Sky Views: Blair airbrushed from Labour's pantheon
Tuesday 2 October 2018 14:12, UK
Adam Boulton, editor-at-large
Labour's successful conference in Liverpool this month confirms the city's new status as a premier league political venue along with Manchester and Birmingham.
It seems that Britain's crumbling seaside towns are less of a draw these days for our top politicians.
The places chosen for these annual jamborees tell a story.
Liverpool, for example, has hosted Labour and the Liberal Democrats, but many on Merseyside want to keep it a Tory-free zone.
The interaction this week between Labour and Liverpool has given a fascinating glimpse of how history, including contemporary history, is being reshaped and redrawn.
For Britons born in the post-war baby boom who are not Scousers, such as Theresa May or me, I suppose Liverpool probably evokes three things.
It is where the Beatles came from. It is a football town with Liverpool and Everton FC, whose fans have suffered two terrible man-made disasters at Heysel and Hillsborough Stadiums.
And it is where a Labour council, dominated by the Trotskyist Militant Tendency tried to challenge Margaret Thatcher's policies and had its methods condemned by Neil Kinnock, the Labour leader of the time.
All this happened in the 1980s or before.
It is not in the lived experience of people younger than about 35 - the millennial and i generations who are increasingly influential in politics.
They don't know about the 1983 general election when Labour was soundly beaten by Mrs Thatcher and the Conservatives after adopting a manifesto of left wing proposals, dubbed "the longest suicide in history note in history" by the late Gerald Kaufmann MP.
Jeremy Corbyn first became an MP then, having previously been a loyal and active ally of Tony Benn.
At the Labour conference in 1985 in Bournemouth, Kinnock delivered one of the most famous speeches of modern times.
He condemned Militant in Liverpool for the consequences of their illegal and confrontational tactics.
"I'll tell you what happens with impossible promises. You start with far-fetched resolutions," Kinnock said.
"They are then pickled into a rigid dogma, a code, and you go through the years sticking to that, out-dated, mis-placed, irrelevant to the real needs, and you end in the grotesque chaos of a Labour council - a Labour council - hiring taxis to scuttle round a city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers".
This was a turning point for Labour.
It looked as if Kinnock had finally put an end to the attempts of the "Bennite left", associated with Tony Benn MP, to take control.
Derek "Deggsy" Hatton, the stalwart Militant deputy leader of the council was expelled from the party. Others including MPs followed.
Kinnock set the party on the path of reform - pro-European, pro-NATO, pro-business - which led to New Labour and Tony Blair's three general election victories.
Labour's internal argument seemed to have been settled for good. But it wasn't.
At Labour's women's conference this month, Dawn Butler MP, the equalities spokesperson who often sits next to Corbyn at PMQs, raised the 1980s and said: "Conference, we are in Liverpool where over 30 years ago the council stood up to Thatcher and said - better to break the law than break the poor."
Matt Zarb-Cousin, a former spokesman for Corbyn, told me he agreed with Ms Butler, while those who disagreed did it in the mildest terms.
Not much was said about the Beatles at the Labour conference.
Perhaps because they don't mean a lot to the under 50s. Perhaps because they are universal property. Perhaps because Ringo has come out for Brexit.
More likely because Bono of U2 likened Blair and Brown to Lennon and McCartney at Labour's 2004 Conference.
Kinnock, Blair and Brown are being airbrushed out of the Labour pantheon. Blair most vigorously of all, he is a non-person, unmentionable by conference speakers.
Labour sees itself as the party of football, the people's game.
Kinnock, Blair and Brown are being airbrushed out of the Labour pantheon. Blair most vigorously of all, he is a non-person, unmentionable by conference speakers.
As usual there were a few pros willing to pad out the party team for the pre-conference match against the press.
But the conference crowd was a little bemused when John McDonnell, Liverpool-born 67 years ago and now a London MP, began his speech with a tribute to Bill Shankly.
They clapped the fact that Shankly was a self-declared "socialist" but the legendary Liverpool manager who retired in 1974 and died in 1981 seemed remote.
The main speakers seemed oddly uninterested in some of Liverpool's current preoccupations.
For them theory trumped awkward practical reality.
Theresa May and the Mayor of Manchester Andy Burnham are the politicians most assiduous in pursuing Justice for Hillsborough.
The new Royal Liverpool Hospital, three years late in part because of the collapse of Carillion, was bailed out by the government while Labour was meeting.
Indeed the Conference facilities themselves on the regenerated Harbour front owe their existence to the combined efforts of the Conservative Michael Heseltine, New Labour and European Union investment.
History is not morality. Liverpool was a great port essential to Britain's global expansion.
But as special new exhibitions admit, it was therefore also a hub for slaving.
On Friday, Derek Hatton wrote in the Liverpool Echo that he had been readmitted as a member of the Labour Party.
As it reinvents old slogans, Jeremy Corbyn's Labour had better hope that the philosopher George Santayana got it wrong when he postulated "those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it".
Sky Views is a series of comment pieces by Paste BN editors and correspondents, published every morning.
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