Socialist republic: Remaking the British left in 1980s Sheffield

By Daisy Payling

Socialist republic is a timely account of 1980s left-wing politics in South Yorkshire. It explores how Sheffield City Council set out to renew the British Left. Through careful analysis of the Council’s agenda and how it interacted with trade unions, women’s groups, lesbian and gay rights groups and acted on issues such as peace, environmentalism, anti-apartheid and anti-racism, the book draws out the complexities involved in building a broad-based politics which aimed unite class and identity politics. Running counter to 1980s narratives dominated by Thatcherism, the book examines the persistence of social democracy locally, demonstrating how grassroots local histories can enrich our understanding of political developments on a national and international level. The book is essential reading for students, scholars, and activists with an interest in left-wing politics and history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Mar 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9781526150295

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Socialist Republic

ffirs01-fig-5001.jpg

Socialist Republic

Remaking the British left in 1980s Sheffield

Daisy Payling

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Daisy Payling 2023

The right of Daisy Payling to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 5030 1 hardback

First published 2023

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover credit: Martha McCulloch

Cover design: Abbey Akanbi, Manchester University Press

Typeset

by New Best-set Typesetters Ltd

For my parents (Red) Sally and Duncan

Contents

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Introduction: radical Sheffield

1 Building from the bottom: Sheffield City Council and the new urban left

2 The labour movement: marching forward

3 Political women: class, feminism and the labour movement

4 Sexuality, ‘race’ and the women's movement

5 Singing from the songbook: new social movements and single-issue politics

6 Lesbian and gay politics

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

This book has been a long time in the making and there are almost too many people to thank. Thanks first to all the library and archives staff; this book is also a product of their labour. The staff at Sheffield Archives and Sheffield Local Studies Library were particularly patient, helpful and generous, and I'd like to express my gratitude to them and to Clara Morgan at Sheffield Museums for sharing digitised material with me during the COVID-19 pandemic. I am grateful too to all the people who agreed to be interviewed for this research. I thank them for sharing their time, stories and papers – as well as cups of tea, slices of parkin and home-grown vegetables!

Numerous people have shaped this work. Matthew Hilton set me on this path over a decade ago. With his no-nonsense approach and dry sense of humour he has been a great support and a generous supplier of constructive criticism. At the University of Birmingham, where the bulk of this research was conducted, I was joined by Amy Edwards, Saima Nasar and Jamie Perry, whose friendship at that time was as invaluable as their insight. Chris Moores and Stephen Brooke gave me thoughtful and encouraging comments on an early draft which helped me uncover the shape of the book, and Lucy Robinson has always championed this work, providing me with a push to keep going with it.

After Birmingham, I found a research community in south London with Jessica Hammett, Ben Mechen, Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite and Natalie Thomlinson. Thanks for the writing group, BBQs and beers, and acting witness to every stage of this painstaking process.

At the University of Essex I gained the confidence and commitment to see this project through largely thanks to Tracey Loughran, who has been an extraordinary mentor. Formidable and funny in equal parts, Tracey pushed me to be a more creative historian and helped me find time to work on this book whilst I was a researcher on her ‘Body, Self and Family’ project. She facilitated a month of unpaid leave for the final push, without which this would still be a collection of drafts. Matthew Grant provided insightful comments on those drafts. During my month of leave Hannah J. Elizabeth met me on Zoom almost every day. They were an anchoring presence and I thank them for their friendship.

Some material in this book has appeared in articles in Twentieth Century British History and Contemporary British History, and in Evan Smith and Matthew Worley's edited collection Waiting for the Revolution: The British Far Left from 1956 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017) and Nathan Yeowell's edited collection Rethinking Labour's Past (London, New York: I.B. Tauris, 2022). I am grateful to the peer reviewers of those articles, and also of this book, for their suggestions for improvements. Thanks also to Tom Dark at Manchester University Press who oversaw the publication of this book.

