Political change in Britain: 40 years after Bermondsey

Political journalists have been looking back forty years on the anniversary of the Bermondsey by-election, a famous gain on 24th February 1983 for the Liberal / SDP ‘Alliance’, whose candidate Simon Hughes achieved what is still the largest swing in by-election history: 44.2%, turning a Labour majority of 11,756 into an Alliance majority of almost 10,000.

Most of the publicity (including several interviews with the defeated Labour candidate Peter Tatchell) has focused on the question of ‘gay rights’, an agenda that has moved on considerably in the intervening decades. Tatchell made no secret of his homosexuality, though at the time he was not so closely identified with the ‘gay rights’ cause as he later became.

Tatchell was vilified by the tabloid press, who gleefully picked up the ‘homophobic’ abuse that was thrown at him, mainly by his rivals on the decaying and often corrupt old ‘right-wing’ of the Labour Party. These included retiring MP Bob Mellish and his ally John O’Grady, long-serving leader (1968-82) of the local Southwark Council.

O’Grady had been ousted as Labour candidate for the Dockyard ward that he had represented since Southwark council’s creation in 1964, while Mellish decided to retire as an MP so as to take a well-paid position as vice-chairman of the London Dockyard Development Corporation. (He eventually became Lord Mellish of Bermondsey.)

Peter Tatchell, controversial Labour candidate defeated at Bermondsey

Looking back on the by-election, Tatchell’s views don’t seem especially ‘far left’ even by the standards of the time, let alone by today’s standards. The real issues affecting Londoners (then as now) included housing. Tatchell and the Labour left had (justifiably) campaigned against the record of their own party, who took local voters for granted and did far too little for council tenants.

Totally ignored by all of the mainstream parties was the ethnic transformation of London which had already begun: parts of the Southwark and Bermondsey area now regularly see gun and knife crime that would once have been rare. And today’s viewers of the 1983 by-election coverage will be astonished to see that forty years ago White working-class voters were still a very large percentage of the electorate.

Sadly the racial nationalist challenge in these areas had already declined by 1983. There were at least four rival candidates from our broad movement. Jim Sneath from the National Front polled 426 votes (1.4%) and finished fifth of what was then a record sixteen candidates. Anti-immigration campaigner Lady Birdwood (standing as an ‘Independent Patriot’) polled 69 votes (0.2%), slightly ahead of Michael Keulemans from the New Britain Party with 62 votes (0.2%), while Ann King of the National Labour Party (a tiny splinter from the NF, formed in 1981) took just 25 votes (0.1%).

This was the sad outcome from several years of decline for the NF in this area. Less than six years earlier at the Greater London Council elections, Sneath had polled 1,515 votes (8.8%) in this constituency, despite the rival National Party even then splitting the nationalist vote and taking 239 votes (1.4%). In other words a combined nationalist vote of 10.2% in 1977 had fallen to 1.9% in 1983.

It’s understandable that voters were confused and disillusioned by the factionalism that had overtaken the NF during those six years.

Many White working-class voters in 1983 backed ousted council leader O’Grady, who stood as ‘Real Bermondsey Labour’ (even though in many ways he represented the worst of the ‘Old Labour’ establishment partly responsible for the area’s decline). He took third place in the by-election with 2,243 votes (7.6%). John O’Grady died in April 2009, having witnessed the total extinction (for better and worse) of the ‘Old Labour Party’ that he knew.

But the main beneficiary of local voters’ disgust with Labour (both left and right), was the Liberal-SDP Alliance candidate Simon Hughes. Despite his own (secret) bisexuality, Hughes also benefited from the ‘homophobic’ reaction against Tatchell.

(There is still controversy over the extent to which some Alliance activists, though not Hughes himself, deliberately encouraged this ‘homophobia’.)

It’s ironic that two of the three mainstream politicians on the panel in the ITV by-election programme (see video link above) had their own ‘scandals’ in their private lives. Liberal MP Sir Clement Freud was later accused of predatory abuse of underage girls, while Tory chairman Cecil Parkinson had to resign at the end of 1983 after fathering a child with his secretary. Robert Hughes (the Tory candidate at this by-election) also had to resign as a minister twelve years later after admitting an affair with a constituent.

On most issues today Tatchell would probably fit into the mainstream of Labour, while Mellish and O’Grady would be a London version of ‘Red Wall’ Tories. The Southwark and Bermondsey area is now unrecognisable, with most of the White working-class having left, and replaced by an assortment of ethnic minorities (including many Africans) and trendy young middle-class Whites.

Neil Coyle, Labour MP for Bermondsey since 2015, seems likely to be ousted at the next election after his suspension for a drunken ‘racist’ rant.

Yet the local Labour party remains mired in controversy. Neil Coyle – the Labour MP who eventually ousted Hughes in 2015 – has been suspended from Labour for more than a year and was recently suspended by the parliamentary standards commissioner after an incident of alcohol-fuelled ‘racist’ abuse against a journalist.

Coyle seems likely to be replaced at the next election, but sadly the days when racial nationalists could expect strong votes in Bermondsey are long gone. There are many parts of the UK where a reunited and reinvigorated racial nationalist movement has great potential, but Bermondsey is not among them. The proud history of its White working-class has long since ebbed away with the tide of the River Thames, and is now history.

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