Dangerous Hero. Tom Bower
the Marxists’ threat to Britain’s social fabric, Conservative Central Office had appointed a professional investigator, Peter Shipley, to monitor relations between Labour MPs and the far left. Ever since James Callaghan had ended the listing of proscribed organisations, left-wing Labour MPs had joined lobby groups that were outwardly reputable, including the World Peace Organisation, but that were in fact secretly financed by Moscow. Among the British associations Shipley investigated was the Movement for Colonial Freedom (MCF), established by Fenner Brockway, a veteran Labour MP and a paid Soviet agent. In 1981 the MCF, managed by Tony Gilbert, a communist agent also controlled by Moscow, counted Corbyn a member. Corbyn met Gilbert frequently, but establishing his political sympathies towards Moscow was beyond Shipley’s remit. All he recognised was the far left’s flaws.
Zealous and serious, all those in the group around Corbyn appeared to march under the same banner, but they disagreed constantly about ideology. They were brothers-in-arms rather than soulmates, and as individuals showed no particular warmth towards each other. One exception was the relationship between Tony Benn and Corbyn. Benn’s radical socialism had polarised Labour. His ascent gave many Marxists and Trotskyites hope that the Labour Party they had abandoned during the 1960s was worth rejoining. To establish their shared ambitions, Tariq Ali, Reg Race and others met Benn in the Commons along with Corbyn, who said little, although everyone knew he could be relied upon to make the logistical arrangements for Benn’s imminent battle against Denis Healey in the election for Labour’s deputy leadership, the result of which was to be announced at the Labour Party conference in Brighton on 27 September 1981.
In the days before the vote, Corbyn assured Benn of victory. Combined with the defection of many Labour councillors to the SDP, the deselections and intimidation were certain, he predicted, to deliver the bulk of the constituency votes to the left. Corbyn also reckoned that Benn was assured of trade union support, including NUPE’s. He was right about the constituencies (81 per cent voted for Benn), but wrong about the unions. Although Benn could attract huge crowds – even during an unannounced stop at a motorway service station nearly a hundred people had gathered to hear him make an impromptu speech – he also inspired hatred. The Times columnist Bernard Levin titled him ‘Mr Zigzag Loon’, while Denis Healey dismissed him as ‘an artificial lefty’. The majority of the unions, including Haringey’s branch of NUPE, voted against Benn, whom they saw as an extremist, but to the moderates’ shock Healey’s overall victory was wafer-thin – 50.4 per cent against 49 per cent for Benn. Corbyn’s disappointment was intense. In the days following, Conservative Central Office became so convinced that the hard left was broken that Shipley’s contract was not renewed. The Tories were profoundly mistaken. On reflection, Benn’s narrow loss gave the left hope. In the nature of Corbyn’s long road, there was never defeat, just one more precursor to another start, another campaign.
‘What next?’ Corbyn asked. Wounded by his defeat but pleased by the party’s imminent split, Benn decided to host a monthly discussion group with Britain’s leading Marxists on Sunday evenings at his home in Holland Park, west London. Among those invited to what he later called the Independent Corresponding Society were Ralph Miliband (the father of David and Ed), university teachers of sociology Hilary Wainwright and Robin Blackburn, and Tariq Ali. In the hierarchy of the left, Benn and Ali had inherited the political skills of the ruling class. They were also intellectuals – self-disciplined agents of social engineering – which Corbyn was certainly not. While Corbyn sat meekly as their NCO, a team player rather than a manager, their ideological theorising passed over his head. But he found comfort in their descriptions of the best tactics against the capitalists.
In a series of debates, the group considered whether peaceful reform was possible through Parliament and what Tariq Ali called ‘class collaboration’ (the old Marxist notion that the bourgeoisie would eventually unite with the working class). Parliament only became relevant, Ali argued, when subjected to pressures from outside groups, and should eventually be abolished. Distrustful of elections, since the mid-1960s Miliband had preached that Parliament should be totally ignored. The masses, he argued, should disregard both the trade unions and the Labour Party, because socialism could be built only by armed struggle. ‘The elite always sells out,’ he told the gathering, and urged Benn to support revolution followed by the creation of democratic soviets, or communities.
