LABOUR’S EUROPEAN CHALLENGE

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New Times, 4 April 1997

A Labour government in London is not simply the last hope of everyone in Britain that has had enough of the corruption and incompetence of the Major government. It is what every single European Union government wants too. When Tony Blair wins office on 1 May the sense of relief in the chancelleries of western Europe will be palpable.
 If they knew the Labour leader better, they might be less enthusiastic. His view of the world, like that of his closest advisers – and of every other Labour leader since the war apart from Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock –  is disappointingly Atlanticist. New Labour has looked primarily to America, not Europe, for its thinking about policy and electoral strategy, and the would-be prime minister is ill at ease about the EU. He knows what the polls and focus groups say about the unpopularity of “Europe”; he doesn’t know European politics too well; and he doesn’t like the idea of winning what he thought was the key position just to find –  like Aneurin Bevan as a councillor in south Wales in the 1920s – that the important decisions are being made one rung further up the ladder.
 Nevertheless, the optimism of the west European political elite is justified. Blair might not be an out-and- out Euro-enthusiast or even particularly au fait with European politics. He is, however, not a pig-headed Europhobe – and his party’s pig-headed Europhobes have been in no position to cause him trouble. Indeed, he wants constructive engagement with Europe, and the mood in the Labour Party remains cautiously Euro-integrationist. A Blair government will not engage in the obstructive histrionics  that the Tories made their trademark under Margaret Thatcher and John Major.
So Blair is guaranteed an initial warm embrace from the rest of the EU. What then? Of course, nobody knows. But European monetary union will suddenly become crucial. If it goes ahead on time – which still looks likely, despite the difficulties of the German economy – Britain will probably qualify for first-wave membership. If it does and a Blair government joins, or says it will, Britain will be the toast of the continental European political class. But if, as seems more likely, Britain stays out, Blair will have his work cut out if he is to retain any credibility with other European governments, however good his reasons.
The problem, put simply, is that EMU has become the touchstone of commitment to the cause of a united Europe. The decision on joining a single currency has become more than a matter of hard-headed economics. It is also a political decision. To opt out is to damage the prospects of further European integration.
Which would be no problem if going it alone were an option for a Labour Britain. But it is not. Further European integration is essential if the EU is to acquire the powers Labour needs it to have in the spheres of economic, environmental and security policy.
So what can Labour do? Its best bet is to come up with a far-reaching programme for European integration that can be implemented whatever happens to EMU – whether or not it goes ahead as planned, and whether or not Britain is part of it. In particular, a Blair government should table proposals for a radical democratisation of the EU, based on a massive increase in the powers of the European Parliament, and should make clear its enthusiasm for reviving Jacques Delors’ “Eurokeynesian” plans for employment generation. This would not go down as well with other EU governments as an unambiguous commitment to EMU – but it would be a lot better than nothing.

NATO IS NOT THE SOLUTION

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New Times, 7 March 1997

Anyone who suggested ten years ago that we would now be discussing the rights and wrongs of Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia joining NATO would have been ridiculed.
It was not quite the height of the cold war: the United States and the Soviet Union were negotiating seriously on nuclear arms, Mikhail Gorbachev had tentatively begun the  liberalisation of the Soviet Union, and at least some of the communist regimes of the Soviet bloc – notably Hungary and Poland – had relaxed their suppression of dissident opinion.

But the division of Europe between two hostile blocs, one dominated by the United States, the other controlled by the Soviet Union, seemed such an established fact that ending it peacefully appeared utopian even to those, like Edward Thompson and his colleagues in European Nuclear Disarmament, who most wanted it. The idea that NATO should expand to the eastern border of Poland hardly entered the mind of even the most militant western cold warrior.
Which only goes to show that the course of history is impossible to predict. The enlargement of NATO to include Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic is now imminent. It is US President Bill Clinton’s top priority in foreign affairs for 1997, and there is a remarkable degree of consensus across the political spectrum in Europe that it is a good thing. In Britain, it has the blessing of all the main political parties.

But is NATO enlargement really such a bright idea? There are good reasons for doubt. It will be difficult and expensive to integrate Polish, Hungarian and Czech armed forces into NATO’s military structure; and enlargement will do nothing for the security of Europe’s most volatile region, the Balkans. Most important, it is likely to have an unwelcome effect on Russia.
NATO was begun in 1948 as an anti-Russian alliance at a time when the west feared – with some reason – that Moscow would attack western Europe. Today, NATO says that it is no longer anti-Russian, and that Russians have nothing to fear from its expansion. But it is not seen that way by Russians, or indeed by most Poles, Hungarians and Czechs. The reason they want to join is to provide security against a future military threat from Russia.

