My great grandfather was a builder. He worked on the Old Bailey building which was built 1902-1907. My grandfather aged about 5 was taken up on the roof, and saw the statue of Justice close to. Grandfather told me that the statue of Justice could see under her blindfold, which is correct.
Great grandfather went on a demonstration in support of the unemployed on his day off, a Sunday. On the Monday he was dismissed. His employer’s daughters had seen him on the demonstration.
“Since you are so keen on the unemployed you can join them.”
This to a man with three children to support.
The demonstration was not illegal. The demonstration was peaceful.
The dismissal was politically motivated.
There was no redress.
In 1893 all adult (over 21) men were given a vote, or two votes if you paid enough rates (the local government tax). If you had a degree from a UK university you additionally could vote in a University constituency. It was not until 1918 that any women were allowed to vote.
One has to ask very hard questions about the extent to which democracy existed for the poor if they could lose their employment for going on a demonstration.
[At this point I will plug a recent book “Blacklisted” by Smith and Chamberlain published by New Internationalist about blacklisting in the construction and engineering industries.]
In the Putney Debates circa 1647 there was pressure for one man one vote. At that time the vote was in public. An employer could see how his servants voted and sack them if they did not vote the right way. Even the Levellers agreed that servants and alms-takers should be excluded from the franchise because their votes would not truly be free. In a time of mass illiteracy, the secret ballot was not an option.
In rural areas for most of the 20th Century there was great power held by the landowners. Radicals could have huge difficulty in obtaining and keeping employment.
In the 1930s the colliery manager at the Morrison Busty pit, near Stanley, Co Durham called in one of his miners.
“Your lad is fourteen years old today.
“Why is he not here?”
“We thought we would keep him in school longer.”
“He is at work tomorrow, or you will be dismissed.”
The lad worked his way up the pits, eventually qualifying as a mining engineer and then working abroad. He took great satisfaction in buying the house next to ours on his return to England. As a schoolboy, he had cleaned the silver in that same house.
What level of democracy was there in the 1930s where an employer could require his employee to force a child to work in the coal pits? One can understand why the miners welcomed nationalization.
Almost the first thing that happened after nationalization was the building of colliery baths for miners coming off shift, in every pit that did not have them.
In the 1930s my grandfather was in the Grainger market in Newcastle upon Tyne. The market was crowded because no-one wished to go out into the heavy rain. Grandfather made a socialist speech which went on forever because he had a captive audience. Grandfather used to make socialist speeches at bus stations where again the audience could not leave just yet. And in those days virtually no-one had cars.
One wonders if someone could do that now without “Security” making them stop?
My father would tell of campaigning in Hammersmith North in 1945. How could Labour lose their deposit in an urban seat in 1945?
The sitting MP was Denis Pritt KC, who had been a member of the Labour Party since 1918. Pritt had been the local MP since 1935. Pritt was expelled from the Labour Party in 1940 for supporting the Russian invasion of Finland. Pritt was known as “the soldiers’ KC” because as an MP Pritt was always taking up cases where squaddies had fallen foul of the officer class.
As my father went from house to house, he would knock on doors. Upstairs windows would open.
“Who is it?”
“The Labour Party”
“Mr Pritt. Yes! No problem!”
And often a “thumbs up” out of the window!
Mr Pritt had earned the loyalty of the people.
That is how Labour lost its deposit!
Much later on, S.O. Davies had been MP for Merthyr and Merthyr Tidfil since 1935. Aberfan was in his constituency. Davies was very unhappy about Harold Wilson using the monies in the Aberfan disaster fund to pay towards removal of the slagheaps. In 1970 Davies boycotted the ceremony bestowing the freedom of Merthyr on Harold Wilson. Davies was replaced for the 1970 election as punishment. The official reason given was that Davies was 84 years old.
S.O. Davies stood as an Independent, and beat the Labour candidate by over 7,000 votes. Davies died in 1972.
Two cases here where Labour voters preferred a person of proven commitment over the official Labour Party candidate. As a democrat I applaud the decision of the people. What it says to me is that the rock solid Labour support in “safe” constituencies cannot be taken for granted.
