Labour’s Wilderness Years: Setting the Record Straight
“Back in the 1980s the Labour party lurched to the left and made the party unelectable. Ultimately it was the hardline Labour left who were responsible for 18 grim years of Tory rule.”
Ever since Blair’s landslide victory in 1997 this has been the orthodoxy, both within the Labour party and amongst political commentators in general. It has been a stick with which to beat those who have demanded that Labour behave in a more principled and more genuinely progressive fashion while in office. It has been a means of frightening any waverers, and a powerful form of self-justification for the New Labour elite.
Labour’s impending defeat at the hands of the Tories will almost certainly create some kind of debate within the Labour Party about the way forward. As such it is time that some scrutiny was given to this still powerful, and influential narrative.
Most of all this is because the certainty with which it is repeated is not entirely consistent with the historical record. Insofar as Labour did ‘lurch to the left’ in the 1980s it was at the 1983 election. Then, its manifesto – famously described as the longest suicide note in history – ‘infamously’ included, amongst other things, a call for unilateral nuclear disarmament. Yes Labour did lose this election. Yet of all elections in the past decades, we should be cautious about treating the result of this one as a judgement on Labour’s political or electoral strategy. That’s because 1983 was very much a ‘khaki election’. Up to 1982 the result was extremely uncertain. By far the most important factor in turning it was the Falklands War. And this is hardly surprising. Though steps could perhaps have been taken to avoid it, Thatcher fought a war that was victorious, obviously patriotic and – I will get shit for saying this – relatively just. It was, after all, a war to defend the right of Falklanders to self-determination in the face of a fascist state making arbitrary and fundamentally anti-democratic claims on their territory.
But that is to digress. The main point is that the result in 1983 was influenced by hugely important factors other than Labour’s political positioning. But when one looks at the other two Tory victories prior to Blair, the dominant narrative of 1980s Labour becomes more unfathomable. Yes Ken was (very popularly) doing his thing in London. Yet the Labour party was lead into the 1987 election by the man who perhaps did more than Blair to create New Labour, scourge of the left Neil Kinnock. In fact Mandelson took a leading role in managing the campaign. Nonetheless, the New Labour elite still turn round and blame those damn trots for making the party unelectable. And it was of course, Kinnock again who somehow managed to lose an election to the charismatic genius John Major in 1992.
If the myth of Labour’s suicidal leftward lurch is not fully congruent with the historical record, it is nonetheless possible to see why many contemporary Labourites stick to it. Even New Labour apparatchiks were probably once socialists. And even they would find it difficult to fully believe in what they do, if they did not repeat to themselves and to others that There Is No Alternative.
Reader Comments
Careful Reuben! Daring to agree with anything the demon Thatcher did will have you hunted down and burned as a witch! Heathen! Heathen!
Well, I already said something similar in passing in my poppies post and haven’t been barbecued so far. They’re probably biding their time…
While it’s not wholly reflective of the period, the general election results in Liverpool (the home of Militant) between 1974 and 1987 are revealing:
1974 (Oct): Labour 54.6% Tory 32.5%
1979: Labour 49% Tory 35.8%
1983: Labour 47.3% 29.3%
1987: Labour 56.7% 17.4%
In a city not “traditionally” Labour (in 1951 Tories got 51% of the vote), the mid 1980s (Militant members were expellled in 1985) saw a huge swing to Labour, and if the 10.% swing between 1983 ad 1987 had been repeated nationally, Labour would have won in 1987 with 325 seats.
Militant had many faults, but electoral popularity was not one of them.
Still the best contemperaneous review of the Labour left in the 1980s is Hilary Wainwrights ‘Labour; A tale of two parties’ and this evidences the popularity of the Labour left in many cities where they took power. The question of the appeal to middle England is a different matter, but the Labour left would, if left to its devices, have almost certainly regained control of national government long before New Labour.
I voted for thatcher and it was basically because I thought the unions had gone mad, you had the winter of discontent where you just seemed to have strikes all the time ,you had dustmen on strike people not being buried and I think lots of people who would normally have voted labour didn’t because the unions had riled them .
its a long time ago but thats how it seemed at the time.
