Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  The most obvious parallel with the GLC, though, came further north. Sheffield, wrote the Guardian’s Peter Jenkins in 1981, was the ‘most proletarian of cities’, a self-consciously working-class place with a smaller middle class than Birmingham, Manchester or Leeds. As a result, outsiders often found it remarkably traditional, even backward-looking. The Steel City’s people were literally older than their counterparts elsewhere; no other major city in Britain had a lower birth rate or a higher proportion of pensioners. And if many of them preferred to look back rather than look around, it was hardly surprising. South Yorkshire’s traditional steel and textile industries had been under pressure for years, and the recession took a devastating toll. In five years after 1979, the number of steel jobs fell by half, while unemployment surged towards 20 per cent. It was no wonder that the head of the council’s employment department talked of feeling ‘under attack, under siege’.19

  Sheffield had always been a Labour stronghold. The local party was one of the city’s most important institutions, inextricably entwined with its steel mills, Methodist churches, football clubs and trade unions. Labour had run the city council since 1933, with only a brief Conservative interlude in the late 1960s. As in London, however, the mood of the local Labour Party had changed. Previously dominated by older, more conservative trade union stalwarts, it had moved sharply to the left, thanks to the emergence of a younger group spearheaded by the ambitious David Blunkett. There, was, however, a difference between the new left in Sheffield and their London counterparts. While many of Livingstone’s supporters were middle-class graduates, the key figures in Sheffield’s Labour group invariably came from manual working-class backgrounds and were acutely conscious of their origins. And unlike some activists elsewhere, they were not ashamed of belonging to a long local tradition. As the party whip told the Guardian, Sheffield’s Labour history gave them a ‘continuity and experience’ which few other councils could match.20

  As in London, Sheffield’s new left benefited from the leadership of an engaging front man. But Blunkett was very different from his southern counterpart. Born into a working-class Sheffield family in 1947, he had known tragedy from an early age. When he was 12, his father, a Gas Board foreman, fell into a vat of boiling water, leaving David’s mother to bring him up on a widow’s pension. Blind from birth because of a rare genetic disorder, he was sent to a specialist state boarding school near Shrewsbury, where the only career options were piano-tuning, lathe-turning and secretarial skills. Blunkett chose the third. He studied in his spare time to pass his O-levels, returned to Sheffield, took more evening classes to get three A-levels and finally won a place to study politics at the local university. These were the late 1960s, when Livingstone was discovering the joys of progressive politics. But Blunkett had little time for the fashionable causes of the day. His blindness and his background made him a man apart; as he later told The Times, he felt a ‘distaste for the trivial concerns of his fellow students’.

  Blunkett was always passionate, though, about the Labour Party. In 1970, aged just 22, he became the youngest councillor in Sheffield’s history; ten years later, he became the youngest council leader in Britain. Even then it was obvious that he would play a major role in the Labour Party for years to come. ‘He may be young’, one colleague said, ‘but David has thought longer and harder than many politicians 20 years older than himself.’ Interviewers unanimously commented on his resilience, memory and work ethic, which had seen him defy misfortunes that would have destroyed a lesser man. His fellow councillors, reported The Times, were often ‘infuriated by the hundreds of memos he dictates each week’. Yet even his critics were invariably ‘charmed by his disarmingly sensible persuasion’, and left his office having forgotten the ‘complaint they had intended to make’.

  In theory Blunkett was on the left. Like Livingstone, he supported the Bennite campaign for greater party democracy, wanted Britain to leave the Common Market and advocated workers’ control in industry. Councils like Sheffield, he said, were ‘beacons’ of socialism, advertising an ‘alternative vision of the world’. He hated having to sell council houses to their tenants, and invested some of the council’s money in local co-operatives, insisting that they make ‘socially useful products’. Like Livingstone, he tried to run his own foreign policy, subsidizing anti-nuclear plays, protests and vigils. He named one street Donetsk Way to honour Sheffield’s Soviet twin city, and even signed a ‘peace treaty’ with Donetsk. And there were a couple of other gestures that would have seemed familiar to observers of the GLC. The oak-panelled Lord Mayor’s Parlour, for example, was converted into a crèche. But children hoping to come away with a packet of Rolos were in for a disappointment: Blunkett ripped out the Rowntree’s machines from the Town Hall, as punishment for the firm’s South African connections.21

