Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [155]
In the end it was saved, but only just, at the Labour Conference in 1981, when Tony Benn stood for the deputy leadership of the party and was defeated in a photo-finish by Denis Healey. The future of the party was not certain until after the disastrous election of 1983, when Michael Foot, who had been elected leader in 1980 (as the candidate of the left, also against Healey), was succeeded by Neil Kinnock. On the eve of his election I spoke at a fringe meeting on that occasion, organized either by the Fabian Society or by Marxism Today. Kinnock himself made a point of being there, and signing a copy of my book ‘with warm thanks’, so, if I recall, were David Blunkett and Robin Cook, then also on the non-Bennite Labour left, at the time I write pillars of the Labour government since 1997. Whatever his limitations, Neil Kinnock, whose candidature I had strongly supported, was the leader who saved the Labour Party from the sectarians. After 1985, when he secured the expulsion of the Trotskyite ‘Militant Tendency’ from the party, its future was safe.
This was the only occasion on which I actually met Neil Kinnock, apart from the time when I interviewed him for Marxism Today a little later, returning rather depressed about his potential as a future prime minister. Hence the absurdity of the habit of some political journalists for the next year or two of linking my name with his (‘Kinnock’s guru’). Nevertheless, there was a sound political reason why the name of a Marxist intellectual who was not even in the Labour Party should, at a few moments of the battle for the survival of that party, have been useful for those who wanted to save it. I had been among the very few who predicted serious trouble for Labour, which gave me some standing in the controversy. I was among the few known socialist intellectuals who were openly sceptical of the project of taking over the party and argued against its proponents with passion and (I hope) some effectiveness.7 But in those difficult times it was particularly useful for the opponents of the sectarians to be able to cite support from someone known to most activists in the party – at least to those who read books and periodicals – and with a long and incontrovertible track record on the far left as a Marxist. For in 1980 and 1981 constitutional changes had given the sectarian leftists what looked like a built-in majority within the party and thus virtually handed its fortunes over to them. The future of the party depended essentially on detaching enough activists of the Labour left from the sectarians to offset this, at least at crucial moments.
The case for doing so had to be made from the left, all the more so since until 1983 the chief alternative candidate for the Labour leadership was Denis Healey, formerly Minister of Defence and Chancellor of the Exchequer, who represented everything the left disliked, who did not try to conceal his contempt for most of them, and who had established a justified reputation as a political bully-boy. The Labour Party under Tony Blair has moved so far to the right of its traditional position that there is probably less ideological difference between Healey and myself when we meet today, old men looking back on a better past, than there has been since we first met in the student CP, but by the standards of the 1970s he was the man of the Labour right. In private life he was and is a person of charm, high intelligence and culture, underneath the battlements of his trademark eyebrows, and the author of one of the few British politicians’ memoirs that can be read with enjoyment as a book. However, the public Healey was easier to respect than to love. He would certainly have made a far better political leader than any of the other candidates, although the sectarians would have done their best to destroy him. The situation at the time was such that probably only a leader