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  So, the rationale for this new edition is that the new urban left of the 1980s – once seemingly eclipsed and irrelevant – warrants closer attention because it now leads the Labour Party. The new urban left was an outrider of cultural change in the political realm, but in a way that needs to be re-examined. The part played by the press in the internal affairs and political direction of the Labour Party has also changed. This, too, needs to be looked at afresh.

  This second edition has had to be kept at roughly the same length as the first. So, old content has been deleted or compressed (sometimes through rewriting) in order to make way for the new. Inevitably, revisiting old content has generated temptations difficult to resist. The chapter on the left and sexuality in the 1980s has been substantially rewritten in order to focus more closely on the active role of the right-wing press in promoting repressive legislation, whilst the focus of the chapter on ‘loony’ myths has been broadened in order to show how such stories exemplify a more general process of myth-making in the press. However, most of the new material – including five new chapters – relates primarily to the more recent period.

  Notes

  1. The new urban left is sometimes referred to in the academic literature as the new municipal left or, more simply, the urban left.

  2. As he commented to the author (9 December 2017): ‘Coming from a Liverpool Irish family, there had to be at least one priest in the family somewhere!’

  3. She was appointed by Ed Miliband to an opposition shadow post in 2010 and sacked in 2013.

  4. J. Schlosberg, ‘Should he stay or should he go? Television and online news coverage of the Labour Party in crisis’, Media Reform Coalition, p. 4, available at: www.mediareform.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Corbynresearch.pdfmedia (accessed in June 20, 2017).

  5. Cited in A. Nunns, The Candidate, 2nd edition (London: OR Books, 2018), p. 2.

  6. Daily Mail 7 June 2017.

  2

  Rise of the ‘loony left’

  James Curran

  To understand the political significance of the new urban left, it is necessary first to grasp the depth of the Labour Party’s crisis in the early 1980s. Even before Margaret Thatcher’s first general election in 1979, perceptive commentators warned that the new right were connecting to dynamic social currents in British society, whereas Labour was locked into a downward spiral of decline.1 Labour’s core constituency of manual workers was shrinking. Growing individualism and market consumerism posed a threat to collectivist politics. Resentment against state bureaucracy allegedly weakened support for the welfare state. Above all, it was argued, the liberal corporatist system of government – the way that Britain had been run for the last forty years – no longer worked. Governments experienced growing difficulty in delivering full employment, while business and labour were increasingly unwilling to participate in a social contract brokered by the state. The crisis-ridden record of the Wilson/Callaghan government (1974–9) – its IMF bailout, public spending cuts, rising inflation and growing industrial conflict – seemed to indicate that social democracy delivered through corporatist conciliation had run its course.

  If the currents of change were seemingly flowing against Labour, the party greatly added to its problems by tearing itself apart. After the 1979 election defeat, activists pressed for greater grassroots influence on the grounds that they had been let down by their right-wing leaders. The response of one part of the Labour right (and centre) was to form in 1981 the breakaway Social Democratic Party, which merged with the Liberal Party in 1988. This had the effect of splitting the progressive vote, and deepening Labour’s woes. In the 1983 general election, Labour’s share of the vote dropped to 28%, its lowest since 1918.2

  In an atmosphere of growing crisis and demoralisation, a new social movement within the party led mainly by youngish people proposed themselves as saviours. From their local council base, they were resisting, they claimed, the ravages of Thatcherism in a more effective way than Labour MPs. They were doing politics in a new way by involving people in decision-making. And they were building a new social coalition of support through progressive politics that connected to a society that had become less class-centred and more fragmented. This siren call grabbed the attention of people looking for a new political roadmap, a new way out of Labour’s crisis. ‘And Now for the Good News’ was how the new urban left was hailed in a New Socialist anthology of essays.3 ‘Renewal is under way, and the GLC [Greater London Council] is very much part of it’, concurred Marxism Today.4

  However, the new urban left was viewed with suspicion by traditionalists on both Labour’s right and left. The traditionalist left, in particular, viewed the new urban left as middle class ‘trendies’ preoccupied with issues that were a diversion from class politics. Thus, David Blunkett, the young firebrand leader of Sheffield Council, objected to the new urban left’s feminism on the grounds that it made an unhelpful distinction between the interests of working men and women, and threatened to ‘sap the energy of the class struggle’.5 Similarly, leading figures on Liverpool Council – then dominated by the Trotskyist Militant Tendency – complained that the new urban left’s positive action policies, designed to assist disadvantaged ethnic minorities, were setting workers against workers.6

  What was the urban left doing to provoke such antagonism but also, in some quarters, optimism and hope? And why was London the cockpit of a municipal experiment in contrast to the staid world of local government in many other parts of the country?

