The Fall and Rise of the British Left

By Andrew Murray

The remarkable advance of "Corbynism" did not emerge from nowhere. It is the product of developments in socialist and working-class politics over the past forty years and more. The Thatcher era witnessed a wholesale attack on the post war consensus and welfare state, through a regime of deregulation, attacks on the unions, privatisations, and globalisation. However, at the same time, there has been a persistent resistance to the growing powers of neo-liberalism - yet this side of the story is rarely told as it was considered to be a history of defeat. Yet out of this struggle emerged a thoroughly modern socialism.

This book is essential reading for those who want to know where Corbynism comes from: the policies, personalities and moments of resistance that has produced this new horizon. This includes the story of power struggles within the Labour Party, and the eventual defeat of New Labour. The movements outside it - trade unions, feminists groups, anti-fascists activists, anti-war protestors - that have driven the policies of the movement forward. And the powerful influence of international groups that have shaped the potential for a global progressive politics.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Verso UK
• Release date: Sep 17, 2019
• ISBN: 9781788735148

Andrew Murray

ANDREW MURRAY (1828-1917) was a church leader, evangelist, and missionary statesman. As a young man, Murray wanted to be a minister, but it was a career choice rather than an act of faith. Not until he had finished his general studies and begun his theological training in the Netherlands, did he experience a conversion of heart. Sixty years of ministry in the Dutch Reformed Church of South Africa, more than 200 books and tracts on Christian spirituality and ministry, extensive social work, and the founding of educational institutions were some of the outward signs of the inward grace that Murray experienced by continually casting himself on Christ. A few of his books include The True Vine, Absolute Surrender, The School of Obedience, Waiting on God, and The Prayer Life.

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The Fall and Rise

of the British Left

Andrew Murray is chief of staff of the union Unite. He was chair of the Stop the War Coalition from 2001 to ’11 and 2015 to ’16. He is the author of a number of books on history and politics, including Off the Rails and Stop the War: The Story of Britain’s Biggest Mass Movement (with Lindsey German). He worked as part of the strategic leadership of Labour’s 2017 general election campaign and continues to advise the party.

The Fall and Rise

of the British Left

Andrew Murray

First published by Verso 2019

© Andrew Murray 2019

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-513-1

ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-515-5 (US EBK)

ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-514-8 (UK EBK)

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A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

Typeset in Fournier by MJ & N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall

Printed in the US by Maple Press

For Jane Barker and Eddie Barrett

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

  1. Class-War World: 1973

  2. The Overpowering Tragedy: 1976–1985

  3. Fragments of the World, Unite: 1979–1990

  4. Thatcher’s Long Shadow: 1997

  5. Blows against the Empire: 2003

  6. Giddiness and the Return of Politics: 2008

  7. Morbid Symptoms: 2010–2015

  8. The Corbyn Moment: 2015

  9. Why the Left Is Risen: 2016–2018

10. The End Is Everything: 2019

Postscript

Notes

Index

Acknowledgements

Many people have assisted in the writing and preparation of this book. At Verso, particular thanks to my superb editor Leo Hollis, whose suggestions have enhanced the finished work considerably; to Tariq Ali for his support and political commitment; and to Tim Clark, Mark Martin and Rosie Warren for their assistance.

A number of comrades and friends have been kind enough to read all or part of this in draft, and to have stimulated numerous vital improvements – Shelly Asquith, Sian Errington, Lindsey German, Len McCluskey, Jessica Murray, Laura Murray, Carmel Nolan, John Rees, Jane Shallice, Jennie Walsh and Nick Wright. Particular thanks to Jessica Murray for her invaluable research assistance on a number of points.

None of the aforementioned bear any responsibility for either errors included or opinions expressed in the text. Given that I work as Chief of Staff at Unite the Union and as an adviser to the Leader of the Labour Party it is important to emphasize that I write exclusively on my own behalf. In particular, for the benefit of the odd journalist who may stray upon this work, the views expressed here are not necessarily Jeremy Corbyn’s!