The 1977 Ashfield byelection was called because David Marquand had resigned to work in the European Commission with Roy Jenkins. Labour’s vote dropped from 35,367 to 19,352. The shock Tory winner lost his seat at the next election, but the result was a clear sign that the voters were not happy with the Labour Government. Thatcher came to power in 1979.
In the same way the drop in the Labour vote from 11,347,882 in 1997 to 8,043,261 in 2005 under Blair was a clear signal that Labour voters were not happy.
In 2010 Gordon Brown increased Labour’s vote to 8,609,527, but lost the election. The Coalition government was formed, and austerity came in.
In 2015 Ed Miliband increased the Labour vote further to 9,347,273, but Labour lost many seats in Scotland and lost seats overall.
I was a Councillor in Bradford. In 1986 I took the third safest Tory ward in Bradford, increasing the Labour vote 80% to squeak in. In 1990 I increased my 1986 vote 47% to record the highest ever vote for any candidate in that ward. I was told by one of the Council staff, who was a polling clerk, that at her polling station many people were asking each other not “What number is Labour?”, but “What number is James?”
I was serving the people.
For those interested see Elected Councillor For Paradise and Increased Majority In Paradise
There are “City Hall” councillors who manage multimillion pound budgets to try to squeeze out a little more service for the community, or to provide services more imaginatively, One example in Bradford was one of the Education Committee councillors who persuaded the council team that instead of responding to presenting issues they should concentrate on the roofs, the walls, the plumbing and the electrics and only then move on to the plaster, the floors, and eventually the paint. Prior to his intervention it was quite common for freshly painted walls to be cut into for electrics and plumbing, and then needing to be repaired and repainted.
There are also “ward councillors” who put huge amounts of time into school allocation issues, potholes, council house repairs, and the quality of the local parks.
I recall being very excited when running a committee rooms in Marsden, West Yorkshire. The Labour voters on the council estates were coming out in droves before I had any “knockers” to send out. Labour was going to walk this council election.
The Tory Councillor was Dorothy Lindley, the consummate “potholes” councillor. Dorothy also had “house meetings” where she would meet with maybe a dozen local women at a time to confer with them about what their little group of streets needed.
Dorothy was doing her job.
The Labour promises were all voting for Dorothy!
As a democrat I applaud the decision of the people. Dorothy delivered the goods to her community. Her community appreciated what Dorothy did for them.
I still remember my very first Labour Party branch meeting. My father was trying to get me to join the Labour Party. For some mad reason he thought that me seeing a Labour Party branch meeting would inspire me to join the Labour Party.
The members discussed an ongoing campaign to have a zebra crossing put across the main road near an old peoples home. Inspiring stuff for a sixteen year old.
One member had found a problem. An old lady who was getting electricity through a coin meter was threatened with disconnection for debt. How was this possible?
The answer is that an electricity bill was composed of a standing charge to be connected at all, plus charges for the electricity used. With coin meters the Electricity Board assumed a certain level of usage each month and split the standing charge across that usage. As this lady used so little electricity she was falling behind on the standing charge.
While I may appear to mock my father’s attempts to have me join the Labour Party, this meeting sticks in my mind fifty years later. Decent people trying to deal with local problems and to help those in need.
Later, Labour led a “Save Staines Moor” campaign, which prevented Staines Moor being dug up for gravel. It has been common land since 1065 at least.
Another memory from Staines was that Labour got to 12:12 on Staines Urban District Council. The Tory Mayor had the casting vote so the Tories usually got what they wanted. One Tory councillor, always referred to as “the Colonel’s lady”, was an independent spirit. She would vote with Labour when she thought that Labour was right. Every Council meeting turned on how the Colonel’s lady would vote.
One common feature of any political party is that there is always a party structure. By its nature the structure is run by people who have done things in the past to propel them into these high positions. Almost inevitably, their political framework reflects the attitudes of past times, and the experiences of past elections and campaigns.
