Dangerous Hero. Tom Bower

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СКАЧАТЬ Chapman discovered, her husband’s grasp of economics at the national level was no better than his understanding of their domestic finances. His lack of interest in money was reflected by his complete silence about improving their standard of living. He never talked about buying a bigger home, a car or increasing his income. He had few material requirements. To her surprise, since they had married so soon after meeting, when he returned home at night he would happily open a can of beans, swallow them cold and declare himself satisfied. Occasionally he returned late from a meeting of the Hornsey Labour Party with friends to sing IRA songs while they all got drunk on beer. He would sit on the floor in his greasy, unwashed pea-green jacket, bought at an army surplus shop in Euston, oblivious to her irritation. They rarely went out together. Invitations to dinner with the Venesses were refused. Corbyn, they were told, did not socialise.

      Chapman spent lonely evenings in their small flat with Mango, the dog, and Harold Wilson, the cat, as her only companions while Corbyn went about extending his circle of political contacts. Among them was Tariq Ali, a Marxist intellectual originally from Pakistan, and Bernie Grant, a bombastic Black Power Marxist from Guyana and a Haringey councillor. ‘It’s racism to control immigration,’ Grant told Corbyn, adding that it was discriminatory to prevent anyone from the West Indies from settling in Britain. Corbyn adopted that opinion. Similarly, he did not openly protest about Grant’s view that boys and girls should be segregated in school, and that girls should be sent home when they were menstruating. Grant’s interest in questions of race was inconsistent, however: asked by Reg Race about the cultural oppression of immigrant women in Tottenham, he replied: ‘I don’t know and I don’t care.’ In their conversations, Grant and Corbyn rarely mentioned economic or social policies. They focused on community and ethnicity, subjects that were not only congenial to Corbyn, but at the heart of his political ideology. Anti-capitalist and disdainful of markets, he wanted citizens to live together in Soviet-style communes or self-supporting districts, as he had seen in Jamaica and South America. Joining in the black-and-white battle of morality against immorality, of good versus bad, underpinned his feelings of self-worth. Thanks to Grant, he was appointed chairman of the council’s new Community Development Sub-Committee, with responsibility for using public money to build community centres for immigrant groups. Within a year he was accused of ‘reckless spending’ by his fellow councillors, and of recruiting ‘community workers’ without giving them specific jobs. To Haringey’s Tory councillors, permanently in opposition but nevertheless vocal critics, Corbyn appeared to be signalling that he was left-wing on all issues, despite his lack of any coherent programme.

      Mirroring Tony Benn, he agreed with the government’s response to rocketing oil prices. To avoid inflation, the American and German governments had cut spending, but Denis Healey, the British chancellor, did the opposite, increasing public spending by 31 per cent in his first year, and by 29 per cent the following year. Most of the money went to state employees, whose wages rose by 32 per cent. To Corbyn’s glee, Healey simultaneously raised income taxes for top earners to 83 per cent, and added an extra 15 per cent tax on unearned income. Some individuals were paying between 92 and 101 per cent in taxation. Healey’s mantra, ‘Squeeze the rich until the pips squeak,’ matched Corbyn’s nostrums. Both men seemed oblivious to the consequences. While inflation in Germany was 7 per cent, in Britain the figure soared to 27 per cent. Rather than face Labour’s punitive taxes and lose their savings to hyperinflation, thousands of the country’s most talented professionals, scientists and engineers emigrated to America and the Far East in what was called ‘the brain drain’, a phrase coined in 1960. The loss to Britain was little short of catastrophic. By the end of 1975, Wilson’s schemes to control capitalism had crippled private investment and Britain was on the brink of bankruptcy. Joe Haines, his media spokesman, later summed up Labour’s policies as ‘trying to make water run uphill – against the facts, against events, against common sense and against human nature’.

