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ONLY DISCONNECT
The tendency to engage in a rhetorical auction was already observable at Exeter in 1973, as CP or CP-aligned speakers on the one hand and IS or IS-aligned speakers on the other invested their disagreements over grants or what-have-you with a significance that could only be understood by reference to the ideological conflict between orthodox Communism and Trotskyism on wider issues. The predictable result was the alienation and growing cynicism of a large part of the audience.
One of the enduring memories I have of that conference is that, after the first session or two, a large proportion of the delegates at the back of the hall stopped listening to the speeches and started chatting about more important matters (presumably sex, drugs and rock-and-roll, or at least football) among themselves. The resulting hum obliged the orators at the rostrum to raise their voices, which in turn obliged the chatters at the back to chat more loudly. The orators in turn became yet more vehement and histrionic, which eventually provoked the more lucidly cynical of the delegates to riposte: from midday on Day Two of the Conference onwards, whenever a speaker intoned the word 'struggle' – as virtually every speaker did, in every second sentence – an ironic echo: "STRUUUGGLE!!" – reverberated from the back of the hall. As far as I know I was the only member of the CPGB present to find this significant.
It seems to me that the spontaneous tendency to cynicism which these bored delegates displayed, and which unquestionably reflected the attitudes of the wider student body, were an inevitable corollary of Broad Left politics. The fact was that the Broad Left was running student unions with no real function and to which the mass of students were, accordingly, fundamentally indifferent. And the indifference (and sound human instincts) of those delegates who were most representative of ordinary students disposed them to see through the clouds of rhetoric of both Broad Left and Ultra-Left alike, and to blow raspberries at them frequent intervals.
This aspect of Broad Leftism – its tendency to concentrate on its duel with its Ultra-Left antagonists, and to be so absorbed in this duel that it has nothing to say to anyone else and cannot speak in the language of anyone else - has since thoroughly infected the Labour Party and, in conjunction with the tendencies to constitutional fetishism and displacement activity, has comprehensively disabled the Labour Party from relating to the British people.
A fundamental premise of the Broad Left form of politics is the substantial irrelevance of the institutions and apparatuses it controls to the mass of the electorate, whether these apparatuses are national or local student unions, or trade unions, or the local or national Labour Party and whether this electorate is the student body or the membership of a trade union of the residents of a London borough or the British people as a whole. It is striking that, in those trade unions which are now run by coalitions which describe themselves as 'the Broad left', Broad Left control has coincided with a vertiginous decline in trade union membership, a decline which cannot be explained wholly by the recession or government policies, and to which the Broad Left leaders of these unions have seemed remarkably indifferent.
Kinnockism – the synthesis of Broad Leftism and Bevanism-at-the-end-of-its-tether – has never really had a feel for how government is actually relevant to the people. Kinnockism has assumed that the people are really indifferent to the government and Kinnock's party has certainly been indifferent to the people, and has been psychologically incapable of leading or articulating popular exasperation with the government. In this respect, Kinnockism is a significant departure from the politics of the original Bevanites, many of whom knew very well how to articulate currents of public opinion hostile to Tory misgovernment. It is perhaps in this respect that the take-over of Kinnock's lapsed-Bevanite outlook by Charles Clarke's Broad Leftist outlook is most sharply apparent.
The explanation lies in the fact that Broad Leftism was never a representative politics. The 'broad mass of the students' was not represented by the Broad Left, but merely invoked rhetorically as a debating point with which to confound the Ultra-Left. But, if Broad Leftism did not represent student opinion and interests, it did not represent an avowable idea either.
There have been unrepresentative forms of politics which, because they have been the vehicle of an avowable idea, have been perfectly capable of organising effective agitations – Bolshevism in the Lenin-Stalin era, for example. But Broad Leftism was never an agitational politics. It could neither represent student opinion nor stir it up in the name of a novel purpose. The fundamental purpose which underlay the Broad Left was the unavowable purpose which I have already described, the CP's purpose of protecting its industrial cadre from contamination by trendy lefties. And this meant that the true function of Broad Leftism required it, not to mobilise student political energies, but to keep them demobilised.
The truth of this proposition may not be self-evident at first glance, because a characteristic feature of Broad Leftism in power has been its inclination to launch 'campaigns' on sundry issues at frequent intervals. But the campaigns which Broad Left leaderships have led have never been true agitations. They have invariably espoused objectives which have been tangential to, if not at odds with, the interests and views of the memberships these leaderships have notionally represented. The NUT under Broad Left leadership has launched umpteen 'campaigns' of this kind, and the TGWU has not been immune from this virus in the last decade.
The issues which have been the subject of these campaigns have invariably been the latest fashionable bees in the bonnet of the Broad Leftists themselves, or have reflected the organisational self-interest of the Broad Left ruling coterie. What Broad Left leaderships have been utterly hopeless at doing has been mobilising their memberships on matters that deeply interest them. This is because Broad Left leadership has constantly required and presupposed a fundamentally quiescent and politically defenceless membership. And, if one examines the kind of campaign which Broad Left leaderships have been inclined to run in the trade unions they have controlled, they have almost always included an element of ideological intimidation and policing of the memberships themselves, and have thereby served the function of consolidating Broad Left control over these memberships.