Righting history

New Labour began in 1981, when the trade unions set out to ‘save the Labour party’ – from the left. Dianne Hayter uncovers a forgotten period in the party’s history

The story of New Labour’s birth is often, wrongly, traced back to 1994 or 1997. At a stretch, some might seek its origins in Neil Kinnock’s denunciation of Militant in 1985. Few, however, would think of looking back to 1981.

Yet it is here that New Labour’s true beginnings can be found: when the unions – progenitors of the Labour party – realised that, if their dream of an electable political party was to be re-established, it would happen by design rather than by chance. And by ‘design’, they meant ‘organisation’. For, as Neil Kinnock says, ‘without organisation, politics is pleasant, but it is only poetry.’

1981 is often seen as the nadir of Labour’s postwar fortunes and the prelude to the spectacular defeat that the party suffered in the 1983 general election. By that time, the left were in control of the NEC and had notched up major conference victories over the automatic reselection of MPs. They had also stripped MPs of their exclusive role in choosing the party leader, creating instead an Electoral College in which 40 per cent of the votes went to the very trade unions who were widely seen as having destroyed the Labour government of Jim Callaghan, and who were also deeply unpopular with the electorate.

These developments drove much of the pro-European right out of the party and into the SDP. Many of the Labour MPs who remained, derided by activists for the ‘failure’ of the last Labour government, also found themselves under threat from their constituency General Committees. Michael Foot, elected by MPs but never seen as a vote winner, was thus presiding over a party that was losing members, votes and by-elections to the SDP. Only the 1982 Falklands conflict saved Labour electorally, by restoring Tory fortunes and marginalising the SDP.

Within days of the January 1981 Wembley conference that established the Electoral College, however, a dozen union leaders from most of the major unions started meeting in secret. The aim of the St Ermins Group, as it became known, was for the unions to use their block votes to win back the NEC for the moderates, and thus to ‘save the Labour party and return it to sanity and electability’.

Having renounced the SDP defectors rather than follow them, the union leaders’ first task was to marshal their block votes to defeat Tony Benn’s challenge to Denis Healey for the deputy leadership of the party. Had this challenge succeeded, it would have led even more MPs to desert Labour. They were helped in this task by the fact that Benn’s bid split the left, causing Kinnock and others on the soft-left to abstain.

For their other aim of changing the political complexion of the NEC, however, the unions worked alone. Within days of Healey’s re-election in September 1981, they had wrestled five NEC seats from the left. In 1982, they gained more seats and thus won the chairmanship of the NEC sub-committees – and so began their moves on Militant.

One other significant party organisation was created immediately after Wembley: the parliamentary-led Labour Solidarity Campaign, or Solidarity. This brought together the remnants of the right-wing parliamentary Manifesto group and a broader-based collection of MPs, such as Peter Shore – who, along with Roy Hattersley, became co-chair – and Austin Mitchell, its treasurer.

Solidarity also reached out to constituency activists who were fed up with Militant’s infiltration of the party, local government’s obsession with fighting lost battles rather than delivering good services, and Labour’s shrinking electoral attractions. In the face of the SDP’s surging popularity, Solidarity set about holding fringe meetings at regional and annual conference. Its aim was to proclaim: we are not leaving Labour, and we will bring the party back to its members and its voters.

Initially, Solidarity wanted to overturn Wembley’s 40:30:30 Electoral College formula. This rapidly became unviable, however, in part because of Benn’s prompt use of the new system, but also because Healey won the deputy leadership under it. Healey’s victory, in fact, owed much to those very union votes that had been so feared by the right.

However, Solidarity went on to become the major champion of One Member One Vote and of expelling Militant. It did so in the face of determined and hard-fought opposition from the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, Labour Against the Witch-hunt, the Campaign group, and a good sprinkling of the current cabinet, who have undoubtedly profited from the brave stance these Solidarity members took.

In those days, supporting Denis Healey, or favouring OMOV, took considerable courage at conference or a GC meeting. Solidarity was the lone group in the party openly supporting OMOV. The officers of Tribune, which both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown joined upon their election to the Commons in 1983, opposed both this and the ‘witch-hunt’ against Militant.

The OMOV campaign was a long one, only finally won in 1993 under John Smith who had long favoured the move and was himself active in Solidarity from the start. OMOV was sought both for the re-selection of MPs – to give votes to all members and not just the GC – and also for the Electoral College, which chose the party leader. For the public, it was reform of the Electoral College that was most important, in particular to avoid the sight of unions casting their block votes – often without consulting their members – to decide the individual who might become the next prime minister.

Paradoxically, it was perhaps this, even more than Mrs Thatcher, that brought greater democracy to the union movement. The power unions were given at Wembley opened them up to scrutiny, not just from the press but also from their members, who wanted some say on the votes cast in their names. The use of the Electoral College in the deputy leadership election of 1981 had highlighted the chasm between the leadership of some unions and their members. For instance, the votes provided by NUPE to Healey, which had given him his majority, followed the union’s decision to consult its members, the results of which were in stark contrast to the views and expectations of its leaders.

Despite their agenda to rid Labour of the hard left, and their identification with the right, many of the moderate St Ermins Group went on to help elect Neil Kinnock – who they realised would take the party by the scruff of its neck – and support him in focusing the party once again on winning elections.

Thus, having created the Labour party in 1900, and helped stabilise it in 1931 after Ramsay MacDonald’s defection, it fell to a new generation of union leaders in the 1980s to set about re-establishing a party that could form a government and hence promote the trade unions’ interests. Their behind-the-scenes activity ensured that by the time of his defining 1985 Bournemouth speech, Kinnock had behind him on the platform an NEC committed to expulsions, and to rebuilding a party in touch with its electorate.

Those close to Blair rarely admit to these early efforts. Philip Gould claims the ‘modernisers’ saved the Labour party. In 1997, Peter Mandelson credited the party’s election victory to the ‘transformation, the rebirth of the Labour party over the last two or three years’. But it was the stayers – those on the moderate wing of the party who were not seduced by the SDP, and who decided to fight back against the hard left – who laid the groundwork, without which New Labour might not have been built.

Dianne Hayter is the author of Fightback!: Labour’s Traditional Right in the 1970s and 1980s, published by Manchester University Press

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