Distant Voices Read online

  Addressing other issues of little interest to the ‘mainstream’ – poverty and race attacks – is a movement comprising those who have demonstrated their power to be heard, despite the media’s echo chamber. One thinks of battles waged with the analytical weaponry of the Child Poverty Action Group, the Runnymede Trust and the Campaign Against Racism and Fascism.

  It is true that many people remain isolated and immobilised by the lack of a mass opposition. But as social Darwinism becomes government policy, resistance will grow. Nothing is surer. The riots in Los Angeles were distant gunfire in Britain. Before the next millennium, the noise will grow louder here and all over the world. Shortly after he left the Labour Party recently, the veteran black socialist Ben Bousquet said, ‘Ideas don’t die. What happens is that people corrupt the ideas, but sooner or later those people go and we have to start to rebuild all over again.’

  June 1992 – February 1993

  THE WITCHHUNTERS

  IN RECENT WEEKS, a BBC series, The Un-Americans, has provided reminders of how Senator Joseph McCarthy and his House Un-American Activities Committee witchhunted thousands of Americans for their political views or because they were ‘suspect’. I hope those who run the Labour Party were watching and heard the echo of their own actions.

  Witchhunting is not on the agenda of next week’s party conference, though it ought to be. Of course, there is not the hysteria of the McCarthy period. This is Britain; the witchhunting is muted and conducted by the kind of sub-managerial apparatchik who now polices the party’s ‘modern’, sub-managerial values. But the parallels are there. Guilt by suspicion and association are pronounced upon or implied, denying natural justice with a shabbiness reminiscent of the demagoguery of the McCarthy inquisitors who demanded, ‘Are you or have you ever been a member of . . .?’

  Some of those who come before the ‘court’ of the modern Labour Party are asked such a direct question. Their offence may be ‘evidenced by’ . . . ‘involvement in anti-poll tax unions’ or links with Militant, which is proscribed, or with other organisations that are not. Others are less certain of their ‘crime’ and find themselves facing a catch-all charge of ‘bringing the party into disrepute evidenced by involvement in public activity designed to discredit the party’.1

  Absurdity is, of course, close at hand. Dave Boardman was suspended from the party more than a year ago. The ‘evidence’ against him included an informer’s statement that he was seen in a pub in Walton, near Liverpool, where a Militant candidate was standing. He was not canvassing; he was there with a team of youngsters to play football. His local party, Oldham, conducted an enquiry and cleared him. However, the ‘allegation’ was apparently enough for Labour headquarters in Walworth Road, London, which sent him a one-sentence letter suspending him and effectively ending his membership.

  This is not uncommon. In Coventry, 127 members have been suspended, many of them for their ‘suspected support’ of Dave Nellist MP. No more than a dozen are, incidentally, Militant members. In Manchester, two councillors were suspended for visiting a friend jailed for poll tax non-payment. In Lambeth, thirteen councillors have been suspended for opposing the poll tax and the Gulf war. In Bedford, several councillors have been threatened with expulsion for opposing a pact with the Liberal Democrats.

  These are but random examples. When I telephoned the Labour Party and asked if there was a nationwide figure for suspensions, I was told there was none. This seems strange in such a bureaucracy. What is clear is that many local party branches are falling apart as the most energetic activists face discipline from Walworth Road, and entire constituency parties are being suspended for years on end.

  For those members brought to ‘trial’, a Kafka quality is present. First, there is the preliminary ‘investigation’ conducted by the party’s Directorate of Organisation – a name with unfortunate overtones of Big Brother. The potential ‘defendant’ often has no idea of what he or she may be accused of, and is therefore ill-prepared to respond and likely to make incriminating statements. Questions to the ‘investigator’ often bring forth the reply, ‘I am only here to listen to you.’

