PAUL ANDERSON

With its leadership contest over, its new front bench team in place and the To­ries in disarray on the economy, it makes some sense for Labour to put behind it the soul-searching that followed the debacle of April 9 and to concentrate on attacking the government.

But it would be foolish for Labour to put everything into the promised summer offensive against John Major and forget the longer term. Even if a succession of opinion polls shows Labour under John Smith well ahead of the To­ries, the severity of the election de­feat will still demand some serious thinking about how Labour should pitch its appeal if it is to have a hope of winning in 1996 or 1997.

So far, unsurprisingly, most of the contributions to the debate about Labour’s predicament have been concerned with what went wrong in 1992. For want of better explanations, it is generally ac­cepted that the defeat had some­thing to do with certain key voters not trusting Labour and other key voters feeling that Labour would do nothing for them.

Beyond this consensus, however, has been little but sweeping statements of the continuing validity of Labour’s values and bickering about which details of style or sub­stance should have been changed for Labour to do better. Hardly anyone has dared to suggest that Labour’s whole strategy needs to be changed for the next election: that, instead of organising its ap­peal to voters around the core of defence of the welfare state, as it has done since the mid-eighties, it should adopt a radically different approach.

Yet that is precisely what Labour needs. Instead of falling back on defence of the welfare state, the party must frame its programme for 1996 or 1997 with Europe and economic policy at the core and significant roles for environmentalism and democratisation.

The future of Europe was barely mentioned during the election campaign, mainly because of a general sense among politicians that only they are interested.

On the detail of the Common Agricultural Policy (or even the Maastricht treaty), such a view is probably correct. But there are good reasons for questioning it in other areas. The perception that Britain lags behind its EC part­ners in wages, technology, social provision, transport, culture – in fact, just about every indicator of prosperity – is widespread among the public. Unease about the To­ries’ lukewarm attitude to the whole project of European union is commonplace. So too, however, is the notion that the EC as currently constituted is remote, bureaucratic and undemocratic.

Labour can tap all these feelings by articulating a vision of a Britain fully committed to a democratic federal Europe in which:

On its own, however, a radical shift in Labour’s position on the political organisation of Europe is not enough. The economic poten­tial of Europeanisation needs to be tapped.

Put crudely, Labour’s main problem hi the 1992 election was popular disbelief in the efficacy of its proposed remedies for Britain’s economic crisis. Labour was still considered by a large number of its target middle-class voters to be in­capable of managing the economy, while many working-class voters, traditionally its core supporters, did not reckon that the party’s rather timid proposals would do anything to put the country back to work. Labour’s economic policy came over as essentially a policy for redistribution – tax and bene­fits – and nothing else.

This was mainly because Labour’s economic advisers were saying, quite rightly, that there was no hope of a Labour govern­ment being able to put some sort of late-seventies-style alternative economic policy into practice. As President Francois Mitterrand found to his cost in the early eight­ies, Keynesianism in one country is no longer feasible.

Labour’s problem was that it had nothing to replace Keynesian­ism in one country as an approach to managing the economy. “Sup­ply-side” measures apart, it really was reduced to offering redistribu­tion and nothing else.

Just about the only way round this is to develop a Europe-wide reflationary economic strategy, ini­tially to be carried out intergovernmentally but to be transferred to democratically accountable Euro­pean institutions as soon as possi­ble.

Of course, Labour could not de­velop such a strategy on its own, let alone implement it: it would, at very least have to draw its sister European social democratic parties into the frame and would almost certainly have to go further, bring­ing in non-party economists as well as sympathetic Christian Democrats and liberals.

The Europeanisation theme can be carried still further if Labour frames its plans for constitutional reform in the language of catching up with the democracies of our EC partners. First-past-the-post elec­tions for parliament, an unelected second chamber and rigid central­ism make British democracy a laughing stock throughout the EC.

The idea that “electoral reform” lost Labour the last election and should therefore be shunned is ut­terly without foundation. Certain­ly, Labour leaders made fools of themselves a week before polling day by refusing to give straight an­swers about the party’s intentions, but that was a matter of indeci-siveness tinged with opportunism, not electoral reform.