These fears of Russia are understandable and legitimate. It is less than ten years since east-central Europe was under the Soviet yoke. Even if Russia today is not a threat, it could well be in the none-too-distant future. It retains substantial nuclear and conventional arsenals, which it has been less willing to dismantle of late than in the early 1990s; and it is anything but politically stable. In the next few years, it could certainly find itself with an authoritarian government, possibly with strong backing from the military, that plays relentlessly on nationalist anti-western themes.

The problem, however, is that expanding NATO eastwards makes it more rather than less likely that this will happen. Public opinion in Russia is running strongly against NATO expansion, and authoritarian nationalist politicians are already trying to exploit this for their own ends. The Russian parliament has refused to ratify the START-2 agreement on strategic nuclear weapons and the government is dragging its feet in other disarmament negotiations. There is a strong case for believing that the priority for European security is to  prevent Russia from turning nasty – and that the best way of doing this is to postpone NATO enlargement and use the good will this creates in Moscow to press for rapid and radical disarmament agreements.

This would of course necessitate some radical new thinking about creating a new post-cold-war security structure for Europe. One option that would certainly allay Russian fears would be expansion of NATO to include Russia. Alternatively, NATO could be recast as a strictly European alliance, excluding both the US and Russia but with non-aggression agreements with each: this would have the advantage of aligning Europe’s security arrangements more closely with the political structures that will emerge in the early years of the next century as the European Union expands. Most radically of all, NATO could be dismantled and the security of Europe entrusted to either the European Union or the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe.

All of which sounds ridiculously unrealistic and utopian. But in ten years’ time, who knows . . .

SAFETY FIRST ALL ROUND

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Red Pepper, March 1997

Tony Blair looks set to win the general election. That’s good, but the left shouldn’t expect radical change, says Paul Anderson

Labour has been ultra-cautious with its pre-election policy commitments for a long time now. Avoiding hostages to fortune was a crucial element of the pre-1992 campaign strategy – and John Smith as leader decided to make it the guiding light of Labour policy-making. Since Tony Blair became leader in 1994, however, “safety first” has been taken to new extremes in just about every area of policy.

ECONOMY
The priorities for Blair and shadow chancellor Gordon Brown have been to reassure taxpayers and to calm business nerves. They have repeatedly announced that they will run a tight anti-inflationary fiscal and monetary regime. In January, Brown promised not to change either the top rate or the standard rate of income tax – and said that, with the exception of the money he gets from his windfall tax on the excess profits of privatised utilities, he will stick to the Tories’ plans for public spending for his first two years in office. That means a continuing clamp-down on public-sector pay and only small increases in spending on health, education and local government.

EUROPE
Policy on Europe has changed little since 1994 – although shadow foreign secretary Robin Cook has adopted a marginally more sceptical position on economic and monetary union than Labour had before. The idea of the EU running a counter-cyclical macro-economic policy, very popular with both Brown and Cook, has been downgraded, although this is in part because the Delors plan on which it was based was scuppered by the British government in the Council of Ministers.

WORK
Labour has stuck to its promise to sign up to the Social Chapter of the Maastricht treaty. But since 1994 it has watered down its commitments to rights for part-time and temporary workers and has abandoned plans to allow trade unions to engage in sympathy actions in certain circumstances. It has also changed its policy on its promised minimum wage: instead of announcing what it will be before the election, as in 1992, it will leave it up to a commission to set it afterwards at a “sensible” level.

WELFARE
In education, the key change since 1994 is that Labour has made it clear that it will not now abolish grammar or grant-maintained schools. In health policy, the party’s opposition to the internal market and GP fundholding has softened. Labour will not now abolish Jobseeker’s Allowance and go back to Unemployment Benefit, and its pensions policy is in limbo after last year’s row at its party conference. The welfare state in its broadest sense is, however, an area where Labour could well prove radical in government. Its plans for “lifelong learning” and a “university for industry” are ambitious, and its “welfare to work” strategy for tackling unemployment contains much that makes sense.

CONSTITUTION
Changing the constitution was the one thing about which Labour under Smith was not ultra-cautious. Reformers looked forward to a Labour government legislating for a Bill of Rights, an elected second chamber and devolution to a Scottish parliament, a Welsh assembly and directly elected regional councils in England. Labour also promised a referendum on the electoral system. Now devolution to Scotland, Wales and the English regions will happen only if people vote for it in referendums, and Lords reform will be limited for now to removal of the voting rights of hereditary peers. There are persistent rumours, denied by Blair’s office, that he has decided to ditch plans for a referendum on electoral reform.

