Machines Like Me

The catchphrase of the late autumn owed an obvious debt to a previous prime minister: a half-hour is a long time in politics. Harold Wilson’s original ‘week’ seemed too long for this parliament. One afternoon it looked like there was going to be a leadership challenge. By the next morning there were insufficient signatures – the fainthearts had prevailed. Soon after, the government survived by one vote a motion of no confidence in the House of Commons. Certain senior Tories rebelled or abstained. Mrs Thatcher, insulted, furious, stubborn, deaf to good advice, called a snap election to be held in three weeks. She was, in the general view, pulling the temple down on her party, most of which now believed she was an electoral liability. She didn’t see it that way, but she was wrong. The Tories could hardly match the momentum of Tony Benn’s campaign, not in the TV and radio studios, not on the stump, certainly not in the industrial and university towns. The Falklands Catastrophe, as it was now called, came back to destroy her. This time, no popular inclination to forgiveness in the cause of national unity. The televised testimony of grieving widows and their children was fatal. The Labour campaign let no one forget how eloquently Benn had spoken out against the Task Force. The poll tax rankled. As predicted, it was difficult and expensive to collect. More than a hundred celebrity non-payers, many of them actresses, were in prison and became martyrs.

A million voters under the age of thirty had recently joined the Labour Party. Many of them were active on the nation’s doorsteps. On the eve of polling day, Benn gave a rousing speech at a rally in Wembley stadium. The landslide was greater than predicted, exceeding the Labour victory of 1945. It was a sad moment when Mrs Thatcher decided to leave Number 10 on foot, hand in hand with her husband and two children. She walked towards Whitehall, upright and defiant, but her tears were visible and for a couple of days, the country suffered pangs of remorse.

Labour had a majority of 162 MPs, many of whom were newly selected Bennites. When the new prime minister returned from Buckingham Palace, where the Queen had invited him to form a government, he gave an important speech from outside Number 10. The country would disengage unilaterally from its nuclear weaponry – that was no surprise. Also, the government would set about withdrawing from what was now called the European Union – that was a shock. The party’s manifesto had alluded to the idea in a single vague line which people had barely noticed. From his new front door, Benn told the nation that there would be no rerun of the 1975 referendum. Parliament would make the decision. Only the Third Reich and other tyrannies decided policy by plebiscites and generally no good came from them. Europe was not simply a union that chiefly benefited large corporations. The history of the continental member states was vastly different from our own. They had suffered violent revolutions, invasions, occupations and dictatorships. They were therefore only too willing to submerge their identities in a common cause directed from Brussels. We, on the other hand, had lived unconquered for nearly a thousand years. Soon, we would live freely again.

Benn gave an extended version of that speech a month later in the Manchester Free Trade Hall. At his side sat the historian, E. P. Thompson. When it was his turn, he said that patriotism had always been the terrain of the political right. Now it was the turn of the left to claim it for all. Once nuclear weapons were banished, Thompson predicted, the government would raise a standing citizen’s army that would make these islands impossible to invade and dominate. He didn’t specify an enemy. President Carter sent Benn a message of support, using words that caused a scandal on the right in the USA and haunted his second term: ‘The word “socialist” doesn’t bother me.’ A poll later suggested that a half of registered Democrats wished they had voted for the defeated candidate, Ronald Reagan.