Militant battles

Jul 9 2007 by Larry Neild, Liverpool Daily Post

WHEN the then Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, made a speech at the party conference in 1985, he unleashed an attack that was finally to lead to the overthrow of Militant domination in Liverpool.

The left-wing council had gone head-to-head with Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Government by failing to set a legal budget.

Derek Hatton was deputy leader of the council, though many felt he was de-facto leader, sidelining John Hamilton, who died in December 2006.

The clash between the city and the government led to a tirade of adverse publicity about Liverpool, its politics and its people.

Things came to a head when Kinnock decided the Liverpool problem had to be resolved.

The catalyst were reports the council was dispatching redundancy notices to its staff, though the council leadership insisted throughout this was no more than a tactic to ensure it stayed within the law.

Kinnock said at the conference: “I’ll tell you what happens with impossible promises. You start with far-fetched resolutions. They are then pickled into a rigid dogma, a code, and you go through the years sticking to that, out-dated, misplaced, irrelevant to the real needs, and you end in the grotesque chaos of a Labour council – a Labour council – hiring taxis to scuttle around a city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers.

“I am telling you, no matter how entertaining, how fulfilling to short-term egos – I’m telling you and you’ll listen – you can’t play politics with people’s jobs and with people’s services or with their homes. Comrades, the voice of the people – not the people here; the voice of the real people with real needs – is louder than all the boos that can be assembled.”

There were boos from the audience, including shouts from Derek Hatton, sat in the conference hall. NEC member Eric Heffer, left-wing MP for Liverpool Walton, stormed off the platform in angry protest. Kinnock admitted later that for one moment he feared Heffer was going to thump him.

It spelled the beginning of the end for Militant domination, as expulsions from the party started. Forty-nine Labour councillors who failed to set a legal budget were set for a clash in the courts. Two died in the meanwhile, but 47 were banned from public office for five years. John Hamilton and Derek Hatton were among the 47. Few returned to public political life.

Although it was the Militants dominating the headlines, there were only a handful of Militant members serving as councillors. The rest supported the stand being made to support jobs and services and to build new homes.

The left-wing Labour council of the 1980s was hugely supported across the city, with turn-outs at local elections well over 50%. The legacy of the 1980s was to haunt Liverpool for over a decade, with some commentators saying it slowed the city’s recovery from the battering it took with the job losses of the 1970s.