What parallels are there between the years of the Corbyn leadership and earlier upsurges of the Labour left? Liam Payne reflects on the similarities, differences and lessons in a Labour Hub long read.

Introduction

It was described as the ‘strange rebirth of radical politics’. But as the moniker suggests, the recent advance of the left in Labour had antecedents. The most immediate will be familiar: the war in Iraq and the movement against it; the 2008 financial crash and the austerity which followed; Occupy and the student protests of earlier in the decade; the Scottish independence referendum and the hesitant rebirth of mass politics in the UK; the rise of Syriza and European left-populism; the shock 2015 UK general election result. All of these irruptions fed into the insurgent left advance within the Labour Party from 2015-2019.

But equally widely acknowledged was the incipient nature of this advance. Many of its most prominent actors were veterans of a previous period of socialist agitation and success within Labour. The key parliamentary triumvirate of Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell and Diane Abbott had all risen to prominence on the left during the 1980s; as did Momentum founder Jon Lansman. In his 1987 book The Rise & Fall of the Labour Left, founder-member of the original New Socialist Patrick Seyd gives a compelling account of this period.  The lessons of the Labour left from the struggles of the 1970s and 1980s have many convergences to what was experienced during the 2015-2019 period and provide interesting points for reflection on this recent history and what comes next.

Labour’s traditional factionalism

As a means of setting his scene, Seyd provides an ideological background as to why a self-described democratic socialist political party has necessitated the formation of a socialist left faction within it, largely at odds with the rest of the Labour Party:

“A tension has existed between those who regard the Party’s purpose as being to transform the relationships between capital and labour and those who view it as being the need to improve the efficiency and temper the inhumanity of capital. Socialists, committed to the transformation of property relationships, and social democrats, committed to the modification of property relationships, have existed side by side within the Party.”

This division has manifested itself through nearly every political position of the party, both foreign and domestic. Obviously, in a modern context these ideological positions no longer truly correspond. The socialist left under Corbyn, while still largely maintaining the rhetoric of that faction, proposed a social democratic resolution to the myriad ailments of the modern UK. Meanwhile the Labour right, the social democrats under Seyd’s ‘80s schema, have long ago shed any pretensions to seriously ameliorating the ravages of capitalism.

The traditional factionalism of the Labour Party was historically largely contained within the boundaries of the Party. The loosely grouped Bevanites, the post-war socialist left amalgamating around the charismatic Nye Bevan, in the main tempered their divergences from the dominant right in the Party to maintain electoral and movement unity – due in part to their fealty to the parliamentary system and its prospects for ‘parliamentary socialism’. This accord was disturbed by the emergence of an organised ‘New Left’ within Labour in the 1970s, with Tony Benn as a figurehead.

Seyd provides a useful examination of why the Labour Party is not only prone to factionalism, but how the structures and cultures of the Party can tacitly cultivate it. The Party was founded as the political arm of the UK labour movement. A triptych made up of the Labour Party, the trade unions, and the co-operative movement, the relatively strong affiliations between these bodies allows multiple channels for education, agitation and organising.

The internal democratic and representational structures of the Party – branch/constituency, regional, national, women and youth sections etc. – are also a catalyst for factional manoeuvrings. The constitutionally enshrined pre-eminence of the Party’s Annual Conference is perhaps the most poignant exemplar of this structural encouragement toward constant factionalism – with the opportunity for seemingly decisive factional gain that the Conference and the positions it adopts offer.

Positioning itself as ideologically and practically divergent from both Conservatism and Communism, Labour’s purportedly democratic socialist ethos demanded a tolerance for dissent and difference within it. These concerns have been utilised in both left and right contexts. Despite this culture of tolerance, these principles are in constant contest with the perceived necessity of ‘Party unity’ – so important to the Bevanite left, for example. Thus, factionalism can be tolerated, but only to a largely superficial degree before the exigencies of what some consider to be national political priorities prevail, and are rigidly enforced – overwhelmingly to the benefit of the conservative right.

A larger political connotation must be considered as well. The UK’s first-past-the-post electoral system historically restricts the choice of political representation available to voters to two dominant parties. Beginning with Whig-Tory then morphing into Liberal-Conservative, the rise of the labour movement at the beginning of the 20^th century upended this consensus, with the Labour Party usurping the Liberals as the dichotomous choice against Conservatism – heavily marginalising that political party.

This electoral changing of the guard has not, however, resulted in a related ideological marginalisation for liberalism. Seeking a political home in the restricted landscape of UK electoral politics, liberals and liberalism largely fastened themselves to the Labour Party, if not the labour movement as a whole. Thus, the upper echelons of a working-class democratic socialist party became dominated by traditionally educated, professional and middle-class liberals.

