Dangerous Hero

by Tom Bower

  3

  The Deadly Duo

  Jane Chapman was torn. Politically and as an academic, she was a rising star, but her personal life made her miserable. For Christmas lunch she prepared a special five-course vegetarian meal for Corbyn and Piers. ‘They stuffed it down their gullets and never said thanks,’ she recalled in an even tone. Her husband, she knew, would have been happy with a can of beans: ‘Usually Tesco, not Heinz, but he wouldn’t know the difference. It was all just fuel to keep him going.’ Their conversation was, as ever, about politics, mainly the inevitability of widespread strikes after the holiday.

  Within Haringey council, everyone knew about Corbyn’s conflict of interest. He was in charge of the employment of NUPE members, and at the same time he was their trade union representative organising a strike against the council. He was also responsible for the housing maintenance department, from which £2 million had gone missing annually for several years in succession. Council employees were both stealing money and inflating their claims for overtime. The consequence was a two-year backlog of repairs to council homes. Because workers had failed to do the necessary repairs, Haringey’s housing was in a bad state, not least on the Broadwater Farm estate, the Tottenham home of over four thousand people that was ostensibly managed by Chapman in her role as chairman of housing. She would claim that the estate’s day-to-day management had been delegated to a local association, but, along with her husband, she was doing little to remedy the borough’s appalling housing shortage. In her defence she could rely on the support of Bernie Grant, who tagged the accusations of corruption as ‘absolutely ridiculous’. The Tories called for an independent investigation, but Corbyn refused to countenance it. ‘We will conduct the inquiry,’ he said, despite a previous internal inquiry ending, according to the Tories, in ‘a whitewash exercise’. No one expressed any confidence in Corbyn’s investigation, especially as his solution was to increase the number of council workers without their either carrying out any identifiable tasks or producing any benefits to the local community.

  In late December 1978, Haringey’s employees’ demands for a 40 per cent pay increase were rejected – at the time that private sector employees were accepting 7 per cent rises – and they went on strike. Corbyn, even though he was their employer, joined them as a NUPE official on their picket line outside the council’s premises. Rapidly, Haringey’s streets filled with bags of uncollected rubbish, children could not enter their schools (the caretakers prevented them), and repairs to council homes were abandoned. ‘Volvos are sliding on the ice on Muswell Hill,’ Corbyn gaily told Toby Harris, the local party chairman and a fellow councillor. The sight of suffering middle classes, Harris noticed, evidently pleased Corbyn. Identical strikes hit many parts of Britain. The lurch towards national panic was highlighted by council workers refusing to bury the dead. Newspaper photographs of Haringey’s plight showed the irate parents of some of the 37,000 children denied their education. ‘The press is just full of crisis, anarchy, chaos, disruption,’ Tony Benn recorded in his diary on 22 January 1979. ‘I have never seen anything like it in my life.’

  With noticeable glee, Corbyn continued to support the strikers. On NUPE’s behalf, he had skilfully organised the dustmen’s dispute. Only the drivers went on strike. The loaders stayed at ‘work’, and shared their wages with the drivers, while Corbyn refused to hire private contractors to collect the rubbish. He also sided with the school caretakers, who were forbidden to hand over the door keys to headmasters to open the borough’s ninety-six schools. Teachers were ordered not to enter the buildings, and those who agreed to help educate children outside their classrooms were threatened by a NUPE rent-a-mob, vocal agitators summoned by the union to assert its cause. Haringey’s parents were furious that no other children in London were being denied their education, but Corbyn dismissed their protests as immaterial to the workers’ rights, which he said came first. The parents staged several public demonstrations, protesting that Haringey had failed in its statutory duty to provide education, but Corbyn arranged for Trotskyites, holding banners that read ‘Low pay, no way’, to stand between them and the TV cameras. ‘He wasn’t a great one for education,’ recalls Chapman, ‘and as he didn’t have kids he didn’t care about opening the schools.’

  Although lambasted by local newspapers, Corbyn was ignored by the national media – the chaos was universal, not just in Haringey. The strikes ended after six weeks. In that decisive moment, the post-war consensus between Labour and the Tories to accept the state’s control of markets, industries and housing was over. Most Britons blamed the trade unions for crippling industries, and in particular their restrictive practices which prevented modernisation and lowered productivity. Conservative leader Margaret Thatcher was committed to unravelling the monopoly of state socialism. By contrast, the left was excited by the display of raw working-class power. Polls showed that the strikes were highly unpopular with the public, but Corbyn dismissed this, and ignored complaints by local NUPE members that his political agitation was coming at the expense of their private lives.