Special thanks to my wife Anna; children Jessica, Jack and Laura Murray and Sally Charlton for their support; and my grandchildren Vincent, Shannon and Zoe for the lovely distractions. I hope that by the time the last three make sense of stuff in the wider world, this stuff makes sense to them.

The period covered in these pages more or less corresponds to my own active political life to date. The argument therefore bears the imprint of many comrades who I have learned from and worked with down the decades – mostly in the Communist Party, the Stop the War Coalition, the Labour Party and Unite the Union (previously, for me, the Transport and General Workers’ Union). They are too numerous to reference individually, but it would be remiss not to record special thanks to the leadership of my union, in particular its General Secretary Len McCluskey and the Chair of the Executive Council, Tony Woodhouse.

This book is dedicated to Eddie Barrett and Jane Barker, two comrades and friends from the T&G who couldn’t stick around to see the possible imminence of a socialist government in our country but who certainly fetched their stones to that cairn. Those who knew them can easily imagine their enthusiasm at this conjuncture, and it is further motivation to press on.

Andrew Murray

London, March 2019

Introduction

And yet it moves.

    Galileo Galilei

As the Labour leadership campaign of summer 2015 unfolded, it became clear at some point that Jeremy Corbyn might win. Amid the mounting enthusiasm generated by this prospect – a fantastical one just a few weeks earlier – I went to a campaign rally held at the Camden Town Hall in London. The room was engulfed in a noisy energy and optimism. Pumped up by Owen Jones, the many hundreds attending were at a pitch of political excitement even before the main event took to the stage. It felt and sounded like an outpouring of feelings largely suppressed for a generation or more.

In my lifetime, I reflected, this sort of movement ends one of two ways for the left whenever a leader in whom such hopes are invested secures office. After a bold start, the new government either swiftly finds it expedient to compromise with the institutions of economic and political power, thereby disappointing the people and dividing supporters before slinking back into opposition; or it holds fast to its commitments, defies the establishment, tackles the centres of privilege – and we all get shot.

So, time for a third way. This book aims to contribute to the search.

Somewhat unexpectedly, Britain seems ahead of all comparable democracies in presenting the opportunity for an alternative to both neoliberal centrism and the national-populist authoritarianism which has arisen in rejection of the former. The progressive left has returned from the political grave to have a passable shot at governing before long, although the way ahead is obstacle-strewn.

On the day this is written the Daily Telegraph carries an article bemoaning the fact that ‘Corbynism’ has broken out of its British fastness to infect the politics of, inter alia, the Democratic Party in the USA and the left in France and Germany: ‘When the far Left took control of the Labour Party, it was possible to dismiss its cranky mix of Seventies state control and punitive taxes as a purely British phenomenon with no real lasting appeal. Now it turns out that it was merely the beginning of a worldwide trend.’¹

Who would have thought? Not the professional commentariat in the Westminster ‘bubble’ for sure, who can, at the very gentlest, be criticized for a chronic lack of curiosity and imagination. They are prisoners not merely of their own prejudices but of a linear misreading of history that holds that the way things are is the way they have to be and the way they must surely remain.

This book endeavours to set the revival of the left in context. Central to this is the international development of neoliberalism, which emerged as a political force (after prolonged intellectual incubation) at around the same time as the labour movement in Britain was at the pinnacle of its influence. As neoliberalism advanced from think-tanks in Chicago to actual tanks in Santiago, so the left retreated from the centre to the margins.

Since then neoliberalism has become something of a catch-all term of abuse. It is not, however, the same thing as either capitalism or right-wing authoritarianism, although it is related to both. It was the guiding thinking behind the ruling-class initiatives that swept away the power of the labour movement – the social base of the political left – over the course of the 1980s. Its main precepts, centred on maximizing the scope of market relationships at the expense of almost everything else, were hegemonic worldwide until the financial crash of 2008. The fall and rise of the left in Britain, then, mirrors the rise and fall of neoliberalism around the world.