ENVIRONMENT AND TRANSPORT
Labour has downgraded the profile of environment policy since 1994 – to the disappointment of green campaigners (see Charles Secrett in last month’s Red Pepper) – but has not formally changed it. On transport, its key shift has been on what to do about the privatised rail network, where it is now promising something less than wholesale renationalisation.

LABOUR SHIFTS A BIT ON EUROPE

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New Times, 5 February 1997
Shadow foreign secretary Robin Cook’s remarks on the Dimbleby programme about a single European currency – that he would back Britain joining if it was working in 2002 – have been widely reported as a surprise shift in Labour’s position on economic and monetary union. But they had been some time in the pipeline.
Although, so far, it has barely figured in the sparring of the run-up to the election campaign, the biggest headache facing Tony Blair is undoubtedly Europe – specifically, whether a Labour government will sign later this year sign up for the first wave of EMU.
Until some time last year – it is impossible to put a precise date on it – EMU seemed to most Labour politicians to be a rather distant problem. Of course, the 1991 Maastricht treaty laid down a strict timetable for creation of a single currency, with EMU itself beginning by 1 January 1999. That meant the member states of the EU making up their minds in late 1997 whether or not they wanted to join, with the final decision about who would be admitted being made by early 1998.
But after the turmoil in the currency markets of 1992-93, it seemed implausible that this timetable would actually be put into practice. Italy, Spain and several smaller countries looked unlikely to qualify for participation under the strict convergence criteria laid down by Maastricht, and it was by no means clear that France, Britain or even Germany would make it either.
With the Tories tearing themselves apart over Europe, it did not seem particularly urgent for Labour to come up with a hard-and-fast policy. The formula that the party had adopted in 1991, that it was in favour of EMU in principle but would join only if the conditions were right for Britain, appeared perfectly adequate to take Labour through to the election – particularly as it had been honed by shadow foreign secretary Robin Cook since late 1994.
Cook’s line, that Labour wanted the proposed European central bank to be “accountable politically to make sure it pursues policies of growth and full employment” and that it insisted on “convergence of the real economy – of output, production and growth” before it would recommend British membership of EMU, satisfied all but a handful of the party’s MPs and MEPs. Those of a sceptical disposition could take comfort in the qualifications; enthusiasts could point to the backing in principle for a single currency.
This has remained Labour’s formal position, with the addition, last November, of a promise that a Labour government would put British membership of the single currency to a referendum if it decided that it was in Britain’s interests to join.
All that Cook’s remarks show is that he has prevailed in a behind-the-scenes argument at the very top of the party about how the position should be nuanced to take account of the facts that EMU is now very likely to go ahead on schedule and that most of continental Europe is prepared to go through almost any amount of hardship to be part of it. From early last year, Labour’s ‘big four’ – Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, John Prescott and Cook – were forced into some serious thinking about whether Labour would go for EMU membership in its first few months in power.
Their problem was that each had a different perception of the issue at stake and a different instinct about how to deal with it. Brown was the initially most enthusiastic about EMU membership in the first wave. He was one of the architects of Labour’s pre-1992 policy of backing British membership of the ERM (along with his mentor John Smith) and, for all his fiscal conservatism when it comes to running Britain’s own economy, in his first years as shadow chancellor he gave strong backing to Jacques Delors’ plans as President of the European Commission for a role for Keynesian counter-cyclical policy for job creation at a European level.
At the other extreme, Prescott was against the single currency on principle – a point of view he had not changed since the prospect of EMU first raised its head – although he was said by colleagues not to be particularly well informed.
In between Brown and Prescott were Cook and Blair. Cook, like Brown, was fully up to speed on the detail and was an enthusiast for European counter-cyclical economic policies. But he harboured doubts about whether EMU would work and was sceptical about Britain’s ability to join in the first wave because of the amount of legislation it would require in the first year of a Labour government. He argued that Britain should not go into the single currency at once but should join later if conditions are right.
Blair took a position somewhere between Brown’s and Cook’s – but like Prescott was said not to be completely au fait with the technicalities. Although he is no anti-European, the Labour leader has never taken a great interest in European politics and feels ill at ease with the EMU argument. Perhaps understandably, he is more worried by winning the election than by what he does afterwards.
Attempts to reach a consensus at the end of last year resulted merely in the agreement that Labour would back a referendum but would not rule out being part of the first wave of EMU. Cook’s public statement that Labour would probably not enter in the first wave but that it would be very difficult to stay out if EMU was working well in 2002 indicates that the stalemate was broken by Brown conceding the unlikelihood of first-wave membership in return for Cook becoming more enthusiastic about the benefits of EMU. It doesn’t actually solve the problem of making the decision when the time comes – but it should preserve Labour’s unity on Europe until the election. And that in itself is no mean feat. 

