Thread by @philwoodford

With all the debate and angst within @UKLabour and the calls from Corbynite MPs for shift back to the left, it's worth taking a little magical history tour. Let's go back exactly 40 years - to the Labour victory in the Greater London Council elections of 7 May 1981... 1/18

2/18 While many will recall that this was the start of Ken Livingstone's notorious leftist administration at County Hall, what is less well remembered is that the campaign was fought by a moderate leader - Andrew McIntosh. He was toppled the next day by the hard left.

3/18 The 'palace coup' in the GLC Labour Group ensured that Livingstone became leader and a coterie of other left-wingers (John McDonnell, Paul Boateng, Valerie Wise, Dave Wetzel and others) were set to become influential committee chairs.

4/18 It was an era where the GLC had immensely more power than the GLA today and its leader was arguably more powerful than today's Mayor. The authority not only ran public transport and the fire brigade but managed major housing stock, controlled parks and historic buildings.

5/18 Strangely, it didn't have responsibility for the police, at at time when the Home Office retained direct control over the Met. But of course that didn't stop it having its own Police Committee and intervening regularly - particularly with its opposition to the 1984 PACE Act.

6/18 The history of this period is now enshrined in folklore. Livingstone ran extensive campaigns against the Thatcher government, funded by ratepayers. Like other so-called 'loony left' authorities of the era, the GLC also campaigned on foreign policy issues and supported CND.

7/18 Eventually, the Thatcher government decided the GLC needed to be abolished and there was a lengthy campaign to save the authority. In Parliament, this involved co-opting the Lords to try to obstruct the will of the right-wing majority in the Commons.

8/18 In 1986, I joined many thousands on the South Bank as we bid goodbye to the GLC and Ken Livingstone led us in a rendition of 'We'll Meet Again'. Because yes, dear thread reader, I had been a fan. In my teens, I was attracted to Red Ken's brand of politics.

9/18 What was it that lured me in? I liked the radicalism, the lack of compromise, the early emphasis on what would now be called identity politics. I was strongly opposed to Thatcher and Reagan and what they stood for. But I also liked the administration's style and chutzpah.

10/18 Livingstone did not stand on ceremony. He really did travel on the tube. He opened up County Hall and let the public in. He'd even be happy to chat to people like me - geeky political teenagers.

11/18 Dave Wetzel, the GLC Transport Chief, hand wrote his letters in red pen and signed them 'Yours for socialism, Dave'. There was a whiff of the Paris Commune about it all, although probably with a fair amount of trainspotters' convention layered on top.

12/18 As the 80s wore on, I became increasingly disillusioned with this weird strand of urban leftism. Partly because I was encountering the hardline Trotskyist entryists in @UKLabour, CND, NUS and other environments. And I could see the disruptive negativity of the extremists.

13/18 My own politics started to shift. I went on a journey, which would take me to the Labour centre ground by the end of the decade and make me a full-scale convert to proto-Blairism after the unimaginably disastrous election of 1992.

14/18 It was around this time I became the controversial young Chair of what is now @Keir_Starmer's Constituency Labour Party in Holborn & St Pancras. I'd later stand as a parliamentary candidate in the 1997 and 2001 general elections.

15/18 The moral of this story? The lesson from this history? Well, the world changed. I changed. But the hard left never changed. They are the same in 2021 as they were in 1981. They were losers then - over the GLC, the miners' strike, Wapping - and they are losers now.

16/18 They were factionalist and self-obsessed back then. They are just the same today. They claimed their politics were a winning formula in the 1980s. And they claim exactly the same politics are a winning formula in the 2020s.

17/18 @UKLabour has a lot of soul-searching to do. There are no easy fixes to the predicament the party finds itself in. But one thing is absolutely clear. There can be no turning back to the agenda Corbyn, Abbott and GLC veteran McDonnell.

18/18 These people helped write off the 80s for Labour. They were resurrected from the political crypt to plunge the party into a nightmare between 2015 and 2019. Never again. The party has to learn. It must move on. For good.