A Labour leader with intellect and passion who advocated defence, patriotism and peace

Michael Foot's reply to Margaret Thatcher in the emergency House of Commons' Falkland Islands debate in April 1982 was the speech of a statesman, delivered with passion, wit and intellect. Its assault on the Thatcher Government’s signal failure to deliver on the first responsibility of any government, that of protecting its people, ought to have made a mockery of the Conservatives’ vaunted defence credentials. It was delivered by a Labour leader who believed in conventional military deterrence and who rhetorically asked why Margaret Thatcher seemingly didn’t, in practise. The previous Labour Government, of which Foot was a very senior member, had mobilised a flotilla in advance of an Argentinian threat, thereby successfully preventing the possibility of invasion. Given the current Conservative Government‘s announcement of a large defence expenditure expansion amidst economic retrenchment, when the Con-Dem Government had previously recklessly slashed defence spending and left the UK without an aircraft carrier for many years, it would be wise to once again question the credentials of a Conservative Government on defence. Foot of course could reach back to his own assaults on another Conservative Government being soft on defence and on fascism (I use the word advisedly) in the latter 1930s. Sad that this great man should have been so pilloried and so parodied to the detriment of appreciating the power of his reason and his rhetoric. Sad that after the moronic disdain for defence shown by the last Labour leader we don’t have one now who's able to rip apart the Tories’ pretensions as the ‘patriotic party’. To hear Foot's speech click on this link

Bury Bus Station and beyond

I arrived at Manchester Victoria station from the sleepier denizens of Whittle-le-Woods near Chorley. Specifically I’d departed for the big city from a bizarre new creation called Buckshaw Village. Village it is not. A large new housing development built around a new railway station and superstore it is. 

Arriving in the heart of the great northern city of Manchester, capital of the cotton trade etc., I was immediately struck by the number of (young) people on the street and the apparent normality of life amidst a global pandemic. The Cathedral beckoned and I figured it might offer safe refuge. Social distancing wouldn’t need to be rigorously enforced in the House of the Lord. I was right about the limited punters, but security was relatively tight. I was taken by the beauty of the stained glass windows, the agnostic humanity of the 'Artist's Statement' by P. Wharton, who made the appropriately-named 'Hope's Last Call' sculpture (below), and a depiction of Christ (see also below). Public displays of Christian iconography can be counted in their millions, but this unique painting, modestly appended to a pillar, moved me in its simplicity and modern reinventions.

I was soon thrown back again into the serried ranks of the fully legal, open air drinking frenzy that the centre of this city seems dedicated to. Unpleasant at the best of times, it seemed downright dangerous now. I decided to get out of town fast, not least as I’d earlier invested nearly a Fiver in a ‘PlusBus’ pass.

I travelled from the centre of Manchester’s last chance saloon boozing orgy to the Bury Interchange via the Number 138. Taking about an hour each way, this was a voyage of discovery, ‘a sociologist’s paradise’ as John Cooper Clarke wrote of Beasley Street in Salford. We journeyed through the outskirts of Manchester, taking in a very different cultural scene to that I’d departed from around Manchester Victoria Station. Traditionally dressed older men of Pakistani heritage, and young Anglo-Pakistani women dressed in variations of hijab. A particularly vocal set of such girls had, from the start been on the top deck of the bus from Manchester city centre, engaging in a war of increasingly loud, hostile and very crude words with boys of, from what I could work out, the same heritage who were positioned at the back of the top deck. The boys kept loudly labelling them ‘racist bitches’, a moniker they rammed home on their eventual departure, thank God, somewhere just before Prestwich. Perhaps the girls were viewed by these boys as being down on their own (and their) culture, or I, as a total outsider, was missing differences of heritage or simply taking their language too literally. As the bus went through Prestwich my drive-by cultural history tour changed from being overwhelmingly Pakistani Muslim and, outwardly at least, ‘observant’, to Jewish, and often Orthodox at that, although this was a Saturday afternoon. The shops looked as modest as the array of Pakistani grocers and barbers I’d seen in Cheetham Hill. Many of course were closed as Shabbat fast approached.

