Mike Phipps reviews The Searchers: Five Rebels, Their Dream of a Different Britain, and Their Many Enemies, by Andy Beckett, published by Allen Lane. A Labour Hub long read.

Andy Beckett’s book looks at the lives and ideas of five of the most influential socialist thinkers in the Labour Party in the last fifty years  – Tony Benn, Ken Livingstone, John McDonnell, Diane Abbott, and Jeremy Corbyn. At a time when the Labour left seems to have taken an unprecedented hammering from the leadership of its own Party, it seems worthwhile to assess just how influential their ideas were.

Benn the standard-bearer

Tony Benn of course was of an older generation, aged 43 when the global events of 1968 happened, yet still profoundly affected enough by them to evolve from conventional centrist to radical outlier.

Capturing the new mood, heretical to much of the paternalistic Labour hierarchy, he wrote in 1973: “Fewer people now really believe that the problems of our society can be solved simply by voting for a Government every four or five years. More people want to do more for themselves, and believe they are capable of doing so, if the conditions could only be created that would make this possible. If the Labour party could see in this rising tide of opinion a new expression of grass roots socialism, then it might renew itself and move nearer to the time when it is seen as the natural Government of a more fully self-­governing society.”

Benn was already acting on these ideas. In 1971, he joined a march in support of the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders workers, which grew into the biggest Scottish demonstration since the Second World War. Despite the company going into receivership, the workers occupied the plant and continued to work, demanding that the Tory government rescue the business, which it eventually did. “We are seeing the birth pangs of industrial democracy,” declared Benn.

When Labour returned to office in 1974, Benn, now Industry Secretary, tried to apply these principles further.  He encouraged shop stewards at Lucas Aerospace, which was planning to cut its workforce by a third, to develop an alternative, socially useful plan for the company. But he was repeatedly undermined by his Prime Minister and Chancellor and even his department’s senior civil servants, who were determined to sabotage his radical Industry Bill.  

Encouraged by these forces, the press began to run articles calling Benn “the most dangerous man in Britain”, who wanted to destroy British democracy.  Journalists rented accommodation across the road from the Benns’ west London house to spy on and target him personally. “The Benns were told several times by journalists that one of their children had been taken to hospital, when no such thing had occurred.” Benn began to receive increasingly detailed death threats.

Labour lost office in 1979. As Michael Foot, who replaced James Callaghan as leader in 1981, increasingly caved in to right wing pressure, it fell to Benn to become the key standard-bearer of the Labour left, a role he took on “with an intensity rare in British politics.”

Foot was the last leader to be elected by just the Party’s MPs. The leftward shift in the Party grassroots and the dissatisfaction among union leaders with the outgoing Labour government fuelled a successful campaign to secure a broader method for electing the Party leader – an electoral college. In response, four ex-Cabinet members announced the formation of a right wing breakaway, the Social Democratic Party,  to which 28 Labour MPs defected.

Benn decided to run under the new electoral college system for the Party’s deputy leadership against Denis Healey, the former austerity Chancellor. The campaign went on for six months, with meetings all over the country. Towards the end, Benn was admitted to hospital with a rare but serious nerve condition. He won four-fifths of Party members but lost in the other sections of the electoral college – the MPs and affiliated unions – and was beaten overall by less than one percentage point.

The 1981 deputy leadership campaign was the high point of Bennite influence in the Party. With Labour suffering in the polls, a truce was agreed between the left and the right that would preserve the left’s constitutional and programmatic gains but ruled out further advances ahead of the next general election. The right meanwhile continued to organise to block the left where they could – including in Tony Benn’s own constituency in Bristol, working to ensure that, following a redrawing of local boundaries, he was not selected for the more winnable of two new seats.

Benn himself continued to be a force. He won some unlikely fans. When Benn spoke in support of Cherie Blair’s Labour candidacy at a Margate rally in 1983, Tony Blair was so impressed that he wrote to Benn over a decade later: “I’ve always regarded your speech for Cherie as the finest statement for socialism I’ve ever heard.” Yet, later in his memoirs, he dismissed Benn as “the preacher, not the general” – unlike himself.

