(Militant International Review, No. 36, Winter 1988)
An MIR interview with Peter Taaffe, Editor of Militant and co-author, with surcharged Liverpool councillor Tony Mulhearn, of an important new book on the historic struggle of Liverpool council from 1983-87.
Liverpool – A City That Dared to Fight
MIR: Why write a book on Liverpool Council?
PT: Well, there have been two major struggles of the British working class since 1979: the miners strike and the struggle of Liverpool City Council. The miners strike has been the subject of much analysis and comment, although mostly superficial. But not one book has dealt with Liverpool from an all-sided approach. Michael Parkinson’s book deals with the economic aspect from a financial and largely academic angle only. Liverpool is a city with half a million people, formerly the major sea port of the British empire. The city succeeded in humbling the ‚Iron Lady‘ herself and forced her to retreat in 1984 – something only the miners had achieved, in 1981. I wanted to rescue the truth of that story from under heaps of lies and slanders that have poured down on the heads of the leaders of the Liverpool struggle.
MIR: So your book is more than a factual account?
PT: A narrative account would have been interesting in itself but the hidden processes beneath the events have been glossed over by most commentators. Liverpool was not a ‚fiendish plot‘ by Marxists but the product of a number of factors. Firstly there is the collapse of capitalism manifested in a striking fashion in the state of Liverpool in the 1980s. And secondly there was the presence of a powerful Marxist tendency gathered around Militant which invested the Liverpool labour movement with a unique fighting capacity. Those are the key underlying factors to the story.
MIR: You have written this book in collaboration with Tony Mulhearn – what were the features of this cooperation?
PT: I have had a long association with Tony going back more than 20 years. Tony has played and is playing a key role in the development of the labour movement. He won wide respect as President of the Liverpool District Labour Party and as a councillor during the Liverpool events. I have closely followed events in Liverpool, visited the city on many occasions, and discussed with Tony and others on the major strategical and tactical problems confronting the leaders of the struggle as they happened. I think we realised that it was a natural alliance to write a book on Liverpool’s story.
MIR: What were the key events in the Liverpool story that your book deals with?
PT: The story of Liverpool’s fight can be divided into two phases: the ascendant or offensive period from the elections of 1983 up to September 1985; and the defensive period from September 1985 to now when the gains of the first period have had to be defended.
The 1983 election campaign stands out for its completely different character compared to other Labour Party election campaigns. Liverpool did not just rely on an ‚opinion poll‘ recording the preferences of voters on the doorstep. Liverpool canvassers set out to convince voters as well, through argument in lengthy discussions. That election revealed what Marxists have always claimed. The working class is not stupid. They wanted to know whether Labour could do any better than other parties, and just presenting an anti-Tory case was not enough to convince them. Voters even discussed with canvassers the failure of the Socialist government in France. They wanted to know why there was unemployment and how to change the situation.
That experience in 1983 was applied in all subsequent elections in Liverpool with brilliant results for Labour. It shows that Labour can win in the teeth of ferocious anti-Labour media attacks. In Liverpool Labour created its own ‚public opinion‘ by action and by a huge volume of socialist propaganda that counteracted the poison of the press. Apart from the mass demonstrations, the other moments that stand out were the exciting council meeting in 1984 when the council set a rate below that needed to finance expenditure and demanded the government provide more resources, and the jubilation following the victory over the government in July 1984. And of course there was the dramatic September 1985 days when the call for strike action was narrowly defeated. After that Liverpool under its Marxist leadership managed to avoid a rout and conducted an orderly retreat which allowed them to consolidate the gains made in previous years through victories in the local and general elections of 1986 and 1987.
MIR: Would you say that Liverpool was defeated in the end?
PT: Eventually there was a setback in the sense that the councillors were surcharged, banned from office and some were expelled from the Labour Party. But there were enormous achievements that had lasting effect. The gains in jobs, housing and education are spelt out in our book but also the Liverpool experience was a monument to working class struggle heightening the political awareness of Liverpool people. The struggle of the 47 is now a tremendous obstacle to the right wing temporarily in control of the council and trying to make cuts. The 47 surcharged councillors are like Banquo’s ghost in Macbeth coming back to haunt him by occupying his seat. Whenever the present leadership try to make cuts they are confronted with the achievements of the 47.
