How Politics Really Happens

Peter Hitchens writes:

The real political changes of the past 25 years or so have not taken place at general elections, but within the political parties.

First, there was the destruction of ‘Old Labour’ in the early 1980s by the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy and the Labour Co-ordinating Committee. These bodies, using such tactics as mandatory reselection, got rid of or drove into the SDP many Labour MPs who were morally and socially conservative. At national level, left-wing factions in the big trades unions, marshalled by the Communist party’s skilled and well-connected industrial organisation, won victories on policy (particularly defence and foreign policy) out of all proportion to the number of Communists and Communist sympathisers in the union movement.

So, in the years following Jim Callaghan’s general election defeat in 1979, the Labour Party was transformed, permanently, from top to bottom. Much of this was the work of Communist sympathisers, who had since the days of Lenin supported Labour ‘as the rope supports the hanged man’, and encouraged sympathisers to join Labour and stay out of the CP, the better to penetrate the Labour Party at the highest and lowest levels. Much less was the work of various kinds of Trotyskyists, but the media were obsessed with the insignificant role of the ‘Militant Tendency’ a front organisation and code name for a tiny Trotskyist sect called the Revolutionary Socialist League, mainly concentrated in Liverpool. A major Communist Party, of the kind which operated in France and Italy, was not what Lenin and the Comintern wanted. They had long sought to take over the Labour Party instead.

Old Labour knew all about this, and the party’s organisation until the 1970s was well-trained in detecting and frustrating Communist party infiltration. William Rodgers’s Campaign for Democratic Socialism successfully defeated attempts to win Labour for the (pro-Soviet) cause of unilateral nuclear disarmamament. Ex-Communists, such as the Electricians’ Union leader Frank Chapple (he left over the crushing of the Hungarian uprising in 1956) had no illusions at all about the CP’s methods and fought them without mercy (the CP never forgave him for exposing pro-Communist ballot-rigging in the union).

But these forces were weakening by the early 1980s, and the New Left of the CLPD and the LCC bypassed the old defences. There were also the new ‘Euro-Communists’, of Marxism Today, Communist Party members who had forsaken the rigid Stalinism of the old party and argued instead for a flexible, post Soviet, Gramscian approach – cultural and social revolution, not Bolshevism.  Some of the cleverer Trotskyists had found their way to the same place. These became the nucleus of Blairism, which was never ‘Right-Wing’ at all. Labour’s Right Wing was by then completely dead.  The New Left were bitterly hostile to the noisier, less subtle Trotskyists (such as Militant) and were happy to see Militant crushed by Neil Kinnock, a victory for the classical, subtle left over the radical, honest left. Fleet Street, in its usual idiotic way, portrayed Neil Kinnock’s crushing of  Militant as the end of the Left in the Labour Party. This ludicrous myth, the opposite of the truth,  is still widely believed. Ha ha. Actually, the whole of British politics would shift decisively to the Left as a result.

The transformation of the Tory Party was less intentional. By bypassing the party organisation,  wooing big donors and using the Murdoch Press and Saatchis to appeal directly to the electorate, and by  creating a ‘leader’ who was a national semi-Presidential figure, Mrs Thatcher and her allies created a vacuum where traditional Toryism had been. The party machine atrophied. The power and significance of the leader hugely increased. But if the leader was weak, he was vulnerable. John Major became the prisoner of Michael Heseltine because of his weakness.

As for the even weaker Iain Duncan Smith,  it was astonishingly easy for the media to ally with Michael Howard to overthrow IDS. Mr Howard then began a process of centralising the party, and delayed the election of his successor for long enough to give David Cameron the edge over David Davis, which he would never have done in a quick contest,  and - as exemplified by his action against Howard Flight for remarks made at a private meeting – sought to end the control which local associations had over candidate selection.

Now we see (as reported in The Guardian on Monday 30^th April) that a group of Tory MPs have magically teamed up to remove old-fashioned, traditional Tory MPs, such as Christopher Chope and Peter Bone, from the leadership of the 1922 Committee of Tory backbenchers.

As The Guardian’s Nicholas Watt puts it:  ‘A conversation among a couple of colleagues mushroomed into the 301 Group – the number of parliamentary seats needed to secure a majority in the next parliament – which attracted 135 Tory MPs to a meeting in January. The group will on Monday show it is reshaping the Conservative parliamentary party when it takes the distinctly un-Tory step of publishing a slate of candidates for the elections to the executive of the 1922 committee. Candidates of all ages and intakes will be put forward to modernise the "antique" backbench committee, which has a hierarchical structure whereby new MPs have to defer to longer-serving colleagues in the weekly meetings. "Quite often, certainly senior members of the 1922 have seen the prime minister and the government as the opposition," says Hopkins, who is driving the changes but is not standing for election. "That is not the way to go about it. They should be challenged.’

Or, as I might put it, the remaining conservatives in the Conservative Party are to be marginalised. Will the voters notice? Some will, but millions, I fear, will continue to vote for a party that hates them, just as millions of Labour voters have been doing since the 1980s. And the next general election like the last four, will be a non-contest among parties which have no serious differences among them.