The Modern British History Podcast
My personal interest in this comes from being a longstanding modern British history enthusiast, with an interest in UK domestic affairs over the recent past.
My rough aim is to put out a podcast every two months, but this is solely a DIY passion project, rather than something I get paid for or do professionally - so that goal's very much life and day-job permitting. Hope you enjoy the podcast!
You can email the podcast with any comments and feedback at mbph.pod@outlook.com and you can also find me on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harry-w-1b045386
The Modern British History Podcast
6. Labour in the 80s: the Rocky Road to Recovery - with Associate Professor Danny Rye
Why did the Labour Party lose the 1983 election and what changes did the party make to put itself back on the path to recovery?
We're joined by another real expert on the period for this episode - associate professor Danny Rye from Liverpool Hope University - to tackle these questions and more!
Reading Suggestions
Drucker, H.M., (1979) Doctrine and ethos in the Labour Party (Vol. 12). Routledge.
Hayter, D., 2005. Fightback!: Labour's Traditional Right in the 1970s and 1980s. Manchester University Press.
Panitch, L. and Leys, C., 2001. The end of parliamentary socialism: from new left to new labour. Verso.
Pugh, M., 2010. Speak for Britain!: A new history of the labour party. Random House.
Russell, M., 2005. Building New Labour: The politics of party organisation. Springer.
Shaw, E., 2002. The Labour party since 1979: Crisis and transformation. Routledge.
Welcome to the Modern British Political History podcast and this episode we're welcoming Danny Rye, who's Associate Professor in Politics at Liverpool Hope University. Welcome to the podcast, danny.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, great to have you on To start with. It'd be just great to hear a little bit about your research interests, danny.
Speaker 2:Well, very broadly, my interests are in political organisation. I'm particularly interested in the power dynamics that take place within political organisations and I've written a bit about that and how parties change as well, and I guess what we're discussing today will cover some of that.
Speaker 1:And I think it will blend in neatly with some other podcasts we've done. So on this one we're going to be thinking a little bit about Labour's fight back to credibility, if we could use that word, and it picks off, I think, quite nicely after some of the stuff we talked about in the 70s with Chris Kirkland, when we were thinking a little bit about crises in the 70s that had to be dealt with and particularly thinking about how the Labour Party itself dealt with some of those crises. So I think this will pick up the story neatly from some of that. So to start with, danny, could you outline, just at a very high level, what was the state of the country like in the very early 1980s?
Speaker 2:Well, I suppose, as you will have perhaps covered in your previous broadcast that you mentioned, we had been through a phase of quite a lot of unrest and instability in politics and in the economy, a lot of industrial unrest and a sense in which the old economic and the old political consensus, which had really lasted from the end of the Second World War up to certainly the early 1970s, had begun to or had collapsed really and really what politics was about at that moment in time was what the response to that should be and what the alternative to the old Keynesian mixed economy and so on ought to be. And of course the Conservative response was embodied by Margaret Thatcher. It wasn't necessarily quite as clear how far she would go and things would go at this particular time, but of course in this period between 1979 and 1983, after a few pickups she was in her pomp and she had won the Falklands War, of course in 1982, which just simply added to that. And so certainly the Conservative Party's image at the time was increasingly of a party that knew what it wanted, that had some answers to the economic and political problems facing Britain whether you agree with those or not and was increasingly confident in that response.
Speaker 2:At the same time, it was aided by a Labour Party, which you were about to talk about, that was still not sure what it wanted to do. Its initial, perhaps response was a shift to the left, with Labour Party, with activists and, in particular, on the party's left, really, I suppose, effectively blaming the previous Labour government for a lot of the timidity, as they saw it, of that Labour government, for a lot of the ills facing both the country and the party. And so the immediate response was a growing vocalness, if you like, of the left in the party, represented in particular by Tony Ben and others, who was the voice of what they called an alternative economic strategy, which was seeking a much more robustly left-wing, somewhat perhaps protectionist response to the economic crisis. So we had quite a significant ideological debate going on, and increasingly the kind of location of that debate was within the Labour Party itself.