There are always groups of people who reflect newer or different thinking. Sometimes the ideas are adopted by the ruling group but usually there is a period of discussion and tension during which the “in” group mourn the amount of time being wasted in futile discussions and the “out” group mourn the obstinacy of the old people at the front of the room. In any healthy political party there are new ideas coming in and struggling for their place on the agenda. It is important to recognize that this is a process, and should not be a war to the death.
For my views on political organization generally please enjoy The Effective Activist .
My first experience of a political group was at Kingston Upon Thames College of Further Education. The Richmond Road Annexe where I was based had a student led History Society. It was actually a Marxist discussion group.
I was invited to a meeting. I asked the speaker what I thought to be a perfectly reasonable question.
“Why did the Revolution happen in a mainly agricultural country instead of one of the industrialised European countries?”
The entire room turned on me because I appeared to threaten the ideological underpinning of the group. I was rescued by the speaker who said that it was a good question and attempted to answer it. Such was the effect of that wave of hostility that I did not go to a second meeting.
Later in the year I stood for the Site Committee of the Student Union. The History Society had a block vote of sixty, and not surprisingly I was not on their “slate”.
I had the lowest vote of the five elected committee members.
I asked a History Society stalwart what had gone wrong with the slate. It was a real question of interest, not a dig. He explained that because I chatted to absolutely everybody in the canteen, I was known to everybody. The slate had held, but my personal vote outweighed it.
Kingston Council decided on Education cuts. Our site committee organized a march against it. The Head of Department purely by coincidence declared a half day holiday that afternoon so everyone could support the site soccer team in an important match.
It was years later before I realized that the Head of Department might possibly have had another motive for declaring a half holiday, other than to support the soccer team.
Hundreds of us were on that march. It was good humoured and well conducted.
I learned later that a group of lefties at Kingston Polytechnic (now Kingston University) had waited in a strategic location intending to jump in front of our march to claim the glory of leading it. When they saw the hundreds of us coming into view, they decided against the idea and just joined on behind. Otherwise, we might have stopped our march, let them march on a bit, and then have resumed our march.
I was at the meeting of full Council where at least three petitions against the education cuts were presented to the Council. A little later, Kingston Council decided not to make these cuts.
I am still impressed by Kingston College of Further Education as it was at that time, It had a secretarial course where young women learned to take and transcribe shorthand in French and German as well as in English. There was a ready market in Central London for trilingual trained secretaries. There was even an intensive one year secretarial course, known of course as “Intensive Secs”. As one lass told me,
“Forget it. We are worked so hard that all I want to do at the end of the day is to go home to my own bed.”
I met my first ethnic discrimination at Kingston. A student who claimed to be a Polish baron in exile was contemptuous of our Mathematics teacher because the teacher was Hungarian. The teacher was pretty good. Until that moment, in so far as I thought about Central Europeans at all, I had mentally lumped them all together.
The central student union was approached by some part time students. They were all three entry level accounts staff on day release courses at the college. The next course for them was after they had turned the age at which day release was no longer compulsory. Two of the three had surnames that suggested Asian origin. Their employer refused to pay for a further course. Yet the student called Brown had been authorised to go on the course. The central student union brought in the National Union of Students, who successfully intervened to have all three authorised to go on the next course.
The central student union was run out of a room off the student common room. I have seen bigger bathrooms. We had no paid staff or sabbatical staff. Within its abilities the student union did a good job
At Durham University, I somehow drifted onto the Student Union Constitutional Committee. This meant I had a seat at the table at the front of the room, but I never spoke. My role was to have a copy of the Student Union Constitution and Standing Orders handy so I could advise the Chair if needed.
At one meeting a proposal was put forward that Durham Student Union (DSU) should disaffiliate from the National Union of Students (NUS).
The background was that at a recent NUS meeting the presiding geniuses of DSU had voted in favour of a motion that smaller student unions should pay proportionately lower fees and larger student unions should pay proportionately higher fees.
