Where did Labour's raunchy radicals go?

LABOUR'S current crisis would seem less grievous were it not so regressive. Compare the conflict over inner-party democracy, powered by the trade-union block vote, with the great combustions that made politics quiver with delicious dangerousness 10 years ago. Troubled, chaotic, grief-stricken the Labour Party may have been in 1983, but it was also on the edge of an epochal moment of modernisation.

Labour in 1983 was not only a defeated party, it was also the most conservative party in the political firmament. Social democracy mutinied against statist Labourism and a labour movement that didn't move but instead exercised party power by proxy. The new centre party promised - but never delivered - a radical realignment.

But there was another, altogether more disorienting realignment happening on the left flank of politics. A cultural revolution took place on the left of the Labour Party during the mid-Eighties that produced naughty, inventive and even democratic challenges. You got the feeling that Labour was learning from a universe beyond itself: from events as diverse as the Greenham peace camp, the spectacle of a gay mayor and his boyfriend escort, Sinn Fein being invited to London's County Hall, the first female fire-fighters.

Never one for inventing a politics of its own, Labourism has always relied heavily on the cultures and habits of the workplace or town hall. Indeed, its political imagination has always been invigorated by sources outside iself. Between 1985 and 1987, it was renewed by the modernisation of municipal socialism and by the rise of the politics of advocacy and activism. If Thatcherism was centralising and cauterising the practice of government and the state, then at least civil society was bustling with invention and initiative.

So when the people associated with the moment of modernisation - Ken Livingstone, Joan Ruddock, Peter Hain, David Blunkett, Tony Banks - set their sights on Parliament, our expectations were high. We assumed, even when Labour was defeated at the 1987 general election, that its new parliamentarians, the class of '87, would at least make Parliament more interesting, by bringing their dialogue with society into its ancient and unchanging discourse.

We were disappointed. Because once they reached their destination, these politicians became, at a stroke, powerless and pointless. Think of it. When Ken Livingstone was leader of the Greater London Council, he was running a vast corporation, advised by some of the best minds municipal money could buy. There were some dafties, too, but let's be charitable - everyone was on a learning curve.

The resources of County Hall were deployed to create a new sense of citizenship and to reach new constituencies, to break out of Labour's class base and connect with Londoners who were Cypriots and Caribbeans, who got around in wheelchairs and on bikes, who needed babysitters and translators, who did night classes and tea dances.

This raunchy radicalism worked. It wasn't Ken, though his self-effacing wit (which disguised self-absorbed ambition) transformed the tone of civic discourse. It was the conjunction of his nerve, specialists' skills and modern civic manners that brought quirky and quarrelsome pleasure to London politics.

David Blunkett was a more poetic polemicist, but he was also more of a traditionalist. Like Livingstone, however, he was enlarged by responsibility for a city and its services, and emboldened by the ecology of Eighties politics.

Yet bereft of institutional responsibility, both Livingstone and Blunkett became, in their different ways, rather indifferent parliamentarians. Neither joined the honourable band of mavericks who, these days, are the only people to make Labour in Westminster worth watching.

These include sea-green incorruptibles such as Tam Dalyell, Dale Campbell-Savours and Frank Field. Or the soul politicians, capable of talking the language of life, such as Clare Short or Dennis Skinner.

As for the movement men and women, the days of direct action are, for the time being, over. Those, like Joan Ruddock or Peter Hain, who were associated with the art of movement, found themselves adrift in the House of Commons.

Labour's retreat from the vigorous, uncertain political locales of the late Eighties is summed up by the current regressive row over one member, one vote. And anyone who was part of that moment must surely feel now exhausted by a journey that never got anywhere, and disappointed by our arrival at somewhere way back when.

(Photograph omitted)