  The most emblematic of all Blunkett’s policies, though, was his commitment to cheap bus fares. Since 1975 South Yorkshire’s bus fares had been frozen, despite inflation having twice gone above 20 per cent.fn1 So in 1981 a four-mile journey from Sheffield still cost only 9p. By contrast, the same journey in Newcastle cost 25p, in Birmingham 30p and in Manchester or Glasgow 40p. This was obviously excellent news for the poor, who depended on public transport, as well as pensioners, who travelled for free. Indeed, South Yorkshire’s buses carried more passengers, proportionately, than any other system in Britain, including London. But cheap fares did not, in fact, come cheap. In 1974 the council subsidy had come to £3.4 million; by 1981 it had reached a whopping £53 million, with local ratepayers footing the bill. In Sheffield, domestic rates rose from 136p in the pound in 1980 to 233p by 1982, while the commercial rate soared from 154p in the pound to almost 252p.

  Local businessmen naturally complained, while the Conservatives claimed that the annual rate increases, sometimes as high as 45 per cent, were deterring new firms from moving to the area. When Peter Jenkins visited the local mills, people told him that Sheffield’s high business rate added £7 to the price of a ton of steel. But Blunkett insisted that this was a genuinely ‘alternative socialist strategy’, giving ordinary people what they wanted and getting businesses and the middle classes to pay for it. The government accused him of overspending. But to stay within their spending limits, Blunkett said, would mean cutting £20 million worth of services. If the government cut Sheffield’s grant, he would put the rates up even higher. And if they tried to cap local rates, he would fight them all the way.fn2 ‘Our claim’, he said defiantly, ‘is that we have a right to act to protect the local community … Local government must be upheld.’22

  Blunkett’s defiance confirmed his image as one of the chief standard-bearers of the new left. Yet his politics were more complicated than they appeared. His view of socialism, one profile said, was ‘more deeply rooted in Methodism than in Marx, in municipal realism rather than in vanguard militancy’. Unlike almost every other Labour councillor in Britain, he made no secret of his admiration for Margaret Thatcher, even though he abhorred her policies. Indeed, when he poured scorn on the notion that ‘people should be told and given what is good for them’, he might have been singing from her hymnbook. A former Methodist lay preacher, he had little interest in what he saw as chattering-class fads, describing feminism as a ‘diversion’ that would ‘sap the energy of the class struggle’. Ken Livingstone claimed that, when Blunkett first heard about the GLC’s plans for a women’s committee, he was so shocked ‘he almost fell backwards off his chair’. And in what modern academics clearly regard as an abominable stain on Sheffield’s reputation, the city council’s official publications did not acknowledge the existence of lesbianism until 1987.23

  Blunkett and his allies were not, of course, without their critics. At the turn of the decade, the leader of the small Conservative group on the county council, the immensely right-wing Irvine Patnick, suggested that it should be renamed the ‘Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire’, and the label stuck. By 1981 two Labour councillors had started selling ‘Socialist Republ
ic’ badges, with the proceeds going to local party funds. To be a ‘Socialist Republic’, said one Sheffield MP, was a ‘term of praise’, although ‘we wouldn’t like it to be interpreted to suggest South Yorkshire is a microcosm of some state in Eastern Europe’. Given the treatment dished out to Livingstone and the GLC, they were right to be wary. Yet the national press only rarely mentioned the Socialist Republic. And although the newspapers shook their heads at Sheffield’s rate rises, Blunkett and his colleagues never attracted the abuse directed at their southern counterparts. Even the Express, which called him a ‘hard line Left-winger’, admitted that Blunkett was ‘a remarkable young man’. It would never have said that about Ken Livingstone.24

