How Margaret Thatcher Saved the Labour Party - Part Two
I was amused by the extraordinary resistance which met my story that Margaret Thatcher saved the Labour Party 30 years ago, and was thus responsible for Blair, Brown and Ed Miliband too. Some said Labour would have survived anyway, by some magic power, without any money. Some denounced me (reasonably) for being a promise-breaker, though I think they would have been less censorious if the resulting revelation had been more to to their taste. Others just argued (on the basis of no knowledge of the circumstances, whereas I have total knowledge of them) about whether it was true, or said that the Thatcher union legislation was in fact tough in other areas, which I don't dispute. Or they said that money hadn't saved the Tories from defeat. So what? The truth is that the knowledge that Margaret Thatcher actually saved the Labour Party from oblivion, and is thus responsible for what that party did when it recovered, is profoundly unwelcome to gullible tribalists of both sorts. To accept this as fact is to accept that their fond illusions are just that - fond illusions. Real politics is not what they think it is. Well, diddums.
The story is absolutely true. My source was both extremely well-informed and very well-placed, and I suspected at the time that he or she was faintly disgusted about what had happened. The information was delivered to me and two other journalists over a lunch-table on what are called ‘lobby terms’, that is to say, what is said cannot be attributed directly to its source, but in this case was hedged about with an extra restriction. I wasn’t sure then, and I’m still not sure, whether the source really wanted us to observe it or not. It certainly can't do her or him any harm for it to be revealed now. It’s an odd thing for a senior politician to tell three journalists something that he or she wants kept secret. But I seem to recall that we all agreed to do so in the discussion that such groups always have after the guest has gone, in which they decide what (if anything) they will write about the encounter. What a collection of gentlemen we were. But were we supposed to be?
Several things persuaded me to break the confidence now. One, that both major figures involved , Margaret Thatcher and Jim Mortimer, have passed away. Two, that the event is now 30 years old, the point at which even Cabinet documents are released. Three, that the chances of the source being identified are virtually non-existent, and it wouldn't hurt her or him if this happened. Four that it has a certain relevance to David Cameron’s frankly absurd attempt to suggest that Labour is uniquely in hock to its donors, which is unjustly winning him golden opinions and praise.
I notice that, as usual, a number of my critics wrote in as if I were defending the Tory Party . People still cannot grasp that it is possible, in British journalism and elsewhere, to be independent of all party machines. I suppose this is because so many journalists are party servants, though increasingly they are the servants of the ‘centre’ consensus, as discussed here a few weeks ago, and will back the Blairite elements of all three parties. The row over the Falkirk selection is actually a quarrel between the Blairites and the Brownites, with Mr Cameron leading the charge on behalf of the Blairites (who, whether in the shape of Blair or Cameron, would take money from almost anyone).
It is amazing how few people can accept the fact that Mr Cameron meant what he said when he declared he was ‘the Heir to Blair’, and was expressing his own true feelings when he ordered his MPs to applaud the Blair creature on his departure from Downing Street. There is one political party in Parliament, and it is not a conservative one. The ‘Conservative’ MPs are, it is true, allowed to play at being conservative from time to time. But it is play, not reality. There was a hilarious moment last week, when Mr Cameron (who for years derided his own party for ‘banging on’ about Europe’) walked into the lobby with his ‘swivel-eyed’ backbenchers in support of an EU referendum, which Mr Cameron has no intention of holding and (unless he has become unhinged) knows very well he will not be in a position to hold after May 2015. As for the alleged ‘repatriation of powers’ on Home Affairs, I think we had better take a long, cool look at that later this week. It is not (how shall I say?),as big as it is being made to seem.
