A Song From 1981 (Or Earlier?)

In October 1981, 250,000 people joined an anti-nuclear demonstration in London. That summer, Tony Benn had come within 1% of being elected Deputy Leader of the Labour Party.

Me? I was unemployed in Brighton.  So unemployed, in fact, I volunteered to work as a steward at that Labour Party conference. As a consequence, I find I am the owner of the 'Phonetappers and Punters Club Official Songbook' (a Clause 4 Publication).

Clause 4, in this context, was a grouping in the Labour Party's youth and student movements who steadfastly opposed the various array of Trotskyists, especially the Militant Tendency, who would otherwise have dominated those youth movements. Because it was a reactive grouping - e.g. anti-Trotskyist - Clause 4 spanned a fairly wide political spectrum from traditional Tribunites to hardline 'Stalinists-in-all-but-party-colours' to 'Eurocommunists-in-all-but-party-colours' and even included a few libertarian leftist/feminist/proto-green types. In student politics they were in deep alliance with the CP. ( I only mention all this as I can't find any reference to  them on the web, so I'm filling in the background). For all this heterogeneity, not to mention a fair dollop of callow youthful sectarianism, they did, in my experience, at least have a sense of humour. Several of them went onto adult political careers, including Ministerial office in a couple of cases.
  
The Phonetappers and Punters Club was their 'end of the pier review' for Labour Conference. The songbook is a window into a different world. CND was being reborn as a truly mass movement.  The politics of nuclear weapons was being discussed with passion and mass involvement again, for the first time in almost 2 decades. & that meant the politics of nuclear weapons on both sides of the Iron Curtain were up for debate. I don't actually know if the song below - intended to be sung to the tune of The Red Flag - was written by the Clause 4 crew in the early eighties or was an inheritance from an earlier age(1) but it captures something of the time , at least as I recall it.


Our cause is surely won this year,
Because 'the leadership' is here,
For Khrushchev's boys and Trotsky's too
Now guide us in the work we do.

Then wave the Worker's Bomb on high,
Beneath its cloud we'll gladly die
And though our critics all shout 'balls'
We'll stand beneath it when it falls.

While Western arms we'll strive to end,
The Russian bomb we will defend
Degenerated though it might be
it is the people's property


The King St comrades chant its praise,
In Clapham they love its blaze,
Though quite deformed politically
We must support it...critically

It will correct our errors past
And clarify with its blast
Deep in our shelters, holes and nooks
We'll all have time to 'read the books'

And when we leave this world of toil
And shuffle off our mortal coil
We'll thank the Bomb that set us free
To Socialist Eternity.


(1) King St was still, then, the HQ of the CPGB. But the reference to Clapham is presumably to the old Clapham grouping of Trotskyists which, in the 1950s, apparently included Ted Grant, Gerry Healey and Tony Cliff - whom by 1981 has most certainly gone their own ways. So the song may actually be older than I'm suggesting here. But there were still folk on both sides of the Stalinist/Trotskyist divide defending the 'Workers Bomb'  when I saw the review in 1981.

Things Were Different When I Were a Lad

Hattip to Blood and Treasure and Virtual Stoa for reminding me that the Left once had a very strong sense of how to avoid the sort of thing we're living through:

"It is essential that industry has the finance it needs to support our plans for increased investment. Our proposals are set out in full in our Conference statement, The Financial Institutions. We will:

• Establish a National Investment Bank to put new resources from private institutions and from the government - including North Sea oil revenues - on a large scale into our industrial priorities. The bank will attract and channel savings, by agreement, in a way that guarantees these savings and improves the quality of investment in the UK.
• Exercise, through the Bank of England, much closer direct control over bank lending. Agreed development plans will be concluded with the banks and other financial institutions.
• Create a public bank operating through post offices, by merging the National Girobank, National Savings Bank and the Paymaster General's Office.
• Set up a Securities Commission to regulate the institutions and markets of the City, including Lloyds, within a clear statutory framework.
• Introduce a new Pension Schemes Act to strengthen members' rights in occupational pension schemes, clarify the role of trustees, and give members a right to equal representation, through their trade unions, on controlling bodies of the schemes.
• Set up a tripartite investment monitoring agency to advise trustees and encourage improvements in investment practices and strategies.

We expect the major clearing banks to co operate with us fully on these reforms, in the national interest. However, should they fail to do so, we shall stand ready to take one or more of them into public ownership. This will not in any way affect the integrity of customers' deposits."

Labour Party Manifesto, 1983 aka 'The Longest Suicide Note in History'

But however suicidal or otherwise it proved at the time it was, of course, the platform on which both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were first elected to Parliament.