The Night the Government Fell

A government without a majority, staggering from day to day in the House of Commons, wheeling and dealing in a desperate bid to survive. A referendum which destroyed the government's chances of staying in power. A minor party from the Celtic fringes of British politics keeping the government awake and fretting at night. A radical opposition leader, beloved by the party membership but widely distrusted by the rest of the front bench.

How things don't change. Forty years ago today, things look very similar to how they do today. Today marks forty years since the last time a UK government was brought down on the floor of the House of Commons in a no confidence motion.

James Callaghan had become Prime Minister in 1976. That was pretty much his last piece of good luck. His majority gone the day he took office, amidst a horrendous economic storm, and the creditors of the IMF circling, it had been a miracle that Callaghan had survived the year without his government falling. In fact, by late 1978, Labour had pulled even with the Conservatives in the opinion polls. Callaghan mulled an early election. In the end, in September 1978, Callaghan went on TV and dropped the bombshell. He would not go to the polls, but would wait until next year.

Callaghan showing the balancing skills that kept him in office against the odds for three long years

Big mistake. At the very same moment, the Ford car workers in Dagenham went on strike for higher pay. The government wanted to restrict pay rises to 5%. The Ford workers got 17%. This triggered a series of walkouts across huge swathes of industry. It was nicknamed the Winter of Discontent.

Britain in the Seventies was no stranger to strikes. The 1971-72 strike by the miners had caused blackouts, and the Three Day Week of 1974 was unprecedented in Britain's postwar history. The Winter of Discontent was far less disruptive than either of those events. But it marked the moment when the Labour government of 1974-79 went into terminal decline.

The Winter of Discontent

If it was the Ford workers in Dagenham that began the collapse of James Callaghan's government, it was voters in Scotland and Wales who delivered the crippling blow. At the depths of unpopularity, in early March 1979, the government was committed to hold devolution referendums about establishing assemblies in Scotland and Wales. The Welsh assembly was roundly rejected; the Scottish Assembly was a more complicated case, as voters did pass it, but not by the required margin. The SNP and Plaid Cymru now had no reason to prop up Callaghan's government, and the SNP made it clear they would vote to bring the government down. The Conservatives, seeing their chance, laid down a motion of no confidence.

But Labour were not going down without a fight. Talks were held with Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalists, and the breakaway Scottish Labour Party, who both agreed to support the government. A freedom of information law was offered to Clement Freud to try and peel him off from the rest of the Liberals. Some Ulster Unionists were brought onside by promising them a pipeline to Northern Ireland. This agreement nearly fell apart when the deal was signed in green ink by accident; it had to be quite literally taped back together.

More worrying was the health of Alfred Broughton, a West Yorkshire Labour MP. Broughton was terminally ill, and his doctors warned that to move him from Batley and Morley down to London would kill him. The Labour whip Walter Harrison asked his Tory counterpart, Bernard Weatherill, if they could reach an agreement for an abstention. Weatherill refused, then offered to abstain himself. Harrison said no, thereby saving Weatherill's career, and quite possibly allowing him to become the Commons' Speaker four years later as a result.

The night itself was one of high tension. There are stories of Labour whips prising half-drunk members out of the pubs and bars of Westminster, where they'd been detained by journalists hostile to the government. Searches were conducted of the Palace of Westminster to make sure there were no lost MPs, or to spot opposition MPs being hidden to vote at the last possible second, to confuse the numbers. It was bordering on chaos.

In the chamber of the House of Commons, the atmosphere was electric. Callaghan, knowing the hour of reckoning had come at last, gave a good defence of his government, branding the SNP as Turkey's voting for an early Christmas. Thatcher's speech fell flat, living up to her then nickname of Cautious Margaret. Gerry Fitt, the SDLP member for West Belfast, decried the government's hardline militaristic attitude to Northern Ireland, and said he couldn't go into the lobbies with his socialist allies tonight. Frank Maguire, the elusive Republican MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone, turned up to 'abstain in person.'

But the real star of the night was Michael Foot. The leftwing firebrand, who had become Callaghan's Leader of the House of Commons, put in the performance of his life. He savaged the uncomfortable bedfellows arranged opposite Labour, pouring scorn on their opponents; he famously described David Steel, the Liberal leader, as having "passed from rising hope to elder statesman without any intervening period whatsoever." In his final paragraphs, Foot launched an impassioned defence of Labour's achievements in office across the 20th century. Were he never to have presided over Labour's sorry performance in 1983, he would have been far more fondly remembered for this.

