by Tom Bower
Five days later, on 15 October, Callaghan resigned as Labour leader, hoping that Denis Healey would be elected as his successor. If Tony Benn were chosen, Callaghan feared, Labour would be transformed into a genuinely revolutionary and unelectable party. There were three candidates: Benn, Healey, and that veteran of the democratic left, Michael Foot. Convinced that enough moderates had been expelled in the constituencies, Corbyn assured Benn that he would win, but Benn decided not to divide the left’s vote, and withdrew. As a result, Foot, who distrusted Benn as a disloyal, divisive and opportunist upstart, became leader. Healey’s defeat plunged the party into turmoil after Bennites won a majority on Labour’s National Executive Council (NEC). Led by European Commission president Roy Jenkins, a sophisticated former home secretary and chancellor, the moderates openly debated whether to quit Labour and set up a new political party. But for Corbyn and the left, Michael Foot was equally unacceptable, as a ‘prisoner of the right’.
The growing likelihood of Benn challenging Foot encouraged Tariq Ali, a member of the IMG and the author of, among other publications, Trotsky for Beginners, to abandon Trotskyism (in public at least) and, with Corbyn’s encouragement, apply to join his local Hornsey Labour Party. In practical terms, it made sense for Ali to jump aboard the Benn bandwagon and try to take over Labour from within. Although he condemned Benn’s politics as ‘bourgeois’, he could see how popular he was among voters. In Hornsey, Corbyn’s alignment with a well-known Trotskyite angered the moderates. What he called a ‘rainbow coalition’ was, in their opinion, outrightly subversive of the Labour Party. Even Toby Harris, a Corbyn ally and a leading member of the local branch, objected to Ali’s membership. Within weeks, Corbyn manoeuvred for Harris to be voted off the General Management Committee. Max Morris, a former communist and the chairman of the ward Ali joined, denounced Corbyn as Ali’s puppet. He too was threatened with expulsion by having his ward packed with new members, all Trotskyists. In response, a local party executive publicly condemned Corbyn for ‘the most extraordinary manipulation of the rules’.
On 13 May 1981, the Queen opened a new shopping centre in Haringey. Corbyn made sure he was absent – another move calculated to drive moderates out of his local party. The resulting tumult persuaded party headquarters to veto Ali’s membership application. Labour’s leaders, complained Corbyn, were ‘hell-bent on an unremitting war on the socialists in the party – they have no intention of disarming or taking power from the City’. In defiance, he accepted Ali’s second application to join the party, and persuaded Barbara Simon to issue him with a membership card. After all, he said, Ted Grant and Peter Taaffe, both members of the Trotskyite Militant Tendency, were members of the party in neighbouring Islington: the discrimination against Ali reflected outright political prejudice. This was not Corbyn the obedient class warrior on a treadmill – he had become engaged in a frontal war.
Immersed in ideological battles in Hornsey and Haringey, he was simultaneously engaged with violent strikers – his own council employees, who were hurling abuse at Haringey’s moderate councillors (such as remained). In the middle were the police – ‘a barrier to the people’s revolution’, as Corbyn saw them. Inside the town hall, he plotted with local trade union chiefs to challenge his party leaders with a new demand for a 43 per cent rates increase. ‘They object to rate rises,’ he said of his Labour opponents, ‘because they can’t get over them like they can fiddle corporation tax and their profits.’ The moderate Labour councillors retorted that he was pandering to the totalitarian left by ‘speaking out unashamedly in favour of terrorism’ and by leading the ‘anti-patriotic, anti-police faction’. From the Tory side, he was dubbed a ‘tinpot dictator’ for protecting what they dubbed ‘Jeremy’s Angels’ – Haringey’s corrupt council workers. The indictment was irrefutable: the district auditor had discovered that Haringey’s caretakers were submitting fraudulent overtime claims and the dustmen had stolen council property.
