Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [157]
Yet a few months later it became entirely clear that Benn was totally unsuited for the job. He had put his money entirely on the sectarians. In January 1981 a special conference of the party in effect handed over its fortunes to the left. The details do not matter. It was now evident that only his own political stupidity could stop Benn from becoming the leader of the Labour Party fairly soon. At this point anyone with minimal political sense, knowing how deeply the party was split, would have played the card of generosity, reconciliation and unity. Instead of this Benn issued a triumphant call for the victorious left to take over and to demonstrate its power by electing him against Healey for the deputy leadership. Whether a more conciliatory approach would have prevented the secession of the future Social Democrats, no one can tell. However, Benn’s total identification with the left sectarians made it evident to anyone who did not want the Labour Party to be reduced to a marginalized socialist chapel that its future required him to be defeated. And this was achieved, if only just. Tony Benn himself retreated to an honourable position as a backbench defender of the constitution, democracy and civil liberties and a propagandist for socialism, but his career as a serious politician was at an end.
II
Such as they were, my interventions in the political debate were almost entirely through Marxism Today. One would not have expected this modest monthly to become, in the course of the 1980s, and in spite of its association with the CP, essential reading in the media and political world – and not merely among the left. Even some eminent Conservative politicians – Edward Heath, Michael Heseltine, Christopher Patten – wrote for it or allowed themselves to be interviewed for it. A young Labour politician of no left-wing sympathies whatever, elected to Parliament in 1983, claimed he was a regular reader and allowed himself to be interviewed for it: Tony Blair. Most of the already established names who were to become major personalities of the future Labour government had their say in it: Gordon Brown, Robin Cook, David Blunkett, Michael Meacher. The journal was bitterly attacked by the hardliners within the Communist Party, which was about to be destroyed by its own internal battles and the collapse of the communist regimes, but its political leadership, firm supporters of the Prague Spring and the Italian kind of communism, gave it solid political and, of course, financial support as long as it could. (It went out of existence at the end of 1991 with the Party and the USSR.) In an era of crisis for the Labour Party the ideas for its future came from a communist journal. Its success was overwhelmingly due to the combination of political nous and journalistic flair of Martin Jacques, and not least to the decision to open its pages to writers far from the Party line, and the orthodoxies of the old socialists. Nevertheless, we also benefited by the almost total disarray of the traditional politico-intellectual universe in Britain in the Thatcher era. This chiefly affected the sectors left of centre, but even the Conservatives were exploring an unknown new territory. What must or could be done in the new era? How, even where, was it to be discussed? Marxism Today provided a space where these questions could be considered outside the established frameworks, above all because it insisted that with the arrival of Mrs Thatcher, ‘The Great Moving Right Show’ as the cultural theorist Stuart Hall called it in an article in 1979 which coined the term ‘Thatcherism’, all bets were off. The game was new. And Marxism Today said so, before the rest.
In retrospect nothing is more obvious. The Thatcher era was the nearest thing in the twentieth century to a political, social and cultural revolution – and not one for the better.