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It is twenty years since I was elected a councillor of the old Brighton Borough Council, representing the then St Peter’s Ward. Those were tumultuous times, in the wake of the Brighton bombing and the miners’ strike. Thatcher was on a collision course with Labour councils and was soon to impose the deeply unpopular Poll Tax.
There was widespread dissent in the country, but paralysis in the upper levels of the Labour Party. In the wake of the defection of many Labour Party MPs to the Social Democratic Party and the terrible Labour election defeat of 1983, the party under Neil Kinnock was desperate for respectability. It waged war against its own party, purging it of left wing elements, leaving little room for dissent. Continue reading