AGAINST EUROSCEPTICISM

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Review of Changing States by Glyn Ford, Glenys Kinnock and Arlene McCarthy (eds) (Mandarin, £7.99), Tribune, 8 November 1996

Labour’s MEPs don’t get the attention they deserve. The European Parliament has long since ceased to be a mere talking shop: it now has considerable powers to influence decisions that affect us all. And Labour plays a major role in every aspect of its business. The party is the largest single national group in the Party of European Socialists, itself the parliament’s biggest party, and Labour MEPs hold a string of key positions.

Yet the European Parliament goes largely unreported by the British media, which still consider, entirely wrongly, that political life begins and ends in Westminster and that Europe is essentially a matter of foreign policy. In the Labour Party, MEPs are too often viewed, equally wrongly, as second-rate politicians with the cushiest jobs going.

This collection of essays by a group of 14 members of the European Parliamentary Labour Party should go some way towards changing all this. Between them, the authors, all from the pro-European (but not-quite-federalist) mainstream of the EPLP, cover just about every aspect of European Union politics, from economic and monetary union to consumer protection. No one who reads this book from cover to cover will come away doubting that the EU has to be at the centre of Labour’s political concerns.

All the contributions are intelligent, well-written and easy to understand – itself uncommon in writing about European politics – and the book sends a clear message to Labour’s leaders in Westminster as it prepares for power: flirt with Euroscepticism at your peril. It will not be easy in the heat of an election campaign for Labour to remain essentially pro-European. With Sir James Goldsmith threatening them from the right, the Tories are setting themselves up to run a vicious xenophobic anti-European campaign, and they will be given strong backing by much of the press. The temptation for Labour to respond by adopting a much more Eurosceptic line than it has taken for the past decade, particularly on the single currency, will be great.

That, however, would be a major mistake. As several of the authors argue, the EU needs to be reformed and democratised, and there are undoubted risks in economic and monetary union. But the risks that would be involved in Britain turning its back on Europe are greater. A “positive, proactive approach to Europe”, in the words of Glyn Ford’s excellent introductory essay, is the only option that makes sense. And, as Alan Donnelly and David Martin make clear in their respective contributions, that includes engaging actively in the negotiations leading up to the single currency and backing a massive increase in the powers of the European Parliament.

BATTLES TO COME

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Red Pepper, November 1996

Labour’s conference last month was an even easier ride for Tony Blair than last year’s. But, says Paul Anderson, the unity on show might not last much beyond the general election

Like it or loathe it, Labour is more united today than at any time in living memory. Last month’s party conference in Blackpool was all smiles and standing ovations. Not one vote went against Tony Blair – even after Barbara Castle’s impassioned call for the basic state pension to be linked again to earnings not prices.

But the party is united for one purpose only: winning the next election. After that, it is unlikely that Labour’s unity will survive long. New Labour is a fragile coalition, and a Labour government will have its work cut out to keep it together. Even now, it’s easy to predict what will stimulate Labour opposition to prime minister Blair – at least some of which will give strength to the pro-European green libertarian left.

Europe The most contentious decision Labour will have to make in office is whether to join the single European currency in 1999. Labour is divided on European monetary union, but unlike the Tories, not on straightforward left-right lines.

The official position is that Labour is in favour of EMU in principle, but against joining unless there is “real economic convergence”. Not only should inflation and government borrowing be low all round – as the Maastricht treaty dictates – unemployment should be low and growth high. This line will probably see Labour through to the election, although it is anathema to the party’s hard-line nationalist Eurosceptics (some hard left, some right-wing Keynesian devaluationists) who are against a single currency in principle.

Once Labour comes to power, however, “the fireworks could start almost at once”, as one centre-left MP put it in Blackpool. A decision on participation in EMU from the outset will have to be made soon after the election, and the best guess is that membership will be on offer only on the terms laid down by Maastricht (albeit flexibly interpreted). It’s most likely that Labour will have to decide whether to join without “real economic convergence” – and that means an unenviable choice. Joining EMU will be a disaster if the convergence criteria turn out to be so tough that they crash the economy. But staying out will be bad news if it means British exclusion from a continental European boom or an EMU-wide job-creation programme.

