Neil Kinnock’s bravery to stand his own ground in the early 1980s was a model for my own political shift, reveals former Bennite Adrian McMenamin
I have not quite been here before. I did not get around to joining the Labour party until I was 16, with my membership approved by Chipping Barnet’s general committee on 25 March 1982 – the same day as the ‘byelection of the century’ in Glasgow Hillhead.
In a way I am glad I was not one of those people who submits their application on the day they become eligible: if I had joined in December 1980 I would almost certainly have voted for Tony Benn as deputy leader the following year, and quite likely have played a small role in Jon Lansman’s Bennite insurgency that pushed us close to the edge of destruction in 1981.
By the time the electoral college met on the Sunday of that year’s Labour conference I still wanted Benn to win, but the doubts were beginning to grow: his refusal to guarantee that he would not run against Michael Foot for the leadership in the following year was weighing heavily. And if there was one person I looked up more to than Tony Benn it was Michael Foot.
That evening, though, I really began to wonder if Labour had not just had a lucky escape. The decision of a few members of the Tribune group of leftwing MPs – notably Neil Kinnock – to abstain in the final ballot had ensured Denis Healey had scraped home. Now their entirely democratic decision was being denounced as treachery. It was ugly but it was effective – in turning me off Bennism.
My final straw was Benn’s refusal to accept shadow cabinet collective responsibility later that autumn. He deliberately and pointedly defied Foot in a speech from the frontbench and got the sack for it, and it was fully deserved.
I was not the only one who was moving on. Though a bigger and much more fundamental ‘realignment’ on the party’s left was another three years and a defeated miners’ strike away, by the spring of 1982 the mood of many was shifting. The ‘rank and file mobilising committee’ which had brought the Militant tendency and supporters of Clause IV – the group dedicated to destroy them – into temporary alignment had gone, while the Tribune group was breaking up as the hard left walked out.
The divorce between the hard and soft left – terms which began to be used around this time – was not driven by the shock of an electoral defeat: in fact that spring, at least before the Falklands invasion, the Tories were, at best, level pegging in the polls. It was because democratic socialists had had enough of an alliance with Leninists, authoritarians and those more concerned with factional control of Labour than with the plight of those who needed a Labour government.
For sure, the movement away from the hard left gained momentum as it became clearer defeat was coming, but it began with a rejection of the politics, not a calculation about electoral outcomes.
Today, Kinnock’s election as Labour leader in the autumn of 1983 is conventionally taken to be the moment at which our party began its long road to recovery. And it is certainly the case that without that, redemption would likely never have come.
But Kinnock’s victory – and to win he had to beat a hard-left challenge as well as Roy Hattersley from the traditional Labour right – did not appear out of nowhere, but began with his decision to refuse to be co-opted by the Bennites and to stand his ground.
We have to hope that there are people out there, in the parliamentary Labour party, in the constituencies and in the unions, who are willing to learn the lesson: we cannot fight back if we are never willing to fight.
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Adrian McMenamin is the former chief press and broadcasting officer for the Labour party. He tweets at @adrianmcmenamin