Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

by Eric J. Hobsbawm

  So I was not really prepared for the moment when, for the first and only time in my life, I found myself with a brief cameo part on the national scene of British politics. For about ten years from the late seventies I was deeply involved in the public debates about the future of the Labour Party and, after the beginning of what turned out to be eighteen unbroken years of Conservative government, the nature of the new ‘Thatcherism’. Most of my contributions were republished in two volumes of political writing.

  It grew from a seed unintentionally planted in September 1978 in the pages of the Communist Party’s ‘theoretical and discussion journal’, Marxism Today, which was to play an unexpectedly important part in political debate in the 1980s under the recently appointed editor, a brilliant, bald, jogging, motor-race watcher, politico-intellectual entrepreneur and former university lecturer, my friend Martin Jacques. It published a lecture I had given in the annual series of Marx Memorial Lectures under the title ‘The Forward March of Labour Halted?’ It was not intended as a political intervention, but as a Marxist historian’s survey of what had happened to the British working class over the past century. I argued that the apparently irresistible though not continuous rise of the British labour movement in the first half of the century seemed to have come to a halt. It could not now necessarily be expected to realize the historic destiny once predicted for it, if only because the modern economy had changed, relatively diminished and divided the industrial proletariat. If my lecture had a political edge, it was turned against the Labour Party leadership under Harold Wilson, Prime Minister from 1964 to 1970 and again in 1974–6, who presided over a brief moment of labour revival in 1966, and did not recognize it. Nevertheless, ‘The Forward March Halted?’ amounted to a public warning that in the late 1970s the movement was heading for serious trouble.

  One part of my presentation was immediately singled out for irritated criticism by Ken Gill, a member of the TUC General Council and perhaps the leading CP trade union leader, namely my comments on the sharp increase of sectionalism in the industrial movement. I had pointed out that the trade unions’ militancy, so plain in the 1970s, was essentially for their members’ narrow economic benefits, and that even under left leadership this did not necessarily indicate a resumption of the forward march of labour. On the contrary, ‘it seems to me that we now see a growing division of workers into sections and groups, each pursuing its own economic interest irrespective of the rest’. Given the new mixed economy, the group relied not on the potential loss strikes caused to employers, but on the inconvenience they might cause to the public, that is on putting pressure on the government to settle. In the nature of things this not only increased potential friction between groups of workers, but risked weakening the hold of the labour movement as a whole. Nobody could live through the strike-happy 1970s in Britain without being aware of union militancy and the tensions between unions and governments. It reached its peak in the autumn and winter of 1978–9. However, I was sufficiently remote from the political scene on the industrial labour left to be surprised to find that my lecture led to an intense and politically charged controversy in Marxism Today over the next year. Without particularly intending to, I had touched several very raw nerves. The fact that within a few months of my article the weak and struggling Labour government had been comprehensively defeated in a General Election by the Conservatives under their new militantly class-warrior leader, Margaret Thatcher, made the pain even more intolerable. By the time the last criticism of my paper appeared in Marxism Today the Thatcher era had already begun. By the time the post-electoral debate on my paper was added to the pre-electoral, and both were published in 1981 in a book jointly sponsored by Marxism Today and Verso Editions,1 the Labour Party itself had been split by the secession of the so-called social democrats, and the remaining rump of the party was struggling to survive.

  In retrospect, the illusions of the mixed coalition of lefts which almost destroyed the Labour Party between 1978 and 1981 are harder to understand than the trade union leaders’ illusions of power which had undermined it since the late 1960s. Since the General Strike of 1926 the British ruling class had been careful not to seek a head-on confrontation with the unions, i.e. with the 70 per cent or so of Britons who saw themselves as workers. The golden age of the post-1945 economy had even taken the edge off the built-in anti-unionism of industrialists. For twenty years giving in to union demands had not put pressure on profits. The seventies had begun to worry both politicians and economists, but they were a triumphant period for trade union leaders, who had blocked a Labour government’s plans to limit their power, and who had twice defeated a Conservative government by national miners’ strikes. Even those union leaders who realized that there had to be some limit on uncontrolled free market bargaining, saw themselves as negotiating a ‘wages policy’ with governments from a position of impressive strength.

  As it happened, the glory years of seventies unionism were also those of the trade union left. For though the CP was small, declining, politically divided between Moscow hardliners and a ‘Eurocommunist’ leadership, and harassed on the left by younger Trotskyist militants, it probably played a larger part on the national trade union scene in the 1970s than ever before, under the leadership of its formidably able industrial organizer, Bert Ramelson, whose remarkable wife Marian, a Yorkshire textile worker, had been an amateur historian herself and an active supporter of the Historians’ Group. The CP was not merely part of the 1970s militancy. With the blessing (not unqualified) of the two figures closest to national Godfathers in the TUC, Hugh Scanlon, of the Engineering Union, and Jack Jones, the former International Brigader, of the Transport and General Workers, the TUC left, largely marshalled by Ramelson and Ken Gill, co-ordinated the unions’ fight against the two Wilson governments’ attempts to clip their wings. Moreover, the long-hoped-for shift in the balance of the (still) great National Mineworkers’ Union had happened in the 1960s. Yorkshire had swung left, bringing to national prominence a – then – CP protégé, the young Arthur Scargill. Together with the always solid and Party-led bastions of Wales and Scotland, the left now outvoted the equally reliable moderate bastions of northeast England. The fifteen years after 1970 were the era of the great national miners’ strikes – victorious in 1972 and 1974, disastrous in 1984–5, thanks to the combination of Mrs Thatcher’s determination to destroy the union and the delusions of the union’s by then national leader, Arthur Scargill. By chance my lecture in the autumn of 1978 coincided with the tensest moment in relations between the unions and the Labour Party.

