed socialism would be brought to earth by creatures from outer space.

Neil Kinnock led a small group of abstentions in the deputy leadership election, which cost Benn his victory by 49.6 per cent to Healey’s 50.4 per cent. At the party conference in Brighton in 1981, Kinnock was jostled and heckled for his perceived ‘betrayal’. His biographer Robert Harris writes how Kinnock ‘was surrounded by a hostile group of Benn’s supporters. There was some brandishing of fists and pushing, and, as he turned to leave, someone spat at him’. On the Friday lunchtime of conference, Kinnock was kicked by a young man in the toilet in the Grand Hotel, and the future leader is quoted as saying ‘then I beat the shit out of him’. Afterwards, it was reported there was ‘blood and vomit’ all over the floor.

It is impossible to imagine such things in our party today. Gordon Brown offensively abused at the NEC. Ed Miliband beating up conference delegates in gentlemen’s toilets. Rachel Reeves, Stella Creasy or Chuka Umunna facing deselection in their CLPs for failing to support public ownership of Marks and Spencer.

We have come a long way and learned some hard lessons. It was not just about expelling the Militant Tendency and Socialist Organiser, both genuine examples of a ‘party within a party’ on the Trotskyist model of ‘entryism’. It has also been about a change in culture – a respect for differing views and perspectives, a space for new ideas, and a unity of purpose around beating the Tories. Progress has been part of that shift, along with the myriad groups and factions that make up our party, from the Fabian Women’s Network to the Labour Friends of Turkey, from the Labour Campaign for Electoral Reform to the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy.

We are a party of affiliates, sections, factions and ginger groups, and always have been. Indeed, let’s not forget that the Labour party was united by an idea – that working men and women should have their own party in parliament – but it was created by a coalition of organisations, not individuals. These organisations included small trades unions, representing different industrial crafts and trades, from cigar-making to French polishing. They included the major industrial unions from the coalmines, cotton mills, ironworks and shipyards. But they also included groups of socialists, including the Social Democratic Federation, the Independent Labour party and the Fabian Society.

Each of these groups – factions, if you will – brought different ideas to the table. The unions brought practical demands to improve conditions in the workplace. The Fabians dreamt up the welfare state. The ILP brought an evangelical approach to tackling injustice and poverty. Into the mighty tributary of Labour flowed liberalism, Fabianism, trade unionism, cooperation, Guild socialism, Christianity, environmentalism, feminism and Marxism. Thus from the very start, the Labour party was a coalition of different interests and ideas, often in conflict with one another.

But as the reaction to the GMB resolution has shown, we are more than the sum of our parts: we are also a united progressive party, more concerned with the future of our country than a retreat into sectarianism, grandstanding and the rhetorical luxuries of a lengthy period of opposition.

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