Down with the kids

The Paul Richards Column

* UPDATE: At the end of the first paragraph of this piece, it is stated that John Harris of the Guardian “orbited” around Militant in the 1980s. We have now published a retraction of this, which is not right, and an apology to John for the error. John in fact was a staunch and active opponent of Militant.

Political parties have always had an uneasy relationship with their young members. The naivety and exuberance of youth can easily combine into a cocktail of extremism and embarrassment for party leaders keen to appear sensible and centrist. There are those who seek to exploit the enthusiasm of the young. The Revolutionary Socialist League took Lenin’s slogan ‘who has the youth has the future’ to heart when it sent its cadres into the Labour Party’s youth and student sections. For over two decades any young person wanting to get involved with the Labour Party was met by people selling Militant, spouting transitional demands lifted straight from Trotsky, offering a Marxist perspective on the failings of the party leaders of the day, and bearing invitations to study circles, seminars and summer camps. Some were recruited, and joined the Militant Tendency. After a few months, they were chewed up and spat out, their idealism sucked dry and their pockets emptied. Others didn’t join, but orbited around them, and never really recovered from the early taste of fanciful left-wingery. Step forward the Guardian’s John Harris. (* See above).

It was as late as 1989 that the Labour Party got round to fixing the election for the youth rep of the NEC, which for 20 years had put a member of Militant onto the party’s ruling executive. When the official trade union candidate was revealed, just days before the election, to not be a member of the Labour Party, an alternative was swiftly identified. Alun Parry, an unassuming lad from Merseyside who knew all the verses of the Red Flag, was elected as the first youth rep on the Labour NEC for years to actually support the Labour Party. I recall the line changing from the debarred candidate to Mr Parry with Orwellian efficiency.

Today, Labour’s young people are in the mainstream of the party. Not blindly loyal, nor blatantly troublesome. Rebellion finds its outlet in nothing more extreme than a subscription to Compass. The hard work put in by the Kinnockites in the 1980s has paid off with a youth section today which actually helps Labour to win elections.

Which brings me to the Young Britons’ Foundation, which Alex Ross covered yesterday, the unofficial Conservative grouping for young people which this week has been denounced by the party chairman Eric Pickles.

Pickles is not the first Tory chairman to have trouble with the young people. Norman Tebbit had to close down the Federation of Conservative Students (FSC) in 1985 following an incident at Loughborough University involving too much beer and the police. This was the period which gave the world the legendary ‘hang Nelson Mandela’ badge, although I’ve never actually seen one. It was only a short step from Thatcher’s own public view that Mandela was a ‘terrorist’. The national chairman of the Young Conservatives the following year was the thoroughly respectable Nick Robinson, who no-one could accuse of extremism.

Unlike Tebbit, Eric Pickles has not sought to bar official links with the Young Britons’ Foundation, with its loopy ideas about gun control and detestation of the National Health Service. I am sure founder Donal Blaney will come to regret describing the YBF as the ‘Tory Madrasa’. A madrasa is a training camp where young people are indoctrinated into extremist views and actions. The word serves as an amusing metaphor for what goes on at these events. I don’t have a problem with that. It is the linking of ‘madrasa’ with ‘Tory’ that gives the game away. It shows that behind Cameron’s detoxification programme, there still lurks the libertarian right, waiting for their moment. These are sons and daughters of the ideologues who backed apartheid, funded the Contras in Nicaragua, wanted to legalise heroin, and sang the Nazi anthem from Cabaret ‘Tomorrow Belongs to Me’ at their conferences. They were to the right of today’s BNP, and for years they were an official organ of the Conservative Party.

Unlike the Labour Party, which took tough action to place a clear line between its own ideology of democratic socialism, and the far-left ideologies of Marxism-Leninism, the Conservatives see right-wing libertarianism as a legitimate strand of their ‘conservative movement.’ And be clear: David Cameron is content for this situation to continue. This tells you a great deal about his own willingness to modernise the Conservative Party. Pickles has shown all the toughness of a wet haddock in his dealings with the YBF. Instead of distancing himself, he has spoken to the YBF parliamentary rally as recently as this year. For Labour, it would be like Roy Hattersley turning up to support the Militant summer camp in 1985. Eric Pickles, of course, is a veteran of Conservative libertarian politics from the 1980s, when he was a Thatcherite Young Conservative chairman and councillor.

The YBF is well-funded by rich backers. It has swanky offices in central London. It has ‘trained’ over 2,000 Tory activists including many of the parliamentary candidates hoping to be MPs after May. But its politics and methods are a throw-back to the extremist days of the FCS. The YBF is proof that Cameron is merely the front-man for a party which still venerates Thatcher and Reagan, and wants to turn the clock back to the 1980s.