Ian Mikardo was born on 9th July 1908. He was educated at Portsmouth
Southern Secretary School for Boys and Portsmouth Municipal College.
A
member of the Labour Party he worked for
the Association of Scientific, Technical and Managerial Staffs. In
the 1945 General Election Mikardo was elected
to represent Reading.
In 1947
Mikardo joined Richard Crossman, Michael
Foot and Konni
Zilliacus to
produce Keep Left. In the pamphlet
the authors criticized the cold war policies
of the United States and urged a closer relationship
with Europe in order to create a "Third Force" in politics.
This included the idea of nuclear disarmament and the formation of
a European Security Pact.
In
the House of Commons Mikardo associated
with a group of left-wing members that included John
Platts-Mills, Konni
Zilliacus,
Lester Hutchinson, Leslie
Solley, Barbara
Castle, Sydney
Silverman, Geoffrey Bing, Emrys
Hughes, D. N. Pritt, William
Warbey, William Gallacher
and
Phil Piratin. Mikardo also wrote articles
for the Tribune.
In
February 1958 Mikardo joined Stephen Swingler,
Jo Richardson, Harold
Davies, Konni
Zilliacus,
Walter Monslow and Sydney
Silverman, to form Victory for Socialism (VFS).
Mikardo
was defeated in 1959 but won Poplar in the 1964
General Election and Bethnal Green in the 1974
General Election.
Mikardo
served as member of the National Executive Committee of the Labour
Party (1950-59 and 1960-68). He was also chairman of the Select Committee
on Nationalized Industries (1966-70) and chairman of the Labour
Party (1970-71). His autobiography, Back
Bencher, was published in 1988.
Ian
Mikardo died in
1993.
Vicky,
cartoon showing Harold
Wilson, Aneurin
Bevan,
Michael Foot, Ian Mikardo attacking Herbert
Morrison,
Clement Attlee and Hugh
Gaitskell (July, 1951)
(1)
Harold
Wilson, Memoirs:
The Making of a Prime Minister, 1916-64 (1986)
In this
unhealthy atmosphere, the Gaitskellites were seeking their revenge.
Their leader, far from discouraging them, was spurring them on, and
some were aiming at expelling those who disagreed with him. A few
of us, Barbara Castle, lan Mikardo and myself, felt that we should
form a small tight group to work out our strategy and our week-by-week
tactics. I was elected leader. We met at half-past one every Monday.
I set myself the task of resisting extremism and provocative public
statements.
For MPs to meet in unofficial
groups, getting together informally, as distinct from in committees
and sub-committees set up by the House of Commons itself, is probably
as old as Parliament itself. King John could have written a thesis
on the subject. But this was too much for Hugh Gaitskell, who would
have been better advised to acknowledge that he led an unofficial
group of his own. Immediately after the annual conference at Morecambe
in 1952 he found his voice.
In a speech at Stalybridge,
he repeated an allegation that one-sixth of the constituency party
delegates at Morecambe were communist or communist-inspired. He drew
the conclusion that at a time when communist policy was to infiltrate
the Labour movement, the Bevanites were assisting them by their disruptive
activities. Then, in a direct reference to us and our pamphlets, he
went on: "It is time to end the attempt at mob rule by a group
of frustrated journalists and restore the authority and leadership
of the solid, sound, sensible majority of the movement.' He referred
to 'the stream fit grossly misleading propaganda, with poisonous innuendoes
and malicious attacks on Atlee, Morrison and the rest of the leadership."
(2)
Michael
Foot, Aneurin Bevan (1973)
Since the opening of the
new session the Bevanites had sought to organize themselves into a
more effective parliamentary group. On the suggestion of LAN Mikardo
and on the precedent of the Keep Left group, it was agreed to elect
a regular chairman - Harold Wilson was the first - and to meet at
a regular time in the parliamentary week: 1.30 on Mondays. None of
those participating in these secret rites thought at the outset that
they might be indulging in some scandalous Mau Mau activity - (none
at least except the compulsive informer in our midst who reported
our proceedings regularly to Hugh Dalton and thereby to the Whips).
Unofficial groups had existed in Parliament ever since the first Witenagemot,
and the Bevanites of the early 1950s imagined they were following
a more recent precedent set by others, notably the XYZ Club, which
had been talking politics over exclusive dinner tables since its foundation
by Douglas Jay and a few others in the early 1940s. No one, after
all, had ever suggested that the Keep Left group should be outlawed.
By January 1952 the new Bevanite arrangements were in full working
order and the agenda was crowded.
(3)
Ian Mikardo, speech (31st October 1952)
I rejoice that we
are not going to have any more personal attacks by members of the
Parliamentary Labour Party on other members of the Parliamentary Labour
Party. Never again, O my exhuberant heart, will I be referred to as
one of "a band of splenetic furies". I rejoice.
Never again will there
be talk of "parlour revolutionaries and other mischief-makers".
That's a great step forward.
No more, never ever more,
will those who write about Nye Bevan include me in the list of "sycophantic
friends about him". Let us praise this day for evermore. For
never again will even the more eminent amongst us refer to some of
his comrades as "extreme Left-wingers… some with outlooks
soured and warped by disappointment of personal ambitions, some highbrows
educated beyond their capacity".
I rejoice at this new upsurge
of self-restraint, even though it will undoubtedly rob us of many
lambent pearls of English literature. We shall, for instance, have
to sigh in vain for any more like "an uneasy coalition of well-meaning
emotionalists, frustrates, crackpots and fellow-travellers, making
Fred Karno's Army look like the Brigade of Guards".
But it ensures that we
don't ever again hear some sizeable fraction of the constituency delegates
to the party Conference (who include many Labour M.P.s) as appearing
"to be Communist or Communist-inspired", or the proceedings
of that Conference characterised as "mob rule by a group of frustrated
journalists".
(4)
Ian Mikardo, statement issued
after the death of Konni
Zilliacus (27th July, 1967)
Zilly was in many ways the greatest international Socialist of my
time. It is for that reason, and only for that reason, he earned the
distinction of being refused a visa to the United States, and being
refused a visa to the Soviet Union, and of being expelled from the
Labour Party all within the same year. He never gave up fighting for
the principles of the United Nations, based on the all-inclusive covenants
of the Charter, no matter who opposed him, whether it was Ernest Bevin
or Wall Street or Stalin. He was completely devoted in the best sense
to the socialist causes which are the basis of peace.
In a way
Zilly was a non-politician. Most people who didn't know him personally
but knew him only from reading what he wrote and reading about him,
would think of him pre-eminently as a politician, but he really wasn't.
He was a man of political ideas, but he wasn't very good at politics.
The tactics, the ritual dances of parliamentary procedure and the
order paper, were in a language that wasn't contained within the eleven
he spoke. They were all foreign to him and when it really came to
the tough stuff and the in-fighting I sometimes thought of Zilly as
a child walking around a jungle of man-eating animals. That's why
he was more than once such an easy victim for the hatchet men. Zilly
was preeminently an analyst, perhaps unparalleled as a political analyst,
and perhaps even more than that a teacher, a great teacher, and not
only those like myself of his own generation learned at his feet,
but the next generation of people in our movement derived a great
deal from him and many of the new, younger men we have had in the
House of Commons in the last three years know a great deal of what
they know because of what they learned from Zilly.
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