  A former Brighton councillor, Jean Calder, herself awaiting ‘trial’, described the process of investigation in a letter to John Smith. ‘There are no sworn statements,’ she wrote, ‘and unsupported hearsay evidence and rumours are accepted and “secret” evidence is made available to the “prosecution” which the defence is not permitted to see.’2

  A ‘trial’ is run by a ‘prosecutor’ from Walworth Road, with the ‘judges’ drawn from Labour’s Constitutional Committee. The committee was given extraordinary and secretive powers in the early 1980s when the Labour leadership decided to reactivate proscription, which had been abandoned in 1974.

  The ‘judges’ have virtually limitless powers, thanks to an amendment to the party’s constitution that reads, ‘Where appropriate, the NEC shall have regard to involvement in financial support for and/or the organisation of and/or the activities of any organisation declared ineligible for affiliation’. In other words, membership of any political group can be called a crime against the party. These include broad-based organisations and the newspaper Labour Briefing, as well as local support groups such as the Friends of the Brighton Labour Party.3

  During the ‘trial’, the prosecutor can call witnesses without forewarning the defendant, yet rules require that the defendant give two weeks’ notice if he or she intends to do the same. A subsequent report to the NEC – described as ‘about half the size of a telephone book’ – is marked ‘confidential’. The defendant has no right of access to it and no guarantee that the information it contains is accurate, or that it is not held on computer in contravention of the Data Protection Act.

  Loyal party members have been suspended for actions which, at the time they took place, were not against the rules, and for misdemeanours for which they have already been punished. Disproportionate weight may be given to the submissions of those who support disciplinary action while others, even if they represent a large majority, are ignored or suppressed.

  Ray Apps is a 62-year-old, working-class man. He is well known in Brighton for his support for what used to be known as ‘basic Labour Party principles’. This has earned him the respect even of his opponents. He joined the party in 1945 when Labour was ‘building Jerusalem’, and has since held numerous senior positions in the local party, including chairperson, election organiser and conference delegate. As a dedicated socialist, he sees no contradiction in his support for Militant and in maintaining an honourable tradition of dissent that refuses to recant in the face of established authority. As one who joined the party forty-seven years ago, he can hardly be accused of ‘entryism’.

  Apps’s trial took place on September 12 at the Old Ship Inn in Brighton. The defendant appeared to many who attended as the embodiment of the struggle of ordinary people during the past half-century. Speaking quietly, with some of the self-deprecation for which he is known, he said he had ‘always fought for reconciliation within the party’. Later he reflected, ‘It comes hard after a lifetime of work helping to build the Labour Party to have to face this. I can’t deny there’s a feeling of hurt and injustice. With other members of my generation, I worked for the party from the time we had only seven councillors, right through until Labour took control. It seems ironic that I am not wanted now.’

  At Apps’s trial one of his friends wept; and both ‘prosecutor’ and ‘judges’ looked decidedly uncomfortable. ‘But Ray,’ said one of them, ‘we never suggested you had not worked hard for the party.’ He was expelled.

  The treatment of Ray Apps is part of a witchhunt that began in earnest in 1990, when Brighton Labour Party called for the reinstatement of six councillors who had been suspended from the Labour Group. In line with local party policy, the councillors had refused to support the use of the courts against poll tax non-payers. ‘We undertook’, wrote Jean Calder to John Smith, ‘to stand alongside the 30,000 Brighton residents who could not
afford to pay the tax. Though we expected punishment for breaking the Labour Group whip, we were unprepared for the draconian response of the party leadership. We were suspended indefinitely, and when the local party protested, it too was suspended for “investigation”. Small wonder that, with dissident councillors barred from standing for re-election, the Labour vote reduced by 6,000 in 1991 and by a further 4,000 in 1992 with a loss of eight Labour seats.’

