Chesterfield Socialist Conference 1987

The Chesterfield Socialist Conference of 1987 attempted to revitalise the left in Britain. Instead it marked its demise.

The year 1987 was an important year, not just because I failed my driving test the day after Mrs Thatcher won her third term in office, but because – although I did not know it at the time – events that year would signal a speeding up in the collapse of the left in Britain.

In October 1987, the first Socialist Conference was held in Chesterfield, the mining constituency which Tony Been famously won in a byelection in 1984. Ralph Miliband described the conference, which brought together the Labour left with several outside groups and parties, as the biggest meeting of socialists since the Leeds Convention in 1918. Benn, Miliband and Eric Heffer all gave powerful orations in the hope of heralding in a rebirth of the radical left in British politics.

Yet, it was not to be. Kinnock (with Hattersley, Smith, Kaufmann and the then youngsters Blair and Brown in tow) announced a policy review, misnamed ‘Labour Listens’ which meant that the leadership listened to everybody except socialists. The remaining socialist policies were either dropped or sidelined. Inside the party de-democratisation took hold and the socialist left was marginalised or expelled. In this stifling atmosphere of party discipline, Kinnock stumbled on until losing to the Tories yet again in 1992.

John Smith’s leadership 1992-94 promised a Labour Party consolidation on the basis of some kind of mild social democracy – and, but for his death, he would have taken Labour to victory in 1997.

But that was not to be, either. In 1994 (the last contested Labour leadership election until 2010), desperate for success, Labour elected Tony Blair, whose drift to the right in the next decade and half would have been unimaginable in the early nineties. So New Labour was born and the Left and socialism ceased to be.

Tony Benn (1925-2014): the death of a political giant

The death of Tony Benn in March 2014 was a psychological blow for the political left in Britain.

Tony Benn was the most admirable British politician in the whole post war era.

In the 1970s Benn signalled in the Labour Party a way forward, not just as an alternative to Thatcherism and authoritarian market fundamentalism, but as a solution to the shortcoings of 1960s and 1970s social democracy. His 1981 defeat to Denis Healey in the battle for the deputy leadership of the Labour Party sadly indicated the start of a process which ended with victory for New Labour in the Party in 1990s.

Benn, unusually for British politicians, was a great moralist and teacher, and invariably presented his ideas in spellbinding orations, rather than through the pen, with even his diaries consisting mostly of written up recordings. Some of his famous aphorisms will always stay with me.

“It’s man’s capacity for good that makes democracy possible. It’s man’s capacity for bad which makes democracy necessary.”

“I do ask people not to dwell too long on the theoretical differences between reform and revolution. I think if you added up all the reforms we want to make in the structure of society, people could not distinguish it from a revolution.”

“It’s not that we have reformed and failed, but we have failed to reform.”

Yet, Benn’s appeal to the moral high ground came at a price. Despite his position and influence in the Party, when his own Bristol constituency was abolished in boundary changes in 1983, he accepted defeat in the candidate selection process in the safe Bristol South seat. Rather than bunk off to a safe seat elsewhere, Benn remained loyal to the town of Bristol. He was accepted for marginal Bristol East where he lost to the Conservative candidate. Only then did he relocate to the mining constituency of Chesterfield, where he won a by-election in 1984, a seat he held until his retirement from Parliament in 2001.

Even after the left was crushed and marginalised in the late 1980s, he remained loyal to Labour – and I think mistakenly so - but he never capitulated to New Labour thinking.

Tony Benn’s death is a very great loss. He is sadly missed.