The hero of the hour

Yet despite all of Foot's rhetorical brilliance, the desperate rushing about of the whips, the timidity of Mrs Thatcher, the result went down to the wire. In a pre-TV era for Parliament, people were forced to rely on radio to discover what was going on. As the tellers lined up to deliver the result, the Tory tellers stood on the losing side. Roy Hattersley, Labour's Prices and Consumer Protection Secretary, watched Thatcher go white, and mouth "I don't believe it."

It wasn't to be believed. In the crush, the tellers had stood in the wrong place. The government had 310 votes, to the opposition's 311. The House of Commons had no confidence in Her Majesty's Government. As the opposition benches erupted in cheers, and the Labour benches were led by backbencher Neil Ninnock in singing 'The Red Flag,' Callaghan got to his feet for the last time as Prime Minster. "Now that the House of Commons has declared itself, we shall take our case country." 

The aftermath of this dramatic night cannot be understated. The election called for May 1979 saw the Conservatives sweep into power. They would remain in office for another 18 years, and transform Britain completely in that time, as monetarist economics and shock therapy would decimate industry and huge swathes of the country. Especially grimly ironic was the fact that these changes hit Scotland the hardest; a cry still levelled against the SNP is that in its opportunism it let in Thatcherism. But the 1980s were not kind on anyone on the left. Labour would come close to destroying itself in the years that followed, in a civil war which makes their current problems look like a picnic in comparison. Many confidently predicted that there would never be another Labour government, and that James Callaghan's last stand on the floor of the House of Commons was the dying gasp of a political movement.

And yet, this was not quite the full picture. Labour may have been defeated in 1979, but it actually added 70,000 votes to its October 1974 share. An increased turnout, and huge shifts from the Liberals and minor parties, put Mrs Thatcher into office, not any collapse of the Labour vote. The Winter of Discontent did not taint Labour, as many claimed. Clearly, Callaghan was doing something right. But this cannot hide the fact that 1979 represented a catastrophic reversal for Labour. The next Labour Prime Minister to rise to the despatch box had only been a member of the party for four years in 1979, and hadn't even started looking for a seat in Parliament. An entire generation would come of age before the Tories were removed from power.

The last old Labour government had gone down fighting in a blaze of glory, having been kept alive on borrowed time and through sheer force of will. But that can't hide how much of a disaster it was, the night the government fell.

If you want to relive the entire night in all its glory, look no further!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifMiJ7DcUi0 BBC documentary from 2009

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqzIZVJOQdk BBC coverage from 1979

Never shall I forget

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed.

Never shall I forget that smoke.

Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky.

Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever.

Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live.

Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.

Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live as long as God Himself.

Never.

From Night by Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Laureate who survived both Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

When the Nazis came for the communists,

I remained silent;

I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,

I remained silent;

I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,

I did not speak out;

I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for the Jews,

I remained silent;

I wasn't a Jew.

When they came for me,

there was no one left to speak out.

First They Came, by Martin Niemöller, German priest, who initially supported the Nazis, but turned against them and was imprisoned in Sachsenhausen and Dachau. For a really interesting history of this poem, have a read of this piece of research.

Red Army soldiers opening the gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau, January 27th 1945

2018 in books

As previously, the list no one has been waiting for...

Target- 25
Books read- 22

Pages read- 10,165 (up from last year, so I've read fewer books, but they've been longer!)
Numbers of new books- 22

Fiction/Non-fiction ratio- 5:17 (another dreadful year for fiction)
Longest Book- Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke, 1005 pgs.
Shortest Book- The Unknown Unknown: Bookshops and the Delight of Not Getting What You Wanted, Mark Forsyth, 23 pgs.
Quickest Read- The Unknown Unknown: Bookshops and the Delight of Not Getting What You Wanted, Mark Forsyth, August 30th 2018
Longest Read- Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke, July 4th 2017 - May 15th 2018
Most Read Authors- No repeat reads this year!
Ebooks- No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump's Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need, Naomi Klein; Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel, Dan Ephron; The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, Rick Perlstein.
Audio books- More of a podcast man this year. Maybe they should get a review too...
Useless Fact- I really am surprised at how many books about one historical city Ken Follett has got in him...

