By Alfie Steer

The recent threatened expulsion of Neal Lawson has sparked a wide-ranging debate about pluralism (or the lack of it) within the Labour Party under its current leadership. Part of this debate has also involved a prolonged conversation about the Labour’s past.

This is probably unsurprising: the Labour Party is a uniquely historically-minded political organization. It is almost fixated by its mythologized past. Historical references and symbols have often wielded immense power. They have been deployed, with varying degrees of success, to justify, or denounce, nearly every conceivable political position.

Nowhere is this more apparent than when it comes to the Party’s chronic factionalism. The partisan accounts of the iconic internal battles of the 1930s, or the 1950s, or more frequently the 1980s remain the touchstones and reference points for contemporary debates and attitudes, even if these stories are wildly historically inaccurate. They have shaped how different factions and groups relate to each other (or fail to relate). They inhibit dialogue and prevent any form of meaningful unity. They have a toxic and deadening effect on practical socialist strategy.

Historians of the Labour Party, as a result, can serve a very useful function. They can challenge, complicate, and sometimes completely reject these misleading, factionalized accounts. If any kind of pluralist left culture is to be built, a serious, detoxifying re-assessment of Labour’s past will have to take place.

An excellent podcast by Jeremy Gilbert and Alan Finlayson, and a follow-up article, has already done a lot in recently re-assessing Labour’s so-called ‘soft left’. Far from being simply a weak, or noncommittal, or inconsistent part of the left, Gilbert and Finlayson argue that it was a serious ideological tendency, and one likely reflecting the views of most in the Party. It was committed to socialism, but increasingly pragmatic, and likely pessimistic about how it could be achieved in a globalizing economy and diversifying class society.

While once making up a core part of Labour’s Bennite ‘New Left’ in the 1970s and 80s, the triple shocks of the 1983 general election, the miners’ strike, and the rate-capping rebellion created a schism that lasted over thirty years. Rather interestingly, it would also be the soft left, rather than the ‘old right’, that would make up the key personnel that would form New Labour. For instance, five members of Blair’s first cabinet had voted for Benn in the acrimonious 1981 deputy leadership election.

While no doubt tempting, simple narratives of betrayal and ‘selling out’, or just complete intellectual surrender are not convincing explanations for that drastic ideological journey. It did not satisfy the great Marxist critic of the Labour Party, Ralph Miliband, and should not satisfy the left now.

As Colm Murphy’s new book demonstrates, many of New Labour’s eventual policies, could actually trace their roots to the New Left. Both tendencies, for example, were profoundly concerned about the implications of globalizing capital, and the rise of multinational corporations. Both also knew that post-war social democracy was failing to meet this challenge.

The fundamental difference was that whereas Benn’s answer was a more assertive use of state power, Blair’s would be an accommodation with the globalizing market. Both initially also exhibited a surprisingly similar hostility to ‘labourism’ and post-war social democracy. There was, as Ross McKibbin once identified “something in the sociology of the soft left which made it readier to abandon that [social democratic] tradition.”

That predisposition to iconoclasm, a desire to move on from post-war social democracy, plus demoralising electoral and extra-parliamentary defeat, was the combination that helped produce New Labour. This is not to ‘left-wash’ New Labour, but to offer a more accurate account of Labour’s past. The implications of a more accurate understanding of our Party’s past may provoke more fruitful dialogue, whether from the left or right of the Labour tradition.

Yet if one half of this historical detoxification process must involve a more sensible re-assessment of the soft left and the origins of New Labour, another must surely be focused on the ‘hard’ (or Bennite/Corbynite) left.

Beyond the more extreme characterisations of Benn and his followers as an existential threat to the nation, some of the most common tropes that have stereotyped the hard left are as follows. First, perhaps the most simplistic, is that the Bennite tradition is synonymous with Trotskyite organisations like the Militant Tendency. Second, that it had little to no interest in the new social and protest movements of the 1980s and 1990s. And third, that it was intellectually stale by the time of the disastrous 1983 general election (if not earlier). The reality is rather more complicated.

While the Bennite left enjoyed the support of the Militant Tendency in the very early 1980s as part of the constitutional reform campaigns, its real involvement was over not long after 1981. Its three MPs never had more than a fleeting degree of influence on the rest of the Socialist Campaign Group, and were often rather out on a limb, uninterested in many of the group’s key concerns (such as feminism and anti-racism, but more on that later). Instead, the defence of Militant members from expulsion by Benn and others should be understood more as a defence of a pluralistic political culture from ideologically motivated expulsions, than a statement of any major ideological affinity.