Corbyn’s response was to approve a triple pay bonus for dustmen. ‘While the Labour council remains in power,’ he said, ‘no trade unionist in its employ will want for anything.’ Equally, he ignored the consequences of his demand for rates increases, which had caused two major employers, Gestetner and Thorn Electrical, to move away from the borough. Corbyn did not comment. Instead, he tried again to topple Robin Young, but again failed to get a majority of the forty-two Labour councillors. In revenge, the moderates voted Corbyn off the planning committee. Characterised as a spendthrift, he even lost the vice chairmanship of the allotments committee. Undeterred, he continued to plot Young’s removal by deselecting more long-serving moderate councillors in favour of his own sympathisers. By early 1981, fourteen out of twenty-two new candidates in Haringey had been nominated by London Labour Briefing. Across the capital, at least twenty moderates had been deselected, and 130 Labour councillors had stepped down rather than face humiliation. Inevitably, Corbyn denied any part in orchestrating the purge. ‘We don’t draw up lists,’ he told the Hampstead & Highgate Express. Instead, he explained, the councillors selected were ‘politically experienced in community politics’ – ‘community’ being his euphemism for using the Labour Party to spread revolutionary socialism.
In March 1981 the skirmishes in Haringey, replicated across the country, finally provoked senior moderates within Labour to split. Exasperated by the activities of the far left, the anti-Marxists led by Roy Jenkins resigned from Labour and created the Social Democratic Party. Few believed the SDP had any chance of electoral success, but within months it had won both parliamentary seats and council elections. Corbyn and Benn blamed Michael Foot. Although the Tories criticised the Labour leader as a dangerous leftie, to Corbyn he was a paternalistic parliamentarian obsessed with ‘bureaucracy’ rather than mobilising the masses for revolution. Even worse, Foot ignored Benn’s protest against ‘the thought police’ in the party, and ordered the expulsion of Trotskyites, Marxists and other entryists. Among the first casualties were the editors of Liverpool’s Militant newspaper, although their expulsion did not undermine Derek Hatton and his fellow Trotskyists on the city council intent, like Corbyn, to challenge the government.
In April 1981, anti-police riots erupted in Brixton – home of the largest police station in the capital outside Scotland Yard – sparked by disaffected black youths living in deprived areas. The riots spread to Liverpool and Manchester. After a mob outside a police station yelled ‘Kill, kill,’ Corbyn condemned the ‘capitalist police’ and attacked the media’s reporting of the riots as ‘disgraceful’. He and John McDonnell welcomed the rise of revolutionary fervour against Thatcher, and were delighted when it spread to Northern Ireland. The world’s attention was focused on Bobby Sands, a twenty-six-year-old IRA member leading a hunger strike in the Maze prison outside Belfast. Naked and near death, Sands had just won a by-election to become a Member of Parliament. For Corbyn and the far left, his defiant martyrdom symbolised the resonance of their struggle. The next stage was to deliver the Target 82 coup in the GLC elections in May.
Ken Livingstone believed that all his work over the previous two years to replace moderate Labour candidates would win his faction a marginal majority within the Labour group in the GLC. But every vote was important. To his irritation Kate Hoey, the candidate in Hornsey, unexpectedly resigned to stand for Parliament. Livingstone renewed his appeal to Corbyn to stand, but he again declined, not least because of the way he was approached. ‘Politics is like biting lumps out of people,’ Livingstone had told him. Biting people was a practice Corbyn resisted – both verbal attacks and violence. He preferred others to do the dirty work. If he engaged in front-line warfare alongside Livingstone he would be exposed, not least to journalists who might begin investigating his past. That would interfere with his parliamentary ambitions and more. Instead he found a new candidate, David Hart, the son of Judith Hart, a left-wing Labour MP, who was duly voted in. Hart celebrated his victory with Livingstone, one of fifty Labour councillors against forty-one Torie
s. Within twenty-four hours Andrew McIntosh, the party’s moderate GLC leader, had fallen victim to the Target 82 plotters: just as planned, Livingstone marshalled a bare majority of the Labour councillors – many his hand-picked leftists – to usurp McIntosh and win election for himself as Labour’s leader. McIntosh, who six years earlier had been ousted as a councillor in Hornsey by Corbyn, had failed to learn his lesson. ‘He wasn’t a proper politician,’ scoffed Livingstone.
The new GLC leader had much in common with his loyal acolyte. Like Corbyn, he too was portrayed by the media as a ruthless revolutionary living for politics and happy to be separated from his wife. ‘Ken’s not interested in ordinary human relations,’ said one Labour councillor, ‘simply in getting to the top of the greasy pole.’ He wasted no time in putting his agenda into action: remaining moderate Labour members of the GLC were appalled by his imposition of higher rates to pay for cheap transport fares and, after Bobby Sands’ death had incited the IRA to burn a mother of three children to death, his instant declaration of support for the IRA. Corbyn, by contrast, cheered Livingstone’s audacity. Phase One was completed: the GLC was theirs. Thatcher was next.