MIR: Why was Liverpool eventually defeated?
PT: Well, it was not because of the policies or strategy adopted by the council. There were mistakes, of course, what mass struggle can be conducted without making some mistakes? But when mistakes were made they were openly admitted and corrected before the working class which helped to raise everybody’s understanding. The most famous mistake was the issuing of ‚redundancy notices‘ in September 1985 as a legal manoeuvre, a tactic to gain time to pursue the campaign to the end of 1985. Of course there was no question of the council sacking anybody but the council’s opponents used the question to obscure the real issues at stake. This was openly recognised by the Liverpool leaders. Compare that to the national Labour leaders who have no comment to make on their role in the general election defeat last year. Because they admit no mistakes, they are preparing even greater blunders.
The main reason for the defeat was the policies and action of the national trade union and Labour leaders. They were a prop for the Tory government. Without their connivance the Thatcher, Jenkin and Baker combination would never have been able to fine or drive from office the 47. Also the former ’soft left‘ when they ditched their own rate-capping campaign gave renewed strength to the national Labour leaders to attack Liverpool.
MIR: What are the main lessons of the Liverpool experience?
PT: Some superficial commentators suggest that Liverpool is in some way peculiar. The pollster Professor Anthony King said the election results showed that Liverpool had declared ‚political UDI‘ from the rest of the ’normal‘ country; while others have talked mystically about the special ‚character‘ of scousers. But Liverpool is not unique in that sense – the same economic and social. problems are faced by Glasgow, the North East and parts of inner London. But Liverpool was and is unique in the sense that the working class there had developed a Marxist leadership and consequently powerful strategy and tactics. It is not the objective conditions in Liverpool that are unique but the subjective factor of its leadership. And the truth is that what happened in Liverpool! between 1983-87 will apply to the rest of the country in the future – there will be many more ‚Liverpools‘ in the next five to ten years. The struggle will not unfold in the same way – at the moment industrial struggles are more likely – but the same fighting capabilities that the miners and Liverpool working people showed will be repeated.
But the key factor was a tried and tested Marxist leadership. For example, in Liverpool in the June 1987 election the swing to Labour was so great that if it had been repeated country wide Neil Kinnock would have got 116 more Labour MPs beside him, which would have meant a Labour government. And I repeat that there is nothing unique about the economic and social conditions in Liverpool. That swing was only achieved because of the leadership and role of Liverpool! Council.
MIR: Finally, your book is the first venture of the newly founded publishers, Fortress Books. What significance is the establishment of Fortress Books for the development of Marxism?
PT: It is of historic importance. Trotsky emphasised in the 1930s that the establishment of a Marxist publishing house in America represented a decisive turning point. He stressed that the labour movement and particularly the Marxists could not rely on bourgeois publishers. They would occasionally publish works of Marxism, particularly if they could profit by this, but this could not counter the deluge of books whose purpose was to ideologically reinforce capitalism. He also pointed out that with the onset of capitalist economic crisis from 1929 bourgeois publishing houses, „which from time to time printed radical works in the firm belief that the US was immune to the actions of destructive ideas, will in the coming years become more cautious, i.e. reactionary. and will completely ostracize revolutionary theoretical thought.“ The crude and hooligan efforts of the Stalinists in the publishing field, with their horrible perversion of Marxism, only reinforced the bourgeois.
Trotsky’s hopes in his American followers, however, were to be dashed. Their heirs have today completely abandoned Marxism. Trotsky advocated „a revolutionary publishing house, independent both from capital and from the Soviet boureaucracy“ which would „from the very beginning set itself the task of bringing out a serious library of revolutionary thought for advanced workers and radical intelligentsia. … Under the blows of the crisis and social shake-ups there will here arise a generation of revolutionary theoreticians capable of saying a new word. All the more necessary is it to create for this awakening social criticism a stable base in the form of a publishing house not bound by any other considerations and obligations outside of the objective to open to humanity a new road of development.“ How delighted would he then be, if he were alive today, to see the establishment of Fortress Books. The publication of this book is only the first of a stream of books which will be produced which will play a vital role in the building of Marxism in Britain and internationally.
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