It is also doubtless true that the prospect of a Liberal Democrat-Labour coalition government put off many disillusioned Tory sup­porters who were toying with the idea of voting Liberal Democrat. That was simply a by-product of the closeness in the opinion polls of the two main parties, which in­evitably led to media speculation about possible governing coali­tions.

Labour should move as quickly as possible to adopt the Additional Member System for the House of Commons, regional assemblies and the Scottish and Welsh parlia­ments. This is the only system to combine one-member constituen­cies and proportionality. The party should propose a new federal sec­ond chamber composed of repre­sentatives of the regional assem­blies.

This is essentially the structure of the German political system. Its advantages in delivering stable growth and affluence to its citizens could be exploited ruthlessly by Labour.

But electoral reform and regional­ism are not the only elements of the democratisation programme that Labour should develop. One of the biggest successes of the Tory Party in the past 13 years has been to persuade people that it stands up for those who feel pow­erless in the face of state bureau­cracy.

The right-to-buy scheme for council tenants persuaded thou­sands that the Tories meant to give people control over the things that most affected their everyday lives. Opt-out schools could play a similar role in the nineties.

Labour has to develop a populist anti-bureaucratic politics of the Left. This does not mean reluctant­ly accepting Tory measures as faits accomplis. Nor does it mean mere­ly adopting a rhetoric of opposition to “vested interests” or simply promising entrenched rights. Labour has to take the initiative across the board with bold, tangi­ble proposals for empowerment in every sphere.

Giving people a greater say at work – with a programme to en­courage rapid growth of producer co-operatives and democratic em­ployee share-ownership schemes, a commitment to a “co-determina­tion” model of industrial relations, and policies to give new rights to trade unionists and to members of pension schemes – must be a prior­ity.

So must proposals to encourage self-build housing schemes and self-management of housing for those unwilling or unable to buy, measures to democratise and de­centralise local government and the health and education services, and policies to increase consumer rights far beyond what is envis­aged by the government’s various charters.

The goal of empowerment should be central to Labour’s Com­mission on Social Justice, which must be a fundamental review of the party’s approach to tax and benefits and not an excuse merely to chip away at the principle of universality hi welfare provision.

Universality is essential if the welfare system is to give people the sense of security that is the prerequisite for confident au­tonomous action. For Labour to ac­cept the Tory view that all we need is a minimal “safety net”, means-tested welfare system would be disastrous. Indeed, there is a strong case to be made for extend­ing rather than reducing the scope of universality by adopting a basic income scheme as the core of a new welfare settlement.

The environment was another big issue notable by its absence from the 1992 general election cam­paign. The consensus among the politicians, apparently borne out by the opinion polls, was that in the middle of a recession voters are less concerned with global warm­ing than with jobs and mortgages.

Whatever the truth of this con­sensus, it is likely that the next election will not be taking place in a recession and that worries about the environment among voters will be even more widespread than in the late eighties.

Meanwhile, the need for govern­ment action, especially on global warming, will have become more urgent and more apparent, much to the embarrassment of the To­ries, with their attachment to non­intervention and “letting market forces decide”.

Once again, Labour has an op­portunity to seize the initiative by developing an alternative pro­gramme, particularly on energy, where Labour should go for giving a massive boost to research into sources of renewable energy, and transport, where the need to re­duce carbon dioxide emissions meshes perfectly with Labour’s en­thusiasm for public transport. Once again, the British government’s poor record compared with most of our EC partners should be  a focus for Labour’s attack.

With the end of the cold war, the government is making severe cuts in defence spending. We have al­ready seen massive redundancies among defence sector workers and there are many more to come.

Labour’s response so far has been cautious in the extreme. The party promised a defence diversification agency at the 1992 election but, largely because an inordinate amount of time had been spent ar­guing about who would oversee it, very little work had been done on what the agency would actually do. Developing the proposal for a DDA is now a high priority.

But Labour needs more than just a policy for the defence indus­try: it has to work out what Britain’s defence needs really are. Calling for a full defence review and arguing that British nuclear weapons should be included in multilateral arms reduction nego­tiations might have worked as a holding operation in the run-up to the last election but in the next five years the party will have to go much further.

