Yes, you're right, I did compress, and certainly it was seen as a swing to the left, and I did scorn it at the time, and now.
After Labour lost the election in 1979 there was a great falling out between the Labour parliamentary party's right wing (there had been since the 40s an establishment input into Labour, people like Roy Jenkins, Oxbridge graduates, technocrats) and the union fixers. That was important because the right had always relied upon the unions to fix the LP conference (then taken seriously as a policy making body). In 1980 the party's left wing, mostly drawn from the constituency section, with a handful of MPs forced through reforms that gave more power to constituencies and less to the parliamentary party. They were supported by the union officers, who were in the mood to teach the right a lesson. This movement culminated in the 'Benn for Deputy' campaign in 1981. The leader, Michael Foot, veteran socialist, had already been chosen as a compromise. Tony Benn lost the vote by about 0.5% of the votes. The outcome of this toing and froing was the 1983 manifesto, reckoned by some, like Benn, as the most left wing Labour had ever stood on.
I have to tell you that I was thoroughly unimpressed at the time. Labour's so-called left-wing manifesto was a tragedy of nostalgia for a by-gone era. It was painfully obvious that the debate within the party was wholly unrelated to wider society. While the LP debated constitutional reforms, the Tories were laying into the working people. First the steel workers and then the railways were dismantled, and all the time, Labour would tell us not to do anything about it, but wait until they were elected.
But the truth is that an entire generation - including myself - had grown up hating the labour government for its miserable austerity socialism with its stalinoid bureaucracy. Tragically, a lot of those people identified more with Thatcher than they did with Labour (I voted for the Workers' Revolutionary Party candidate in Tottenham North, Richard Goldstein).
(Cultural critics: that's what punk rock was all about. Listen to the first Jam LP and ask yourself who Paul Weller voted for in 1979 - Margaret Thatcher - or listen to Chelsea's great song The Right to Work, and remind yourself that the lead singer wrote it as a protest *against* trade unions. The Clash were something of a throwback, because their manager Bernie Taupin, thinking that they should sing about politics gave them some SWP pamphlets and told them to put them to music.)
Labour had lost all ability to relate to working class people in 1979, and in 1983 it proved it. The manifesto, rightly called the 'longest suicide note in history', was a sorry tragedy. It's central plank was a call for nationalised industries and welfare spending. The rationale was that Labour could manage capitalism better than the Tories, and that if we all pulled together, then British industry would get back on its feet. They just had no idea how repulsive the welfare state looked to most people then. Claimants were persecuted by snoops. Nurses in the NHS had their pay squeezed over and over again on the grounds that they were a caring profession. Nobody identified with the nationalised industries, least of all the people who worked in them. As a programme it was a nostalgic hearkening back to the glory days of the 1945 government. But the difference was that by 1983 we had all already seen what state socialism looked like, and we didn't want it. Labour got its lowest vote in the post-war period.
I could of course indicate some of the more loathsome aspects of Labour's national reformism, like its support the British occupation in Ireland, for immigration controls, its opposition to gay rights, its opposition free abortion on demand, etc etc. But that would be easy. The real point was that the central plank of its policy, welfarism, was tried and tested in the post war period, and when the public were asked to pass judgement on it they rejected it. -- Jim heartfield