Tribune leader, 17 July 1992
The election of John Smith to the Labour leadership has been so certain for so long that this weekend’s special Labour conference will be something of a non-event. After the initial outrageous behaviour of the union bosses in bouncing Labour into an early election which only Mr Smith had a hope of winning, the leadership and deputy leadership contests have been dull in the extreme. Despite the best efforts of Bryan Gould to raise issues of substance, there has been little intelligent discussion either of why Labour lost on April 9 or of what its direction should be in the next four or five years. Since it became obvious, a month or so ago, that Margaret Beckett was clear favourite for the deputy leadership, observing the contest has been worse than watching paint dry.
Mr Smith faces a daunting task as leader. Although since April 9 Labour has seen little of the back-biting that characterised the aftermath of the 1979 defeat, and despite the likely size of his majority on Saturday, the party is deeply divided over the most important questions currently facing it: Europe, electoral reform and its links with the trade unions. Having expected to win on April 9, moreover, the party faces a severe crisis of morale, worse even than after the 1983 debacle. Forget about the electoral mountain that Mr Smith will have to climb if he is to become Prime Minister – first he has to act to bring the party together and give its worn-out, disillusioned members a renewed sense of purpose.
He will not be able to do either if, when he dishes out positions in the Shadow Cabinet next week, he is seen to reward his supporters and punish the losers. Even though Mr Gould and Mr Prescott have proved unable to win sufficient support among Labour Party members and affiliated trade unionists to come close to winning on Saturday, they remain representatives of strong currents of opinion in the party, particularly among activists, and their records as front-bench spokesmen in recent years, on the environment and transport respectively, should be enough to secure them places in the top rank of the Labour leadership. At very least, they should keep their current jobs in the reshuffle.
The Shadow Cabinet is only the first of many challenges that Mr Smith must face, however, and it is by no means the most important. Once the new front bench is in place, he and his colleagues will have to address the far bigger problem of the party’s woeful shortage of ideas and hick of confidence about its raison d’etre.
In the nine years of Neil Kinnock’s leadership, Labour threw out a large amount of ideological baggage, much (but not all) of which was undoubtedly outmoded. But, with the exception of Roy Hattersley’s vague and arid redefinition of the philosophical basis of social democracy, in all that time Labour never came up with anything to replace the old baggage. Iconoclasm and argument were discouraged in the interests of unity and marketing men made all the key decisions.
Labour now desperately needs to think through its political project – not its detailed policies or its core values, but what it wants to achieve in the next 20 or 30 years. To do that it has to have at least two years of open, wide-ranging discussion, in which heterodoxy, experimentation and participation by people outside the narrow confines of the Labour leadership are positively encouraged by the party at every level.
That does not mean opening up the party again to Leninist parasites. But it does mean the creation of an atmosphere of tolerance and pluralism. One of Mr Smith’s first acts should be to declare that, for a little while at least, he will play the role of gardener while a thousand flowers bloom.