The whole security system in Europe is in a state of crisis. With the Soviet threat no more, the Balkans torn by war and ethnic tensions in the former Soviet Union threatening to explode, NATO is desperately searching for a role in the post-cold-war world. Pressure is growing for the devel­opment of the Western European Union into the main security or­ganisation on the continent. With the current pace of nuclear arms reduction talks, the time is fast ap­proaching when the other nuclear powers demand that French and British nuclear forces are included in negotiations.

Labour needs to do some deep thinking: first, about what it wants (and what is needed) from a new European security system and, secondly, about its precise ne­gotiating positions on nuclear arms. In both cases, its delibera­tions should be informed by the conviction that the demilitarisa­tion of international relations is the best way of ensuring lasting peace and security.

All this does not in itself add up to a detailed programme for Labour in the next five years. But it is, I hope, the basis for a coher­ent and credible left agenda for the mid-nineties and beyond, with plenty to appeal to working-class and middle-class voters. Does any­one out there agree?

For some on the left, the lessons of Labour’s leadership contest and John Smith’s distribution of Shadow Cabi­net and front-bench posts are clear. “The triumph of the right is now complete,” declared Ken Livingstone in the New Statesman last week. The genuine soft left has to cut itself free from the Brown, Blair, Cook, Straw ‘realist’ wing, recog­nising that in everything but name, these people are now on the right wing of the party every bit as much as Jack Cunning­ham.” The left of the Tribune Group of MPs should line up with the Campaign Group and run a joint slate of candidates for the next set of Shadow Cabinet elec­tions, he argued.

Few have expressed themselves so di­rectly and publicly, but a version of Mr Livingstone’s position is shared by plenty of other left MPs. In the medium term at least, left unity in parliament is a high priority, they believe.

Up to a point, it is difficult to disagree. Labour is insufficiently radical and is in danger of getting even worse. The idea of persuading radicals in the Parliamentary Labour Party to work together is an at­tractive one. If, instead of squabbling, left MPs could come together on a com­mon platform, the chances of putting Labour on a radical course might be in­creased.

The problem is that it is increasingly difficult to define the Labour left as a group of people with a common political platform. Of course, the left has common values. Anti-militarism is one; the sense that labour should be empowered against capital is another. The left believes that people should have more control over the decisions that fundamentally affect their everyday lives.

So one could go on – but these common values do not yield agreement on the great issues of the day. On these, from the European Community through electoral reform to the importance of Green poli­tics, the left is deeply divided. Most im­portant, on the economy, where once there was left consensus on the neo-Keynesian protectionism of the Alternative Economic Strategy, there is not one left position but a raft of competing ideas, with fundamental disagreements about devaluation, the possibilities of European alternative economic strategies, nationalisation and much more besides.

Add the continuing arguments on the left about toleration of Leninist entrists in the Labour Party and about the future of the block vote at Labour conference, and it is difficult to see how a comprehen­sive platform could be devised to bring together the left rather than divide it.

It follows that it is not always very easy these days to define who isn’t on the left. Abandoning principles in the pursuit of power is all too familiar a phenomenon, and it is just about possible that some or even all of “the Brown, Blair, Cook, Straw ‘realist’ wing” of the soft left have sold the pass on everything they once be­lieved, as Mr Livingstone claims. But the evidence for his assertion is patchy, to say the least.

Unless serious signs of apostasy ap­pear, the energy that Mr Livingstone would like to see spent on realigning and rebuilding the left would be better used simply to encourage open no-holds-barred debate on Labour’s future, no one in the party excluded.

The six weeks since Tribune – then alone  among  British  newspapers – first argued for limited military inter­vention to save Sarajevo from the bloody siege by Serbian irregulars should have been used by the governments of west­ern Europe to make the necessary military preparations and then to send in the aircraft and troops.

Instead, the British and American governments have resisted all calls for military force to stop the siege, taking refuge in hand-wringing and hoping against hope that sanctions and peace talks will yield some result.

Meanwhile, the crisis in Bosnia has de­veloped precisely as any intelligent ob­server knew it would. The Serbs have consolidated their positions and contin­ued the grisly programme of “ethnic cleansing”; and the Croats, at first hesitant about getting in on the act in Bosnia for fear of what might result, have pitched in with a vengeance. The carving-up of Bosnia between Serbia and Croatia is now well advanced.

