Culture Wars Read online

  2. D. Butler and G. Butler, Twentieth-Century British Political Facts, 8th edn. (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 234–8.

  3. D. Massey, L. Segal and H. Wainwright, ‘And now for the good news’ in J. Curran (ed.), The Future of the Left (Cambridge: Polity/New Socialist, 1984).

  4. ‘Left alive: Labour and the people debate’, Marxism Today, December 1984, p. 19: cf. B. Campbell and M. Jacques, ‘Goodbye to the GLC’, Marxism Today, April 1986.

  5. ‘Interview with David Blunkett, Leader of Sheffield Council’, in M. Boddy and C. Fudge (eds.), Local Socialism? (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984), pp. 254–5. Blunkett subsequently became a right-wing Labour politician (and Home Secretary).

  6. H. Butcher, I. Law, R. Leach and M. Mullard, Local Government and Thatcherism (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 123–4; cf. D. Hatton, Inside Left (London: Bloomsbury, 1988), p. 89.

  7. R. Porter, London: A Social History (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1994), p. 346.

  8. Porter, London, p. 347.

  9. There was a shift to the left in the grassroots of the Labour Party in other parts of Britain during this period, partly for the reasons that applied in London. See P. Seyd, The Rise and Fall of the Labour Left (Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1987).

  10. H. Wainwright, Labour: A Tale of Two Parties (London: Hogarth Press, 1987), pp. 20–1 illustrates this in relation to Newham.

  11. S. Goss, Local Labour and Local Government (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989).

  12. Butler and Butler, British Political Facts, pp. 238, 261.

  13. S. Lansley, S. Goss and C. Wolmar, Councils in Conflict (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), p. 144.

  14. Porter, London, p. 354.

  15. I. Benjamin, The Black Press in Britain (Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books, 1995); S. Quisrani, Urdu Press in Britain (Islamabad: Mashal, 1990); P. Martin, Black Press, Britons and Immigrants (Kingston, Jamaica: Vintage Communications, 1998).

  16. P. Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (London, Routledge, 2002); P. Fryer, Staying Power (London, Pluto, 1984); S. Humphries and J. Taylor, The Making of Modern London, 1945–85 (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1986).

  17. H. Butcher, I. Law, R. Leach and M. Mullard, Local Government and Thatcherism (London: Routledge,1990), p. 121.

  18. J. Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society (Harlow: Longman, 2nd edn, 1989), p. 285.

  19. Weeks, Sex, p. 286.

  20. T. Sanderson, Mediawatch (London: Cassell, 1995).

  21. Wainwright, Labour; M. Boddy and C. Fudge, ‘Labour councils and new left alternatives’, in M. Boddy and C. Fudge (eds), Local Socialism? (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984); J. Gyford, The Politics of Local Socialism (London: Unwin and Hyman, London, 1985).

  22. S. Rowbotham, Promise of a Dream (London: Verso, 2001).

  23. Lansley, Goss and Wolmar, Councils, p. 124.

  24. F. Bianchini, ‘Cultural Policy and Political Strategy: The British Labour Party’s Approach to Cultural Policy with Particular Reference to the 1981–6 GLC Experiment’, University of Manchester unpublished Ph.D. thesis, 1995.

  25. C. Geraghty, ‘Women and sixties British cinema: the development of the ‘‘Darling’’ girl’, in R. Murphy (ed.), The British Cinema Book (London: British Film Institute, 1997); G. Murphy, ‘Media influence on the socialization of teenage girls’, in J. Curran, A. Smith and P. Wingate (eds), Impacts and Influences (London: Methuen, 1987); J. Winship, Inside Women’s Magazines (London: Pandora, 1987), among others.

  26. Goss, Local Labour; Lansley, Goss and Wolmar, Councils.

  27. Lansley, Goss and Wolmar, Councils, pp. 144–5.

  28. The principal organisation undertaking research for London borough councils during this period was MORI: copies of its reports are retained in its archives.

  29. K. O. Morgan, The People’s Peace, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

  30. London Evening Standard, 18 August 1981; Sun, 19 August 1981; Daily Express, 19 August 1981.

  31. L. Brook, ‘The public’s response to AIDS’, in R. Jowell, S. Witherspoon and L. Brook (eds.) British Social Attitudes: The 5th Report (Aldershot: Gower, 1988), p. 73.

