JUST twenty-five years ago, a tiny journalistic event took place within the pages of Sunday’s Observer: a short piece by former Labour deputy leader and shadow chancellor Roy Hattersley.  

He had been amiably voluble in media outlets during more than 32 years as a Labour MP (1964-97), and had been guilty of writing a light-touch memoir entitled Who Goes Home? (1995), and guilty too in 1997 of admission to the House of Lords. He is still with us, though retired from the Lords.

His interests, as his memoir makes clear, centred on housing, schools, hospitals and race relations. Hattersley had not been known for radicalism.  

A fan of right-wing Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell, who had died before Hattersley’s arrival at Westminster, his memoir tells us that in the mid-sixties socialist journalist Paul Foot had thought of Hattersley “as one of the better milk-and-water libertarians who made up the modern Labour Party.”

Hattersley’s claim to socialism indeed relied, in his Choose Freedom publication of 1983, on a vague commitment to “equality for the majority,” thereby achieving “liberty.” Better than nothing, perhaps.

On June 4 2000, however, three years after his exit from the Commons, Hattersley’s Observer article carried the sturdy title of “Let’s get back on the barricades.” He referred to the previous year’s Labour Party conference, when prime minister Tony Blair had proclaimed: “The class war is over.”  

“In truth,” declared Hattersley, “it will continue for as long as there are classes.” He went on to state that “it is Tony Blair’s wilful refusal to adjudicate between different groups which has blurred his government’s image.”

In passing he drew attention to the newly installed national minimum wage as being set barely above subsistence level. He pointed to the widening gap between the rich and the poor, and the need for “governments to discriminate” in favour of the unemployed poor, the old and ethnic minorities.

By announcing that “every stratum of society has an equal interest in increasing prosperity”, Blair, in his view, was taking a wrong path. “The idea that as long as the rich get richer, the poor become less poor, is, in reality, the discredited trickle-down effect.”

It seemed that for out-of-office Hattersley the penny – or at least one penny in the bunch – had now dropped.

Blair’s problem, he averred, lay “in not knowing whose side he is on.’’ Yet Blair had signed up to the interests of the City of London and those of Washington’s elite years earlier.  

Blair’s lengthy 2010 memoir (A Journey) sprinkled as it is with selfie compliments, is revealing about his own milk-and-waterism.

In 1995, he wrote, he was pressing (among other things) for no return to the old trade union laws, no renationalisation of privatised utilities, no raising of the top rate of tax. He declared: “I wanted to preserve, in terms of competitive tax rates, the essential Thatcher/Howe/Lawson legacy. I wanted wealthy people to feel at home and welcomed in the UK...”

Indeed, he had gone as far as to accept a £1 million donation to the party in early 1997 from Bernie Ecclestone of Formula One road racing, and to exempt it from a policy ban on cigarette advertising, facilitating a scandal which had much occupied the media in November that year.  
 
Hattersley’s June 2000 article was written a month after Labour’s loss of some 600 local council seats, and the failure of Blair’s candidate to defeat Labour Party veteran Ken Livingstone, standing as an independent, for Mayor of London.

According to Livingstone’s weighty memoir (You Can’t Say That), the inadequate public support for Labour’s own candidate, Frank Dobson, had caused Downing Street to brief the press that Blair had told a cabinet member that the Tory candidate, Steve Norris, was “the New Labour candidate really,” and the Sunday Mirror even reported after the election that Blair himself was understood to have voted for Norris.

Livingstone commented: “For a socialist to win this election and defeat the three party machines would demolish New Labour mythology, so anything was justified to prevent my winning, even if it put a Tory in office.”  

Livingstone took 39 per cent of the vote, to which voters’ second choices were added, giving him a 58 to 42 per cent majority.

His victory was stunning confirmation that a politician with socialist convictions could stand up to Labour’s “centrist” leadership and win, and was perhaps a concealed “elephant in the room” underlying Hattersley’s Observer article. This ended by stating that the Labour leadership should understand that “it is politically essential” to take sides.

Despite the piece’s title, Hattersley was not quite calling for a return to the barricades, but for a modest quantum of welfare-oriented parliamentary “class war.” But he had a point, a point which applies as much to Sir “Scrooge” Starmer’s regime today, as to Blair’s a quarter of a century ago.

Back to the 1995 memoir. For Hattersley, it seemed, the interesting stuff was limited to Westminster circles. He tossed out disapproving comments about the “insular and sentimental posturing” of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), which got under way in 1958, with the Cold War militarism of Washington and London raising the risk of nuclear war and requiring the unsentimental challenge which CND provided.  

He mentioned the 1961 election of US President John F Kennedy – “which we believed to be the victory for youth and reason” — but not Kennedy’s commitment to overthrowing the socialist government of Cuba headed by Fidel Castro, and to subsidising reactionary Latin American regimes to undermine radical forces.  

Hattersley avoided all mention of the Vietnam war, of the long Iraq-Iran war of the 1980s (during which Britain’s arms sales to Iraq included chemicals), and of the US/UK Gulf War massacre of 1991.  

It is as though he needed to create a world in which he was comfortable, with nastiness abroad sanitised away, and in which his own doings, observations and individual interactions with others excluded almost everything else.  

His memoir is certainly “insular,” while CND has always been too engaged with the world outside for insularity to be a tenable charge against it.  

As a junior defence minister under Denis Healey in 1969-70, Hattersley had a role in addressing Northern Ireland’s escalating violence, but his memoir indicates unawareness that the established cross-party approach left the Unionist ascendancy able to underwrite further escalation.

He preferred to mock civil rights campaigner and MP Bernadette Devlin, unable to regard her pulling the hair of Tory Northern Ireland minister Reginald Maudling in the Commons as a human reaction to his endorsement of the British army’s massacre of peaceful marching protesters in Londonderry on January 30 1972.

A keen Common Marketeer, Hattersley had only derision for the description given of the Market as a “rich man’s club” by “the mindless left,” without troubling to consider any evidence for that view.

At one moment, during the Conservative Edward Heath 1970-1974 regime, Hattersley, as shadow education secretary, did earn applause from the left for speaking out for an end to private education.  

He suffered a penalty: no education secretary job for him under the Harold Wilson government that followed. He had blotted his copybook, which he did in small ways from time to time.  

He unequivocally acknowledges what he considered his own follies, such as granting himself “grotesque over-estimation of his importance to the Labour Party.”

During the Thatcher prime ministerial years (1979-1990), Hattersley’s memoir contains glimpses of his then political stance. “Tory trade union laws,” he says compelled the Neil Kinnock-led Labour opposition from 1983 ‘“to choose between sentimentality and common sense” (ie letting them stand).  

But as deputy Labour leader and shadow chancellor he wanted to increase top tax rates in order to finance public services.

On June 4 2000, with the knock-back for Labour in the May local elections inevitably in mind, and safe in the House of Lords from blocked promotions, Hattersley permitted himself to be more of a socialist. More milk, less water. Even some class war.  

The same message bites harder a quarter of a century later, as the uprising against Sir “Scrooge” Starmer’s policy package gathers pace.