Unsurprisingly, Labour is divided right to the top on what to do. Gordon Brown apparently wants to take a deep breath and jump in the deep end – but Robin Cook would rather stand on the side and see whether the water is as cold as it looks. Blair is in two minds, but inclined to follow Cook. According to insiders, a majority of the shadow cabinet is wary of EMU, but the balance in a real cabinet will tilt in favour if Blair promotes some of the younger modernisers now in junior front-bench posts. Whatever the leadership decides, at least a significant minority of MPs will disagree, as will a fair number of MEPs, key advisers and trade unions. A referendum on EMU, touted as a way out of Labour’s dilemma, would exacerbate its divisions more spectacularly even than the 1975 Common Market membership referendum.

On the non-xenophobe left, there’s a real argument going on, between EMU sceptics, who would like a renegotiation of the Maastricht conditions (Unison, the TGWU, Tribune, Roger Berry, Peter Hain, Alan Simpson, Jonathan Michie), and EMU enthusiasts, who argue for signing up and then pressing for compensatory measures to cope with the resulting austerity (the GMB, the TUC, Denis MacShane, most of the European Parliamentary Labour Party, John Palmer, Stuart Holland).

This one will run and run – but if Labour signs up for EMU, the protagonists will almost certainly come together behind a Europe-wide employment programme like that being promoted by Labour MEP Ken Coates, which is backed by an impressive coalition of socialists and greens throughout the continent.

Public spending One of the arguments advanced by opponents of participation in EMU is that it requires draconian cuts in public spending; even pro-EMU Labour politicians concede that it means fiscal discipline. But it’s quite possible that a Labour government will decide to squeeze expenditure – except on education, on which Labour is committed to spend – even if it stays out of EMU.

Having made so much of the Tories’ lies about tax, Gordon Brown cannot easily raise income tax or VAT if he needs to reduce public sector borrowing, as he will have to if it overshoots the government’s estimates (as seems likely). There are other options for raising revenue – such as windfall taxes and green taxes – and, in the medium term, growth might ease Brown’s problems. If, however, he decides he has to cut spending (for example to curb inflation), there will be howls of protest from the PLP left, from the constituencies, from the public sector unions and from Labour local government.

Even a refusal to increase public spending beyond the minimal promises in Labour’s manifesto document will be unpopular. Local authorities have high expectations of a Labour government. And the public sector unions are in no mood to be told that big pay rises are out of the question. They will be especially angry if a nugatory minimum wage eventually emerges from the government.

Relations with the unions It’s at this point that big union trouble could start for Blair, and the he knows it. Measures that give substance to the slogans of “social partnership” and “stakeholding” will go down well with the unions – but they might still insist on exerting their influence inside the Labour Party. Because they still dominate Labour’s conference and National Executive Committee, they have the power to make the party ungovernable if they fall out with the government.

Labour’s general secretary, Tom Sawyer, is looking at ways that party structures could be reformed to minimise the damage if the unions get awkward; and if that doesn’t work, there’s the option, floated by junior employment spokesman Stephen Byers during TUC week, that the leadership could cut the party adrift from the unions. As the furore that followed Byers’ remarks shows, that would start a bloody battle that the leadership could well lose.

All the same, it’s not just the modernisers in the New Labour camp that reckon a divorce might not be a disaster. The unions increasingly feel that money they spend on Labour could be better used. Few union leaders are likely to join Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party, but the TGWU, MSF and Unison – at very least – are already thinking seriously about life without. Using all their political funds on their own campaigning is looking more and more attractive.

Welfare reform There have been tastes of the potential for welfare policy to generate Labour dissent in recent months – not just the conference row over the proposals from Barbara Castle and welfare expert Peter Townsend on pensions, but also the less-public spats over Gordon Brown’s plans to drop universal child benefit for 16- to 18-year-olds and to retain the Job Seekers’ Allowance.

How much of a hot potato welfare will be in government is unclear, however. If Labour’s welfare-to-work programme really does reduce the dole queues, there will be few complaints; but if benefits are cut – or if Labour embraces some of the wilder privatisation schemes being hatched by Frank Field and others – there will be mayhem, and not just from the parliamentary left and the unions.

The network of left-leaning academic and pressure group welfare experts is out of the New Labour loop: the Castle-Townsend collaboration on pensions could be a portent of trouble to come from politicians acting in league with the Child Poverty Action Group, Shelter and others. There’s also growing interest across the political spectrum in the (originally radical left) idea of a basic income, which will find increasing purchase if a Labour government fails the poor.

Scotland On Blair’s insistence, Labour is now promising referendums on devolution for Scotland and Wales in the first year of a Labour government. And the Scottish one, considered a sell-out on Home Rule by many Scottish Labourites and ridiculed by nationalists, is set to be a particular problem.

