Labor lurches leftward in a rowdy party conference
Looking out over the gilded hall, where shouting matches were degenerating into fistfights, the conference chairwoman, Lena Jeger, rapped her gavel and shook her head like an angry schoolmarm. "This isn't a football match!" she cried over the pandemonium. "We are making a spectacle of ourselves!" So it seemed. At the very time when Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government was slumping and vulnerable to possible attack, some 1,250 Labor Party delegates trekked to the seaside resort of Blackpool for their annual conference last week and promptly turned their guns on one another. The result was a brutal factional dogfight that even the pro-Labor Daily Mirror branded "a triumph for lunacy."
No one had expected sweetness and light. Ever since Labor's defeat in the 1979 elections, the party has been riven by struggles between its moderate parliamentary leadership and an increasingly radical rank and file. Last week's conference proved no exception. Headed by Tony Benn, 55, a former viscount who renounced his title in 1963 in order to remain in the House of Commons, the left arrived in Blackpool determined to wrest control of the party from its leaders. In particular, the militants aimed at three longtime objectives: 1) the right to draft the party's policy manifesto, which is far more binding than a U.S. party platform; 2) closer control over M.P.s by their "constituency parties," or local committees, 80% of whose members are leftist militants; and 3) selection of the party leader by the rank and file instead of the M.P.s.
The radicals were emboldened by an early victory. A conference vote increased their dominance of the National Executive Committee, stacking it 19 to 11 against Party Leader James Callaghan's moderates. The left-wingers later won a series of drastic new policy demands: withdrawal from the European Community, unilateral nuclear disarmament and a ban against U.S. cruise missiles on British soil. Although a proposal that Britain should quit NATO was rejected, the antinuclear pledges would effectively end active British participation in the Western military alliance.
Nothing better illustrated the leftists' mood of triumph than the cheers that greeted their hero Benn as he mounted the rostrum. "Within days of the election of a new government," the silver-haired radical promised, bills would be introduced to impose a wealth tax and to nationalize a broad spectrum of additional industries, from banks to trucking firms. Benn then called for the immediate abolition of the House of Lords. This could be done, he said, simply "by creating 1,000 new peers" who could override the existing members of the House of Lords and vote the chamber out of existence. The proposal caused Labor M.P.s, including some of Benn's leftist allies, to gasp in disbelief.