Dangerous Hero

by Tom Bower

  That year’s Labour manifesto was famously dubbed ‘the longest suicide note in history’; certainly the electorate was terrified by the party’s extremist pledges and Militant Tendency’s noisy demands for the draconian confiscation of wealth. Across the country, Labour secured its lowest percentage of the vote since 1918 – just 27.6 against the Tories’ 42.4. Those working-class voters who owned cars and homes voted 47 per cent to 26 per cent for the Tories. As usual, the left interpreted their defeat as victory. Tony Benn, who lost his seat in Bristol South-East, welcomed the result, because ‘for the first time since 1945 a political party with an openly socialist policy has received the support of over eight and a half million people. This is a remarkable development by any standards.’ Corbyn himself avoided the rout. Despite the SDP winning 22 per cent of the vote in Islington North, and Labour’s share falling by 12 per cent, his exhaustive campaign won him a majority of 5,607. Four miles to the north-west, John McDonnell was defeated in Hampstead by the sitting Tory MP, Geoffrey Finsberg. McDonnell had also contrived to lose Labour’s seat in his own branch, Hayes and Harlington. Neville Sandelson blamed McDonnell’s persecution when he was deselected after thirty-two years as the constituency’s Labour MP. He stood as the SDP’s candidate, splitting Labour’s vote and allowing Terry Dicks to become the constituency’s first Conservative MP since 1950.

  Corbyn and McDonnell blamed Michael Foot for Labour’s defeat. The party leader, said McDonnell, was a right-wing ‘welfare capitalist’. Even the manifesto’s promise to impose socialist protectionism and ban the import of foreign cars was too liberal. Labour would have won, both men believed, by promoting the complete renationalisation of the British economy, the ruthless confiscation and redistribution of wealth and the disbandment of the military to transform Britain into a pacifist, nuclear-free, non-aligned nation. Convinced of that error, Corbyn spoke at Marxist meetings about working through Labour to democratise Parliament out of existence. In public speeches he ridiculed the moderates’ suggestion that the far left had failed to recognise the working class’s appreciation of consumerism, of mortgages to buy their council homes and of the abandonment of restrictions on foreign travel. He told his allies in London Labour Briefing about his determination to reverse Thatcherism’s plot to destroy ‘class solidarity’. After all, he was now an MP, on a national stage that offered unlimited opportunities.

  5

  Four Legs Good, Two Legs Bad

  Dressed in a dirty jacket, creased trousers and open-necked shirt, Jeremy Corbyn arrived in Westminster unmoved by the British electorate’s rejection of Labour. He joined thirteen other far-left MPs who sympathised with East Europe’s communist governments and supported trade union militancy to break Margaret Thatcher’s government. He told the Venesses that he considered Parliament ‘a waste of time’. Westminster’s agenda bore no relevance to his Islington constituents, especially the immigrant communities. ‘I don’t like this place,’ he told Keith Veness as they walked through the arched corridor from St Stephen’s Entrance to the central lobby. As they passed the huge paintings depicting the glories of British history, Corbyn added, ‘It’s all phoney, set up to make you feel intimidated.’ The advantages for him personally were a good income and a job for the foreseeable future, with the opportunity to indulge his interests, especially foreign travel.

  Reflecting his self-imposed isolation, Corbyn’s office in Dean’s Yard was far from the centre of political activity of what he called ‘a gentleman’s club’. (The 1983 intake included just fourteen Conservative and nine Labour women MPs.) In the Commons chamber he preferred to sit on the back seats, away from other MPs. At the regular votes he walked alone through the lobby, and he made little contact with his fellow Labour MPs, other than to discuss the best cycle routes to and from Westminster. He also kept his distance from the party whips. When asked to remain in the House to release other Labour MPs to work in their marginal constituencies in the hope of saving their seats, Corbyn refused. ‘I’m focused on my own constituency,’ he replied, complaining about the power the whips tried to wield. ‘I won’t be at their mercy,’ he told one party official. He was also somewhat isolated from his four London Labour Briefing allies, who were still struggling to find seats.