The List

Things Can Only Get Worse?: Twenty Confusing Years in the Life of a Labour Supporter, John O'Farrell

The Anglo-Saxons, James Campbell, Eric John, Patrick Wormald

Bitter Freedom: Ireland in a Revolutionary World, 1918-1923, Maurice Walsh

Race of a Lifetime, John Heilemann and Mark Halperin

It Can't Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis

Nothing Venture, Nothing Win, Edmund Hillary

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke

The Ghost, Robert Harris

No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump's Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need, Naomi Klein

A Column of Fire, Ken Follett

Pinochet in Piccadilly: Britain and Chile's Hidden History, Andy Beckett

Moskva, Jack Grimwood

Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel, Dan Ephron

Under Another Sky: Journeys in Roman Britain, Charlotte Higgins

On the Map: Why the World Looks the Way it Does, Simon Garfield

Time and Chance, James Callaghan

The Unknown Unknown: Bookshops and the Delight of Not Getting What You Wanted, Mark Forsyth

The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, Rick Perlstein

Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-56, Anne Applebaum

The Private Lives of the Saints: Power, Passion and Politics in Anglo-Saxon England, Janina Ramirez

Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee, John Bew

The Tigers of the Snow: How One Fateful Climb Made the Sherpas Mountaineering Legends, Jonathan Neale

"Come and go with me to that land": Britain's First Democratic Step

On December 14th, 1918, the country voted. As it did so, it changed, irreversibly. It was the first step on the final stage of change, from the autocratic, imperial power we had been, to the modern representative democracy we are today.

1918 was the first electoral contest in which the property qualification for men was removed, as per the terms of the Representation of the People Act of 1918. Now, all men could vote in the constituency in which they lived, provided they were over 21, or over 19 in the case of those in the armed forces. 5.6 million men were added to the electorate, the largest ever increase. No more would the money or status of the individual voter impact on the act of voting for the government.

More famously, this was the election in which women could vote for the first time.

One of Britain's first female voters, casting her vote a century ago today

Well, not exactly. Before the 1832 Great Reform Act, there had been plenty of female electors. From the Middle Ages until 1832, the franchise was determined by your wealth; any rich enough woman would be enrolled. In practise, the only women with sufficient independent wealth were widows. These early participants in the first pangs of electoral democracy are frustratingly hard to spot in the historical record, but they are there, ghostly echoes of a forgotten world. In a by-election in Elizabethan Aylesbury, comments were made about women doing the voting. Complaints were made when women in Norfolk voted for the Long Parliament in the 1640s. These scraps are all we have of what was clearly a much bigger picture.

But the door was firmly slammed shut by the Great Reform Act; it explicitly restricted the franchise to 'male persons.' Even as that electorate widened to encompass more and more men, it remained sealed off to female voters. And yet, local election rolls from the 1840s onwards show that female voting was very much still alive at parish and municipal elections. The government did eventually pass some concessions. Single rate paying women were allowed to vote in local elections in 1869, and from 1894 this was expanded to cover married women. In 1867, an error by a polling clerk enabled elderly Lily Maxwell, a widowed shop owner, to vote in a parliamentary by-election in Manchester, capturing national attention and sparking many of the early suffrage societies.

What is true is that 1918 marks the first time a significant number of women voted in a British election. Yet the recent slaughter had taken its toll on the country. Were the franchise to have been expanded to encompass all women, they would have constituted the majority of the electorate. As a result, the 1918 Representation of the People Act specified that the only women who could vote were to be over 30and owned or rented property worth more than £5, or was married to someone who did, or was a graduate of a university with a constituency. 8.9 million women were added to the franchise; a remarkable start, but still not quite there.

On this day, at the first point of asking, a female candidate was actually elected to the House of Commons, the self-declared mother of parliaments, taking over 60% of the vote in her constituency. Yet the overwhelming victor in the seat of Dublin St Patrick's did not take her parliamentary seat.

Countess Markievicz, the first woman elected to Parliament, campaigning in a by-election in 1917

This wasn't due to a ignoble protest about women voters by men, or a last minute legal challenge, or a push by the suffrage campaigners to get full equal voting rights. Constance Markievicz didn't take her seat in Parliament because she was in Holloway prison, imprisoned for protesting against wartime conscription. Even had she been a free woman, she had not intention of going to Westminster. This is where the third reason this election is so important becomes clear. The 1918 election marks the beginning of the endgame of British rule over Ireland.

