impending nomination of Labour’s parliamentary candidate in Islington North, Corbyn next marshalled Haringey’s twenty hard-left Labour councillors against the remaining thirteen moderates, and appointed Angela Greatley, an aspiring quangoist, as the council’s ‘patsy’ leader. He himself returned to chairing the uncontroversial planning committee, and awaited the next general election with confidence. The invasion of the Falkland Islands on 2 April dashed his hopes.
Military dictators had ruled Argentina since 1976. To crush the opposition, thousands of civilians had disappeared in the so-called ‘dirty war’. Some victims, including socialists, had been pushed out of military helicopters over the Atlantic, their babies and young children then handed to childless supporters of the regime. By any measure, Corbyn should have opposed General Leopoldo Galtieri’s dictatorship, and welcomed the opportunity to liberate oppressed Argentines. Instead, he opposed Margaret Thatcher’s dispatch of a naval task force to recapture the islands as a Tory plot. In his hatred of America and Britain, he supported anyone who was their enemy – Stalin, Mao, Castro and now Galtieri. According to Corbyn’s logic, while he did not condone the dictators’ murders, they were not to blame for all the excesses that had occurred under their rule. That was the fault of the imperialists – America and Britain – for subjugating the poor. In Galtieri’s case, his crimes could be excused as the price for liberating the Falklands from Britain.
Regardless of the islanders’ overwhelming wishes to continue the legal settlement established in 1833 that the Falklands were part of the UK, Corbyn demanded that Thatcher ‘pursue peace’ and negotiate their surrender to the Argentinean dictator. ‘We resent the waste of unemployed men who are being sent to the Falklands to die for Thatcher and Galtieri,’ he stated in a motion tabled in Haringey council, and continued, ‘A tide of jingoism is sweeping the country … It is a nauseating waste of money and lives.’ The ‘grotesque’ war, he said, was conceived to keep the Tories’ ‘money-making friends in business’. To explain why he ignored the rights of both the Falklanders and the Argentines to live in freedom, he declared that Thatcher was ‘exploiting the situation’. Allowing people to live under military tyranny, he said, was preferable to removing despots by force. The cost of the war would be better spent on housing, hospitals and wages in Britain, or to feed the starving in Africa. He saw no contradiction in his attack on the British armed forces rather than the Argentine dictator. ‘He’s always lived according to his principles,’ explained Chris Mullin, a sympathetic Bennite MP. To Corbyn’s dismay, in the Commons Michael Foot supported the government, and in a bravura speech blamed the ‘guilty men’ at the Foreign Office for the Falklanders suffering Argentinean oppression. Only a handful of Labour MPs voted against the dispatch of the task force.
In Haringey, the consequence of rule by Corbyn was an accelerated exodus of businesses and residents. The escapees feared yet another 40 per cent rates hike to fund another 50 per cent increase in administrative staff. Among the 4,500 additional employees were two ‘anti-nuclear officers’, charged with ‘promoting peace’ in the borough. On Corbyn’s initiative, Haringey had been twinned with Grenada, then led by a Marxist government; and with his encouragement another large group of gypsies had moved onto the site of a pony club for handicapped children. The gypsies used the field as a dump for commercial waste. ‘It’s become a filthy rat-infested mess,’ complained Robin Young, ‘and the source of dysentery among schoolchildren.’ A year later, the council paid over £45,000 (£90,000 today) to clear the site. Once again, Corbyn refused to apologise. ‘The decision not to evict the people,’ he told the council, ‘was correct.’