It is not too late to rescue the situation. Sarajevo is still holding out – just. However emboldened they have been by the criminal prevarication of the British and American governments, the Serbian mili­tias are still not in a position seriously to resist what the big powers could throw at them; the same goes for their Croatian counterparts. But in another couple of months  it will be too late.

Less than four months into their fourth term, the Tories are in an almighty mess on the economy. The re­covery they promised has foiled to mate­rialise. Every economic indicator shows that the recession is as deep as ever. Company failures are still growing. So is unemployment. A Confederation of British Industry survey published this week reports that 57 per cent of manufac­turers’ order books are below normal and two-thirds of manufacturers are working below capacity.

True to form, the Chancellor, Norman Lamont, has responded by claiming yet again that recovery is imminent and ar­guing for patience while his anti-infla­tionary policies create the foundations for sustained growth. He has ignored crit­ics who have argued that sterling is over­valued, that the fight against inflation is not the main priority at the depth of a re­cession or that the reduction of public spending is idiotic in an economy suffer­ing a collapse in demand.

In such circumstances, and with its new Shadow Cabinet in place, there is no reason why Labour cannot have a field day baiting the Government over its performance – and indeed this week Gordon Brown, the new Shadow Chancellor, set to work with relish.

But it is one thing to attack the Govern­ment and another to come up with an altentative to its policies. And Labour is rather short of ideas about how it would do things differently.

It is true that the party has, since the election, made it clear that it would not be averse to devaluation of sterling, al­beit by way of a general realignment of currencies within the exchange rate mechanism of the European Monetary System involving, crucially, the revalua­tion upwards of the Deutschmark. It is true, too, that Labour has said that a re­cession is not the time to engage in public spending cuts, which will remove yet more demand from an already depressed economy. Then there are Labour’s long­standing commitments to “supply-side” measures: extra spending on training, tax breaks for investment and so on.

All of this is most sensible. Sterling is over-valued, spending cuts are a bad idea and supply-side measures are essential. But it does not add up to a radical alter­native to the Tories* basic approach. De­valuation of the pound against the Deutschmark within the ERM would certainly ease the pressure on British ex­porters for a while, which is what makes it necessary. 

But it is no panacea. Be­cause of the import-reliance of the British economy, its most significant effect would be to cut real wages for a while – hardly die stuff of socialist dreams, even if it temporarily improved competitivity. Sim­ilarly, the spending cuts, effectively the downside of over-generous pledges in the run-up to the election, are not particular­ly significant in macroeconomic terms (although they could well be viciously shared out). And supply-side measures are not a short-term answer to recession. 

So what should Labour do? The traditional left response is to call for a reflationary alternative economic strategy for Britain. But any nation-state-based at­tempt to reflate would founder in the face of a massive flight of capital. Britain sim­ply is not big enough to cope with the mo­bility of capital in the contemporary glob­al economy. What would be possible, how­ever, is a co-ordinated Europe-wide reflationary strategy, organised either inter-governmentally or through new Euro­pean economic institutions. Labour should start work now with its European social democratic sister parties on pre­cisely such a programme, making the call for Europe-wide reflation the core of its assault on the Tories’ miserable economic record.

If the talk in the corridors of Westmin­ster is correct, two of the key posts in the new Shadow Cabinet, due to be an­nounced today (Friday), have been decid­ed for weeks. Unless John Smith decides at the last minute to change his mind, Gordon Brown will be the new Shadow Chancellor and Tony Blair will become Shadow Home Secretary.

Both are well fitted to their new jobs. Mr Brown has proved himself a capable trade and industry spokesman with a good grasp of the economic realities cur­rently facing Britain – not always hither­to a precondition for being given the post – and promotion should give him the au­thority and confidence to develop the Eu­rope-based strategy for redistribution, demilitarisation, environmentalism and growth that he knows Labour needs.

Mr Blair, taking over from a decent but unimaginative sixties social democrat, Roy Hattersley, has a chance, well within his capacity, to develop his brief as a nineties libertarian, more conversant than his predecessor with the politics of race, gender, electoral reform and rights that has energed at the centre of British radical politics in the past decade.

Beyond these two, however, the picture is hazy – and for good reason. The result of the Shadow Cabinet ballot was not known when Tribune went to press. With more than 50 contenders for the 18 or so places up for election by the Parliamen­tary Labour Party and the likelihood of several surprises, everything was up for grabs.

