Dangerous Hero. Tom Bower
‘Corbyn built his own Berlin Wall and stood on the other side. He introduced hatred and divisions between us. He got it so that the left would not speak to the right, and after that battle we barely spoke. He hated anyone who didn’t subscribe to his view. He wanted them out.’ In the vote over the rates increase, Corbyn led his group of thirteen fellow-travellers to side with the Tories. The Labour moderates won – just. ‘They were pretty horrible people,’ recalled Young, but he did not dare discipline his rival. Two months later the group made a renewed attempt to oust Young, and again failed.
By then Corbyn’s relationship with Tony Benn had become unusually close. ‘Benn would come to love Corbyn as his son,’ reckoned George Galloway, a twenty-six-year-old Dundee-born Marxist and a rising star in the Scottish Labour Party. Corbyn was devoting much of his time to supporting the ambitions of Benn, who embodied the aspiration of many idealistic young socialists, for the party leadership. For Benn, corporate capitalism was incompatible with democracy, and formed the main threat to civilised life, a philosophy embraced by Corbyn. At Labour’s Blackpool conference in September 1980, Benn won a vote in favour of unilateral disarmament and cowed Jim Callaghan into allowing the mandatory reselection of MPs, a critical part of the strategy of ‘democratising’ the party. The left was gaining power.
Popular discontent about early Thatcherism created fevered excitement among Corbyn’s associates, who believed that the government was heading towards a cliff edge, with the cabinet divided over her abandonment of the post-war consensus. Losing public support, and even her customary self-confidence, Thatcher was expected by the left to capitulate to their demands. Instead, she turned defiant. At the Tory party conference she scolded: ‘To those waiting with bated breath for that favourite media catchphrase, the U-turn, I have only one thing to say: You turn if you want to. The lady’s not for turning.’ That phrase had been written for her by Ronald Millar, her speechwriter and a well-known playwright.
Five days later, on 15 October, Callaghan resigned as Labour leader, hoping that Denis Healey would be elected as his successor. If Tony Benn were chosen, Callaghan feared, Labour would be transformed into a genuinely revolutionary and unelectable party. There were three candidates: Benn, Healey, and that veteran of the democratic left, Michael Foot. Convinced that enough moderates had been expelled in the constituencies, Corbyn assured Benn that he would win, but Benn decided not to divide the left’s vote, and withdrew. As a result, Foot, who distrusted Benn as a disloyal, divisive and opportunist upstart, became leader. Healey’s defeat plunged the party into turmoil after Bennites won a majority on Labour’s National Executive Council (NEC). Led by European Commission president Roy Jenkins, a sophisticated former home secretary and chancellor, the moderates openly debated whether to quit Labour and set up a new political party. But for Corbyn and the left, Michael Foot was equally unacceptable, as a ‘prisoner of the right’.
The growing likelihood of Benn challenging Foot encouraged Tariq Ali, a member of the IMG and the author of, among other publications, Trotsky for Beginners, to abandon Trotskyism (in public at least) and, with Corbyn’s encouragement, apply to join his local Hornsey Labour Party. In practical terms, it made sense for Ali to jump aboard the Benn bandwagon and try to take over Labour from within. Although he condemned Benn’s politics as ‘bourgeois’, he could see how popular he was among voters. In Hornsey, Corbyn’s alignment with a well-known Trotskyite angered the moderates. What he called a ‘rainbow coalition’ was, in their opinion, outrightly subversive of the Labour Party. Even Toby Harris, a Corbyn ally and a leading member of the local branch, objected to Ali’s membership. Within weeks, Corbyn manoeuvred for Harris to be voted off the General Management Committee. Max Morris, a former communist and the chairman of the ward Ali joined, denounced Corbyn as Ali’s puppet. He too was threatened with expulsion by having his ward packed with new members, all Trotskyists. In response, a local party executive publicly condemned Corbyn for ‘the most extraordinary manipulation of the rules’.