  To meet his constituents, he set up offices in the Red Rose Centre at 129 Seven Sisters Road in Holloway. His promise at his selection meeting to open an office in the constituency had, he believed, won him decisive votes. The building was bought from the Co-op, with the aid of a loan provided by a brewing company that would finance the initial conversion works in exchange for the exclusive rights to supply the club’s drinks. The caretaker’s flat on the first floor became Corbyn’s office. He was personally liable for the rent, since as a London MP he was required by parliamentary rules to use a room in his local party’s headquarters to meet his constituents. Under those same rules, he could not reclaim his personal expenses at the Red Rose, or the cost of additional staff in the club. This was a wholly unreasonable arrangement for an MP to make. The poisoned chalice that would haunt him thirteen years later was his signed personal guarantee to repay any losses the club incurred.

  Many people came to the large, cavernous building, which was soon filled with people discussing politics, enjoying the bar and the end-of-week cabaret. Upstairs, Corbyn’s door was open to a tide of misery: Cypriots, Jamaicans, Indians, Pakistanis, South Africans, South Americans, Somalis, West Saharans and Kurds all sought his help. In his opinion, all immigrant communities were victims of white imperialists, and the British state owed them a financial obligation. To achieve a fair and equal society, they should be provided with their basic needs, rather than the state expecting them to take personal responsibility for their fate. Beyond that, the possession of any unnecessary wealth was greed. For Corbyn, those praised by Thatcher for creating wealth were exploiters of the working class. He despised her gospel of ‘reward for success’. As an enemy of aspiration, he championed losers. Not being successful was a sign of moral probity.

  To strengthen his cause, he welcomed into the Islington North branch a small group of Trotskyites calling themselves ‘Socialist Action’. Among their number were Simon Fletcher, an ally for the next twenty-three years, and Kate Hudson, who had directed her fellow members to join Labour without revealing their allegiance (since Michael Foot’s edict Trotskyites were again effectively banned from joining the party). ‘We must move to a clandestine form of entry,’ she wrote. ‘Under the present circumstances a public-face organisation is a millstone around our neck. It must go.’ Corbyn was sympathetic to her further strategy to target black Britons involved in the recent race riots in Brixton, Bristol and Toxteth as potential recruits. Anyone who challenged the British establishment – for whatever reason – was viewed as a likely supporter. Among Corbyn’s other confederate organisations was the Militant Tendency, an important supporter over the coming years. But by far his most important ally was Ken Livingstone.

  Corbyn would regularly see the GLC leader, along with his deputy John McDonnell and Keith Veness, at Labour Herald editorial meetings. Throughout 1983 the newspaper pursued a consistent far-left line, praising the North Korean dictatorship, for example, as a ‘model of successful, self-reliant, socialist development’, even though by then about a million North Koreans had been murdered by Kim Il-sung’s regime. Among Corbyn’s other allies were the anti-Semitic playwright Jim Allen, and Tony Greenstein, an anti-Zionist who ran the Labour Movement Campaign on Palestine (LMCP). LMCP regarded Israel as an ‘apartheid state’ without the right to exist, an opinion reflecting Corbyn’s own antagonism towards Jews and Israel, feelings that had hardened since his employment by the tailors’ union in 1972. Ever since Israel’s defeat of the Arab invasion in 1973, the country’s growing military and financial dominance over its Arab neighbours, and Israeli settlers building new permanent homes in Jordan’s West Bank, had aroused anger among those sympathetic to the Palestinians.

  Corbyn’s antagonism towards Zionism
is one of the most notable through lines of his entire career. During the 1980s he sponsored the LMCP’s campaign to ‘eradicate Zionism’ and replace Israel with Palestine. In 1984 he chaired a conference blaming the Labour Party for colonising Palestine. ‘Zionism,’ asserted the LMCP, ‘is inherently racist’, and that same year he sponsored an LMCP newsletter calling for the disaffiliation of the Poale Zion, the only Jewish group attached to the Labour Party. He also supported the expulsion of Jewish societies by student unions. At the time he was never asked to explain his motives, but in the opinion of Harry Fletcher, a Labour campaigner who would become an aide to Corbyn during his bid for the leadership in 2015, he did not understand his own anti-Semitism. For Fletcher, Corbyn was ‘institutionally anti-Semitic’ – by which he meant that he unwittingly subscribed to the left’s inherent prejudice.

