Redmond O’Neill: an assessment by Bob Pitt
Posted on Friday 30 October, 2009
Filed Under The left
REDMOND O’Neill – a man I knew relatively well during my membership of the International Marxist Group in the 1980s, but with whom I have had no dealings whatsoever since – died earlier this month at the young age of 55.
In recent years, he was in the public eye as one of the coterie of £100,000-a-year ex-Trots that played a prominent role in the Greater London Authority under the Livingstone administration. Fine by me; I’ve never had anything against old comrades doing well for themselves, so long as they stay the right side of the political tracks.
Tributes have been paid by a number of leading figures on the left, including Ken Livingstone, George Galloway and Andrew Murray. I have to admit that my memories of the man are not quite as fond as theirs seem to be.
I did think of writing something to mark his departure, but decided to keep my trap shut on this one. However, this morning I received an email from former Livingstone staffer Bob Pitt, offering his assessment of O’Neill’s modus operandi.
After consideration, I have decided to publish it, even though I fully expect take some flak on this. However, given last year’s controversies over the way Livingstone and Socialist Action ran City Hall, and the lessons the experience offers to the wider left, I feel it is valuable to have an insider account from a hard left source who cannot be accused of being in the pocket of the rightwing media.
The following is entirely unedited. If you don’t like it, shoot Bob; I’m only the messenger.
I KNOW it’s not done to speak ill of the dead, but in the case of Redmond O’Neill, who played a prominent role in the London mayor’s office during the eight years that Ken Livingstone held power, I feel an exception should be made. Particularly so, in view of the gushing and entirely uncritical tributes to him that have appeared since his demise.
Having had some experience of working with him in the mayor’s office during 2004-8, I saw another side to O’Neill, namely the abuse and bullying of staff for which he became notorious at City Hall. It was the kind of behaviour you would expect from the worst sort of manager in the worst private sector company. Yet it took place under an administration that was supposed to be pursuing a progressive agenda and the individual responsible for this behaviour claimed to be a socialist.
This went on for years. Back in 2002 the chair of the London Assembly received an email from a member of staff stating: “Some of the mayor’s advisers have demonstrated an abysmal grasp of even basic management techniques, frequently bullying and threatening officers to obtain results.” With the backing of UNISON, the editor of The Londoner newspaper was pursuing a grievance against O’Neill on those grounds at the time Ken was voted out of office.
This was why many staff at City Hall had mixed feelings about Ken’s defeat. They were sorry for Ken that he lost the election, and understood that it was a big setback for progressive politics in London, but they really didn’t want people like O’Neill coming back for another four years.
As its programme of job cuts has shown, the current regime at City Hall is hardly a friend of the workers. Nevertheless, there are not a few PAs, portering staff and other non-political employees who actually find it pleasanter working under Boris Johnson’s administration than under Ken’s. On a one-to-one basis they are at least treated with some basic respect and civility, which is more than they got from O’Neill and those around him.
O’Neill’s methods not only alienated staff but also helped to bring down Ken’s administration. The reason why Atma Singh, the mayor’s former policy adviser on Asian affairs, turned against Ken and collaborated in the witch-hunt led by Andrew Gilligan and Martin Bright was because of his anger and bitterness over being bullied into a nervous breakdown by O’Neill. You have to ask – what sort of “socialism” is it that produces results like that?
Some would attribute it all to the corrupting influence of power, and there is an element of truth to this. Having long regarded himself as a central figure in the leadership of the British revolution, O’Neill certainly held an exaggerated view of his own political importance and, after he got his hands on a little bit of actual state power, the delusions of grandeur could only be magnified.
But a more fundamental explanation, I think, lies in the form of organisation that characterises most Leninoid sects – a “democratic centralism” in which the overwhelming emphasis is placed on the centralist component, providing a justification for unaccountable rule by domineering leadership cliques.
The problem was that O’Neill and other individuals who had spent decades running a small Trotskyist group on that basis suddenly found themselves at the head of a much bigger and broader organisation, where they antagonised and repelled people by importing the arrogant, top-down, authoritarian culture that characterises the internal life of the far-left sect. There is a striking parallel here with the behaviour of the SWP leaders in Respect.
The irony is that when I worked in the mayor’s office I was enthusiastic supporter of the administration’s political agenda – its transport and environmental policies, defence of multiculturalism, anti-racist campaigning, opposition to Islamophobia, promotion of LGBT rights, support for the anti-war movement and solidarity with Venezuela. It was just a shame that this progressive programme was soured by the organisational methods employed by some of the people charged with implementing it.
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57 Responses to “Redmond O’Neill: an assessment by Bob Pitt”
There is a good reason for the old injunction not to speak ill of the dead – most stories have two sides to them, and the dead are not able to tell theirs, which makes this a very one-sided game. There can be good reasons for departing from this rule, but I am not sure what that might be in this particular case.
Having no contact with Redmond for the past 30 years, I cannot add anything useful to this discussion, but I would like to speak up for something I do know a bit about – the record of the IMG.
