Tony Benn, a good and honest man who almost brought the party to ruin, lacked neither ego nor ambition. After all, he had spent a great deal of time and energy fighting for the right to disclaim his title as a hereditary peer to win the right to shorten his name and to enter the real politics of the House of Commons. In some ways he was extremely well fitted to be what he plainly wanted to be more than anything else, namely leader of the party and, in due course, prime minister. Handsome, looking remarkably young, physically robust – politics is an exhausting game like rugby or chess – and eloquent, he was and remains one of the few faces and voices almost immediately recognizable by the general public. Even his air of eagerness, like a Boy Scout looking for an occasion to do a good turn, his trademark pipe, his proletarian preference for mugs of tea, were assets. Though he had no great political profile in the past, he was moving left in the 1970s. Had he wanted to, he would almost certainly have been able to hold the Labour Party together and see it through difficult times. He looked like winning the leadership sooner or later, and, like many others, I thought he was probably the best man for the job – until he threw it away. I interviewed him at some length for Marxism Today in October 1980, and was impressed, if not completely reassured, by his insistence that in his view the Labour Party should remain ‘a very broad church’.
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. Armed with the most uncontrolled and centralized power available to government in any electoral democracy, it set out to destroy everything in Britain that stood in the way of an unholy combination of unrestricted profit-maximizing private enterprise and national self-assertion, in other words greed and jingoism. It was moved not only by the justified belief that the British economy needed a kick in the pants but by class feeling, by what I called ‘the anarchism of the lower middle class’. It was directed equally against the traditional ruling classes and their mode of rule, in practice including the monarchy, the country’s established institutions, and the labour movement. In the course of this largely successful endeavour it obliterated most of the traditional British values and made the country unrecognizable. Most of my generation probably feel like an American friend who decided to settle in England in the new century after retiring from an academic career in Massachusetts, and who was asked whether he missed the USA. He answered: ‘Nowhere near as much as I miss the Britain I knew when I first came here.’ This, at bottom, was the reason for the overwhelming dissidence of, even the widespread visceral hatred of Thatcher, felt in intellectual and cultural Britain, and the increasing dissidence of the bulk of the college-educated middle class, symbolized by the spectacular refusal of Oxford University to grant her an honorary degree. Not that this prevented the ideological advance of the Thatcherite belief that the only way to run the public and private affairs of a nation was by businessmen with business expectations using business methods. What made the triumph of Thatcherism so bitter was that, after 1979, it was not based on any massive conversion of opinion in the country, but primarily, though not exclusively, on the deep division of its opponents. There was no wave of Thatcherite voting in the 1980s like that which lifted Ronald Reagan in the USA. It consistently remained a minority of the electorate. My own calls for some electoral arrangement between Labour and the Liberal–Social Democratic Alliance or, at the very least, systematic ‘tactical voting’8 by anti-Conservative electors, were (naturally) dismissed by both, although in the end the voters had more sense than the parties and voted tactically in large numbers and to good effect. What made the situation so frustrating was that neither Labour nor the Liberal–Social Democratic Alliance had an alternative to offer. Thatcherism remained the only strategy in town. In the end all we had to rely on was that it would eventually become so unpopular that it would lose against any opposition, which is indeed what happened – but only after eighteen years. We warned that much of the Thatcherite revolution might prove irreversible. In this also we were right.