While much of this book focuses on the fortunes of the Labour Party over the last fifty years, the Party itself is not necessarily coterminous with the British left. The latter includes all those who politically advocate for a shift to a socialist system of society, a grouping that overlaps considerably with the labour movement. In contrast, the Labour Party has always included an element (usually dominant) not interested in socialism at all, while the left has embraced movements, campaigns, initiatives and parties standing outside the Party.

Today, the left and the Labour Party are more closely entwined than at any point in history. This has been the outcome of the left’s own struggles against a rising and then declining neoliberalism since the 1970s. It is represented by Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party, although it did not start there and won’t end there either. As a result, this is not another book about the rise of Corbyn. It is about a movement and the ideas underpinning it, which cannot be reduced to any one individual and will outlast any particular leadership and any foreseeable electoral outcomes.

Chapters 1 through to 8 are more or less chronological, telling the fall–rise and rise–fall stories together, perhaps informing younger activists how we got here and what debates there were along the way. The two concluding chapters break with the chronology. In essence they seek to answer the question posed by a colleague who read an early draft of this book – ‘How do we win?’ – by which she meant how do we get from here to socialism.

None of the scenarios which gripped the left I grew up with in the twentieth century appear fully plausible any more, although neither 1917 nor 1945 seemed so in prior contemplation. In that spirit, we cross the river a stone at a time. The other bank is there, even if only dimly perceived, the present side no longer habitable.

So what’s next? In many countries across Europe and North America, only two choices present themselves – a reconstituted centrism flogging the dead horse of the old dispensation, or a nationalist authoritarianism trading on populist sloganizing. These two live in a symbiotic relationship, sharing far more than either likes to admit.

When push comes to shove, liberalism defends property and market rights first of all. If the liberals wanted to stop the rise of the authoritarians, one contribution to that cause might have been the jailing of a few bankers. Instead, they were rewarded with a super-fast return to business – and bonuses – as usual. The parties and politicians of the left, like Hollande and Obama, who campaigned offering a different approach but ended up abandoning many of their pledges and conforming to the Wall Street–City–Brussels consensus instead, did more than anyone to inculcate a cynicism towards democratic politics and open the door to the nastiest elements of the right wing.

The leaders of the authoritarian nationalists’ pseudo-alternative, for their part, treasure most of the system they rail against. Theirs is a rebellion against powerlessness organized by the powerful. Authoritarian populism is neoliberalism’s ugly enabler, not its principled opponent – a ‘populism’ which seeks to entrench gross inequality, strengthen every institution of class power, and preserve the basic institutions of economic liberalism while indulging freely in racism and xenophobia. The main purpose of the lurid Donald Trump is to make the rich still richer (himself definitely included). Indeed, the shift to authoritarianism represented by Trump, Erdoğan, Orbán, Modi and Bolsonaro mostly reflects the difficulty in extending neoliberalism by democratic means at a time of its rampant unpopularity.

This is not how history ends. Conjuring the spirit of Rosa Luxemburg, Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin warn that ‘the persistence of neoliberalism alongside hyper-nationalism through the crisis increasingly poses the question of socialism vs barbarism redux’.² Barbarism redux is evidently on the menu, synthesizing elite neoliberalism with authoritarian identity politics – backing the bankers while banning the burka. Behind Boris Johnson, still worse may lurk.

In Britain, however, as the Telegraph noted, there is that other Luxemburgian possibility. It is popular (unexpectedly so, for most commentators), but not populist, in that it draws on socialist class analysis rather than demagogic anti-elitism, and confronts privilege rather than cultivating prejudice. And it will be fought all the way. Probably (hopefully) no one will actually get shot. But the hysteria that has greeted Labour’s embrace of socialism anew, including anti-Labour campaigns stretching from the absurd (remember ‘Comrade Cob’) to the much more damaging, as in the anti-Semitism furore;³ muttered threats from anonymous generals; state funding of obscure, yet hostile, think-tanks; and misfiring plots to launch a new spoiler ‘centre party’ all reflect the establishment’s alarm at the turn of events. In three years it has gone from Dylan’s Mr Jones, who didn’t know what was happening here, to Dad’s Army’s Corporal Jones, yelling ‘don’t panic’ unreassuringly.

