Things are different today

They're not in love, it's just a silly phase they're going through. Kevin Meagher in the New Statesman points out that Labour Party members have always had a bad reaction to being in government, tending to fall out with each other, before pulling themselves together and trying again.

Meagher is quite right, of course. There is a depressing familiarity about Labour's behaviour during the current leadership election. So as they say on The News Quiz, I brought along some cuttings to make the point. These have been culled at random from a very cursory glance through the papers.

So here's Herbert Morrison in 1952, after the fall of Clement Attlee's government, being asked: 'Is it true that the Labour Party is torn by internal dissensions or feuds?' To which he replies: 'There are differences of opinion and many of them are in the process of being argued out. In a progressive party there is plenty of room for argument.'

Despite those 'differences', Labour did come back from the 1951 election defeat, though it spent thirteen years out of office first.

After Harold Wilson's government lost power in 1970, the period in opposition saw bitter divisions over Britain's membership of the European Community. Roy Jenkins and other pro-Europe Labour MPs defied the party whip and voted for Britain's entry, causing Tony Benn to write in his diary about the emergence of 'a new political party under the surface'. Roy Hattersley later reflected that Jenkins's rebellion 'was the moment when the old Labour coalition began to collapse'.

As the Daily Express pointed out in a leader column: 'The longer the feuding, the poorer grows Labour's credibility. That is not good for the country. Our parliamentary democracy demands a strong, vigorous opposition.'

Happily for Labour, the Conservative government of Edward Heath was so disastrous that the electorate removed it from office after just four years. It was a close-run thing though: the Tories got more votes in the February 1974 general election than did Labour.

And then there was the most divisive episode since the war: the fallout from the 1979 election defeat, with the rise of Bennism, the departure of the SDP and a full eighteen years in opposition.

So Kevin Meagher is perfectly right that, even if the Labour Party were daft enough to elect Jeremy Corbyn as its leader, this is (just about) in keeping with tradition. But it feels different this time. Different at least to 1981, the only occasion of which I have personal memories.

And I think Meagher may be a little optimistic is his conclusion: 'Ultimately Labour will survive - as it always has done before.'

I'm not entirely convinced by this. It's the most likely outcome, admittedly. But I've been saying for the last few years that the current political alignment was unsustainable, predicting that: 'New political forces will emerge, whether within the existing parties or outside them.'

Maybe it's the start of that re-alignment that we're now seeing.

It's 1983 again (again)

Returning to 'the longest suicide note in history', the 1983 Labour Party manifesto raised a serious question: if those policies were so obviously doomed to failure, how did they get through the party machinery? It's a subject I addressed in my book Rejoice! Rejoice!

By this stage the Left had already suffered serious setbacks: the 1981 defeat for Tony Benn in the deputy leadership contest had been followed at the 1982 conference by a clutch of right-wing victories in the elections to the National Executive Committee.

Benn himself had lost the chairmanship of the NEC's home policy committee, which he had held for eight years and which had been the base of his power within the party. He had been replaced by John Golding, an MP who was also a senior trade unionist and very much on the right of the party - he was said to regard political theory as being 'in the same league as crossword puzzles'.

Which left a query about why the manifesto, this 'list of meaningless promises,' as Peter Shore called it, was so readily adopted by the new regime.

And the answer appeared to be that, along with most of the country, Golding realized that the election was lost even before the polling date had been announced, and had concluded that the strategic interests of the Labour Party were best served by blaming the defeat on the Left: 'why not lose it on Benn's terms and teach him a lesson?' as he said to Roy Hattersley.

I was reminded of this episode when reading Dan Hodges in the Daily Telegraph, arguing that Blairites should vote for Jeremy Corbyn because 'it's time to call the Left's bluff'.

And it might be worth remembering that the defeat of 1983 was followed by fourteen years of opposition.

Black sections

The noisy controversy over Rachel Dolezal’s self-defining ethnicity in the last few days reminded me of the furore about black sections in the Labour Party in the mid-1980s. This is an extract from my book Rejoice! Rejoice!:

The conflict between the new identity politics and the Labour leadership was evident in the issue of black sections that arose in the middle of the decade. Black activists, particularly in London, began to call in 1983 for separate sections to be organized within constituency Labour parties, based on the model of the existing women’s sections.

They met with immediate opposition, both from the left – Eric Heffer and Militant were opposed in their own ways – and from above: ‘It would create significant problems of racial definition which could lead only too easily to endless unproductive acrimony,’ pronounced Neil Kinnock in 1984.