Speaker 1:And with the left. I remember seem to remember Tony Ben's Beachway pointed out areas of the Labour Party manifesto where he felt that they hadn't been delivered on. Could you touch on some of those areas where the left and figures like Tony Ben felt that the Labour Party hadn't gone in the direction they wanted to go in?
Speaker 2:This was a really interesting and perhaps a very illustrative indeed, perhaps the main substantive point of contestation as well, I think, between the left and the party leadership, because the party in the 1970s I think the Labour's programme in leading up to the 1974 election, for example, was a case in point here was proposing some pretty radical policies, particularly when it came to things like nationalisation and public ownership of key strategic areas of industry. It shouldn't be overstated, I mean, it's still broadly accepted a mixed economy, but what it proposed was control of some very important key strategic industries and so on, amongst other things, and these were largely ignored basically by the party in office, by the party leadership, by those governments, particularly led by Harold Wilson and then Jim Cullerhan. And this is what an academic called Henry Drucker, who wrote a book called Dr in an Ethos in the Labour Party was a very famous book among scholars of the Labour Party. It's what he described as manifestoism, which was the sense that the party leadership should and I'll morally oblige, if you like to implement this party programme Now, an important dimension to this, which I think is perhaps might not be appreciated as much today as it would have been at the time, is that the party leadership, the parliamentary leadership, had very little direct say over what went into the manifesto.
Speaker 2:The manifesto was largely the responsibility of the National Executive Committee of the party, which had a labyrinthine set of policy committees and so on, and the NEC, the National Executive Committee, had been key, if you like, targets of the left and had become increasingly controlled by the left, and so those manifestos were being set by effectively one faction of the party I mean, I'm simplifying it a bit and the party leadership were perhaps not entirely on board with what was going on in those manifestos.
Speaker 2:And of course this then became a flashpoint, if you like, and a fairly frequent narrative, I think, in Labour Party history, really ever since the 1930s and the formation of the national government under Ramsey McDonald, who'd been the Labour Party leader, labour Prime Minister, was the narrative of betrayal. And this was just another example of how the parliamentary leadership had betrayed the movement, betrayed the activists. The Labour Party in particular loves its procedure and certainly many activists hold it very highly in what they regard as good and proper and right. And of course so the properly passed policy of the party that had gone through all the appropriate procedures and so on should be sacrosanct. It should be carried out by the leadership. It should be treated as an instruction, if you like. So that idea of manifestoism contrasted with, perhaps, the parliamentary party's attitude, which was much more about, perhaps much closer to the idea of having a mandate to govern. So being elected means that you are there to govern according to the realities that confront you.
Speaker 1:Next question, danny, is about this point around making the Labour Party credible, which is a word we might unpick a little bit as it's probably a bit of a contested one. But a good starting point will be the 1983 election. So could you walk us through a little bit of that election and the results of it?
Speaker 2:Right. Well, yeah, well, it was a bit of a disaster. I think it's probably fair to say the campaign itself was a bit of a mess. So the party's image was shot to pieces as well, and it wasn't just an image, I mean, it was. It was in a terrible state of fractious, fragmented, quite unpleasant, very often, division, and all of this coupled with a very poorly organized and, frankly, incompetent campaign, a mess of a manifesto which Gerald Kaufman, an MP on the right of the party, described after the election as the longest suicide note in history. Things could have been worse, but not much worse, it has to be said.
Speaker 2:So in the wake of that, we have a new leadership election in 1983, taking place within the Labour Party, which was conducted between well, neil Kinnock was the leading candidate, and he was a credible leading candidate because he had come from the left. Roy Hatterley was on the party's right. He was perhaps astute enough to realize that his prospects weren't that great. So he also stood for the deputy leadership and he won that. And this was described as the sort of dream ticket, because it Neil Kinnock won the election overwhelmingly.
Speaker 2:In the Electoral College. He was seen as a figure that could begin to unify the party a bit more, and I think one of the things perhaps that was important at the time was that the party was getting perhaps a bit tired of its infighting. This internal warfare had been conducted with great energy from the left and perhaps largely acquiesced to in many ways by the right, which I think was just exhausted. Don't forget that the Labour Party had been in power between 1964 and 1979. It had been in power for most of that period, with a brief interruption by Edward Heath, and it had been a traumatic experience as well. So the right was largely exhausted and this was perhaps the beginning of the fight back, if you can put it like that.
