Neil Kinnock did not do it alone

—Peter Mandelson’s deservedly warm description in the last issue of Progress of Neil Kinnock’s fight to rescue Labour in the 1980s omitted one vital ingredient – the role of the unions in the fightback. They proved pivotal in turning round the party’s fortunes by providing Kinnock with a moderate majority on the National Executive Committee, without which he would have been hard-pressed to achieve anything – especially the expulsion of Militant, where senior union officials did the heavy-lifting. This has been recognised by Kinnock himself and by Denis Healey, the party’s former deputy leader, who concluded: ‘Without the unions, change wouldn’t have happened.’

By the 1979 election defeat, the NEC had turned itself into the ‘disloyal opposition’ to the Callaghan government – passing 23 votes critical of the government over 14 successive meetings. The following months were dire, with the 1979 and 1980 conferences witnessing the Bennites attacking  Labour’s record, adopting automatic reselection of MPs and deciding to remove the choice of leader from the parliamentary Labour party.

Before that last change was made, James Callaghan stood down and Michael Foot was elected by the PLP, horrifying those already unsettled by the party’s behaviour.

Some brave MPs fought against this leftward march which they believed made the party unelectable. But others began to think the party could not be saved and, the day after the Wembley conference which gave the biggest share of the electoral college (40 per cent) to the unions, they signed the Limehouse declaration which would lead to the Social Democratic party and the defection of a dozen Labour MPs.

That was all in the public domain. What was not known was the reaction of a group of long-standing, moderate, brave and far-sighted trade union leaders who believed that the party could not fulfil its role of getting  trade unionists into parliament if it became unelectable. They decided to use their block votes to change the composition of the hard left NEC as a precondition for ‘saving’ the Labour party and making it an electoral force again.

No sooner had they begun to plan, however, than Tony Benn – taking advantage of the new electoral college which gave MPs 30 per cent instead of 100 per cent of the votes – decided to challenge Healey for the deputy leadership at the 1981 party conference.

The fledging, secret, trade union gathering – named the St Ermin’s Group after the hotel where it met – knew that it had to defeat this challenge, or risk a greater defection of MPs to the SDP which was riding high in the polls.

Nifty, intelligent footwork not only saw Healey re-elected, albeit by a tiny margin, but also saw moderates gain five NEC seats, the unions controlling the women’s seats in addition to the union places. This was only the start. Each year, seat by seat, a moderate majority was created on the NEC so that after Kinnock’s  election as leader in 1983 he had an executive committee which backed rather than opposed his changes and, in particular, stood solid behind him during his 1985 Bournemouth speech in which he attacked Militant.

So, while Mandelson writes that the turnaround ‘was ultimately Kinnock’s achievement, no one else’s’, I beg to add that without the help of trade unionists, loyal to Labour and its core values, his task would have been near-impossible.

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Dianne Hayter is author of Fightback! Labour’s traditional right in the 1970s and 1980s, and a former chair of the National Executive Committee

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Photo:  Rob C Croes/Anefo