Narrow it might have been, but the victory regenerated the cause of violent republicanism. An incarcerated criminal had been elected to the House of Commons. It was not just the Ulster Unionists
who were horrified.
The Times
argued in its leader column that the Commons should immediately disqualify him on the grounds that his remaining prison sentence exceeded the length of the
parliament to which he had been elected.
39
In the event, there was no need to risk anything so questionable. In May 1981, Sands died after sixty-six
days of refusing food. Parliament had never experienced one of its elected representatives ending his life in this way before. ‘A convicted criminal,’ Thatcher told his nominal
colleagues in the Commons, ‘he chose to take his own life. It was a choice that his organization did not allow to many of its victims.’
40
This was not how Ulster’s enraged nationalist communities saw it. At his funeral, Sands was conveyed by masked paramilitaries in an IRA-decorated coffin and followed by
a hundred thousand mourners. His end sparked several days of severe rioting
in Belfast, resulting in two deaths, a supportive march in Liverpool, and the offering of marks of
respect and remembrance all over the world. The extent to which his self-proclaimed martyrdom was a propaganda coup for Irish republicanism could be measured in the dollars American citizens poured
into supporting the IRA’s front organizations. Their generosity fuelled a gun-and bomb-buying spree. Sands’s demise also ensured a by-election which granted him a second victory in
death. The replacement candidate, his former agent, even managed to increase Sands’s majority.
After another nine inmates had followed Sands’s example, the IRA called off its hunger strike campaign on 3 October 1981, in response to the appeals of priests and relatives who pleaded
for the lives of those concerned. It had served its publicity purpose. Three days later, Jim Prior, the new Northern Ireland secretary, announced government concessions which included the right of
H-block prisoners to wear their own clothes after all. The IRA’s response was to intensify its terror campaign. On 10 October, a nail-bomb was detonated on a coach carrying Irish Guards at
Chelsea Barracks. Twenty-three soldiers were wounded. Two civilians were ripped apart by the six-inch nails that went flying into them. Days later, there was another fatality from a bomb planted in
an Oxford Street Wimpy bar. The following month, the Ulster Unionist MP for Belfast South was shot dead while he was holding a surgery for his constituents.
Amid the escalating violence, Sinn Fein emerged as a major political party and, for the first time since the Troubles began, threatened to supplant the non-violent SDLP as the major nationalist
voice in Northern Ireland. The government’s response to such developments came in the form of intensifying existing ministerial and official collaboration between Dublin and London, which was
duly beefed up and christened the ‘Inter-Governmental Council’. This approach assumed that better communication meant enhanced understanding. However, the Irish Republic was also going
through a period of instability, with neither Fine Gael’s Dr Garret Fitzgerald nor his Fianna Fáil opponent, Charles Haughey, managing to form a long-term administration. Haughey had
been dismissed from a previous Irish government in 1970 over allegations of involvement in IRA gun-running. His overconfident announcements about the influence he was bringing to bear upon Mrs
Thatcher succeeded only in irritating unionists and, in any case, he quickly showed himself at odds with London’s plans for Ulster. What the Northern Ireland secretary, Jim Prior, proposed
was a ‘rolling devolution’ of responsibilities held by Whitehall back to Ulster, with the creation of a Northern Ireland Assembly whose powers would increase the more its rival parties
could find agreement to work constructively together. The assembly would be elected by proportional representation in order to prevent the unionist majority achieving an absolute majority. The
response from Dublin was as
hostile as that from nationalist spokesmen in the province. When elections to the 78-seat body were held in October 1982, the Ulster Unionists and
the Democratic Unionists (DUP) won forty-seven seats, the SDLP won fourteen, the non-aligned Alliance Party ten seats and Sinn Fein five. The decision of the Sinn Fein and SDLP members to refuse to
take their seats effectively torpedoed the assembly before it had achieved anything. The following year, the unionists also called time on it. Once again, the province’s future appeared to
have reached an impasse.
It seemed that everywhere the politics of confrontation was triumphing.
The Democracy of the Committed
Talk of ‘splits’ was nothing new in the Labour Party. Internecine bitterness, personal hatreds and heroic principled stands had provided Labour with some of the
most dramatic moments in its history – Ramsay MacDonald’s breakaway National Labour Party in 1931, the expulsion of Stafford Cripps and Aneurin Bevan in 1939, and the battles of Bevan
and Hugh Gaitskell with Labour’s unilateral nuclear disarmers in the late fifties and early sixties being only some of the most memorable. Issues and personalities changed, but the essential
fault line between committed socialists and liberal progressives remained. Those who regarded Clause Four of the party’s constitution as the cornerstone upon which to build in government felt
let down by the failure of successive Labour administrations to go more than part of the way towards honouring the solemn commitment dating back to 1917 (and extended in 1929) to ensure the
‘common ownership [nationalization] of the means of production, distribution and exchange’. For socialists of this carat, the state was the solution. But it also seemed to be the curse,
for whenever Labour politicians actually occupied the offices of state the experience seemed to have a moderating effect on them. Harold Wilson had been elected Labour’s leader as a candidate
of the left only to move towards the centre when in power. Delegates at the 1973 party conference voted to mandate him to nationalize twenty-five of Britain’s biggest companies. He simply
ignored the demand. His successor behaved similarly. Given the chance to impose import tariffs and stringent exchange controls during the crisis of 1976, Callaghan instead preferred the public
spending cuts demanded by the IMF and implemented by the Chancellor, Denis Healey.