The GLC

Meanwhile the focus had shifted elsewhere – from the big, educational, campaigning speeches of Benn to what left wingers in the Party could achieve in office. Like many of his generation, Ken Livingstone marched against the Vietnam War in the late 1960s. But unlike others, he drew the conclusion that the political system could be changed only from within: “I agreed with Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a leader of the French student protests, when he said, ‘We must begin the long march through the institutions.’”

Livingstone spent the next decade mastering the detail of the workings of local government. When Labour won the Greater London Council elections in 1981, he realised he had enough support among his fellow councillors not only to oust the right wing Labour leader but to hand out all the key policy briefs exclusively to his left supporters. It was all done in an afternoon – and the Tory press was outraged.

The GLC’s embrace of left wing polices – which eventually proved hugely popular – could not have been achieved without the behind-the-scenes work of John McDonnell, a newly elected councillor, far less self-publicizing than ‘Red Ken’,  who became Chair of Finance and later Deputy Leader. The work  he undertook led to the GLC funding over 2,000 organisations by 1986 and annually distributing grants worth over £50 million. As with Benn, the tabloid media hysteria whipped up against the ‘loony left’ had horrendous consequences. McDonnell had his windows broken, his car dangerously tampered with and found bottes broken in his children’s sandpit.

Ken Livingstone’s outlook had been partly formed by months of travelling around Africa in his youth. Jeremy Corbyn’s had been shaped by his travels through Latin America and in particular Chile just before the election of Salvador Allende’s radical socialist government in 1970.

Diane Abbott’s formative experiences were different. She was four when a white mob hammered on the doors of the houses in her street to see who lived inside. She experienced the upheavals of the late 1960s “from a less secure vantage point.” After graduating from Cambridge and working briefly in the civil service, she joined the Labour Party, was elected to Westminster Council, became a press officer at the GLC and also worked in TV. She was also central to the creation of Labour’s Black sections, set up to represent a key part of the Party’s electorate which was largely taken for granted – in the teeth of opposition from the right wing.

New MPs

Today the exodus of much of the left from Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is opening new spaces for the Labour right to organise and seek office. In the early 1980s, the creation of the breakaway SDP saw many right wingers leave, allowing the left to move forward – as happened with the selection of Jeremy Corbyn in Islington North.

Corbyn won election in 1983, but Labour lost heavily, partly due to the breakaway SDP, partly due to the jingoism that had gripped the country during the 1982 Falklands War. The media and Labour’s right wing were quick to blame the Party’s radical manifesto, derided by Gerald Kaufman MP as “the longest suicide note in history.”

“I was determined that the left would get the blame,” wrote John Golding, another right winger, “by going along with some of the barmiest policies [Benn] had got through.” When Benn’s defeat in Bristol was announced on election night, Golding said: “We counted it as a Labour gain.” As Beckett notes: “For the sectarians of the Labour right, saving the party required them first to destroy much of it.”

The newly elected Corbyn soon gained a reputation for his internationalism and total dedication to politics. “During 1983, in the few months of parliamentary time remaining after the election, he made Commons contributions about Grenada, Cyprus, Turkey, Bangladesh, El Salvador and Nicaragua; about the World Bank and the Commonwealth; about experiments on animals and interrogations by the Royal Ulster Constabulary.” In1984 he was arrested on an anti-apartheid protest outside the South African embassy. His willingness to talk to Irish Republicans got him into greater trouble with the new Labour leadership.

Tony Benn got back into Parliament through a by-election in Chesterfield in 1984 just before the start of the year-long miners’ strike, which more than any other single event shaped the prospects for the left in this period.  Ken Livingstone and Diane Abbott would have to wait until 1987 to become MPs.

Years of defeat

The defeat of the miners’ strike, followed by a third Labour general election defeat in 1987, strengthened the Party’s right wing, which the leader, Neil Kinnock, was happy to accommodate. To halt the rightward drift, Tony Benn decided to run for the Party leadership in 1988, addressing packed meetings as before, But the mood in the Party had changed: Kinnock crushed Benn’s challenge with 88.6% of the vote.

