TWO MORE

Two useful reminders of Britain's past -

Jeremy Corbyn and the Strange Rebirth of Labour England Francis Beckett 
and Mark Seddon (2018)

CHAPTER FIVE BACK TO THE ’30S WITH MAGGIE

Labour England had at its heart the idea of social, public and cooperative

ownership as part of a mixed economy. It shared the same vision as the Scandinavian social democrats or the German and French socialists.

The idea that Labour was committed to public ownership of the corner shop was one ritually trotted out by the Conservatives – who, nonetheless, up until the mid-1970s had little intention of reversing the public ownership of the utilities for instance. Indeed, Edward Heath’s government nationalised Rolls-Royce in the early 1970s to save it from possible closure – just as David Cameron’s Tory government was to nationalise failing banks that had brought the Anglo-American economies almost to their knees decades later. But for Margaret Thatcher and her arriviste new Tories, the promise of a new Britain of small shareholders was a powerful one. Glitzy television advertisements urged the public to buy into what they already owned.

‘Psst, don’t tell Sid!’ was the advertising line used to accompany the selloff of British Gas. ‘Buzby’, a yellow canary, did the job on British Telecom. No matter that within a dozen or so years the privatised public utilities were largely in the hands of the big corporate shareholders, many of them based overseas. Even a former Conservative Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, was to speak out against the sell-off of the ‘family silver’. But it would be another thirty-odd years before the grand larceny that had been the sale of often profitable nationalised industries began to be seriously questioned. On the privatised British railways, for instance, a ticket costs far more than on the nationalised railways in France. Furthermore, some of the organisations being subsidised to run trains over tracks in Britain were nationalised foreign railway companies, such as the French SNCF. When the private operators failed, they were usually rewarded with more franchises and more taxpayers’ money. When the East Coast line returned to public ownership and proved hugely successful and profitable, the government handed it over to the same failing privateers, including the company owned by the subsidy junkie Sir Richard Branson. Tony Blair and his closest cohorts in New Labour refused to countenance taking back at least some of the utilities into public ownership. Rather the reverse, Peter Mandelson was to cite the ludicrous corner shop claim as he and Blair set about removing any commitment to common ownership in Labour’s constitution. Blair would usually excuse himself by saying that it was ‘too costly’, or in the case of the Post Office, blame the European Union for forcing Britain to outsource its publicly owned companies.

Outsourcing and privatisation were to continue apace as the remnants of the family silver were flogged off. But back in the early 1980s, Labour’s praetorian guard, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), had to be broken before the real process of breaking up and selling public assets was to begin in real earnest – the National Coal Board being one such target. The year 1983 had been marked by a small eruption of seemingly unplanned, unrelated events that were in turn to explode into much bigger and profound struggles. These were to determine the future of the declining trade union movement in particular.

The first came on the Ides of March and with the decision of the miners in one of the last remaining pits in the Rhondda Valley, Lewis Merthyr Colliery, to call on their union to come to their aid over plans to shut it on the grounds that it was no longer profitable. Profitability in coal mines was one of the great industrial bones of contention of the late twentieth century. A mine could go from being profitable to making a loss in fairly quick order if one face stopped being mined while another was under development. The miners’ union had long argued that pits should only be shut if exhausted. In Germany, France and the Netherlands, a long-term approach, based on retraining and bringing new industries into areas with a declining coal industry, was the preferred option. Not in Britain, though. On two occasions in 1984 and in 1992, Tory governments had no compunction whatsoever in shutting down whole swathes of the industry, without any realistic employment prospect for those affected. While doing it, they appeared to take some collective enjoyment in humiliating those they had targeted. The national leadership of the NUM under Arthur Scargill and his deputy Mick McGahey had long predicted that a hidden Tory plan to run down the coal industry – and Lewis Merthyr – was to be just the beginning of a major pit closure programme.

This was the first whiff of grapeshot in the battle that followed the Tories’ victory in the May 1983 general election. In March, Scargill had called for a national strike as a show of solidarity against the threat of pit closures nationally. In a portent of what was to come, he also suggested that strike action could take place without a national ballot of miners being held. Yet barely a week later, on 8 March, a majority of miners voted to reject a national strike in support of the striking Welsh colliers in a secret pithead ballot. Lewis Merthyr was shut soon afterwards and unlike most of its sister pits whose iconic architecture and headgear was soon to be bulldozed from the landscape, was reinvented as the Rhondda Heritage Park. On a visit to the park a few years after the convulsive strike of 1984–85, Mark Seddon recognised former south Wales area NUM stalwart Ivor England, now dressed in Victorian collier’s gear in his new role as a tourist guide. ‘It’s bollocks,’ said Ivor. ‘But it’s a job. And most jobs, well they’ve vanished like an autumn mist from these valleys.’ Would Margaret Thatcher have opted for an early general election had the miners voted for an all-out strike in support of their doomed colleagues in south Wales in March 1983? Would she have risked another general election framed by pictures of striking miners, picket lines and a bitter struggle for the survival of the coalfields and risked an Edward Heath-style debacle? For when Heath had asked the British electorate, ‘Who governs Britain?’, in the middle of a national miners’ strike over pay in 1974, voters had responded with a fairly definitive answer: ‘It’s clearly not you!’, and sent Harold Wilson back to Downing Street, with Michael Foot as the Employment Secretary to work out a pay deal with Britain’s miners. Britain was a changed place a decade on, but probably not changed enough to produce an entirely different set of circumstances. The Tory government backed off from confrontation in 1981, under the threat of industrial action from the NUM.

