LOCAL ELECTIONS 2010: Politics demands poetry, flamboyance and humour - Illtyd Harrington on the Labour Party's victory in Camden

Published: 13 May 2010
by ILLTYD HARRINGTON

AWAY with gerontocracy – it stifled the Russian Revolution and ossified Japanese society, as well as the arthritic Curia. A surfers’ wave has swept new faces into the corridors of power at Camden Town Hall.

To paraphrase the legend on the vulgar archway at the entrance to the Paramount Studios in Hollywood, through our Town Hall portals have passed some of the greatest names in politics. For it was there and at its previous incarnations that men and women of distinction – Bernard Shaw, Krishna Menon and Barbara Castle among them – learned to serve the people, and challenge the complacency and inertia which hide in the cold hands of permanent bureaucracy. 

The mandate for our new council leadership is clear and the challenge formidable. And they should never forget, it was David who beat Goliath. 

People want to be involved: community is acceptable political currency again. I never underestimated that factor when I sat at the heart of local government in the centre of London. Political Daleks have enlarged their limited vocabulary. They bleep “journey”, “transparency”,  “inclusiveness”, “public conversation” in their “new politics”. But, as they say in the old Westerns, they speak with forked tongue.

Camden has been the cradle of radical thoughts and humanitarian endorsement for more than a century. We have great universities, new technical skills, teaching hospitals, the British Library, probably the most potent learning tool in Europe, and political tolerance. Not to mention the best pub life in London.

Before I joined the Labour Party, I served my political apprenticeship among the Communist miners in post-war South Wales. I would tingle when some self-educated leader, inciting us to a crusade, said: “Remember comrade Garibaldi and his 600 red shirts united Italy.” Then the voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper as he went on: “The Chinese Communist party had only a dozen members to begin with.” This inflammatory oratory was delivered to half a dozen eager subversives. He had the confidence of Napoleon on the eve of Waterloo, but we failed to breach the walls of the solidly Labour town hall. 

Politics demands poetry, harmony, flamboyance and humour. One wet Sunday, I went to a public meeting for the local elections. The pubs were closed, so a few dozen bored men took refuge as well as a handful of boisterous women from a hamlet in the nearby mountains, a communist stronghold. Our star was a miner’s agent from the Rhondda. In an act of rhetoric worthy of Demosthenes, he exhorted us to break Labour’s monopoly, by reciting  Tennyson’s Locksley Hall:  “When I dipt into the future far as human eye could see; saw the Vision of the world and the wonders that would be.” Ecstatic stuff but it failed to capture Dowlais ward of Merthyr Tydfil. 

Dai Dan Evans, our zealous leader, was chairman of that meeting, and, not to be outdone by our comrade from the Rhondda, he said: “Comrades! In the words of Shelley: ’Ye are many, they are few.’ Unfortunately, our hopes were dashed, so that we were the few and they were the many.