Well, they are not wrong to worry. After a lamentable absence, socialism is back.

1

Class-War World

1973

MAJOR JIMMY ANDERSON [describing who his private army will target]: Wreckers … Communists, Maoists, Trotskyists, neo-Trotskyists, crypto-Trotskyists, union leaders, Communist union leaders, atheists, agnostics, long-haired weirdos, short-haired weirdos, vandals, hooligans, football supporters, namby-pamby probation officers, rapists, papists, papist rapists … Wedgwood Benn, keg bitter, punk rock, glue-sniffers, Play for Today, Clive Jenkins, Roy Jenkins …

REGINALD PERRIN: You realise the sort of people you’re going to attract? Thugs, bully-boys, psychopaths, sacked policemen, security guards, sacked security guards, racialists, Paki-bashers, queer-bashers, Chink-bashers, anybody-bashers, Rear Admirals, queer admirals, Vice Admirals, fascists, neo-fascists, crypto-fascists, loyalists…

ANDERSON: Do you think so? I thought recruitment might be difficult.

The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, 1976

A Tale of Class Power

In 2018 an obscure moment in Britain’s industrial history became the subject of a popular film. Nae Pasaran told the true story of a group of workers at a Rolls Royce factory in Scotland who in 1974 prevented the repair and return of aeroplane engines to their owners, the Chilean air force.¹ Their action was motivated by the fascist overthrow of the democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende on 11 September 1973, in a coup led by General Augusto Pinochet. Aeroplanes powered by the British-made engines had played a signal part in this outrage, bombing the presidential palace in Santiago as Allende made a last stand for democracy. The film explains the background to both the events in Chile and the solidarity displayed in East Kilbride. It reveals the powerful impact the workers’ action had, inspiring their counterparts in Chile and grounding the fascist air force plane by plane. The shop stewards who led the action are now heroes in contemporary, and more democratic, Chile and have been decorated for their efforts.

The workers’ democratic commitment to international solidarity was noteworthy, but what was remarkable was that their action succeeded: the engines were left to rust; the entire factory supported the initiative; no punitive action was taken against the instigators of the ban on returning the engines. Such was what the left liked to call ‘the balance of forces’.

Union-organized workplaces were once able to express their support for people in other lands, taking a form of industrial action – ‘blacking’² in the then-usage – without falling foul of the law or fear of employer reprisal. The strength of, and pride in, the union (the engineering union in this case) won out against the opposition. Organized workers had the capacity to translate democratic values into practical initiatives. Nae Pasaran displays the heights that the labour movement in Britain fell from. It speaks of a largely vanished world of working-class power.

It was also a world where battle lines were drawn, very much as indicated by the BBC’s satirical tormented middle manager, Reggie Perrin, and his military brother-in-law Jimmy Anderson, a deranged suburban Pinochet wannabe. Management writ did not run as unchallenged as they felt it ought to, nor did the ruling class rule undisputed. The class struggle was not a dogma or a fanciful formula. Far from being confined to sitcoms, it was on the television news most nights. The Jimmy Andersons of Great Britain – there being at least one in every saloon bar – faced twin enemies: trade union power and social liberalism, with a Jenkins (Clive or Roy) for each malady.

While the fascists throttled Chilean democracy, Britain was being engulfed by the strongest movement of industrial militancy since the General Strike of 1926. This was a time not just of strikes to protect living standards against the depredations of inflation, but of sit-ins to keep workplaces open, of solidarity action to build a powerful sense of class, of fighting the law and the law not winning, of projects to reorient production away from armaments, and of action to drive pay beds out of the NHS. In short, it was a period in which trade unions exercised broad economic and industrial influence.

