Down the Walworth Road
Ferdinand Mount
There he stands blinking in the sunlight high. above the Walworth Road, grinning broadly under his hard hat. It always looks odd to wear a plastic helmet when you're standing on the roof, as if you expected a stray piece of Skylab to fall on your head. Jim Callaghan entered the Labour movement just about 51 years ago when the party headquarters moved into Ernie Bevin's fine new red-brick building in Smith Square. Transport House — Ecstasy Mansion — a bizarre name, for so long established as the shorthand phrase for the headquarters of the Labour Party. Now the party is moving across the river and here is the most ancient inhabitant of its front bench lopping out' the new building.
As Mr Callaghan looks down over the Walworth Road, does he reflect on what the party has achieved in its South London heartland? From the top of this block of patched-up Georgian houses, you can see the grim cliffs of the Elephant and Castle development, a disused meat-pie factory next door, a couple of garages and, beyond, waste ground and tower blocks and more waste ground. The new Jerusalem it isn't. Has the Labour Party kept faith with the Walworth Road? Has it kept faith with the intentions of the founders? What exactly is the structure that is being topped out?
The Labour Party has gone into the summer recess with a series of really blistering rows. The between the Shadow Cabinet and the National Executive is purulent. To say that these are as bad as any of the Bevanite rows in the Fifties and early Sixties is to devalue their significance. For despite the spectacular malevol ence of those ancient quarrels, they did not really affect the balance of power within the party. Then, Right-wing leaders securely dominated both the trade unions and the parliamentary party; now the hold of the Right is more uncertain in both. Moreover, the left-wing majority on the National Executive Committee has learnt to concentrate its efforts on grabbing the crucial. levers of power.
The Left's main demands are: that the NEC should draw up the manifesto by itself and not together with the parliamentary party, that funds allocated to the party leadership either by Parliament or by the EEC should be handed over to the NEC, that the party leadershould be elected not by Labour MPs but by the party conference or some other wider electoral college, that Labour MPs should all have to submit themselves for re-selection between each election. If all these became part of the party's constitution, the leader would become a puppet of the NEC; he would have no freedom of action at all.
These demands have provoked great indignation among Labour MPs, not only on the Right. And they have enraged trade union leaders who are fed up with having to fork out large sums of money to an incompetent and bilious clique of leftists who are increasingly unrepresentative of, and unattractive to, Labour voters.
At this point in the row, though, we arc always told not to worry. The trade union bosses will see Jim right in the end. They are practical men who know how to organise their block votes. And they have had just about enough'; the NEC has 'tried their patience too far this time'. You just wait and watch David Basnett 'sort out the Left' at the party conference. And when and if the conference is brought to reject the recommendations of the National Executive, we shall he told that this proves the party is fundamentally sound and basically is just like the dear old Labour Party we used to know, the party of Bevin and Deakin and Lawther and Attlee.
On the contrary, what these events will show is the essentially passive and ultimately corrupting nature of the trade unions' control of the Labour Party. Tory polemicists like to point out that the trade unions pay the bills and demand in return legislation which enshrines and furthers their privileges. But this is usually the most that the trade unions demand. They make little or no effort to insist that the Labour Party should reflect the general views of their members or that it should be organised to attract the maximum number of Labour voters and subscribing members.
What trade union leaders care about is the number of their own members and the size of their own funds. From the beginning, the unions, not least Bevin's TGWU, used the NEC and the House of Commons as a dumping ground for their second-rate officials. Metaphors which attempt to ennoble the relationship between the TUC and the Labour Party from the Thirties onwards. miss the secondary importance of the Labour Party, which occupied in trade union calculations the place, not of a 'wing' of 'this great movement of ours' but more that of an unmarried aunt given houseroom out of a sense of duty and somewhat con'descending affection.
It was not until 1918 that Henderson and Sidney Webb thought it worth opening local Labour parties to individual members; for the next ten years nobody bothered to count them. After 1945, in that extraordinary flush of postwar political enthusiasm which swept through both major parties, people did join in great numbers, so that individual membership doubled from 487,047 in 1945 to its peak of 1,014,524 in 1951. But in many constituency parties they were scarcely made welcome. A highly complex structure had had to be set up for the management of the local party and for the selection of candidates because the trade unions had to be represented in proportion to the money they had subscribed. So the ordinary individual found it difficult to have his views passed on from ward to the gen eral management committee — at which he had no say or vote. Often he found the association dominated by a highly motivated clique — so much so that Transport House's booklet on party organisation in 1950 had to warn: 'the old-fashioned complacency with a ward committee of a dozen people must give way to a modern conception of a ward association of some hundreds of members . . . there is no need to fear big ward committees.' This cliquishness was not necessarily doctrinal but rather derived from the idea that the unions were where the numbers ought to be. The Labour Party never became a wholehearted mass party and as a result the number of individual members has fallen away catastrophically, down to 678,587 in 1977. And even that is admitted by the party to be a gross overestimate because 533 local parties out of 623 simply fill in the minimum tally of 1000 required to send delegates to conference, although in reality they have far fewer members.
The dead weight of the unions has prevented the growth of proper grass roots in the Labour Party; only earwigs and lice scamper about under the big stone. And the people who really might bring about a „genuine growth of popular support cannot identify trade union dominance as the ultimate cause of the difficulties, because the trade unions are their allies against the Left; only the stone can crush the earwigs.
Meanwhile the balance of power in the constituencies — and hence gradually in the Parliamentary Labour Party — tilts further and further to the Left. The Labour Party can be saved only by opening it up at both ends, that is, by reforming its constitution so that at the top Labour MPs share policymaking and organisational power with the trade unions and the constituency parties in a reformed National Executive; and at the bottom, the structure of local parties must be opened to allow all members the right to choose their candidates — 'primaries' as they are called by Shirley Williams although not, I think, by the Walworth Road. This opening out of the party to Labour voters and to those they voted for is of course the exact opposite of what Tony Benn wants. His blueprint, although labelled as 'democratisation', represents a closing up of the party so that clique elects clique and the party becomes an instrument of control rather than a vehicle of representation. The tragedy is that the constitution of the Labour Party is ideally adapted for sealing the party off from the voters. And there is not much time left before it is closed up for good.
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