Speaker 1:And in that, then there's this question about credibility we've talked about or touched on, and there's two questions, I suppose that are linked, that come to mind. So one is about the reasons why which we've talked about a little bit the election was lost, and then also what we actually mean by making the Labour Party credible, and I know you've got a bit of a framework for thinking about that which we could work through in turn and unpack a little bit, which is public party principles and power. There's different axes, you think about.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's these different aspects of things I think that parties have to address, I suppose, when they're responding to defeat, particularly, I think, when it comes to, you know, what 1979 was at 1983 really confirmed was the fact that it was a pretty. It wasn't quite existential defeat, obviously, but it was a very, very, very dramatic defeat which wasn't something you could just bounce back from by tweaking a few things here and there. I think that it was clear, and there were a lot of things that needed to be repaired the relationship with the party, with the public, and the extent to which it had that it was in tune with public opinion, that public opinion was positive about it, that the public was even listening to it. Let's take that one.
Speaker 1:Just to go into that one a little bit. First, how in tune or not in tune were Labour with public opinion in the early 80s? So I think there's the general, I suppose, impression, broad-brush impression that I think is given of this period is that Labour were really far out from public opinion on things like nuclear disarmament or nationalisation, control of industries. To what extent was that the case? Is that an accurate debate?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it is to a large extent. I mean there was some. A dramatic defeat is hard enough. The fact that the Labour Party were also trying to recover their credibility with the public at a time when the kind of social and economic context was changing so dramatically made it even more, I think, of an uphill struggle, because it wasn't just a case of responding to something that had happened. It was a case also of trying to adapt to a radically different country really, and it was changing quite fast.
Speaker 2:You had I mean already by 1979, they had they were losing votes from their traditional working class constituency.
Speaker 2:But also at the same time, of course, through this period and throughout their period in opposition in the 1980s, the very nature of that constituency was changing as well.
Speaker 2:So there was a dramatic class deal, a deal, alignment going on, and their share of the working class vote was in decline. And in fact I think it was an analyst I can't remember quite the call, who it was who said it. An analyst at the time said they were still a party of the working class but not the majority of the working class. So they were losing support from those key constituency which have seen in thatcherism something that was alive to aspirations for advancement, for home ownership, as being someone that stood, if you like, for them in some way, in a way that the Labour Party was increasingly, rightly or wrongly, associated with losers in life as far as their public image was concerned, and those perhaps that were undesirable the unemployed, immigrants, racial minorities, gays all of these things were exploited mercilessly, first of all, by the Conservatives, and Labour's problem was that it was really struggling to respond to it, so it was coming from every direction.
Speaker 2:As well as the fact that their economic credibility was completely shocked, that they were associated with economic mismanagement and prophecy and all the rest of it, they were associated with militant trade unions and so on, they were also under attack on the social dimension as well, and all of this meant that their public image was just incredibly poor.
Speaker 2:But one of the things that perhaps Kinnick was very alive to was the fact that, in order to address this, the first thing that needed to happen was that the party needed to be got under control, that the party's power in the party. This is the power side of things I suppose that we need to consider. If a party leader, for example, or a party leadership, wants to improve its electoral prospects, it needs to be able to take the party with it, so it needs. Part of that is about persuasion, of course, but part of that is also about power and control over the party machinery and at this point the power was very widely dispersed within the party. I've already mentioned the fact that actually the party leaders, the people who had to go out there and campaign, for example, in elections and so on, those who had to promote party policy and all the rest of it, had very little say over what those policies were. Officially at least, it was the National Executive Committee that had control over that.
Speaker 1:And coming out of this, by contrast with the Conservative Party, for example is there something almost psychological that it seems like typically Conservative leadership are able to exercise control over the party and that is generally more accepted, whereas there seems to be this distrust of power in the Labour Party. I almost wonder if that comes from the psychology of the Labour Party is designed to distribute power from the top down to others and there's almost the idea of a leadership steering the party overall. Is there a bit more skepticism, a bit more doubt about that? Just on a pure base psychological level.