I'm lucky enough to have many people to remind me that work isn't everything. Thanks to Nina, Sophie, Polly, Grace, Beckie, Philippa, Suzie and Anna for the distractions and celebrations. Meg is as proud of me for outdoor winter swims as she is of this book. Jeremy is the best working-from-home buddy, with the best snacks. Emma listened to me talk about this for a decade, and Amy helped me climb many walls (metaphorical and literal). Maggie and Chris (and Cobweb and Buzz) welcomed me into their home, and Chloe, Lou, James and Amy provided the perfect escape.

My parents, Sally and Duncan, could not have been more supportive and I am grateful knowing that they and the rest of my family – my sister Sophie, my nan Ella and Lucie, Brian and Harvey – always have my back. And finally, I can't thank Phoebe enough for holding my hand through everything and filling every day with joy.

Abbreviations

Introduction: radical Sheffield

South Yorkshire County Council and Sheffield City Council became known informally as the ‘Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire’ in the late 1970s. As with any good nickname, debate exists about where this moniker and its alternative – the ‘People's Republic of South Yorkshire’ – first came from. Nevertheless, Labour Party and trade union activists took on both names with a sense of pride. In the early 1980s the slogan became a literal badge of honour when it was reproduced on pin badges made by Labour councillors in Sheffield Brightside.¹ Although meant as hyperbole at the time and taken with a heavy pinch of salt since, the ‘Socialist Republic’ can be a useful concept in examining Sheffield's politics and grassroots activism as it was presented by the local authority and activists involved in the city's many political and social movements.

In this book I use the ‘Socialist Republic’ to explore left-wing politics in 1980s Britain. In both popular and academic histories of the 1980s the figure of Margaret Thatcher looms large; understandable in a decade framed by the rise and fall of her governments.² Some studies position Thatcher as the ‘guiding spirit of the age’, understanding political, economic, social and cultural developments as manifestations of either Thatcherism or neoliberalism, a related ideology. But more recently scholars have begun to ask what the 1980s look like if we step out from the shadow of Thatcherism.³ For Stephen Brooke, doing so draws our attention to the ‘plurality of trajectories’ in the 1980s and the contradictions those trajectories generated. When we view politics from beyond Westminster, one contradiction which emerges is the ‘stubborn persistence of social democracy’ at a local level despite the spread of neoliberalism nationally, calling into question meta-narratives which frame the social democratic project as a ‘brief blip’ in mid-twentieth-century Britain.

⁴

In this book I explore how social democracy persisted in the ‘Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire’ and what forms it took. The ‘Socialist Republic’ captured a moment in Britain when the left was reaching out to new constituencies of voters in an attempt to combat Thatcherism. David Blunkett and Sheffield City Council embraced aspects of new social movements in an attempt to build this new constituency, but class remained central to their political agenda which was rooted in the powerful manual worker traditions of the city's labour movement. The Council tried to make identity and movement politics more attractive to working-class voters by framing them as labour issues and keeping their radicalism in check. Peace was connected to coal mining through slogans such as ‘Mines Not Missiles’, and became an issue relatable to everyday life. Sexism and racism were presented as exacerbating unemployment and disadvantaging family incomes. The ‘new’ politics of post-material social movements became material concerns that the majority could rally against.⁵ Blunkett wanted to win ‘hearts and minds’ back from Thatcherism, and invest them in ‘collective response[s]’ to the city's problems.⁶ Whereas Thatcherism strove to make individualism ‘ordinary’, Sheffield's local authority attempted to do the same with collectivism, to create a social democratic ‘Socialist Republic’. However, as this book explores, in trying to keep a lid on the more radical elements, Sheffield City Council denied certain activist movements space.

Behind the ‘Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire’ lay a more complex activist milieu. The labour movement had a long tradition in Sheffield, but by the 1970s it was starting to weaken under the strain of recession. Sheffield also had a strong radical tradition, which new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s had added to. These forms of activism interacted with each other and the Council, with some activists trying to influence Council policy while others worked outside or against it. Tensions developed as certain movements held more sway than others. Left-wing politics in Sheffield struggled to be cohesive even without the pressure of presenting a pragmatic front to voters. In this way Sheffield's vibrant local democracy sheds light on the wider British left. With the rise of identity politics,⁷ class remained a prominent and connecting issue, but renewal based on class, and particularly on ‘workerist’ notions of class, had its limits.