  Showing similar dogmatism in favour of the IRA, soon after his election Corbyn organised a rally in Finsbury town hall for Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Féin, and Martin McGuinness, then head of the IRA. At the time, Britons were dying as a result of IRA terrorism. Corbyn opposed the government’s anti-terrorism legislation, arguing that the innocent sons and daughters of many of his Irish constituents became alienated after being wrongly banned from travelling to the UK, or had been imprisoned without proper evidence. Ireland, he believed, should be reunited without asking for the consent of all its people. He had touched a popular nerve. A thousand people, mostly Sinn Féin supporters, packed into the hall to give the IRA leaders a standing ovation. In his introduction, Chris Smith, the Labour MP for Islington South and the meeting’s host, because the hall was in his constituency, bravely told the audience: ‘I don’t accept the use of violence for political reasons …’ Prolonged booing drowned the rest of his sentence. Alongside him, Corbyn showed no sympathy for his trembling neighbour. The following day, Corbyn called Smith: ‘Gerry thanks you for being there, and don’t worry, he respects what you say.’ Corbyn had won notoriety, and this was the first of countless occasions on which he would share a platform with terrorists. By coincidence, he had stepped into the national spotlight in the midst of the election of a new party leader after Michael Foot resigned in June 1983, and at the beginning of what Denis Healey later described as ‘one long tribal battle for the soul of the Labour Party’.

  In that toxic atmosphere, Eric Heffer, a bullying Trotskyite, was the left’s candidate against Neil Kinnock, who was also left-wing but not so extreme. From his retirement, Harold Wilson, evidently alarmed by the continuing Trotskyite infiltration of the party, encouraged his supporters to oppose Heffer, who ended up with just 6.3 per cent of the vote. Kinnock was elected, with Healey as his deputy. Corbyn regarded Kinnock as a traitor for refusing to support Tony Benn’s bid for the deputy leadership, and now saw no reason to be loyal to the party. His litmus test was Northern Ireland. He opposed Labour’s policy of self-determination and constitutional change, and supported the IRA’s policy of violence to end ‘British imperialism’. He made no effort to establish a relationship with Kinnock, and rarely went to the weekly parliamentary Labour Party meetings. On the few occasions he entered the Commons tearoom, he sat with like-minded MPs such as Dennis Skinner and Tony Banks, and shunned the rest. For their part, the majority regarded him as someone not to be taken seriously – the source, as one Commons wag had it, of a ‘single transferable speech’. In reality, he subscribed to Keith Veness’s outburst against the non-believers: ‘The difference between the traditional social administrators composing Labour Party policies and the revolutionary socialists at the GLC,’ he said, ‘left an acid taste.’ Like Veness, Corbyn detested those not utterly loyal to the struggle.

  Real life was outside Parliament. ‘Smash the Tory state!’ he would yell into his megaphone on endless marches through Islington, blaming American imperialism for his constituents’ ills and, with clenched fist, praising Fidel Castro and Daniel Ortega, the leader of the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, for showing the road to socialism. The left’s eventual victory in Britain, Corbyn proclaimed, depended on the people, not the politicians. Revolution, he promised, would end the Tory government’s curse upon Islington of bad housing and unrelieved squalor.

  Much of his constituency was made up of white English and Irish workers alongside immigrants. Most inhabited either unrepaired private houses or dilapidated council estates. They suffered bad schools, stretched health services and one of the worst Labour councils in the country: inefficient, expensive and corrupt – even worse than Haringey. Officials in the housing department bought whole streets of private houses by compulsory order, ostensibly for council tenants, used council labour to rebuild them, and occasionally moved themselves into the best. Corbyn never complained about that corruption or criticised the council’s incompetence, not least because Val Veness was the chairman of the council’s housing committee.

