It was really just an exercise in power. Tory govt with huge majority meant we on the Left were reduced to rather pathetic gesture politics.
I was involved in a protest to shut down a talk by this guy -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carlisle_(British_politician) … - at @unisouthampton. It was the wrong thing to do.
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Big CND marches made you feel good, you got a sense of your own efficacy, but it was a sense of efficacy routed in confirmation bias.
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You didn't have to think about the 70% of the population that thought you were bonkers, because they were clearly fascists and bigots.
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And then, of course, elections came along, and not surprisingly you got annihilated. 1983 was a terrible result for the Left in the UK.
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Anyway, by the mid-1980s, Neil Kinnock et al had had enough of this nonsense, and thankfully began to remold the Labour Party.
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And sure, it became something different, no longer a party of the Left, but at least it could begin to take on Thatcherism in arenas...
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...where real power is exercised. If you want your politics to be more than about whining a lot & smashing things, it's got to be hegemonic.
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And it's not going to be hegemonic if you police for ideological purity, if you demonize potential allies, if you sequester yourself in
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hermetically sealed safe places where you're protected from people who might inadvertently use wrong pronouns.
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If you do all that, you're gonna lose, unless - and to be fair it is a significant unless - demographics are wildly in your favor.
End of conversation
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