Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [154]
The illusion of trade union power under left-wing leaders and activists fuelled the even greater illusion of a conquest of the Labour Party, and hence of future Labour governments, by the socialist left. A mixed coalition of lefts within the Labour Party and ‘entryist’ revolutionaries who had joined it, had increasingly come together behind the project of winning control of the party under the banner of the increasingly radical ex-minister Tony Benn. Unlike the industrial militancy, which had substantial backing from the members of the unions, then at the peak of their numbers, the political militants reflected the decline in the political interest, votes and party membership among workers. In fact their strategy relied on the ability of small groups of militants among a largely inactive membership to capture Labour Party branches and, reinforced by the politically decisive ‘block vote’ of left-led unions at party conferences, to impose a more radical leadership and policy on the party. This was an entirely practicable strategy. Indeed, it almost succeeded. The illusion lay in the belief that the Labour Party thus captured by a mixed minority of sectarian leftwingers would somehow remain united, gain in electoral force, and would have a policy capable of standing up to the attack of Mrs Thatcher’s class warriors, whose force they systematically failed to grasp.
Consequently this illusion led to disaster. Many traditional voters – one third of the actual self-described working-class electors – were in any case abandoning Labour and voting for the Conservatives. The party split, and for some years the alliance between the new Social Democratic Party and the Liberals actually came close to gaining more votes than the Labour Party. Two and a half years after the victory of Mrs Thatcher’s Conservatives Labour had lost another one in five of its voters and no longer had majority support in any group of the working class, even the unskilled and unemployed. And this at a time when the Conservative government itself had lost votes since the election of 1979. As I wrote at the time, ‘The triumph of Thatcher is a by-product of the defeat of Labour.’ What made things worse was what I then described as ‘the sheer refusal of some of the left to look unwelcome facts in the face’.2
In short, the future, perhaps the very existence, of the Labour Party was at stake in the years following the victory of Mrs Thatcher’s Conservatives in 1979. The new Social Democrats had written it off, and aimed to replace it by an alliance, eventually a merger between themselves and the Liberals. I remember the occasion – a dinner in the house of Amartya Sen and his wife Eva Colorni – to which one of their Kentish Town neighbours came late, with apologies. Bill Rogers had just been meeting with the rest of the so-called ‘Gang of Four’ (Roy Jenkins, David Owen and Shirley Williams, all eventually in the House of Lords) to draft the declaration establishing what became, a few weeks later, the Social Democratic Party. It was joined by a substantial number of the Labour middle and professional classes, some of whom were to return to the party when it stopped pursuing its visibly suicidal course. On the other hand, the militant left, and many socialist intellectuals such as my old friend Ralph Miliband (whose sons were to become important figures in the offices of Prime Minister Tony Blair and Chancellor Gordon Brown), also wrote off the Labour Party until the moment when it had been captured and was ready to become ‘a real socialist party’, whatever that meant. I outraged some of my friends by pointing out that they were not seriously trying to defeat Mrs Thatcher. Whatever they thought, ‘they acted as though another Labour government like the ones we have had before from time to time since 1945 were not just