Where more pluralistic political cultures were possible, such as at the Party’s annual women’s conference, it appears that the Bennite left (organised around the Women’s Action Committee) was happy to consistently oppose and defeat Militant in open political contestation. Nevertheless, this defence was no doubt misplaced, and a damaging, energy-sapping distraction which unfortunately allowed characterisations that lumped the Bennites in with the often-irrelevant Trotskyite revolutionaries.

The claim that Bennites were unresponsive to the new social movements of feminism, anti-racism and gay rights was made most prominently by the intellectual network around Marxism Today. Originally a theoretical journal for the Communist Party of Great Britain, under the editorship of Martin Jacques, Marxism Today enjoyed a huge level of influence on the British left, and enjoys iconic-status to this day.

It also had a tendency to, as described by Sheila Rowbotham, “regard disagreement as synonymous with fundamentalism”. In MT’s self-image as a forward-thinking vanguard of modernisers, Benn was a traditionalist, an old-school class warrior, trapped, according to Beatrix Campbell “in a kind of political asylum”.

This characterisation flew in the face of the hard left’s actual record. It played a central organizing role in the diverse network of miners support groups that emerged during the 1984-5 strike. Ken Livingstone, one of the champions of an intersectional, ‘rainbow alliance’ socialist strategy, explicitly praised Tony Benn and Dennis Skinner for their prescient recognition of “the increasing role of women and black people within the working class”.

Not only did the hard left support the struggle of the Black Sections and the Women’s Action Committee, it was central to its internal strategy after 1983. The level of overlap between feminist, or black or gay activists in the Labour Party, who were also firmly associated with Benn, was profound. When leadership opposition saw this struggle stall by the late 1980s, the hard left’s engagement with social movements outside the Party structures only grew.

By the 1990s the hard left was living a kind of ‘detached co-habitation’ with the mainstream Party, dedicating increasing amounts of time and energy to the struggle against the poll tax, or the Criminal Justice Bill, or the Newbury bypass and neoliberal globalization. The appeal of Jeremy Corbyn, Benn’s favourite politician, is inexplicable without an appreciation of this deep involvement in the intersectional social movements that emerged in the 80s, 90s and 2000s.

In the vibrant left-wing intellectual currents of the 1980s, the hard left also had a role to play. While policy discussion was put on the backburner during the constitutional reform campaign, by the mid-1980s, the hard left once again focused on developing new ideas for a changing world.

This was not a time of political hibernation. Two thousand people amassed at the Chesterfield conference in 1987 to talk socialist policy, reading briefing documents written by some of the most prominent activists and intellectuals of the New Left. While there was Marxism Today there was also Interlink and later Red Pepper.

By the 1990s Ken Livingstone was publishing the Socialist Economic Bulletin, calling for the dismantling of the cold war defence economy to fund public spending. Alan Simpson would propose ‘green collar employment’ around the same time, laying the foundations of the Green New Deal. By the 2000s, John McDonnell had taken on the anti-globalization slogan ‘Another World is Possible’ and made it his own.

These examples are not well known, and likely challenge many popular perceptions of Labour’s hard left. Their rediscovery is essential if the most pernicious and toxic myths that surround Labour’s factional divides are to be seriously challenged. Until the soft and hard left are able to see that they have far more in common than different, Labour’s progressive majority will be locked out of power and influence.

As Jeremy Gilbert argued in New Statesman, there is a brief window of opportunity here for the left to reunify, rebuild and begin to reverse what has been four years of decline. Nor would this be the first time the soft and hard left have found common cause.

Left unity ensured the most successful democratisation process in the Party’s history in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It resisted the worst excesses of Blair’s control freakery in the 1990s, and of course, took the Party leadership itself in 2015.

But the key to any progressive response to Starmer’s most authoritarian instincts must be a unity that is far less brief, and far more permanent. Such a unity can only be forged with some degree of mutual respect and understanding. A small part of that process must involve a healthy re-assessment of the Party’s historic factionalism.

The hard left needs to recognise that the soft left are not simply traitors or cowards, and that New Labour’s origins are far more complicated than we’d perhaps like to think. The soft left must recognise that the Bennite hard left are not simply dogmatists or class war dinosaurs. Pluralism is the new course of action, and must be embraced wholeheartedly.

Alfie Steer is a doctoral student at Oxford University, researching the history of the Labour left form the late 1980s to 2015. 

Image: Labour politicians Dennis Skinner & Tony Benn, taken on Ilford HP5+ back in May 1992, in Chesterfield. Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/duncanh1/50644571573/. Author: It’s No Game, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.