Speaker 2:It's a very interesting one, actually, because I think traditionally, the Labour Party has been very loyal to its leaders, and I mean, I think the period we're talking about, yes, there was a very serious problem with distrust that the old, up to this point, the Labour Party, the Labour Party's ethos as Henry Drucker, who I've mentioned before, put it, one perhaps key characteristic of its ethos was its loyalty to its leaders.
Speaker 2:However, the Conservative Party leader has an immense amount of power that perhaps a Labour leader hasn't traditionally had, although I think it depends on the leader to some extent. So conservatives are much more willing to change their leader, as we know from recent history. But when you are a Conservative leader, you have immense amount of power to set the tone, decide policy and so on, and, if you like, the mechanism that the party has to keep you accountable is to boot you out, whereas the Labour Party Alexa Leeder, but and certainly at this point, and certainly at least in theory, it's the rest of the party, if you like, other bits of the party that have responsibilities for things like making policy and all the rest of it. So that's perhaps where the distinction is.
Speaker 1:And then another pee that you have is about principles in the party, and one question that comes to mind for me with this is is there a tension between Labour as a party of principles and then also Labour as more a party of pragmatic and practical representation of the working class and trade unions, which may have principles attached to it, but it's actually much more. It's much more practical. It strikes me that the Labour Party is often made up of, to generalise, middle class people who have very strong principles, and then the working class, and sometimes those things aren't. Are they sometimes at odds almost?
Speaker 2:I mean, I think there's certainly some historical truth to that sure, if you like, I think, if you look at the relatively early development of Labour Party, so certainly pre-war. So it's outside of the period you're broadly interested in, I realise. But these things I think are important in setting the culture of an organisation. So in that period I think it's fair to say that's exactly what it was really. Yeah, so you had like, on the one hand you had the trade union wing, and the trade union movement was interesting because we often in modern times associate trade unions with the left, and particularly in the Labour Party context. It's understood in that way very often, but historically that's not the case at all and in fact very often it was the trade union wing who were being pretty conservative.
Speaker 2:And then so it's kind of like you had that alliance between these sort of you know they were definitely in favour of, you know, and supporting working class interests. That's what they were there for, but in many kind of aspects, say, for example, in terms of things like attitudes to patriotism and monarchy and social issues and so on, and even economically in some respects conservative, and those were in alliance with socialist societies that were a bit more like, as you suggested, often more middle class not always, but often more middle class more doctrinaire socialist types. Interestingly as well, some of those more doctrinaire socialist types later on as well were in the 20s and 30s, I guess, were people who had defected from the conservative party. These were what you might call Tory socialists. They were quite paternalistic, with a particular view about the role of the state in the economy and all the rest of it, and began to see Labour actually as their natural home and actually had very often the zeal of the comfort.
Speaker 1:We've talked a little bit about the part of credibility and the different elements that the leadership needs to square, come to terms with, whether it's the relationship with the public or the different factions within the party, trying to create some coherence there. But there's constraints to a leadership's ability to do that, isn't there, and you break it down into a few different categories, such as personal, institutional and so forth. So could we unpack some of those?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely yeah, I mean. Yeah, I mean there's the personal stuff, the actual leader themselves is pretty important and the character of the leader is pretty important too, their abilities, their talents and so on.
