Hinterland by Chris Mullin (Profile Books 2016)

It was some time before I had any further contact with Blair. Then, in November 1994, he invited me to his office and asked if I would be willing to go on the front bench. This was not the first time I had been asked (I was by now very respectable). As long ago as 1992 John Smith had asked me to be housing spokesman and I had declined in favour of remaining on the Home Affairs Select Committee. Blair talked of ‘pepping up’ the front bench and giving it a radical edge. ‘So many of the left are …’

‘Impossibilists,’ I said.

‘I was going to say “conservative”. Their idea of being radical is to defend the status quo.’ An astute observation and one that was hard to deny. The Labour left at this time had few new ideas beyond repealing the Tory trade union laws (some of which were sensible and popular) and reversing all changes in the management of the NHS, regardless of whether or not they made sense.

A Man Out of Time

The tubes at Tribune still won't join the 21st century by putting a decent archive on their website, but this sideline page/blog of theirs looks promising in a leftish trainspotterish kind of way (can't be arsed to link to their other sideline blog, a cartoon page, 'cos the cartoons in general aren't up to scratch).

Nice self-deprecating touch by leading off their historical page with a wee political hand-grenade thrown the way of the late Woodrow Wyatt; a man who, in his political life, started out as part of the Tribunite/Bevanite left in the Parliamentary Labour Party in the immediate post-war period, only to end up with a peerage courtesy of Thatcher for journalistic services to her Government's policies.

The sub-heading of the piece on the Tribune page is 'Lech, Toady and Turncoat' but one can't help feeling that the late bow-tied duffer's has been a bit hard done by.

A lech and a toady? Yep, his published diaries and his weekly column for the News of the World in the 1980s, 'The Voice of Reason', testify to the fact that he was enthralled by power, but a 'turncoat'? The bloke was New Labour when Blair was still reading the liner notes to the Tom Robinson Band's 'The Power in the Darkness', as if it was official Labour Party policy.

The poor sod was simply born before his time.

Degsy Goes Down - History Part II

Reidski in the comments box below reminded me that June 12th was also the date the Derek Hatton was expelled from the Labour Party. Wasn't 1986 also the year that Liverpool won the double, beating Everton in the FA Cup final? That really was an annus horriblus for the Pierre Cardin section of the old Militant Tendency.

Fascinating to read that the vote on the Labour NEC to expel Hatton was only won by 12 votes to 6. Six people voted against Hatton's expulsion? OK, I'm guessing that Benn (Tone) and Skinner (Dennis) were on the NEC in '86, but who were the other four who were prepared to give so much slack to the most prominent member of the 'It's just a newspaper, honest' reading circle?

Maybe the Parcel of Jonahs over at Dave Osler's comment boxes are right when they opine that the Labour Left's strength is but a shadow of its heyday in the eighties, and there's no way back. If a decent and straightforward bloke like John McDonnell can't muster up sufficient numbers to even ensure that there is a token leadership challenge against Gordon Brown then the Labour Left really has done a Captain Oates these last ten years.

I remember encountering the old Millies in the Labour Party Young Socialists, and even then there seemed something amiss about them, but from this point in time it's weird to think that someone like Hatton was ever taken seriously. I can't help but smile when I think of Steve Coleman's words when he was reviewing Alan Bleasdale's drama, GBH, in the pages of the Socialist Standard:

"Militant renamed it BGH: Bleasdale Gets Hatton. Hatton himself went on Channel Four's Right To Reply to say that Michael Murray must have been based on him because the fictional character was a bullying, corrupt council leader." [The Eileen Critchley Show, August 1991 Socialist Standard]

Whatever did happen to Degsy?

Whinge of the Day

'These times demands the New York Times' is the ad slogan on every other bus or yellow cab in New York. A snappy wee ad line* for an oh so smug newspaper.

I'd like to borrow - and paraphrase - the slogan just for a moment: 'These times demands that the Labour Left Briefing webmaster gets his or her arse in gear' and gets their bloody website into shape.

I know, I know - my copywriting skills need a bit of work.

With their chap possibly challenging Brown for the Labour Party leadership - less David and Goliath, more a case of Arbroath versus Bon Accord circa 1885 - their moment in the sun has finally arrived, and yet it looks like that their website** is one step above a geocities site that has been knocked together in the time it takes to draw up a composite resolution at a local GMC meeting.

I thought it was us ultra-lefties who were supposed to be the dilettantish amateurs?

*The radical New York free paper, The Indypendent, recently took the New York Times to task for the smugness and doubletalk of its advertising slogan.

**Yep, I know that John McDonnell's own website, John4leader, is much more easy on the eye, but no excuse should be necessary to poke the LLB bods with a sharpened stick. They've got it coming for that awful excuse of a website.