The Scots will decide whether they want a Scottish parliament and whether it should have tax-raising powers. If the result is “yes-yes”, Labour will be laughing. ”Yes-no”, the next most likely result, will spark apoplexy not just in the Scottish Labour Party but among everyone – from the Scottish TUC and the Lib Dems to the churches and the Greens – who backed the Scottish Constitutional Convention agreement on self-government for Scotland.

Electoral reform Labour is committed to holding a referendum on electoral reform for the Commons – and, if it’s ditched, the party’s electoral reform lobby will be livid. There is also potential for conflict over the wording of the referendum and in the referendum campaign itself, in which senior Labour figures will back different systems.

Once again, Robin Cook is a key player (he is the most senior enthusiast for the German additional member system of proportional representation), and once again there is not a simple left-right divide. Although MPs tend to be sceptical about anything that might threaten their hold on their seats, several, many on the left, are enthusiasts for PR (Ken Livingstone, Clare Short, Richard Burden), and their numbers will swell after the election. They have backing from younger party activists and some unions – as well as from non-party pressure groups such as Charter 88. Cross-party alliances will be key, particularly when it comes to deciding on the particular electoral system the PR lobby supports if the referendum goes ahead.


Civil liberties With Jack Straw as shadow home secretary, Labour has relentlessly asserted its enthusiasm for getting tough on crime, playing down civil libertarian themes. In opposition, internal Labour criticism has been muted – largely because Straw has not come up with concrete proposals that are particularly authoritarian even though his rhetoric has often echoed Michael Howard’s.

The tests here will come in office: in the scope of the Freedom of Information legislation Labour has promised, in the content of its Bill of Rights, in its replacements for Tory laws restricting asylum rights, immigration and freedom of assembly. There is a strong civil libertarian movement outside party politics, part of it long-established and single-issue (Liberty, Amnesty International), part of it new and as involved in questions of social justice and environmentalism (The Big Issue magazine, the new squatting movement, the campaigns against the Criminal Justice Act and road-building).

It would be rash to predict a flowering of a radical new left after Tony Blair makes it to Number Ten. But the pond life is stirring. And it will certainly be more exciting than Blackpool last month.

WHAT’S NEW ABOUT BLAIR

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Review of The Blair Agenda by Mark Perryman (ed) (Lawrence and Wishart, £9.99), Tribune, 4 October 1996

After the closure of the Communist Party magazine Marxism Today in late 1991, its marketing manager, Mark Perryman, was at a loose end. So, with a handful of north London buddies, he set up a discussion group, Signs of the Times, to keep exploring some of the ideas about “New Times” that had been central to the magazine’s thinking in its final years.

Ever since, a shifting group of people, some but by no means all ex-CPers, have met for two series of seminars every year. The group has heard from speakers from a wide range of backgrounds: old Marxism Today stalwarts, writers on cultural studies, right-wing libertarian activists, feminist columnists.

 This collection of essays is based on papers given to last autumn’s seminars, and it’s a typically mixed bag. The best two pieces are by Andrew Gamble, professor of politics at Sheffield University, who contributes a typically pithy analysis of the legacy of Thatcherism, and Kevin Davey, a regular on Tribune’s reviews pages, who writes with great insight on the likely tensions inside the Labour Party if Tony Blair wins the next election.

I also liked the contributions by Helen Wilkinson, project director at the think tank Demos, on Blair as the first “post-1960s, post-Beatles, party leader”, and Gerry Hassan, on the impact of Scottish devolution.

But too many of the contributors exaggerate the novelty of the Blair “project”, and there are too many occasions on which authors lapse into pretentious gobbledygook, with buzz-words taking the place of clear thinking – an all-too-common trait of Marxism Today, as I remember. Perryman’s introduction is a case in point. Try as I might, I can’t find much meaning in his claim that “Tony Blair remains the supreme arbiter of the fluid of British politics” or his talk of “the millennial terrain on which Tony Blair and his colleagues will be tip-toeing as they ponder over their red boxes in Whitehall”. Which is a pity, because much that Perryman says is really quite sensible.

One final gripe: again like Marxism Today, the book is peculiarly parochial in its focus. It desperately needs more on the international context of New Labour, particularly on the impact of Bill Clinton’s “New Democrats” and on how other west European social democratic parties have adapted to globalisation and the end of the Keynesian era. Britain might be a peculiar little country, but it has rather more in common with abroad than you’d think from The Blair Agenda.