At Easter 1916, a ragtag band from the Irish Republican Brotherhood had staged an uprising across Ireland, in an attempt to use Britain's distraction by the First World War to drive them out of Ireland. The Easter Rising failed miserably, with the tiny numbers of rebels overwhelmed by the full military might of the most powerful empire on Earth, their leaders executed or thrown in prison. The self-proclaimed Irish Republic had lasted less than a week.

By 1918, resentment seethed across Ireland. Resentment at the treatment of the Easter rebels, resentment at London's attempts to impose conscription on the island, resentment at the imminent partition of Ireland along religious and political lines. When the election was called, the Irish Labour party agreed to stand down, to give a clear choice to the people of Ireland- vote for Sinn Fein and independence, or the Unionists to stay with Britain.

The results were wide open to interpretation. Of the 105 Irish seats, Sinn Fein took 73 out of the 105 seats. They took 46.9% of the votes across Ireland, but this amounted to 65% of the vote in the areas on the brink of leaving the UK; although in many areas they ran unopposed, and so no votes were cast in those areas. The Unionists took a quarter of the vote; however, this was mainly based on sweeping the seats in what was to become Northern Ireland- outside of this area, they only took one seat, in south Dublin, and the two seats given to the Irish universities. The old Irish Parliamentary Party, which for forty years had been the dominant voice of Ireland at Westminster, was crushed, holding a mere 6 of its 74 seats; however, it did take a fifth of the votes, and this represented more total votes than ever before, thanks to the expansion of the franchise. Quite what was to be made of this mess was anyone's guess.

Tensions were running high across Ireland

It fell to the MPs of Sinn Fein to make the next move. Those able to do so convened at the Mansion House in Dublin, saying they would boycott the Westminster Parliament, as it had no right to rule them. They called their new assembly the Dáil Éireann, and invited all Irish MPs to attend. The Unionists and moderate nationalists would not come. Only 27 of Sinn Fein's new politicians were free men. When the roll call was conducted, the many missing members were described as é ghlas ag Gallaibh, or 'imprisoned by the foreigners.'

Their next move was just as bold. The Dail declared that, rather than having been crushed and buried in 1916, the self-declared independent Irish Republic was very much alive, now with a mandate from the people of Ireland. On the face of it, this was suicide. Every attempt by Ireland to sever the union unilaterally had failed, including one barely two years before. Only one part of the British Empire had ever succeeded in leaving British control by force of arms. And Ireland was nowhere near as powerful as the Thirteen Colonies of British America had been in 1776.

The words of the Dail could have ended up being an empty declaration, lost in the tides of history. But on the same day the Dail announced independence, remnants of the Irish Volunteers attacked a Royal Irish Constabulary wagon bringing explosives to a quarry in County Tipperary. In the shootout, two RIC officers were killed. The Irish Volunteers hadn't aimed to coordinate their actions with the Dail. But the Volunteers now saw themselves as the army of the Irish Republic, and with shots fired they set about attempting to achieve a military victory against Britain by force of arms.

The 1918 election did not yet see Britain become a perfect democracy. Although virtually all adult men could vote, the exclusion of 57% of women, and continued irregularities such as business voting and the university constituencies meant that it wasn't there yet. And the election in Ireland plunged one part of the United Kingdom into a vicious civil war, which had consequences lasting well into the 21st century.

And yet, this was the first election in British history which was something approaching democratic. In the previous elections of 1910, 7.6 million people had been able to vote. In 1918, the total possible number of voters was 21.4 million. And 1918 transformed the political landscape forever. David Lloyd George, the popular wartime leader, split the Liberal Party. His supporters continued in government with the Conservatives. The Liberals who didn't follow him into this unholy alliance were crushed at the polls. But Lloyd George's supporters were only saved by their pact with the Tories. Although they came fourth in terms of seats, the second placed party in terms of the vote share, with a fifth of the voters supporting them, was the Labour Party. As the Liberal star waned, the Labour star waxed. The modern political landscape, recognisable to us today, was being born.