New times: the ‘crisis of the left’ in the 1980s

The 1980s was a difficult decade for the Labour Party. It weathered the continued erosion of its industrial base, its allies in trade unions were vilified by politicians and the press, and it suffered successive General Election defeats in 1979, 1983, 1987 and 1992. Despite the ‘unusual’ rise in influence of ‘socialism’ within the Labour Party in the early 1980s, Labour's defeat in the 1983 election after running on a manifesto since dubbed the ‘longest suicide note in history’ put the Party on a path to ‘modernisation’, much to the disillusionment of the traditional left.⁸ At the same time two 1970s developments altered the shape of the left considerably: the growth of rights-based movements and identity politics campaigning for formal equality for women and ethnic minorities, and deregulation and free market economics leading to greater inequalities in terms of wealth and class.⁹ Thatcherism's commitment to monetarism arguably exacerbated wealth inequalities. In the 1980s unemployment rose above three million, and deindustrialisation ground down Labour constituencies.¹⁰ Many have argued that this break in the postwar consensus led to a widening of the gap between rich and poor and changed the social and cultural fabric of Britain.

¹¹

Some on the left saw this as a period of ‘crisis’, but with the Labour Party in opposition there were opportunities to strategise and suggest paths back to power; to design a ‘renewal’ of the left. The cultural theorist Stuart Hall identified the ‘swing to the Right’ in 1979, and called for a serious left-wing politics to counter it.¹² He recognised that the rise of Thatcherism and the ‘crisis of the left’ were two sides of the same coin. Hall was not alone in identifying this ‘crisis’ or calling for renewal. In 1978 Eric Hobsbawm argued that Labour's decline had its roots in the structural changes of 1950s postwar capitalism, and that working-class identity and solidarity were fragmented and weakened.¹³ The same year Rowbotham, Wainwright and Segal published Beyond the Fragments, which confronted the divisions within the left from a socialist-feminist perspective, and argued that many strands needed to be brought together to reshape the labour movement.¹⁴ In the journals Marxism Today and New Socialist there was widespread concern regarding the need for political ‘renewal’.¹⁵ Many of the Marxism Today articles were subsequently published by Hall in collections Hard Road to Renewal and New Times.¹⁶ These ideas culminated in Hall's Gramscian notion that the left needed to form a ‘counter-hegemonic strategy’ that would come from acknowledging the ‘diversity of different points of antagonism in society; [and] unifying them … within a common project’.¹⁷ Hall explained that ‘to construct a new cultural order, you need not to reflect an already-formed collective will, but to fashion a new one’.¹⁸ By hanging on to class politics, the left was clinging to an old collective will, and one that was not only old but damaged. Hall recognised this in the fragmentation of class solidarity. He wrote that there was ‘no inevitable or guaranteed link between class origin and political ideas’.¹⁹ For Hall and his contemporaries, the renewal of the left lay in the ability to mobilise around something beyond class politics, such as identity politics and new social movements organised around post-material issues, to create a viable ‘image of modernity’ and combat Thatcherism.²⁰ These ideas were perhaps best articulated by Hall, but they were part of a general exploration of new politics which had been developing in communities across Britain since the 1960s.

²¹

One area where these and similar ideas were being worked on was in Labour-led local governments, which ‘captured a sense of opportunity’ otherwise missed by the national Labour Party, leading to the claim that left-wing politics was most vibrant in local strongholds.²² Local authorities made attempts to combine class politics with elements of identity politics and new social movements to develop distinctive and varied ‘local socialisms’. These aimed to make local politics more democratic and develop ‘new ideas about the future of socialism’.²³ Political scientists at the time identified common themes including the restructuring of local capital, decentralisation of local services and increased participation in provision by users, and positive action towards women, poor people, and ethnic and sexual minorities.²⁴ It was practised by councils dominated by the new urban left, which included new, younger councillors, party members, community workers and grassroots activists, and even local government officers, who were expected to be sympathetic and committed to the politics of the councils.²⁵ Labour's local election defeats in the late 1960s and local government reorganisation in the 1970s had facilitated a sea-change in Labour councillors across Britain.²⁶ A change of personnel brought a change in attitudes. New urban left councillors were trained in the activism of the 1960s and counter-culture – rather than Marxism and Methodism. They saw beyond class-based politics and appreciated the concerns of new social movements.²⁷ ‘Local socialism’ was an attempt by some Labour-led local authorities to gain mass support through new alliances whilst at the same protecting old ones. It was also local, and therefore differed depending on the political priorities of each area. Although Quilley notes that generally the new urban left offered a ‘rhetorical commitment to socialism as opposed to the social-democratic compact embodied in the Keynesian welfare state’, in practice local authorities like Sheffield City Council pushed for greater public expenditure on services and defended organised labour's traditional bargaining powers whilst attempting to bring in new political actors and respond to their needs.²⁸ ‘Local socialism’ was therefore ‘grounded in a pluralist rather than corporatist social democracy’.