The structure at most Student Unions was that there was a Student Union that ran all activities including sport. Durham’s sport was run by an independent organisation Durham University Athletic Union (DUAU). The student union fees paid by the local authority were divided between DSU and DUAU according to a formula.
Our DSU presiding geniuses had thought that they were voting to lower the affiliation fee DSU would pay, but they had ended up increasing it! Hence the proposal to disaffiliate.
At no notice I gave an impassioned speech about the struggles of small student unions, about how the proposal the leadership had voted for was right, and no we should not disaffiliate. The rumbles and applause from the floor killed the proposal to disaffiliate.
Inspired by this, I stood for student union President, only to be defeated by a slate. It was the Christian Union slate which had a significant presence in every college. Their candidate romped home.
One of my campaign points was about the way that the teacher training colleges part of Durham University were being “sold down the river” by the University and by Durham Student Union. Even in those colleges, the Christian Union slate won.
In 1971 there was a postman’s strike. A friend and I made a collection for the striking postmen. We attracted significant hostility from the mainly middle-class students who basically objected to trade unions, to strikes, and to anything that inconvenienced them.
What were we to do with the money we had collected?
Neither of us had collected for anything before.
Looking back, the logical thing to do was to walk to the Durham sorting office and give the money to the pickets there. Instead. we went to the union office at Newcastle and we gave it there.
One of the funniest events at Durham was when a former DSU President, personally popular among the students, decided to stand for Durham City Council. Pat Wolfe stood in Elvet ward, which had huge numbers of student voters.
Normally the students never voted in council elections. The seat was held by a Tory.
In County Durham at that time the Conservative brand was so toxic that their council candidates stood as “Progressives” or as “Independents”. The sitting Independent councillor for Elvet ward was the Mayor Elect.
Pat stood as an Independent because Pat was independent.
The Mayor Elect soon realised that he could well lose his seat.
In desperation, he put out leaflets saying he was “the official Independent”, which caused gales of laughter, and brought more students to the polls. Pat won Elvet ward.
I joined the Labour Party in February 1972. Later in 1972 a group of us decided to set up the Durham University Labour Club. There were not many of us. A group from the Durham Labour Party Young Socialists came to advise us.
We wanted advice on how to run a University Labour Club.
What we got instead was advice about delegates. We could have delegates to Durham Constituency Labour Party, to the County Durham Labour Party, to Regional Conference, to the National Organisation of Labour Students (NOLS) Regional Committee, to the NOLS Annual Conference…
We were all of us relative novices.
A comrade called Liz and I were elected as delegates to the next NOLS annual conference, being held in Durham Castle in January.
Reading the motions for Conference it was clear that there was a political faction operating. I had picked up some Marxism from my friends in the History Society. I had read a little Marxist and Leninist and Trotskyist stuff for the Politics part of my degree.
This stuff was weird. It was sort of Trotskyist.
It had “transitional demands”. For those who have never met transitional demands, they are demands for something that cannot be achieved without a revolution. The idea behind transitional demands is to get the working class to understand that a revolution is the only way forward.
Many Militant supporters believed that if they got a motion through their branch it was a victory in the class struggle. They were unkindly referred to as “resolutionary socialists”.
When we arrived at the Conference we met other people who also thought that “Militant” was bonkers.
We went to a meeting of the non Militant delegates to try to agree who should stand for positions on the National Committee of NOLS.
Without the Scots, Militant had a majority. With the Scots, we had a majority.
Where were the Scots?
About fifteen minutes late, the Scots walked in.
They announced whom the non Militant slate was to be. It was entirely Scots and Oxford University Labour Club. It was all stitched up.
I wish I had had the moral courage to walk out. I so disbelieved what was going on that I stayed.
Less than a year into the Labour Party I was unhappy with slates, and very aware of the dishonesty on all sides.
The 1973 Chester le Street by-election was only a bus ride away. We were in Washington New Town on election day.
It was a normal committee room. We came back from “knocking up” and had a cup of tea.
Three guys arrived in a car. They did not introduce themselves. They were senior GMB (NUGMW in those days) trade union officials. GMB basically ran the Chester le Street constituency, and the candidate Giles Radice was a GMB research officer.