In Bury itself the bus pulled into the impressive ‘Interchange’, a large and very organised bus stop. I felt foreign, not because of religious or cultural traditions different to my own, but because Bury seemed, despite appearances, homogenously northern and working class. Among its many traditionally dressed Asians out shopping, and often unhealthy looking older white men spilling out of a nearby pub, I put my mask away and sat in the main pedestrianised shopping area near the bus station. With my home-made cheese sandwiches I felt more like Alan Bennett than somehow blending in with the other middle-aged white people occupying the public benches. While my thermos flask might have been something Bennett’s parents would have deployed waiting for the homeward bus from Leeds town centre, it was a pretty rare specimen round here. I was tempted by a Wetherspoon’s pub (‘The Robert Peel’), but was fearful of the post-drinking comedown more than the lack of social distancing. Passing a gaudy sports bar, I sought refuge in the nearby Bury Art Museum (and ‘Sculpture Centre’) (BAM). It was every inch an architectural tribute to late Victorian municipal splendour from the outside, and was not really that much different in terms of its content. Upon entry, greeted in a very friendly manner and managed sensibly in terms of logging in my personal details and maintaining distancing etc., I was struck by a confusing array of abstract sculptural images that seemed, in part at least, to to be the product of schools’ art projects. Certainly there were several references and indeed work spaces throughout BAM intended to motivate children to take up or at least be interested in art. They all felt like add-ons though in a desperate bid to suggest that what remains irrevocably, in spirt as well as in name, a museum, is somehow relevant. A tribute to a comedian, local girl Victoria Wood, did little to assuage this impression. In much of BAM, in its tall gallery rooms (see photo below) and up its generous stone staircase, the heart of what still defines it adorned the walls: paeans to the old ruling class, fat generals sat astride struggling old nags, local burghers typical of those whose spare cash helped start the Museum itself, and especially educative time pieces such as ‘The Slave Girl of Cairo Market’, a depiction, bizarrely, of a pretty white girl in what I suppose was an example of orientalist prejudice/propaganda. A huge and perfectly executed oil painting of a slain deer being mourned by, or still breastfeeding, its offspring, was either an unexpected condemnation of bourgeois slaughter sports of the animal variety, or just a soulless caricature of ‘natural’ exploits.

There was a very large space at the top of BAM that on the occasion I visited was dedicated solely to some moderately interesting work by a modern sculptor cum installation artist where I witnessed an over-zealous attendant inform an only partially interested punter of all that was apparently important about this (possibly local) artist. There was space in a stairwell for a different tribute to the Bury local, and former PM and police founder, Sir Robert Peel, than that provided by Wetherspoons. The one and only public toilet in the building wasn’t working though.

BAM is a strange place. Still very much a tribute to Victorian class-ridden philanthropy whose literal legacies probably help to keep it running, with would-be kiddy-friendly and ultra-modern sculpture spaces added on without seemingly much thought. Perhaps any really promising local artists would get the hell out of Bury as soon they’ve graduated from university, but thinking of that large space occupied by just one artist, a conceptual sculptor, I wondered about all the local and totally amateur work that could be displayed there. A floor full of the best work of a local art college’s students might get some punters in from the nearby pubs, some of whom would probably be related to the artists on display, a very unlikely proposition at present. If such open access happens regularly at BAM then forgive me, but my brief experience – I had bowled up just 20 minutes before closing time – suggests a place different to that being bizarrely re-imagined on the BAM website and equally disconnected.

Interestingly, as I exited BAM I spied more contemporary art but of a very public kind. Positioned above Bury Interchange itself, "From Northern Soul (Bury Neon)", by Ron Sliman (see below), spelt out the forced punning of ‘Poetry has been Bury, Bury good to me.’ It was though an interesting antidote to the public art that first greets you as the Manchester bus pulls into Bury: a sculpture of a senior officer from the Lancs Fusiliers marks the 1905 South African Boer War (by George Frampton; see below). I’d be surprised if there was as much pressure from Bury locals to pull that down as there is from some Manchester and other folk regarding the sculpture of Sir Robert Peel in Manchester Piccadilly.