What the left wing interpreted as weakness or betrayal was defended by the party’s right wing as sensible and realistic. And in each clash, the latter was able to deploy a winning argument
– that the floating voter found a moderate Labour Party more attractive than a red-blooded socialist one. The left could dream, but only the right could govern. It was defeat in 1979 that
removed the moderates’ aura of electoral success. For, if elections could only be won on the centre ground, how was it that Thatcher, despite being
clearly on the right
of her party, had landed a 43-seat majority? On this interpretation of events, Labour moderates were complacently misreading the mood. The country was becoming radicalized.
The left’s analysis was perceptive in so far as it recognized that the Keynesian legacy had been tarnished by a decade of stagflation and that there was a hunger for new solutions.
Thatcher and the monetarist think tanks made the running in the Conservative Party at least partly because they displayed fresh thinking, unlike the Tory ‘wets’ who suffered from being
identified with the failures and retreats of the Heath government. Like the Thatcherites, it was primarily Labour’s left that offered dramatic proposals to meet the new challenges presented
by a worsening recession and the divisive attitude of the government. By contrast, Labour’s moderates appeared to be bereft of ideas, merely offering a return to the policies they had
implemented in office during the 1970s and upon which they had lost the 1979 election. Not only was British politics now animated by a level of ideological division greater than at any time since
the 1930s, soaring unemployment and the deep unpopularity of the Thatcher government offered the best opportunity that committed socialists were likely to get to overturn the capitalist system. The
extraordinary bitterness and hatred that disfigured the Labour Party in the first years of the 1980s owed much to the left’s sense that its hour had come and that the possibility of victory
must not be frittered away yet again.
The left’s strategy to seize control of the Labour Party obviously involved replacing Callaghan with a leader more sympathetic to their way of thinking. But they were plotting more than
regicide. What they planned was a revolution, not a palace coup. For not only did they want a new leader, they wanted a new constitution to govern him. Never again should the leader be able to
exercise authority in a way that conflicted with the wishes of the rank and file of the Labour movement. In order to achieve this, the left articulated two basic demands. The first was to change
the method by which both the leader and deputy leader were elected. This had always been the sole prerogative of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) – in other words, Labour’s MPs.
Instead, the left believed the leadership should be determined by an electoral college made up of MPs, trade union leaders and constituency activists. The exact proportion of votes accorded to each
of these three estates could be debated, but once the arithmetic was settled it should be accepted as final. The second demand concerned who got to write the general election manifesto. The
existing system accorded the privilege of laying out the proposed legislative programme to a joint committee of the party leader and the party’s governing body, the National Executive
Committee (NEC). Experience had shown that in reality this allowed the leadership to have an effective veto over the more radical prose usually proffered by the NEC. The left’s demand was
that in future only the NEC could
frame the election manifesto. A subsequent Labour prime minister and his Cabinet would be bound to implement it, whether they liked it or
not.
The revolution was not limited to bending the leader’s power to the wider Labour movement’s will. The same principle guided the left’s demand for the ‘mandatory
reselection’ of all MPs. Under the existing rules, paid-up members of Labour constituency associations (known as the CLPs – constituency Labour parties) could stop their local MP or
candidate from standing again at the next election by passing a vote of no confidence in him or her, and if the NEC found no procedural anomaly the local association could then proceed to select a
new candidate. However, no-confidence votes were generally difficult to secure unless the MP was guilty of a major personal transgression. Mandatory reselection made it much easier for local
activists to ditch their MP on policy rather than personal grounds because it ensured that at least once during each parliament the MP, no matter how spotless his or her reputation, would have to
face a new selection contest in which an alternative candidate could compete. The effect of this would be to make MPs less like elected representatives and more like delegates, toeing whatever line
the activists in their constituency association demanded of them, for fear they would be deselected if they showed independent judgement of their own. It threatened to turn the traditional
Westminster model on its head and usher in activist-led caucus politics.
The underlying demands for an electoral college to determine the leader, for the NEC to write the party manifesto and for mandatory reselection of all MPs were egalitarian and decentralizing
and, as such, philosophically attractive to many committed socialists. But it also helped that all three demands would have the effect of increasing the leverage of the left wing over the right
wing. The left could not be sure of victory if the leadership election remained in the hands of the Parliamentary Labour Party, where the arithmetic between left, right and those in between was
tight. By contrast, the other institutions of the Labour movement were visibly shifting leftwards. Between annual conferences, the party’s governing body was the NEC, whose membership was
elected by union leaders and constituency associations. Throughout the 1970s, the proportion of moderates and right-wingers on the NEC was whittled down, so that by the decade’s end they
seldom accounted for more than five out of twenty-nine members. The majority of motions at the annual party conference were determined by trade union leaders who cast block votes proportionate to
the size of their union’s membership (although only the union leaders, not the members, cast votes in the conference). As the Winter of Discontent demonstrated, the most powerful unions were
increasingly led by those with little deference to moderate Labour Party leaders or by those who were too ineffectual to restrain their own more militant subordinates.
The election of Arthur Scargill as president of the National Union of Mineworkers in 1981 was symptomatic of the left’s success in winning over the union high
command. A similar shift to the left was also apparent in the local constituency associations. In the early 1970s, the Labour Party had seven hundred thousand members nationwide. A large proportion
were traditional blue-collar workers, supportive of Labour values without necessarily being energized by the framing of policy initiatives. Disillusion with Labour’s record in power during
the 1970s caused the national membership to shrink to around two hundred and fifty thousand by the decade’s end. Of these, an estimated twenty-five thousand were active participants in their
constituency associations and other party bodies. This smaller, tighter group of activists was far more interested in policy formulation and, rather than working in traditional industries, were
often teachers, social workers or local government officers with articulate and far more radical views.
1
These were the sort of activists who were
most likely to attend MPs’ mandatory reselection meetings and to select themselves as delegates to the party conference, where their votes would be counted in the proposed electoral college
for the leadership.