Dean Godson

Labour’s forgotten army

If Slim’s 14th was the ‘Forgotten Army’ of the second world war, then the trade union Right and its sponsored MPs are surely the ‘Forgotten Army’ of Labour’s civil war of the 1970s and 1980s. They were ‘old Labour’, but not in the sense which the term has taken on in recent years to mean the hard Left: indeed, this largely working-class group constituted the Bennites’ staunchest opponents. The old Labour Right tended to be patriotic and conservative on social issues, whilst remaining firmly wedded to the welfare state. This wing of Labour was allied to (but culturally had little in common with) those middle-class ‘revisionist’ intellectuals who are the true spiritual forebears of Blairism. Yet were it not for their holding action during the hard Left’s surge after Labour lost office in 1979, the party would have been irretrievably damaged. To mix military metaphors, this beleaguered band held the fort till the Kinnockite and Blairite cavalry arrived.

Left-wing historians such as Lewis Minkin are inevitably hostile to the old Labour Right. But the old Labour Right has also received too little credit in Blairite accounts of the salvation of the party. These obviously accord pride of place to the Prime Minister, with Neil Kinnock receiving a very honourable mention for starting the party’s modernisation (though he was unable to complete it). Nor, for that matter, has the old Labour Right received much credit in the Jenkinsite narrative of the past two decades. According to this interpretation, Labour was largely brought back to sanity by the creation of the SDP/Liberal Alliance and the consequent haemorrhaging of moderate voters in the 1983 and 1987 elections.

So who were the members of the Forgotten Army? They have been dying at quite a rate recently.

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Written by
Dean Godson

Lord Godson is Director of Policy Exchange. He is a member of the House of Lords Sub-Committee on the Windsor Framework. He is author of ‘Himself Alone: David Trimble and the Ordeal of Unionism’ (2004)

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