  32. N. Annan, Our Age (London: Fontana, 1991), p. 205.

  33. See Chapter 6.

  34. M. Mackintosh and H. Wainwright, A Taste of Power (London: Verso, 1987).

  35. R. Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto and Windus, 1973); J. Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination (London: HarperCollins, 1997); J. Richards, Films and British National Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997).

  36. Frendz (32, 1972) cited in E. Nelson, The British Counter-Culture 1966–73 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989) p. 120.

  37. Lansley, Goss and Wolmar, Councils, p. 84.

  38. Mackintosh and Wainwright, Taste of Power, p. 430.

  39. T. Gitlin, The Twilight of Common Dreams (New York: Henry Holt, 1995).

  40. B. Pimlott and N. Rao, Governing London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 38.

  41. Lansley, Goss and Wolmar, Councils, p. 196.

  42. A. Heath, R. Jowell, J. Curtice, G. Evans, J. Field and S. Witherspoon, Understanding Political Change: The British Voter 1964–1987 (Oxford: Pergamon, 1991).

  43. For a good critical exposition of Conservative arguments about local government, see J. Gyford, S. Leech and C. Game, The Changing Politics of Local Government (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), especially Chapter 8.

  44. Information about the composition of cabinets, and ages of ministers, has been derived from Butler and Butler (2000), pp. 38–47 and 84–133.

  45. This was typified by 1960s films aimed at the youth market such as A Hard Day’s Night (1964), Help! (1965), and The Knack (1965).

  46. This draws upon D. Edgar, The Second Time as Farce (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988).

  47. Cited in Edgar, The Second Time as Farce (1988), pp. 94–5.

  48. The Guardian, 28 March 1982.

  49. Daily Mail, 25 July 1985.

  50. Journalists’ ages are derived from D. Griffiths (ed.), The Encyclopedia of the British Press (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992).

  51. Daily Express, 7 July 1981.

  52. Spectator, 20 October 1983.

  53. Booker had been involved in the development of political satire in the early 1960s, as a writer for the BBC television series That Was the Week That Was and the satirical magazine, Private Eye. But like many of these early 1960s pioneers, he became increasingly conservative. In 1983, he was aged forty-seven.

  54. Daily Mail, 10 November 1983.

  55. A. Gamble, The Free Economy and the Strong State: The Politics of Thatcherism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), pp. 197–8. Key contributions to this general argument are provided by S. Hall, C. Critcher, T. Jefferson, J. Clarke and B. Roberts, Policing the Crisis (London: Macmillan, 1978); P. Golding and S. Middleton, Images of Welfare (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1982); G. Murdock, ‘Reporting the riots: images and impacts’, in J. Benyon (ed.), Scarman and After (Oxford: Pergamon); S. Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal (London: Verso, 1998); and C. Critcher, Moral Panics and the Media (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2003).

  56. Cited in Edgar, Second Time, p. 112.

  57. Cited in K. Teare, Under Siege (London: Penguin, 1988), p. 71.

  58. Cited in R.Weight, Patriots (London: Macmillan, 2002), p. 624.

  59. Cited in P. Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 54.

  60. It was linked to a modernising discourse centred around neo-liberal themes. For an insightful analysis of the way in which contradictory Thatcherite themes were combined in a compelling synthesis, see S. Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal (London: Verso, 1988).

  61. Daily Express, 25 February 1983.

  62. Goss, Local Labour.

  63. L. Segal, ‘The heat in the kitchen’, in Hall and Jacques (eds.), The Politics.

  64. Hall, Hard Road, p. 90.

  65. G. Stoker, The Politics of Local Government, 1st edn.
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988); and 2nd edn. (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991); H. Butcher, I. Law, R. Leach and M. Mullard, Local Government and Thatcherism (London: Routledge, 1990); J. Kingdom, Local Government and Politics in Britain (Hemel Hempstead: Philip Allan, 1991); D. King, ‘From the urban left to the new right: normative theory and local government’, in J. Stewart and G. Stoker (eds), Local Government in the 1990s (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995); A. Cochrane, Whatever Happened to Local Government? (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1993); J. Gyford, S. Leech and C. Game, The Changing Politics of Local Government (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989); S. Duncan and M. Goodwin, The Local State and Uneven Development (Cambridge: Polity, 1988); J. Gyford, The Politics of Local Socialism (London: Unwin and Hyman, London, 1985); M. Boddy and C. Fudge (eds), Local Socialism? (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984). Lansley, Goss and Wolmar’s Councils is not part of this mainstream local government studies tradition.

