Thread by @labour_history

‘We must not abandon our policies’ v ‘We must not bury our head in the sand’

A thread on Labour’s Response – left, right and centre – to its last major traumatic defeat at the 1983 General Election

Neil Kinnock quickly emerged as the favourite to secure the leadership. He did not reject the manifesto outright instead blaming division within the party for defeat

In a TV debate he claimed ‘If your face is dirty wash it – don’t cut your head off’

He did however warn that Labour loyalty has to be ‘earned and retained from generation to generation’ and that the previous victories of workers ‘precluded the necessity of tooth-and-claw struggle’ had led to a standard of living ‘more or less taken for granted’ by the voter.

Michael Foot offered a more positive take in the post-election PLP meeting, declaring that

‘The manifesto will prove right’ and that ‘we could still have won against the Thatcher government, if we had more time to state our case’.

Eric Heffer was as adamant that defeat

‘must not be used as an excuse to throw over socialist objectives and policies. The policies put forward were good ones’ but that they needed ‘bringing up to date and clarifying’

Tony Benn – who had lost his seat – famously called it:

'The Spirit of Labour reborn - It is indeed astonishing that socialism has re-appeared...Labour commanded the loyalty of millions of voters and a democratic socialist bridgehead has been established'

The narrative on the left aligned defeat to the right-wing of the party. Bennite MP Michael Meacher claimed

‘We had an incompatible combination of radical policies and people around the leadership who didn’t believe in them – and made that clear’.

Labour Herald edited by Ken Livingstone wrote

‘Our worst election defeat means the Left must capture the party for socialism or face prospect of permanent opposition.The defeat is the responsibility of the right-wing whose ambition is to manage capitalism better than the Tories’

Tribune welcomed the ‘Labour gains’ such as Jeremy Corbyn in Islington whilst aligning defeat to the ‘Four Guilty Men’ – Healey, Shore, Callaghan and Hattersley

Arthur Scargill declared the election result illegitimate.

‘I am not prepared to accept policies proposed by a government elected by a minority of the electorate…A fightback against those polices will invariably take place outside Parliament rather than in it’.

Scargill compared the Conservative victory to that of Nazi Germany

‘We can give in, as many German people did in the 1930s… we can watch social destruction and repression on a truly horrific scale, and wait for the inevitable holocaust. Or we can fight’

Others blamed organisational issues. One anonymous MP told the Guardian that ‘it couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery’ and that the party ‘had worse generals than Argentina’

There were critical opponents, led by the right-wing candidate Roy Hattersley:

‘Unless we rapidly change our ways we risk changing from a party of power to a party of protest’. He dismissed the 83 economic programme as ‘literally incredible’

Hattersley was the first to accept Thatcher’s Right to Buy policy

‘We cannot continue to deny council tenants the right to buy their own house when the sale would do no harm to the community as a whole’.

Peter Shore urged a cold hard dose of ‘realism’:

‘I do not want a party poisoned by feuds and hatreds, misled by the clap-trap of demagogues injured and distracted by those who have no faith in the party itself nor in the democracy which our predecessors fought to create’

Shore claimed Labour ‘must reach the new society’ and that it had failed to ‘tune in’ to the concerns felt by the ‘new earning classes’.

‘We suffered not a defeat but a disaster. If we do not face this fact, if we hide our heads in the sand, still worse disasters befall us’

Gerald Kaufman accused the party of the need to ‘recover credibility’ with its policies on full employment ‘too good to be true’

Kaufman also called for an end to the nostalgia:

‘Too often we have spoken in terms of the past, looking backward to the golden yesterdays and to the mythical heroes of that time whose names have no resonance to the young new voters we failed so dismally to attract’

Newly elected MP Tony Blair told the BBC that the party

‘Has to be an image more dynamic, more modern, more suited to the 1980s…It’s not a matter of left and right, more a matter of style’.

Newly elected MP Jeremy Corbyn claimed

The landslide happened 'because everything had been fudged'

There had been 'a great incompetence in the party machine: the leaflets put out were absolutely bland crap'

As one letter to the Labour Weekly argued women's voices hardly featured in the post-election debate.

Harriet Harman and Patrica Hewitt had long criticised how economic debate within the party was long 'confined to male trade unionists'

As the leadership battle developed over the Summer, the issue of Militant divided the party

Kinnock appeared to endorse Militant when he said

‘I do not think it is any good chasing round after people. We have neither the means nor the will as a party to do that’.

Peter Shore attacked Kinnock

‘For simpletons in the party to say that they must be all right because they share some part of the socialist tradition is to duck the problem’

‘The Labour Party does have within it individuals who simply ought not to be there’

In the end, Kinnock won a clear majority in the trade union and constituency sections of the electoral college, as well as coming top amongst the MPs as well.

He got a total of 72.3 per cent of the votes, with Hattersley on 19.3, Heffer on 6.3 and Shore on 3.1.