Mr Smith has indicated that he will ap­point a Shadow Cabinet of all the talents, and that those who opposed him and Margaret Beckett in the leadership and deputy leadership contests will be consid­ered fairly for posts in the new line-up. He has also promised a welcome promo­tion to senior positions of some of Labour’s most able women politicians. But much remains vague. In particular, the third “big” job in the Shadow Cabinet, Shadow Foreign Secretary, is apparently a contest between Jack Cunningham and Robin Cook, with the “loser” being given trade and industry.

Mr Cook is the man to go for. Unlike Mr Cunningham, he has shown a sustained interest in, and engagement with, the world outside Britain, and he is unencumbered with the old cold-war Atlanticist baggage that has debilitated Labour thinking on foreign policy for too long. Mr Cunningham has given no indication that he sees the future of foreign policy as anything but business as usual. Mr Smith should appoint the man who might be prepared to break the old mould.

Perhaps, though, the old hierarchy of tasks is no longer what it was. There is no reason, for example, to consider that the defence or environment portfolios are any leas important these days than the “big three”. On one hand, there is no more important question facing Britain or the world than the burgeoning ecologi­cal crisis; on the other, whoever takes the defence spokesperson’s job will have to preside over Labour’s response to the massive cut-back in war preparations that is attending the end of the cold war.

Yet there has been no speculation about who gets either defence or environ­ment. For Tribune, the best bet would be to keep Bryan Gould where he is at envi­ronment – for him to shadow William Waldegrave on the Citizen’s Charter would be a waste of one of Labour’s best talents on one of the Tories’ least con­vincing initiatives. On defence, the im­portant thing is that whoever is appoint­ed must be given the autonomy to push the case for reducing the role in the coun­try’s affairs of the military-industrial complex. As with Shadow Foreign Secre­tary, it would be best to appoint someone who is not a cold-war Atlanticist. Mr Smith has a chance to give the Shadow Cabinet a radical cutting edge. With the leadership and deputy leader­ship in such safe hands, he should reward imagination and flair rather than seniori­ty and solidity.

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.

“We are not a global power, nor do we have aspirations to be a global power. We are primarily a middle-ranking European power.”

So said Malcolm Rifkind, the Secretary of State for Defence, on Tuesday, the day he published the Government’s 1992 de­fence White Paper, and it is difficult to disagree with the sentiments. Britain’s world empire is long gone, its economy is only the fourth biggest in Europe (and sixth biggest in the world) and its influ­ence in world affairs is minimal.

Yet the practice of Mr Rifldnd’s Min­istry of Defence does not match his mod-eat rhetoric. For all the talk of a new de­fence strategy in the White Paper and for all the spending cuts planned in the next five years, British military procurement decisions are still being made as if the cold war were in full swing.

The most obvious sign of this is the MoD’s decision to place the long-delayed order for the fourth Trident nuclear sub­marine with the VSEL shipyard in Bar­row. That decision will be widely wel­comed there because it will save the yard from closure for a few more years. But there is absolutely no rationale for the fourth Trident boat except as a job-creation scheme. In the absence of a Soviet nuclear threat, precisely whom is Trident supposed to deter? Is it really worth spending £33,000 million or so over the next 30 years to provide insurance against the unlikely eventuality of a rogue Third World state acquiring not just nuclear weapons but also the ability and desire to threaten Britain with them?

But Trident is not the only evidence of continuing MoD delusions of grandeur. Almost as telling is its response to the German government’s decision last week to pull out of the production phase of the four-nation European Fighter Aircraft. The Germans, after more than two years of weighing up the options, have decided that EFA is not the sort of fighter that they will need at the turn of the century. Because it is designed to counter the very best Soviet aircraft, it is extremely com­plex and therefore expensive. But because the cold war has ended, there is no need to counter the very best Soviet air­craft. The Germans believe that they can make do with a cheaper fighter.

There is no reason that Britain cannot do the same. Indeed, as with Trident, the only rationale for continuing with EFA in its current form is as a job-creation scheme. There is no military reason for producing such a high-tech aircraft and the export market for EFA is shrinking by the month.

