Culture Wars Read online

  In addition, members of ethnic minorities were co-opted on to council bodies in order to increase their influence on council policy. A conscious policy was pursued of promoting multiculturalism in schools: through the recruitment of more ethnic minority teachers and governors, and through additions to the curriculum that connected pupils to ethnic minority cultures and histories. The GLC also sought to promote a positive view of London as a multiethnic, multicultural, cosmopolitan city through free concerts, festivals and public events, in which different types of music were played, different kinds of ethnic cuisine were often available, GLC sideshows conveyed appropriate messages and above all the large crowds drawn from different ethnic and social groups in London embodied the plural, inclusive understanding of community that the council was seeking to foster.24

  In short, the new urban left set out to offset the disadvantages of ethnic minorities in terms of jobs, housing, education and social esteem, and to support their collective organisation and political inclusion. While these policies were the natural culmination of radical sixties anti-racism, the municipal championship of women occurred in a more pressured way. The 1960s and early 1970s had modified gendered behaviour and attitudes among young people, in subtle ways that were reflected in contemporary films, magazines and fashion.25 Young Labour activists were especially disposed to recognise – at least in principle – that arrangements between men and women were in general unfair and needed changing. This made young male councillors distinctly uncomfortable when they were subjected to a barrage of questions from feminist party members. Why did so many housing estates lack adequate play areas, lighting and security? Why did the council have no crèche facilities? Why was daycare for children so inadequate throughout the capital? The answer, councillors were told, was because they were overwhelmingly men with little insight into the practical needs of women. In this, they were no different from the senior council officers and leaders of community organisations they regularly dealt with. Women, it was argued, were the main consumers of council services, yet they were not part of the decision-making process.26

  Feminist pressure led Lewisham Council to pioneer in 1979 a women’s rights working party. This became the model for the women’s committee established at the GLC in 1982, and for similar committees or units introduced in eleven London councils between 1981 and 1987.27 These became channels through which women’s groups in the community exerted influence on local government policy. Their main effect was to redirect expenditure in support of a large expansion of day-care provision for the under-fives in London during the 1980s. They also helped to funnel money into a variety of women’s projects, facilities, groups and training schemes. More generally, they led to improved equal opportunity procedures, staff training (to assist women up the ladder), and provision for maternity and paternity leave. Feminist criticism also contributed to the adoption of a more user-oriented approach, in which during the mid- and later 1980s28 a number of left-wing authorities in London commissioned surveys into what people wanted.

  The London left’s championing of lesbians and gays also had its roots in the 1960s’ cultural revolution. The 1960s were a time when large numbers of young people were drawn towards youth subcultures that celebrated freedom from social conformity, and affirmed the importance of individual self-realisation and human empathy. This shift was part of a more general process of liberalisation, registered in shifting attitudes towards sex, illegitimacy, divorce, marriage and homosexuality that gave rise to a series of landmark legal reforms during the 1960s.29 The urban left’s support for gays and lesbians was merely a continuation of this trend, though in a form that was new to mainstream politics. When Ken Livingstone, in his third month as leader of the GLC, spoke at a Harrow Gay Unity meeting, and said that men had both male and female characteristics in their make-up, there was a collective raising of eyebrows in Fleet Street.30 It was a break from convention for a heterosexual politician to attend a gay liberation meeting at all, let alone speak in this unguarded fashion. It signalled the arrival of 1960s’ cultural values in the traditionalist sphere of local government.

  The GLC set up a gay working party, and took active steps to oppose prejudice against gays and lesbians at County Hall. It also gave grants to gay liberation organisations, and became identified by association with a public campaign to normalise homosexuality. This last step went beyond the standard liberal position of opposing job discrimination, and entailed actively combatting homophobia.

  Where the GLC charged in, some other left-wing authorities held back. Local Labour politicians could not fail to be aware of the extent of antipathy to gay men, especially at the time of the AIDS panic. In 1987, three out of four people in Britain said that homosexual relationships were ‘always’ or ‘mostly’ wrong.31 Even old-style liberals, like Noel Annan (the first full-time Vice-Chancellor of London University), felt uneasy about the new phenomenon of gay liberation. ‘Who were these hard-left creatures’, he wondered, ‘in dungarees, trumpeting Time Out values, sporting pink triangles and glowering instead of camping?’32

  In this hostile climate, the Inner London Education Authority promoted supportive counselling of gay teenagers and acted against the victimisation of gay teachers, but stopped short of publicly campaigning against anti-gay prejudice in schools. Other councils moved discreetly, opposing discrimination against gays and lesbians in council jobs and housing, while being careful not to draw attention to their work through the setting up of gay and lesbian committees. The one major exception to this caution was Haringey Council, which initiated a ‘positive images’ campaign in schools that opposed homophobia by asserting the moral equivalence of gay and straight lifestyles. The campaign was eventually abandoned in response to press and public protest.33

  The 1960s influenced radical municipal politics in another way. It was a time when irreverence and distrust of authority found expression in ground-breaking television political satire, a youth-led fashion for long hair and casual clothes and the ‘power to the people’ rhetoric of radical student politics. This tradition lived on in the town-hall politics of the 1980s. Young, left-wing councillors often came casually dressed to public meetings, in contrast to their older colleagues, and most contemporary Labour MPs and trade union officials. They shocked their elders by the ‘individualistic’ way they were ready to vote against the party line in council meetings. Radical councillors in the 1980s also developed a critique of bureaucratic power which echoed the arguments of 1960s radicalism. It had become the convention, they argued, for councils – whether under Labour or Conservative control – to be run by council leaders and their cronies in conjunction with the ‘officer corps’ of council officials. This concentration of power sidelined ordinary councillors, and excluded the public. It needed to be replaced by a more open and inclusive process of decision-making.