  66. G. Stoker, The Politics of Local Government, 1st edn. (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), p. 210.

  67. B. Pimlott and N. Rao, Governing London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Butcher, Law, Leach and Mullard, Local Government; Lansley, Goss and Wolmar, Councils.

  68. G. Stoker, The Politics of Local Government, 2nd edn. (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991), p. 48.

  3

  Goodbye to the clowns

  James Curran

  The claim that those on the left of politics are mentally impaired is not new.1 This abuse became particularly virulent in the 1970s, a time when political discourse coarsened, and was directed against radical MPs who questioned the prevailing political orthodoxies.2 Tony Benn was called ‘round-the-bend Benn’ and ‘Barmy Benn’ when he moved to the left.3 An early example of the phrase ‘looney left’ (then spelt with an e) appears in a Sun cartoon (4 October 1975) about three prominent left-wing MPs: Barbara Castle, Tony Benn and Ian Mikardo. The cartoon featured them floundering in the sea after their boat, with a tattered sail on which was written ‘Ship-Wrecked Looney Left’, had foundered on a rock, represented by the smiling face of the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson. A variant of the phrase ‘loony left’ – ‘The Loons’ – appeared in another cartoon (Daily Express, 10 April 1981). Again, it was applied to prominent left-wing MPs (Michael Foot, Eric Heffer and the ubiquitous Tony Benn). However, the phrase ‘loony left’ had not yet become firmly established as a standard part of the political vocabulary. Nor had it acquired its specific association with a new kind of left. All this was to change by the mid-1980s.

  Genesis of a political crusade

  During the late 1970s, national tabloid newspapers seldom paid any attention to local government, save for fleeting references during local election campaigns. Councils were viewed in Fleet Street as being part of a dull, fustian world where local worthies dealt with parochial, uncontroversial issues. ‘News’ did not happen in local town halls.

  However, some national papers reported in May 1981 that Ken Livingstone had been elected leader of the Greater London Council (GLC) by his council colleagues, shortly after the local election, ousting the right-wing Labour veteran, Andrew McIntosh. Livingstone’s supporters justified the switch on the grounds that newly elected councillors were entitled to choose a new leader, and that Labour’s GLC manifesto was the basis of their democratic mandate. This claim did not impress a number of national papers which questioned the legitimacy of Livingstone’s ‘coup’.

  However, the event that put the tabloid press on full ‘Red Ken’ alert was a fresh outbreak of disorder in Brixton in July 1981. A major riot, accompanied by arson and looting, had occurred in Brixton in April. During the preceding three months, there had also been ‘race’ riots in Bristol and Liverpool, and significant disturbances elsewhere. To some alarmed commentators, the latest trouble in Brixton seemed to be part of a general pattern in which law and order was beginning to break down in inner city areas where there was a large concentration of disaffected black and Asian British youths.4

  These disturbances coincided with major upheavals within the Labour Party. In January 1981, the left secured a change in the rules that, for the first time, gave union and party activists a major say in the election of the party leader. In March, an influential group of right-wing Labour MPs broke away to form the Social Democratic Party (SDP). In April, Tony Benn, the left’s standard bearer, announced that he would contest the party’s deputy leadership in a move that was widely seen as his opening bid to lead the party. The popular press’s response to these developments was typified by the Daily Express’s (22 May 1981) standfirst: ‘Why Labour leaders tremble at the relentless advance of Benn’s army. Torn apart by the politics of fear’. What made the rise of the left still more dramatic was that Labour stayed ahead in the polls, while the Conservative Party slipped to third place throughout most of the summer of 1981.5 Fleet Street journalists began to contemplate the possibility that a left-dominated Labour Party could conceivably be elected to political office during a period of recession and mass unemployment.