(Photo, left, by Nick Smale). 

                                                                                            (Photo above by David Ingham from Bury)

On the bus back from Bury to Manchester, I was, like earlier, for what this observation’s worth, the only other white male present for most of the one hour journey, apart that is from the very obliging driver. Economic demographics play a role in urban bus usage, hence why there were plenty of elderly white women using their free bus passes. Being a ‘bus wanker’ is though for some an expression of personal economic failure once cited, albeit not quite in those terms, by Margaret Thatcher. 

As we approached the city a man got on who bore more than a passing resemblance to Robert Wyatt. Of course I was under no flashback-driven delusion that this was in fact the former drummer with Soft Machine who'd gone on to make 'Shipbuilding' famous. For one thing the socio-demographic factors in the area didn’t compute, despite the rock star’s professed commitment to public services, including those of the omnibus kind. The most obvious preclusion of this possibility though was the fact that he self-evidently wasn’t in a wheelchair. The uncanny thing though was that he got on somewhere past Cheetham Hill with what looked like a couple of walking implements, one of which he laid out in the heavy luggage section at the front of the bus. The other is that Wyatt has just turned 75; this chap looked 20 years younger, perhaps more, as part of his aged appearance was due to the fact that he was a bit dishevelled and plainly not that healthy. Life hadn’t been kind to him, it seemed. The first thing that struck me, aside from his long grey hair and long grey beard, when he walked on to the bus was that he was armed with a large black note book. Whilst I was musing on the idea of him being Robert Wyatt, I noticed after he sat down a few rows in front of me that he was actually keenly reading what was hidden inside the note book: a section of what looked like a guide to rock music written at least three decades ago with parts marked in highlighter pen. Perhaps he was reading about himself?

Back in Manchester I wandered around the back streets close to Piccadilly and Victoria stations and found myself spying the original Co-Operative Wholesale Society building (right). 

Just around the corner from this, and facing Manchester Victoria station, was the HQ of the Co-op Bank. A large display in its window gave expression to the halcyon days of the Co-Op Movement, topped off by the bronze statue outside of Robert Owen. With a needy child at his feet, 'The Father of Co-operation' stood as a, presumably unthreatened, monument to a Victorian philanthropist and to a different, if not idealistic, time. As the Co-Op Bank's window testament implies, Owen can be claimed for the Labour Movement's traditional focus on wage protection and ending destitution. So far so safe. However his statue, and the accompanying Bank tribute, is also testament to his desire to build a new 'model society' as he sought to do in the New Lanark mill village in Scotland. The Co-Op seems keen to draw on some of that legacy to offset the poor PR of its late capitalist cynicism. A late middle-aged woman weighed down with life and luggage, propped herself against Mr Owen. A great image perhaps, but it prevented me from taking a photo of my own.

 

            (Photo above by Mike Peel) 

  

Heading back by train to the new model society that is Buckshaw Village, the rudimentary socialism of a free public toilet in Manchester Victoria station was appreciated. However it was not socially safe inside. 'We're not even practising social distancing for our knobs,' a local wag drolly observed. 

I headed out of Manchester, passing through the intense architecture around Salford Central, clocking the bizarrely named 'New Bailey' amongst the varieties of old and new brutalism on display. Changing at Bolton the 'heritage' industry was seemingly making a virtue of social apartheid. Edwardian frosted  windows on the station platform included such legends as 'Gentlemen's First Class Waiting Room', juxtaposed with the rather less exclusive 'General Waiting Room', or, further along, the 'Ladies' First and Second Class Waiting Rooms.' In the real world of the present day we usually share the same facilities but social and cultural hierarchies seem as rigid as ever, in Bury and beyond.    