  There were consequences. Corbyn had forbidden private construction workers to cross the picket lines, and eventually the council had to pay them £6,160 in compensation for loss of earnings, the equivalent today of £25,000. A committee was set up to award bonuses to council workers who had to clear the backlogs caused by the strike: Corbyn was its chairman. His conflict of interest was referred by the borough’s chief executive to the director of public prosecutions. He would be acquitted of any wrongdoing, and was merely castigated for managerial incompetence. Around the same time, he forbade an animal circus to perform in the borough.

  The strikes divided the forty-two Labour councillors in Haringey. The moderate majority, with the support of the seventeen Tory councillors, opposed Corbyn’s ambitions to turn their borough into a mini-Marxist state. In his undisguised bid for power, he challenged council leader Colin Ware, a conventional social democrat. Although he was defeated, he had demonstrated that he had considerable backing. ‘You could not out-left Corbyn,’ recalled Robin Young, the Labour whip. ‘He detested everyone who disagreed with him. And he always got others to do his dirty work.’ Constantly calculating the numbers and the strategy to assert control, Corbyn quietly ordered junior councillors to propose motions to destabilise the moderates, encouraged activists to challenge his ideological enemies in the Labour branches, and energetically recruited far leftists as Labour Party members. As an organiser he was showing real political gifts. Young’s biggest gripe was that ‘Corbyn played no part in building Haringey’s houses and social services. He just played politics.’ Even Mark Killingworth, a fellow left-wing councillor, had grown to dislike Corbyn’s conspiratorial ways. ‘He wanted all the power and to be the one leader everyone should follow. Jeremy and Jane turned every meeting of the Labour group into a terrible argument.’

  Corbyn’s opponents would not go quietly. Raucous meetings of the Hornsey Labour Party were testing Toby Harris, its chairman. ‘Corbyn was encouraging all the left groups to join. Some arrived with fake names, especially the hardliners. They were out-lefting each other, and he loved that, but he never identified with one group. He just distributed leaflets, announced the next demo, but never stood up as a leader to say what we should do.’ A general election was imminent – the five-year parliamentary term expired that year – and Corbyn was certain that Labour would win, especially in Hornsey, which was a marginal seat. All that remained was to select a candidate.

  Corbyn was well prepared. His support was based entirely on an individual’s political beliefs, not on their personal relationship with him. So in the final run-off to select the Labour candidate he made no distinction between Reg Race, the friend who had secured his job at NUPE, and Ted Knight, a well-known forty-five-year-old unmarried Trotskyite. Knight was leader of Lambeth council, notorious for its debts, its corrupt workforce, and for failing to prevent serious sexual abuses at a young children’s home. Ostensibly, Corbyn supp
orted Race’s nomination by introducing him to the members in every ward, but he seemed untroubled when Knight won selection by a single vote. With the support of the local party’s far-left professionals, recruited by Corbyn, he would be the Labour candidate. Corbyn, however, had private reservations. Always dressed in a dark suit, Knight addressed everyone as ‘Comrade’, delivered with a distinct hint of menace, and in private screamed obscenities. ‘He scares me,’ Corbyn admitted to Keith Veness. No genuine friendship was ever forged between the two, not least because they supported opposing Trotskyist factions.

  In a campaign leaflet issued by Corbyn, Knight pledged to strengthen the legal protection of strikers, to ‘weaken the capitalist police who are an enemy of the working class’, pay ‘not a penny for defence’, and repeal the Prevention of Terrorism Act, which gave the police emergency powers to deal with suspected terrorists. As IRA supporters, Corbyn and Knight opposed any law specifically targeted at the Irish which empowered the police to stop people entering or leaving Britain, and to control the membership, activities and finances of proscribed organisations like the IRA. Going well beyond Labour’s official policy, the two men also advocated mass nationalisation of banks, industry, major shops and newspapers – all without compensation. These promises were important, but in targeting the immigrant vote Corbyn made race an issue by recruiting Martha Osamor of the United Black Women’s Action Group to spread the word that Labour would abolish immigration controls. In his election speeches across Hornsey he accused Thatcher of promoting ‘racism and fascist forces’. To create a false image of the National Front storming through the borough, he and Knight constantly staged protests under the banner ‘No Nazis in Hornsey’. The far left and immigrant groups admired this side of his campaigning, but when he refused to pay homage on Remembrance Day to those who had died in the two world wars, he was criticised even by moderate Labour supporters for ‘exploiting the anti-fascist platform for left-wing political ends’. Tories directly accused his canvassers of telling West Indian immigrants that they would be sent home if Labour lost the election. Haringey’s one black councillor supported the Conservatives’ protest – which was perhaps not surprising, because he was a Tory.