  Of the twenty members suspended in Brighton, only six belong to Militant; and this is not untypical throughout the country. Jean Calder is a Christian Socialist. In her letter to John Smith, she reminded him of his own ‘dual allegiance, not just to socialist principles but to our faith as well’. She wrote, ‘A system has been set up which penalises honesty, and encourages sneaks, bureaucrats and informers. Aided by the ambitious, the corrupt and the naïve, they have taken over our party. Now the witchhunt has acquired a terrible life of its own. With the national membership scheme and the party’s finances in crisis, recruitment is at an all-time low . . . and a climate of fear has been created. Last week I was shocked when a very elderly and frail member, who I had always thought supported the witchhunt, apologised to me, saying, “I should have done more to help you, but I was frightened I’d get on a list. I’ve been a member for years. I didn’t want to get expelled too”.’4

  Labour is said to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on its ‘investigations’ and ‘trials’. To what end? The ‘modernisation’ of the party has failed; Labour distinguished itself by being defeated in a general election at the depth of an economic depression.

  If the aim of the witchhunters is to destroy the party of the rank and file, leaving a rump to provide for the new conservatism, they have not succeeded, not yet. There are still a great many people in the Labour Party who cling tenaciously to the reason they joined. In Blackpool next week their voices should be heard.

  September 22, 1992

  LAUGHING NINE TIMES

  THIS WEEK, A secret Labour Party report will admit that the party is dying as a mass movement. The report, by the finance working party, will tell the national executive that individual membership will fall below 200,000 and union-affiliated membership will drop by a million within the next four years, unless there is ‘a new spirit both to attract and retain members and to mobilise support in the community’. In many areas, says the report, ‘the party on the ground has deteriorated . . .’5

  There is a call for ‘new ideas’, one of which is a recruitment campaign that includes ‘new techniques’ such as telephone canvassing and subscription fees linked to income. The irrelevance of this when set against the unstated causes of the ‘deterioration on the ground’ is striking, though not surprising. There is no mention of the principal cause: that tens of thousands of Labour Party members and activists have been driven away from the party by years of executive thuggery and witchhunting and, above all, by the abandonment of the pretence of opposing the now rampant reactionary forces in Britain.

  At the end of two extraordinary months in politics, during which the Conservative government has shown itself to be corrupt and run by liars – a government more deeply unpopular than any since the Second World War – Labour has proved itself to be an enfeebled component of a rotting system, further disenfranchising those millions of people who still look to it as the constituted opposition.

  John Smith and his people are not wholly to blame. This is an historic process at work, perhaps in its final stages. Modern labourism based its postwar credibility on the reforms of the Attlee Government. ‘Social justice’ and ‘welfare rights’ were not seen by the public as a new form of charity. They were at the core of a contract that made it possible for the powerless and the poor to consent to be governed. They made popular democracy seem possible, even though its premises – employment, state education, a national health service, decent housing – were always more tenuous than was widely realised. ‘Gentling the masses’, rather than liberating them, was the aim of a ‘consensus’ which masked the collusion between capital and the defenders of labour, between the imperial state and those claiming to speak for democracy.

  In fairness to the Labour hierarchy, be it in the party or the Trades Union Congress, its history was there to be read. From the 1926 general strike to the 1984–85 miners’ strike, the trend was an unerring one of surrender and collaboration. From the British occupation of Ireland to the slaughter in the Gulf, Labour’s leaders have not been equivocal. ‘During the long period of collusive silence,’ wrote Jeremy Seabrook a few years ago, ‘a majority of us became accustomed to what we had gained, so dependent upon it continuing that way, that we were prepared to accept all kinds of repugnant social by-products of so fortunate a state of affairs, as long as it seemed that nothing would impair our rising standards of living. This is how new forms of ugliness and violence came to be assimilated into our daily lives . . .’6

  In Labour’s municipal bastions a flatcappery that depended upon apathy condoned corruption and failed to root out slumlords. Margaret Thatcher may have spoken out about Britain being ‘swamped’ by immigrants, but it was a Labour home secretary, James Callaghan, who introduced the most racist immigration bill more than a decade earlier. Attacks on the gains of the ‘consensus’ – on the health service, education and welfare rights – began under Labour, not Thatcher. The doctrine of a ‘free market and a strong state’ – with its high secrecy and ‘privateers’ within the bureaucracy – owes as much to Labour as it does to Thatcher. Thatcherism, it is fair to say, began under Labour.