At its inception, Labour’s infamous ‘broad church’ was a confederation between Marxists, socialists, trade unionists, religious radicals, and progressive ex-Liberals. Conceived by founder Keir Hardie, this original ‘broad church’ configuration was aimed at welding progressive voices, the labour movement and nascent British socialism together into one political vehicle. This can be seen in the choice of party name: not the Independent Socialist Party, Socialist Representation Committee or Socialist Party, but ‘Labour’. The corralling of the ‘left’ under the banner of the cause of ‘labour’ was an explicit manoeuvre to politicise the largely industrial and socially conservative labour movement in the UK; to ideologically infuse it with the democratic socialism propagated by Hardie and his cohort.

Thus, a party steadfastly aligning with the interests of exploited and marginalised labour within the capitalist system, has always described itself as ideologically committed to its socialist transformation. The former position has traditionally been the laser-focused preserve of the Party’s right; the latter credo has usually been maintained to a degree by the left. The historical domination of the Party by the right has led to the pointed and perceptive critique of ideological ‘labourism’ – as opposed to socialism – being levelled at the Labour Party by those on the left, both inside and outside the Party.

With the extinguishing of liberalism’s explicit political vehicle, the original ‘broad church’ was steadily transformed into a fragile accord between the remnants of the Party’s original ideological covenant, and insurgent social liberalism – over time, increasingly shedding the social affix, re-accommodating itself to economic liberalism/neoliberalism and reduced to vacuous sloganeering.

Advance of the new left

This predisposition to factionalism has resulted in various periods of struggle within the Labour Party. Historically, the default ideological position of the Party, since it became a serious political force upon eclipsing the Liberals, has been dictated by the right. Determined attempts to wrest the Party back from this faction have been few and far between. Outside of the recent surge of ‘Corbynism’, the most totemic of these sporadic struggles was the advance of the new left in the period that concerns Seyd’s study.

This advance was fermented by the publication of Stuart Holland’s The Socialist Challenge in 1975. Through this book, Holland aimed to refute the comfortable stasis that had overcome a labour movement in thrall to Keynesian demand management and a party bewitched by the proclamations and proscriptions of Tony Crosland’s seminal The Future of Socialism.

 Crosland had argued that Labour should recalibrate its aims away from the establishment of a socialist society, and instead focus on achieving equality within the new post-war mixed economy – which Crosland argued actually signalled the end of capitalism as popularly understood. Holland averred that this position was no longer feasible, ideologically or politically. This was because:

“The economy was dominated by multinational firms whose power was so great as to minimise the impact of government intervention. These firms operated in the ‘mesoeconomic’ sector of the economy and occupied the contemporary commanding heights of both the national and international economy… Managers of these large multinational companies could undermine a government’s monetary, exchange control, fiscal and locational policies.”

Holland believed that this stark reality reaffirmed the viability of the classic socialist tenets of public ownership and economic control. In concrete policy terms, he called for Labour to take 20-25 of the leading manufacturing companies into public ownership; thus controlling a third of total domestic turnover, 40% of total national profits, and half of all UK employment; and to nationalise the leading financial institutions in the country.

To tighten overall economic control, Holland further proposed to reinvigorate state planning as a tool of socialist advance. A state holding company should be established, to “purchase equity shares in firms in order to establish some degree of public enterprise within particular sectors of the economy as a stimulus to industrial growth and efficiency.”

Planning agreements would be enacted between the Labour government, the trade unions and the private sector. These would cover such areas as wages, investment, prices, workplace rights and conditions, and would be subtly enforced through leveraging state procurement practices and financial aid against recalcitrant private companies – with the coercive force of nationalisation waiting in the wings if needed.

Much of this analysis found its way into the Labour left’s Alternative Economic Strategy (AES), which Seyd describes as “a more wide-ranging programme of limited but achievable reforms than any put forward by the Left since the 1930s.” The left would progress from the economic fringes of Keynesian demand management and redistribution to decisively tackle the central issue of production and the social relations therein.

The left also sought to break from the default right-wing ideology of Labour in such areas as foreign and defence priorities and the structures of the British state. Critiquing both American and Soviet multipolar hegemony from a democratic socialist perspective, the new left in Labour championed the old shibboleths of unilateral nuclear disarmament and large-scale cuts in UK defence spending – even questioning continued NATO membership.

Concisely captured in Tony Benn’s Arguments for Democracy, the Labour new left railed against the established structures of the British state – including the Labour Party. Sharing the trade unions distrust of liberal legalising, they ably contested the supposed impartiality of a judiciary steeped in the British class structure, and drawing on the experiences of past Labour governments, applied the same critique to the civil service. Alongside these established socialist aims and principles, the new left in Labour at this time also adopted a transversal scope to its politics, attempting to weld the traditional labour movement to newer struggles in the forms of anti-racism and feminism.   