 

 

Sir Harold Wilson and the Adelphi Hotel, Liverpool

We were given a key to the joint entrance to rooms 100 and 101 in Liverpool’s most iconic hotel, The Adelphi. Four years earlier I had only managed to get as far as the plaque outside that very modestly marks the fact that Harold Wilson - the 20^th Century’s most electorally successful party leader - had used the suite as his Constituency Room.

The entrance to the Sir Harold Wilson suite, replete with modest plaque

The dark wooden doors led you into two rooms that are virtually unchanged since the Labour leader had used the hotel to conduct constituency business for his Liverpool seat of Huyton, located close to the city centre where the hotel stands. Opening the door to the sitting room, we were struck by the large dark marble fire place, replete with electric fire that looked vintage 1960s, an original looking dining table and even a fold-out green beige card table. The sofa was decidedly of a different vintage. However the huge windows, subtly painted mock Georgian wall panels, and phenomenal ceiling plaster moulding that would in Harold’s time have sported a chandelier not an electric mock candelabra, made it easy to imagine yourself in a time when the PM needed somewhere very comfortable to, perhaps once a month, conduct meetings with local party officials and trade unionists or to simply be based for a night in advance of a Saturday morning constituency surgery in Huyton.

Harold's sitting room (Room 100)

Room 100 at the Adelphi was handy on election night too (1966) (c/o 'Harold Wilson' by Ben Pimlott, HarperCollins, 1992)

Harold’s bedroom was equally original, minus the bed with its mock leather headboard. The huge, fitted wood and marble washstand cum chest of drawers, replete with deco-looking chrome towel rack, and the large marble fire place were not only in place when Wilson used these rooms but when this incarnation of the famous hotel opened in 1914. 

Harold's washstand

A huge wooden, mirrored, wardrobe had certainly been in the room for more than half a century. It is hard to imagine that a hotel that for several decades has had a funding problem – one not remotely alleviated by its comparatively recent transfer to the ownership of the Britannia chain – would replace anything that wasn’t broken, save for maybe the odd light bulb and, sadly, the original carpet. 

Sir Harold Wilson's bedroom

The bathroom separated the two main rooms; its tasteful frosted glass lattice work door opened to a porcelain furniture set that may not have been 1914 but was probably at least 1950s. Valerie mused on the idea that Sir Harold had used the very same bath as her. From the bathtub you can look out via an enormous window to the rather grand building opposite that in Wilson’s time housed Lewis’ department store. Above the entrance to Lewis’ (now no doubt housing offices or flats) is a slightly odd but no less iconic stone sculpture of a naked male, which was referenced in a famous local tune popularised by a mostly local act, The Spinners. The sculpture almost matches the campness of a much smaller, metallic one depicting a naked young soldier sporting what looks like a Teutonic hard hat, which is located in the Adelphi Hotel ballroom.

The view from Harold's bathroom

When I booked the Sir Harold Wilson suite, I discovered the rather odd fact that it is actually known as Room 101. In fact it isn’t really known as the Sir Harold Wilson suite at all. The scouse-sounding and very helpful guy who took my phone reservation confirmed that he had typed into the booking that the ‘Sir Harry Wilson suite’ i.e. Room 101 had been requested. After successfully checking in to the suite we heard an older person’s voice outside the door informing her husband that Harold Wilson had stayed here, and evincing a disinterested response.

Wilson is mentioned on the Adelphi Hotel’s website, as is his ‘preferred suite’ where we stayed. However the Huddersfield-born man, part schooled in Liverpool, who represented a Liverpool constituency for 33 years, 13 of which as Labour leader and eight of which as prime minister, remains almost an incidental figure in the catalogue of famous people who’ve either made Liverpool their home or who were born and raised there.