Speaker 2:I mean, neil Kinnick was a pretty good example. He was a very strong leader in many respects. Now it's ironic because his image in public became one who was very sort of weak and vacillating and dithery, if you like, but one of the things that he was very adept at. Certainly, once the left had finally collapsed in on itself as a result of the defeat of the minor strike and the collapse of resistance to controls over local authority spending that came in places like Lambeth in London and Liverpool and so on, once those had those caused great problems for Kinnick for a couple of years, but once those kinds of, if you like, last redoubts of the left began to fragment, he was very ruthless and very powerful. He had some great strengths. Yeah, one of the things that attracted many members to him and attracted attention to him when he was a young MP was his oratory and so on, although again, this is something that, in the search for and in the pursuit of respectability, became more and more. He became more and more repressed, as it were, and in many cases with Kinnick it's like his great strengths were also his great weaknesses. So he got the backing of the left and right. He was very effective in shifting the party's policy in really important areas, including defence to some extent, which was a very tricky brick to pull off. But it also that success that he had in doing that gave him the image, if you like, in the press as being inconsistent. So his very success in getting control of the party and transforming its programme and transforming its policy and even its principles to some degree was perhaps the was also the source of his weakness. But there was someone who wrote quite a bit about that period of the Labour Party's history said that yes, neil Kinnick changed his mind on everything, but only once it wasn't vacillating, he wasn't, even though that image was given to him. So yeah, I mean so the personal qualities of the leader is pretty important, but there are other factors as well the institutional factors I've described a little bit about the party's structure, if you like, and also the fact that there were these still pretty big divisions in the party between left and right, and perhaps one of the reasons why the party's transformation was quite slow in lots of ways was because he had these kind of disparate groups, if you like, to carry with him and the key perhaps to his success.
Speaker 2:One of the keys to his success was the ability to. I mentioned first of all those MPs that were sort of Ben's allies who then refused to vote for him in the deputy leadership election. That was the sort of genesis of what's called the soft left, and the soft left was basically those who were on the left of the party but perhaps were more willing to make accommodations with the right of the party. That saw, perhaps party unity is much more important and that rapprochement between the right and the soft left was the basis really of Kinect's sort of control over the party. It's very skillful really in being able to keep all of those elements together, but the fact that those constraints were there just made it harder. You had much more gingerly having to hold these together, particularly over things like policy on nuclear weapons. That was perhaps an illustrative point Whereas many on the soft left were willing to make quite a lot of accommodations and perhaps even change their own minds.
Speaker 2:In areas of social and economic policy, for instance, unilateralism was something that many of them were very unwilling to let go. People like David Blunkett, for instance, were very wedded to that policy. So one of the things that perhaps gave the party and Kinect a pretty persistent image of indecisiveness and so on was the inability really to shift policy in that area. And the reason that that inability was there was because there's all these coalitions of interests and so on to keep together and so there was quite a lot of fudging and things like that. In areas of policy, things like renationalization of public utilities like water and electricity and so on, those were still issues that were a bit contended.
Speaker 1:And to what extent was the change that was needed seen as one of policy that you've mentioned, so things on, whether it's nationalization, nuclear disarmament, some of those big pillar policies. To what extent was that? Or a change of style of labour, professionalizing of it, having more of a media operation and so forth?
Speaker 2:It was much more than the latter, I think. I mean actually the media and communication side of things. They really did transform and, as I said, 1983 was a shambles, whereas 1987 was incredibly professional, incredibly disciplined on the whole and a very strong, very well-organized campaign. It wasn't enough. They didn't shift the dial very much at all because it hadn't really changed those pretty deeply held, pretty ingrained public attitudes towards labour and their credibility as the public saw it.
Speaker 1:So we've talked about 1987 and that there was a small amount of progress made, but not enough. So there were missing ingredients, it seems, in the credibility of the Labour Party. What were some of those and how were some of those resolved to get towards labour being seen as credible?
Speaker 2:Certainly, one of the arguments was that 1987 had perhaps professionalized the party but what it hadn't really done is change very much politically.
Speaker 2:So yeah, one of the things that the party instituted very soon after the 1987 election was the policy review, which was this big exercise. And this was made possible, of course, because by this point the leadership had got control of the policy process. It had replaced the old labyrinthine NEC committees on policy with joint shadow cabinet NEC bodies that the leadership had much more control over, and then these became policy review committees dealing with different areas, key areas of Labour Party policy. So this was partly a genuine exercise in seeking to change the party's approach, but partly as well, I suppose, as a dimension of it, was a demonstration. It was more than just a PR exercise, but it was partly a demonstration that the Labour Party was changing and the leadership was driving this change as well. So, yeah, so that became a very important part of what was going on over the next few years and resulted in what the eventually Labour's programme for 1992 election was, which has seemed to be much more in tune with perhaps moderate European social democracy, which had never really been part of Labour's tradition.