Haringey had become Britain’s highest-spending local authority, with the highest rates for residents and businesses. Its few remaining moderate Labour councillors, angry about the chaos, appeared powerless. Outraged by the discovery of another £1 million fraud executed by council employees who were supervised by the Public Works Committee formerly chaired by Corbyn, they were shocked by his reaction to a bomb explosion outside the local Labour Party headquarters which had severely damaged the door and outside wall. ‘He blamed the police for not being more vigilant,’ said a resident about the unsolved crime. ‘That’s the same Corbyn who criticised the police presence in Haringey as a threat to ethnic minorities.’ The critic was referring to his condemnation of the ‘increasingly repressive nature of London policing’. The blast exposed a familiar characteristic of Corbyn’s management: there was no correlation between recruitment and efficiency. Although he had presided over a record number of new members joining the party, the constituency was mired in debt and there was no money to repair the bomb damage. The party was forced to close the building.
That December, Corbyn faced a moment of reckoning when Haringey’s Labour moderates threatened to join with the Tory opposition to defeat his latest proposal to increase spending. ‘You are like little Hitlers,’ the Hornsey Journal accused Corbyn, Bernie Grant and their cabal. ‘Like him, you will eventually be rejected by forces of democracy.’ To Corbyn’s good fortune, the newspaper lacked the resources to publish a muckraking exposé. Nor could the editor penetrate the wall of secrecy surrounding Corbyn, who always refused to speak to the ‘capitalist press’.
The major obstacle to Corbyn’s ambition to become a parliamentary candidate was his continued support of Tariq Ali’s membership of the Hornsey branch – endorsed on Corbyn’s insistence by the borough’s general committee. After the NEC rejected Ali’s third bid, Corbyn was warned that the branch would be disbanded if he issued him with another membership card. This was not the best time for Corbyn to oppose the party leadership, and at his request Ali withdrew his application. He would later describe Corbyn – quoting E.P. Thompson’s judgement on the socialist poet and textile designer William Morris – as ‘unsteady among generalisations, weak in analytic thought, his response to life was immediate and concrete’. And that was a friend talking. Corbyn was not a willing martyr, but he was vindictive. Max Morris (no relation), the chairman of the ward that was opposing Ali’s membership, was ousted by an influx of thirty Trotskyists at an ‘emergency meeting’.
There was good reason for Corbyn to hasten the end of the saga. Unexpectedly, the Labour MP for Islington North, Michael O’Halloran, switched his support to the SDP. In the next general election, he announced, he would stand as their candidate. Most of the constituency’s moderates joined him in defecting, giving the left a sudden advantage. This was Corbyn’s chance. He badly wanted the seat, but accepted the advice of Val Veness, for some time now a powerbroker in the local party, that his nomination would have to be handled discreetly if he was to secure the support of both the party and the constituency at large.
He approached Clive Boutle, a linguist and publisher, to organise his campaign for selection. Boutle left their initial two-hour discussion about strategy convinced that Corbyn was ‘left-wing, experienced and not self-important like others’. In the selection process, Corbyn was introduced as Val Veness’s preferred candidate. In exchange, she applied to be the Labour candidate in Hornsey, where his influence would be crucial.
Corbyn’s emergence as a candidate surprised Toby Harris. Like others, he had not realised his ally’s burning ambition for national recognition. To Harris and other enquirers, Val Veness claimed that Corbyn was a ‘reluctant’ candidate who she had had to persuade to apply for the seat. ‘They seem certain to pick an extremist,’ a Labour moderate predicted, ‘who will be fully in step with the mad majority.’ Others reckoned that ‘left-wing revolutionaries’ like Val Veness were ‘unacceptable to Michael Foot’.
In the final race, a month before the June 1983 general election, the choice was between Corbyn and Paul Boateng, a barrister educated in Ghana. Corbyn won the contest by four votes. Aware that Michael O’Halloran for the SDP could expect substantial support, he promised in his campaign to prevent mass unemployment following the inevitable recession if the Tories were re-elected. The working class, he was convinced, would be attracted by higher taxes, more powers for trade unions, unilateral disarmament and the renationalisation of shipbuilding, aerospace and steel. George Cunningham, the SDP MP for Islington South, urged electors to consider the reality of socialism. He portrayed