I got a brother in that land

I got a brother in that land

I got a brother in that land

Where I'm bound

Where I'm bound

I got a sister in that land

I got a sister in that land 

I got a sister in that land

Where I'm bound

Where I'm bound

Come and go with me to that land

Come and go with me to that land

Come and go with me to that land

Where I'm bound

To Germany, by Charles Sorley

You are blind like us. Your hurt no man designed,

And no man claimed the conquest of your land.

But gropers both through fields of thought confined

We stumble and we do not understand.

You only saw your future bigly planned,

And we, the tapering paths of our own mind,

And in each other's dearest ways we stand,

And hiss and hate. And the blind fight the blind.

When it is peace, then we may view again

With new-won eyes each other's truer form

And wonder. Grown more loving-kind and warm

We'll grasp firm hands and laugh at the old pain,

When it is peace. But until peace, the storm

The darkness and the thunder and the rain.

To Germany, by Charles Sorley. Killed at the Battle of Loos in 1915, aged 20

Lieutenant Arkwright of the 9th Hussars, washing in the grounds of a chateau, September 5th 1914. During last few days, the British Army had retreated several hundred miles, from Mons in Belgium to the outskirts of Paris. Across 1914, the all-volunteer, pre-war professional British Expeditionary Force suffered 90,000 casualties, which was greater than the number of soldiers originally sent.

Men of the 1st Lancashire Fusiliers, some time before 7am on July 1st 1916, preparing to attack Beaumont Hamel. The Battle of the Somme was when Britain's volunteer armies were first used in large numbers, and 18,000 soldiers were killed on that first day.

Soldiers and civilians in Birmingham, celebrating the announcement of the Armistice, November 11th 1918.

'A Voice Crying Out in the Wilderness:' Why Jeremy Corbyn Isn't the John the Baptist of Foreign Affairs

Saturday saw 700,000 people march in central London in a (vain, in my opinion) attempt to stop Brexit. This issue is the single greatest facing the UK. At best, it has the capacity to produce economic and social turmoil. At worst, it is almost beyond our ability to comprehend how bad it will be.

Was the Leader of Her Majesty's Most Loyal Opposition there to throw his weight behind the campaign to save us from ourselves? He was not. Instead, Jeremy Corbyn was in Geneva, marking 20 years since the arrest of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in London, on charges of human rights abuses.

This year, I read the excellent Pinochet in Piccadilly, which examined the historic ties between Britain and Chile. From 19th century economic imperialism, to the student Jack Straw visiting the Allende government, the coup that had Allende killed, Pinochet's outriders of Thatcherism using Chile as their economic test lab, and finally Pinochet's fate being argued out in the House of Lords, the ties between Britain and Chile run deep, especially where Pinochet is concerned.

This book was written in the year 2000, two years after Pinochet's arrest in London. It was still fresh from the events. And yet Jeremy Corbyn doesn't make a single appearance. Many of the participants were interviewed, including the Chilean exiles who staged a vigil outside the House of Lords while Pinochet's fate was debated. Not a single sign of the MP for Islington North. That is not to say that Corbyn was not involved in the anti-Pinochet struggle. It was a popular left wing position after the coup, and until Pinochet was dragged from power. It is widely regarded as the issue that ignited Corbyn's passion for foreign affairs. But his position and role were so unremarkable that a book about the subject, written at the time, failed to mention him.

Corbyn campaigning against Pinochet

This Corbyn trend is not unique to Britain and Chile. Since being unexpectedly catapulted from utter obscurity to the leadership of the UK's largest leftist political force in 2015, there has been a big push on Corbyn's image. His years of engagement in various foreign affairs issues of the later 20th century have been held up as a virtue, which they undoubtedly are. However, as many of these events recede beyond memory for most people, there is a danger that the myth of Jeremy Corbyn will distort his part in these events.

Nowhere is this clearer than with regards to the Northern Irish Troubles. Corbyn and John McDonnell were long time supporters of a United Ireland and Sinn Fein, and by extension at that time the IRA. Whenever this is now raised, the response is to say that it was because they were exploring every possible avenue to bring about peace and stop the appalling sectarian carnage that engulfed Northern Ireland in the later 20th century.