In terms of the Party and its structures, Seyd lays out the now-familiar programme of the Labour left in detail:

“Recent experiences of Labour Governments abandoning Party commitments and succumbing to conservative orthodoxy provided the impetus for the Labour Left’s demand that Party democracy should take precedence over parliamentary democracy, in the sense that the parliamentarian should be made more directly accountable to the Party activist. The Party conference should determine the Party’s policies and should elect the Party leadership; the NEC should determine the election manifesto; and the local Party General Committee should have the regular right to reject its incumbent Labour MP.”

This was a marked departure from the previous laissez-faire stance of the Bevanites, who had staunchly defended the freedom of the individual MP. This was to be the area of the Labour new left’s most obvious and contentious successes.

Demographic shifts and organisational forms

The organisational impetus behind this renewed socialist engagement with the oft-derided Labour Party partly came about due to large-scale demographic shifts in the activist bases of the labour movement. The powerful shop stewards’ movement in the trade unions had been flexing their anti-authoritarian and increasingly socialist muscle for decades prior to this point. Buoyed by the success and renown of such struggles as the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders work-in of 1971-2, these gave a structure and voice to increasingly militant rank and file workers, undergoing what Ralph Miliband characterised as a process of ‘de-subordination’ to the whims of capitalist hegemony.

Given an unprecedented degree of security and relative freedom by the welfare state and post-war policies of full employment, significant sections of the trade union movement nevertheless engaged in protracted struggles against both state and private interests to build on these in the pursuit of further socialist progress. The elections of Jack Jones and Hugh Scanlon as the leaders of the powerful Transport and General Workers Union and Amalgamated Engineering Union in this period give a further indication of this renewed left advance, and also provided the left in the unions with powerful national institutional champions at state-level, the TUC, and the Labour Party.

Inside the Party itself, moribund local organisations were soon revitalised by the political engagement of a new generation of left-wing activists coming out of the recently expanded tertiary education sector and public services. Disastrous local election campaigns in the late 1960s cleared a path for these new recruits to quickly assume positions of influence at a local and regional level – Ken Livingstone being a prime example.

Combining their influence in the Party in many cases with careers in the public sector, and schooled in the prevalent left-wing theorising of university social science departments, these new members looked to the inspiration and lessons of the global ruptures of 1968, and aimed to channel such radical aspirations into a theoretical and practical ‘long march through the institutions’. In a UK context, this led to a re-contextualising of the role and opportunities of the traditional labour movement, and the Labour Party as its political wing.

These rank-and-file rumblings were knitted together with more established left groupings within the national Labour Party. In the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP), the Tribune group of ostensibly left-wing MPs had been in existence since 1966. Weekly meetings allowed members of the group to discuss political events, policy proposals and general tactics in an effort to very loosely organise a left presence on the benches at Westminster – but this was strictly not a regimented affair.

Between the years 1970-78, the group rose in number from 48 to 86, perhaps reflecting the growing strength of the left in the overall labour movement. The Tribune group was responsible for “‘the most persistent, sizeable and cohesive dissent’ in the PLP” at this time. But without a regimented structure and ethos, history has shown that too often membership was used as a form of ‘red-washing’ – to burnish supposed socialist credentials with the restive rank and file.

Outside of Parliament, perhaps the most trenchant and effective left organisation was the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy (CLPD). Formed in 1973 and still active today, this vehicle of ordinary activist members provided the nexus and impetus that drove the issues of intra-party democratic reform, stated above, to staggering success in the years that followed. Unlike the parliamentary Tribune group, CLPD codified its purpose with a statement of aims, a formal membership structure (classified as supporters) which elected an executive committee, and its own annual general meeting. At its height in 1982, CLPD could boast over 1,200 individual members, over 250 affiliated CLPs and Labour Party branches, and over 150 affiliated trade union branches and organisations.

Alongside CLPD, Independent Labour Publications (ILP) was another prominent Labour left organisation largely comprising and driven by lay members. Formed out of the 1975 dissolution of the old Independent Labour Party, and again still in existence today, the new ILP maintained the structure of the old party, but now looked to work within the left of Labour to further its aims of achieving a truly democratic socialist society and sided with CLPD on many issues of intra-party democracy. It published books, pamphlets and a monthly newspaper (Labour Leader) in this vein. It averaged 250 paid-up members, and a readership of three to four thousand for its paper. Interestingly for our current juncture, Seyd says the following about the ILP:

“Perhaps better than any other persons within the labour movement members of the Independent Labour Party were aware of the historic dilemma for members of the Labour Left of either establishing an organisation independent of the Labour Party and then competing with it unsuccessfully for working-class support and votes or establishing an organisation within the Labour Party and becoming ‘a party within the Party’ liable to expulsion. The creation of a publications organisation was an attempt to remedy the disastrous period of thirty-three years in the political wilderness yet steer clear of any accusations by the Labour Party of constitutional impropriety.”

