Ted Knight
Council leader known as ‘Red Ted’ who challenged local government cuts but was barred from office
TED KNIGHT, who has died aged 86, was the uncompromising hard-left leader of Lambeth council from 1978 to 1985 who challenged Labour and Tory governments alike with sky-high rate increases until he was barred from office.
A neat, stocky man with a thin smile and a liking for small cigars, Knight quit his job as sales manager of a gutter-cleaning company when elected leader to become a full-time politician, operating from Room 103 in the town hall at Brixton. He lived on his councillor’s expenses of, initially, £65 a week.
Expelled by Labour in 1956 for being a Trotskyist, and nicknamed “Red Ted” by the media, Knight rejoined the party in 1970 and became mentor to the young Ken Livingstone. The two worked closely together until a falling-out in 1985 when Livingstone’s Greater London Council set a rate and Lambeth refused to; Livingstone accused Knight of “duplicity”. Knight was also an ally of Jeremy Corbyn and John Mcdonnell as they broke into London politics.
Knight never joined the Communist Party despite declaring that “the defence of the Soviet Union and the gains of the October Revolution must be maintained.” To do so would have meant betraying former comrades in what became the Workers’ Revolutionary Party.
He became a thorn in Margaret Thatcher’s side as he tripled Lambeth’s rates and increased council staff by 66 per cent over three years as the borough’s population fell. Knight sided with squatters who occupied councilowned homes, and when the Brixton riots erupted in 1981, he unhesitatingly blamed the police.
He had little time for successive leaders of the Labour Party until Corbyn, and worked to shift power within the party to hard-left activists. With Livingstone and Mcdonnell he drove home this message through the Labour Herald newspaper, until it collapsed because of a split in the WRP, on whose press it was printed.
Edward Robert Knight was born in Brixton on June 13 1933 and educated at Strand Grammar School, Tulse Hill. He started work in 1952 as an insurance clerk, becoming active in the trade union ASTMS.
Knight joined the Labour League of Youth at 15 but was expelled from the party for his involvement in the Socialist Labour League, for which he worked until 1961. Readmitted, he became Norwood branch chairman in 1972.
He teamed up with Livingstone to purge the party of Right-wingers before the 1974 council elections, when both were elected for Knights Hill ward. They spent the next four years undermining the council’s leader David Stimpson, a showdown being averted when Livingstone moved out of the borough.
Knight became chair of Lambeth’s construction services committee in 1977, and after the 1978 elections was elected leader by 23-19.
In 1976 he was selected as parliamentary candidate for marginal Hornsey. The Socialist Campaign for Labour Victory published a manifesto calling on Labour in power to “settle accounts with capitalism”. The SCLV was housed on Lambeth council premises alongside the London Squatters’ Union, Librarians Against the Cuts, School Kids Against the Nazis and South London Health Workers against Racism and Fascism.
The Conservative Hugh Rossi saw off Knight at Hornsey as Mrs Thatcher came to power.
With Michael Heseltine as Environment Secretary moving to curb councils’ spending, Labour was divided over how to oppose him. Roy Hattersley, Heseltine’s “shadow”, left it to councils to decide whether to make the cuts. Knight called on inner-city councils to take Heseltine on, saying: “Roy Hattersley’s position of everyone doing his own thing is a recipe for disaster for the Labour movement.”
At Labour’s 1980 conference he moved an emergency resolution calling on the party’s National Executive to co-ordinate a united fight of Labour councils and trade unions against Tory policies.
Prior to the 1981 rate-setting Knight had Lambeth’s director of finance suspended after he warned that the budget proposed was £14.5 million over the Government’s target; his union forced his reinstatement. Eventually the increase was pruned by £11 million, meaning a 37.5 per cent rate rise instead of the 57 per cent Knight had aimed for.
In April 1981 came the riots. When violence broke out Knight asked the local police commander to reduce the “provocative” presence, but it was increased. Knight accused the Met of escalating the violence by sending in the SPG and called for the withdrawal of this “army of occupation” and the dropping of charges against those arrested. One Labour councillor, the young Peter Mandelson, disowned these comments.
In that May’s GLC elections, Knight stood for Norwood. The Conservatives held the seat with a strong swing in their favour. But Labour took control of the GLC, with Livingstone ousting the moderate-group leader Andrew Mcintosh. Knight survived a leadership challenge in Lambeth by 27 votes to 11.
At Labour’s 1981 Labour conference he moved a resolution – carried on a show of hands – that Labour councillors must “refuse to make the cuts” proposed by Heseltine. Lambeth then received a grant settlement enabling it to reduce the rates by 2.7 per cent, and the tension eased.
In May 1982 Knight lost control of Lambeth when the outgoing Labour Mayor used his casting vote to install a Tory successor. A Conservative-sdp coalition took over, but after a campaign of intimidation by anarchist squatters one SDP councillor agreed to support Labour, who regained control.
In February 1984 Labour voted through a rate increase of 15.7 per cent, making a 285 per cent increase over six years.
Shadow-boxing over the rates ended that year when ministers took legal powers to cap council budgets. When
Whitehall took away £5.5 million of Lambeth’s grant, Knight retaliated with a £200,000 publicity campaign.
Knight became a leading figure in the national campaign against capping as Lambeth and 17 other councils were targeted. Encouraged by ministers having withdrawn their threats against Liverpool, he persuaded the majority to safeguard council jobs by not setting a rate until ministers backed down. However, other council leaders began to feel such tactics would fail, and feared being surcharged and barred from office.
In April 1985 the GLC broke ranks and voted to set a rate, with Livingstone and Knight falling out. Livingstone then resigned as co-editor of Labour Herald in protest at Knight and Mcdonnell campaigning to oust Kinnock.
Knight led a mob which tried to coerce Southwark council into refusing to set a rate, but soon only Lambeth and Liverpool were holding out. That June Lambeth voted 32-30 not to set a rate.
The district auditor told Knight and 31 other councillors that as a result of their “wilful misconduct” they would be surcharged a total of £126,000 and barred from office for five years. On July 3 the council finally set a rate amid chaos and fisticuffs in the chamber.
At this point Knight took off to visit Moscow, Cuba and Nicaragua, to “see what practical help can be given to the people of Nicaragua who are currently at war”.
Knight’s five-year disqualification began in April 1986. The councillors facing disqualification sang The Red Flag, and 9,000 council workers walked out in their support. Knight changed council standing orders to allow three Labour councillors who had not been surcharged to run the council, rather than the Conservatives. After the 1986 elections, Linda Bellos – a self-described “hard-left black feminist” – took over as leader, incurring criticism from Knight for agreeing to cuts.
Knight found a job at a restaurant in Clapham, before taking it over and running it for a couple of years. Later he was bursar of a language school. He continued to manage a social club in the town hall basement until a Labour/lib Dem coalition evicted it in 1996.
He tried for Coventry North East, Deptford and Tyne Bridge before the 1987 general election, and in 1991, with his suspension ending, considered a return to Lambeth Council. By then the Audit Commission had recalculated the council’s losses, and the surcharged councillors had to find a further £101,000.
In 1994 the London Labour Party refused to put Knight on the panel for the council elections – a decision upheld by the NEC.
After Corbyn’s election as Labour leader, Knight, now in his eighties, again became active in the Norwood party; in 2016 he was elected chair of Gipsy Hill branch.
Ted Knight was unmarried.
Ted Knight, born June 13 1933, died March 30 2020
‘The defence of the Soviet Union and the gains of the October Revolution must be maintained’