But back to the Labour Party. Perhaps the sharpest comment on my revelation came from Mr David Martin, who wrote : ‘The Trade Union Act 1984, which required trade unions to ballot their members on whether each union should continue to have a political fund, was intended to go further than changing opting out to opting in. To the dismay of Thatcherites, every ballot had a majority in support of political funds. There is no logic in asserting that without financial support from the unions Labour would have suffered political oblivion. Mr Hitchens appears to believe Labour would not have won the general elections of in 1997, 2001 and 2005 without money from the trade unions - but is it not the case that the Tory party has received even bigger donations from its supporters and has not won a general election since 1992?’.
Well, sort of, though I'm not sure about that 'dismay'. Its not that Labour wouldn't have won in 1997, but that it would have efefctively ceased to exist by 1992, if its funding had been cut off as originally planned. Everyone involved knew what a significant measure this was. In 1927, after the defeat of the General Strike, the Tory government passed the Trades Disputes Act which enforced ‘contracting in’ on the political funds of the Labour Party. This was a grave blow to Labour funds, even in the days when most organised working men were keen Labour supporters and actually elected to keep on contributing. The Attlee Government took pains to reverse it in 1947. Laws are only repealed when they are really, really contentious and important in their effect. The wording of the Tory manifesto in 1983 gave Mrs Thatcher a mandate (aftr some talks with the TUC which would almost certainly ahve stalled quite quickly) to re-repeal, and go back to the state of affairs of 1927.
In 1983, with the Labour Party more or less prostrate, and public support for it, even among trade unionists, sagging to dismal levels, I am sure a return to 1927 would have finished Labour for good. I wish it had. Mr Martin perhaps does not recall, as I do , that at this stage the Liberal-SDP Alliance was very close to supplanting Labour. It was my view then, and it is still is now, that the Labour Party should have died a natural death at that stage. In 1980, during the ’Solidarity’ crisis in Poland, the British trade union movement had revealed itself as a nest of apologists for Soviet tyranny, refusing (with a couple of brave exceptions) to support the Gdansk shipyard workers against the Communist authorities. This was because a large number of important unions had been penetrated at very high levels by well-organised Communist and fellow-travelling factions, which ensured that their higher councils and their significant officials were dominated by fellow-travellers or leftist apologists, and that the political power of the unions in the Labour Party (which was considerable) was deployed to help the Left, in domestic and foreign policy. Much of the suicidal behaviour of the unions during this period also only makes sense if it is seen as part of a campaign of national destabilisation. Those taking part probably didn't have a clue they were being used. But I am sure someone was using them.
Because the actual British Commun*ist* Party was always a pygmy (kept alive for years by shopping-bags full of used fivers from the Soviet embassy, handed over at Baron’s Court Tube Station in London and stored in a Golders Green bungalow, details here
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/reuben-falber-480404.html ),
people assumed that British Commun*ism* was also insignificant. But in fact, as revealed for instance in Peter Hennessy’s ‘Secret State’, the CP often rejected promising recruits, telling them they could be much more useful if they did not join. We will never know how many such people ended up in high positions in politics, the civil service, journalism, the academy, perhaps even the Church. But, as an industrial and labour correspondent in the 1980s, it was easy for me to see that such people were very influential indeed at the top level of the union movement, not least in its political links with Labour. In those days, Constituency Labour parties were also quite active ( I belonged to one that certainly was) and their activists were more or less indistinguishable from continental Communists in policies and outlook. Having given up revolutionary socialism myself, and having thought I ws joining a social democratic party, I was quite surprised to find that many members of the Labour Party were well to the left of where I had been when I was an International Socialist.
Many of the activists were men and women who, in France or Italy, would have been open Communists. The remannts of 'right wing' Labour, heirs of Bevin and Gaitskell, were the main victims of such people. The constituency Left carefully and successfully targeted socially conservative and patriotic Labour MPs for deselection in a very effective purge. By the time of the Gang of Four breakaway, the old Methodist and socially conservative Labour Party was dead forever. The attempt by people such as William Rodgers to turn it into a version of the German SPD, during the CND rows of the early 1960s, was comprehensively defeated.