If that’s true of Liverpool, it’s much more so nationally. In 2006, a decade after his death, a metal sculpture of Wilson was unveiled in Huyton by the then Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair (the only Labour leader to serve more years as PM than Wilson). Blair is reported as saying that his fondness for Wilson was because he was the first ‘modern British prime minister’, more or less code for the fact that he was (more or less) working class. Wilson was a ‘modern prime minister’ because unlike every predecessor save Lloyd George, and patently unlike Blair (or his successor but one, Cameron), he wasn’t privileged. Wilson’s immediate predecessor as Labour leader, Hugh Gaitskell, was, according to Wilson's biographer Ben Pimlott, superiorly conscious of the huge class gulf between them, while some of the upmarket press mocked Wilson for being a philistine. Yet he had a first class brain, got a first class degree from Oxford, and founded the Open University – the only Wilson policy legacy that Blair noted. Only a year before Blair unveiled the sculpture, he gave a speech to the Labour conference in which he attacked the Wilson-led Labour governments of the 1960s for being responsible for Thatcherism by failing to understand the depth of economic and social change. Ironically, just prior to entering No 10 for the first time Wilson urged change on both sides of industry in his famous ‘White Heat of Technology’ speech. As prime minister Harold Wilson would be weakened by often senseless industrial action; his successor and close colleague Callaghan was destroyed by it. However Mr Blair’s simplistic attack on, in effect, Wilson’s legacy was rich coming from the man ultimately responsible for fiscal mistakes that subsequently helped undermine the Brown Government amidst global economic meltdown. In supposedly praising Wilson, Blair failed to mention the neo-colonial American war that he kept British troops out of (Vietnam), in marked contrast to the one Blair sent British troops to fight in (Iraq). If, as the comment attributed to Churchill has it, ‘to govern is to decide’, then Wilson’s decision to in effect break with Washington (and for which the UK economy was punished by the US) was very much about governing - and doing so in the national interest.

Perhaps you don’t get remembered or properly respected as a British prime minister for the wisdom of what you didn’t do – as opposed to the damage caused by much of what you did (Margaret Thatcher). However Wilson did much in general to expand higher education and its availability to people of his background. A BBC story written in 2009 about long abandoned car production in the Merseyside town of Speke begins with a reference to what it calls ‘the dark days of the 1970s’. While there was much industrial action, there was also much less inequality pre-1979, and, for all the faults of Wilson’s public housing and welfare programmes, far less homelessness. As we walked around the centre of Liverpool the number of very visible homeless people on the streets was shocking. No doubt they congregated in the centre to try to tap visitors coming out of pubs, but their plight in the middle of winter was, and is, very real.

'V' performed by Jonny Magnanti at the St. Leonard Pub

Jonny Magnanti is the first actor to interpret Tony Harrison’s still controversial poem,‘V’. Like Tony Harrison, Jonny Magnanti had a working class upbringing in Leeds. In his familiarity with the Leeds dialect, its cadences, and the reality of what for some at least is everyday speech, Magnanti took us right to Harrison’s parents’ municipal graveyard, daubed with swastikas and profanity and littered with discarded cans of Harp larger. For nearly an hour in three separate performances this week, thirty-odd people in the St Leonard pub in London Road were drawn-in to Harrison’s (or was it Magnanti’s?) private world where a painful internal dialogue took centre stage.

Years before he wrote this poem in 1985, Harrison had sometimes used vernacular language in his poems so that people like his parents would not be alienated from them. Returning to Leeds for the first time in years, this middle aged man was seared by his visit to his parents’ desecrated grave and by the poverty and desperation of a city wilfully run down like the surrounding pits where the bitter confrontation of the Miners’ Strike raged. However the vernacular in ‘V’ came largely from the skinhead, the ‘yobbo’ that Harrison’s poem says he (or Magnanti) could have been, had not education taken them both to a different creative and material dimension. When speaking in the poet narrator’s voice, Magnanti delivered powerful and highly evocative poetry of a different kind, where the damp stone of the graves was suffused with images of coal’s prehistoric geology and an eternity of unity as all bodies secrete together in an undifferentiated carbonic mass. The skin dismisses this part of Harrison’s delivery, contemptuous of this elitist ‘c***’. 