Which again would be grand if anyone could point to a single moment where their actions had some influence. Corbyn voted against the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement, the first (and as it turned out, faltering) step on the road to peace. Neither of them played any role in the Good Friday Agreement, or the torturous process afterwards by which the IRA was persuaded to disarm, nor the unionist parties persuaded to share power with those who had until recently been murderers. John McDonnell's claims he was trying to persuade the IRA to disarm in 2000 especially fly in the face of this timeline. Any history book on the Troubles doesn't contain their names at all.

Signing of the Good Friday Agreement, April 1998. Definitely no Corbyn or McDonnell there...

The same goes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The summer was dominated by stories about Corbyn's links to the various Palestinian groups fighting the Israeli government. And yes, Corbyn is a long term supporter of the Palestinian cause. In this, he was ahead of the curve, as Israel has traditionally had a lot of support from within the UK Labour party. Only with the savage war in Lebanon during the 1980s, and as occupation began to take its toll, did this start to shift within the Western left. But his claims to have been at the PLO cemetery in Tunisia to promote peace are laughable. When the final analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is written, his contribution won't even merit a footnote within a footnote.

Signing of the Oslo Accords, 1993. I doubt there's a single Briton there, let alone backbench Labour MPs...

Surely Corbyn's one area of foreign policy success must be South Africa. After all, there is this photo, which did the rounds last year:

I'm not going to repeat much of the analysis of this, which can be seen here. But Corbyn was not a lone voice in the 1980s in opposing apartheid. Since Harold Macmillan had told the apartheid parliament in 1960 that the 'winds of change' were blowing through Africa, opposition to the racial state had been formal British policy, backed up by widespread global support. The African National Congress, the party of Nelson Mandela, was based in London from 1978 until 1994; the South African government had to resort to sending spies to plant bombs in the offices to try and get at them, as they had no help from the British government in moving against what was labelled a terrorist organisation. The rally that this picture was taken at was organised by a Trotskyite fringe group, and was not supported by the main British anti-apartheid groups. Two other Labour MPs were arrested. Aligned with the right side of history? Corbyn certainly was. A lone voice standing up bravely against apartheid? Not really.

Perhaps where Corbyn can legitimately claim to have been a trailblazer is the war in Iraq. As the world watched with baited breath, tens of millions around the globe used 15th February 2003 to march against the war. Corbyn did give a speech at the million strong march in London, under the banner of the Stop the War Coalition. You can see it here.

The poor quality of the few pictures of Corbyn at the rally probably tells you more than any words I can spill on the subject

If you look at the BBC news report from the day, they list a huge litany of speakers. Charles Kennedy, as the leader of the Liberal Democrats, the largest UK-wide political party to come out against the war. Jesse Jackson, Tariq Ali, Mo Mowlam, Ken Livingstone, Vanessa Redgrave, Bianca Jagger, Tony Benn, Harold Pinter- all are noted for their contribution. Corbyn is not.

This is the politician that did most to articulate the anti-war case in 2003.

Blair refused to bow to public pressure. But he still had to face the House of Commons, in a moment of high political drama. Labour was deeply divided on the issue. Junior ministers resigned, and Robin Cook delivered one of the finest speeches in modern Parliamentary history in resigning from the Cabinet to vote against the war. No one could be quite sure how events would play out.

Cook's resignation speech- Look who picked a good spot behind him!

When MPs voted, Blair had his majority. 412 MPs voted to support the war in Iraq, as against 149 against, and 94 abstentions. But this belied the Labour splits. Only 254 Labour MPs had voted with their own Prime Minister; 84 of them voted no outright, and a further 69 abstained. Blair had been saved by the Conservatives, UUP and DUP. Yes, Corbyn had done the right thing. But he was not a leading light, nor was he alone in voting against the war. In that, he was joined by 83 other Labour MPs, 52 Liberal Democrats, 9 Scottish and Welsh nationalists, two Conservatives, 1 SDLP and 1 independent MP.

While on many of these issues, Corbyn was indeed on the right side of history, he was not alone, nor a driver of events. Most importantly, when the history books are written, he will at best be a footnote in these events. The role his supporters wish to ascribe him, as the John the Baptist of foreign affairs, the long voice crying out in the wilderness, heralding better things to come, is simply not true.

"I believe there are certain things that are not at issue at all. ... And that is his character": Why we are still living in 1991, Part II.

A couple of years ago, I wrote a piece showing how the world of 1991 was still very much with us today. And if you ignore the bit where I confidently predicted a second Clinton would sit in the Oval Office, the comparisons between 1991 and the late 2010s hold up reasonably well.