By the 1970s, trade union power had grown to the extent that it was able to defeat the attempts both of the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson and of his Tory successor Ted Heath to impose legal restrictions on its operation. It was a time of work-ins, of which the most celebrated was at Upper Clyde Shipbuilders where workers successfully frustrated the shipyards’ closure. There were nationwide strikes by coal miners, won in part through effective mass picketing, and an expanding trade union presence in many workplaces (including in white-collar occupations), which led to management losing a degree of their traditional absolute control over the production process.

This appeared to portend an inversion of the wider social order. Of course, not everywhere in the early 1970s was like Rolls Royce East Kilbride – but much of industry was. It would shortly be argued in hindsight that labour’s power in the land was in fact already past its peak, but that was by no means evident at the time. It was a moment of global economic crisis, with the dollar having broken free of the gold standard in 1971, the quadrupling of oil prices by OPEC at the end of 1973 in protest at Western support of Israel, and inflation accelerating across the developed capitalist world.

The influence of the left wing of the Labour Party also intensified, again reaching a peak not seen since the days before the defeat of 1926. Socialists were buoyed by this rising working-class assertiveness and emboldened by the evidence that popular aspirations were considerably outrunning what Harold Wilson felt able to offer. Trade unions had shifted gradually, if unevenly, towards the left, with a strong militant trend ascending to leadership in the National Union of Mineworkers and a powerful shop stewards movement increasingly influential in the Transport and General Workers Union – the two unions wielding the greatest economic leverage. Even the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers, home to the skilled manufacturing elite, was more open to militancy than it had ever been (or was to be since). Given that the unions collectively accounted for around 90 per cent of the vote at the Party’s policy-making conference, this was of great importance.

By 1973, Labour’s National Executive was adopting the most left-wing programme the Party had ever agreed, proposing, inter alia, the nationalization of twenty-five leading manufacturing firms through a state holding company, over the objections of the Party’s right wing. The revisionist argument dominant since the 1950s – when a Gaitskellite right, with Anthony Crosland as its main thinker, had redefined socialism to exclude public ownership and class struggle in favour of terms amenable to a technocratic managerialism – was threatened in Labour’s leading counsels. The accumulating sense of working-class strength was allied to the growing disillusionment with the methods and results of Labour government hitherto. Labour in office had neither a plan for, nor even the intention of, advancing towards a socialist society, an omission that the left felt empowered to challenge.

These developments within the Labour Party and the trade unions, however, do not tell anything like the whole story. The spirit of 1968, even if it did not move as strongly in Britain as it did elsewhere, had incubated a new radicalism among youth, above all in the universities and colleges, now themselves accessible to far more working-class students than ever before. Second-wave feminism sought to extend the demand for women’s equality beyond the political/legal sphere into the workplace and personal relationships. The invention of the notion of ‘lifestyle’ seemed itself to be a radical interrogation of the existing dispensations. In the words of Sheila Rowbotham, ‘nothing seemed impossible. The experiences of 1968 opened your political eyes and ears. It revealed vulnerabilities within capitalist society which were making it possible for people to imagine socialism in different ways.’³

The expanding possibilities of the future were enriched by a past in which the working class could, and did, take a self-conscious pride. The Nae Pasaran militants, and active trade unionists and socialists throughout Britain, stood squarely in a tradition of struggle, self-sacrifice and internationalism. The Hunger Marches of the 1930s, the fight against fascism on the streets of Britain and in Spain, the ‘people’s war’ against the Nazis, the redemption for all the suffering that came with the 1945 Labour government, the establishment of the welfare state, the commitment to full employment and a large nationalized industrial sector – all this nourished the working-class confidence of the age.

The continuing advance of socialist ideas and movements for national liberation around the world also played a major part in establishing the new mood. Here the (eventual) victory of the Vietnamese people against US imperialism took pride of place. This had energized what was, at that time, Britain’s strongest ever anti-war movement, led by activists from outside the hitherto overwhelmingly hegemonic Labour/communist/trade union milieu. A new sense of emancipatory opportunity and of internationalism infused the left.