The following year, two of the leading campaigners, Sharon Atkin and Diane Abbott, met Kinnock to press their case, but again found themselves rebuffed. He asked who would be eligible to join, and was told that the sections would be open to anyone who considered themselves black. ‘Can I consider myself black?’ he asked, and they replied: ‘Patently not, because you’re so obviously white.’ He later told the press: ‘I consider, and so do most other people, the idea of a segregated section on the basis of colour or racial origin to be repellent.’

Despite the opposition, several local parties did set up unofficial black sections, starting with Vauxhall and Lewisham East in London, though their contribution didn’t always seem to be characterized by compromise and comradeship.

‘The Labour Party itself perpetuates racism,’ claimed a booklet produced by the Vauxhall branch for the 1984 conference. ‘It is an institution rooted in a racist society and its own routine practices, customs and forms of organization exclude black people from the structures of power as effectively as if they were barred from membership.’ A conference resolution that year to set up official black sections was rejected by the union block votes.

It was a contentious issue and one that produced a series of anomalies. The Enfield and Barnet branch of the far-right National Front passed a resolution welcoming the idea ‘as the first stage in the realignment of British politics on racial lines,’ adding that: ‘These sections clearly indicate both the inability and unwillingness of blacks to integrate into British society.’

Meanwhile a selection meeting in the Brent South constituency chose Paul Boateng as its parliamentary candidate, but was faced by a demonstration led by Sharon Atkin because the local party didn’t have a black section, even though all those on the shortlist were themselves black.

The controversy died down almost as swiftly as it had arisen. The gradual adoption of leading black figures as parliamentary candidates – Diane Abbott, Bernie Grant, Keith Vaz, Russell Profitt (who had been the party’s only black candidate in 1979) – took much of the steam out of the campaign, leading some to conclude that all along it had been, in Roy Hattersley’s words, ‘really a vehicle for promoting the parliamentary ambitions of metropolitan, middle-class professionals’.

Yesterday's News Today: Ed Miliband in 2010

I was looking through some old newspapers yesterday, and stumbled across the Guardian's coverage of Ed Miliband's debut as Labour leader in 2010.

You'll remember that Miliband was elected at the start of the conference week that September, and that a couple of days later he made his first big speech in his new role. The paper invited various figures to comment on the speech:

Tony Benn: 'I supported him for leader, and he's justified my every hope.'

Roy Hattersley: 'Ed Miliband made the speech which, for years, I have wanted a Labour leader to make.'

Jenni Russell: 'The party has chosen the right man. David Miliband could not have spoken like this.'

Seumas Milne: 'This is a long way ahead of Brown, let alone Blair. It also reflects the mainstream centre of public opinion.'

Polly Toynbee: 'Here was a fresh tone of honesty and authenticity ... This was grownup politics.'

Derek Simpson: 'His clear support for the vital role of trade unions is welcome. It has been too long since we heard a Labour leader speak in those terms.'

Anne Perkins: 'warm words, priorities that any progressive would welcome, and no convincing narrative to show what he wanted to do with them.'

Norman Tebbit: 'He had been well rubbed down with snake oil.'

Martin Kettle: 'a political ecumenism which indicates that Miliband's Labour would be seriously open to a centre-left coalition if and when the chance comes.'

Elsewhere, the Independent ran a similar, though less impressive, feature, with comments from Jim Murphy: 'He ensured Labour would remain in the mainstream... He is a serious, deep politician.' And from Dave Prentis: 'These first steps towards refreshing the party are a giant leap towards reconnecting with voters.'

To add to the picture, here's Kevin Maguire in the Daily Mirror: 'His freshness allowed him to pose as the optimist without appearing to be silly.' While the Sun reported Ken Livingstone: 'It was excellent. The only leader's speech in thirty years when I've agreed with every word.'

And some other newspaper comment. The Daily Telegraph leader concluded: 'Labour may yet rue the day they picked the younger Miliband.'

Daniel Finkelstein wrote in The Times: 'The more this week that Mr Miliband has said that he gets it, the less I have believed that he does. The more he said he "understood" voter concerns (rather than shared them) the more I wondered whether he really does.'

Finally back to the Guardian, this is Deborah Orr, writing two days on: 'The first time I watched Ed Miliband's speech to the Labour conference on Tuesday I felt soothed, even grateful. I'd waited a long time to hear a Labour leader say such things after all. Then every time I saw a clip of the speech, that clip seemed slightly absurd... New Labour was a tragedy. New Generation Labour, I'm afraid, seems farcical to me already.'