![]() ![]() Kinnock appointed Peter Mandelson as Labour’s director of communications in 1985. ![]() Unable or unwilling to defend the party’s traditional program, its leaders became increasingly preoccupied with questions of image. Thatcher’s wholesale attack on key tenets of Labourism, such as nationalization and redistribution, undermined the ideological basis of the party. Red Wedge took shape during Kinnock’s reign over a party that was already trying to accommodate itself to the ongoing neoliberal turn. Kinnock didn’t go quite as far as Tony Blair in his acceptance of the Thatcherite legacy, but he certainly took several steps in that direction. Over time, he dropped plans for the renationalization of industries that Thatcher had privatized and the scrapping of Britain’s nuclear arsenal. Kinnock refused to support the miners’ strike of 1984–85 and the resistance of Labour councils in London and Liverpool to Tory cuts. In practice, this meant gradually abandoning key parts of the party’s policy and culture. He announced his plans to “modernize” Labour. Much like Keir Starmer following Labour’s 2019 defeat, Kinnock campaigned from the left, then shifted right after becoming leader. The party’s electoral college of MPs, trade unions, and ordinary members chose Neil Kinnock as Foot’s replacement. But Thatcher’s victory in the Falklands War and Labour’s internal feuding hobbled the party, and the Tories won a landslide victory. Michael Foot replaced Callaghan and the Labour conference adopted a left-wing manifesto for the 1983 election. A bitter factional conflict between the party’s left and right wings soon followed. Labour’s first defeat came in 1979, when Prime Minister James Callaghan proved unable to manage the crisis brought about by the end of the postwar boom and the strike wave of 1978–79. The achievements and limitations of Red Wedge have wider lessons for attempts by left activists to bring politics into culture and culture into politics. It was one of the first times that British musicians expressly lent their support to a political party. Red Wedge couldn’t defeat Thatcher, but it deserves to be remembered today. They toured Britain in the lead-up to the 1987 general election, aiming to drum up youth support for Neil Kinnock’s Labour. Red Wedge, a collective of musicians opposed to Tory rule, believed that music could help galvanize opposition to the government. ![]() Electoral defeats at the hands of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives had made Labour a spectator, watching as the welfare state the party had fought hard to create was dismantled. In the 1980s, the British Labour Party was in crisis. ![]()
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