Labour has responded to all this by ex­pressing concern about jobs and the preservation of Britain’s manufacturing base, which is fine as far as it goes. In the long run, however, the fact is that Britain cannot remain reliant on military indus­try if it is going to compete in the interna­tional markets of the next century. Labour must make it clear that, rather than paying billions to keep the shipyard workers of Barrow employed on Trident and the British Aerospace workforce beavering away on EFA, the answer is to switch that expenditure to civilian projects, particularly retraining and research and development, to give British high-tech manufacturing a chance to prosper beyond the end of the decade.

The first big policy question that John Smith will confront when he becomes Labour leader next week has vexed the party for three decades: Europe.

Since last month’s rejection of the Maastricht treaty in the Dan­ish referendum, Labour’s fragile consensus on the European Com­munity, carefully constructed to minimise argument in the run-up to the election, has all but col­lapsed. However the 12 EC gov­ernments eventually decide to deal with the Danish rejection of the treaty, Smith is going to have to work hard to prevent a Labour split over the British govern­ment’s Maastricht bill.

Smith recognises the difficulties ahead and has taken care to rule out nothing in the way of tactics. Last weekend, he made it clear that he expects dissent among Labour MPs and MEPs whatever line the leadership eventually agrees, telling a television inter­viewer that “it is just impossible to expect on an issue of this kind that they will all vote in the same way and there has to be some respect for differing opinions”.

The problem is not really that either the Parliamentary Labour Party or the European Parliamen­tary Labour Party are particularly divided in their opinions of the treaty. With the exception of a small group of Euro-fanatics (30-strong at most among MPs) who want to vote for Maastricht, there is a consensus that the terms of the treaty are far from perfect.

On economic and monetary union, there is a widespread belief in both the PLP and EPLP that the treaty is too deflationary and that its criteria for convergence be­fore the creation of a single Euro­pean currency are too narrowly fo­cused on interest rates, inflation and state spending. There is a sim­ilar agreement that the British government’s “opt-out” on the so­cial provisions agreed by the other 11 signatories is indefensible. On political union, there is near-con­sensus that the Maastricht deal does not give enough extra power to the European Parliament.

But none of this makes for agreement on how the party should respond to the govern­ment’s Maastricht Bill. Just about everyone apart from a handful of anti-EC diehards reckons that Labour should vote for the Maas­tricht bill if it can secure an end to the social chapter opt-out – but no one really believes that Labour can force the Tories to climb down on this. So Labour is heading for a show-down between those who think that Maastricht without the social chapter should be opposed and those who believe that the party cannot in the end oppose Maastricht because the only con­ceivable alternative is worse: no progress at all towards European union. The depth of disagreement already suggests that Labour would split down the middle if it came to a referendum on the bill.

The most articulate of the anti-Maastricht pro-Europeans is Peter Hain, MP for Neath and secretary of the “soft left” Tribune Group of MPs, who was the author of a Tri­bune Group motion calling for op­position to the Bill put to the PLF last month. His move, which has the support of perhaps one-third of Labour MPs, has caused ructions in the PLP, which agreed to post­pone coming to a decision on Maastricht bill tactics, and Tri­bune Group MEPs are now threat­ening to split with their Westmin­ster colleagues because they were not consulted about it.

Hain is unrepentant. “It’s not a factional issue,” he says. “It’s about establishing a socialist cri­tique of Maastricht.”

For him, the Tories’ disarray on Europe is something for Labour ruthlessly to exploit. Labour has nothing to lose by making it clear that it will vote against the Maastricht Bill unless the Government changes its line on the social chap­ter. With a little help from Tory rebels, Labour could ensure that Britain did not ratify Maastricht, killing the treaty for good whatev­er happens with Denmark and forcing the 12 to negotiate a new, more democratic, growth-oriented European union agreement.

Some critics of this position, no­tably Neil Kinnock in the PLP meeting at which it was discussed, have argued that Labour would destroy its credibility with its con­tinental sister parties if it decided to vote against Maastricht. Accord­ing to Giles Radice, MP for Durham and a long-time pro-Euro­pean whose book Offshore: Britain and the European Idea has just been published, “There is little doubt that a U-turn on Maastricht would cut Labour off from the con­structive dialogue with continental socialist parties which has been such a feature of the last five years.”