The fragmentation of the left inside the Party had been prefigured in 1985 with the differences that emerged between Ken Livingstone and John McDonnell at the GLC over how best to respond to the Thatcher government’s restrictions on local councils’ tax-raising powers: rate-capping. McDonnell was keen to stick to the agreed united front across affected Labour local councils, to stand together and refuse to set a budget. Livingstone, convinced that the GLC could live with the new arrangements without major cuts, decided to break ranks and stay within the law. The row became public: “He has betrayed the whole campaign in order to save his political career,” McDonnell declared. Livingstone responded with similar invective. At the end of a 23-hour budget-setting meeting, Labour right wingers took advantage to pass a Conservative proposal to set an even lower budget than Livingstone was proposing. “The aftershocks went on for years,” notes Beckett.

Thatcher abolished the GLC altogether in 1986, making London the only capital in Western Europe without an elected form of government. Livingstone was selected to be Labour’s parliamentary candidate for Brent East after a damaging battle against Abbott, who eventually won Hackney North in 1987. John McDonnell would have to wait a further decade to enter Parliament as MP for Hayes and Harlington. Yet those who preceded him were also pretty much in the political wilderness at this time. Livingstone was not even given parliamentary office for nearly a year. Abbott, as the only female Black MP, was treated by many as a curiosity.

Diane Abbott was one of the few to warn Tony Blair as early as 1996 that his New Labour project was “losing sight of those who traditionally voted for us”. Labour’s 1997 landslide victory seemed to contradict that assessment, but  “in fact her warnings about New Labour were not wrong, just premature. Over the next three general elections, under Blair and then Brown, the party would shed almost 5 million voters.”

Of the five individuals discussed here, Jeremy Corbyn was the least interested in ministerial office. He voted against the first Blair government 64 times. And just to set the record straight, between 1987 and 2015 he sponsored 46 different early day motions opposing antisemitism or supporting the Jewish community. He also helped the Jewish Labour MP Margaret Hodge, when her constituency of Barking in east London was targeted by the antisemitic British National Party, bringing carloads of activists to campaign for her.

New Labour’s approach to socialist MPs was to quarantine them. According to left wing MP Alan Simpson, the whips would say, “You want to be careful having conversations with Jeremy Corbyn. Careers can be ruined that way.”’

London Mayor

Ken Livingstone, with his experience of local government leadership, had not ruled out serving in the New Labour government. But six months in, when Blair invited him in for a one-to-one meeting and asked him how he thought the government was doing, Livingstone replied: “Much worse than I expected” – which ended any prospect of a ministerial job.

Yet when the government proposed a new locally elected structure for London – an executive mayor and a Greater London Authority (GLA) to scrutinise the role – Livingstone decided, having initially opposed the idea as “barmy”, that he wanted it. New Labour were determined to prevent him from being the Labour candidate in the 2000 election, but Livingstone’s underdog status – and the fact that his old job as GLC leader had been undemocratically abolished from under him – gained him widespread backing, including from John McDonnell.

To stop Livingstone being selected, the Party bureaucracy decided the Labour candidate would be chosen by Labour’s London MPs, GLA candidates and even members of the European Parliament. Narrowly overtaken by Frank Dobson in this rigged arrangement, Livingstone decided to run as an Independent and won comfortably – the first elected mayor of Europe’s largest city.

Livingstone’s powers were fewer than before and his ambitions had diminished to working with the private sector to make London better. But he did introduce the congestion charge, part-pedestrianize Trafalgar Square, give free bus travel to under-18s in full-time education and bring in more buses and bus lanes. His successes persuaded the Labour hierarchy to allow him to be the official Party candidate in 2004 and he was re-elected.

The peak of his mastery was probably 2005 when he secured the 2012 Olympics for London and the following day had to deal with a terrorist attack that left over 50 people dead. “Nothing you do, however many of us you kill, will stop the flight to our cities where freedom is strong and where people can live in harmony with one another,” said the Mayor. “You will fail.”

But in other respects, Livingstone squandered his authority on damaging side-shows, including trading insults with a Jewish journalist for which he was found guilty of bringing his office into disrepute, a ruling that was later overturned. With Labour nationally unpopular, Livingstone lost the 2008 mayoral election to Boris Johnson. “The left’s one powerful politician was gone.”

