Yesterday once more

There's a lot of talk about the 1980s, all of a sudden. Particularly about the 1983 general election, when Labour went down to a crushing defeat. And since it's been a long time since I put a graph on this blog, I thought I'd remedy that with a chart showing the opinion polls conducted by Gallup on a monthly basis right through the 1979-83 Parliament.

There are, as Sherlock would say, a couple of points of interest.

When James Callaghan relinquished the Labour leadership in November 1980, he left the party on a 47 per cent share of the vote, more than 10 points ahead of Margaret Thatcher's Conservatives. Michael Foot maintained that position for a few weeks, but then it all went catastrophically wrong.

In January 1981, Labour stood at 46.5 per cent. By December of that year, support had crashed to half that level, on 23.5 per cent. It still stands, I believe, as an all-time calendar-year record. And this was the year, of course, that Tony Benn challenged Denis Healey for the deputy leadership of the party, a particularly nasty and divisive contest.

So spectacular was Labour's decline that it tended to eclipse, then and afterwards, the appalling performance by the Conservatives in the same year of 1981. They started in January on 33 per cent, and ended in December on 23 per cent.

To present the figures like this, however, is not entirely honest. Because, as you can see on the graph, December 1981 was something of a rogue poll, showing a massive spike in support for the newly formed Liberal-SDP Alliance. The existence of a third force was the main cause of the decline in support for both major parties that year, but the Alliance was never to get anywhere near those dizzying heights again.

If we go to the poll published in April 1982 - the last one conducted before the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands - the figures stand at: Alliance 37 per cent, Conservatives 31.5 per cent, Labour 29 per cent. In other words, the Tories had remained fairly constant, and the Alliance had primarily taken its support from Labour.

Victory in the Falklands, combined with an economic recovery, saw the Tories end the Parliament back on track: they won 42.4 per cent of the vote in the 1983 general election, just 1.5 points down on the 1979 election. And behind them, virtually neck-and-neck, came Labour and the Alliance.

The standard explanation on the Left, obviously, was that the SDP had split the anti-Tory vote, gifting Thatcher a landslide that was simply not supported by her share of the vote. The bitterness - and lord, was there bitterness - was directed primarily at Roy Jenkins and David Owen for having led the breakaway from Labour.

My own interpretation is to lay the blame entirely at the feet of Labour MPs, who chose Michael Foot rather than Denis Healey as leader. With Healey as leader, life in the party would have been chaotic and vicious for a while (as it turned out to be anyway), but the SDP would not have come into being. At least not in that potent form, though Jenkins may have tried to start a new (unsuccessful) party. And Thatcher would probably not have won in 1983.

Because leadership is important. Tony Benn's constant refrain was that issues not personalities are what's important in politics. But he was wrong. People vote on personality, as we've just seen in this year's general election.

Labour lost because the electorate, having given Ed Miliband a cursory glance, didn't believe he was up to being prime minister. Just as, in 1981-83 the electorate didn't think that Foot was up to the job. It's not primarily about the policies, it's about character.

Why don't you do it again?

Following Labour's  massive defeat in the 1983 general election, the party began the long, painful march back to electoral success. A new leader, Neil Kinnock, was elected, senior figures stepped back from the front-line, and policies associated with the 1983 manifesto began gradually to be dropped.

And, just fourteen years later, the Conservative Party was finally removed from government.

The election defeats in 2010 and this year are not on the scale of 1983. Not quite. But there are, I think, echoes of the 1980s to be heard. In particular, there is an attitude within Labour that harks back to that long period of opposition.

In my book Rejoice! Rejoice! (available in paperback from all good retailers), I argued that the radicalism of Margaret Thatcher 'threw the left on the defensive, so that the Labour Party seemed constantly to be fighting rearguard actions, seeking to protect a status quo from which support was fast draining away.'

Every change made by the government, I said, was 'opposed until it had been implemented and had been seen to win popular approval, at which stage Labour accepted it. The impression given was that the party was hidebound and dogmatic, and yet paradoxically lacking in principle.'

And that, I fear, has been the impression that the party has again given in recent years. Because, under David Cameron, the Conservatives have rediscovered a Thatcherite zeal for reform, and Labour still hasn't worked out how to respond.

