As I rambled through the sealed zone that is the Labour conference site on Sunday night, I had a growing feeling that I had somehow wandered into a Congress of Zombies. Inside these odd secure areas, the only place where politicians can be seen in the flesh in any numbers any more, there is a very strange atmosphere entirely unlike the rest of the country. I am sure it helps the power elite to forget what life is really like.
The place is crammed by two very strange breeds of the Undead, the professional political class - groupies and careerists who slave for think tanks or as bag-carriers in the hope of becoming MPs and Ministers; and the enormous squadrons of political journalists who now cluster round them, in many cases also hoping to make the leap across into government. Look and see how many men and women who appeared to be independent journalists in 1995 were working for New Labour by 1999.
In pools of other-worldly TV lights, unreal-looking types blather into microphones, watched by the aides who have worked so hard to make sure that these types say nothing in the least bit interesting.
These obsessives are gripped by the - to me - meaningless Blair-Brown struggle and behave as if there is a real controversy here. I am haunted by memories of the days when the Labour Party was a living, breathing organism, not a cadaver on life support from millionaires. There was also a real controversy.
I particularly remember the genuine contest for the Deputy Leadership of the party between Denis Healey and Tony Benn. I am not pretending that I liked Labour much in those days. I was badly bruised from trying to do what people who know nothing about British politics are always urging other people to do - to change the Labour Party from within. I used to attend ward and general committee meetings assiduously. I spoke against unilateral disarmament. I attacked IRA terrorism. I was opposed to the wild, destructive militancy of the unions - a subject I could claim to know about, as I was in those days an industrial correspondent.
It was entirely futile. I was called to order by a biased chairperson, because I was being heckled. This was deemed to be my fault. And my position, in a tiny knot of diehard right-wingers, was typical.
Outside a few pockets of grizzled Cold Warriors in the Engineering and Electricians unions (who had seen the Communists at work and fought them), and a besieged band of MPs, Labour was by then almost completely taken over by the more -or-less destructive and anti-British Left.
Right-wing Labour -socially conservative, tough on defence, in favour of NATO and suspicious of Moscow - was even then an isolated and dying force. The Communist Party's well-tuned industrial organisation was immensely influential in many big unions and - through them - in the high councils of the Labour Party.
Meanwhile the Constituency Parties were increasingly dominated by the university-educated New Left of one kind or another. The days when there had been serious numbers of old-style Labour members, able to defeat the pro-Soviet and fellow-travelling types (which they did) in the long battles of the early 1960s, were long gone. Most of those who were still alive had by this time defected to the SDP.
Benn, by rights, should have won that election. But Healey did, by an incredibly narrow margin, and the dimwits of the political commentariat then and ever afterwards imagined that the Left had been beaten and the Labour Party had returned to 'moderate' sanity. They would say the same when Neil Kinnock defeated the tiny, insignificant Militant tendency a few years later. In fact, Healey's front-bench political career was over, and so was Benn's. But the truth was that the Left had really won and since then there has been no serious Left-Right division in the Labour party. I believe there is still one Labour MP who might loosely be described as 'right-wing' but he is a sort of curiosity, kept on show in case anyone asks to see one.
It wasn't a straightforward Left-Right battle at all. There was no Right wing to fight it. There was another conflict, harder to understand, which was mainly about method and principle, and which was confined to the Left. You could say it was between the Trotskyists - noisy, idealistic, rash - and the Stalinists - quiet, conspiratorial, cynical. Both wanted a Britain far more socialist than it then was. But the Stalinists had the sense to see that this was better achieved by stealth and camouflage. Labour's ruling elite, to this day, hates Trotskyist ultra-leftists far more bitterly than it hates the Tories (if indeed it hates the Tories at all these days. Why bother?) . It hates them because they were open about their aims, and so kept Labour out of power for years.
And you'll notice that the unapologetic ex-Communist John Reid is now rated as 'conservative' in Labour's spectrum. The veteran Trotskyists, on the other hand generally keep very quiet about their pasts and refer to themselves as 'Blairites' - a politically meaningless designation which just means 'loyal to the leader in power'. They have accepted their defeats gracefully and now see that the Stalinists had a point. Power is fun, and rewarding, even if you got it by deceit rather than at the head of an adoring revolutionary mob.
Benn himself has become a rather enjoyable guru, so divorced from ambition that he is rather good at telling the truth, and so wonderfully old-fashioned in his manners and speech that conservatives, such as me, take pleasure simply from seeing and hearing him. Benn never really took to Marxism and remains an intensely English radical, who could have been one of Cromwell's Ironsides, which is another reason why he appeals to people like me. He loves Parliament, liberty and national independence. No wonder the Stalinoid Left wouldn't unite behind him. Healey, incidentally, is also very hard to place in the modern Labour spectrum. In fact I defy anyone to do it. He's simply too intelligent and knowledgeable to stomach it. And he's a real ex-Marxist, who genuinely gave Communism up but can still understand its power and importance.
So the Stalinists won, pausing to remove that other picturesque old English romantic Michael Foot. Their chosen fig leaves were first Neil Kinnock and Roy Hattersley, who the country couldn't believe were any good; and then Anthony Blair (who has no opinions and knows nothing) and Gordon Brown, who is a strange 1930s throwback and knows everything. Their job was to present a moderate, reassuring front - a public school accent on one hand, an insistence on 'prudence' on the other - while they raped the constitution, rampaged round the country imposing political correctness, and debauched the economy with taxation and debt.
The crucial task (and see Edmund Dell's wonderful book 'A Strange, Eventful History' for more detail on how important this was) was to gain the full two terms Labour had always thought it needed to make irreversible change, and the third to put the lid on it so that the Tories could not even try to turn back the clock. Since 1931 this had always been denied them. Now, through Stalinist stealth, they have finally got it.
In the past, Labour had always hit bad trouble in its first term because the economic policies rebounded just in time for the election or even sooner. Now Gordon Brown had the sense to move more cautiously, saving up the bad news for later and hiding it well in labyrinthine budgets. And political radicalism was difficult when it was linked with weakening the country in the face of a Soviet threat. Once that link went, people weren't so alarmed, even if they should have been.
One of the most interesting things about the current Parliamentary Labour Party (so interesting that 'political' journalists have never noticed it) is this: That almost all of them were in favour of scrapping British nuclear weapons, unilaterally, when this would really have mattered and would have strengthened the USSR; but that the same people are now quite happy to keep them, when they don't really matter and when there is a perfectly reasonable case for spending the money on other types of weaponry.
No, at the time, they claimed they were horrified by these weapons of mass destruction. But their horror evaporated as soon as the Cold War was over. Which tells us that their horror was phoney, and they really were anxious to make Moscow more powerful. Well, that's all over now. The Left has given up old-style Soviet Communism, which even they must now realise was a flop. But they haven't given up the objective of a socialist world. They've simply adopted different methods of getting there, the cultural wars they are now fighting, the mass immigration they are now sponsoring, the multinational and global authorities they are building to supplant conservative, sovereign nations. Decent old-fashioned patriotism is fated to become a sin, known as 'racism'. And so we go from Stalin to Star Trek.
The war between Blair and Brown has nothing to do with this. It is tribal, like a war within a clan or between two Mafia families. There is no political disagreement between the two (though they like to adopt positions to appear different, rubbish about schools from Blair, rubbish about Britishness from Brown). They have become like one of those couples who enjoy bickering so much that they just cannot stop, however much it upsets everyone around them. Their battle isn't interesting. Its outcome isn't important. Nor is any political movement or development, which fails to challenge the left's total domination of thought and culture.