  County Hall stands on the south bank of the River Thames, almost directly facing the Houses of Parliament. A six-storey monument to the grandeur of Edwardian Britain’s imperial capital, this was the home of the Greater London Council. Everything about it suggested size, importance, the intoxicating swagger of power: the 1,200 rooms, the 3,000 windows, the twelve miles of corridors, one of them stretching for a quarter of a mile. Here was a fitting headquarters for the largest local authority in Europe, employing 35,000 staff to serve almost 8 million people. To walk into the council chamber, with its ‘imported oak, Portland stone and Italian marble’, wrote Livingstone, was to feel the weight of history. As in most other councils, meetings started with a prayer by the chairman’s personal chaplain. The first thing Livingstone did was to abolish it, but the outgoing Conservative chairman insisted on one last prayer. ‘I have been told to be brief,’ the chaplain said, ‘so I shall simply beseech Almighty God to watch over those who have chosen to walk a crooked path.’25

  For all its grandeur, though, the façade along the South Bank was not so much the face of power as the mask of weakness. The GLC had been set up in 1963 to give the capital an overarching metropolitan authority. But its day-to-day responsibilities were less extensive than many people realized. Most services, from libraries and cemeteries to street cleaning and food safety, were provided by London’s thirty-two borough councils. That left the GLC handling main roads, traffic management, flood prevention, the fire brigade and land drainage, hardly the most glamorous responsibilities in the political world. In effect, it was squeezed between the borough councils, which jealously guarded their daily responsibilities, and Westminster, which insisted on taking major strategic decisions itself. Even in the mid-1970s, some observers wondered whether there was any point to the GLC at all. The government, said The Times, could easily save millions by getting rid of it, ‘at no cost to public convenience or competent administration’ – and this six years before Livingstone took office.26

  Livingstone’s mandate was weaker than it looked. Despite Mrs Thatcher’s travails, Labour had won less than 42 per cent of the vote, just 2 per cent ahead of the Conservatives. By contrast, when the Conservatives had won in 1977, the gap had been almost 20 per cent. Talk of ‘Red Wreckers’ and higher rates had clearly alienated suburban voters, and most analysts agreed that, if the SDP had been organized enough to mount candidates of its own, Labour would not have had a hope. ‘If London again proves to represent the nation,’ wrote the elections expert Ivor Crewe, ‘Labour is in serious trouble.’ Yet Livingstone’s supporters had no intention of letting electoral reality stand in the way of building socialism. ‘After the most vicious GLC election campaign of all time, Labour has won a working majority on a radical socialist platform,’ boasted London Labour Briefing. The headline read simply: ‘LONDON’S OURS!’27

  At first Livingstone’s radicalism was limited to a series of eye-catching gestures. He returned his limousine to the car pool, announced he would only use public transport and asked his staff not to call him ‘Leader’. The word ‘lead’, he explained, ‘isn’t a term which we go along with on the left of the Labour Party’. On the top of County Hall, which some journalists nicknamed the ‘People’s Palace’, he hung a banner, showing how many Londoners were currently unemployed. His only regret, he said, was that they could not afford the electronic version, which would have updated the figures every hour. He threw open County Hall to the People’s March for Jobs, putting the demonstrators up at a cost of some £14,000. And in the most striking sign of change, he promoted a new generation to run the GLC’s committees. The youngest, Paul Boateng, was only 29. Born to Ghanaian and Scottish parents, Boateng had spent much of his childhood in Accra and had worked as legal adviser to the Scrap Sus Campaign. Now he was in charge of the police committee.28

  On Fleet Street, Livingstone’s gestures confirmed his reputation as a bogeyman of Tony Benn proportions. Later, he complained that the press had set out to smear him, but there is no doubt that his hunger for publicity made matters worse. On just his second day in the job, he agreed to an interview with the Evening Standard’s Max Hastings. In an oddly tragicomic little scene, Hastings arrived at Livingstone’s flat in Maida Vale to find the leader ironing his shirts. The resulting picture was not complimentary. Livingstone came over as a lonely, ascetic and almost fanatical man, who lived alone with ‘a portable snooker table, a tank of salamanders, a wardrobe, a bed, a suitcase, a couple of chairs and a portable TV’. One of his GLC colleagues described him as ‘utterly ambitious, mean, ruthless, a brilliant organiser of caucuses’. Another recalled that, after Livingstone had separated from his wife, he had told him: ‘I don’t need anybody. I can cope.’ The new leader was ‘not interested in ordinary human relations – simply in getting to the top of the greasy pole’. And these were his own comrades talking.29

