Tribune, 8 May 1992
In the first of a series of interviews with the contenders for Labour’s leadership and deputy leadership, Paul Anderson talks to the MP for Dagenham
“I very much regret that we’re involved in a leadership election before we’ve had time for reflection,” says Bryan Gould, who, despite his regrets, is now running for the party’s leadership and deputy leadership. “We need to work out what we want to take forward to 1996. ‘One more heave’ isn’t good enough.”
The 53-year-old environment spokesman is very much the outside chance for the leadership and he knows it. When he launched his campaign last week, after managing to get eight more than the necessary 55 nominations from MPs to enter the race, he told journalists that John Smith, the shadow chancellor, was “clear front-runner” for the top job. Even some of Gould’s supporters say that the best that he can hope for is the deputy leadership.
Gould, however, is convinced that he can win votes both from the Constituency Labour Parties and from those trade unions which ballot their members on the contest and reckons that he might just pip Smith to the post. “The picture is by no means as clear-cut as people think,” he says. “We’ve had a flood of offers of help from all over the country. I’m fighting to win the leadership.”
Whether or not his optimism is justified, there is no doubt that his criticisms of the “insensitivity* of Smith’s proposals, in his shadow budget, to increase income tax have struck a chord among party members in the south-east. Labour’s plan to abolish the upper earnings limit on national insurance contributions (NICs), which are currently paid only on the first £21,000 of earnings, is widely perceived as the main reason for Labour failing to take many of its target seats in the country’s most affluent region.
“I’m not opposed to tax redistribution: no socialist could be,” says Gould. “But a cleverer package could have been put together which had the same objectives but was not so crude in the way that it resolved the anomaly on NICs.”
For Gould, however, the most important thing about Labour’s tax plans was that they were just about the only macro-economic policy the party had on offer. “We can’t just sit back and say, ‘Let everything rip, let market forces take effect, and we’ll come along afterwards and deal with the problems through redistributive taxation’,” he says.
An alternative approach to economic policy is at the core of Gould’s platform: “I don’t accept the monetarist line, which 1 think has been accepted by the party by implication, that the only function of economic policy is to establish monetary stability.”
As Labour’s trade and industry spokesman between 1987 and 1989, he developed a much more interventionist industrial policy than was subsequently adopted, and he is is still in favour of the measures with which he was then associated: greatly increased planning powers for the Department of Trade and Industry, legislation to encourage investment in Britain by pension funds and increased worker participation, strict controls on mergers.
More controversially (at least now that Michael Heseltine’s appointment as President of the Board of Trade has made interventionism respectable again), Gould is also in favour of devaluation of sterling as part of a realignment of currencies within the exchange rate mechanism of the European Monetary System. “We have seen the damage we suffer if we try to run an over-valued pound. But the right way forward is not to take unilateral action. There is almost certain to be a realignment and I’d like to see the Labour Party ahead of the game for once. If we continue to defend an over-valued exchange rate, we will continue to crucify manufacturing industry.”
Surely, though, the inflationary implications of devaluation would make it even more vulnerable to Tory attack at election time than promising to put up taxes? Gould agrees – up to a point. “We don’t want to get hooked on these technicalities at the time of a general election, which is why we need to have the debate now,” he says. “Handled correctly, getting the exchange rate right does not carry severe inflationary consequences. It stimulates production and that in itself is a powerful anti-inflationary factor. A devaluation does raise the price of imports by comparison with domestic goods, but we have to do that. That’s the only way we can survive. We have to alter that price and value-for-money equation, otherwise we continue to go down the drain.”
Devaluation is one clear difference between Gould and Smith; another, intimately related, is Europe. A former parliamentary private secretary to Peter Shore, Gould was a leading parliamentary opponent of the European Community for most of the eighties. Although he is at pains to emphasise that he is not an “unremitting negativist” – “I’ve always been much more in favour of a co-ordinated foreign policy than most of my colleagues,” he says, “and the notion that a European central bank should be in London was my idea” – he remains far more sceptical than Smith or most of the rest of the Labour front bench.
“I think the common agricultural policy was and is nonsense,” he says. “And I’m very critical of the way in which the ERM operates as a deflationary mechanism.” He argues that a single European currency should be created only after convergence of rates of unemployment and growth across the EC, and voices support for the creation of something not far removed from the Tories’ long-forgotten “hard ECU”, a European currency operating alongside existing currencies rather than merging the currencies into one.
Gould recognises that there is a strong argument from the left that there is now no alternative to European management of the economy, but he is uneasy about its implications. ‘The Left in postwar Britain and post-war Europe got very close to a very substantial achievement: within the confines of the national economy it had sorted Out a deal with capital to give labour had a fair share. But what then happened, almost as we were talking about it, was that capital found a way of escaping that deal by going international. The more we’ve gone down the road of deregulation of the movement of capital and all the rest of it, the more difficult it has become for labour to keep that deal in place, to exercise control over capital.
“The obvious response is that, if capital is operating internationally, we must have international political organisations able to deal with it. Of course, that’s part of the answer, but it is also fraught with difficulties. It’s very easy to say, ‘Right, let’s step up European institutions.’ But, in the process of doing so, we’re conceding defeat, on at least part of the socialist project, which is to keep power close and diffuse, so people have as much power over their own destinies as possible.”
Decentralisation is one of the things that Gould wants to see being discussed in a United Kingdom constitutional convention, modelled on the Scottish Constitutional Convention, which draws in all the Opposition political parties and a broad range of non-party bodies. He is open to electoral reform, he says, but believes that the most important thing is for a wide-ranging debate to take place. “Our role as the major Opposition party is not just to contest damn thing and to go in sot product differentiation in respect of everybody. We should consciously be making common ground with other groups and parties where that’s possible, in an attempt to isolate the Tories. That general approach would also do a great deal to overcome the gender gap, which is still a very worrying aspect of our performance. Many women are put off by the macho style of our adversarial politics.”
On Labour’s internal organisation, Gould is a cautious reformer. Although he wants to see a party far more controlled by individual members, and an electoral college for the leadership in which only individual members vote, he doesn’t want to see the end of the party’s link with the unions or the abolition of the union block vote at party conference.
“What I want to see is a means by which individual political levy-payers who want that money to support the Labour Party are somehow entitled to indicate that, and that then becomes an individual membership of the Labour Party. I don’t say that that’s an easy thing to arrange, but that must be the way forward. At the same time, I think it’s perfectly right for the trade unions as organisations to have a vote on all conference decisions: there should be a substantial proportion of votes, at least 20 per cent, for affiliated organisations. They should also have representation on the National Executive Committee.”
Now, though, his priority is winning under the current system – and that means a period of hectic activity between now and July 18, the day of Labour’s special leadership conference. The Gould campaign has set up in offices in the same building as the Fabian Society’s headquarters and is busy organising meetings at trade union conferences and with constituency parties, stuffing envelopes and canvassing support, on the telephone. Any weariness in anyone’s manner can only be because so recently they were all doing exactly the same in the hope of winning the general election.