It’s probably debatable whether Harrison or Magnanti ‘but for the grace of God’ would, minus an advanced education, have become Nazi skinheads. In the mid-80s I remember unemployed northerners on the edge of, or fully absorbed in, the black economy down south. They were angry but very unlikely recruits to that particular form of working class politics. The dramatic effect, however, of the polarity that Harrison writes, and Magnanti so powerfully vocalises, is mining a rich seam indeed.

The strike of course hangs heavy over the poem and this performance, as it does any recollection of the 1980s. Fetch Theatre, who produced the performance, include brief audio interludes that politically and musically soundtrack the decade. Margaret Thatcher’s voice, and its dogmatic and propagandist interpretation of what the strike was about, still cuts to the quick in its absolutist sense of what she believed, or wanted, to be at stake. A warmer voice of a striking miner paradoxically becalms with its moving assertion of the social dimension to what some saw as just an economic issue.

Harrison wasn’t expressing the ‘V’ for ‘Versus’ sentiment that united many young Leeds men with their football team, and much else in their culture, against whoever they were ‘losing to’ that week. Harrison’s ‘true’ voice says that the reference to Leeds football club, ‘United’, that had been spray-painted on his parents’ grave could perhaps be left there. While having no religious faith himself, he says that it could be a sentiment of hope that they would, someday, be together again. More broadly, the poet expresses in ‘V’ the wish that his nation could be united; not divided down the middle in what is presented as a wilful exercise in class politics.

Magnanti gives expression to Harrison’s guilt upon making one of his rare homecomings; not privileged but having escaped from the miserable powerlessness that the poem argues spawns such ‘yobbos’. The occupants of these tombs – butcher, baker and publican - would have wanted such vandals punished, Harrison’s non-skin voice observes. His own Dad, elderly and isolated, had felt increasingly alienated too, not recognising the city he grew up in and uncomfortable at the presence of ‘coloureds’ (his father’s most ‘liberal’ term) whose culture he didn’t understand and whose shops obliged him to walk ever further for a tin of baked beans. Leeds was, according to ‘V’, ‘beef, bread and beer’ and that is what was being played out, positively and negatively, among the tombstones. There is much humanity and realism in Harrison’s poem and in Magnanti’s telling of it, including language and sentiment that can still be shocking, but now perhaps for an otherwise very sympathetic audience.

Jonny Magnanti in 'V' - a portrait by Peter Mould www.stagesnaps.com

I don’t think the poem’s telling is intended to evoke some guilt in the audience. However Magnanti’s delivery and the audio soundbites combined to trigger in me sharp memories of the class-conscious politics of the time. I felt a familiar conflict between total sympathy for miners resisting deliberate and spiteful socio-economic engineering and contempt for those whose cynical political calculations helped lead them to defeat. Thatcher’s self-serving ‘enemies of democracy’ rhetoric aimed at working class industrial action did have a ring of truth for some, like me, on the compromising, trimming, centre-left. The poet detected where the Labour leadership was heading; two references to the Leeds MP who led the Labour Party when Harrison was a much younger man, Hugh Gaitskell, and his ‘smooth’ appeal to what the ‘other side’ wanted to hear, were signposts of what was beginning to happen when ‘V’ was written.

If this performance of ‘V’ still makes people uncomfortable, for the contemporary resonances of its subject matter, for its explanation of where social resentment can come from, and because of the disconnect that perhaps many of us feel from those at the sharp end, then it only proves the poem’s abiding power and particularly this performance of it. 

Jonny Magnanti said to me afterwards that the Leeds LitFest have not only thrilled him by inviting him to perform ‘V’ there, but have asked him to sit on a discussion panel about it with Tony Harrison. ‘You couldn’t make it up,’ he said. You couldn’t make up the language and concerns of ‘V’ up either. Rooted in the real and poetically connecting to other possibilities: not ‘Versus’ but ‘United’.