An overwhelming mandate

The years leading up to 2015 were seemingly barren for the left. But the decline of New Labour, the fiasco of the Iraq war and the economic crash of 2008 all vindicated core arguments the left had been reiterating for many years. Prefiguring Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership victory in 2015, Ed Miliband won the leadership in 2010 after Labour were voted out of office – despite the much greater media and financial backing for his brother – primarily because he had opposed the Iraq war. When Labour lost again in 2015, it was not, as New Labour remnants claimed, because the Party was too far to the left, but because it had retreated back to a tired Blairism.

In winning this argument, the left were helped by the election results in Scotland. Labour had been almost totally wiped out there, a result made all the more dramatic by the effects of the first-past-the-post electoral system. The fact that the Party had been beaten by the SNP, then perceived as being to the left of Labour, made it easier to make the case that Labour needed a more radical leader.

The question was who? Both Diane Abbott and John McDonnell had stood before and been heavily defeated and neither was keen to repeat the experience. When Jeremy Corbyn emerged as a candidate, the aim of the campaign “was simply to keep the left in the contest for as long as possible.” The explosion of support for his candidacy took everybody, including those most closely involved, by surprise.

Technical changes, such as a more membership-led method for electing the leader – now scrapped – certainly helped Corbyn. But above all, the game-changer was Jereny Corbyn himself, drawing on  a long track record of putting principle before preferment, breaking the Labour whip mid-campaign to vote against Tory benefit cuts, giving honest, straight answers in a manner that broke political custom and drawing increasingly large crowds wherever he spoke. I recall a meeting in North West London, organised at a few days’ notice, in a large ex-cinema which previously only evangelical preachers had been able to fill, which had people queuing around the block to hear Corbyn speak, despite his lack of oratorical flair. Across the country, there was a similar pattern of overflowing venues.  

Much of the media, inhabiting the same milieu as most of the political elite, dismissed what was happening as a fad. But when the result was announced in September 2015, Corbyn won by a huge distance with 60% of the vote.

It was, as Beckett says, “an overwhelming mandate”. But from the outset, he faced obstruction from the Party apparatus – doors locked, computers removed. The Forde Report would later catalogue “a deliberate go-­slow by certain members of staff designed to frustrate” the leadership on factional grounds.

His parliamentary colleagues were also hostile. Lord Mandelson later said, “I work every single day in some small way to bring forward the end of his tenure in office.”

No newly elected Labour leader had ever faced such a barrage of opposition from within – not to mention the relentless media hostility and other attacks from within the broader Establishment, including, later, sections of the military. Beckett mentions some of this but perhaps underestimates how it destabilised the new leadership. It’s easy to criticise the dysfunctionality of Corbyn’s inner team, but given the elite consensus that his leadership couldn’t endure more than a few months, it was actually hard to find top people to fill the roles that could take on so many adversaries.

Despite making 60 public appearances for Remain in the last 60 days of the Brexit referendum campaign, he was immediately targeted by Labour’s right wing following the vote to Leave. Mass resignations from the Shadow Cabinet were orchestrated, spread over two days, “evenly spaced for maximum media attention.” The parliamentary Party voted no confidence in him by 172 votes to 40. But a new leadership contest saw him achieve an even larger mandate than before.

The following year, Labour’s performance in the general election deprived the Tory government of its majority. Besides the dismal campaign of Theresa May, the two central factors were Labour’s ground-breaking manifesto, written by Andrew Fisher, and Corbyn himself.

A telling moment was a speech he made following a terrorist attack at a pop concert in Manchester, in which 23 people were killed and over 1,000 injured. Rather than mouth the usual platitudes, the Labour leader linked terrorism in Britain to the country’s armed interventions abroad. “Many experts, including professionals in our intelligence and security services, have pointed to the connections between wars our government has supported or fought in other countries… and terrorism here at home,” he said. “That assessment in no way reduces the guilt of those who attack our children… But an informed understanding of the causes of terrorism is an essential part of an effective response.”

It was a risky speech. But a poll afterwards found voters agreed with its sentiments by a margin of two to one. Labour’s subsequent seat gains in the general election led even Mandelson to admit he was wrong.

Downhill from here

Perhaps, with his enhanced authority, this was the moment for Corbyn to press the reset button, impose his will over a hostile Party apparatus and temporarily subdued right wing parliamentary Party and map out a strategy for power. It’s true that fresh ideas were being generated particularly by Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell and to a lesser extent by Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott, but the left’s enemies soon regrouped and many of the new policy ideas would be sidelined by the long parliamentary argument over Brexit that would dominate the next two years.