  In his unquestioning allegiance to Knight’s utterances – even supporting the extremist demand that all local shops be nationalised – Corbyn for the first time exposed his attitude towards Jews. In July 1976, Israeli special forces had carried out a raid at Entebbe airport in Uganda to rescue 102 hostages on board a hijacked aeroplane. It was a spectacular success, but during the election campaign, Knight publicly criticised the operation, and Corbyn agreed. ‘His support for Knight,’ said David Barlow, a middle-of-the-road Labour councillor in Haringey, ‘an awful candidate who was destroying Lambeth council, showed that Corbyn was dubious.’ Jews who were otherwise Labour supporters refused to vote for Knight. Some were also uncertain about Corbyn, by then a prominent local politician in Haringey and now identified as Knight’s henchman.

  Galvanised by the industrial unrest, Corbyn and Knight grasped the opportunity to lead a left-wing takeover of the entire London Labour Party (LLP), covering the capital’s thirty-two boroughs, with over a thousand Labour councillors and fifty-one out of ninety-two MPs. They made no effort to conceal their Trotskyist agenda. Corbyn began writing regular articles for the Socialist Organiser, a weekly newspaper representing the Trotskyist Revolutionary Socialist League, and was frequently seen marching under the banner of the Socialist Campaign for a Labour Victory with Alan Thornett, a leader of the Workers Socialist League. Corbyn and Knight worked closely with Ken Livingstone, a forty-four-year-old GLC councillor well known for disrupting neighbouring Camden council’s housing department (Livingstone was the department’s chairman) with rent freezes, strikes and compulsory purchase orders. ‘Jeremy’s just like me,’ Livingstone would say. ‘You get what you see.’ Socialist Organiser was Livingstone’s mouthpiece for the ambitious Trotskyite group inside the Labour Party. While Livingstone was selected as the Labour general election candidate in Hampstead, and Knight in Hornsey, Reg Race became the candidate in Wood Green, the adjoining borough.

  Corbyn’s continuing embrace of Trotskyites alarmed several of his colleagues. In a plea to Jim Callaghan to stop the left’s takeover of ‘many of our inner city parties’, Douglas Eden, a member of the Hornsey branch for fifteen years, identified Corbyn – along with forty-three Labour MPs and twenty-six parliamentary candidates, including Knight – as one of the ultra-leftists who ‘overtly associated themselves with extreme Marxist activities’. Corbyn and the others, wrote Eden, were ‘unrepresentative of Labour voters’ and had ‘no scruples about associating themselves with totalitarian organisations’. Naming the ‘public-school-educated Cllr Jeremy Corbyn and his fellow-traveller’ Chapman, Eden attacked the ‘fascist left [who] manipulate any public office they hold to further their own undemocratic ends’.

  Among his examples was Jane Chapman’s removal of three moderate Labour governors of Creighton School, a Haringey comprehensive, which she carried out without notice or hearing. Allegedly, the governors had tried to open the school during the caretakers’ strike, and were accused of ‘not giving support at a critical time to the strikers’. Despite their denials, they were replaced by three ultra-leftists including Bernie Grant. ‘Are there any moderates left,’ asked many Labour voters in Haringey, ‘to stop these empire-building fanatics, or have they been eliminated by the “deadly duo”?’