  Product of transition

  The urban left in London gained increased influence partly in response to rapid economic change. Between 1964 and 1974, Greater London lost 40% of its manufacturing jobs.7 In the subsequent period 1973–83, manufacturing jobs in the capital again almost halved.8 This was offset by a rapid growth of the service sector, which gave rise to an increase in the proportion of left-leaning, middle-class members within the London Labour Party. Their increasing influence was reinforced by a critical grassroots response to the rightward drift of the Wilson/Callaghan government (1974–9). In 1977, the left gained control of the London Labour Party Executive – a victory that symbolised an historic shift in the metropolitan Labour Party long dominated by the centre-right.9

  The changing social composition of the London Labour Party also had a direct impact on local government. From the late 1960s onwards, a growing number of middle-class people moved into poverty-stricken inner-city areas, attracted by their central location and cheap housing. In some cases, they joined inactive branches of local Labour parties, with small memberships, and rapidly acquired positions of influence.10 Many of these confident, new recruits – in areas like Islington, Camden, Southwark and Lambeth – set out to make councils more effective agencies of change by extending their role in the local community. By contrast, areas untouched by gentrification, such as Barking, tended to stand aloof from local socialist experiment throughout the 1980s.

  If one key influence shaping the London Labour Party was a change in its social composition, a second formative influence was the rise of the women’s movement. The shift from industrial production to the service sector resulted in a growing proportion of married women gaining full-time paid employment, especially in the period after 1970. Increasing economic independence was reinforced by the ‘second wave’ of feminism. London became the forcing ground for change. It was where the historic Women’s Liberation Workshop was founded in 1968, followed by the launch of Spare Rib in 1972, the Virago publishing house in 1973 and the National Women’s Aid Federation in 1975. While some feminists settled for creating women-only enclaves of mutual support, others sought to change society through a more interventionist approach. Both approaches were adopted by Labour feminists who transformed a number of almost moribund women’s sections, traditionally concerned with social events and fund-raising, into feminist caucuses.11 These maintained a steady broadside of criticism against the male domination of contemporary politics in which women accounted for only twenty-ei
ght out of 650 MPs in 1983,12 and only 22% of London councillors in 1986.13 Labour feminism exerted strong pressure on radical councils to change, and become more women-friendly.

  A third influence reshaping the London Labour Party in the 1980s was immigration. A large number of migrants, from the West Indies, India and Pakistan, arrived in London in the 1950s and early 1960s. The rate of immigration declined in the next two decades, following the restrictive 1962 Commonwealth Act, and still more restrictive legislation in 1968, 1971 and 1981. Even so, enough immigrants settled in London to change significantly its ethnic mix. By 1981, one in five people living in inner London, and one in ten in outer London, were of Asian or Afro-Caribbean descent.14

  However, it took some time before immigration affected left politics. The first generation of Afro-Caribbean and Asian migrants (like their Irish and Jewish predecessors) tended to keep their heads down, partly in order to avoid trouble in a city where racism was both widespread and open. Their communities were still fragmented in the 1950s by allegiances to their places of origin, sometimes reinforced by different religious affiliations. Many immigrant newspapers in Britain reported extensively during this period on what was happening in the countries where their readers came from.15 However, the second generation was more integrated into the wider community, and less willing to put up with racial prejudice. During the late 1960s and 1970s, Londoners of Afro-Caribbean descent developed in particular a more unified subculture, radicalised by the American civil rights campaign, black pride movement and the bruising contradictions of a complex, ‘refused’ British identity.16 Out of this grew a new mood of militancy, especially during the 1980s when rising unemployment affected disproportionately ethnic minority groups. Anger erupted into major riots in south London (Brixton) in 1981, and in north London (Broadwater Farm) in 1985. This increased militancy, combined with black lobbying inside the Labour party and the mushrooming of ethnic minority organisations, led to a belated political adjustment. Black representation in London town halls doubled in 1982, rising to seventy-seven black councillors (4% of the total).17 By 1987, three black councillors – Bernie Grant, Linda Bellos and Merle Amory – led London local authorities.

  The emergence of ethnic minority protest coincided with the rise of gay liberation. Successive generations of gay men had kept a low profile during the period when it was a criminal offence for them to make love in private. When gay sex over twenty-one was legalised in 1967, it was widely held that tolerance was conditional upon discretion. This attitude often concealed latent hostility, and could give rise to casual, violent assaults on gay men who were judged to be flaunting their sexuality. This combination of prejudice and intimidation was challenged by a group of gays and lesbians in London who set up the Gay Liberation Front in 1970. Its three main objectives were to assert the validity of homosexuality (‘Gay is Good’), to be open (‘Coming Out’) and to organise for reform and mutual support.18

  London became the main centre of this more combative approach, and acquired a network of organised gay groups, telephone help-lines, community services, gay theatre, cinema, newspapers and journals. The gay liberation movement also set out to influence public attitudes, cultivating successfully the word ‘gay’ in place of the then oppressive label ‘queer’.19 In the more liberal climate of the 1970s, gays and lesbians came to be portrayed more sympathetically on television, at least in comparison to the past.20

  With a new sense of confidence, gay campaigners demanded freedom from discrimination in employment, and called upon progressive councils to join them in openly fighting sexual prejudice. A section of the gay community thus engaged in a new kind of public politics very different from the cautious lobbying for reform of the pre-1967 era.