²⁹

Stuart Hall recognised his ‘image of modernity’ in the ‘local socialism’ of the Greater London Council (GLC) in 1984.³⁰ Dworkin suggests that Hall's writings ‘exemplify the British cultural Marxist tradition at its best’, placing them in a wider, longer-term project of renewal and revival of socialist ideas.³¹ Hall and Marxism Today's ‘New Times’ may not have been wholly ‘new’, but the articles represented a culmination of this thinking and reflected the ongoing reorientation of left-wing politics throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Michael Rustin complained at the time that Marxism Today was ‘more or less the theoretical organ of Labour revisionism’.³² The ideas published in Marxism Today throughout the 1980s influenced Labour's trajectory, but in turn were inspired by ongoing practical experiments in local politics. These experiments both tested notions of renewal and encouraged more abstract reflections on the results of their attempts. Hobsbawm, Hall and other Marxism Today writers, cast by some as the eventual forebears of New Labour, were often responding to changes in left-wing politics as well as leading calls for renewal.

³³

From the mid-1980s modernising Labour Party figures acknowledged the importance of the local when polling data and market research techniques found that place and region were central to the composition of social identity.³⁴ Yet there is a lack of historical literature dealing with ‘local socialism’ – a politics that recognised local differences – outside of London. Liverpool is an exception as the city has received some attention given the role of Militant and the disruption that entryism caused on the left.³⁵ Different cities embraced ‘local socialism’ in diverse ways. Julia Unwin, who worked for Liverpool and Southwark Councils as well as the GLC in the 1980s, describes how Labour authorities were motivated to engage with community groups and new social movements to ‘generate a new constituency’.³⁶ This political agenda was developed around attracting voters who were interested in more than class politics. In cities like London which were more ethnically diverse, building left-wing coalitions around ‘race’ and gender made sense. However, elsewhere these coalitions were not as attractive.³⁷ New urban left councils were mostly aiming to extend rather than replace Labour's core support base, and struggled to embrace ‘race’ and gender fully. In the words of Unwin ‘we have to bear in mind how very different things looked in different parts of the country’.³⁸ Sheffield's constituency had remained relatively stable – predominantly white and working-class – until the late 1970s. The search for a new constituency in Sheffield was bound to be different from one in London where deindustrialisation had happened much earlier.

This book examines how Sheffield City Council strove for a politics of renewal. It investigates how the local authority interacted with the labour movement and other grassroots activists involved in identity-based and new social movements. Under ‘local socialism’ each area developed and tested new ideas that could set an example of what a socialist government could do at a national level. Sheffield City Council's ‘local socialism’ was based on carefully defined notions of working-class community. This was disrupted by activists working inside and outside of local government, but, contrary to popular notions of renewal, even in more radical movements traditional understandings of class and labourism still shaped their politics significantly.

Sheffield

I use a single city to test the problematic of left-wing renewal. Sheffield makes for a good case study to explore how different streams of activism and local politics interacted with each other as it is a city with a strong labour tradition and a vibrant history of radicalism, and it had a local authority which was willing to engage with both in the 1970s and 1980s. The book places Sheffield's local politics within the national picture, and uses the city to draw out previously ignored facets of activism in the late twentieth century. The local approach allows access to interactions between movements which might not be apparent when movements are looked at in isolation or solely within the national context. Through an in-depth look at Sheffield's local politics we can see how the Labour left engaged in building new constituencies of voters by mixing persuasion with pragmatism, and by engaging with activists from the labour tradition and new social movements. This was a conscious attempt by a local authority to build an alternative politics, but the activist milieu fostered by Sheffield City Council in the 1980s had existed in some form from the late nineteenth century.