(The famous 'Militant Tendency' , I should say here, was wholly irrelevant in the left-wing takeover, an insignificant diversion, whose ostensible 'crushing' was wrongly taken to be the end of hard leftism in the Labour Party by Fleet Street's gullible, ill-informed 'political correspondents').
I think it is absurd that the well-organised and well-directed minority of real hard leftists, in the constituency parties and among CP fellow-travellers in the unions, should have been able to have such influence over British politics, so long after Communism had been utterly discredited (first in its own terms as a liberation movement of the masses - by the Gulag, by the crushing of the East Berlin workers in 1953, of the Hungarian rising in 1956, and of the Prague Spring in 1968; second in general terms as a utopian panacea and alternative economic system, by the disastrous failure of its economies across the Soviet Empire and in Cuba) .
It was only the union political funds which allowed this to continue. Without them, the CP and the hard leftists could have played their games, but they would have had no major party machine to infiltrate and control. A Prime Minister seriously concerned for the country (especially in the days when the USSR still menaced western Europe with its enormous conventional armed forces) would have taken the opportunity, in 1982, to destroy this menace to freedom and prosperity, even at the cost of her own party’s medium and long-term electoral position. I have little doubt that, deprived of the revenues created by the ‘opt-out’ system, the political levy would have shrivelled to a trickle in that period. Labour would have been destroyed by the Alliance in the election of 1988, and thereafter faded into non-existence. The Alliance might well have won in 1988. It’s my guess that, had this happened, British politics might have achieved the reform they so badly need, under which one party speaks more or less, for the views espoused by Polly Toynbee, and the other one speaks, more or less, for the views I hold. With the Alliance as their principal opponent, the Tories would have had to become more socially conservative and more opposed to the expansion of the EU. As it is, the current Tory front bench is rather confusingly dotted with SDP veterans.
A word about the ballots which were eventually held on the political fund. Tragically large numbers of union members don’t vote in most union ballots, even when the issue is quite significant. If they did, the outcomes would be much more conservative. This was proved, in a way, by the active intervention of several Fleet Street newspapers, including the Daily Express (in those days a major force with a big working-class readership), in union ballots in the 1970s and early 1980s. These interventions themselves followed the disclosure of severe ballot-rigging in the old Electrical Trades Union, a scandal partly exposed by traditional ‘right-wing’ Labour supporters disgusted by Communist subversion. By repeatedly and insistently urging their readers to vote for right-wing candidates in union elections, instead of leaving the voting papers to moulder on the mantelpiece, Fleet Street papers tipped the balance in several ballots, most notably in the Amalgamated Engineering Union, as it then was.
Of course several unions didn’t have much in the way of democracy, so it was harder to influence them.
But significantly, I don’t recall there being any co-ordinated or major Fleet Street intervention in the political fund ballots of the late 1980s. This inaction, in my view, ensured that the status quo prevailed, as the Left always had enough organisation and drive to get *their* vote out without alerting opponents to the importance of the poll. Had there been any co-ordinated Fleet Street action by the ‘Tory Press’ (which would have had to have been sanctioned personally by editors) , then I think Labour would have assumed that this was also sanctioned by the government, and considered it a breach of the Thatcher-Mortimer Pact.
I don’t deny that there were several significant pieces of union legislation at the time. How could I? They are not the point. But I have always believed that the general collapse of manufacturing industry (for which I mainly blame the Thatcher government’s bungled economic policy in the early 1980s) was the real reason for the end of the wave of strikes which had been fouling up British industry since the 1960s. The final Scargill miners’ strike was purely political in intention, and actually helped the government destroy coal-mining in this country. Since then the Union movement has been transformed by mergers and contractions, and is now largely a lobby for heavy spending on the public-sector lobby, and a fortress of ‘Equality and Diversity’, not to mention Warmism and sexual liberationism, the modern incarnations of leftist utopianism now that fellow-travellers have nobody to fellow-travel with any more. And the political funds are still there, and operating.