Those on the left often cite the achievements of Clement Attlee's government, the great changes that were wrought even at a time when the nation was in massive debt and struggling to cope with the aftermath of the Second World War. Against all the odds, and against conventional political wisdom, a new world was built. 'We were, as Winston Churchill said, a bankrupt nation,' reflected Nye Bevan, 'but nonetheless we did these things.'

The same may one day be said of Cameron's governments. In the face of a huge economic recession, the coalition set about the radical restructuring of the NHS, of education and of the benefits system. And Labour's reaction has been, as in the 1980s, simply to oppose every change that is mooted, to denounce it as unnecessary, vindictive and wrong, possibly evil. After which, the truth is gradually acknowledged - too late to be of any use - that maybe change was necessary after all.

Put another way: If a Labour government were to be elected in 2020, how many of the Tory reforms to education and welfare would it actually reverse? Precisely.

As acting leader, Harriet Harman (elected to Parliament in 1982) has at least tried another tack: of accepting large swathes of the government's benefits agenda as soon it was announced. Inevitably this has caused some tension in the party, with both the front-runners for the leadership - Yvette Cooper and Andy Burnham - distancing themselves from her approach.

They're probably right to do so. Apart from any question of morality and principle that Labour might wish to articulate, this isn't normally a successful political course to steer. When in opposition, the cry of 'me too' does not tend to get heard, no matter how loud you shout. This is particularly the case in the immediate aftermath of an election defeat, when no one is listening.

But there is an alternative. It starts by recognising that change is necessary, that there are no sacred cows and that things are going wrong. Which can be controversial, but shouldn't be.

To suggest that the NHS is failing to deliver the service that it should deliver is not the same as demanding that we abandon the institution entirely. It's merely to point to an obvious, if not often articulated, truth: the NHS isn't good enough. It really isn't. Its efficiency and patient care could be considerably improved, and the public has a right to expect better.

And the same is true elsewhere. Educational standards in the state sector are not high enough, and the public has a right to want improvement in the performance of Britain's schools. The benefit system has developed too many flaws to be allowed to continue unchallenged, and the public has a right to feel that its tax contributions could be better targeted.

When William Beveridge and the other great reformers of the 1940s set out to change society, they identified the five giant evils as squalor, ignorance, want, idleness and disease. Progress has been made, but you'd be hard pushed to claim that these giants have been slain.

Reform is necessary and inevitable. But by simply adopting a defensive position, Labour has - in the post-Attlee years - chosen not to participate in shaping that reform.

There have been exceptions, of course. There was James Callaghan as prime minister, for example, launching his great education debate in the 1970s, though it was a subsequent Tory government that actually made all the running, culminating in the Education Reform Act of 1988. Better yet, there was Frank Field, with his thinking-the-unthinkable transformation of the welfare state, which Gordon Brown point-blank refused to fund.

That latter case illustrates Labour's problem. If the entire system of benefits needed to be re-examined - and it did and does - then it's important to have the Labour Party coming up with some ideas. Because if it doesn't do so, then it simply hands over the whole thing to the Tories to make whatever changes they deem necessary. And the Conservatives may not have the same priorities. Which leaves Labour bleating on about Iain Duncan Smith's 'hated bedroom tax'.

The problem with not accepting the need for change - and therefore failing to initiate new thinking - is that it passes the agenda to your opponents. And it can take an awfully long time to recover from that.

I don't know if you remember Ed Miliband's speech to the 2011 Labour conference. Possibly not, though it was said to be enormously significant at the time: 'the most radical analysis of Britain's plight offered by any Labour leader since 1945,' according to the post-match punditry of Patrick Wintour in the Guardian. It was the speech that was going to reframe the public debate of capitalism, with its distinction between predators and producers.

But perhaps the most striking section of that speech was when Miliband dwelt on the past. There had been speculation that he was going to apologise for the mistakes made by the last Labour government. But he had much older fish to fry. 'Some of what happened in the 1980s was right,' he told conference. 'It was right to let people buy their council houses. It was right to cut taxes of 60, 70, 80 per cent. And it was right to change the rules on the closed shop, on strikes before ballots.'