LABOUR’S LONG REVOLUTION

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Review of  Labour Lives by Andy  McSmith (Verso, £16) and What Needs to Changeby Giles Radice (ed) (Harper Collins, £9.99), Tribune, 13 September 1996
Andy McSmith, Observer political correspondent, biographer of John Smith  and one-time Walworth Road press officer, has written a timely book, using the format of Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, on seven people he sees as figures whose stories epitomise the life and times of the Labour Party in the past decade or so.
It’s not a collection of biographies of the shadow cabinet or even of the most powerful figures in “New Labour”.  Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson, Clare Short and David Blunkett are four of the seven, but the others are Neil Kinnock, Ted Grant (the leader of Militant) and the late Jim Murray, a working-class Tyneside socialist and engineering union activist whose main claim to fame in the world of high Labour politics is as the man who swung the block vote of the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers behind mandatory reselection of Labour MPs back in 1979.
Of course, it’s possible to quibble with McSmith’s choice of characters. Some will undoubtedly bemoan the absence of various obvious high-profile movers and shakers: Gordon Brown, John Edmonds, Roy Hattersley, Ken Livingstone, Margaret Beckett or whoever. My own feeling, however, is that he has erred on the side of the predictable. The best piece in the book by a long chalk is that on Murray; the least gripping are those on Kinnock, Blair and Mandelson, where McSmith covers a lot of familiar ground.
But this is a small point. McSmith has an extraordinary  feel for the subtleties of Labour politics, and he manages to write about them without ever getting bogged down in tedious minutiae. Throughout, his fondness for the people and causes of “Old Labour” is apparent – but, for all his antipathy to the culture of glitz and spin that characterises the party under Blair,  he stops well short of sentimentalism for the good old days when Labour appeared incapable of ever winning an election again. All in all, it’s an excellent read, the most insightful book yet published on Labour’s cultural revolution since the 1983 general election.
By contrast, What Needs to Change, now published in paperback, is a disappointment. A collection of essays edited by Giles Radice with an introduction by Blair, it has its moments – indeed, just about every contribution is competently argued if not stylishly written – but never quite catches fire. The problem is that almost all its authors, from Patricia Hewitt on the family through Frank Field on the welfare state to David Marquand on community and the left, are summarising arguments  that they have made more forcefully elsewhere.
If in the past couple of years you’ve been reading the thoughts of the best-known figures of the British centre-left intelligentsia in the papers, What Needs to Change will have few surprises for you. If, on the other hand, you’ve just returned to Britain after a long spell away without even the Guardian Weekly, you’ll be able to catch up with the minimum of inconvenience. For me, the only intriguing thing about this plodding collection is that the one truly iconoclastic piece – by Geoff Mulgan on reinventing democracy – is by the contributor closest to Blair.  Weird.

LOOKING BACKWARDS

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Review of Political Economy and the Labour Party by Noel Thompson (UCL Press, £12.99) and A Short History of the Labour Party by Henry Pelling and Alastair J Reid (Macmillan, £9.99), Tribune, 18 August 1996
Forget the policy shifts that “New Labour” has made in the past couple of years under Tony Blair: as Noel Thompson’s timely historical survey of Labour’s thinking about economics makes clear, the defining moment in the party’s recent recasting of its identity happened nearly a decade ago. After the 1987 general election, under Neil Kinnock’s leadership, Labour ditched the Keynesian approach to management of overall demand in the economy that had dominated its thinking about the economy for more than 50 years.
Ever since, Labour has held fast to what its proponents call “supply-side socialism”. Put crudely, the big idea is that the ability of any medium-sized nation state to manage demand has been dramatically curtailed by the globalisation of the economy. The best any British government can do is to secure low inflation and exchange-rate stability – the preconditions for steady growth – and make the economy more internationally competitive by encouraging long-term investment and by improving education and training. Measures to expand demand have to be internationally coordinated to have any chance of success. Full employment can remain a goal, but only insofar as pursuing it does no threaten the counter-inflationary strategy.
Thompson has serious doubts about New Labour’s “quest for the Holy Grail of international competitiveness”, finding it at best soulless and uninspiring and at worst a capitulation to free-market liberalism: he is much more sympathetic to early-1980s radical-democratic variants of the left-Keynesian Alternative Economic Strategy. (The AES, which proposed reflation, import controls and widespread nationalisation,  dominated Labour thinking throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. It did not, however, have much influence on the practice of the 1974-79 Labour government,  which in its austerity programme from 1976 in many ways prefigured Thatcherism. )
But this is a scholarly history of ideas, not a polemical work, and Thompson is consistently fair even when he is dealing with authors with whom he disagrees. His expositions of the ideas of the key figures, from H.M. Hyndman and William Morris to Neil Kinnock and Gordon Brown, are exemplary in their clarity, and his bibliography is excellent. Thompson is particularly strong on Labour’s thinking in the 40 years after 1945.
The book could have done with more on the “Eurokeynesian” ideas developed by Stuart Holland and others in the past decade – the period that, perhaps unsurprisingly, Thompson deals with most sketchily. More generally, there are a few places where it is weak on political context, exaggerating the importance of some marginal figures and downplaying the significance of major ones – but that is a function of its genre. Political Economy and the Labour Party is more specialist than the nearest thing it has to a precursor, Geoffrey Foote’s  The Political Thought of the Labour Party, published way back in 1985, but it is also more thorough and much more up-to-date. It deserves a wide readership.
A Short History of the Labour Party has already had just that: the first edition of Henry Pelling’s book was published in 1961, and this is the 11th edition, with the updated sections (taking the story up to the abandonment of Clause Four) written jointly by Pelling and fellow Cambridge don Alastair Reid. It certainly gives the bare bones of Labour’s history, but its prose is wooden and its analysis banal (and unerringly sympathetic to the Labour right). Worse, its end-of-chapter guides to further reading are skimpy, dull and often outdated. Strictly for those with no prior knowledge, to be taken with a large dose of salt.

