In the annals of British political history, the image of Labour leader Neil Kinnock denouncing the “grotesque chaos” of Liverpool’s local government at his party’s conference in 1985 looms large. According to official memory, this was the moment when Kinnock asserted himself over the hard left, specifically the Trotskyist Militant tendency, whose sectarian antics had subordinated the city’s real needs to ideological dogma.
The speech, delivered in the seaside town of Bournemouth, has acquired a cult status, at least for devotees of British political history. This includes even conservative commentators like Simon Heffer, who included Kinnock’s attack on Militant in his anthology The Great British Speeches. When Keir Starmer railed against Nigel Farage at last year’s Labour conference, one of his supporters could think of no finer praise than to compare it to Kinnock’s intervention four decades earlier.
But Kinnock’s version of events obscures a far more complex and interesting story. While the Militant tendency was certainly an influential force in Liverpool’s Labour Party, it was one part of a wider left-wing movement. Fewer than a third of the Liverpool councillors who were ready to defy Margaret Thatcher’s government in the mid-1980s actually belonged to Militant.
Moreover, Liverpool was just one of the Labour-run councils under left-wing leadership around the country that was ready to take action against Thatcher’s austerity. But Kinnock and his allies worked hard to ensure that when the time for conflict came, Liverpool would stand virtually alone and its council would go down to defeat. Like the miners’ strike of 1984–85, the struggles over local government proved to be a turning point for Thatcher and her neoliberal project, with consequences for British society that are still evident today.
For centuries, Liverpool had been an industrial powerhouse thanks to its bustling port. But during the 1970s, the so-called New York of…
Auteur: Anders Lee