  Ken Livingstone became an emblematic figure symbolising for right-wing papers a dual nightmare: the breakdown of social order in the inner cities and the rise of the Labour left. He had already been marked down, in the words of one Fleet Street journalist, as ‘a platoon leader of the advanced party of Bennite shock troops’6 when he became leader of the GLC. What transformed him into a public enemy, following short bursts of bad publicity, were his outspoken public comments about the causes of the Brixton disturbances. These were the product, he claimed, of years of neglect, high unemployment, resentment against racial discrimination and insensitive, racist policing.7

  Although his analysis was later echoed – in more restrained language – by the official enquiry headed by Lord Scarman,8 it was judged at the time to be the height of irresponsibility for London’s first citizen to be offering ‘sympathy to rioters’ (Daily Express, 16 July 1981) and acting as ‘a cheer leader to trouble’ (News of the World, 12 July 1981) Underlying this outrage was the belief that the riots were the work of hooligan and subversive elements, and that the best way to maintain order was to use whatever force was required. Livingstone stood accused of bestowing a mantle of respectability around urban thugs, and of engaging, in the words of the Sunday Express (19 July 1981), ‘in a ruthless campaign … to destroy good race relations between the police and the local community’. It was even suggested that he was trying to exploit lawlessness to bring down the government. Livingstone and his friends on the left, according to Max Hastings in the Evening Standard (20 July 1981), wanted to ‘wreck the Tory government – and clearly the riots are useful stepping stones in this direction.’ The article was accompanied by a photograph of a policeman, carrying away a rioter, with the caption: ‘In charge – but for how long?’

  Following the Brixton disturbances, Ken Livingstone and his GLC colleagues were subjected to a sustained press assault. This mobilised the standard rhetoric against the Labour left, derived from the polemics of the Cold War. It depicted the GLC administration as marxist, authoritarian and undemocratic, symbolically placing it outside the pale of legitimate politics.

  In actual fact, the GLC administration elected to office in 1981 was a political coalition. While it included marxist councillors, these were only a minority within a minority. They were part of the left faction led by Ken Livingstone, which depended in turn on a centrist group of Labour councillors (people like Kinnock-supporting John Carr) to win the vote within the Labour group. Livingstone himself was an intelligent, radical populist – something that is clearly revealed in his political reminiscences,9 revealing interviews with left inquisitors10 and a good, pioneering biography.11 His politics were the product both of his generation, and of an empirical, ethical tradition prominent in the British Labour Party.12 It contrasted with the more theoretical tradition of far left organisations which instruct their members in marxist analysis in order to equip them for their role as vanguard leaders.

  The politics of the GLC administration was also hyb
rid. Its radical arm, the Greater London Enterprise Board (GLEB) sought to promote co-operatives and economic democracy, and was influenced by the radical left. However, GLEB increasingly functioned in practice as a ‘state capitalist’ agency propping up ailing companies.13 More importantly, the main thrust of the GLC’s programme took it in a different direction, away from class politics and in the direction of personal politics: women’s emancipation, gay liberation, and anti-racism. The GLC also championed environmentalist and ‘anti-bureaucratic’ initiatives, which were not part of the traditional repertoire of the old left. The GLC represented something new: a radical council that owed more to the 1960s counter-culture than to methodism or marxism.

  However, the right-wing tabloid press initially foisted on Livingstone and his colleagues an identikit image of the left derived from the 1920s and 1930s. Livingstone was denounced as the ‘Trotsky of County Hall’ (Daily Express, 6 December 1982), ‘the Commissar of County Hall’ (Daily Mail, 30 July 1981) and in a bulging, portmanteau image as ‘Ken Livingstone and his coterie of Marxists, Communists and Trotskyists’ (Sun, 9 February 1983). The marxist tag was often accompanied by adjectives underscoring its negative symbolisation, as in the GLC’s ‘hardline Marxist ideologues’ (Daily Mail, 5 June 1985) and ‘Ken Livingstone and his grubby pack of marxists’ (Sun, 9 February 1983). The implication was that they did not share the core values of democracy, something that was sometimes made explicit. Livingstone ‘wanted the street demonstration to replace the ballot box’, explained the Sun (10 June, 1984). In a similar vein, the Daily Mail (30 March 1984) warned that ‘the real assault on the democracy of this country is by the Fascist left, which has gained a menacing hold on the power structures at union and local level within Mr. Livingstone’s Labour Party’. The Daily Express (30 April 1984) was more direct: ‘Citizen Ken Has No Time For Democracy’.