The Decline and Fall of the Labour Left
Evening Standard
When I became a Member of Parliament in 1987, the Labour Left seemed to be sweeping all before it. Every year at party conference we piled up votes; winning on one policy position after another. Local authorities fell to Left control like ninepins; including the Greater London Council with a bigger budget than some third world countries. My first shock was actually turning up in the House of Commons. There I discovered how much the rest of the Labour Party disliked us on the Left in general (and the London Labour Party in particular). I was particularly shocked by the fact that the causes that we young left-wingers held most dear (anti-racism, rights for women, gay rights) were feared and misunderstood by most of my Labour colleagues. The erstwhile radical Neil Kinnock began the struggle against the Left. However, it was Tony Blair and his outriders who hunted us down with a ferocity that made Attila the Hun look like an Islington social worker.
To ensure no potential Left leader could build a base in the party, they simply stripped out its internal democracy. They took away ordinary party members control over the conference agenda. Instead, they packed it with videos, staged “question and answer” sessions (chaired this year by Eddie Izzard) and interminable speeches by ministers. Crucially, they stopped party members electing MPs onto the NEC. This eliminated the possibility of any potential Left leader building up support in the time-honoured fashion .They made strenuous efforts to ensure that left-wingers were not selected as parliamentary candidates. Positive action to ensure more women MPs was a left wing policy (pushed through when John Smith was leader). In Blairite hands, it became a mechanism for removing left-wingers (who happened to be men) with right-wingers (who happened to be women).
Inside the Parliamentary Labour Party Blair gave himself unprecedented powers of patronage by creating record numbers of junior ministers and their bag carriers. Moreover, New Labour spin-doctors lavished their best efforts on spinning against their own left-wingers. Party membership has halved since the late nineties. Most of these members were on the left. After over a decade of this search and destroy policy the Left in Labour party is at all-time, low ebb. We have no credible candidate for the leadership of the party. Gordon Brown has many merits but he is not a left-winger. We won some of the arguments on social issue; notably on race, women and gay rights. We recaptured control of London under the leadership of, the original left wing Young Turk, Ken Livingstone. However, we comprehensively lost the arguments on economic policy. Consequently, the gap between rich and poor has actually widened under New Labour. As the long years of Blairite ascendancy end, one-time loyal Blairites scramble to disassociate themselves from him. And we on the Left currently lurk in our caves like Afghan tribesmen scanning the horizon for dawn.
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