  The illusion of trade union power under left-wing leaders and activists fuelled the even greater illusion of a conquest of the Labour Party, and hence of future Labour governments, by the socialist left. A mixed coalition of lefts within the Labour Party and ‘entryist’ revolutionaries who had joined it, had increasingly come together behind the project of winning control of the party under the banner of the increasingly radical ex-minister Tony Benn. Unlike the industrial militancy, which had substantial backing from the members of the unions, then at the peak of their numbers, the political militants reflected the decline in the political interest, votes and party membership among workers. In fact their strategy relied on the ability of small groups of militants among a largely inactive membership to capture Labour Party branches and, reinforced by the politically decisive ‘block vote’ of left-led unions at party conferences, to impose a more radical leadership and policy on the party. This was an entirely practicable strategy. Indeed, it almost succeeded. The illusion lay in the belief that the Labour Party thus captured by a mixed minority of sectarian leftwingers would somehow remain united, gain in electoral force, and would have a policy capable of standing up to the attack of Mrs Thatcher’s class warriors, whose force they systematically failed to grasp.

  Consequently this illusion led to disaster. Many traditional voters – one third of the actual self-described working-class electors – were in any case abandoning Labour and voting for
the Conservatives. The party split, and for some years the alliance between the new Social Democratic Party and the Liberals actually came close to gaining more votes than the Labour Party. Two and a half years after the victory of Mrs Thatcher’s Conservatives Labour had lost another one in five of its voters and no longer had majority support in any group of the working class, even the unskilled and unemployed. And this at a time when the Conservative government itself had lost votes since the election of 1979. As I wrote at the time, ‘The triumph of Thatcher is a by-product of the defeat of Labour.’ What made things worse was what I then described as ‘the sheer refusal of some of the left to look unwelcome facts in the face’.2

  In short, the future, perhaps the very existence, of the Labour Party was at stake in the years following the victory of Mrs Thatcher’s Conservatives in 1979. The new Social Democrats had written it off, and aimed to replace it by an alliance, eventually a merger between themselves and the Liberals. I remember the occasion – a dinner in the house of Amartya Sen and his wife Eva Colorni – to which one of their Kentish Town neighbours came late, with apologies. Bill Rogers had just been meeting with the rest of the so-called ‘Gang of Four’ (Roy Jenkins, David Owen and Shirley Williams, all eventually in the House of Lords) to draft the declaration establishing what became, a few weeks later, the Social Democratic Party. It was joined by a substantial number of the Labour middle and professional classes, some of whom were to return to the party when it stopped pursuing its visibly suicidal course. On the other hand, the militant left, and many socialist intellectuals such as my old friend Ralph Miliband (whose sons were to become important figures in the offices of Prime Minister Tony Blair and Chancellor Gordon Brown), also wrote off the Labour Party until the moment when it had been captured and was ready to become ‘a real socialist party’, whatever that meant. I outraged some of my friends by pointing out that they were not seriously trying to defeat Mrs Thatcher. Whatever they thought, ‘they acted as though another Labour government like the ones we have had before from time to time since 1945 were not just unsatisfactory, but worse than no Labour government … (i.e.) worse than the only alternative government on offer, namely Mrs Thatcher’s’.3 The question was, could the Labour Party be saved?

  In the end it was saved, but only just, at the Labour Conference in 1981, when Tony Benn stood for the deputy leadership of the party and was defeated in a photo-finish by Denis Healey. The future of the party was not certain until after the disastrous election of 1983, when Michael Foot, who had been elected leader in 1980 (as the candidate of the left, also against Healey), was succeeded by Neil Kinnock. On the eve of his election I spoke at a fringe meeting on that occasion, organized either by the Fabian Society or by Marxism Today. Kinnock himself made a point of being there, and signing a copy of my book ‘with warm thanks’, so, if I recall, were David Blunkett and Robin Cook, then also on the non-Bennite Labour left, at the time I write pillars of the Labour government since 1997. Whatever his limitations, Neil Kinnock, whose candidature I had strongly supported, was the leader who saved the Labour Party from the sectarians. After 1985, when he secured the expulsion of the Trotskyite ‘Militant Tendency’ from the party, its future was safe.