“It is hard to be a radical under siege,” writes Beckett of those years – in a far fairer spirit than some of the analyses that came out soon after the 2019 general election defeat. He contrasts the increasingly conventional style and centralisation of the Corbyn leadership with the flexibility Ken Livingstone had shown when similarly beleaguered as Leader of the GLC. Yet for all hie experience, it was Livingstone who proved to be singularly unhelpful at a time when preposterous allegations of antisemitism were hurled at Corbyn, by publicly musing about Adolf Hitler’s supposed support for Zionism.

The details of Labour’s ‘antisemitism crisis’ have been explored at length elsewhere. But Beckett is right about its most important aspect: in Corbyn’s “alleged tolerance of antisemitism [his enemies] had finally found an attack line that worked.”

As analysed elsewhere, Labour went into the 2019 general election, struggling to impose its narrative, with an unsatisfactory compromise position on Brexit, a wounded leader and a divided parliamentary Party, facing a Tory Party that had absorbed the lessons of its disastrous campaign two years earlier. Labour’s campaign was further hampered by Corbyn’s refusal to attack Prime Minister Boris Johnson personally – which meant failing to highlight the one thing that would bring him down a few years later: his lack of integrity and unfitness for office.

Erasure

Facilitated by the scale of Labour’s defeat, a concerted effort to erase Jeremy Corbyn from Labour history began on election night itself. “Go back to your student politics!” said the former New Labour minister Alan Johnson, setting the tone. On election night four and a half years later, a compliant media filled the airwaves with Mandelson, serial loser Neil Kinnock and other New Labour deadbeats. As far as they were concerned, the left was back in its ‘sealed tomb’ where it belonged. It was almost as if the Corbyn leadership had never happened – and most of the media played along.

To make that happen, an unprecedented counter-offensive was enacted within the Party under Keir Starmer’s leadership. In 2020, Corbyn was suspended from Labour and lost the whip: later he would be barred from being a candidate. In February 2022, eleven left wing MPs, including Abbott and McDonnell, were told that they too would lose the Labour whip unless they removed their names from a letter written by the Stop the War Coalition criticising NATO.

As leader, Keir Starmer, despite campaign promises to build on the previous manifestos, moved quickly to dump most of his predecessor’s policies. The right’s sense of entitlement was off the leash. As  Beckett notes, “The Labour right’s preoccupation with the left’s supposed dogmatism, intolerance and aggression is actually a form of projection, an inadvertent display of its own vices.”

Speaking to the author about Corbyn following this change of Party regime, Ken Livingstone said: “I never thought I’d see anyone subject to more lies and smears than I was. But… he’s survived quite well,” he said, adding, “If me or Jeremy had been politicians in Argentina, or Chile, or Brazil, we would’ve been murdered.”

But in the UK, the left survives; and some of its leading figures are still able to make a difference. Diane Abbott’s successful campaign to remain a Labour candidate in 2024 stopped in its tracks the Party bureaucracy’s purge of other left wing candidates. Corbyn’s own public defiance of the Party apparatus saw him elected as an Independent – and he wasn’t alone.

At over 500 pages, this is an important, largely brilliant book. In focusing on the left, rather than the Jeremy Corbyn phenomenon, Beckett helps us to see more clearly the strengths and weaknesses of what the movement did at a time when it mattered most. By looking at the groundwork done over a much longer period, he also reminds us that these great historical processes are neither created by heroic individuals nor betrayed by evil traitors. Rather than hoping for stronger character traits in the next ‘messiah’, the left would do better to explore the key forces, issues and circumstances that can help bring about major change.

Andy Becket’s selection of individuals is a strong one, but curiously London-based. Yet it would be superficial in the extreme to dismiss the input of these individuals as somehow marginal to what Labour has done  – and will do – when in government. Time and again, it is the left that has set the political agenda and whose solutions to the crises Britain faces truly resonate with most people. As Keir Starmer tries to steer some hopeless middle way between the interests of predatory capital and the needs of the vast majority, it is once again the ideas of the left that continue to capture the public imagination.

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.