  The sixties generation were strong believers in do-it-yourself politics. In the 1960s and early 1970s, there had been a great mushrooming of radical civil society groups – organisations like Amnesty International, Shelter, Crisis, Child Poverty Action Group, Help the Aged, the Disablement Action Group and the Playgroups Association. This belief in the virtues of organised action outside the bureaucratic structures of the state lived on, and gave rise to the new urban left’s sponsorship of local participation in the 1980s. Left-wing councils introduced specialist committees, serviced by staff often recruited from the voluntary sector. These committees co-opted community activists and instituted processes of ongoing public consultation. Above all, left-wing councils gave grants to activist groups so that they could become more effective agencies representing the local community.

  This approach was epitomised by the GLC’s extensive patronage of the community sector. For example, County Hall funded local groups so that they could formulate plans for urban development, and challenge those advanced by commercial developers. In the case of the widely reported Coin Street project, the GLC blocked the developer’s plans, bought the vacant land and involved
the tenants’ organisation in supervising what became a successful, much-lauded residential development in a prime London site.

  Similarly, the GLC also funded some workers’ groups to formulate plans for the restructuring of their companies, invested in their development and placed worker representatives on the board of directors.34 Borough-wide groups were also given the resources to monitor the police as a way of influencing how the police operated in their local communities. In addition, the alternative arts movement was also funded by the GLC partly because the arts were viewed as an important way in which disadvantaged groups could cohere, express in imaginative ways their concerns and communicate these to a wider public.

  Promoting community groups laid the municipal left open to the charge of crony politics, while the incorporation of community activists into the structure of local authority decision-making proved to be much more difficult, and also rancorous, than the new urban left had anticipated. However, these experiments came out of the idealistic, anti-statist, radical populism of the 1960s. Other threads of radical sixties culture are also discernible in the fabric of 1980s local socialism. The defining issue of radical politics in the 1960s – opposition to the Vietnam War – seemed far removed from the concerns of local government. However, this radical legacy prompted GLC councillors to assume the mantle of peace campaigners. They nominated 1983 as ‘peace year’, and publicised the devastation that would result from a nuclear attack on the capital. They also engaged in a public dialogue with Sinn Fein during a period when IRA bombs were being detonated in London. A political solution, they argued, had to replace a policy of attempting to suppress insurgents through force.

  Another concern of sixties’ radical culture was the environment. It found expression in a desire to lead a simple life, free of capitalist pressures and consumerist superficiality – a yearning that had a long history in British culture.35 It also took a politicised form of growing anxiety about the negative effects of noise, pollution, traffic congestion, urban sprawl, the erosion of energy resources and the destruction of wildlife, giving rise to the founding of Friends of the Earth in 1970 and Greenpeace in 1971. This radical inheritance was central to the GLC’s programme, which arrested the decline of public transport use in the capital by subsidising transport fares, and imposed greater restrictions on private motorists. This legacy was resurrected when the Greater London Authority, under Ken Livingstone’s leadership, introduced in 2003 controversial congestion charges on private motorists driving into central London.

  Thus, the politics of the new urban left – its anti-racism, defence of gays, feminism, environmentalism, concern with peace and distrust of bureaucracy – reflected the formative influences of the 1960s. The urban left’s rise also represented the emergence of a new political generation – the sixties generation – in the foothills of power. The alternative magazine, Frendz, had consoled itself in the dying days of ‘sixties’ culture (1972) with the thought that ‘if flower power has gone to seed then germination must soon begin. And what King Weeds they’ll be’.36 These ‘King Weeds’ first made their appearance in mainstream politics during the early 1980s, between the grand colonnades of London’s town halls.

  Yet, the youngish men and women who took control of County Hall, and elsewhere, were all ‘politicos’. This made them almost by definition aberrant products of the 1960s, partly disconnected from its hedonism. They were also conditioned by membership of the Labour party, which had a collectivist ethos embodied by the trade union movement (with special rights of representation and great prestige within the party). Leading members of the new urban left (including key figures like Ken Livingstone and Tony Banks) could deploy at times rather traditional, left rhetoric in grassroots publications like London Labour Briefing and Labour Herald. They also made common cause for a time with older, soberly dressed members of the far left like Ted Knight, leader of Lambeth Council. The London left was always a coalition made up of different elements.