  The reckoning was unexpectedly swift. In March 1979, Margaret Thatcher tabled a motion of no confidence in Callaghan’s government, which was passed by just one vote (311 to 310), triggering a general election to be held in May, six months before the end of the five-year term. In April, just weeks before the election, Labour’s ruling group in Haringey fired five left-wing chairmen, including Corbyn, Chapman and Mark Killingworth. In what the moderates called ‘The Night of the Long Knives’, their spokesman explained: ‘We were fed up with these individuals. The elite was making a mess of certain jobs.’ Corbyn was naturally outraged: ‘The council leadership have given us a tremendous kick in the teeth despite all the good work we have done.’ Killingworth blamed the departing chairman’s self-interest: ‘I didn’t like his ambition and conspiracies. He created the “organiser” job so he could be powerful and then allowed the Trotskyites to infiltrate the constituency without us knowing.’ Not surprisingly, the local Tories highlighted Labour’s ‘wild extravagance’ and pronounced, ‘The party is over.’ That proved to be true on 3 May, the day Margaret Thatcher swept to power with an overall majority of forty-three. Labour lost a total of fifty seats.

  Corbyn was shocked. He had even printed a leaflet announcing Hornsey as a Labour win. Every copy had to be dumped. Hugh Rossi, supported by traditional Labour voters changing their allegiance, secured by far his biggest majority – 4,037, up from 782 in October 1974. In endless post-mortems, Corbyn failed to draw the link between the strikes and how people had voted. Instead, he blamed Callaghan for refusing to destroy capitalism. By imposing a wage limit, the ‘non-believer’ had ‘betrayed the working class’. As a result, the party’s natural constituency had refused to vote Labour. ‘You’ll see,’ Corbyn told his acolytes. ‘The Tories will be out in four years after the people see the truth.’ The only immediate consequence was a court summons for Corbyn and Knight for breaking electoral law by overspending in the campaign by £49.

  Corbyn rightly saw Thatcher’s pledge to reverse his community-style socialism and resurrect individualism and the market economy as a threat. Her instant dismissal of the government-appointed regulators of wages and prices, her introduction of laws to prevent trade unions organising wildcat strikes, the denationalisation of inter-city coaches, the abolition of exchange controls so that Britons were allowed to take more than £50 a year out of the country, and the sale of council homes all enraged him. Her promise to cut government expenditure despite inevitable unemployment was, in Corbyn’s world view, a declaration of war. He de
manded ‘a massive campaign against the cuts’. Together with Ken Livingstone, Bernie Grant, Ted Knight and Keith Veness, the knights of the Socialist Campaign for Labour Victory, he plotted to reverse Labour’s political fortunes.

  Haringey was one of the Tory government’s prime targets. Over the previous five years, the council had employed an additional thousand people and accumulated a £6 million deficit, yet its services were deteriorating. Now, Thatcher forbade all councils to increase their debts, and at the same time reduced their government grants. Most councils sought to improve their efficiency, but Corbyn protested that less money meant cuts in services. Without appreciating the irony, he told the Labour group, ‘We must positively defend and protect services which have already been badly hit.’ He took no responsibility for the uncollected rubbish, closed schools and unrepaired council homes. Instead, as the leader of the left, he launched a counter-attack, demanding that the Labour group defy the government by setting illegally high rates. ‘We’ll be personally surcharged,’ the moderates retorted, fearing that their privately-owned homes would be seized to pay the fines. Corbyn continued to demand the sacrifice, without revealing that his own flat had been bought with a GLC mortgage, and was therefore safe from repossession.

  Robin Young, Labour’s new council leader, discovered that there was nothing gentle about Corbyn’s politics. ‘He was very ambitious but always careful not to get into trouble with the party,’ Young observed, echoing Mark Killingworth’s assessment, adding that ‘he always disguised his grabs for power’. Toby Harris also noticed that while Corbyn presented his arguments in calm and considered terms, he deliberately generated hostility towards moderates, while managing the inevitable disputes among the left about demands and tactics to present a united front. His success, observed Barbara Simon, the Hornsey party’s general secretary, owed much to his being ‘good-tempered, patient and hard-working’. But despite his qualities, Corbyn still led only a minority of councillors. Undeterred, in 1980 he sought to topple Young by standing against him in the Labour group’s leadership election. Once again, he employed a mild manner to disarm his opponents. ‘He never had stand-up rows,’ Killingworth noticed. ‘He was more cunning than that.’ Without being confrontational or physically threatening, Corbyn expressed his bitter intolerance of his ideological enemies in quiet tones. ‘He would propose motions about housing, rates or council employees in party meetings,’ recalled Killingworth, ‘with extreme demands but worded as if only the Tories could oppose his ideas. And he cleverly presented himself as seemingly detached while encouraging his supporters to threaten his opponents with no-confidence motions. Those meetings were really nasty.’ Nevertheless, on this occasion Young came out the victor.