They were not there to work the election. They were touring the committee rooms to make sure all the committee rooms were functioning well.
The woman of the house did not offer the men a cup of tea.
I was surprised by this, because she gave everyone a cup of tea on arrival.
I think the men were a bit surprised not to be offered a cup of tea.
“You don’t know whose house this is, do you?”
“No.”
“My husband is “X”.”
Within three minutes, they had gone.
That was my first observation that trade unions are not the monolithic blocks that they are portrayed to be by the media.
I read in the newspaper the following day that a GMB official had been killed in a road accident on the day of the by-election. Whether it was one of the three men I met, or someone else, I never knew.
In 1975 a few of us in the Chester Labour Party formed “Chester Labour Against The Common Market” to campaign for a “No” vote in the Referendum. Sadly, one of us was a Militant supporter who at every meeting was pushing that we had to adopt the “Militant” stance on the Common Market. We could not make any progress because this guy could not accept “no” for an answer. Eventually we formed a new committee that excluded him.
Was this Stalinist anti-democratic apparatchik behaviour? At the time it was a response to the fact that we could not achieve anything with this guy on board.
I went to Liverpool, collected some leaflets, and we distributed them.
In 1975 Mid Bedfordshire CLP was in a long and unedifying cycle of moaning and recrimination between two evenly balanced factions. Every CLP meeting was taken up with minutes and matters arising and never got beyond that. The two faction leaders, both good socialists, decided that the way forward was to bring in a Chair who was not associated with the events that led to the recrimination.
I was new to the constituency and I was nice to everyone. At the AGM, I was pulled off checking Membership cards and I was called upstairs. I was told by the two faction leaders that I was to be the new CLP Chair – aged 24.
At the next meeting I explained that I had promised the visiting speaker an hour, and I wanted forty-five minutes for the political resolutions. This meant that all “business” had to be fitted into fifteen minutes. Were these timings accepted?
Stunned, the CLP agreed by acclamation. After 7 minutes, I invited the speaker to begin. This set the pattern. The meetings were happy and harmonious and the CLP pulled together as a unit.
With my experiences at NOLS and the negative impressions I had formed of the Scots and the Oxford University plotters, I refused to join “Clause 4”, the “soft left” group opposing Militant. It may only be my prejudice, but when I see dirty work going on in the Labour Party, there usually seems to be an Oxford graduate involved.
Friends who did join “Clause 4” confirmed my impressions of the leadership of Clause 4.
At the LPYS Conference in Blackpool in 1976, the Militant supporters discovered from a barman at the local Mecca Dance Hall that the Mecca had increased the price of beer by two pence a pint because the Conference was the Young Socialists. One of the leading lights immediately called a boycott, and the young socialists picketed the Mecca, After two nights of virtually no trade, the Mecca reduced its prices back to the original levels. Great political education for all of us!
At one meeting of Eastern Region LPYS our branch was attacked because we were not Militant supporters. I was so cross that I went down to Companies House and I started investigating Militant. The company that published “Militant” was Cambridge Heath Press Limited.
Eventually I discovered WIR Publications Limited, which held the assets. RSL members gave money each month to WIR Publications Ltd which loaned money to Cambridge Heath Press Limited.
Cambridge Heath Press Limited was hopelessly insolvent, buoyed up only by the loans. Were anyone to sue Cambridge Heath Press Limited they would get no money because there were no assets.
I wrote a piece “The Companies We Keep” and I put it into the Labour Party. I know that Prime Minister Jim Callaghan saw a copy.
One strategic error Militant made was that they attacked anyone who did not agree with them in terrible vitriolic terms. People left the Labour Party because they could not take the abuse. As a result, Militant had few friends when the national Labour Party woke up to the activities of the group behind Militant, the Revolutionary Socialist League.
Had Militant supporters not been such a nasty bunch, Militant might be with us still.
I suppose I could have used my activity against Militant to advance myself in the Labour Party but I hardly ever mentioned it. I stress the positive things I have done to advance Labour. Helping to put out the trash was just a chore.
