When the Labour party began, its purpose was the representation of labour (i.e. workers) in the House of Commons. Indeed, its name was the Labour Representation Committee. Its goal was gradually achieved, and then, from the 1980s, gradually annihilated. With the victory of Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader is supported by only 10 per cent of the party’s MPs, and yet it is imagined, at least by his backers, that he will eventually be able to get into government with them. It is an impossible situation. What is needed today is the opposite of how it all started — a Parliamentary Representation Committee in the Labour party.
When the history of Corbynism comes to be written, many will assume that his form of leftism arose as a protest against the Thatcher era. This is not so. It predated her. There really was a belief in the 1970s that capitalism would ‘collapse under the weight of its own contradictions’. The formative experience of the Corbyn generation was not Thatcher but the crisis of 1976, when a Labour government was forced to bring in the IMF. It was then that the campaigns against ‘the cuts’, which have been going on ever since — and the hard-left infiltration connected with them — really took off. (Indeed the Jim Callaghan/Denis Healey cuts were much more severe than any imposed by Mrs Thatcher.) The left, supported, in some cases, by the Soviet Union, thought revolution was nigh. When the revolutionary turned out to be Mrs Thatcher, they half-admired her — or at least hated her only in a bogey-woman sort of way. The bitterest disputes are internecine, so the figures of true loathing were Callaghan, or Roy Jenkins, or right-wing trade unionists, who had cheated them, they thought, of power.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in