CAN THE TORIES RECOVER?

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New Statesman & Society, leader 19 April 1996

The miserable failure of the Conservative candidate in last week’s by-election suggests that they are doomed to lose the next general election

Voters’ behaviour in by-elections is notoriously untrustworthy as a means for predicting what they do in a subsequent general election. Every single one of the seven seats the Tories lost in by-elections between 1987 and 1992 returned to the fold at the 1992 general election. Only a fool would claim that, next spring or perhaps this autumn, Staffordshire South East (or rather the Tamworth constituency that will encompass all but 5,500 of its voters) couldn’t go the way that Vale of Glamorgan, Mid-Staffordshire, Monmouth and Langbaurgh went four years ago.

But it would be equally foolish to deny the significance of Labour’s victory last week. The Staffordshire South East campaign began in circumstances as favourable as they could have been for John Major’s administration. The economy was on the up at last, the government had survived the Scott report on arms sales to Iraq, and the backbench Tory rebellion over Europe appeared to be over. In Jimmy James, the Conservatives had the best by-election candidate they had fielded for ages – and the seat seemed pretty safe, with a majority of more than 7,100 over Labour.

In other words, it appeared that the by-election offered Major a good chance to demonstrate that the tide had turned for his party and that Labour’s popularity had passed its peak. If Labour failed to win, it would hardly be a disaster on the scale of Bermondsey in 1983 or Greenwich in 1987, but a Tory victory would do untold damage to Labour morale. Even a narrow Labour victory could be portrayed as proof that the party could not win the next election, much as happened with the Langbaurgh by-election in 1992.

That nothing of the sort happened has a little to do with the Tories’ bad luck: the mad cow crisis blew up just as the campaign got into gear, and it did immense harm in what is still a farming constituency. It’s also a tribute to an effective Labour campaign to get local council leader Brian Jenkins elected. But the scale of his victory – he took 60 per cent of the vote and a 13,762 majority over James – suggests something more profound at work.

Given the state of the economy, the affluence of the constituency, the quality of the candidate and all the rest, the Tories should at least have made a close fight of it. Their failure suggests an unprecedented level of disillusionment with the government among the voters – and it is difficult to imagine how the Conservatives can possibly counter it. Even if they manage to hang on until next spring before calling an election – for which they will need a combination of cooperation from the Ulster unionists and an absence of defections and deaths among their own MPs – and then pull off a 1992-style scare on Labour’s tax plans, it’s hard to imagine them being returned to office.

For Labour, the message from Staffordshire South East is as optimistic as it is pessimistic for the Tories. The result shows that the party can now win in Middle England even when the economy is going the Conservatives’ way. For a change, the opinion polls seem to be an accurate reflection of people’s voting intentions. If it keeps up the momentum, Labour could be looking at a Commons majority of 1945 proportions after the next general election. Tony Blair had good reason to look as pleased as he did when he gave his news conference outside the White House after hearing the result.

Of course, Labour cannot afford to be complacent, as Blair never ceases to remind us. But the big question in British politics is increasingly not whether Labour will win but what it will do once it has won. Up to now, Labour has preferred to be vague about its intentions on most things: indeed, it is only on certain constitutional reform issues that its detailed plans have been made public (although the broad outline of Labour policy is clear enough in several other areas) . But with the imminence of the general election, it is going to have to get specific sooner rather than later. If it does so without either alienating its traditional supporters or scaring off the middle-class voters who backed it in Staffordshire South East last week, Tony Blair will have pulled off a political trick that none of his predecessors since Harold Wilson has managed to master.