This week, the US political scene has witnessed the spectacle of a presidential nominee to the Supreme Court being accused of sexual misconduct, the brave testimony of his accuser, and a combative response of the potential justice.. The parallels to 1991 apparently aren't done yet. 

In the summer of that year, the first African American Supreme Court justice, Thurgood Marshall, was retiring. In his place, George HW Bush nominated Clarence Thomas, another African American, who had been an official in the Reagan and Bush administrations, as well as a federal judge. Yet Thomas provoked panic and fear amongst those on the left. He was a strident conservative, and many liberals promised they would fight his nomination in the last ditch. The battle lines were drawn for his confirmation hearings.

Hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee were not to be treated lightly. It was only four years since the same committee, headed by the same senator, a Joe Biden of Delaware, had sunk the nomination of Robert Bork. Bork had been chosen by Reagan for his impeccable conservative credentials. Yet during his hearings Bork floundered, as his conservative views came under attack for being too extreme, as did his role in the Saturday Night Massacre of 1973, when Bork had been the highest ranking Justice Department official to survive Richard Nixon's cull, the one who had fired the Watergate special prosecutor for Nixon. Bork was rejected by the committee, and later voted down by the full senate.

Despite the concerns over Thomas' views, and the power of the hearings, during the autumn of 1991 his nomination wound its way through the hearings. Towards the end of the process, a bomb was detonated under this orderly process. The media leaked that the FBI background checks on Thomas had thrown up reports that Thomas had made unwanted, sexually inappropriate remarks to a colleague, Anita Hill. Hill, now a law professor at the University of Oklahoma, was called before the committee to give evidence. What evidence she gave. The US public were treated to comments about the size of Thomas' penis, comments about pubic hair, about how long Thomas could last in bed, about Thomas' favourite porn stars.

But Thomas wasn't going down without a fight. In his own testimony, he denied everything, and claimed he was the subject of a "lynching." As a black man, the language was emotional, and designed to hit home.

It did the trick, but barely. The Judiciary Committee sent Thomas' name to the full Senate without a recommendation to accept or reject, a very rare move. Thomas was confirmed by the full Senate with 52 votes to 48, and not along party lines either. Some Democrats supported Thomas, while some Republicans tried to stop him taking office. But take office he did.

It is easy to see the parallels between the two events. In both 1991 and 2018, an extremely conservative choice to sit on the US Supreme Court fired up opposition to his confirmation. Liberal activists and interest groups draw a line in the sand. As the hearings come to a close, allegations of sexual misconduct emerge. They culminate in a dramatic showdown before the Senate, with accuser and defender both fighting for their lives and pouring out their souls.

However, there are two major differences between the hearings of 1991, and the hearings of 2018. Firstly, in 1991, Hill was questioned by the full committee. The optics, and the message they sent, were awful. An all male, all white, mainly elderly, committee, fired questions at the young black woman in front of them, some of them questions of an extremely explicit nature. The outrage at how Hill was treated bled into the 1992 general election. Bush was not re-elected, and a record number of women were swept into office. The Republican party have clearly taken this message on board. The mixed gender, mixed racial Democratic team on the 2018 Judiciary Committee posed their own questions to Brett Kavanaugh's accuser. The all male, all white Republicans of 2018 picked a female prosecutor to field their questions. They do not want to pour oil on the flames of an already difficult election year.

Secondly, in 1991, Anita Hill's lone voice was not enough to stop Clarence Thomas making it onto the Supreme Court. Thomas narrowly survived the process, and remains on the Court to this day, as the longest serving current justice. One reason the Bush White House stuck with Thomas was that opinion polls showed the vast majority of people believed his denials over Anita Hill's claims of sexual harrassment. In 2018, although the process has not yet reached its endgame, Kavanaugh's chances of ending up a Justice of the Supreme Court look less good than Thomas' did at this stage. Because millions of people believe Dr Christine Blasey Ford, his accuser.

I believe her. And you should too. We owe it to the people of 2018 to show that we are not really still living in 1991.

(To help me write this, I drew on this excellent article from the New York Times. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/27/us/politics/anita-hill-kavanaugh-hearings.html

What struck me was how some of the senators who questioned Hill in 1991 are *still* in the same roles, and have apparently learnt nothing...)