Breaking: Kezia Dugdale steps down as Scottish Labour leader

[Ken Burch]

29. My point about the no-confidence motion was not about claiming Callaghan was brilliant.

Callaghan was a disaster and from what I've seen, Healey spent much of the Seventies actively working to sabotage his own party-using alarmist rhetoric about Labour's tax policies in the run up to the 1974 elections, and then doing the IMF deal when there was no need for it. Most of the problems in the late Seventies were down to the IMF deal and the assault on the welfare state begun by it.

The Seventies was a bad period...but what would have made that a better time? It's not as though Scotland would have benefited from Heath staying in power or from the Liberals moving past Labour as the main non-Tory party. And there's a "chicken or egg" question as to whether the unions would have been that militant had Labour not agreed to austerity policies that put workers under direct attack.

It would have been far better for all concerned if Foot, rather than Callaghan, had won the Labour leadership in '76 when Wilson stepped down. I'll grant you that Foot may not be a beloved figure, but he was at least respected as a man of principle and did nothing to deserve the treachery of those who formed the SDP just to prevent a Labour victory on an actually socialist manifesto. If the Gang of Four hadn't done what they did, Thatcherism would have ended after four years and the trade unions-the only means working people have ever had of defending themselves from exploitation-would not have been crushed.

I also think that, had Tony Benn held his seat in 1983 and then replaced Foot as leader rather than the deeply disliked and principle-free Neil Kinnock, Labour would have won or at least reduced the Tories to a minority in the 1987 election. Benn knew how to present himself on television, was never intimidated by Thatcher in the way that Kinnock was, and would have turned Labour's unilateralist position on the Bomb into a plus rather than a minus by actually making a case FOR getting rid of nukes and using the funds required to maintain them for social good, and would not have wasted endless party resources expelling socialists FROM the party instead of building a broad movement for socialism. As the 1990s prove, when Labour isn't socialist and when it is casual about starting wars, Labour ends up not standing for much of anything at all.

I used the no-confidence motion simply to illustrate that political grudges can go in more than one direction.