Dangerous Hero. Tom Bower
criticisms bounced off Corbyn, as did the endless complaints of Haringey’s residents. Their list was damning. Parents were angered when a go-slow by council bus drivers, supported by Corbyn, left their handicapped children stranded at home; the homeless protested that his refusal to accept government money for rebuilding houses meant that 1,500 council properties had been left unoccupied; a quarter of the council’s street cleaners were permanently absent on ‘sick leave’; buildings had been flooded after the rubbish on Haringey’s unswept streets had blocked the drains; and a Labour group report had exposed a ‘bonus racket’ rewarding council employees for not working. Haringey’s councillors admitted that they had lost control of their employees, mostly members of NUPE. Corbyn expressed no regret. Management and detail were of no concern to him. Nor was he sympathetic to the anger of white applicants for council jobs that Bernie Grant’s aggressive campaign against racism intentionally discriminated against them. In his world, immigrants’ interests were paramount. They were the victims of oppression. Any who disagreed, including Haringey’s disgruntled residents, were the enemy. Just as he was unable to deal with his own personal life, he was unable to resolve many causes of other people’s misery. He was an activist, not a manager willing to immerse himself in detail to improve the lives of all Haringey’s inhabitants.
In spring 1982, as part of his single-minded quest to seize power, Corbyn was elected chairman of the Hornsey Labour Party, and immediately reignited his battle against the moderates. On 24 March a party meeting erupted in physical violence as he once again attempted to ram through Tariq Ali’s membership, despite the opposition of the national executive. Moderates erupted in anger that a notorious Trotskyist, contrary to the rules, was even notionally admitted to the party. Blows were exchanged, and eyewitnesses reported that ‘bedlam spilled out on to the street’. In the midst of these and other fights, Corbyn theatrically presented Ali with a party membership card. His conduct, according to George Page, London’s Labour Party leader, was ‘the most extraordinary study of bias and manipulation of rule and customs I have ever witnessed’. Corbyn wore that criticism as a badge of pride. After the national council elections in May, he believed, Britain would be one step closer to Michael Foot’s election as prime minister. Margaret Thatcher, he was convinced, could not recover from the deep unpopularity she had attracted during the previous months, following cabinet splits and an economic crisis – private polling by the Conservatives showed the Tories’ support had fallen to just 20 per cent. ‘The Tory vote will disappear,’ Corbyn predicted, ‘and I think we shall win.’ In his manifesto for re-election in Haringey he pledged ‘the smashing of the capitalist state’ – not an unusual declaration in those fevered times. ‘I don’t have any personal ambitions,’ he added. That was untrue, and struck his council colleagues as laughable.
Six weeks later, after Labour had won the council elections, Corbyn moved once again to topple Robin Young, his key enemy among the moderates. On the fourth attempt, having at last gathered sufficient support after a succession of purges and deselections, he was successful. ‘I was persuaded to go,’ Young admitted ruefully. ‘They were a funny lot, the hard left.’ Mindful of the impending nomination of Labour’s parliamentary candidate in Islington North, Corbyn next marshalled Haringey’s twenty hard-left Labour councillors against the remaining thirteen moderates, and appointed Angela Greatley, an aspiring quangoist, as the council’s ‘patsy’ leader. He himself returned to chairing the uncontroversial planning committee, and awaited the next general election with confidence. The invasion of the Falkland Islands on 2 April dashed his hopes.
Military dictators had ruled Argentina since 1976. To crush the opposition, thousands of civilians had disappeared in the so-called ‘dirty war’. Some victims, including socialists, had been pushed out of military helicopters over the Atlantic, their babies and young children then handed to childless supporters of the regime. By any measure, Corbyn should have opposed General Leopoldo Galtieri’s dictatorship, and welcomed the opportunity to liberate oppressed Argentines. Instead, he opposed Margaret Thatcher’s dispatch of a naval task force to recapture the islands as a Tory plot. In his hatred of America and Britain, he supported anyone who was their enemy – Stalin, Mao, Castro and now Galtieri. According to Corbyn’s logic, while he did not condone the dictators’ murders, they were not to blame for all the excesses that had occurred under their rule. That was the fault of the imperialists – America and Britain – for subjugating the poor. In Galtieri’s case, his crimes could be excused as the price for liberating the Falklands from Britain.