These member-led organisations, alongside the central and energetic – but ultimately fickle – Labour Coordinating Committee (LCC), formed solid organisational foundations for the left’s march through the Labour Party in this epoch. Worthy of note is that both the ILP and LCC favoured the setting up of a specific left-wing research and propaganda organisation which could provide guided purpose and ideological grounding to the nascent Labour new left. This was inspired by such an organisation operating successfully within the French Socialist Party at this time, known by the acronym CERES. Such a role was filled to a limited degree by the LCC itself, but ultimately never reached the levels envisioned by either organisation. Despite what can be construed as a relative failing of this new organised left in Labour, their efforts were taken up and expanded by Tony Benn, bringing national political attention to the Labour left and its aims and proposals.

Similar to Bevan in the 1950s and Corbyn recently, the insurgent socialist campaign within Labour was given a popular moniker which tied it inexorably to its most prominent proponent, in this instance ‘Bennism’ and/or ‘Bennite’. Benn’s ministerial and vast political experience imbued the left surge at this time with a potent insight into the mechanisms and machinations of state power. His contemporary books – Arguments for Democracy and Arguments for Socialism – distilled this into broad programmes of radical reforms whose efficacy had arisen from the experience of grass-roots members, activists and trade unionists, and Benn’s critical experiences of power.

Championing Labour left shibboleths such as public ownership and workers’ control, perhaps more than anything else Benn brought to this new Labour left a heightened awareness of the democratic in democratic socialism. Not content with a thorough democratisation of the Party, although appreciating its vital importance in many ways, Benn reinforced the necessity for pursuing democratisation in all avenues of British power – his arguments grew from and chimed with the new left movement.

In May 1980, this movement agreed to form a singular cohesive vehicle to press its aims within the Party in the short-term. The Rank and File Mobilising Committee (RFMC) brought together: the Socialist Campaign for a Labour Victory, CLPD, LCC, ILP, the Institute for Workers Control, National Organisation of Labour Students, the Clause Four Group, the Militant Group, the Labour Party Young Socialists, the Labour Action for Peace, and the Socialist Education Association – the Tribune Group of MPs refused to join.

This committee mobilised around a handful of specific demands over a year-long period and could call on significant financial, organisational and activist support. In the run-up to the seminal 1980 Party conference, RFMC held large rallies in twenty different locations across the country in an effort to coalesce support for their specified aims from a majority of Labour Party members:

“The RFMC was a unique organisation in the history of the Labour left. For a period the Labour left was united around one issue (limiting the powers of Labour parliamentarians) and the multitude of organisations operated together as a single unit.”

Successes for the left

Whilst never quite achieving the level of intra-party power that ‘Corbynism’ chanced upon after the surprise 2015 leadership election, the new left in Labour of this period did engage in relatively successful struggle inside the Party, and in the larger political ‘battle of ideas’. The establishment of programmatic alternatives such as the AES allowed the Labour left to wage an ideological campaign whose reach and scope had hitherto eluded the socialist faction within Labour since the immediate post-war government. The adoption of many of the left’s policy proposals as official Labour Party policy – most notably in the two election manifestos of 1974 – produced significant gains for the labour movement in the early days of those Labour governments and enhanced the Labour left’s credibility as a serious political force.

Within the party structures, the advance of the left was highlighted by some high-profile deselections of MPs from the right of the party. In 1972, Dick Taverne was ousted in Lincoln. This was followed by other such deselections in Sheffield Brightside and Newham North East later in the decade. These events were orchestrated under rather archaic procedures for de- and re-selection in constituencies and illustrate both the rationalisation of the Labour left to improve and further expand these processes, and the vehemence of the establishment reaction to such endeavours.

At the 1979 Party conference, the left succeeded in their aim with the passing of a motion introducing mandatory reselection for all Labour MPs, after dogged work by the CLPD and its supporters. Building on years of near misses, in the run-up to the 1979 conference, CLPD took the issue to the smaller regional and sectional Labour Party conferences, as well as to affiliated trade union branches and conferences, to induce these to pass motions in support of mandatory reselection. Allying this momentum to the usual supportive motions from across Constituency Labour Parties, the campaign for mandatory reselection of MPs was eventually successful at the all-important Party Conference that year.

In the limited internal democratic structures of the Labour Party, by 1978 prominent representatives of the left had gained control over all the major sub-committees of Labour’s National Executive Committee (NEC) – Home Policy (Tony Benn), International Affairs (Ian Mikardo), and Organisation (Eric Heffer). Seyd says of this: “This NEC left provided the guidance and direction for the policy shifts within the Party.”

The new left’s campaign to assign primary responsibility for the Party’s election manifesto to the NEC was perhaps the one central plank of its programme for radical intra-party reform that failed to come to fruition, albeit narrowly. The NEC is officially the governing body of the Labour Party and brings together elected representatives from every part of the British labour movement affiliated to the party.