4
The Other Comrade
‘Where’s that member of Militant who just won in Hayes?’ asked Livingstone jocularly about a trusted comrade in the headquarters of the Greater London Council opposite Parliament.
‘That’s me!’ replied John McDonnell. ‘And I’ve left Militant.’
Livingstone admired McDonnell’s ‘macho form of class-based politics’. The Trotskyite’s fondness for a violent revolution to topple the capitalists, said Livingstone, had been learned during his training as a supporter of Militant Tendency. Emerging from the shadows to become Livingstone’s deputy at County Hall, McDonnell was soon voicing his disgust that moderate Labour GLC councillors dared to criticise his boss. Their so-called colleagues, he sneered, were traitors for advocating ‘middle-of-the-road policies’. ‘Traitor’ was a word he was to use often in the years to come.
Born in Liverpool in 1951, the son of a docker, McDonnell had moved with his family to Great Yarmouth in the late 1950s. His father became a bus driver and his mother worked at the local British Home Stores, for a time at the biscuit counter. Good at maths, the flame-haired ten-year-old sat next to a girl named Judith Daniels at St Mary’s Roman Catholic primary school. In later years, McDonnell suggested that he had whispered a maths answer to her to save her from a severe caning, but in reply she ridiculed his exaggeration. His whisper, she said, ‘saved me from a gentle tapsy from an inspirational nun’. The small lie was similar to Jeremy Corbyn’s attempts to build up the story of his early years, but in other respects their narratives were very different.
After passing the 11-Plus, McDonnell went to Great Yarmouth Grammar School, but left early due to trouble at home and at school. After briefly considering the priesthood, he arrived in Burnley to be employed first as a manual worker at Silent Night Beds and then at Mullard’s in Simonstone, making TV screens for Philips. Shortly before his twentieth birthday he met Marilyn Bateman, a local nursery nurse four years his senior, at a miners’ club. They married and moved to a small terraced house in a cul de sac in nearby Nelson. At nights he resumed studying for History A-Level at Burnley Municipal College. Three years later the McDonnells moved with their two daughters to west London, to establish a business fostering up to ten children in their home. McDonnell enrolled in an evening course in politics and government at Brunel University. During the first year, his political beliefs hardened.
At the beginning, his militancy was ambiguous. Barbara Goodwin, his tutor on government, recalled him as the least extreme in a group of eight students. ‘He was regarded as a class traitor for defending Labour against the Trotskyites,’ she recalled. Later, David Shapiro, his personal tutor, declared him ‘academically unteachable. He was already a Marxist and it was all water off a duck’s back. But he was pragmatic and sensible.’ After graduating in 1976, McDonnell was employed as a researcher at the National Union of Mineworkers. By then he had become well known at the Hayes and Harlington branch of the Labour Party for leading a campaign to oust Neville Sandelson, the sitting Labour MP. The public-school-educated, cigar-smoking Jewish barrister was pro-Europe. ‘He can’t understand the grassroots trade union activists,’ claimed McDonnell, who forced a vote that Sandelson should retire or be deselected. The MP survived by three votes, to be re-elected in the 1979 Labour bloodbath.
During the following three years, McDonnell left the NUM to work in the TUC’s welfare section. As secretary of the TUC’s book club, he selected each month’s read. ‘It’s Das Kapital,’ he told the other staff at the TUC’s headquarters in Bloomsbury. ‘That’s the only book we’re going to study.’ He found himself alone in the room. Before Labour’s defeat in 1979, he had gravitated towards the Trotskyites. Sitting in a café in Lambeth with George Galloway and the Workers Revolutionary Party leader Gerry Healy, he discussed the creation of the Labour Herald, a glossy magazine to be financed by Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi. Although he was a thug, rapist, fraudster and anti-Semite, Healy attracted many idealists to the WRP, including Keith Veness. ‘McDonnell was a proper Trot in a way that Corbyn was not,’ observed Galloway. Veness confirmed the judgement. With a hatchet face and jutting chin, McDonnell was confrontational, spouting Marxist jargon about constant agitation in his advocacy of violent disruption. Appointed as the new magazine’s editor, he regularly appeared at WRP meetings to promote revolution, after which would come the mass nationalisation of the British economy and the abolition of all private land ownership, without compensation. With his new role, his life changed. His Trotskyist sympathies qualified him to become head of policy at Camden council, and his marriage ended. While his estranged wife continued to run the fostering business, he lived with Julia Fitzgerald, a Camden councillor, in a flat in Kentish Town.