  One key relationship for any MP at that time was with the editor of their local newspaper. After watching Corbyn for nearly a decade, Tony Allcock, the editor of the Islington Gazette, understood the new MP’s politics, but was surprised by his approach. Unlike Chris Smith, Corbyn never issued press releases about local issues. His frequent publicity flyers were about Palestine, Ireland, the Western Sahara (occupied by Morocco since 1974) or Nicaragua. ‘They went in the bin,’ recalled Allcock. ‘He said that he was aligned with the oppressed, but most of his releases were in favour of murderous dictators.’ Equally surprisingly, Corbyn’s dislike of the media prevented him from contacting Allcock, who concluded: ‘He was a maverick outsider who did not care about his image and would not play the game.’ For his part, Corbyn decided he did not need the paper’s backing. In his concern for his ethnic constituents, especially their attempts to get council houses, welfare benefits and their families into Britain, Corbyn had become the go-to person. ‘People thought he was a nice bloke,’ conceded Allcock. ‘He made them feel comfortable. He even charmed his adversaries.’ In his constituency dealings at least, Corbyn had perfected a genial mask, despite not yet proving himself an effective MP.

  His constant activity hid a new laziness. Rather than engaging in the detailed work necessary to organise the parliamentary left (his task as secretary of the Campaign Group), he preferred to board a plane heading for some far-off destination. He loved the intrigue of travelling in secret across the Sahara on a camel to meet Polisario guerrillas; or flying to Nicaragua just eight weeks after Britain’s general election. Or, on his return to Westminster, protesting against the American invasion of Grenada after Marxists had murdered Maurice Bishop, the island’s prime minister. As ever, he selected the issues he thought were important. In the Commons he blasted Geoffrey Howe, the foreign secretary, as ‘pathetic’ for supporting America rather than the Grenadian murderers, yet avoided mentioning the Cuban military base, targeted at the USA, on the island. ‘The Member for Antarctica North’, he was called by a Tory MP for sentimentally ‘banging on’ about parts of the world irrelevant to most Britons. Copying Tony Benn’s style, he had become a ‘platform man’, delivering speeches while uninvolved in attempts to change or improve government policies. To some, his passion for protest lacked any strategy – he expressed wholehearted support by attending endless meetings, but offered no ideas about the route to reach any destination. In contrast to his years in Haringey, he made no attempt to seek real influence in Parliament. Unlike Ken Livingstone, he never considered how to forge alliances with moderates. To some, he appeared to find the task beyond his abilities, and instead plotted for the revolution. Beyond Parliament, in the shadows, he was active with London Labour Briefing, for which the next stage was a coup to oust Thatcher and take over Britain. To most, the idea was as fanciful as Palestinians adopting the last words of the traditional Jewish prayer at the beginning of Passover dinner, ‘Next year in Jerusalem.’

  To cut spending, a new law compelled councils to set rates below a defined limit. This remained anathema to Corbyn. In retaliation, he and the Labour Herald group at the GLC, especially
Livingstone, McDonnell and Knight, planned to refuse to set any rates, or else to set them illegally high. At a series of meetings with an assortment of Trotskyites, Marxists and far-left councillors from across the country, especially the Militant Tendency in Liverpool, London Labour Briefing offered to orchestrate huge displays of disobedience. By law, the government had the power to fine individual councillors and ban them from office for five years for setting illegal rates. Mass disobedience and national resistance, the conspirators believed, would impair the government and cause local services to collapse; in the ensuing turmoil the government and the City would surrender to the left, and Thatcher would be forced to resign. McDonnell spoke about a mass movement of workers engaged in direct action to overthrow capitalism. To hasten that revolution, he, as chairman of GLC’s finance committee, claimed that Thatcher’s new law would force the GLC to cut services totalling £180 million (the equivalent today of £440 million). Corbyn spoke up too. Urging his former colleagues in Haringey to join him, he forecast with conviction that a pincer movement of defiance by councillors and miners would topple a second Tory prime minister, just as it had Heath. To the believers, their conspiracy was sane and timely.

  Ever since 1980, when the Consett steelworks in County Durham had been closed down, costing 3,700 jobs, the left had accused Thatcher of plotting to destroy the steel industry, break the trade unions and damage working communities. Until 1984, the realities of British Steel, especially its declining fortunes, did not interest Corbyn. He was unaware that British steelworkers in 1978 were 40 per cent less productive than their German or Dutch counterparts: each British steelworker took fifteen man-hours to produce a tonne of steel, while the same tonnage in Germany took about six hours. Overmanning and under-investment were compounded by the British trade unions’ refusal to allow the introduction of automated production methods that would improve efficiency and lower costs.