Others say that the main prob­lem with the Hain position is that it implies that if Maastricht falls a better treaty on European union could be negotiated, when in fact it couldn’t. Maastricht was the prod­uct of intensive negotiations among EC governments, they say, and it is difficult to see how they could reach agreement on a differ­ent compromise if negotiations were reopened. Wayne David, MEP for South Wales, is typical. “It’s Maastricht or nothing,” he says. “We should stop kidding our­selves.”

He could well be right. The cen­tre-right German government will not budge in its insistence that the Bundesbank should be the model for the European central bank and, for reasons deeply root­ed in German history, will not sanction any attempt to downplay the centrality of price stability in the criteria for convergence and as a goal of EMU.

If it came to renegotiation, it is hard to conceive of French president Mitterrand extracting any more concessions from the Ger­mans than he got first time around: the role of Ecofin, the Council of Economic and Finance Ministers of the EC countries, in overseeing the central bank, and the rather vague commitments to goals of growth and social cohesion. There would also be very little likelihood of renegotiation removing the British opt-out on the social chapter.

On political union, there seems to be just as little room for ma­noeuvre. Kohl has suggested that a way out of the impasse created by the Danish referendum might be to bring forward negotiations, scheduled to begin in 1996, on in­creasing the powers of the Euro­pean Parliament. But this is anathema to the British govern­ment, which is committed to the principle that intergovernmentalism should be the foundation of EC decision-making, with the Council of Ministers playing the key role. John Major has suggested that the way to get the Danes back on board is to emphasise the impor­tance of “subsidiarity”, the doc­trine that decisions should be made at the lowest level possible, interpreted by his government as meaning “the level of the nation-state”.

Of course, the 12 might have no option but to start again if no way is found of getting the Danes to change their minds, which would mean the end of the British Maas­tricht bill regardless of what Labour does. While that remains a strong possibility, it is perhaps un­derstandable that the Labour lead­ership sees the value of making soothing noises and keeping its op­tions open. Eventually, however, Labour is going to have to make up its mind about what it wants from Europe.

If there was any consensus at last weekend’s conference of Labour’s democratic left, organised by Tri­bune and the Labour Co-ordinating Committee, it was that Labour desper­ately needs a period of free debate about its direction and organisation.

After its fourth consecutive election defeat, the Labour Party cannot re­spond simply by giving support to its new leadership, changing a handful of policies and waiting in hope for the To­ries to hoist themselves with their own petard. The last thing that anyone needs is an immediate return to the at­mosphere which existed in the party from 1989-92, when open discussion was sacrificed in the interests of party unity in the run-up to the election.

But, contrary to the fears of certain of John Smith’s supporters, there is no general enthusiasm on the democratic left for a return to the bad old opposi­tionist days of the early eighties. Nor is there any basis for any such thing.

The democratic left is united by its radical environmental ism and, most importantly, by a strong sense that the empowerment of ordinary people in their everyday lives should be at the centre of Labour’s politics. In line with this, there is agreement that both the European Community and the British state need to be radically democratised.

But there were few signs last week­end of consensus about precisely how this democratic agenda should be translated into political practice.

The voices arguing for a massive in­crease in the powers of the European Parliament and for the introduction of the additional member system for West­minster are more numerous and more insistent than they were five years ago, but they are by no means uncontested.

The differences within the democratic left are even more marked on eco­nomic policy and on the best ways of countering the Tories’ plans for the wel­fare state and local government. On the most immediate issues facing Labour – how it should respond to the Maas­tricht treaty and how, if at all, it should change its relationship with the trade unions – there is no consensus at all.

This does not mean, however, that the democratic left is in a bad way: quite the reverse. Despite the universal dis­appointment over the April 9 defeat, last weekend’s gathering was enthusi­astic and upbeat, brimming with ideas, and the arguments were conducted in a constructive and friendly spirit.

If we can maintain the momentum, particularly in the pages of Tribune and through the network of local Tribune Groups that the parliamentary Tribune Group is planning to encourage, there is a real possibility, with Labour’s hard left a spent force and Leninism utterly discredited, that the democratic left can once again act as the main creative element of British radical politics.

The analysis of the election defeat presented last week to Labour’s National Executive Committee by the Shadow Com­munications Agency has stirred up a hornets’ nest.

