The radical force of Labour

In October 1992, Tony Benn, the towering British Labour politician who died last week at the age of 88, stood up in front of his peers in the House of Commons to deliver a powerful attack on the then-Conservative government. His target was the decision to close all deep coalmines in the country that hadn’t already been shut down, with the loss of thousands of jobs.

His anger at the “callous” and “brutal” closure of the mines was palpable as he spoke out against a government he said had “lied and lied and lied again” about the mining industry it was savaging. “Don’t tell us it’s market forces…” he thundered, pointing to Conservative support for the farming industry which, as he noted, would have collapsed years ago without such backing.

Calling for reform of the energy markets, he hailed a public awakening to the realities of the mining industry and the “rotten philosophy” of the 1980s: “We were told that everything was about cash and that chartered accountants had to be brought in to tell us what to do,” he declared. “That is not what it is all about. The issue is whether our society puts people in a place of dignity and services them or whether we hand over money to gamblers who create no wealth.”

The dynamism with which Benn fought his causes, and the passion and clarity with which he articulated them, turned him into a legendary figure, not just in the UK but internationally. While in the week since his death tributes have poured in from across the political spectrum (even British prime minister David Cameron made sure to praise a “magnificent writer, speaker, diarist and campaigner”), for some of his most ardent supporters this has been a moment to look back at his efforts to transform the Labour party.

It was a party of which he tried but never succeeded in becoming the leader, but for whose socialist members, he was, for decades, an inspirational leader and voice.

“What we tried to do under Tony’s leadership was to reshape the party from the bottom up, to make it an effective instrument of working class representation,” wrote Mike Marqusee, a left-wing writer in Red Pepper . “And while we failed to do that, we came close enough to scare the hell out of the British ruling class, who put huge resources into destroying Benn and the Bennite movement.”

Benn, who attributed his radicalisation to his time in government in the 1960s and often said that he grew more radical as he grew older, never seemed to nurse illusions about the Labour Party while steadfastly remaining a member. “The Labour party has never been a socialist party but it’s always had socialists in it,” he told BBC Newsnight three years ago.

The movement that he led in the 1980s and 1990s — the Bennite movement, as it came to be known — was part of a long tradition of left-wing movements within the Labour party, including the Independent Labour Party, a socialist political party that was affiliated to Labour for three decades in the early part of the last century, led by Keir Hardie, a former miner and Scottish socialist, who became Labour’s first party leader.

There was the Bevanite movement in the 1950s: Aneurin Bevan, the minister responsible for establishing the National Health Service, subsequently resigned from the post-war Attlee government to champion the deepening of the welfare state and nationalisation of industry.

Even Ramsay MacDonald, who became the first Labour prime minister, in his early days in politics resigned as Labour party leader because of his opposition to the First World War, which, like Hardie, he regarded as an imperialist venture. While never an avowedly socialist party, Labour for many decades contained within it forceful socialist voices, whose influence came and went but which couldn’t be ignored.

The Bennite movement was arguably one of the last radical movements within the party. Since its demise, in the context of Thatcherite triumphalism, radicalism is something that has generally happened outside, and frequently in open opposition to, Labour party activity.

The decline of the left within Labour has been a process of gradual erosion in a period of ascendant neo-liberalism. The coup de grace was delivered by the victory of Tony Blair in the 1997 general election. For one thing, his win seemed to give credence to those who argued that it was the socialist voice within, and popular fears surrounding it, that had kept the party out of power and apparently unelectable. The centerpiece of Blair’s reinvention of the party under “New Labour” was his controversial evisceration of Clause IV of the Labour constitution, which had held many of its socialist ambitions, such as nationalisation of key sectors of the economy.

It was easy to see Blair’s appeal in the early days of his leadership. As a student in the UK, I still remember the hope and optimism that seemed to grip much of the country upon learning that more than a decade and a half of Conservative rule was now behind it.

The optimism quickly melted away. Blair’s support for policies such as tuition fees for domestic university students, his open admiration for the Thatcherite agenda, and most significantly, his muscular support for the invasion of Iraq took its toll of Labour party members: party membership fell from 400,000 when Blair became prime minister to just over 200,000 in 2004.

The party’s long-standing and fundamental links with the trade union movement also weakened. An example was the powerful RMT transport workers union (whose fiery leader Bob Crow died just a few days before Benn’s death), which severed its links with the party in the early 2000s.

The party continued the same trajectory under Gordon Brown, and little seems to have changed under Ed Miliband now. While some on the right make jibing references to Miliband’s “socialist” tendencies (‘Red Ed’ is a sobriquet served up by the rightwing press), his position on a number of issues tells a different tale.

Miliband concurs with the ‘necessity’ of austerity, albeit in what he claims to be a more diluted form; he has pledged to bring in curbs on non-EU immigration, arguing that his predecessors as leader were wrong to ‘ignore’ it as an issue; and he is on course to further weaken the party’s links with the trade unions.

Nick Clegg, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, has expressed a willingness to discuss the possibility of an alliance with Labour in a future government — a gesture that has so far been brushed off by Miliband

“The promise of opportunity, dignity, health and work, fulfilled by Labour’s welfare state after 1945, is not to be the one we can look to today’s Labour party for,” wrote filmmaker Ken Loach and two others in a recent piece in The Guardian , summing up the frustration of many on the left.

In contrast to some other European nations, where socialists have had some success in creating a unified voice (in Germany, for example, Die Linke has been relatively successful), Britain’s socialists remain largely unrepresented and, by that token, weak. Efforts continue to build a left-wing alternative to the Labour Party, but Tony Benn’s inimitable calls to battle, and his warm, inspirational presence, will surely be missed.