In aggregate, this was a constellation of possibilities that largely rested on an increasingly assertive rank and file in the trade union movement, with a sense of its own potential to change Britain and the world. The idea of socialism as a new society not too far in the future, with a basis in public ownership of the means of production and a new system of popular power, was still relatively unproblematic – the declining attraction of the Soviet system notwithstanding. With a massive strike wave engulfing industry as an aroused working class asserted its social power, socialism was easy to envisage.

Nevertheless, there was another side to the picture. There was no automatic read-over from industrial militancy to political action. While labour’s fortunes had risen in the workplace and in terms of union organization, the Labour Party’s share of the vote in elections had declined – its victories in 1974 were won on less than 40 per cent of the poll and owed everything to a renewed Liberal Party draining Tory support. The Labour left that had emerged in the early 1970s had conquered many positions, but it controlled the leadership of neither the Party nor the Trades Union Congress. These remained in the hands of a right wing allergic to the new militancy and committed to the postwar mixed-economy consensus, wishing to manage capitalism the better not to replace it. As a result, the retreats and broken promises of Labour in office had alienated many young people (above all over Wilson’s refusal to oppose the Vietnam War), and the ‘In Place of Strife’⁴ attack on the trade unions drove a wedge into working-class support for Labour.

Even in the context of the 1970s the notion of union strength can be overplayed. Aside from the two miners’ strikes of 1972 and 1974, the most-recalled dispute from that decade was the fight for union recognition at Grunwick, a north London photo processing plant staffed mainly by low-paid Asian women. The workers, though supported by the majority of the labour movement, were defeated by a legal and political campaign orchestrated from within the Tory opposition, even while Labour was in government and union leaders Jack Jones and Hugh Scanlon were supposedly fixtures beside the Number 10 fireplace.

There was additionally a lack of strategic perspective. The crisis of the capitalist system was also a crisis for the venerable tradition of British labour reformism. The core assumption that a combination of parliamentary majorities and the power of organized labour in the workplace and society would be sufficient to lead to socialism, or something which could be thus described, had been hegemonic since the defeat of Chartism in 1848, with occasional bumps along the road.⁵

This perspective had always

Reviews for The Fall and Rise of the British Left

[stillatim · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I am not the audience for this book. I'm not British (although I'm British enough* to find his use of the term 'British' grating). I had thought it would be a history book, but it's a current affairs book, which is mostly settling scores from the last fifty years of 'British' politics. And Corbyn lost, so there's more than a bit of sadness/hilarity/irritation at the approach Murray takes here, which is, shall we say, bullish. He memorably slams Polly Toynbee for suggesting that Corbyn's Labour Party had lost touch with the class that it claimed to represent. Well, anyway. I imagine there'll be no apologies to Polly.

More concerning is Murray's repeated insistence that the left can't just re-run the twentieth century politics and policies, while immediately after talking about how the only way the left can win is by strengthening trade unions and massaging class consciousness (e.g., people who are no richer than Murray but oppose his politics are 'class-collaborationists,' while those who are richer than him and oppose his politics are 'bosses' and 'elites'). The rhetoric, in other words, is appalling.

More concerning still is that that rhetoric gets in the way of thinking. Murray's world is entirely dualistic; there's us, on one side, and the bosses/elites/imperialists/racists/... on the other. Of course, this is not meant to be a nuanced history; it is designed to prop up a party and stand against the (utterly repulsive) Murdoch Empire narrative. So, perhaps this us vs them approach is essential for electoral politics? I would have thought demonizing anyone who doesn't entirely agree with you is a bad way to gain majorities in a democratic system, even one as fatuous and decayed as the 'British.'

But, as I said, I'm not the audience here. I put it to you, fair reader, that if you're reading this in 2020 or later, and you find unironic references to Lenin's wisdom painful, then you probably aren't the audience, either.

*: My parents were both English, migrated to Australia.