Ali. In the hierarchy of the left, Benn and Ali had inherited the political skills of the ruling class. They were also intellectuals – self-disciplined agents of social engineering – which Corbyn was certainly not. While Corbyn sat meekly as their NCO, a team player rather than a manager, their ideological theorising passed over his head. But he found comfort in their descriptions of the best tactics against the capitalists.
In a series of debates, the group considered whether peaceful reform was possible through Parliament and what Tariq Ali called ‘class collaboration’ (the old Marxist notion that the bourgeoisie would eventually unite with the working class). Parliament only became relevant, Ali argued, when subjected to pressures from outside groups, and should eventually be abolished. Distrustful of elections, since the mid-1960s Miliband had preached that Parliament should be totally ignored. The masses, he argued, should disregard both the trade unions and the Labour Party, because socialism could be built only by armed struggle. ‘The elite always sells out,’ he told the gathering, and urged Benn to support revolution followed by the creation of democratic soviets, or communities.
This was not yet Corbyn’s thinking. Although energised by disdain for Parliament and impatient with liberal democracy, he accepted Benn’s philosophy that ‘to change the world you need to join the Labour Party and work from within’. By hard work, Benn said, Labour’s Methodist roots would eventually be replaced by true socialism with no need for violence. While Benn’s programme for socialism lacked the historical and cultural perspective of Michael Foot and other intellectual worshippers of the great socialist heroes, he was obsessed by the need for democracy within the party. Structures and machinery were fundamental to his programme to transform Labour, and then the country, into a Marxist idyll. Without studying either economics or finance, Corbyn absorbed Benn’s slogans about ‘equality’ and ‘justice’, and adopted the belief that ‘The role of private capital should be ended.’ Beyond that, he was intellectually adrift. ‘He didn’t understand the relevance of Marxist theory about markets or a planned economy,’ said one of the participating academics. ‘You can’t be an unconscious Marxist.’ Corbyn’s ignorance did not diminish his passion for Marxism: he was totally committed to the confiscation and redistribution of wealth to produce equality – but knowing the philosophical explanation was beyond him. As he retold stories in praise of Salvador Allende to the group – his principal contribution to their discussions – he came across as the most committed of Marxists. Strangely, he never mentioned his experiences in Jamaica or Guyana.
In later years, the impassioned discussions about Marxist dialectics and modern capitalism would be described as substitutes for Corbyn’s missed university education. They were hardly that. Nevertheless, he did learn from Benn and Miliband that socialism would be built by mobilising workers to take over the ownership and control of key industries, and the importance of organising people in their workplaces and housing estates to struggle against the capitalists. Thereafter, employees and their trade unions would negotiate government investment and production plans with the managers, rather than be subject to employers, bankers and Parliament. Tellingly, in 2017 Labour’s election manifesto would reflect Benn’s promise to give workers the statutory right to buy their own companies at discounted prices with taxpayers’ money. Thirty-six years earlier, in February 1981, Benn and Corbyn imagined Labour sweeping the Tories aside to implement just those policies. Their dream was encouraged in late 1981 by the miners’ threat to strike in protest at the government’s decision to close uneconomic pits. Fearing the same defeat as Heath, Thatcher surrendered. Soon after, Arthur Scargill was elected as the leader of the National Union of Mineworkers. The left felt further emboldened. Across the country, other militants similar to Corbyn were seizing control of Labour associations, galvanising the trade unions to replicate the miners’ industrial challenge to Thatcher, and giving the impression of engaging in subversion.
In 1982, Corbyn, now thirty-two, ranked among the leaders of the left in the capital. Recognised by the Economist as London Labour Briefing’s ‘general secretary figure’ and by the Hornsey Journal as joint editor of its newspaper, he boasted that the organisation was ‘moving the leadership of most London authorities well to the left’. Reflecting that influence, he was elected as Hornsey’s representative to Labour’s regional executive, appointed the chairman of its finance committee, and also sat on a number of the London party’s subcommittees. For the next council elections, he had ensured that half the Labour candidates in Hornsey were associated with London Labour Briefing. All of them echoed his call for ‘a full-frontal attack on the government’, and obeyed his directive that they would vote to ‘defy the law and the unelected judges’ to increase rates, cut bus fares and back a twenty-four-hour general strike. Even so, within Haringey’s Labour caucus his supporters were still a minority. In a vote in February 1982, the majority blocked his attempt to break the law and act outside ‘the constitutional mechanism of Parliament’. They feared, however, that their victory was temporary, and that the ‘anarchists’, led by Corbyn, would stage a coup. Their anxiety was noticed in Westminster. Acting on Foot’s instructions, his lieutenants purged the far left from the NEC. Right-wing Labour MPs, led by Bob Mellish, the chief whip, dismissed Corbyn as a ‘middle-class Trot’ with little contact with the working class.The Bennites were forced to retreat.
All those criticisms bounced off Corbyn, as did the endless complaints of Haringey’s residents. Their list was damning. Parents were angered when a go-slow by council bus drivers, supported by Corbyn, left their handicapped children stranded at home; the homeless protested that his refusal to accept government money for rebuilding houses meant that 1,500 council properties had been left unoccupied; a quarter of the council’s street cleaners were permanently absent on ‘sick leave’; buildings had been flooded after the rubbish on Haringey’s unswept streets had blocked the drains; and a Labour group report had exposed a ‘bonus racket’ rewarding council employees for not working. Haringey’s councillors admitted that they had lost control of their employees, mostly members of NUPE. Corbyn expressed no regret. Management and detail were of no concern to him. Nor was he sympathetic to the anger of white applicants for council jobs that Bernie Grant’s aggressive campaign against racism intentionally discriminated against them. In his world, immigrants’ interests were paramount. They were the victims of oppression. Any who disagreed, including Haringey’s disgruntled residents, were the enemy. Just as he was unable to deal with his own personal life, he was unable to resolve many causes of other people’s misery. He was an activist, not a manager willing to immerse himself in detail to improve the lives of all Haringey’s inhabitants.
In spring 1982, as part of his single-minded quest to seize power, Corbyn was elected chairman of the Hornsey Labour Party, and immediately reignited his battle against the moderates. On 24 March a party meeting erupted in physical violence as he once again attempted to ram through Tariq Ali’s membership, despite the opposition of the national executive. Moderates erupted in anger that a notorious Trotskyist, contrary to the rules, was even notionally admitted to the party. Blows were exchanged, and eyewitnesses reported that ‘bedlam spilled out on to the street’. In the midst of these and other fights, Corbyn theatrically presented Ali with a party membership card. His conduct, according to George Page, London’s Labour Party leader, was ‘the most extraordinary study of bias and manipulation of rule and customs I have ever witnessed’. Corbyn wore that criticism as a badge of pride. After the national council elections in May, he believed, Britain would be one step closer to Michael Foot’s election as prime minister. Margaret Thatcher, he was convinced, could not recover from the deep unpopularity she had attracted during the previous months, following cabinet splits and an economic crisis – private polling by the Conservatives showed the Tories’ support had fallen to just 20 per cent. ‘The Tory vote will disappear,’ Corbyn predicted, ‘and I think we shall win.’ In his manifesto for re-election in Haringey he pledged ‘the smashing of the capitalist state’ – not an unusual declaration in those fevered times. ‘I don’t have any personal ambitions,’ he added. That was untrue, and struck his council colleagues as laughable.
Six weeks later, after Labour had won the council elections, Corbyn moved once again to topple Robin Young, his key enemy among the moderates. On the fourth attempt, having at