Thirty years on, and Labour was still trying to get over its failed strategy in the 1980s. Before straightening its tie and going out to make the same mistakes all over again.

Now that's what I call a Labour leadership election

Final nominations are due in tomorrow for candidates wishing to stand for the Labour leadership. Which inevitably brings comparison with the best slate of candidates who ever stood for the job, back in 1976 when Harold Wilson unexpectedly resigned as prime minister. The following is an extract from my book Crisis? What Crisis?...

The three principal candidates of the right in the election were Roy Jenkins, Denis Healey and Anthony Crosland, who had respectively voted for, voted against and abstained in the crucial 1971 Commons debate on entry into Europe. The rivalry between them ensured that there was no single figure around whom the right could comfortably coalesce, though the election did go some way towards resolving the issue for the future.

In the first ballot Crosland was decisively beaten into last place with barely 5 per cent of the 314 votes cast by Labour MPs (who then made up the entire constituency), and was therefore automatically knocked out.

Jenkins came third in a field of six but, distraught at having got only fifty-six votes, withdrew from the race, to the undisguised glee of his arch-enemy: ‘When I think of the fantastic press that man has had, year in year out, and all the banging I’ve had, it is gratifying that he should have only got eighteen votes more than me,’ exulted Tony Benn, who had already announced his own withdrawal.

It was indeed a disastrous performance by Jenkins; ninety Labour MPs were considered at the time to be strongly pro-European and yet the man who had risked his career by defying the party whip on the issue, and should therefore by rights have been the leader of that group, attracted little more than half of them.

Healey, however, coming second to last, with a paltry thirty votes to his name, refused even to consider withdrawing, and thereby enhanced his position for the future. Where Jenkins looked like a beaten man, Healey was revealed as a born fighter, determined to stay in the ring until forcibly ejected from it – next time round, it was clear, he would be the champion of the right and would probably be the favourite to win.

Crosland’s analysis of the contest summed up the shifting fortunes of the also-rans: it was, he said, ‘A year too soon for Denis. Four years too late for Roy. Five years too soon for Tony. Two years and one job too soon for me.’

The left was also split, despite the performance of Michael Foot. He came top in the first ballot, getting three times as many votes as Benn, but Benn was able to take comfort from a Sunday Times poll that showed him as the second-placed candidate among Labour voters, clearly ahead of Foot. Amongst Labour activists it is to be assumed that his support was stronger still, such was the growing gap between the old left in Parliament and the younger, more radical factions in the party outside, who looked to Benn as their tribune.

Foot had only joined the front bench in 1974, after many years on the backbenches, and though he brought with him a history as the conscience of the left and as the passionate defender of the memory of the sainted Nye Bevan, whose constituency he had inherited, he was starting to seem like something of a relic, a platform orator in a world shaped by the mass media. Moreover he was a man whose fierce loyalty to the party ensured that he would always side with the leadership in moments of crisis, a fact that was anathema to the idealist Jerusalem-builders two generations below him.

For it wasn’t just the attitudes that were looking elderly; now approaching his sixty-third birthday, Foot was older than Wilson himself. Even so, he was still younger than the man who beat him in the third and final ballot. (Healey had been knocked out in the interim round, gaining just one vote more than Benn had on the first ballot, which again gave the latter ‘great pleasure’.)

James Callaghan, the ultimate victor in the contest, was in many ways an outsider in the race, overcoming the handicaps of birth and circumstance. ‘Prime minister, and I never even went to university,’ he marvelled in his moment of triumph, revelling in his defeat of five Oxford graduates.

He had succeeded largely by remaining outside the fray; aligned with the factions of neither left nor right, but instead establishing himself as the master of the party machine, he carried no ideological baggage, just a reputation as a safe, if unadventurous, pair of hands. By these means he had already occupied the other three great offices of state – chancellor, home secretary and foreign secretary – before ascending to the highest position of all.

As Claudius put it in the recently screened BBC adaptation of Robert Graves’s I, Claudius, when he finally became emperor and was accused of being half-witted: ‘I have survived to middle age with half my wits, while thousands have died with all theirs intact. Evidently quality of wits is more important than quantity.’