Historically, Conservative governments had always avoided confrontation with the miners. Harold Macmillan had once famously warned that as with ‘Eton and the Guards’, all Tory Prime Ministers should avoid taking on the NUM. Winston Churchill, when asked in the 1950s whether he had settled with the miners on his terms or theirs, replied, ‘On theirs, of course. One must have electric light.’ The appointment of Ian MacGregor, a former American business executive who had been presiding over the shrinking of the British steel industry, to head the publicly owned National Coal Board in March 1983 was to set the scene for much that was to follow. Industrial convulsions continued. Workers at Ford’s giant Halewood plant began a strike over the unfair dismissal of a colleague. Labour’s campaign document ‘The New Hope for Britain’, outlining its strategy for fighting the next general election, proposed an ‘emergency programme’, to be enacted upon taking office, with increased public investment in transport, housing and social services. A ‘national economic assessment’ was to be undertaken in co-operation with the trade unions. Also included were proposals to withdraw from the then European Economic Community (EEC) and the establishment of a nonnuclear defence policy by removing nuclear weapons from US and other bases. The campaign document was to morph into a Labour manifesto,  enthusiastically embraced by, among others, the young, upstanding candidate for Sedgefield, Tony Blair. Blair had squeaked into winning the parliamentary nomination on the casting vote of the chairman, Jack Burton. Moreover, this, according to folklore, had been helped by Burton’s decision to wave aloft a letter from Michael Foot that waxed enthusiastically over the qualities Blair had demonstrated in fighting the hopeless seat of Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire a year or so earlier. Blair, despite his later detestation of the Labour left, always had a soft spot for Foot. The manifesto was dubbed ‘The longest suicide note in history’, by Manchester Gorton MP Gerald Kaufman. Foot famously and quite uncharacteristically never forgave Kaufman for his outburst, coming as it did in the middle of the general election. Labour’s national campaign is remembered for the general chaos that surrounded it. Shadow Cabinet ministers frequently didn’t know where they were supposed to be and sometimes turned up at the wrong venues. And yet the enthusiasm that often met Michael Foot as he travelled the country seemed to suggest that the polls were guilty of underestimating the number of his supporters. Foot’s arrival in Norwich coincided with the arrival of footsore participants taking part in the ‘People’s March for Jobs’, who had marched from unemployment-hit towns in the north-east of England to protest the rising level of joblessness and deindustrialisation. Mark Seddon recalls going to meet the marchers, who were consciously adopting the mantle of the Jarrow hunger marches of the 1930s, as they arrived at the approaches to the city. Foot’s natural empathy was well received by them and the image of the day which made it onto the front pages of some of the national press was of the Labour leader, his arms draped around the shoulders of one of the young female marchers who sported a magnificent pink Mohican and multiple nose piercings. Foot then got a rapturous reception in the ancient and packed St Andrew’s Hall in the city, as the marchers finally arrived.

But for all of the enthusiasm, the uplifting oratory and the hard work of activists, the campaign was succeeding in motivating existing supporters, but few others. When Michael Foot arrived in Norwich, two Labour MPs represented the city. Yet after the general election, both had been swept away and replaced by Conservatives to the genuine shock and disbelief of virtually everyone who had been there battling it out on the doorsteps. Margaret Thatcher was returned to office as Prime Minister with a majority of 144 seats. Labour won the fewest number of seats since the Second World War. Among the prominent parliamentary defeats were those of Shirley Williams, whose Crosby constituency was captured by the Conservatives; Bill Rodgers, whose Stockton North seat was one of only four gained by Labour; and Tony Benn, who lost the newly redrawn Bristol East to the Tory candidate, Jonathan Sayeed.

Generation Left Keir Milburn (2019)

In the next chapter we examine the impact of the event of 2008 on the technical composition of the working class. I will argue that the older generation are still tied to the neoliberal hegemony of finance while the young seek to escape it. The event of 2008 provides a shared generational location for the young and disadvantaged. But the emergence of a coherent new political generation requires events of a different kind. A Left generation requires a rupture caused by a moment of collective action that exceeds the existing sense of social and political possibility. In chapter 3 we will name these types of events ‘moments of excess’ and propose the 2011 international wave of protests and revolutions as a prime example. We will examine this wave as the first iteration of an emerging political composition, examining its forms for traces of 2008’s impacts on the technical composition.

The events of 2011 created a Left generational unit, and in chapter 4 we examine this unit’s turn to electoral politics to gain hegemony over the much larger but politically ambiguous generation of 2008. This turn brought them into conflict with a previous Left generation, the Third Way Left, formed by the events of 1989 and characterized by their compromise with neoliberalism. The event of 2008 undermined that generation’s formative assumptions, leaving them unable to understand or deal with the current generation gap. This means it falls to Generation Left to deal with the current situation, and in chapter 5 I suggest ways that the current generation gap can be overcome. This will involve reinventing the categories of youth and adulthood to break their current entanglement with private property ownership, shifting them instead towards the kinds of common ownership which can act as a solution to the generational divide over access to material security. Only in this way can we ensure that our current ‘storms of youth precede brilliant days’ for all generations.