This reform was believed to be an essential part of the programme due to the leadership’s overall control of the 1979 manifesto, which left out numerous Conference policy decisions democratically agreed upon in the years leading up to the election – this fact was given a fly-on-the-wall accuracy through the recounting of Tony Benn, a cabinet participant at the time. Successive attempts to enshrine the principle of NEC control in Labour’s statutes during the high-water period of ‘79-81 fell just short, and so the possibility of the whole Party, through its representative NEC, gaining control of the manifesto was lost.

At the 1980 Labour Party conference, the advances of the new left contributed to policy motions passed in support of the following: public ownership, industrial democracy, economic reflation, a wealth tax, selective import controls, a 35-hour working week with no loss of pay, a substantial cut in the ‘defence’ budget (all from the AES); unilateral nuclear disarmament; the removal of American nuclear bases from the UK; withdrawal from the European Economic Community; the abolition of private education and medicine.

In Party terms, motions were passed reaffirming the previous Conference position on mandatory reselection and the new inclusion of the extra-parliamentary elements of the Party in leadership elections (more on this below) – each of these owed somewhat to the organisational chutzpah of the upstart left in evidence over the previous years. These victories were made manifest in the policy document Labour’s Programme 1982, along with its 1973 and 1976 counterparts, probably the most radical political statement offered by the Party since the 1945 Labour government. Then CLPD secretary Vladimir Derer gave a succinct reading of this progress of the left within the traditionally conservative Labour Party:

“Our experience in CLPD has shown that in the context of the present party structure, important advances towards the achievement of Labour’s goals can be made. But an indispensable condition for such an advance is a massive pressure by the rank and file. Such pressure rarely – if ever – emerges spontaneously. A concerted effort by party activists must act as a catalyst.”

At a special Conference held in Wembley the following January, the electoral college that was agreed for leadership elections gave the PLP a minority position. After this conference, the ‘Gang of Four’ announced their defection from Labour to form the Social Democratic Party (SDP). 

Just before the Wembley conference, still under the old leadership election rules, Michael Foot was elected leader of the Labour Party in November 1980. After the Conference victories of the new left earlier in the year, the then leader James Callaghan had announced his resignation so that a contest could be conducted one final time with only the PLP enfranchised. Despite this blatant skulduggery, it was an old tribune of the left who emerged victorious.

This victory can be read as the PLP bending to the grassroots pressure of the ascendant left to some degree, electing Labour’s most left-wing leader since George Lansbury in the 1930s. It also had the effect of splitting the left over the next few years between those traditional ‘Bevanites’ supportive of Foot and spouting the old adages of ‘unity’ and ‘broad church’ in the face of perceived electoral priorities, and the new left upstarts keen to cement their current intra-party dominance and even push beyond.

Another explanation could have been the PLP’s desire to throw the new left in the Party a ‘bone’ in the face of looming mandatory reselections procedures. Despite their generosity, not all were spared when the new regulations came into force. Eight sitting MPs were deselected under the new rules in 1981-83, although this was out of 208 mandatory reselections contests that occurred. This was a highly disappointing figure for the new left in terms of its correct assessment that a continued socialist advance in and through the Labour Party could be truly conceivable only with a total reconfiguration of the PLP. It was dominated then and now by people completely unwelcoming to the Party’s stated ideology of democratic socialism – neither democrats nor socialists.

However, this reality did reinforce another of the new left’s arguments for mandatory reselection – that in a Party that purports to be democratic, the Party members should naturally have the power to choose who goes forth to represent them and the Party they constitute in local and national elections, and this doesn’t necessarily lead to mass purges or such like, just debate and some form of conceivable consensus. Something similar occurred with the Labour right’s acceptance of the principle of the whole Party membership being enfranchised in leadership elections, an idea which caused many of their leading lights to defect in 1981.

It was they who pushed beyond the electoral college agreed at Wembley in the years that followed and ended up applying the One Member One Vote electoral system to these contests. Being too clever by half, the right smugly thought they had muzzled the trade unions, and ended up getting Corbyn, having to lie through their teeth to wrest the leadership back in 2020.

Re-emergence of municipal socialism

The Labour new left’s achievements nationally, while impressive considering what they were up against, were also mostly achieved while the Party was in opposition and in general turmoil. Although this socialist advance within the Labour Party never got the chance to truly test itself under conditions of national state power, it did offer examples of what might have been in its local state power bases. The re-emergence of municipal socialism under the guidance of the new left is one of the abiding legacies of this period.

After tumultuous losses in local government elections in the late 1960s, the way was cleared for a new, younger cohort of local councillors to emerge from the ranks of the Labour Party. Many of these were the energised activists of the new left, discussed previously, who encountered moribund local Labour parties that they could quickly rise through. The most famous example of this new cohort, and updated British municipal socialism generally, was the Labour administration of the Greater London Council (GLC) between 1981-86, under the leadership of Ken Livingstone – with John McDonnell as deputy leader and Chair of finance. Ken Livingstone described this ascension as “the post-1968 generation in power”.