  In short, the late 1970s and early 1980s marked a time when a number of groups who were discriminated against or marginalised entered politics with growing effectiveness. The Labour Party in the capital was in process of transition, responding to economic change and the social recomposition of its membership. The coming together of these different influences produced a new kind of local politics.

  Something rather similar happened in Manchester, and elsewhere, in the mid-1980s21 in response to a broadly comparable conjunction of influences. But the London-centred national press focused on the new urban left in the capital, and this was consequently where public attention was directed. Indeed, left-wing London councils were regularly in the national news throughout the period 1981–7. They were the cynosure for a new politics, the context where public and internal party reactions to anti-racist, feminist and ‘pro-gay’ policies would be put to the test.

  Product of a generation

  If the radical politics of the London left was partly a response to a change in the political environment, it also expressed the values and concerns of a new political generation. Many of the leading figures of the new urban left in London during the early 1980s were in their thirties or, at most, early forties. This was most noticeably the case in relation to the left’s flagship authorities, the Greater London Council (GLC) and Inner London Education Authority (ILEA). Its leading figures, such as Ken Livingstone, Frances Morrell, Tony Banks, John McDonnell, Michael Ward and John Carr, all gained their majority in the 1960s. Many of the people they appointed to influential policy and advisory positions – such as Reg Race, Hilary Wainwright and Sheila Rowbotham – belonged to the same age cohort. The cultural revolution of the 1960s (extending into the early 1970s) provided the formative political experience of this group.

  The great political and social causes of the left during the 1960s were peace (Vietnam War), anti-racism (US civil rights movement), personal freedom and, to a lesser degree, feminism and environmentalism. It was also a time of cultural experiment, in which deference to authority and class power was explicitly repudiated in music, fashion, film and literature. Infusing this new cultural politics were also values that fitted uneasily within the left tradition: growing individualism and distrust of the state.22 Youth cultures of the 1960s shaped the politics of the new urban left. It predisposed them to respond sympathetically to the rise of ethnic minority, gay and feminist lobbies. It also encouraged them to attempt to manage local government in a non-hierarchical way that involved local people. Out of the 1960s’ revolt grew the urban radicalism of the 1980s.

  Thus, one common thread linking the concerns of 1960s’ protest and 1980s’ municipal politics was anti-racism. Growing concern about racism gave rise to pioneer anti-racist legislation in 1965 and 1968, which was strongly supported by the young left (some of whom attacked their parents’ assumption of racial superiority inherited from the days of empire). The new urban left were heavily involved in the Anti-Nazi League, a broad left movement founded in 1977 that successfully campaigned against the advance of the far-right National Front. By deploying a new style of campaigning that involved spectacle, pop music, celebrity and agitprop, people mostly in their twenties and thirties set about persuading teenagers that racism was uncool – with striking success.

  Some people involved in the Anti-Nazi League also turned their attention to municipal politics in the late 1970s. In particular, a group of Labour activists in Lambeth argued that anti-racism should entail more than confronting the overt racism of the far right. There was a problem in Labour’s own backyard, they argued, which the standard left rhetoric of ‘we are committed to colour-blind socialism’ and ‘there is no race problem here’, failed to acknowledge. While about 30% of the Lambeth population consisted of people from ethnic minorities (mostly Afro-Caribbean), there were in 1974 no black Lambeth councillors and senior officers, and only a small minority of black staff in the council workforce. Activists’ vocal criticism resulted in Lambeth Council establishing in 1978 an ethnic minorities’ working party. This became the forerunner of the ethnic minorities unit established in the GLC in 1982, and similar bodies, in nine radical councils in London, created between 1978 and 1986.23

  Their creation led to more members of ethnic minorities
being employed in local government. A number of radical London councils initiated ethnic monitoring of their workforce, partly as a way of demonstrating the need for change. They established or strengthened equal opportunities procedures that made appointments open and fair, and took positive steps to increase ethnic minority employment by, for example, including advertisements in ethnic minority publications. Some councils introduced race training to discourage subtle forms of racial discrimination (sometimes in an aggressive form that could be counterproductive). The Greater London Council (GLC) also carried a ‘positive action’ approach one stage further by adopting the ‘contract compliance’ strategy used to combat anti-Catholic employment practices in Northern Ireland. The GLC refused to buy any product or service from a private company that did not adhere to equal opportunities procedures.

  Left-wing councils in London, and elsewhere, adopted other measures to aid ethnic minorities. Some modified the rules governing council house allocations in response to growing awareness that, for a variety of reasons, ethnic minorities had by far the worst council accommodation. Information about council services was translated into the relevant foreign languages, in areas where there was a large number of Asian migrants with imperfect English. Pressure was also exerted on the police to take racial harassment more seriously in places where ‘Paki-bashing’ was a recurring problem. Ethnic minority organisations (including the black arts movement that flourished under GLC patronage) were funded partly in order to assist the expression of ethnic minority concerns.