FAMOUS QUESTION
Any politician who could fiercely hold both Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair to account over the most seismic events of their terms as Prime Minister deserves to be remembered as a fighter and a true maverick of late 20th century politics. Tam Dalyell, the source of the ‘West Lothian question’ and the Labour MP for West Lothian itself (and later Linlithgow) between 1962 and 2005, earned these descriptions and more.
With Thatcher, it was the sinking of the Argentinian cruiser General Belgrano during the Falklands War in 1982 which drew Dalyell’s fire and brought him to national attention. An event celebrated as a great strategic victory in the UK, Dalyell’s contention was that the Prime Minister had ordered the sinking of the ship to ensure an American-negotiated truce over the Falklands wouldn’t happen.
Although he never managed to prove the claim, his repeated onslaughts upon Thatcher in the Commons – he was thrown out by the Speaker five times, branding the Prime Minister a liar and refusing to withdraw the remark – imprinted the idea upon the public imagination.
In a wider sense, they also identified Dalyell as a tenacious and uncompromising Labour voice at a time when the Tories were very much in the ascendant. Indeed, in 1982 he left the role he had held for two years as Labour’s frontbench science spokesman in protest at the party’s support for action in the Falklands.
Two decades later, Dalyell turned his aim upon the leader of his own party, this time ahead of Blair’s decision to take the country to war in Iraq in 2003. Although he was the Father of the House – the oldest member of the House of Commons, a venerable position – between 2001 and his retirement in 2005, Dalyell was asked to leave the House again in 2003 by the Speaker for refusing to sit while demanding a debate on Iraq.
“Fiercely independent, Tam’s persistence in pursuing causes close to his heart is legendary,” eulogised Blair upon Dalyell’s retirement.
“He is not the worst,” bit back Dalyell on Blair, referring to the eight Prime Ministers he had served with. “He is by far the worst.” He described himself not as New Labour, but as “Ancient Labour – I want nothing from the party leadership, so it cannot control me.”
Dalyell was a voice – often a lone one, but raised above the crowd – on all manner of issues, although, inspired by his civil servant father’s work in the Middle East, foreign policy was his suit, namely issues which stirred his strong sense of pacifism and his repulsion at what he believed to be the imperialist policies of both the British and American governments.
While in office he came out against actions in Borneo, Aden, Diego Garcia, Northern Ireland, the Gulf War of 1990 and Kosovo. After retirement he opposed action in Syria.
He successfully campaigned for Britain to not follow the United States’ lead in boycotting the Moscow Olympics of 1980, and argued passionately against the official version of events surrounding the Lockerbie bombing.
In home affairs, Dalyell was also out of step with many of the policies of the mainstream Labour party, particularly the plan to bring devolution, and then a Parliament, to Scotland. “I am the arch anti-devolutionist,” he told this paper in 2012. “I am positively a believer in the regions. West Lothian was never so well served than when it was Lothian Region, and I have a view on Scotland actually, that we are a series of different places, and I’m not sure Aberdeen wants to be run from Edinburgh and I’m jolly sure that Glasgow doesn’t want to be run from Edinburgh.”
Following his familiar tactic, later used against Thatcher on the Belgrano, of asking the same question over and over again in the House of Commons, Dalyell would regularly voice the same potential problem with Scottish MPS’ voting rights in the run up to the Scottish devolution referendum of 1979:
“Howcanitbethati can vote on education in Accrington, Lancashire, but not Whitburn, West Lothian?”