The precursor to this rise to local state power was a rank-and-file conference held in opposition to local government cuts and rising council house rents in London in 1975. Out of this came an organised grassroots movement which won democratic control of the London Labour Party in 1977, and in 1978 this same movement started to produce the publication London Labour Briefing. Organising and mobilising for the upcoming council elections, the left rank and file ensured that new socialist candidates dominated the council selections for the London Labour Party. This resulted in a left-dominated Labour Group when the Party regained control of the GLC in 1981.

Seyd identifies key areas of GLC policy that marked this version of municipal socialism as a watershed in British politics:

“First, the Council’s commitment to popular participation and to the decentralisation of decision-making…The GLC’s encouragement of a very wide range of groups to make use of its resources played a significant part in mobilising a political majority within an urban area in which Labour’s traditional working-class base of support was declining.”

These groups included the feminist movement, the growing LGBT activist circles, black pressure groups, the unemployed, the London Irish community, and so on – with the stated attempt to fuse these movements and struggles together with the traditional labour movement and its aims. Engaging and participating in the rising tide of feminism on the left, and with many prominent left feminist members, an example of this fusion was the GLC’s establishment of a pioneering Women’s Committee in 1982.

Not only were these marginalised groups incorporated into London’s local government by increased participation and power at County Hall, the then seat of local government in London, but also by cultural events and the expansion of the local commons within London. The GLC provided spaces for all their supporters and constituents – space always being at a premium in London – to organise, produce and enjoy.

A pertinent example of this was the GLC’s use of the Southbank Centre, a venue of art and culture built for the Festival of Britain in 1951. Livingstone’s GLC transformed the Centre with large funding increases and used it as a prominent stage to showcase the new coalition of progressive London that they were seeking to build. The Council’s ‘Open Foyer Policy’ from 1983 opened the Centre up to democratic participatory usage by ordinary Londoners.  

Finally, there was the GLC’s ground-breaking approach to local economic policy. Seyd explains:

“The GLC’s development of a distinct industrial and employment policy for London involved the establishment of an Industry and Employment Committee, from which emerged the Greater London Enterprise Board. The object of the GLC’s economic policy was its direct involvement in the production process, the development of local technology networks, and the encouragement of worker participation in the production of corporate plans for all industrial and service sectors of the London economy. By 1985 it had produced The London Industrial Strategy itemising a very detailed micro-economic strategy for twenty-three sectors of the local economy.”

To stamp down on the flowering of an alternative in Britain, Thatcher took on the radical GLC in the middle of the decade, first aiming to cap its income, and therefore expenditure, and finally legislating to abolish a unified local government in London altogether. The GLC went out in style, but only recently since the demise of it and other centres of municipal socialism in Thatcher’s Britain has the hope of a local seeding ground for an alternative political path in Britain begun to flex its muscles again.

Benn for Deputy

With the change in leadership election rules came the opportunity for the left to test its strength in an internal Party election of national political prominence. Despite calls for unity from senior party and union sources behind the ‘broad church’ leadership team of Michael Foot and right-wing champion Denis Healey, the grouping around and including Tony Benn concluded somewhat fractiously that he should utilise the newly won democratic freedoms and challenge Healey for the position of Deputy Leader of the Labour Party. This triggered an election challenge in 1981, mere months after the special Wembley conference had reshaped the rules. With such a decision, this iteration of the left in the Labour Party marched towards what in hindsight appears to have been their apotheosis.

To launch this campaign, Seyd explains:

“Benn issued a five-point manifesto with sixteen supporting signatories from the PLP. In his statement he reaffirmed his commitment to the alternative economic strategy and, in particular, to the restoration of full employment; to the expansion of public services; to the withdrawal of Britain from the EEC; to a non-nuclear defence strategy; and to a range of reforms which would extend democracy, including abolition of the House of Lords, and enactment of a Freedom of Information Bill.”

Between his announcement in early April and the election in October, Benn toured the labour movement in an effort to drum up support and activism. The Rank and File Mobilising Committee morphed into the Tony Benn election campaign, although significantly, CLPD decided to keep its distance. The first part of the campaign concentrated on trade union conferences in the late spring/early summer, with many highly attended and scene-stealing fringe meetings bringing lots of support and attention. The campaign then pivoted to appealing to ordinary Labour Party members, again centring on large cross-country rallies.

In the end, after a second ballot, Benn lost by the narrowest of margins. The new electoral college gave the Party membership 30% of the vote, the PLP also 30%, and the affiliated trade unions 40%. In the membership section, Benn scored 24% to Healey’s 6%, from the unions the split was 15% to 25% in favour of Healey, and in the PLP voting, Benn scored 10% to Healey’s 20%. In such a tight race, if Benn had managed to secure the votes of only four more MPs, he would have won. Sixteen Tribune Group MPs abstained in the second ballot, and another four plumped for Healey.