Other than the ‘Socialist Republic’, Sheffield is most often described as a ‘Steel City’ or as ‘an unambiguously Labour city’, despite the Conservative Party's stubborn hold on Sheffield Hallam, one of the city's six historical constituencies.³⁹ The city's strong working-class and labour tradition developed in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Sheffield was granted city status in 1893 and became the largest manufacturing city in the country with a population of 334,000.⁴⁰ Population growth was largely due to people coming from surrounding rural areas to work in the expanding steel industry, keeping Sheffield's population relatively homogeneous.⁴¹ Timothy Mitchell has theorised how political agency grew out of conditions similar to those seen in Sheffield. Mitchell argues that in the 1880s in northern Europe and America new energy systems developed from ‘the mutually reinforcing interactions between coal, steam technology, and iron and steel’.⁴² In locations where coal could be mined and railways developed, workers held no small amount of control over the production and distribution of energy which they used to bargain for mass democracy. Sheffield fits Mitchell's template; its skilled workers capitalised on their agency and formed an emerging labour movement. But in the 1890s union activity was disjointed, with light trades like cutlery makers represented by a different trades council from their steel-working and engineering neighbours.

⁴³

The First World War helped to develop and consolidate working-class politics in Sheffield. In 1916 twelve thousand workers went on strike against conscription. Although many relied on the armaments industry, pacifism was strong in working-class organisations.⁴⁴ In this period, and the recession that followed the war, the Trades and Labour Council (which represented heavy industry) vigorously defended working-class interests to the detriment of the more Liberal and patriotic Sheffield Federated Trades Council (which represented the light trades). In 1918 the Reform Act increased the electorate and brought election successes to the Labour Party across the country. In 1920 the Sheffield Federated Trades Council was quietly absorbed into the Trades and Labour Council, becoming the Sheffield Federated Trades and Labour Council (SFTLC).⁴⁵ The newly strengthened labour movement supported the 1926 General Strike in solidarity with its ten thousand miners and also on behalf of engineers who had suffered cuts in wages and conditions in 1922.⁴⁶ In the election of that year the Labour Party won the City of Sheffield, and, barring losses in 1932 and 1968, held it consistently until 1999.⁴⁷ The important role the trade unions played in securing a Labour local authority was integral to Sheffield's politics, and the link between politics and labour remained.

Communism and Christianity, especially Methodism, also influenced Sheffield's labour movement.⁴⁸ The British Communist Party formed in 1920 from the British Socialist Party and the Socialist Labour Party, and between fifty and sixty people attended the first meeting of the Sheffield branch. Individual members were only reluctantly expelled from the Labour Party in the 1920s because the National Executive demanded it. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s Sheffield Communist Party was small but disciplined and its members were mainly in the engineering unions. They had very little electoral power, but individual Communists, such as George Caborn, a shop steward in the Heavy Engineering Department at Firth-Brown's from 1938, were able to influence the City Council through the SFTLC.⁴⁹ George Caborn was active in Sheffield's politics well into the 1970s, and his son Richard Caborn was Labour MP for Sheffield Central from 1983 to 2010. Another well-known Communist was Alan Ecclestone, the vicar of Darnall. Although some in the Church authorities disagreed, Ecclestone did not find the Church and Communism incompatible.

This milieu dominated Sheffield's politics right up until the 1960s and 1970s. William Hampton's work on democracy and community in Sheffield uses data from the 1961 Census to show that Sheffield had a larger than average proportion of manual workers compared to other cities in England and Wales. Of those manual workers Sheffield had a larger proportion of skilled workers than any other city: 44 per cent compared with under 35 per cent in England and Wales as a whole. This is significant as traditionally skilled workers ‘formed the heart of the British trade union movement’.⁵⁰ Data from every decade from 1926 to 1966 show that over the years