On 13 May 1981, the Queen opened a new shopping centre in Haringey. Corbyn made sure he was absent – another move calculated to drive moderates out of his local party. The resulting tumult persuaded party headquarters to veto Ali’s membership application. Labour’s leaders, complained Corbyn, were ‘hell-bent on an unremitting war on the socialists in the party – they have no intention of disarming or taking power from the City’. In defiance, he accepted Ali’s second application to join the party, and persuaded Barbara Simon to issue him with a membership card. After all, he said, Ted Grant and Peter Taaffe, both members of the Trotskyite Militant Tendency, were members of the party in neighbouring Islington: the discrimination against Ali reflected outright political prejudice. This was not Corbyn the obedient class warrior on a treadmill – he had become engaged in a frontal war.
Immersed in ideological battles in Hornsey and Haringey, he was simultaneously engaged with violent strikers – his own council employees, who were hurling abuse at Haringey’s moderate councillors (such as remained). In the middle were the police – ‘a barrier to the people’s revolution’, as Corbyn saw them. Inside the town hall, he plotted with local trade union chiefs to challenge his party leaders with a new demand for a 43 per cent rates increase. ‘They object to rate rises,’ he said of his Labour opponents, ‘because they can’t get over them like they can fiddle corporation tax and their profits.’ The moderate Labour councillors retorted that he was pandering to the totalitarian left by ‘speaking out unashamedly in favour of terrorism’ and by leading the ‘anti-patriotic, anti-police faction’. From the Tory side, he was dubbed a ‘tinpot dictator’ for protecting what they dubbed ‘Jeremy’s Angels’ – Haringey’s corrupt council workers. The indictment was irrefutable: the district auditor had discovered that Haringey’s caretakers were submitting fraudulent overtime claims and the dustmen had stolen council property.
Corbyn’s response was to approve a triple pay bonus for dustmen. ‘While the Labour council remains in power,’ he said, ‘no trade unionist in its employ will want for anything.’ Equally, he ignored the consequences of his demand for rates increases, which had caused two major employers, Gestetner and Thorn Electrical, to move away from the borough. Corbyn did not comment. Instead, he tried again to topple Robin Young, but again failed to get a majority of the forty-two Labour councillors. In revenge, the moderates voted Corbyn off the planning committee. Characterised as a spendthrift, he even lost the vice chairmanship of the allotments committee. Undeterred, he continued to plot Young’s removal by deselecting more long-serving moderate councillors in favour of his own sympathisers. By early 1981, fourteen out of twenty-two new candidates in Haringey had been nominated by London Labour Briefing. Across the capital, at least twenty moderates had been deselected, and 130 Labour councillors had stepped down rather than face humiliation. Inevitably, Corbyn denied any part in orchestrating the purge. ‘We don’t draw up lists,’ he told the Hampstead & Highgate Express. Instead, he explained, the councillors selected were ‘politically experienced in community politics’ – ‘community’ being his euphemism for using the Labour Party to spread revolutionary socialism.
In March 1981 the skirmishes in Haringey, replicated across the country, finally provoked senior moderates within Labour to split. Exasperated by the activities of the far left, the anti-Marxists led by Roy Jenkins resigned from Labour and created the Social Democratic Party. Few believed the SDP had any chance of electoral success, but within months it had won both parliamentary seats and council elections. Corbyn and Benn blamed Michael Foot. Although the Tories criticised the Labour leader as a dangerous leftie, to Corbyn he was a paternalistic parliamentarian obsessed with ‘bureaucracy’ rather than mobilising the masses for revolution. Even worse, Foot ignored Benn’s protest against ‘the thought police’ in the party, and ordered the expulsion of Trotskyites, Marxists and other entryists. Among the first casualties were the editors of Liverpool’s Militant newspaper, although their expulsion did not undermine Derek Hatton and his fellow Trotskyists on the city council intent, like Corbyn, to challenge the government.
In April 1981, anti-police riots erupted in Brixton – home of the largest police station in the capital outside Scotland Yard – sparked by disaffected black youths living in deprived areas. The riots spread to Liverpool and Manchester. After a mob outside a police station yelled ‘Kill, kill,’ Corbyn condemned the ‘capitalist police’ and attacked the media’s reporting of the riots as