Despite this agonising and rancorous defeat, Seyd does the achievement of this campaign – perhaps the pinnacle of this new left’s march through the Party – justice when he says:

“Benn’s vote was astonishing considering the desire of senior Party and trade-union figures to re-establish Party unity around the Foot-Healey leadership and therefore their very considerable pressures to defeat Benn. But the Benn campaign succeeded in challenging these pressures by arousing the individual Party member in a manner unknown since the campaigning days of Aneurin Bevan in the early 1950s. For the first time in its history the Labour Left concentrated its attentions on the industrial wing of the Labour movement. Never before had such a comprehensive and systematic attempt been made to appeal directly to active trade unionists. In the past the Labour Left had very little contact with trade unionists, leaving this activity either to union Left caucuses where they existed or to general approaches through the Institute for Workers Control. Very often it had been the Communist Party which had mobilised support for Left politics within the trade-union movement.”

After the dust settled, a determined right-wing fight back ensued. The left split between those now loyal to Foot’s leadership and those eager to further pursue the left surge. The right, as usual, decided to burn the house down. More and more senior figures defected to the SDP, expulsions of left wingers began in earnest, media smear campaigns were launched – most notably against parliamentary candidate Peter Tatchell in a London by-election – and negative briefings against the Party’s democratically decided policy programme were rampant. Tony Benn was savaged by an unhinged media, lacking any integrity or apparent sanity. The Party staggered to a calamitous election performance in 1983, and in its aftermath the right seized back the Party and began to dye its colours blue.

Once as tragedy, twice as farce, as the saying goes. 

Towards an Uncompromising Left

From the experience of the Labour new left’s in both the Corbyn and Benn eras, it should be easy to appreciate that both were compromised by opponents external and internal. The Conservative Party and its vast media mouthpieces savaged both movements and their figureheads to ludicrous and hysterical degrees. Even more perniciously, the careerist clique of the Labour Party establishment – capitalism’s agents in the labour movement – denigrated each in the most spiteful manner, denying not only their efficacy and popularity, but even their right to exist at all in British politics.

But in a more insular way, the democratic socialist left in Britain compromised itself after the high tide of both surges began to ebb. Much has been written about the failure of Corbyn and the left-in-power to radically change the structures of the Labour Party, in a democratic effort to cement the authoritative participation of the ordinary members of the labour movement within it – falling far short of the achievements of the new left that Seyd’s study concerns. Also, Tony Benn’s decision to run for Deputy Leader in 1981 has courted controversy from those advocating a retrospective period of consolidation in the wake of the impressive internal victories of the new left prior to this – more a product of hubris than compromise. Aside even from these reflections on tactical mistakes at the point of advance, the current interregnum requires a consideration of what can be construed as the compromising of the left in the wake of defeat.

Each of the periods in the aftermath of the modern left advances within the Labour Party has been marked by widespread disenchantment and disengagement by the left from institutional politics. Diagnoses of events correctly point to the sheer scale and mendacity of the oppositionists and the fact that the innumerable obstacles put in front of a prolonged and successful leftism in these environs are predictably high. But a positive understanding of why this is, coupled with an appreciation of what has been achieved and that which is still to be won, could work as a brake on this disengagement and reawaken the idea of the ‘long march’ mentioned earlier.

The battle for democracy

The title of Ken Livingstone’s first autobiography is a version of an old anarchist saying – ‘if voting changed anything, they’d abolish it’. The title can be taken to have a double meaning, one following the other: Livingstone is perhaps poking fun at this absolutist statement by holding up the GLC’s achievements under his Labour administration as proof that voting can make a difference; but by the same token, when it did in the guise of a radical GLC, Thatcher and the right had a tantrum and abolished the whole Greater London Council.

In the advanced capitalist epoch, limited political democracy is one of the last effective lipsticks that can put on the capitalist pig. By struggling on this terrain, the left threatens not only to win national or local state power, but also to crack the veneer of capitalist democracy and illuminate this contradiction in terms to its advantage. The establishment reaction in Britain to the ‘Bennite’ new left, the radical GLC, and ‘Corbynism’ can be read as an insight into how potent and sensitive a field of struggle institutional politics is in this era.

The potential threat of socialist success in this field can be measured by the reaction which arises against it. To stop a popular left from utilising the ballot box effectively, democracy has to be dispensed with or seriously undermined, to one degree or another – Allende’s Chile offers perhaps the most poignant and extreme example of this. There are opportunities as well as pitfalls here.

