[Militant No. 377, 14th October 1977, p. 1 and 2]
Goodbye and good riddance! That is the reaction of most Labour Party members to Reg Prentice’s defection to the Tory Party.
“If I blame myself for anything,” Prentice told Walden on ‘Weekend World’, “it is that I did not leave the Labour Party earlier.” This touching self-recrimination is nothing to the anger of the Labour rank and file, who sincerely wish that he had never joined.
Prentice’s step is a complete vindication of the long campaign of Newham North East Labour Party to exercise its democratic right to replace him as a candidate in the next election.
Joining the Tories, the party of big business, simply confirms the thoroughly reactionary logic of the ideas Prentice has long voiced within the Party, and to which his own constituency rightly objected.
For years, Prentice has been like a fifth columnist in the Labour ranks, always ready to provide the Tory press with an anti-trade union, anti-socialist quote to blazon across the headlines or hammer out in the news bulletins.
Cuts
He attacked the “Pentonville Five” and jailed Shrewsbury pickets for “breaking the law”. He attacked the trade unions for “welshing” on the social contract, when wage restraint was actually effective while unemployment rose and social services were cut.
When Denis Healey concluded a deal with the IMF, Prentice actually denounced the public spending cuts as “insufficient”, and called for a reduction of social security payments to the unemployed and the sick.
The only surprise about Prentice’s action is that, unlike most of his friends who also peddle Tory ideas in the Parliamentary Labour Party, Prentice has had the barefaced cheek openly to go over to the Tories.
Prentice chose to launch a new attack on the “surrenders by Labour ministers to the militant elements in the so-called labour movement” as delegates were returning from an annual conference at which most of them felt that the Labour leaders, far from bowing to militants, had stolen many of the Tories’ clothes.
The timing of Prentice’s defection also seemed designed to inflict the maximum damage on the Party in the event of an early general election, one factor which made many delegates more willing than they would otherwise have been to swallow the unpalatable policies served from the platform.
Sorry
Prentice’s defection to the Tories has clearly covered his parliamentary and ministerial friends with embarrassment. Shirley Williams, who attacked those who wanted to remove Prentice as MP as totalitarian enemies of democracy, said: “I am extremely sorry that he should have left the Labour Party and very surprised that at this particular time he has joined the Conservatives.”
Neville Sanderson, another Prentice supporter, said: “I am astonished … We tried to help him. I’m disappointed.”
They are shocked and embarrassed because Prentice’s action reveals the logic of thinking that they share. It is a case of hating the traitor, whose clumsy tactics have damaged their position, but loving the treason.
Prentice was a close ally of Roy Jenkins, who himself abandoned the Parliamentary Labour Party to head the EEC Commission in Brussels. It was Jenkins who saved Prentice’s position in the cabinet when even Harold Wilson moved to sack him.
Jenkins, together with Shirley Williams, spoke for Prentice in Newham at the height of Prentice’s struggle to regain majority support in the local party.
‘The Guardian’ summed it up when it said that Prentice’s right-wing pronouncements and his attacks on the trade unions and the left, are “much stronger than anything … Labour’s right-wingers will normally express in public.”
In other words, Prentice says what others think. His parliamentary friends are not embarrassed by his ideas, but by his bullet-headed insistence on blurting out the true-blue “truth”.
Prentice is out: but important questions remain. This MP’s final step across the class lines highlights the real reasons for moves against right-wing MPs in many other constituencies.
This development is not the result of infiltration by “left-wing extremists”, as Prentice and the press try to make out, but the result of a shift to the left in the labour movement as a whole. In many constituencies there is now an accumulation of years of dissatisfaction with MPs cast in the same mould as Prentice.
Prentice’s parliamentary career is typical of many of those, mostly drawn from the middle classes, who flooded the Parliamentary Labour Party in the 1950s.
He was first elected in 1957, shortly after Gaitskell assumed the leadership, and when the leaders handed out parliamentary seats as eighteenth century Tory squires handed out livings to their favourite parsons.
Shortly after Prentice went to Westminster, Gaitskell, Crosland, Jay and others stepped up their campaign to throw out the socialist aims of the party embodied in Clause Four and to sever its links with the trade unions, a campaign which Prentice fully supported.
Renegades
Prentice later became an early supporters of the so-called Campaign for Democratic Socialism, which based itself on the right-wing ideas of Gaitskell and tried to launch a crusade against Marxism in the party.
Other prominent CDS supporters were Roy Jenkins, Williams Rogers, Dick Taverne (who broke from the Labour Party), Christopher Mayhew (who joined the Liberals), Desmond Donnolly (who opposed the Labour Party as an independent “Democrat”), and Frank Tomney (who has recently been given his marching orders in Hammersmith).
The list of those Prentice has been associated with, in fact, is a veritable roll-call of right-wingers and open renegades.
Constituency Labour Parties are now no longer prepared to accept MPs who are completely insensitive to the problems of the working class and out of touch with the rank and file. Throughout the Party there is a demand for MPs who will consistently represent the party which puts them in parliament and be answerable to the rank and file.
The Prentice affair underlines the urgent need for the Labour Party to strengthen the democratic procedures in relation to the selection and reselection of MPs, to place strict limitations on their business links, consultancy arrangements, and other extra-parliamentary sources of income, and to ensure that constituency parties are able to recall MPs when they feel they no longer represent their interests.
Lynn Walsh
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