In the years I was associated with it (all of the 1970s) it did a very good job of avoiding a “top-down, authoritarian culture” and carved out a distinctive place on the far left as the upholder of both a particular type of internal regime and a particular sort of external politics – based on internal openess and democracy, and a willingess to engage with the complexities of the real political world and to listen the people it was working among, rather than simply spouting dogmatic formulae.
The attempt to counterpose the IMG to the LCR in France simply won’t wash – the internal regime of the two groups was pretty similar (and if anything in favour of the IMG). Andrew Coates description of Krivine’s relationship with the rank-and-file would be true of any member of the IMG leadership of the 70s.
The IMG’s virtues were probably part of the reason for its eventual disintegration – but there are positive lessons to be drawn from its “good years” and the far left forgets them to its disadvantage.
Bob’s critique of Redmond O’Neill does no justice to the whole range of progressive achievements secured by Redmond at the GLA, and Bob’s distorted picture grossly prettifies Johnson’s Tory administration.
However Bob is correct about Tony Greenstein’s witch-hunt.
Greenstein put his campaigning proposals to the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) AGM, they were rejected so he is seeking to overturn that decision by resorting to the undemocratic methods of a witch-hunt. His smears have plumbed the depths with the entirely fictional claim that Redmond O’Neill abandoned Bob Pennington to die on a park bench. As is inevitable such methods only assist the imperialists, hence the glee with which Greenstein’s material has been quoted by the Jewish Chronicle’s Political Editor to attack the PSC.
Prianikoff, everything I wrote is accurate. You seem to agree with my political analysis re Socialist Action. If I have got a detail wrong then correct it rather than just saying it is rubbish. So, what is inaccurate? Or is it the other varient of Pabloism in awe of Galloway the ISG that you have time for?
Further to Tony Greenstein’s views on PSC, I want to emphasise that I have no sympathy at all with his attack on two named individuals who he claims were able to “magically obtain jobs from their friends on PSC Executive”.
These are people who possess political experience and abilities that make them an excellent choice to work for PSC. The accusation that they owe their positions to some form of corruption is despicable, and so far as I can see Tony offers no evidence for it.
I resent my piece on Redmond O’Neill being used by Tony to reinforce what I think can indeed be accurately characterised as witch-hunting.
And I still don’t understand how Tony can hold Redmond O’Neill or John Ross responsible for the unhappy death of Bob Pennington, from whom they broke personally and politically years before he died.
Tony may hold that “certain common and human decencies transcend sectional difference”, but I don’t imagine he spends much of his time earnestly inquiring after the health of Jim Denham.
Most people don’t understand alcoholism. If the alcoholic wants to keep drinking there is nothing you can do. It is an illness. You may as well try to stop cancer. No one should be accused of not helping an alcoholic. The only thing an alcoholic wants is money or somewhere to get pissed. An alcoholic can only help himself/herself.
Redmond O’Neill must have done something right.
A lot of distinguised people were at his funeral.
No, Im not a Trot. No wonder the left barely exists anymore with all the vile pouring out. Is it envy?
Redmond O’Neill is buried in Highgate Cemetery.
His grave is in a disputed corner of the cemetery.
The people of the Whittington Estate which borders the cemetery on two sides tried to stop the creation of this new mini cemetery. First of all on humanitarian grounds. The Friends of Highgate Cemetery went ahead. Trees were cut down and thousands of tons of earth were poured in to create a mound. The problem was it buried the 200 plus pauper graves. Secondly, some of the new graves are within 10 yards of the flats, which must be illegal. If you believe Redmond O’Neill was a bully then you should have met the elderly Jean Pateman, head of Friends. She and her late husband were in the colonial service in Africa.
The people of this estate began to feel we were her new Africans. She has since been deposed.
I believe graves there cost up to £10,000. It is quite a prestige place to be buried although I would think Redmond O’Neill would have wanted to be buried near Marx. I have conveyed this information about this new part of the cemetery to George Galloway and Ken Livingstone but I don’t expect an answer. I have also written to the Camden New Journal who have on file our struggles against the Friends of Highgate Cemetery over the years.
I think some of the major left politicians want a bigger international scenario than our miserable little local battle with the cemetery officials.
Isn’t it nicer to fly off to Malaysia for example or Venezula than to be involved in a cemetery dispute on a wet and rainy day. If you have lost a highly important job or will lose your seat in parliament then I suppose you build up a media career for the future. But surely the ranting over the airways has to stop sometime through monotony. Don’t you also wish that those speeches from the platform – after you have dragged yourself from Hyde Park to Trafalgar Square for Stop the War Coalition – would cease. We know the case inside out. Chill out – let’s have music, a comedy play and dancing. Aren’t all politicians bullies, when you come to think of it. I’ve done it myself – shouted down the opposition, shouted down family members. So have a nice time – yes you with the big international issues that takes you around the world. We are miserable bastards anyway for taking up working-class issues that effect our lives, that effect the relatives of the 200 in pauper graves buried forever under thousands of tons of soil so that a number of highly-priced graves can be become availabe. Yes, I know, they have won, why bring it up again. You sound like my wife. Go sun yourself.