Speaker 1:I was thinking about. We've talked a lot about Labour and talked a lot about their party credibility. What were the Conservatives? How were they reacting to the Labour Party making these changes? Was it very much? Well, we're still winning elections, so we're not particularly bothered what's going on over there. They can keep doing their own period of transformation and we'll focus on winning and governing. Or was there a Conservative reaction to some of the changes that were going on?
Speaker 2:I think what the Conservatives were able to do was to keep exploiting that shift that the Labour Party was making. So the fact that it was changing its mind on things, that Neil Pinnock was therefore weak and unreliable, and so on he was prone occasionally to the odd gap here and there as well. It didn't help. Particularly in. There was one particular dinner with journalists that I think he was under the impression was perhaps off the record in which he had to vacillate or make a mess of his own party's defence policy and so on.
Speaker 2:Things like that didn't help, and also the fact that, as I've mentioned, there was still this careful part of having to hold together perhaps different wings and factions of the party together, and the Conservatives were pretty much remorseless in exploiting some of those issues. Of course, the other thing is that they had the important advantage of incumbency and all the resources of the civil service. They also had the press on their side, or much of the press on their side, and they exploited all of those things, which meant that the Labour Party, like any opposition, really often struggles to get a proper hearing, and was this worse than perhaps any other opposition gets? Maybe, to some extent, I think there was a real step change in the way that the Conservative Party of that time used the resources they had politically and perhaps blurred some of the lines between the business of government and the business of party politics and probably set a tone that's continued since.
Speaker 1:Really, in that respect, Great and I know we've run long and we've darted about in a few different places because there's so much to go at.
Speaker 2:And really we could spend a couple of hours talking about any element of questions.
Speaker 1:But I think it's been really interesting. Is there anything that we've missed in the story, that you want to pick up and sort of mop up now or anything else to add?
Speaker 2:Well, I think actually there is an interest. Of course we haven't really got on to the appearance of Tony Blair and new Labour, which Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and so on were kind of involved, particularly around the time of the policy reviews and so on, very frustrated at the slowness and the pace of change and so on. But I mean that's a whole, perhaps that's a whole new chapter, a new volume in a way to the story.
Speaker 1:I guess if listeners want to go into a bit more depth, particularly in the last few years that we had less time on, what can they read of your work or other works?
Speaker 2:Well, the stuff that I would recommend. I would recommend, I mean in terms of, like the scholarly books, if you like, that I've drawn on. There's a book by Eric Shaw which is called the Labour Party Since 1979 Crisis and Transformation, and that covers a lot of the period we talked about today and that's often been my go-to book for a lot of this stuff. I mean, eric Shaw is a fantastic scholar of the Labour Party and covers a lot of ground and a lot of detail. So, yeah, I would thoroughly recommend Eric Shaw's work. I mean more for the later period, I suppose, but overlapping with that, but for how the Labour Party itself was changed, particularly during Blair's period as well. I would recommend a book called Building New Labour by Meg Russell, and oh, oh, yes, and with a lot of historical detail that perhaps we haven't covered here.
Speaker 2:There was a whole lot of stuff going on behind the scenes, perhaps before Kinneck came along, that perhaps helped this project, particularly amongst the trade unions. There was a group called the St Irmins group, named after a hotel they used to meet in which was, if you like, plotting the fight back of the Labour right, and this book is actually called Fight Back. It's by Diane Hayter, who's a longstanding Labour Party official and activist. She's in the House of Lords these days and Fight Back was I think it was her PhD, and she used her experience and contacts in the Labour movement. She was part of this fight back. If you like to write this fantastic piece of history and I would thoroughly recommend that book as well so that's really about how the traditional right fought back is.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. We'll put all those in the show notes, and some links to some of those would be great. So it just leaves me to say thanks so much, danny, for coming on.
Speaker 2:You're very welcome.
Speaker 1:It's been a great pleasure and lots of food for thought for listeners.
Speaker 2:Great. Thanks very much.
