Tragedy or Farce

Among many quotable moments from the writings of Karl Marx, one in particular came to mind recently as I was thinking about the upcoming Labour leadership election. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Marx remarks that history has a habit of repeating itself “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”

Whilst searching for a quote in a book called ‘The Far Left in British Politics’ Marx’s words occurred to me. It was this Introductory passage that struck me as a pretty neat summary of what was happening in 2019. Change some of the names and history does appear to have repeated itself.

“When Labour entered the 1983 election under the leadership of Michael Foot most leftists believed that it was a better organisation with a better programme than ever before. Moreover, the Thatcher government had created mass unemployment, mass poverty, a housing shortage, a war, urban riots, a large reduction in manufacturing industry and much else besides: the misery factor could not have been higher. But the Tories remained in power and Labour registered its worst result in 50 years.” (John Callaghan, 1987, The Far Left In British Politics: xii-xiii)

The manifesto was lampooned, by Labour MP Gerald Kaufman as “the longest suicide note in history”. Fast forward to 2020 and Labour right wingers such as Chris Bryant could not wait to declare the election result the "worst night for Labour since 1935". As in 1983 the party has been plunged into a bitter, albeit at this stage a polite, civil war. There is clearly more at stake than just ‘who’ leads but questions of ‘how’ they lead and what exactly they will be leading are to the fore.

Let’s go back to 1983 to see if there are any clues as to what will happen next. By the time the dust had settled on the election Michael Foot had resigned and Labour’s right were determined to ditch a manifesto they never fully supported in the first place. The left believed that the manifesto was fine and were determined to defend its central socialist values. The right were determined to shift the party in the direction of the electorate in order, so they believed, to make it more electable.

The man to take the party forward to electoral success was the centre-left candidate Neil Kinnock who defeated the left’s Eric Heffer and right-wingers Roy Hattersley, and Peter Shore in the leadership election taking 71% of the votes (though remember there was no one member one vote at the time), to become the leader tasked with making Labour electable. Writing some time later, one of the architects of New Labour Peter Mandelson described Kinnock as a warrior battling his own side.

“In 1983, the newly elected leader Neil Kinnock, a Tribunite left-winger himself, grasped the gravity of the situation. He was utterly uncompromising in his determination to confront the hard left. He tirelessly spelled out how the party had to reconnect with its voting base and did not hesitate to identify the policies that needed changing..” (The Independent, 16/12/19)

So successful was Kinnock in his relentless campaign for respectability that he led Labour to two successive Labour defeats: 1987 and 1992. In 1987 Kinnock secured 10 million votes (equivalent to Jeremy Corbyn in 2019] and in 1992, an election he was widely expected to win Kinnock secured 13.5 million votes (roughly equivalent to Jeremy Corbyn’s 2017 total).

As far as I am aware neither Michael Foot nor Neil Kinnock had to contend with a high profile figure from a previous Labour government declaring that they were working every day for their downfall. But, Mandelson’s verdict is interesting more for what he omits to say than what he does:

“He may have lost two general elections but, unlike our experience under Jeremy Corbyn, he took the party forwards, building a broad-based electoral coalition and gathering more votes at each stage of the journey, and he did so precisely because the public witnessed his commitment to defeating a hard left whose instincts and priorities were at odds with their own.”

Mandelson salivates over Kinnock’s decision to ditch most of the 1983 manifesto and to expel the Militant Tendency deliberately misrepresenting them at Labour Party conference. In right-wing Labour history Militant are simply a bogeyman summoned to insult Momentum, an organisation set up to support Jeremy Corbyn which could not be further from Militant. 

Unlike Momentum the Militant Tendency were a Trotskyist entryist group who, coincidentally, had mass support in Liverpool and also managed to elect two of their members – Terry Fields and Dave Nellist – to parliament in the 1983 election which saw even a stalwart of the left in Tony Benn put to the electoral sword. They also were the controlling group on Liverpool City Council and refused to bow before Conservative cuts setting an illegal budget and bringing themselves into direct conflict with the government. The Labour Party, of course, refused to support them.