During the following year, McDonnell plotted with Corbyn, Knight, Grant and Livingstone to take over the country’s government. After the victory in 1981, he focused on anything that would challenge the government. Disguise was one chosen weapon. ‘Cut your hair, dress properly, wear a tie and act the part,’ he advised Toby Harris. ‘He was always professional to win power,’ says Harris, a member of the London Government Assembly, an elected group representing the London boroughs. Corbyn was very much part of the group, alongside McDonnell, Livingstone and Veness, and was the ‘organiser’ of London Labour Briefing. After his election as Labour leader in 2015 he would deny any official role for London Labour Briefing, but he is listed in the group’s literature as responsible for the sale of tickets to a social event that offered curries during a discotheque evening, and two years later was named as overseeing the group’s mailing list. Labour moderates in Haringey were appalled by Corbyn, but the local newspaper, noting the election of more far-left councillors and Corbyn’s brazen resubmission of Tariq Ali’s third application to become a Labour member in the borough, tipped him to become the council’s next leader.
By then, fearful of the Marxists’ threat to Britain’s social fabric, Conservative Central Office had appointed a professional investigator, Peter Shipley, to monitor relations between Labour MPs and the far left. Ever since James Callaghan had ended the listing of proscribed organisations, left-wing Labour MPs had joined lobby groups that were outwardly reputable, including the World Peace Organisation, but that were in fact secretly financed by Moscow. Among the British associations Shipley investigated was the Movement for Colonial Freedom (MCF), established by Fenner Brockway, a veteran Labour MP and a paid Soviet agent. In 1981 the MCF, managed by Tony Gilbert, a communist agent also controlled by Moscow, counted Corbyn a member. Corbyn met Gilbert frequently, but establishing his political sympathies towards Moscow was beyond Shipley’s remit. All he recognised was the far left’s flaws.
Zealous and serious, all those in the group around Corbyn appeared to march under the same banner, but they disagreed constantly about ideology. They we
re brothers-in-arms rather than soulmates, and as individuals showed no particular warmth towards each other. One exception was the relationship between Tony Benn and Corbyn. Benn’s radical socialism had polarised Labour. His ascent gave many Marxists and Trotskyites hope that the Labour Party they had abandoned during the 1960s was worth rejoining. To establish their shared ambitions, Tariq Ali, Reg Race and others met Benn in the Commons along with Corbyn, who said little, although everyone knew he could be relied upon to make the logistical arrangements for Benn’s imminent battle against Denis Healey in the election for Labour’s deputy leadership, the result of which was to be announced at the Labour Party conference in Brighton on 27 September 1981.
In the days before the vote, Corbyn assured Benn of victory. Combined with the defection of many Labour councillors to the SDP, the deselections and intimidation were certain, he predicted, to deliver the bulk of the constituency votes to the left. Corbyn also reckoned that Benn was assured of trade union support, including NUPE’s. He was right about the constituencies (81 per cent voted for Benn), but wrong about the unions. Although Benn could attract huge crowds – even during an unannounced stop at a motorway service station nearly a hundred people had gathered to hear him make an impromptu speech – he also inspired hatred. The Times columnist Bernard Levin titled him ‘Mr Zigzag Loon’, while Denis Healey dismissed him as ‘an artificial lefty’. The majority of the unions, including Haringey’s branch of NUPE, voted against Benn, whom they saw as an extremist, but to the moderates’ shock Healey’s overall victory was wafer-thin – 50.4 per cent against 49 per cent for Benn. Corbyn’s disappointment was intense. In the days following, Conservative Central Office became so convinced that the hard left was broken that Shipley’s contract was not renewed. The Tories were profoundly mistaken. On reflection, Benn’s narrow loss gave the left hope. In the nature of Corbyn’s long road, there was never defeat, just one more precursor to another start, another campaign.