Quite a few former Militant supporters are still with us. They are generally on the Left and are sometimes described as “recovering Trotskyists”.
When I arrived in Bradford in 1981, politics there was very interesting.
Pat Wall had been selected to be the Labour Candidate for Bradford North in place of a right wing MP Ben Ford. Pat was selected despite being a Militant supporter. Ben Ford stood against Pat in the 1983 General Election, splitting the Labour vote to let in Geoff Lawler. Pat replaced Geoff Lawler at the following General election.
In 1981 the SDP was formed. The MP for Bradford West where I lived, Eddie Lyons, joined the SDP even though Eddie was under no threat at all from the Left in Bradford West. Max Madden replaced Eddie Lyons.
In the hot summer of 1981 the United Black Youth League (a split from Bradford Asian Youth Movement (AYM)) made petrol bombs to defend the community against fascists. The threat did not materialise, but they could not bear to dismantle their cache of petrol bombs. The cache was discovered by a gardener clearing land. Fingerprint evidence led to the UBYL, and all the UBYL was arrested. This led to the Bradford 12 trial.
A co-worker at Bradford Law Centre was Marsha Singh, later to become a MP. Marsha was a leading light in the AYM. Marsha led the political campaign to free the Bradford 12. The defence line was
“Black and White Unite and Fight,
“Self Defence Is No Offence”
After the acquittal, the Bradford 12 went to the pub with the jury and all chanted it together.
In 1982 I was a volunteer teacher at Croxteth Community School in Liverpool, using my “lieu” time for all the Law Centre evening meetings I had attended. The acting Head was a joiner. He and the other parents ran a very successful occupation until Labour (under Militant) won Liverpool Council in 1983.
In 1983 I helped with the occupation at Thornton View Hospital which ran for quite a long time. It being a geriatric hospital, a lot of the patients died of old age during the occupation. Had they been moved as the Health Authority wished, they would many of them have died sooner.
I was also involved in the Eccleshill 12 case where leftists had disrupted a BNP election meeting.
In 1984 the Honeyford incident blew up. I was on the fringes of that.
I collected for the miners in the long coal strike. My father was County Councillor for some former mining villages in the West of County Durham. Meeting a miner’s wife in the supermarket, she explained that the miners lodge was providing hot meals at the miners lodge near the coast. It was not practical to go there to eat, so in practice her family were getting no help. My father started fund raising, and at one point was supporting 84 miner’s families in the area. He telephoned me early on and asked me to set up weekly or monthly donations for what was clearly going to be a long struggle.
In 1983 and in 1984 I was asked to stand for Labour in the marginal Toller ward.
This was not just a testament to my outstanding personal qualities.
In Toller ward, and desperate to be our councillor, was Amin Qureshi. Amin was from Mirpur where many of Bradford’s people had origins.
Amin had been a docker’s leader in Karachi, and was a strong leftist. The name of the game was to block Amin from being selected because some ward members saw Amin as a loose cannon. I was not prepared to stand against Amin because I respected Amin.
Amin did eventually become a councillor, for University ward. Amin had so much ward work that the Council gave Amin a dedicated assistant.
This maelstrom of excitements and activities gave me huge respect for people who did what was right and who would let chips fall where they would.
As an immigration and political asylum lawyer I saw many people caught up in deportation struggles. It seemed to me that every Trotskyist group had an immigration campaign running. Often the poor soul they were “helping” appeared to be a disposable pawn. Within weeks of the person being deported, the Trots found another pawn.
Again, this was to illustrate that to achieve social justice one needed a revolution.
There have been Trots I liked. I stopped buying Socialist Worker because everyone I bought Socialist Worker from was expelled.
Over the years I saw lots of faction fights in the Labour Party, and frequent discord.
There are some people in the Labour Party who seem to spend their entire lives fighting within the party against other comrades in the Labour Party, rather than fighting together against the common enemy.
I would need a young book to talk about where we are today!
See Our “Left Labour” Future .