  The behaviour of the Labour leadership during most of the 1980s, as it tried to catch up with Thatcher, while witch-hunting those who were often Labour’s most committed defenders, all but destroyed the party as a great popular movement; the collapsing membership now tells us that. Should further proof be required, I recommend the book Defeat from the Jaws of Victory, whose authors, the Labour historian Richard Heffernan and Mike Marqusee, editor of Labour Briefing, take us behind the closed doors of the ‘modernised’ party to witness the Labour hierarchy in action. It is a chronicle of rigged voting, stage-managed meetings, patronage dispensed to favourites, score-settling and McCarthyism.7

  ‘By the end of Neil Kinnock’s tenure as leader,’ they write, ‘investigations of local parties and disciplinary action of one kind or another had directly affected party members in over 80 constituencies in all regions of the country.’ Although Militant was singled out for attack, the real target was always wider; in many areas, the majority of members expelled had nothing to do with Militant. An official register of unaffiliated Labour Party groups was drawn up in 1982, leading to the expulsion of any group and anyone espousing ideas on the left – be they socialist, Christian, anti-war, whatever – who were deemed to ‘bring the party into disrepute’.

  ‘Violations of natural justice were legion,’ write Heffernan and Marqusee. ‘The presumption of innocence was hopelessly subverted. Guilt by association became commonplace. Smears, innuendo and catch-all charges proliferated. Hearsay and other forms of uncorroborated evidence were uncritically accepted. Judgments were made on the basis of secret dossiers compiled by anonymous figures whom the accused could never confront . . .’

  Although a special body, the national constituency committee, elected by party conference and independent of the NEC, was set up to adjudicate on expulsions, only one case was ever heard by the full NCC. This was the case of Sharon Atkins, who had been removed as the candidate for Nottingham East before the 1987 general election because of remarks she had made at a black sections public meeting.

  General Secretary Larry Whitty presented the NEC’s case against Atkins, who was defended by Lord Gifford QC. As Heffernan and Marqusee show, Gifford tore Whitty’s case to shreds, pointing out legal, logical and factual errors in charges he described as ‘fundamentally misconceived’. He expressed ‘utter astonishment that they are being seriously put forward’. The NCC was forced to recognise that no grounds could be found for expulsion.8


  All other cases were heard by panels of three NCC members, the majority always on the right. The kangaroo ‘investigations’ of Terry Fields and Dave Nellist are told in shaming detail. As the authors point out, one of the main reasons the Labour Party is now deeply in debt, with little hope of making up the losses, is the squandering of the party’s finances on ‘discipline’.

  The value of this book is that it helps to dispel myths. For example, the British people did not overwhelmingly support the Gulf slaughter, yet the Labour leadership was at times even more committed to war than the Government, even rejecting Edward Heath’s attempts at a diplomatic solution. The Sun’s evaluation of ordinary people became Labour’s; the popular consciousness, according to Walworth Road, could never be raised above ignorant certainties.

  This almost total failure of political imagination – if that is not being too charitable – ensured that the issue of the ‘peace dividend’ remained outside the public arena. The enormous savings to be had from reducing Britain’s defence spending to that of Germany were never mentioned. All discussion about Trident was suppressed.

  To many people, the consequences of such ‘collusive silence’ are now provided daily by the demolition of industry, training schemes, social services and of lives once remote from the fear of poverty. Today, the bodies of ‘redundant’ people found on the railway lines wear cheap copies of designer jeans and trainers. Scan the reports of coroners’ inquests in the local press and you will get an idea of the number now taking their own lives. They are the victims of a revolution no modern Orwell has yet described.