Loony Left - Origination and Themes of The Term

Origination and Themes of The Term

The term "Loony Left" as used to describe certain aspects of Labour politics was invented by the British popular press a couple of years or so before the 1987 General Election. Throughout the run-up to the election it became a staple feature of press-coverage of the election, with many stories running detailing the "antics" of Labour politicians and Labour-controlled local government authorities.

Jolyon Jenkins recorded in 1987 that 1986 was the climax of the Loony Left campaign, that it was the year:

when the Sun announced that it was going to award a prize — a symbolic two-finger statuette — to the "looniest" council of them all when the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday sent teams of reporters chasing round London boroughs in search of good (if not true) stories; when even The Times used the term without apparent irony. Most importantly, it was the year when Environment Secretary Nicholas Ridley and Conservative Party Chairman Norman Tebbit decided this could be harnessed as a vote winner for the Conservative Party.Jolyon Jenkins (1987-01-09). "The green sheep in 'Colonel Gadaffi Drive'". New Statesman: 8–10.

The ridicule of the political left by some British newspapers has a far longer history. Petley observes that the British press had long-since "perfected a way of representing the ideas and personalities associated with socialism as so deranged and psychotic that they represented a danger to society", thus rendering them fair game for editorial vilification. After his party's defeat in the 1983 General Election, one newspaper had characterised Michael Foot's habit of swinging his walking stick around as he went for his morning walk as being "like an escaped loony". The election of Ken Livingstone to leader of the Greater London Council in 1981 had him regularly described in newspapers as "barmy" or "loony", with the GLC's policies labelled "crazy". These labels were increasingly also applied to local councils within London: The 1983-03-13 Sunday People labelled Islington local council the "Bananas republic"; and the 1983-02-13 Mail on Sunday labelled it "The mad mad mad mad world of Islington". In some ways, the "Loony Left" campaign was a generalisation of the Conservative campaign of demonising Livingstone and the GLC.

As recorded by Jenkins, the climax of the campaign was in 1986, and pivotal moments in its history were the London local council elections held in May 1986, and the Greenwich by-election, 1987, as well as of course the campaign for the 1987 General Election.

The general theme that the "Loony Left" label suggested was twofold: Labour Party local government authorities were perceived to be:

• irrationally obsessed with minority and fringe issues,
• paranoid about racial and sexual "problems" that are wholly imaginary on their parts and that have no real existence.

"Loony Left" was also used to describe specific individuals. Neil Kinnock, who had been subject to press vituperation since his election as party leader was associated with the "Loony Left" when in March 1987 he endorsed a rise of 60% in local council rates in Ealing, where he was a rate-payer. The Sun gave this the headline "Kinnock admits — I back loonies." and other newspapers put this forward as an example of support for extremism by the Labour Party leadership. A later story in the Daily Express, about how Ken Livingstone purportedly had a left-wing takeover of the party arranged, was denied by the Labour leadership only to have that reported as "Neil Denies Truth About Left Plot".

Similarly, Deirdrie Wood, Labour candidate in the 1987 Greenwich by-election, came to be known in the press as "Dreadful Deirdrie". Wood had been selected by her local constituency party against opposition from the Labour leadership. Privately, she had promised Kinnock "I won't drop you in it.", to which he had replied "It's not you, it's those bastards out there", i.e. the press. Labour presented her as "a hard-working local woman with sensible policies", but the press portrayed her as a radical extremist both by association, as an IRA sympathiser living with a militant shop steward who was not the father of her children, and directly as a "hard left feminist, anti-racist and gay-rights supporter" (as one News of the World report put it) who wanted to twin London schools with PLO camps.

However, local authorities were the primary targets, in part because that is where progressives had found their platform in the 1980s. This was caused by two factors: a change in the composition of local authorities, and the General Election defeats for Labour from 1979 onwards. Partly because of structural changes to local authorities enacted in 1974, including the end of local aldermanic dignities, and partly simply as a result of an influx of new people whose background had been in the radical youth movements of the 1960s, local government authorities became highly partisan political battlegrounds in the 1970s and 1980s, that a canny politician would be able to use to construct a power base and as a stepping stone to a career in national-level politics.

This was compounded by the General Election defeats for Labour, leaving the party with little ability to push its agenda at a national level in Westminster. As a result, local authorities became hotbeds of progressive and radical ideas, and a conflict between local Labour local authorities and the Conservative central government on many issues ensued. Like municipal socialism before it, Labour leaderships at local level saw themselves as stronger than their Westminster party colleagues, and capable of pushing socialist political agendas where they could not be pushed at national level. This resulted in an era of "grand gesture politics", with local authorities taking highly visible stances on national political issues such as declaring themselves Nuclear Free Zones, and "rainbow coalitions" between local Labour party politicians and pressure groups for causes outside of Labour's traditional working class roots, such as anti-racism, gay rights, disabled rights, and feminist groups.

Unfortunately for Labour, the wide range of local-level policy initiatives that this engendered made it easy for Conservative opponents to then apply the "Loony Left" blanket label that the news media had handed to them, a political card that the Conservatives played at both local and national levels. The label was a particularly effective tactic against Labour-controlled local education authorities, because the suggestion of innocent children being manipulated to further cynical adult political goals was a very potent image.