Tribune leader, 5 March 1993
The second of John Smith’s promised series of keynote speeches, on the state of the constitution, was better than his first, on Labour’s values.
Speaking on Monday at a meeting organised by Charter 88, Mr Smith laid out a coherent programme of constitutional reform, with a conviction entirely lacking in Labour’s statements during Neil Kin-nock’s leadership.
Mr Smith’s package is well short of perfect. In particular, if Labour’s enthusiasm for pluralism is to be credible, the party cannot echo Mr Smith’s silence on the question of electoral reform for the House of Commons. Nor should Labour opt for a referendum on electoral reform instead of coming out with a strong recommendation for a particular electoral system.
As Tribune has argued, the way in which the people are represented at national level must be changed to ensure that the House of Commons really is a reflection of the whole spread of opinion across the country. Of the options now being considered by Labour’s Plant Commission on electoral systems, the only one that makes sense in this context is a version of the German additional member system of proportional representation for the Commons.
The commission should make a recommendation of AMS and the party should adopt it at its next conference. A referendum on changing the electoral system, as advocated by Charter 88, is no more necessary than a referendum on the Maastricht treaty. For Labour to support one would signal a singular loss of nerve.
But back to what Mr Smith did say. His proposals include a great deal that deserves support: incorporation into British law of the European Convention on Human Rights, greater openness in the budget process and a new Ministry of Justice, as well as Labour’s familiar promises of a new tier of government for Wales, Scotland and the English regions, reform of the House of Lords and freedom of information legislation.
More generally, it is entirely welcome that Mr Smith’s speech embraced wholeheartedly the rhetoric of citizenship rights. While much of the most interesting thinking on the intellectual left in Europe in the past decade has been about reclaiming the language of citizenship and rights for the left, Labour has tended to fight shy of such concerns – the left on the Marxist grounds that bourgeois property rights are cover for exploitation, the right on the basis of a deep-seated belief in corporatism. One speech by the leader does not mean that the party as a whole is changing the way it thinks about politics but at least Mr Smith is moving in the right direction.