Eric Heffer's death came at an awkward time for the Labour Party. It ensured that the party's problems with Militant in Merseyside would get all the concentrated publicity of a by-election swarming with media hacks, when Labour might have hoped that it would be obscured in a general election. And just as Neil Kinnock is congratulating himself on the apparent success of his single minded drive to tune up the the Labour Party into a winning machine, he finds his open cynicism being contrasted to Heffer’s stubborn loyally to principles. For example Heffer's dramatic exit from the platform at Labour's 1985 conference, in protest at Kinnock's assault on Militant, receives kinder treatment now than the speech which provoked it. One obituary put the boot into Kinnock by recalling two episodes from his past as an attention-seeking left winger. On the first occasion he enraged Heffer by calling for a one-day general strike. A few years later, when he had come on a bit, he made a point of lounging on the front bench during the Queen's Speech. Royalists who were upset by this puerile demonstration will have been reassured when Kinnock recently informed the Commons, with a coy simper, that he had spent the previous night as a guest of the Queen at Windsor Castle.
Frustrations
There is, however, a problem about these supposedly unyielding supposed principles of Eric Heffer because there is no certainty about his ideas nor about whether he held them consistently enough for them to deserve to be called principles, let alone unyielding. He began his active political life at the age of 16 or 17 in the Labour Party but he soon became frustrated at the party's lack of commitment so he joined the Communist Party. However the CP were perhaps a bit too committed for him; in 1948 they expelled as a "left wing deviationist" which was their way of describing his stand against their support for a government of national unity and their opposition to strikes during the war.
Heffer then decided that his frustrations could after all be contained in the Labour Party and he rejoined it but by 1954 he had resigned again, propelled by another bout of impatience. The misguided lesson he drew from his political oscillation was that there was a need for a new party which would treat left wing fantasies seriously. With a few others equally deluded, he helped form the Socialist Workers Federation but it did not take long to dawn on him that the SWF was outside the mainstream of the workers' movement — where no self-respecting left winger could ever be comfortable. So Heffer (by now you know what’s coming) joined the Labour Party for the third time. On this occasion his membership survived, perhaps because he took out his frustration by being consistently out of step with the leadership and joining the left wing gadflies in Tribune Group and then the Campaign Group.
Along the way he became famous for what might kindly be called inconsistencies. For example, was it really a loveable eccentricity which caused this righteously left wing MP to like and admire arch reactionaries like Margaret Thatcher and Auberon Waugh? Or was the naive vanity which Heffer's friends said somehow existed in him alongside kindness and sincerity? How could this rigidly principled Marxist also be a devout Christian, dispensing the opiate of the masses from the High Anglican church, where it is more usual to find crusty Tories than Merseyside militants? What happened to the SWF policy of opposition to the Labour Party or any other parliamentary party and to the parliamentary "peaceful" road to socialism, when Heffer became what his admirers called "a great parliamentarian"? How many such contradictions can one person cram into one lifetime?
Militant
Still, they all loved him. Tories like Robert Rhodes James (". . a very special and for me remarkable friendship") and Kenneth Baker ("He has won the respect of the House"); right wing Labourites like Joel Barnett ("He will be much missed by all who knew him") and of course Militant, whose cause he defended on the Labour NEC (". . . he felt it his duty to stand up and speak for me" said Derek Hatton). In fact there may have been rather more than that to Heffer’s relationship with Merseyside Militant. There was every reason for him to respect their organisational talents and their ability to marshal votes; every reason for him to want them on his side rather than to antagonise them with one of his famous outbursts of candour, vanity, kindness, stoical principles and parliamentary greatness. We can only speculate about his reaction if Militant had put up a candidate against him as they have in the by-election caused by his death. Perhaps, among his irritation, there would have been a sneaking admiration for this policy change, worthy of Heffer at his best; for by contesting the election they are challenging the Labour Party openly instead of trying to change it from within.
Heffer spent a lot of his time clinging to the wreckage of the theory that the Labour Party lost elections because it was "not socialist enough". It is difficult to reconcile this with what has actually happened to Labour in recent elections. Even someone as divorced from reality as Heffer was would be hard put to find any convincing evidence that Labour would have stayed in power from 1945 until the present if only they had behaved as if capitalism is not a social system in which everything has to be paid for, the books must be balanced and a nice profit made for the class who are in ownership over us. In any case Heffer was not excessively eager to do the donkey work in applying his theory about the electoral harvest to be reaped from "more socialist" policies. In 1967 he was offered a junior ministerial post but he turned it down; when he agreed to be Minister of State under Tony Benn at the Department of Industry in 1974 he lasted only a year. Far from trying to change Labour policies from within the government he took one of his "principled stands" and left Harold Wilson with no choice but to sack him.
Futility
Heffer is not the first left wing politician to be kindly assessed after their death and he will not be the last. So far no one has mentioned the confusion people like that are responsible for and the effect it must have on workers who are aware of what capitalism does to them and are genuinely looking for a better way of organising society. In his Liverpool constituency, plagued by desperate poverty and scarred by the memory of the Toxteth riot, Heffer persuaded thousands of workers to vote for him on the assurance that his intellectual muddle of irreconcilables could tame the worst features of capitalism. Well he failed: the Militant by election candidate. Lesley Mahmood, promised to fight on the same issues like council redundancies, unemployment and hospital closures which Heffer had been supposedly dealing with since his election nearly thirty years ago.
Did Heffer ever wonder, from the depths of his futility, if there was another way? In April 1981 he wrote a pompous letter to The Socialist Standard ("It has been drawn to my attention . . I expect an apology and retraction in your next issue".) when we mistakenly attributed to him a piece in the SWF journal Socialist Revolt. He was right and we said so unreservedly. We also pointed out some important inconsistencies in an article which he definitely had written in the same issue of Socialist Revolt. The point is that Heffer must have read — or at least had his attention drawn to — The Socialist Standard and so to the ideas of Marxism, of socialism and the democratic revolution necessary for its establishment. It meant that all of his confusion and wobbling from one daft idea to another was unnecessary. He should have known better.
Ivan
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