Dangerous Hero. Tom Bower
– shipbuilding, car manufacturing and engineering – had crippled the economy. Continental Europe was thriving while Britain tottered on amid shortages of food and fuel. Exports drained away, and foreign competitors grabbed Britain’s traditional markets. After devaluing the pound in 1967, the Labour government was accused of creating ‘the British disease’ – a growing trade deficit, low productivity, high unemployment, a ballooning national debt, an exodus of talented professionals and, above all, industrial anarchy. Under Wilson, eleven million working days were lost to strikes in 1970 (compared to 900,000 in 2017). Once Wilson abandoned his attempts to control trade union militancy, the electorate had turned to Heath to prevent left-wing union leaders from destroying the country.
Heath, however, fudged his party’s manifesto pledge to unravel the socialist economy imposed by Labour governments since 1945. Airlines, the telephone network, road haulage, the steel industry, utilities, coalmines and the railways were all state-owned. Whitehall’s civil servants not only managed the economy but also, through joint committees with trade unionists and employers, industrial production, the regulation of incomes and prices in shops. Privatisation would eventually show that the public-owned industries were largely run for the benefit of their employees. Nationalised industries were 40 per cent overmanned, and costs were inflated by about 20 per cent; but after two years in government Heath lacked the conviction and the courage to destroy the consensus accepted by both Tories and Labour since the war. Besieged by strikes, Heath faced in particular Arthur Scargill, a Marxist miners’ trade union leader who had called out his members to strike for a 40 per cent pay rise. ‘We took the view we were in a class war,’ said Scargill. ‘We were out to defeat Heath.’ Thousands of miners confronted and outnumbered police. ‘This conflict,’ wrote Heath, ‘was the most vivid, direct and terrifying challenge to the rule of law that I could ever remember.’ Knowing that the miners held the country to ransom because its electricity supplies depended on coal, Heath panicked. In his search for a way to escape, he appointed Lord Wilberforce, a senior judge, to review the miners’ pay. Wilberforce decided in just three days that the 16.5 per cent pay rise they had been offered was insufficient, and that they should receive 20 per cent. Heath instantly capitulated, despite knowing full well that every other union would demand similar pay rises. In 1972, twenty-three million working days were lost to strikes.
Corbyn and his new friends rejoiced in Heath’s surrender. It was a tumultuous moment in the Labour Party. Britain’s trade union leaders, some of them on Russia’s payroll, were sabotaging the economy in order to topple the government. The outrage among the Tories only increased the pleasure among the Young Socialists gathered at Skegness.
The infiltration of Labour had been advocated by Lenin. ‘Support the Labour Party as the rope supports the hanged man,’ he had told Sylvia Pankhurst, who had hosted the first meeting of the British Communist Party. Lenin taught that the far left should gain political power in Britain by taking control of the Labour Party. Once the communists commanded the party, and then became elected to government, they could destroy capitalism. Thus battle was joined. In the early days, democratic socialists expelled communists and Trotskyites from Labour, but during the 1960s Harold Wilson inexplicably relaxed the controls, and ‘entryists’, as they were known, were allowed to join the party. Constituency parties were infiltrated by Trotskyites, who then deselected any social democrats. Effectively, a separate hostile party was flourishing within Labour, and more and more communists were elected as Labour MPs. Their object was to use the democratic machinery of Labour to undermine democracy. The result was toxic. In February 1973, in the wake of Heath’s surrender to the miners, Wilson succumbed to left-wing pressure to sign a ‘compact’ for the party’s next election manifesto. To win workers’ support, Labour pledged to extend nationalisation, prevent Britons taking money abroad, impose a rent freeze, enforce price controls on private business, finance widespread food subsidies, and push through a ‘large-scale redistribution of Britain’s income and wealth’ – precisely the programme that Corbyn and the Venesses saw as the first step towards their Marxist ideal.
In that era, the distinction between Marxists and Trotskyites was important. Refashioned as the ‘new left’ to separate themselves from Stalin’s crimes, the Marxists viewed history through the lens of the class struggle. Britain’s evolution into a truly socialist society, they believed, would start with a communist state under the dictatorship of the proletariat. British Marxists like Keith Veness spoke about a ‘revolution’ to assert the proletariat’s control, but without the bloodshed that had marked events in Russia in 1917.
Trotskyites were more aggressive. Leon Trotsky had led the Red Army after 1917 to defeat the counter-revolutionary tsarist White Army supported by Winston Churchill and the British government. Thereafter, ignoring the mass starvation caused by the Bolsheviks’ forced collectivisation of agriculture, he campaigned to spread the communist revolution across Europe and then the whole world. His militarist internationalism and belief in fostering a permanent international revolution were opposed by Stalin, who wanted first to consolidate his takeover of power in Russia. In turn, Trotsky accused Stalin of obstructing the proper course towards global communism by refusing to encourage the working class to agitate and cause unrest in every country. In 1929 Trotsky, fearing for his life, fled Russia. He settled in Mexico, from where he urged his followers to engage in a permanent struggle. Unwilling to be threatened by an ideological foe, Stalin arranged for Trotsky’s assassination in August 1940. His death galvanised his disciples to recruit members, organise meetings, constantly debate, and to secure power wherever and however possible. Organisation, Corbyn was told by Veness, was paramount. Salvador Allende’s election in Chile was a crucial lesson for Marxists: it showed that they could win elections even in capitalist democracies. The vital ingredient was to have an effective political machine.
Soon after that weekend, Corbyn prepared to move to London. At his mother’s suggestion he had enrolled at the Polytechnic of North London in Holloway to study trade unionism. He barely entered the building before he abandoned the course. ‘I was utterly bored,’ he would say later, but he knew that academic work was beyond his abilities. To conceal his failure, he and his brother Piers would in later years craft a story of defiance: how he had walked out of the polytechnic after an argument with a lecturer about his course. Others knew the truth. Val Veness was working at the left-wing newspaper Tribune when Corbyn appeared in her office along with a friend, John Pickering. He had just arrived in London, he said, and having rented a bedsit in Islington was looking for work. ‘He never mentioned the poly,’ she recalled.
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In his search for employment, Corbyn aimed low. An advertisement placed by the National Union of Tailors and Garment Workers for an assistant in its research department attracted just one reply – Corbyn’s – and he got the job. Based first at the union’s headquarters in Kensington, then at Hoxton in the East End, he worked directly for Alec Smith, who was the national officer for the union from 1959 until he became its general secretary in 1974. In 1973 Smith was negotiating with employers at the Retail Bespoke Tailoring Wages Council, at a time when the industry in Britain was declining as production moved to Asia. Out of 112,901 union members, just 7,220 lived in London, the majority of them women. Working under Smith was Mick Mindel, a Jewish communist and the union’s representative at the World Jewish Congress. Mindel articulated his members’ passionate support for Israel, reflecting the fact that most of their employers were also left-wing Jews. Like Mindel, they looked to communism to abolish injustice and prejudice, including anti-Semitism. Mindel and many of the union’s members became Corbyn’s first encounter with Jews.
In Corbyn’s version, although only an assistant in the research department, he personally challenged the employers to recover members’ unpaid wages after their bosses ‘had mysteriously gone bankrupt just before Christmas, owing their workers a lot of wages and not paying National Insurance and all this kind of thing. Scumbags, actually. Crooks. My job was to try and chase these people through Companies House and so on.’ According to Corbyn, he forensically examined the companies’ accounts in order to verify phoney bankruptcies. That notion is contradicted by Alec Smith, and also by the trade union’s