A LITTLE WIZARDRY

For most of the newspapers, what mattered about last Fri­day’s Labour rally in Swansea, on the eve of the Wales Labour Party’s conference, was ei­ther devolution or the running ar­gument over tax cuts and public spending.

“Kinnock’s pledge: Welsh assem­bly promised in his first term of government,” proclaimed the front page of the Cardiff Western Mail on Saturday, above a report on the Labour leader’s speech the previ­ous evening. The Independent and most of the other London papers found great significance in Kinnock’s promise that a Labour gov­ernment would borrow not to pay for tax cuts but for investment.

Of course, these were both real stories. Kinnock had never before been quite as clear on the timing of the proposed Welsh assembly, nor had Labour politicians previ­ously spelled out quite so explicitly that their objection to the Tories’ plans to borrow to pay for tax cuts was not an objection to borrowing as such.

But there was more to the Swansea rally than that, at least in the eyes of the 1,000-plus party faithful packed into the city’s Guildhall to listen to the speeches and cheer. To them, the rally marked the official start of Labour’s election campaign, not just for Wales but for the rest of Britain too. In many ways they were absolutely right.

That might seem just a little bold. On one hand, there has been no end of beginnings for Labour in the past couple of months: the launch of Made in Britain, the eco­nomic policy document, the rally in York, the local government confer­ence. On the other, nobody knows for certain whether another launch will be needed a month hence if John Major decides to postpone the election until May.

But Swansea was special. Labour for the first time laid out in public its package for the elec­tion campaign, and it did so with a conviction that has eluded it for much of the pre-election phoney war.

Kinnock’s speech was long, at times prolix, but unexpectedly ag­gressive and populist. He was al­most frighteningly ebullient, and he hammered home his theme with great force: the Tories are re­sponsible for the worst recession in living memory – and now they are on the run.

Kinnock made a particular point of attacking Major in person (an attack echoed later by Bryan Gould, who told the rally that “be­ing a nice guy isn’t enough to be a good Prime Minister”). 

Labour has clearly decided that the best way to defend itself against Major’s personal popularity u to repeat in­sistently that he cannot escape the blame for the mess the country is now in, to challenge him again and again to take part in a televised debate with Kinnock.

In similar vein, the party has decided to take on the Tories directly on tax and public spending. Kinnock was unashamedly redistributionist in rhetoric. His answer to the expected tax-cutting budget was simple: the government’s promise of a penny or two off the basic rate, paid for by borrowing, was a simple electoral bribe.

“They’re putting Britain in hock to keep themselves in office,” he said. The key difference in the coming election was between Tory bribers and Labour builders”. “We are the builders!” he exclaimed, and brought the house down.

Much of this was unremarkable – “standard campaign-trail stuff”, as the man from the BBC re­marked to me – and there is no doubt that Kinnock, on home ground, was playing to the audi­ence’s need for a morale boost be­fore the grisly business of canvass­ing in the wind and rain begins in earnest.

But the emphases in his speech have a wider significance. The idea that Labour should sit tight, stay uncontroversial and focus all its efforts on training and the National Health Service seems at last to have been abandoned. There is nothing wrong now with sounding egalitarian, even at times left-wing.

This turn to ideology is symbol­ised (ironically in view of his past reputation) by the elevation of Roy Hattersley to a prominent position in the campaign. After a week of high-profile pronouncements, he was in Swansea on Saturday for a starring role in the conference proper, reinforcing Kinnock’s as­sault on the Tories’ tax-cutting plans.

This is not to suggest that train­ing and the NHS will not be play­ing a big part in Labour’s cam­paigning. Tony Blair opened the proceedings on Friday night with a vigorous attack on the govern­ment’s neglect of training and Robin Cook got the heartiest re­sponse after Kinnock when he wound up the rally with a stinging denunciation of the Tories’ health policies.

Some of the most enthusiastic applause came after he declared: “I do not take back one word we said during the Momouth by-election” on the Tories’ plans to privatise the NHS.

But Labour has decided to adopt a strategy of assault on all fronts in an attempt to open up the four-point lead it needs to stand a good chance of being able to form a ma­jority government after the elec­tion. In Swansea last Friday, with the polls indicating that Labour had clawed back the advantage that the Tories had gained in Jan­uary with their attack on Labour’s tax proposals, Kinnock and his col­leagues gave the strong impression that they really believed Labour could make it.

By the end of the evening, some of their self-confidence had rubbed off on the audience. Who knows, it might yet take the whole country by storm.