A New Leadership? - Part 1 of 11

Keir Starmer's slogan for the Labour Party, he now presides over is “A New Leadership”. No part of this description is accurate. It is neither new nor leadership. 

Starmer does not represent anything new. On the contrary, he represents simply a return to the old Labour Party as it existed under Neil Kinnock in the 1980's. Like Kinnock, Starmer is a centre-right politician posing as centre-left, and acting to pave the way for the return of the hard right, as Kinnock did in opening the door to Blair. 

I have recently gained access to my archives that have been boxed up in storage for more than ten years. It contains useful documents from the 1980's, which shed light on the events that took place then, and which have their echo in the events of today. 

In 1981, I was elected on to the Executive Committee of Stoke District Labour Party with a vote that overwhelmed those of everyone else. At the same time, I was elected Assistant Secretary of the DLP, with Andrew Dobrasczyc being elected Secretary. 

At the time, there were lots of members of revolutionary groups active in the area, many of them inside the LP itself. For a time, even some members of the SWP joined in order not to be excluded from where all the political action was taking place. This was an era of forming broad organisations. In 1979, the organisation I belonged to, the International Communist League, whose paper was Workers' Action, created the Socialist Campaign for Labour Victory, along with the Socialist Charter group, whose paper was The Chartist. It brought in others on the Left including one Jeremy Corbyn, as well as people like Ken Livingstone. The SCLV created a new paper, Socialist Organiser. 

As is the way of these things on the Left, it was a short-lived unity. Socialist Organiser became the paper of the I-CL, replacing Workers' Action. And, when the I-CL fused with the WSL of Alan Thornett, it became the paper of the new WSL. Many of those that had been part of the SCLV, in London, but who moved away from Socialist Organiser, set up London Labour Briefing. This did not stop supporters of Socialist Organiser from continuing to work with LLB, or others in the following period, or in the creation of a range of other broad organisations. So, when in the early 1980's, a number of local Labour Briefing groups were organised around the country, to mimic LLB, the idea of creating a North Staffs Labour Briefing naturally arose. 

In fact, it was not that natural. Most of what passed for the soft left in Stoke, at the time, was generally very timid. A majority were middle aged people, often people who had managed to congregate in a couple of ward parties where they had managed to take control, and where some of them had got elected as Councillors against the opposition of the Right. A number of previous attempts to create Left caucuses had been made, but, as soon as the Right got notice of it, and the local right-wing press seized on it, this timid left shrank back. The fact that, in the Newcastle under Lyme Constituency we had the so called “Hammer of the Left”, John Golding, made this timid left, even more apprehensive, and, during this period, there was barely a week went by when Golding was not commenting in the Evening Sentinel, the local rag, that he was going to get me expelled. He never did. 

In my own constituency of Stoke North, the MP was John Forrester, who was a Stalinist, who had left the Communist Party after the 1956 Hungarian Uprising, but who brought all of his Stalinist bureaucratic methods with him, in exercising a close grip on the local party. Like Denis Healey, he made the move from Stalinism to right-wing Labourism seamlessly. As a result, the party was effectively an empty shell, until, in the mid to late 1970's, a growing number of young revolutionaries and Leftists managed to begin to recruit new members. (See: Pits, Pongs and Politics)

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