But, Mandelson also conveniently forgets that between 1983 and 1987 was the epoch changing miners strike. Kinnock’s support for the miners was at best lacklustre and the personal animosity the Labour leadership felt for Arthur Scargill meant that they failed to see the significance of this battle.  If he were capable of irony that would explain Mandelson’s claim that it was Kinnock’s union roots that were behind his leadership.

“Throughout, Kinnock had an indispensable force to draw on: the trade unions which had founded the party and desperately wanted to see it elected again for the sake of the working people whose interests they sought to advance.”

It takes a particular kind of mendacity to make such a claim when the Labour leadership contributed to the biggest working class defeat since 1926.

If Kinnock had the support of the unions, it was not the millions of members, many of whom joined the miners on picket lines, but a bureaucracy that refused to call secondary action, and these in the days before such things were illegal. Kinnock and his advisers were determined to make the Labour Party “electable”, and if that meant abandoning striking miners then so be it. Everything was focussed on a strategy of winning over a hostile press who they believed held the balance of power. As James Thomas in his book ‘Popular Newspapers, the Labour Party and British Politics’ notes following the 1983 election the Labour establishment were intent on keeping the press onside.

“Such a strategy may have reduced some of the worst excesses of the tabloids, but it made no difference to their fundamental hostility…Labour’s strategy also allowed the press to supplement their ‘You can’t trust Kinnock’ theme as they portrayed the Labour leader as a man protected by his minders due to his own incompetence, afraid and unable to answer questions from the public.” (Thomas, 2005)

Cosying up to the press only led to the infamous front pages of The Sun, the most hostile of the anti-Labour papers. The day of the election in April 1992, an election which polling indicated Labour were about to win, The Sun’s front page featured a picture of Kinnock inside a lightbulb with most of the page taken up with the headline ‘If Kinnock wins today will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights’. The following day the paper followed this up with their infamous headline ‘It’s The Sun Wot Won It’. Alistair Campbell, then a journalist in Fleet Street says:

“While I never fully subscribed to the theory that the Tory press won the election they played a part. They ensured that Kinnock was rarely seen as he is, but through a prism of hostility which made him defensive, his colleagues concerned, and his opponents cheerful.” (Thomas, 2005)

Unlike somebody genuinely on the left, think Jeremy Corbyn, Tony Benn or Arthur Scargill, Kinnock had feted the press and had what he thought were good relations with them. Indeed, in the leadership election of 1988 the press were on his side against Tony Benn (by then back in the Commons following his Chesterfield by-election victory). Kinnock and his wife Glenys, counted journalists as, if not quite friends, close associates. They were shocked, therefore, when those ‘friends’ turned on them.

The parallels today are relatively clear. For Neil Kinnock think Keir Starmer. Kinnock came to power espousing his ‘sensible’ but still socialist credentials. Keir Starmer has pitched himself as a continuity candidate. He gave a wide ranging interview with the centrist house paper The Guardian before the leadership process opened. But, in appealing for “unity” he talked of Labour as a broad church and appealed to both Momentum (which has backed Rebecca Long-Bailey) and “people who might self-identify as Blairites.” 

Of course, any party should be united. But, what the centrists ignore is that when the left were in the ascendancy they, especially those in the PLP believed not in unity but in undermining the party leadership using every trick they could. Starmer, as Shadow Brexit Secretary, was instrumental in shifting the party’s pro-Brexit policy to a remain position. 

Only the delusional do not see that when 54 of the 60 seats were in leave areas that this policy was instrumental in the election loss. Tom Peck, of The Independent, a paper that more than any other did its best to undermine Jeremy Corbyn and was unequivocally supportive of the so-called ‘people’s vote’ campaign, writes, following Jess Phillips, that Labour “needs to understand how it came to be in the unimaginably woeful state it is in. It needs to work out how it managed to become repellent to northern working-class voters and the lives they lead. (It could start by rewatching the mad Palestinian flag-waving sessions from its own conference).” 

It was not a handful of Palestine flags that were repellent to the leave supporting working class voters but rather the more incessant background of EU flags reminding them that the Party did not trust them to make decisions. And, is Labour actually in a woeful state? It attracted 10 million voters, it pushed the anti-austerity agenda forcing the Tories to follow them and it has a membership of over 500,000, numbers Blair could only dream of achieving.

