Kate Hoey’s parachuting into Vauxhall by Neil Kinnock sent shock waves through the local party. They had wanted a black candidate but the most likely ones to win were considered too left wing by Labour’s leadership so Hoey, a Kinnock loyalist, was imposed as a candidate with a “like it or lump it” note from Labour HQ.
Qucik background, the previous Vauxhall MP had been Stuart Holland, the chief theoretician of the Alternative Economic Strategy that formed the bedrock of Bennism and the Labour left in the 1970s and 80s. He quite being an MP in 1989 to go into academia, leaving a vacancy in Vauxhall, one of the safest Labour seats in the country.
This is an exert from Radical Lambeth about what happened next…
Radical Lambeth 