      Corbyn was deaf to such complaints. Taxing the rich was right; he disputed the possibility of any permanent damage. In the cause of building socialism, he also opposed modernisation, including widening a main road that ran through his borough. During a delegation’s visit to Bill Rodgers, the new junior minister at the department of the environment, he had gone into a long harangue. Rodgers had retorted, ‘You are tiresome, Councillor Corbyn.’ Far worse humiliations followed. He was fired by the AUEW: his research was judged unacceptable. Corbyn would explain his sacking by saying that he had been a target in the clearout of leftists. His boss, he claimed, had decided that his celebrating the American withdrawal from Vietnam, continually attending political meetings or standing on picket lines across the country, was unwelcome. In reality, without an academic background, he lacked the skills to present a cogent analysis of political and economic issues. ‘He never told me he was sacked,’ recalled Chapman, whose own career was advancing: she had been selected as Labour’s parliamentary candidate for Dover and Deal, a Tory marginal.

      Once again, fortune intervened. NUPE, the trade union for public employees led by Alan Fisher, an ambitious left-wing firebrand, was recruiting officials to increase its membership among the underpaid. Replying to an advertisement, Corbyn arrived in Charing Cross for an interview. Reg Race, at that time the NUPE official in charge of the process, looked at the bedraggled applicant, whom he had never seen before.The Brylcreemed panel of men conducting the interviews, Race knew, would never consider someone wearing unpolished shoes, no jacket, and an un-ironed grey shirt, open at the collar. ‘Go down The Strand, buy a tie and smarten up, or else you’ve got no chance,’ he advised.

      On this occasion Corbyn did as he was told, and in truth the union had every reason to employ him. He was tirelessly active and a committed socialist, respected by both the Hornsey Labour Party and the Haringey Labour group. He was duly hired as the organiser for two London boroughs, Barnet and Bromley, a job that gave him responsibility for the area’s low-paid Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) workers, mostly school dinner ladies and caretakers. Given an old green car, he toured his domain in what Keith Veness, also a NUPE official, called ‘a sinecure job’. Corbyn was in seventh heaven. He had status and a good income. As an outstanding recruiter – the union’s membership would increase from 50,000 to 250,000 over the following seven years – and a keen organiser of strikes, he quickly won popularity with the union’s five hundred dinner ladies. However, he had nothing in common with the macho Cockney dustmen swearing over their pints down the local. In an attempt to win their acceptance he renamed himself ‘Jerry’ – no dustman would bond with a Jeremy – and, to avoid their hard-drinking sessions, would make his excuses and go off early to join another picket line.

      During his endless discussions with like-minded allies, Corbyn saw Britain’s industrial turmoil, rising interest rates and the collapse of the value of the pound as an opportunity to destroy capitalism. Ranged against Labour were the enfeebled Conservatives, led since February 1975 by Margaret Thatcher, who held that Britain was ruled by the unions, the majority of which were controlled by committed Marxists and agents of Moscow. In that febrile atmosphere, right-wing elements in the military, the City and the media plotted to stage a coup against Wilson, whom they suspected of being a KGB agent because of his regular trips to Moscow in the years immediately after 1945. Corbyn would not have been surprised if the plot had been implemented. Reports from America described the White House orchestrating military coups, assassinations and invasions across Africa, Asia and Latin America. The oppression and torture carried out by the military dictatorship in Chile particularly appalled him. The atmosphere of paranoia and persecution was agitated by leaks from committees in Washington investigating the Nixon government’s secret operations. Adding to the hysteria, ‘experts’ forecast that by 2000 the world would be convulsed by widespread famine, followed by total destruction. The uncertainty excited the left.

      In March 1976, Harold Wilson resigned as prime minister because of ill health. In the first round of voting among the 313 Labour MPs to choose Wilson’s successor, Tony Benn and Michael Foot, both left-wing unilateralist disarmers, together outscored James Callaghan, the right-wing candidate, with 40 per cent of the vote. In the final ballot, Callaghan got just thirty-nine more votes than Foot. The left did not feel defeated. Corbyn and his allies interpreted the loss as a temporary blip, and an incentive to redouble their efforts.

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