  The Evening Standard’s interview set the tone. For press and public alike, Livingstone’s image was fixed: a strange, slightly sad man, alone with his snooker table, his salamanders and his socialism. ‘Bedsitter Vision of the Socialists’ Mr London,’ read the headline on the Telegraph’s profile, which explained that at his ‘£20 a week room in Maida Vale he is just one of the tenants who have to share the lavatory. To the neighbours he is the bizarre character who spends his free time searching the local terrain for slugs and woodlice to feed his pet lizards.’ Once again the article juxtaposed the depressing banality of Livingstone’s bedsit, the snooker table again very prominent, with what it saw as the fanaticism of his ‘Socialist dream for London’. It drew down the curtain ‘close to midnight, when Livingstone comes up the steps at Maida Vale station and stops to buy a packet of chips on the way to his room and his seven cold-blooded friends’. It was talking about his salamanders, not his colleagues.30

  Although none of this was exactly flattering, it was hardly disastrous. There are worse things than playing snooker or owning salamanders. Private Eye mocked him as ‘Ken Leninspart’, his life consisting of feeding newts and allocating funds to ‘special bus shelters for disabled gays’, but this was not so much brutal satire as a mild exaggeration of his daily routine. The Sun, meanwhile, got hold of some rumours that Livingstone had a taste for schoolgirls and had attended an orgy where, apparently, ‘he was buggered by six men in succession’. Unfortunately, none of them turned out to be true. When the paper’s editor Kelvin MacKenzie told his news team to dig up some dirt, they reported that Livingstone ‘kept newts and lived extremely modestly’. ‘Fucking newts!’ MacKenzie exploded. ‘All you can find is newts!’31

  At this point, Livingstone was still a vaguely comic figure. But then, in early July, came the riots in Toxteth, Southall and Moss Side, and with them the first sign of his instinct for controversy. Addressing the Anti-Nazi League in Lambeth on 10 July, Livingstone told a boisterous crowd that the real culprits were Mrs Thatcher and her press allies, who had been ‘pumping out a daily diet of filth and making racism respectable’. The next day, he added the Metropolitan Police commissioner to the list, telling LBC radio that Sir David McNee had ‘views which I frankly consider to be racist’. This, he said, had ‘set the scene for a worsening of police–black relations’.

  On the hard left, these views were not remotely controversial. After the Brixton riots, Livingsto
ne’s friend Ted Knight, the leader of Lambeth Council, had declared that the police were an ‘army of occupation’ and urged them to ‘withdraw’ immediately to avoid future disturbances. A future Labour government, Knight said, must replace the Metropolitan Police with a new force, ‘responsible and answerable to the working-class people’. London Labour Briefing went even further. ‘The street fighting was excellent, but could have been (and hopefully will be in future) better organised,’ an editorial remarked of the Brixton riots. ‘Some of us feel there are occasions when, in defence of genuine legality and democracy, insurrectionary methods become necessary … The task, surely, is to break the Metropolitan Police as presently constituted.’32

  Among the public at large, however, views like these were positively inflammatory. When Mrs Thatcher told the Commons that London Labour Briefing’s editorial would be ‘repugnant to most people in Britain’, she was stating the obvious. And when Livingstone blamed the riots on unemployment, bad housing and police racism, demanding that responsibility for the Metropolitan Police be handed over to the GLC, the tabloids joyfully whipped themselves into a lather of rage. The Evening Standard claimed Livingstone wanted to ‘handcuff’ the police; the Sun said he wanted to ‘destroy’ them; the News of the World accused him of acting as ‘a cheer leader to trouble’. Here, said the Mail, was the ‘Commissar of County Hall’, the ‘face of a dogmatic zealot’ hidden behind the ‘mask of reason’.33