Regardless of the islanders’ overwhelming wishes to continue the legal settlement established in 1833 that the Falklands were part of the UK, Corbyn demanded that Thatcher ‘pursue peace’ and negotiate their surrender to the Argentinean dictator. ‘We resent the waste of unemployed men who are being sent to the Falklands to die for Thatcher and Galtieri,’ he stated in a motion tabled in Haringey council, and continued, ‘A tide of jingoism is sweeping the country … It is a nauseating waste of money and lives.’ The ‘grotesque’ war, he said, was conceived to keep the Tories’ ‘money-making friends in business’. To explain why he ignored the rights of both the Falklanders and the Argentines to live in freedom, he declared that Thatcher was ‘exploiting the situation’. Allowing people to live under military tyranny, he said, was preferable to removing despots by force. The cost of the war would be better spent on housing, hospitals and wages in Britain, or to feed the starving in Africa. He saw no contradiction in his attack on the British armed forces rather than the Argentine dictator. ‘He’s always lived according to his principles,’ explained Chris Mullin, a sympathetic Bennite MP. To Corbyn’s dismay, in the Commons Michael Foot supported the government, and in a bravura speech blamed the ‘guilty men’ at the Foreign Office for the Falklanders suffering Argentinean oppression. Only a handful of Labour MPs voted against the dispatch of the task force.
In Haringey, the consequence of rule by Corbyn was an accelerated exodus of businesses and residents. The escapees feared yet another 40 per cent rates hike to fund another 50 per cent increase in administrative staff. Among the 4,500 additional employees were two ‘anti-nuclear officers’, charged with ‘promoting peace’ in the borough. On Corbyn’s initiative, Haringey had been twinned with Grenada, then led by a Marxist government; and with his encouragement another large group of gypsies had moved onto the site of a pony club for handicapped children. The gypsies used the field as a dump for commercial waste. ‘It’s become a filthy rat-infested mess,’ complained Robin Young, ‘and the source of dysentery among schoolchildren.’ A year later, the council paid over £45,000 (£90,000 today) to clear the site. Once again, Corbyn refused to apologise. ‘The decision not to evict the people,’ he told the council, ‘was correct.’
Haringey had become Britain’s highest-spending local authority, with the highest rates for residents and businesses. Its few remaining moderate Labour councillors, angry about the chaos, appeared powerless. Outraged by the discovery of another £1 million fraud executed by council employees who were supervised by the Public Works Committee formerly chaired by Corbyn, they were shocked by his reaction to a bomb explosion outside the local Labour Party headquarters which had severely damaged the door and outside wall. ‘He blamed the police for not being more vigilant,’ said a resident about the unsolved crime. ‘That’s the same Corbyn who criticised the police presence in Haringey as a threat to ethnic minorities.’ The critic was referring to his condemnation of the ‘increasingly repressive nature of London policing’. The blast exposed a familiar characteristic of Corbyn’s management: there was no correlation between recruitment and efficiency. Although he had presided over a record number of new members joining the party, the constituency was mired in debt and there was no money to repair the bomb damage. The party was forced to close the building.
That December, Corbyn faced a moment of reckoning when Haringey’s Labour moderates threatened to join with the Tory opposition to defeat his latest proposal to increase spending. ‘You are like little Hitlers,’ the Hornsey Journal accused Corbyn, Bernie Grant and their cabal. ‘Like him, you will eventually be rejected by forces of democracy.’ To Corbyn’s good fortune, the newspaper lacked the resources to publish a muckraking exposé. Nor could the editor penetrate the wall of secrecy surrounding Corbyn, who always refused to speak to the ‘capitalist press’.
The major obstacle to Corbyn’s ambition to become a parliamentary candidate