I’m not anti union but at the time I think they seemed to have over done things this was all through the 1970s , for whatever reason people thought they were to keen on industrial action and labour couldn’t seem to control them so people voted for thatcher .
this may well annoy people who hated thatcher at the time but thats how a lot of people who voted for her thought .
Well Mrs Thatch has had a few makeovers in her time but I think this may be the first time she has been made over as an “anti-fascist”.
Indeed one of her strategies for getting in in the first place,in ’79,was by deliberately courting the racist and fascist vote, through her infamous “swamping” speech, and reassuring NF supporters, who had nothing electable to vote for, that they could get several of their anti-immigrant and law and order demands met by the Tories. This was the period when Young Tories used to sport “Hang Nelson Mandela” t-shirts, and many very right wing Tory MPs had somewhat close connections with the non-Tory far right (captured in a Panorama programme of the period called “maggie’s militant tendency).
The regime in Argentina was actually fairly typical of the arch-reactionary regime that the Tories closely bound up with Ronald Reagan, typically supported. So the escalation of the conflict with Argentina was clearly about another agenda.
The war in the Falklands was cynically used for electioneering as surely as son of Thatch, Tony Blair, used frequent wars in his time of office.
That’s very true David and I think the comparisons with Blair’s wars are very apt. When examing the Falklands war in the localised, short-term context, it would be fair to say, as Reuben points out, that Thatcher was not quite as nasty as Galtieri. But when has the left ever been able to use odiousness alone to justify war? It would be equally fair to say that George Bush was not quite as nasty as Saddam Hussein. But in the wider context, Thatcher’s war-bolstered regime has done far more harm to the world than one Latin American dictator. Plenty of whom Britain has supported when it has suited us. Equally, unchecked neo-conservative American imperialism, in the long-term and on a global scale, is far more dangerous than one crackpot Iraqi despot. It can never be enough to pick the lesser of two evils in a war to justify a conflict.
well the falklands has always had a soft spot in my heart, and I see it in britains vital national interests to keep the falklands british .
the falklands is one of the few places that could support a higher population its close to Antarctica and I think in the future you will see many more british people going to live there.
Id be tempted to go there myself the place just needs more trees to cut down the wind so you could grow field crops and better drainage to clear the bogs and more people .
on thatcher and the nf if she hadn’t courted the anti immigration vote I think the national front would have done far better
Salman and David: I don’t think the rightness or wrongness of a war is determined by the total amount of good or bad done by the political leaders of either side. Yes, Thatcher did more harm to the world (and certainly the UK) than Galtieri; ditto Dubya and Saddam Hussein. But for me, the main issues in determining the justness of a war are the motives and objectives of the belligerents (i.e. whether or not one party going to war for a morally acceptable reason, such as stopping mass murder or defending itself against attack) and, if that is met, whether or not all other options have been exhausted. Gulf War 2 clearly fails at the first hurdle; Bush didn’t have humanitarian motives. The Falklands isn’t so cut and dried, in my opinion. I’m prepared to believe that for all her many and varied deficiencies as a politician and member of the human race, Thatcher did genuinely want to help the Falklanders. (It probably also crossed her mind that doing so wouldn’t harm her electoral chances, of course). What’s less clear to me is whether or not there were other options that could have been tried before rushing to war; I simply don’t know enough about it to have an opinion.
Again, though, I don’t think motives alone are enough. Many former left-wingers, such as Christopher Hitchens and Nick Cohen, have justified Iraq as being the right war for the wrong reasons. Equally many wars fought ostensibly for morally just reasons have had disastrous consequences. And probably the most justifiable war in recent history, WW2, was not waged to liberate Europe’s Jews. That, you might say, was the right war for the wrong reasons. It’s far too simplistic to judge the rightness or wrongness of a conflict on the motivations of the belligerents.
I’ve never bought into the “leftward lurch” meme. As far as I am concerned it is a construction of the propaganda system. I wasn’t even a teenager in 1983 election but I knew even at that time that it was the Falklands War which had won the election for Thatcher. Once a particular narrative is established in the media that is it, there is simply no changing it and it will inform all coverage for years or even decades after. The narrative established in 1983 (which, not coincidentally, favoured capital), shapes mainstream political discourse in this country to this very day.