  That the GLC belonged, in some ways, to a traditional mould is demonstrated by its spending commitments. One of its top priorities became the growing number of Londoners who were made redundant as a consequence of ­de-industrialisation. It set up the Greater London Training Board (the word Manpower in the original title was hastily dropped) to enable workers to acquire new skills. In a major new departure, it also established the Greater London Enterprise Board (GLEB), and allocated to it £60 million over three years, in a bid to regenerate the local economy.37 Originally, a major concern of GLEB was to promote innovative forms of ownership (in particular co-operatives); encourage worker representation in the companies that it backed; bring into being socially useful work, and foster through the provision of expertise and financial assistance the planned growth of specific sectors of the London economy. However, the urgent need to save desperately needed jobs in an economic downturn came to dominate the work of the organisation. GLEB became a lender of last resort to failing companies, sometimes in response to pressure from trade unions attempting to avert imminent redundancies. That GLEB sometimes ‘fell captive to bad managements’,38 leading to a relatively high failure rate, brought into sharp relief the ‘old Labour’ presence that lurked inside the new urban left. Its commitment to job creation through direct investment in the local economy was of course a standard social democratic policy. This increasingly eclipsed GLEB’s more innovative goals of promoting economic democracy and creating socially useful work.

  In short, the urban left experiment came about as a consequence of the ­conjunction of new social movements and a new political generation conditioned by 1960s’ values. This took place inside a political party, with a strong ideological tradition and union presence, operating within a parliamentary system. What resulted was significantly different from the fragmentary identity politics that took shape in the United States, during roughly the same period in response to similar cultural changes to those in Britain.39

  The new urban left’s strategic approach was also more traditional than it was sometimes represented to be. Critics argued that the new urban left was solely intent on creating a ‘rainbow coalition’ represented by ethnic minorities, gays, feminists and greens, and that this was doomed to failure because these minorities did not add up to a majority. But, in fact, the new urban left sought merely to extend Labour’s core base of the organised, white working class, not to replace it. Radical councillors fought elections: their approach was often guided more by ‘Reading pads’ for knocking up supporters than critical social theory.

  Clash of ideologies

  The municipal left were big spenders. This put them on a collision course with the Thatcher government, elected in 1979, one of whose principal objectives was to reverse the rise of public spending. The new government argued that public profligacy had fuelled inflation, ‘crowded out’ private investment and fostered a ‘dependency culture’ that undermined individual self-reliance. Labour’s allegedly wasteful ways had also given rise to punitive rates of tax that discouraged enterprise and initiative. Soaring public spending and punitive taxation were, in the official view, a major cause of Britain’s relative economic decline. It was something that the government was determined to rectify.

  However, the Thatcher government quickly discovered that this was easier said than done. Rising levels of unemployment in the early 1980s led to an unavoidable increase in expenditure on social security. The central administration also found that it had very little control over the rising spending of local government, the main dispenser of public services. The worst ‘culprits’ were left-wing authorities in London. In 1983 the GLC and IlEA accounted for 40% of local government ‘overspend’.40 To reduce public expenditure, the government had to find a way of reining in these local authorities.

  Fuelling this conflict over the appropriate level of public spending was disagreement about what local councils should do. The urban left believed that local government should regenerate the local economy, foster a progressive sense of community, comba
t prejudice, improve public services and transfer resources from the rich to the poor. It wanted, in other words, to expand what councils sought to achieve. By contrast, the government wanted to limit councils to managing the cost-efficient delivery of essential services. In particular, the radical right within the government favoured the outsourcing of services to private enterprise. The Conservative Environment Minister, Nicholas Ridley, hoped that eventually local councils would only meet once a year to allocate contracts to private providers.41

  Underlying this clash was a conflict of political philosophies. The new urban left was broadly collectivist, whereas the government was increasingly wedded to free-market individualism. Although this divergence reflected profound political differences, it was also a response to differences of economic interest. Labour drew its support disproportionately from the working class, the Conservatives disproportionately from the middle class (despite making inroads into Labour’s heartland support).42 The implications of this became all too apparent in 1990 when the graduated council rate based on property values was replaced by a flat-rate, community charge (popularly known as the poll tax) on each adult resident. A key argument advanced by ministers for this reform was that it would bring more low-income groups within the local tax net, and encourage them to vote for prudent council administrations. The days of profligate, redistributive councils voted in by rate-exempt, ‘dependent’ citizens would be over. Critics objected that the poll tax made the millionaire pay the same amount as the shop assistant. What this angry debate made explicit, in other words, was class-based differences about who should pay and who should benefit that sometimes lurked behind differences over the role and organisation of local government.

  The Thatcher administration sought to establish central government control over local government in a more direct way than had been attempted before. This meant repudiating the convention – then more often invoked by the right than the left – that the autonomy of local councils should be preserved as a check on central government (and ‘elective dictatorship’). The new urban left responded by seeking to mobilise public support in defence of local democracy and the maintenance of local services. Both sides appealed to the public through the media in a historic battle over how the governmental relationship between the centre and the locality should be structured.