Tony Mulhearn
Leading Liverpool Militant in the 1980s whose antics damaged Labour more than the Tories
TONY MULHEARN, who has died aged 80, was a key member, with Derek Hatton, of the Militant Tendency-dominated Labour regime in Liverpool in the mid-1980s whose lavish spending on socialist projects reduced the city’s finances to chaos, directly challenged Tory rate-capping legislation – and helped to keep the Labour Party out of office until 1997.
Although the sharp-suited Hatton became the public face of Militant in Liverpool, within the organisation he was just an ordinary member. Mulhearn, a printing compositor who had helped found Militant in 1964 and was president of the Liverpool District Labour Party, was widely seen as the driving force behind the council’s confrontation with the government in 1985. Indeed, Hatton has recalled that it was Mulhearn who persuaded him to enter politics in the first place: “He was my inspiration and mentor going back to the 1970s.”
The Militant takeover of Liverpool City Council began in May 1983 when the Labour Party gained 12 seats in the local elections and took control from the previous Tory-liberal coalition. Mulhearn was elected to the council the following year. The Labour leader of the council, John Hamilton, a mild-mannered Quaker former schoolteacher, was not a Militant member but was allowed to retain the leadership as a figurehead to disguise where the real power lay.
In 1984 Liverpool defied government guidelines and went on a spending spree, launching a hugely expensive “Urban Regeneration Strategy”, creating hundreds of new jobs and threatening to adopt illegal tactics in its budgeting.
When the then Conservative Environment Secretary, Patrick Jenkin, conceded an extra £20 million for housing, the council set a legal budget. But, encouraged by what it claimed was a Tory climb-down, along with a number of other Left-wing councils it returned to the charge the following year.
In June 1985 Liverpool passed an illegal budget in which spending exceeded income, demanding that the deficit be made up by the government.
But the government stood its ground, and as bankruptcy loomed councillors were advised in August by the District Auditor that the council was about to break its legal obligations and would not be able to pay wages to its staff by December of that year.
In September the Labour group on the council upped the ante by deciding on the “tactic” of issuing 90-day redundancy notices to the 30,000 strong workforce in order to gain leeway to “campaign more vigorously than ever before”. Mulhearn led the council delegation negotiating with the unions, insisting that the council would succeed in getting extra funds from the Government, making the notices unnecessary. “The workforce understands that the Tory Government is responsible,” he declared.
But the threat of illegality quickly turned from councils fighting the Government into a fight within the Labour Party. At the party’s Conference that October, held in the week that Liverpool’s employees received their redundancy notices, its leader Neil Kinnock famously denounced “the grotesque chaos of a Labour council – a Labour council – hiring taxis to scuttle round a city, handing out redundancy notices to its own workers”.
In the end, in what Militant newspaper called an “orderly retreat”, the council removed £23m from its capital budget to fund revenue spending, and borrowed £60m from Swiss banks to replenish the capital fund, leaving Liverpool with a burden of debt which would hang over it for many years to come. A legal budget was finally set in November.
It took another couple of years for things to be finally resolved. In 1986 Mulhearn and Hatton were among nine Militant supporters in the Liverpool district party thrown out of the national party, and in 1987 they were among the 47 rebel councillors to be surcharged and suspended from holding public office for five years by the district auditor for “wilful misconduct” in their delayed setting of the budget in 1985.
After Mulhearn’s death friends paid tribute to “a true champion of the working class” and a devoted family man, but this was not the image many had of him during the turbulent 1980s.
In 1986, in evidence to the inquiry set up by Labour’s National Executive Committee into the Liverpool party, the anti-militant but Left-wing Labour Coordinating Committee claimed that at party meetings Militant supporters had denounced their critics in the party as “rats, cretins, wimps, friends of the Tories and enemies of the working class”. They had, it was alleged, directed sexual obscenities against women they disagreed with, going unchecked by Mulhearn who, it was claimed, had joined in on occasions.
In December 1985 Tribune newspaper reported a meeting of the Left-wing Tribune Group of MPS at which Eric Heffer, the veteran MP for Liverpool Walton, had declared Mulhearn to be “really a very nice man”, to which a voice was heard in reply: “Come off it, Eric. Not even Tony Mulhearn would second that one.”
Anthony Mulhearn was born on January 24 1939 in the Scotland Road, a poor Catholic area of Liverpool, and brought up in the Fontenoy Street and Leeds Street area. He attended Bishop Goss Secondary Modern School and Liverpool School of Art, where he was a near-contemporary of John Lennon.
He then worked, variously, as a baker, tailor, trainee ship steward, apprentice cabinet maker, and printing compositor, latterly with News International, a job from which he was made redundant shortly after being expelled from the Labour Party and barred from local government office.
Mulhearn had joined the Labour Party in 1963 and a year later cofounded Militant, the Trotskyist entryist group, serving on its central committee until the late 1970s. He stood unsuccessfully for Labour in Crosby in 1979 and was due to stand in Toxteth before boundary changes in 1981. In 1985, at around the time of the rate-setting debacle, he was nominated by a “Broad Left” faction in Knowsley North to challenge the incumbent, Robert Kilroy-silk, for the Labour nomination. The attempt was unsuccessful but Kilroy-silk resigned his seat the following year, complaining that he had been assaulted by members of Militant.
After losing his printing job Mulhearn worked as a private-hire taxi driver and in 1996 took a combined Social Sciences degree at Liverpool John Moores University, graduating with a 2:1, including a First for a dissertation on Leon Trotsky, and winning the accolade of “most meritorious mature student”.
He later worked as an IT support coordinator for the Department for Work and Pensions in Warrington, while remaining active in politics as a member of Militant’s successor, the Socialist Party, and a member of the Campaign for a New Workers’ Party.
In later years he was vice-chairman of the Merseyside Pensioners’ Association.
In 2012 he stood for Mayor of Liverpool under the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition banner, coming fifth but beating the Conservative candidate.
In 2016, following the election of Jeremy Corbyn to the Labour Party leadership, Mulhearn was among 75 former Militant activists reported to have made a public appeal to be readmitted to the party. The outcome has not been made public.
In 2009 Mulhearn had open heart surgery and last year he was diagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a rare condition which, he explained, “tore into my lungs like the private vultures who are colonising the NHS” – and from which he died.
In 1988 Mulhearn published (together with fellow Militant Peter Taaffe) Liverpool: A City that Dared to Fight. A book of memoirs, Tony Mulhearn: The Making Of A Liverpool Militant, was due to be launched yesterday (October 13).
Mulhearn’s wife, Maureen, died last year. He is survived by their seven children.
Tony Mulhearn, born January 24 1939, died October 7 2019