I have always had a great deal of respect for Roy Hattersley, not least because of his refusal to join with the rest of the Gaitskellite right wing of the Labour Party when they collectively upped sticks and joined the Social Democratic Party.
Just what that cost him in personal terms became clear to me when I happened upon an unpleasant scene on the committee corridor of the House Commons at the time of that upheaval.
As I walked down the long corridor, I could see an angry scrum ahead of me. A few steps further and it became clear that someone was being verbally roughed-up by a group of MPs, as if in a school playground. The victim was Roy, and the school bullies were youngish Labour MPs who were followers of the other Roy, Lord Jenkins.
Shamelessly eavesdropping, I found that the mob were trying, and failing, to persuade Hattersley to come with them into the nascent SDP. I was delighted to see that Roy was giving as good, if not better, than he got.
Virtually all the people in that lynch mob are now totally forgotten. Indeed, most of them were wiped out in the subsequent general election, standing for the SDP against official Labour candidates. But Roy is still around, a peer of the realm and a self-appointed spokesman for “old” Labour against the modernities of Tony Blair’s “new” Labour.
Not that Roy has adjusted his opinions to fill this role. On the contrary, he has stuck firmly to what might be called his Croslandite belief in equality (after Tony Crosland, the theoretician of Gaitskellism).
All that has happened is that
official Labour Party policy has swung so far to the right under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown that Hugh Gaitskell, Crosland
and Hattersley now look like positive revolutionaries in comparison.
So I was a little disappointed when I read Roy’s piece in The Observer last week, accompanying the news of the latest Mori opinion poll in which the Tory lead has been slashed from 13 per cent to a mere 6 per cent. Extensive analysis of the figures had encouraged Guardian writers to speculate that an outright majority might be beyond David Cameron’s reach and that a hung parliament was therefore a real possibility.
But gloomy old Roy was doing his best to rain on this jolly parade, recalling the awfulness of the last period of minority or near-minority government between 1974 and 1979.
Harold Wilson and then Jim Callaghan had been forced to do all kinds of sordid deals with David Steel’s Liberals, Enoch Powell’s Ulster Unionists and the Scottish National Party just to stay in office.
A good many of those “sordid” deals were brokered by Tribune’s own dear Michael Foot, who was leader of the Commons under Callaghan, and he evidently thought the survival of the Labour Government justified them.
But it was all too much for Roy’s sensitive Yorkshire conscience. The message of his piece – although, to be fair, I don’t think he said so in as many words – was that defeat would be better this time round than a return to those squalid times.
This attitude comes dangerously close to the approach of some of my more rarefied socialist friends in leafy north London. They take the view that the present government is so compromised by its cosy relationship with the City and by things such as the Iraq deception that it is probably time for a period of opposition, when the party can cleanse its soul and grope its way back to its founding principles.
Well, I jolly well don’t agree – either with Roy on the 1970s or with my north London friends.
Remember what was sitting across the dispatch box both then and now. Sitting opposite Callaghan was Margaret Thatcher, clutching the most right-wing programme of pro-rich, anti-worker policies in living memory. Anything that could have kept her out of office was worth trying – the ultimate irony being that it was the workers’ trade union representatives who finally put Thatcher in Downing Street.
And sitting opposite Gordon Brown today are David Cameron and George Osborne – two jokers who between them have constructed an economic policy which would nip the embryonic recovery in the bud and could plunge this country into the kind of endless stagnation that afflicted Japan until quite recently.
If saving us from that involves, say, handing electoral reform to the Liberal Democrats, then I’m all for it.
As it happens, this week brought a second poll which excited me almost as much as the one showing the Tory lead crashing. It was a YouGov survey revealing that a majority of Britons support the idea of a “Tobin” tax on financial transactions, with 53 per cent in favour and only 28 per cent against.
This is sensational news, and means that Brown hit the nail on the head earlier this month when he proposed the idea to G20 finance leaders.
It could form the basis for an economic recovery programme that isn’t founded on slash and burn cuts in public service, but is based on making the bankers pay for the train wreck they have caused.
That, I reckon, would be simple justice – which is what Hattersley and the rest of us “old” Labourites are supposed to be about.
