“A Socialist Identity in Parliament”? The Campaign Group of Labour MPs, 1982-2015

Ahead of a seminar on 11th February, Alfie Steer explores how Labour’s parliamentary Labour left organised from the 1980s to the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader.

In March 1988, on the eve of his final bid for the leadership of the Labour Party, Tony Benn addressed a meeting of the Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs, who he nicknamed his “foul-weather friends” [Benn, Diaries, 23 March 1988].

It was an apt descriptor. While a bewildering number of campaigns and organisations came and went during Labour’s three decades of marginalisation, one constant was the Campaign Group. Formed in the fractious aftermath of the 1981 deputy leadership election by Benn and his small gang of parliamentary supporters, it also remains one of the last organisational legacies of Labour’s ‘new left’.

Although Labour’s parliamentary left had organised in groups and factions for much of the Party’s history, including the Socialist League, the Bevanites and the Tribune Group, the Campaign Group saw itself as an entirely new organisation of left-wing MPs. A 1985 leaflet listed its aims to provide “a socialist identity within parliament”, but also to “build a campaigning function within the PLP”, and to “forge links with the labour and trade union movement outside.”

Alongside the more immediate factional divisions between Labour’s ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ left in the early 1980s, the Campaign Group’s formation was sparked by a deeper ideological discontent with the established practices of its left-wing predecessors, with the officially autonomous Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP), and even with the Westminster majoritarian system itself. Rather than being the only arena of political contestation, the Campaign Group saw Westminster as just one part of a wider struggle, and Labour MPs as just one part of a mass movement. This implied a political strategy based on dedicated socialist activity in the Commons, but also the cultivation of a powerful grassroots movement outside of it.

Starting with 23 MPs in 1982, the Group’s membership would reach a peak of 43 by 1987. Its MPs would maintain a busy parliamentary schedule, presenting dozens of early day motions and private members bills to the Commons between 1983 and 1985 [Labour Herald, 4th October 1985]. In 1988 alone, Tony Benn would also present five of the most radical private members bills of the era, using them as tools of political education to demystify parliamentary procedure, and make hoped for changes “almost tangible”. Before long, the Group had also established itself as the PLP’s most consistent backbench rebels. From 1983 to 2010, the Campaign Group would be involved in three-quarters of all Labour parliamentary rebellions.

Outside of the Commons, the Group held weekly meetings open to external speakers, which could include students, trade unionists, feminists, social workers and foreign delegations. From 1984 to 1987, the Group published a book and seven policy pamphlets, and from 1986 was also producing a monthly newspaper, Campaign Group News, with a circulation of around 4,000 by 1987. By that same year, approximately 100 local Campaign Groups had been set up around the country, with some, such as in Scotland, Manchester and Teesside, producing their own publications and organising local conferences.

While far removed from power, and treated with explicit hostility by Party leader Neil Kinnock, the Campaign Group therefore appeared as a substantial presence in parliamentary and Party life. If Benn’s hair’s breadth defeat to Denis Healey in 1981 would prove to be the high point of the Labour left’s factional power for the next thirty years, this was not quite so clear at the time.

By establishing local Groups and forging connections with wider social movements, the Campaign Group demonstrated a major departure from the insular parliamentary focus of its immediate predecessors, most notably the Tribune Group. The common desire to, in Jeremy Corbyn’s words, “be there on the picket lines and at the workplace level” [Benn, Diaries, 11th July 1983] demonstrated a new conception of an MP’s role as a supportive auxiliary to, rather than necessarily the leaders of political struggles.

Tony Benn would similarly describe the Campaign Group as a “resource” or “paid officials of the labour movement” [Labour Briefing, June 1986], rather than as traditional political leaders. Through their privileged position in Parliament, a national profile and easy access to the media, Campaign Group MPs also emphasised their role in providing a voice for otherwise marginal causes.  As Diane Abbott described it, “the thing about being an MP is you’ve got a platform, people listen to you.” [Socialist Action, 10th January 1986]. Similarly, according to John McDonnell: “We campaign within Parliament so that the campaigns which are excluded by the Westminster elite and the media get a voice and some recognition.” [Guardian, 23rd July 2007].

Another major departure was clear in the Group’s attitude to the parliamentary system itself. For one, Campaign Group MPs exhibited little deference to the niceties or rituals of parliamentary procedure, and through various acts of protest, both individual and collective, they contributed to a significant uptick of ‘disorderly’ behaviour within the Commons by the 1980s.

More substantively, while key figures of Labour’s ‘old left’, like Aneurin Bevan, had embraced Westminster’s majoritarian system as the essential weapon in the struggle for socialism, the Campaign Group took a more critical view. This would be demonstrated in one of its early publications, Parliamentary Democracy and the Labour Movement (1984), which called for the transfer of all Crown prerogatives to the decision of the House of Commons, and even the direct election of Labour Cabinets by an electoral college at the Party’s annual conference. While the transfer of prerogatives like the power to declare war constituted a firm assertion of the parliamentary supremacy, transferring the power to call elections, or even freely appoint the Cabinet, were also drastic restrictions on Prime Ministerial power and patronage.

Though previous iterations of the Labour left had been happy to use the Westminster majoritarian system virtually unreformed in the name of socialism, the Campaign Group was more circumspect, conscious of how the discretionary powers of the executive had often been used to moderate Labour programmes and discipline backbench rebels, as seen in the 1970s, rather than ensure their implementation. Proposing that Party conference elect the cabinet also underlined a desire to integrate the officially autonomous Parliamentary Labour Party into the full participatory, decision-making structures of the wider party. This illustrated the integral ‘new left’ belief that Labour’s parliamentarians were but the privileged delegates of a wider mass movement and therefore had to be directly accountable to it.

While the Campaign Group’s membership and organisation would fluctuate and decline after 1985, riven by political divisions and personality clashes, a consistent feature of its activity remained this radical scepticism toward Parliament, and a far less paternalistic attitude to the role of Labour MPs within it. This would encourage an innovative and, despite countless setbacks, failures and outright disasters, a robust factional strategy that can, as my paper aims to demonstrate, go some way in explaining the highly unlikely election of Jeremy Corbyn, one of Benn’s “foul-weather friends”, as Labour leader in September 2015.

Alfie Steer is completing a doctorate on the history of the Labour left from the end of the miners’ strike to 2015. His paper on the Campaign Group of Labour MPs will be presented at the Institute of Historical Research’s ‘Parliaments, Politics and People’ seminar on 11th February, 5:30 pm to 7:00 pm. More information on how to attend here.

Image: Socialist Campaign Group News Frontpage from March 1990. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Socialist_Campaign_Group_News_Frontpage_from_March_1990.jpg Author: Pipenetal, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.