Starmer is the favourite in the leadership race. According to Guardian columnist Zoe Williams Keir Starmer is best placed to be leader because: “He is a highly recognisable figure to Labour activists, going back to the 1980’s: anti-militant but also anti-triangulation, socialist but not purist, the antithesis of the career politician..” (21/01/2020)

Well, I have been active in the Labour movement since 1983, and was particularly active during the 80’s. I can honestly say that until Starmer emerged as Shadow Brexit Secretary he was completely unknown to me. Of course, perhaps, I was not as active as Zoe Williams, who was 16 at the end of the 80’s, who has possibly followed his career (he was Director of Public Prosecutions during the Blair years) with interest. As for being the antithesis of the career politician, as a barrister he is, in my view, far too close to the average career politician for comfort.

I am not about to make a prediction about who will win the leadership. I learned my lesson after predicting a hung parliament in December. But, I will say this. Very often professional (dare I say career) politicians say whatever is necessary to achieve their goal. Neil Kinnock and Tony Blair both presented themselves as of the left when it suited them. Both, as it turned out, were very quick to distance themselves from the left when that suited them. Does Keir Starmer, or Rebecca Long-Bailey for that matter, fit this profile?

After 1983, the appeal was to the so-called “radical centre”. This turned out to be a code for pulling the party rightwards in the hope that Labour supporters who had deserted the cause would come back. Rather than engage in argument and discussion with them, it was taken for granted that their views were fixed and therefore it would be necessary for the party to change to attract them. Of course, this failed. The problem was that it was not particular policies that lost the election (either in 1983, 1987, 1992 or 2019) but rather the fact that Labour was the one proposing them.

According to the revisionist history favoured by the right, what got in the way in the 80’s were what were termed the ‘hard left’ who were determined to not only take on the Tories but to develop policies that were decidedly socialist in their orientation. The answer to that conundrum was to expel members who were out of step with the “modernisers”. It started with Militant, but came to include many who were simply too Marxist for the leaderships liking. For many of us, the miners strike was a watershed in which the Labour Party simply seemed like an irrelevance. For others, it was the Iraq War. For the new generation, it may be the climate emergency, or austerity or the Iran War (should it develop).

Labour is currently a mass members party in which the members are treated as a stage army to support the careerist politicians who are embedded in Westminster, and the Welsh Senedd. There are few left in Holyrood. Many people on the left will stay in the party regardless of who wins. Those on the left will live on the hope of promises of more democracy which any leader will find hard to deliver. For many more, the leadership election could herald the end of the Corbyn project that so many people joined to support. The election of Keir Starmer as leader (or possibly Lisa Nandy emerging as the media darling now that Jess has come face to face with her own unpopularity) would mark a decisive break with Corbynism. 

Rebecca Long-Bailey, should she win, does not strike me as Corbyn Mark 2. She does not have the history of activism or principled opposition to a variety of causes. Rather she too feels like a career politician who has successfully ridden the wave of Corbynism to emerge as his successor. She has my support primarily because she is the only candidate who seems likely to be influenced by the left and the least likely to rush to distance herself from a manifesto she was instrumental in creating.

In The Eighteenth Brumaire, a treatise on the French counter-revolution of 1851, Marx remarks that: “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” Nowhere is this more true than the selective reading of the 1980’s by the right of the Labour Party who have concocted a tale of the party burdened by left-wing infiltrators with no intention of winning. Tom Peck in his thoroughly depressing piece of propaganda masked as journalism makes this observation:

“Jeremy Corbyn’s opinions and those who share them are of no value whatsoever to the Labour Party. They are the fast lane to oblivion. This is as true in 1983, as it was in 2019… The best hope for this next short era – the party’s next self-inflicted spell in the wilderness – is that it finds a kind of Kinnock of the hour.”

This is the advice from the smug, self-satisfied liberal elite that were more than partly responsible for the defeat in 2019. Essentially, lets rerun 1983 but in a version that we have created in which ditching socialism was the only way to save a socialist party. But, at least the right have a memory, if a somewhat sketchy one. The left seem to be able to ignore both the memories and the lessons of our own past and in so doing we are destined to repeat over and again the mistakes of the past. Whether as tragedy or farce only time will tell.