Dangerous Hero. Tom Bower
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Название: Dangerous Hero
Автор: Tom Bower
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Политика, политология
isbn: 9780008299590
isbn:
The Corbyns were duly rewarded for their hard work. Chapman became chairman of housing, while Corbyn was made head of the Public Works Committee. Houses had up to that point been given to families in need; Chapman instead allocated homes to gays and single mothers. Moderate Labour councillors became alarmed. ‘She was a classy but poisonous lady,’ recalled Robin Young, the party whip in Haringey. ‘Cold, extreme left and not capable as a chairman.’ Others noticed the competition between Corbyn and his wife, and judged Chapman the superior talent. Mark Killingworth, a left-wing committee chairman and an ally of the Corbyns, recalls Jeremy as ‘hungry for power’. Already at that early stage, Killingworth observed, ‘his ambition was to be an MP’.
As the chairman responsible for the council’s services to the community, Corbyn once again set about hiring more workers, doubling the size of the direct labour workforce and increasing their wages. No one mentioned that as a NUPE official representing those council employees, he had a clear conflict of interest. In his mind, that notion was a capitalist ruse. Rewarding the workers was his duty. As a man devoted to causes rather than to the hard graft of implementing decisions and managing their consequences, he had no difficulty spending money to enrich his members. Here he imitated Keith Veness, who as a councillor negotiated on behalf of the ILEA, with Corbyn representing the NUPE workers. ‘I gave NUPE as much as possible,’ recalled Veness, who preferred dealing with Corbyn than with Bernie Grant, who, he complained, would threaten employers with physical violence. By contrast, Corbyn allowed his shop stewards to do the intimidating. The result was the same. Tony Franchi, a wood craftsman and Tory councillor, accused Corbyn of the ‘misuse of our money’. On one occasion he watched five council workers arrive outside his workshop in Crouch End to sweep the road. ‘Only one man did any work. The other four stood smoking cigarettes.’ This was not just a Haringey problem: the waste, repeated across the country by Labour councils, became unaffordable.
In the country as a whole, to prevent an economic collapse Callaghan had imposed a 5 per cent limit on pay increases, but it was not long before the bulwark was crumbling. Trade union leaders warned that high inflation was eroding their members’ wages, and that they were unable to hold back pay demands. In October 1978 Labour was still ahead in the opinion polls, but despite expectations Callaghan refused to call an election. Soon after, the dam broke. When their demand for a 20 per cent pay increase was rebuffed, road haulage and oil tanker drivers went out on strike; some rail workers followed. Then Liverpool’s dockers walked out, crippling not only Britain’s biggest port but devastating local industries and eventually the city itself. Against this background, NUPE demanded a more than 40 per cent wage increase for council workers. The government refused, and Corbyn called on his members to vote for a strike.
Leading the militancy was Jack Jones, the recently retired general secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, Britain’s largest trade union. Callaghan was stymied. He relied on Jones to support his economic policy, even though MI5 had warned Harold Wilson that a raft of British trade union leaders were being paid by Moscow to advance communism in Britain. Among them was Jones, identified as a paid Soviet agent since the mid-1930s. Wilson had repeated that intelligence to his successor, but Callaghan chose to ignore the danger. That Christmas, the country sensed the lull before the storm. Corbyn stood and waited.
3
Jane Chapman was torn. Politically and as an academic, she was a rising star, but her personal life made her miserable. For Christmas lunch she prepared a special five-course vegetarian meal for Corbyn and Piers. ‘They stuffed it down their gullets and never said thanks,’ she recalled in an even tone. Her husband, she knew, would have been happy with a can of beans: ‘Usually Tesco, not Heinz, but he wouldn’t know the difference. It was all just fuel to keep him going.’ Their conversation was, as ever, about politics, mainly the inevitability of widespread strikes after the holiday.
Within Haringey council, everyone knew about Corbyn’s conflict of interest. He was in charge of the employment of NUPE members, and at the same time he was their trade union representative organising a strike against the council. He was also responsible for the housing maintenance department, from which £2 million had gone missing annually for several years in succession. Council employees were both stealing money and inflating their claims for overtime. The consequence was a two-year backlog of repairs to council homes. Because workers had failed to do the necessary repairs, Haringey’s housing was in a bad state, not least on the Broadwater Farm estate, the Tottenham home of over four thousand people that was ostensibly managed by Chapman in her role as chairman of housing. She would claim that the estate’s day-to-day management had been delegated to a local association, but, along with her husband, she was doing little to remedy the borough’s appalling housing shortage. In her defence she could rely on the support of Bernie Grant, who tagged the accusations of corruption as ‘absolutely ridiculous’. The Tories called for an independent investigation, but Corbyn refused to countenance it. ‘We will conduct the inquiry,’ he said, despite a previous internal inquiry ending, according to the Tories, in ‘a whitewash exercise’. No one expressed any confidence in Corbyn’s investigation, especially as his solution was to increase the number of council workers without their either carrying out any identifiable tasks or producing any benefits to the local community.
In late December 1978, Haringey’s employees’ demands for a 40 per cent pay increase were rejected – at the time that private sector employees were accepting 7 per cent rises – and they went on strike. Corbyn, even though he was their employer, joined them as a NUPE official on their picket line outside the council’s premises. Rapidly, Haringey’s streets filled with bags of uncollected rubbish, children could not enter their schools (the caretakers prevented them), and repairs to council homes were abandoned. ‘Volvos are sliding on the ice on Muswell Hill,’ Corbyn gaily told Toby Harris, the local party chairman and a fellow councillor. The sight of suffering middle classes, Harris noticed, evidently pleased Corbyn. Identical strikes hit many parts of Britain. The lurch towards national panic was highlighted by council workers refusing to bury the dead. Newspaper photographs of Haringey’s plight showed the irate parents of some of the 37,000 children denied their education. ‘The press is just full of crisis, anarchy, chaos, disruption,’ Tony Benn recorded in his diary on 22 January 1979. ‘I have never seen anything like it in my life.’
With noticeable glee, Corbyn continued to support the strikers. On NUPE’s behalf, he had skilfully organised the dustmen’s dispute. Only the drivers went on strike. The loaders stayed at ‘work’, and shared their wages with the drivers, while Corbyn refused to hire private contractors to collect the rubbish. He also sided with the school caretakers, who were forbidden to hand over the door keys to headmasters to open the borough’s ninety-six schools. Teachers were ordered not to enter the buildings, and those who agreed to help educate children outside their classrooms were threatened by a NUPE rent-a-mob, vocal agitators summoned by the union to assert its cause. Haringey’s parents were furious that no other children in London were being denied their education, but Corbyn dismissed their protests as immaterial to the workers’ rights, which he said came first. The parents staged several public demonstrations, protesting that Haringey had failed in its statutory duty to provide education, but Corbyn arranged for Trotskyites, СКАЧАТЬ