  This was the only occasion on which I actually met Neil Kinnock, apart from the time when I interviewed him for Marxism Today a little later, returning rather depressed about his potential as a future prime minister. Hence the absurdity of the habit of some political journalists for the next year or two of linking my name with his (‘Kinnock’s guru’). Nevertheless, there was a sound political reason why the name of a Marxist intellectual who was not even in the Labour Party should, at a few moments of the battle for the survival of that party, have been useful for those who wanted to save it. I had been among the very few who predicted serious trouble for Labour, which gave me some standing in the controversy. I was among the few known socialist intellectuals who were openly sceptical of the project of taking over the party and argued against its proponents with passion and (I hope) some effectiveness.7 But in those difficult times it was particularly useful for the opponents of the sectarians to be able to cite support from someone known to most activists in the party – at least to those who read books and periodicals – and with a long and incontrovertible track record on the far left as a Marxist. For in 1980 and 1981 constitutional changes had given the sectarian leftists what looked like a built-in majority within the party and thus virtually handed its fortunes over to them. The future of the party depended essentially on detaching enough activists of the Labour left from the sectarians to offset this, at least at crucial moments.

  The case for doing so had to be made from the left, all the more so since until 1983 the chief alternative candidate for the Labour leadership was Denis Healey, formerly Minister of Defence and Chancellor of the Exchequer, who represented everything the left disliked, who did not try to conceal his contempt for most of them, and who had established a justified reputation as a political bully-boy. The Labour Party under Tony Blair has moved so far to the right of its traditional position that there is probably less ideological difference between Healey and myself when we meet today, old men looking back on a better past, than there has been since we first met in the student CP, but by the standards of the 1970s he was the man of the Labour right. In private life he was and is a person of charm, high intelligence and culture, underneath the battlements of his trademark eyebrows, and the author of one of the few British politicians’ memoirs that can be read with enjoyment as a book. However, the public Healey was easier to respect than to love. He would certainly have made a far better political leader than any of the other candidates, although the sectarians would have done their best to destroy him. The situation at the time was such that probably only a leader with left-wing credentials could have got the party out of its crisis.

  Michael Foot, who beat him, was not constructed to be a party leader or potential prime minister, and should not have been elected to the leadership. He was and is a marvellous man. For years he and I used to meet at the Hampstead bus stop from which we travelled together, I to the university, he to the House of Commons or the office of the journal Tribune, an increasingly stooped, casually dressed old man with a limp and a fine profile, shaking his white head of hair with passion. Walking – he belonged to the generation of the great hiking British intellectuals – and public transport were his forms of locomotion. Since he became a government minister only briefly in the 1970s, the official car was not part of his ego.

  He was and is a Labour politician who attracts genuine love, as well as admiration for patent moral integrity and for his considerable talents and literary culture. He had eloquence of the kind that belonged to the era of mass meetings and great House of Commons occasions, before the days of the small TV screen: the oratory of the flashing eye, the gesture, the elocution reaching to the last row. He was a highly professional journalist of great rhetorical power, superb at denouncing injustice and reaction. He was a voracious reader and easy writer of some style, never tired of singing the praises of those he admired most, Jonathan Swift and William Hazlitt. Perhaps his capacity for enthusiasm, or his unwillingness to hurt, made him too uncritical. His life of Aneurin Bevan, the great leader of the Labour left, whose parliamentary seat in the South Wales valleys he inherited and in due course passed on to Neil Kinnock, was too hagiographical, his numerous book reviews, including those of my own books, not critical enough. I cannot think of anyone who actually disliked him.

  He seemed, even to his contemporaries and colleagues, to belong to an older, almost a pre-1914 generation, the first from the old dissenting provincial middle class to abandon their traditional loyalty to the Liberal Party for the cause of the workers. He was not built for authority but for opposition, a ‘tribune of the people’ who defended it against the presumption of its rulers. For almost all his career in the Labour Party he was the spokesman of the left against the leadership, although they could always rely on his utter loyalty to the mov
ement – notably in 1964, when the left had Harold Wilson’s first Labour government with a tiny majority of three at its mercy. He was not an organization man. He lacked the unfortunately useful gifts of intrigue and horse-trading that give the term ‘politician’ a bad name, and the sense of egoism and personal ambition that drives so many of the most formidable of them. The three years of his leadership were a disaster.

  Tony Benn, a good and honest man who almost brought the party to ruin, lacked neither ego nor ambition. After all, he had spent a great deal of time and energy fighting for the right to disclaim his title as a hereditary peer to win the right to shorten his name and to enter the real politics of the House of Commons. In some ways he was extremely well fitted to be what he plainly wanted to be more than anything else, namely leader of the party and, in due course, prime minister. Handsome, looking remarkably young, physically robust – politics is an exhausting game like rugby or chess – and eloquent, he was and remains one of the few faces and voices almost immediately recognizable by the general public. Even his air of eagerness, like a Boy Scout looking for an occasion to do a good turn, his trademark pipe, his proletarian preference for mugs of tea, were assets. Though he had no great political profile in the past, he was moving left in the 1970s. Had he wanted to, he would almost certainly have been able to hold the Labour Party together and see it through difficult times. He looked like winning the leadership sooner or later, and, like many others, I thought he was probably the best man for the job – until he threw it away. I interviewed him at some length for Marxism Today in October 1980, and was impressed, if not completely reassured, by his insistence that in his view the Labour Party should remain ‘a very broad church’.