This was not yet Corbyn’s thinking. Although energised by disdain for Parliament and impatient with liberal democracy, he accepted Benn’s philosophy that ‘to change the world you need to join the Labour Party and work from within’. By hard work, Benn said, Labour’s Methodist roots would eventually be replaced by true socialism with no need for violence. While Benn’s programme for socialism lacked the historical and cultural perspective of Michael Foot and other intellectual worshippers of the great socialist heroes, he was obsessed by the need for democracy within the party. Structures and machinery were fundamental to his programme to transform Labour, and then the country, into a Marxist idyll. Without studying either economics or finance, Corbyn absorbed Benn’s slogans about ‘equality’ and ‘justice’, and adopted the belief that ‘The role of private capital should be ended.’ Beyond that, he was intellectually adrift. ‘He didn’t understand the relevance of Marxist theory about markets or a planned economy,’ said one of the participating academics. ‘You can’t be an unconscious Marxist.’ Corbyn’s ignorance did not diminish his passion for Marxism: he was totally committed to the confiscation and redistribution of wealth to produce equality – but knowing the philosophical explanation was beyond him. As he retold stories in praise of Salvador Allende to the group – his principal contribution to their discussions – he came across as the most committed of Marxists. Strangely, he never mentioned his experiences in Jamaica or Guyana.
In later years, the impassioned discussions about Marxist dialectics and modern capitalism would be described as substitutes for Corbyn’s missed university education. They were hardly that. Nevertheless, he did learn from Benn and Miliband that socialism would be built by mobilising workers to take over the ownership and control of key industries, and the importance of organising people in their workplaces and housing estates to struggle against the capitalists. Thereafter, employees and their trade unions would negotiate government investment and production plans with the managers, rather than be subject to employers, bankers and Parliament. Tellingly, in 2017 Labour’s election manifesto would reflect Benn’s promise to give workers the statutory right to buy their own companies at discounted prices with taxpayers’ money. Thirty-six years earlier, in February 1981, Benn and Corbyn imagined Labour sweeping the Tories aside to implement just those policies. Their dream was encouraged in late 1981 by the miners’ threat to strike in protest at the government’s decision to close uneconomic pits. Fearing the same defeat as Heath, Thatcher surrendered. Soon after, Arthur Scargill was elected as the leader of the National Union of Mineworkers. The left felt further emboldened. Across the country, other militants similar to Corbyn were seizing control of Labour associations, galvanising the trade unions to replicate the miners’ industrial challenge to Thatcher, and giving the impression of engaging in subversion.
In 1982, Corbyn, now thirty-two, ranked among the leaders of the left in the capital. Recognised by the Economist as London Labour Briefing’s ‘general secretary figure’ and by the Hornsey Journal as joint editor of its newspaper, he boasted that the organisation was ‘moving the leadership of most London authorities well to the left’. Reflecting that influence, he was elected as Hornsey’s representative to Labour’s regional executive, appointed the chairman of its finance committee, and also sat on a number of the London party’s subcommittees. For the next council elections, he had ensured that half the Labour candidates in Hornsey were associated with London Labour Briefing. All of them echoed his call for ‘a full-frontal attack on the government’, and obeyed his directive that they would vote to ‘defy the law and the unelected judges’ to increase rates, cut bus fares and back a twenty-four-hour general strike. Even so, within Haringey’s Labour caucus his supporters were still a minority. In a vote in February 1982, the majority blocked his attempt to break the law and act outside ‘the constitutional mechanism of Parliament’. They feared, however, that their victory was temporary, and that the ‘anarchists’, led by Corbyn, would stage a coup. Their anxiety was noticed in Westminster. Acting on Foot’s instructions, his lieutenants purged the far left from the NEC. Right-wing Labour MPs, led