An invaluable plus

The discursive space that was opened up on each occasion of the left’s successes in the Labour Party is an invaluable plus that should not be discarded lightly. The airing of socialist alternatives through media and social media coverage of the left in these moments allow the ideas, history and policies of socialism to reach audiences they would otherwise not. In the same vein, the organisational structures formed by the left during these periods offer ‘institutional memory’ and solid bases from which to wage wars of position and eventually movement – defending the left presence and voice in the labour movement in hard times, engaging energetically in struggles of all kinds at all times, and providing the capacity and creating the conditions for renewed advances.

The fact that prominent elements of certain of these organisations have proven less than steadfast should not discount from their long-term worth. The LCC soon abandoned the left in the early ‘80s outside of Scotland and jumped aboard the ‘modernisation’ bandwagon – it wound up in 1998 when its work was done. Influential members of Momentum and Corbyn’s team deserted to the Starmer Supremacy. But again, to dismiss organisations or ideas involved in the success of the left due to such anomalies when the context shifts is a compromise with marginalisation and impotency that can barely be afforded.

The centrality of coordination

In terms of moving forward, a few lessons present themselves from Seyd’s study of the Labour new left in the ‘70s and ‘80s. The first is the integral role of coordination in a serious attempt at advancing the socialist agenda in and through the labour movement, penetrating the general political mainstream in the process. The Corbyn leadership practically fell into the left’s lap, which was a gift and somewhat of a curse in terms of its preparedness for such a situation. Compared with this, the new left in Seyd’s account was built-up methodically by highly committed and coordinated groups and activists.

Although Momentum began to fill this void in the Corbyn years, alongside Campaign for Socialism in Scotland and Welsh Labour Grassroots, this depth was not possible to replicate in such a compressed and competitive time period. Others, such as former Corbyn insider James Schneider, have highlighted the efficacy of the labour movement left building such a coordinated bloc while largely out of the political limelight. Through such existing groups as the Labour Representation Committee (LRC), founded by John McDonnell and others in the early 2000s, and Jeremy Corbyn’s new Peace and Justice Project, the seeds of this coordinated bloc may already be planted.

The LRC aims to bring together the left across the labour movement, inside and/or outside the Labour Party. Jimmy Reid once said that the only true dividing line in politics is between left and right: a clearly defined left, acting through a coordinating vehicle such as the LRC, could bring together left-wingers from across the political party spectrum and trade unions, and act as a means of concentrating their energies and directing activities at democratically agreed points of pressure and promise.

The Peace and Justice Project (P&JP) could play a similar role for single-issue campaigns. The Communist Party of Britain historically punched far above its weight in political terms. This was due to its coordinated and politically infused campaigning on issues ranging from solidarity campaigns with left-wing governments and third world countries, to tenant rights, peace movements, and the anti-apartheid struggle. The P&JP could play a part in coordinating the plethora of social justice campaigns that exist and are constantly being created, giving these a political and ideological focus that could hone them into powerful tools of base-building and propaganda for the left.

To amend the famous dictum of Lenin: ‘freedom of debate, coordination of action’.

Research and propaganda

As mentioned in the main body of this essay, at the time of the new left advance the LCC and ILP favoured establishing a specific organisation tasked with the role of research and propaganda for the left in the labour movement. The necessity of this is still apparent today. Such a grouping could be created from the various left intellectuals that both predated the rise of ‘Corbynism’ or accompanied it. Coordinating and tailoring their endeavours to suit prevailing political contexts, this body could be a conduit for structured left policy programmes and arguments to filter out into the wider movement.

The means for this propagation can be found in the relatively vibrant field of left media and publishing. Through this structured and coordinated intellectual basis, the left can have an opportunity to speak and act with a coordination of purpose that it has often lacked, opening up greater scope to educate, agitate, organise and ultimately build up a left-wing power base.

Electoral politics

For the left to wholly abandon institutional electoral politics, whether through the Labour Party, Communist Party, Socialist Workers Party, or some new configuration, would be an act of costly self-compromise. This doesn’t mean that all energies should be devoted to such endeavours; not much could be as futile as spending time in routine CLP meetings alongside people with nothing in common with the socialist left.

But local parties and organisations can provide a good vehicle for local community work and support, with the attendant benefit of promotion, and having a say in national political parties allows the left to maintain an important presence and build its base. This work can take place alongside engaging in the growing strength and militancy of the British trade unions and utilising the still expansive cooperative movement for mutual aid purposes and as a general existing alternative to capitalist ownership.

Conclusion

This essay was an attempt to look at the last socialist advance within the Labour Party with the fresh perspective that ‘Corbynism’ can hopefully bring to such events. Moving forward in a coordinated and strategic way will of course not be easy, indeed it may even already be too late for this. But lessons are there to be learnt – they don’t call it the struggle for nothing.

Liam Payne is a Labour Party member based in Edinburgh.

Image: Tony Benn. Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/lewishamdreamer/1524600879. Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC 2.0)