Loony left
[2] While academics have depicted the era as of the "new urban left" (such as the rate-capping rebellion) as a throwback to earlier municipal militancy (e.g. Poplarism), wider media coverage tended to focus on the personalities of city leaders such as the Greater London Council's Ken Livingstone and Liverpool's Derek Hatton.
The term "loony left" as used to describe certain aspects of Labour politics was created by the British popular press a few years before the 1987 general election.
[3] Jolyon Jenkins recorded in 1987 that 1986 was the climax of the Loony Left campaign:[2] [That it was the year] when the Sun announced that it was going to award a prize — a symbolic two-finger statuette — to the "looniest" council of them all [...] when the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday sent teams of reporters chasing round London boroughs in search of good (if not true) stories; when even The Times used the term without apparent irony.
[6] The election of Ken Livingstone to the leadership of the Greater London Council in 1981 had him regularly described in newspapers as "barmy" or "loony", with the GLC's policies labelled "crazy".
Neil Kinnock, who had been subject to press vituperation since his election as party leader, was associated with the "loony left" when, in March 1987, he endorsed a rise of 60% in local council rates in Ealing, where he was a rate-payer.
The Sun gave this the headline "Kinnock admits — I back loonies" and other newspapers put this forward as an example of support for extremism by the Labour Party leadership.
Labour presented her as "a hard-working local woman with sensible policies", but the press portrayed her as a radical extremist by association, as an Irish Republican Army sympathiser living with a militant shop steward who was not the father of her children.
She was also depicted personally as a "hard left feminist, anti-racist and gay-rights supporter" (as one News of the World report put it) who wanted to twin London schools with Palestine Liberation Organization camps.
This resulted in an era of "grand gesture politics", with local authorities taking highly visible stances on national political issues such as declaring themselves nuclear-free zones and "rainbow coalitions" between local Labour Party politicians and pressure groups for causes outside of Labour's traditional working-class roots, such as anti-racism, gay rights, disabled rights and feminist groups.
The label was a particularly effective tactic against Labour-controlled local education authorities because the suggestion of innocent children being manipulated to further cynical adult political goals was a very potent image.
[5] However, changes made by the Labour Party after the 1987 general election to ensure that it was no longer associated in the public mind with the images of the "Loony Left" from 1986 to 1987 have since blunted its impact and reduced its power, to the extent that it had far less impact on the 1992 United Kingdom general election, less even (according to academic studies by Butler and Kavanaugh) than Labour Party officials themselves believed at the time post-election.
One party press secretary said of Labour's attitude to the news media in the 1983 general election campaign: "If a miracle had happened and Fleet Street had suddenly come clamouring to Walworth Road for pro-Labour material, they would have been sent away with a copy of the manifesto each".
The party leadership noted afterwards that it had been the effect of the "Loony Left" image that had caused it to lose the 1987 Greenwich by-election by such a large margin.
Kinnock refused to talk to the press on the flight back from his visit to the U.S. President Ronald Reagan after British journalists had continually sought a story that would represent the trip in a negative light.
The "Loony Labour Left" is now taking its toll; the gays and lesbians issue is costing us dear amongst the pensioners and fear of extremism and higher taxes/rates is particularly prominent in the GLC area.
At the time of Brent Council's initiative to appoint race-relations advisers to schools, the party's deputy leader Roy Hattersley said, "I do not deny the existence of unacceptable behaviour in some local education authorities.
"[10] On several occasions, the Labour Party leadership and others attempted to take a hard line on the "Loony Left" to gain a more favourable impression in the media.
On 3 April 1987, for example, five Labour MPs with constituencies in Birmingham — Roy Hattersley, Denis Howell, Jeff Rooker, Terry Davis and Robin Corbett — wrote to Sharon Atkin, Bernie Grant and Linda Bellos in letters that they themselves leaked to the newspapers, demanding that they not attend a meeting in Birmingham, scheduled for 7 April, of activists campaigning for Black Sections within the Labour Party.
[11][12][verification needed] The same accusations made by the British press in the 1980s were levelled by U.S. newspapers such as The Chicago Tribune, The New Republic, Time, Newsweek and New York.
It determined that many of these stories were either partially or wholly fabricated and that their targets, against whom they aimed to inflame public opinion, were a few London local councils that were under Labour Party control.
[citation needed] Variants of this story have been reported repeatedly by the British mass media since 1986, to the state at which it has almost gained the status of an urban myth.
[19] An Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) teaching pack titled Auschwitz: Yesterday's Racism drew comparisons between the trade union legislation of Adolf Hitler and Margaret Thatcher.
