David Kogan - Protest and Power: The Battle for the Labour Party

To my father Philip and my uncle Maurice, without whom neither book would have been written

Contents

This book is a sequel to The Battle for the Labour Party that, as a 24-year-old journalist, I co-authored with my uncle, Maurice Kogan, in 1981. The first three chapters of Protest and Power are based on that book, which was the first to look at the groups of the left that changed the Labour party in the 1970s. It has taken forty years to return to this subject. Id like to thank my aunt Ulla and cousins Peter and Tom for agreeing to the reissue of the first book by Bloomsbury and its use in this latest work. Just to keep it in the family, Id also like to thank my sister Helen and my father, Philip, from Kogan Page Ltd, my first publisher, for releasing the rights to Bloomsbury in the original book.

Aside from all this nepotism I have been incredibly lucky to have a coterie of well-connected people to help find interviewees and give me guidance. It was always my intention to talk to as wide a group as possible from all sides of the Labour movement and from the different elements of its history. I could not have reached them without a small group of friends from different wings of the party vouching for me and using their extensive contacts. I owe Rachel Kinnock, Scarlett MccGwire, Jon Lansman and David Triesman a huge vote of thanks. Nico Doherty was my researcher who did a great job of fact-checking and pointing out what Id missed. My business partner Sara Munds was, as always, a rock and critic.

A group of astute readers kindly gave their time to read various iterations of the manuscript, including Sara, Rachel and Scarlett who I asked to judge the writing, and Mark Thompson, Sue Bishop, Bill Turnbull, Roger Mosey, Leah Schmidt and Rebecca Kogan who all gave helpful feedback from their different perspectives. The final result and any errors are mine alone. I owe them all thanks for their efforts to make me a competent writer and historian.

When I conceived of this book, I sent Richard Charkin a short treatment which was then taken up by the redoubtable Stephanie Duncan at Bloomsbury. The manuscript was researched, written, edited and produced in a few months, with the late addition of the final chapters in February 2019 as we waited to see what would happen in the rapidly changing world of British politics in the run-up to Brexit. Stephanie and all the team at Bloomsbury, particularly Claire Browne, Kealey Rigden and Rachel Murphy, handled this difficult author with great skill and (mostly) patience. Its been a pleasure working with them.

Finally, my wife Leah and daughters Rebecca and Emma who have had to endure nine months of my latest obsession. The words Labour, Party and Book have now been banned from the house. As always, I am grateful for their love, tolerance and support.

In May 2015, Ed Miliband became the latest in a long line of Labour party leaders to lose a general election. Since 1945 only Clement Atlee, Harold Wilson and Tony Blair have won power from a sitting Conservative government and of the ten general elections since 1979, Labour has won only three, all under Blair. This record of failure, if applied to any other walk of life, would raise the fundamental question of why continue to fight a losing battle? For Labour, it asks whether it is a party of protest designed to be only a voice from opposition, commenting on the flaws and falsities of Conservative policy or a party of power?

I watched the 2015 general election results with two representatives of the Labour movement who exemplified the fractured history of the party; Jon Lansman, who had been a young activist and acolyte of Tony Benn in the brief period of New Left supremacy between 1978 and 1982, and David Triesman, who had been a trade unionist and then general secretary of the Labour party under Tony Blair. Both were committed Labour members, both lifelong anti-Tories, both tired of another Labour defeat and both completely at odds with one another about the past and future of the Labour party. Three months later, to the utter surprise of all three of us, Jon Lansman spearheaded the resurgence of the left with the election to the leadership of another Bennite veteran, Jeremy Corbyn, who in 2017 became the latest Labour party leader to lose a general election.

If the Conservative party is a modern version of the Borgias far more powerful when united and vicious when not then Labour is Game of Thrones , with kingdoms constantly fighting it out for different moments of supremacy, to the greater cost of the throne. Different factions have held power within the Labour party at different times with the fundamental struggle always being between those wishing to take a reformist approach to the social and economic institutions of Britain and those who take a much more radical view of managing the economy and using the State to introduce change. These competing groups have seen Labours pendulum swing from the centrist governments of the 1960s and 1970s, to the first manifestation of the New Left between 1978 and 1982, and back to the centre under New Labour in the 1990s. New Labour had thirteen years in government until 2010 when it was repudiated, first by the country and then by the party. In 2015 the left rose again, reincarnated by the veterans of the 1980s who used the new, powerful engine of social media to elect Jeremy Corbyn as leader. The left had won an unexpected second chance four decades after its last resurgence. This evolution has also been marked by the evolution of its own name. Ive called it the New Left in the 1970s to reflect its rise to prominence. After Tony Benns run for the deputy leadership in 1981, this group started to refer to itself as the Bennite left. Once it was cast into the wilderness in the 1980s, it became common usage to simply call it the left and so it has remained until today.

This book seeks to chronicle the history of the Labour party since the late 1970s. It is both an account of high political drama and a cautionary tale. Labour today is a party of over 500,000 members; transformed since Corbyns election, with 350,000 new members joining since 2015. The belief is that this huge growth in membership, driven by frustration with traditional Labour politics, means the party bears no resemblance to its 1979 incarnation; that its history is of no value in assessing its prospects in the future, and that everything is new. The opposite is true. The current leadership of the Labour party learned its politics in the 1970s and 1980s. In todays era of austerity, rage, social media, poverty and a Conservative government of moderate achievement, the left could realise its potential for victory and radical change. If it does, the veterans of those earlier campaigns will be in government.

In 1973, this all seemed impossible. The New Lefts long march may have started as a general protest against the Labour leadership, but it led to the realisation that power could be won boringly by using the arcane nature of the Labour party rulebook to force a radical new idea; that policy could be made not just by the parliamentary leadership, but by its activist membership through what it termed Labour party democracy. The rise of the New Left was founded on an attack on the previous eighty years of deference paid to the leadership of the party. It fought to ensure that the traditional bastions of authority writing the manifesto, securing the election of members of parliament and the selection of the leader should all be driven by the membership of the party outside parliament.