The general conclusion of the post mortem by the party’s public relations advisers is that Labour lost not because of faults in the campaign, nor because of (easily changeable) unpopular policies, but for much the same reason that it lost in 1987. Under Neil Kinnock’s leadership, Labour was simply not trusted by the floating voters it had to attract to win.

According to, the SCA, it is seen as old-fashioned, too concerned with no-hopers and minorities, too re­liant on the trade unions.

Unsurprisingly, this has caused a furore among critics of the SCA’s role in the run-up to the election. John Prescott has accused the SCA, which played a major role in decision-making during the elec­tion campaign, of attempting to divert criticism away from itself.

Supporters of Bryan Gould have detected a different hidden agenda behind the SCA’s findings: they are too convenient by half for all those, particularly the architects of Labour’s tax and economic policies, who want to keep Labour on the same tack that it has taken since 1987.

But, for all the legitimate con­cern about the power and politics of an unelected body at the top of the Labour Party, the reality is that the SCA’s analysis gives no comfort to anyone in the leader­ship. Indeed, it suggests that the whole approach adopted by Labour from 1987 to 1992, designed pre­cisely to address lack of trust in the party and its perceived obso­lescence, failed miserably to achieve its objectives.

The unpalatable truth is that, between 1987 and 1992, Labour did everything in its power to appear modern, responsible and trustworthy. It ditched what the opinion pollsters said were unpopular and impractical policies and it finalised a prudent minimal programme well before the election. It threw out Leninist entrists, played down its links with the unions and exercised an unprecedented collective self-discipline.

The party fought the 1992 election on a cautious social democratic platform, of modest, redistribution and “supply-side” intervention in industry, all carefully costed and easily understandable. Puni­tive taxation was out. So was na­tionalisation. Capital had nothing to fear apart from stricter regula­tion. Labour promised nothing to upset the status quo on defence. On Europe, the line was “go with the flow”.

No party could have gone fur­ther, in pursuit of respectability and media-friendliness, Labour even got the endorsement of the Financial Times.

Yet all this was in vain. Ever with substantial help from the To­ries, in the shape of the poll tax and the recession, Labour failed to persuade the voters’ that Britain would be safe in its hands.

There is indeed no easy excuse to be found in the conduct of the campaign. Far from leading Labour to conclude that its-general approach in 1987-92 was just about right, the result should pro­voke the party into a thorough and self-critical, examination of why the strategy didn’t work: why, af­ter all this effort and all these years, Labour is still widely seen as the party of bureaucratic statism and corporatist carve-up, Is it all about folk memories of the early eighties or the Winter of Dis­content or has it more to do with the party’s current practice and culture?

But so far there are few signs that very many of Labour’s senior politicians have the stomach for debate about fundamentals. Apart from Bryan Gould, members of the Shadow Cabinet have given only the vaguest indications that they have been thinking critically about Labour’s predicament, and the best that most seem capable of coming up with is that things weren’t taken far enough between 1987 and 1992.

A couple of them have said that Labour did not adopt a sufficiently individualist and consumerist rhetoric; rather more have said that Labour’s relationship with the trade unions was still too close; and several appear to think that Clause Pour of the party constitu­tion was a problem.

More helpfully, one or two have listed concerns – notably the envi­ronment and constitutional reform – which could have been exploited more effectively by Labour, and John Prescott has used his deputy leadership campaign as a platform to make some trenchant remarks on Labour’s organisational fail­ings.

For the most part, however, Labour’s leaders have spent the past ten weeks resolutely defend­ing everything they did in the pre­vious five years. Most notably, John Smith, now virtually certain to be the party’s next leader, has gone out of his way to identify him­self with the broad thrust of the Kinnock years. His only significant innovation is a cross-party com­mission on, social justice to re­assess the structure of the welfare state.

By contrast, Gould has made some telling points during his cam­paign for the leadership and the deputy leadership. He has argued convincingly that Labour’s macho style put off many women voters and that Labour needlessly played down several key issues (the envi­ronment, housing, transport) in its campaigning, and he has made a powerful case tor the inadequacy of Labour’s approach to the democratic agenda. Perhaps most importantly, he has dared to criticise the party’s economic policies for being too timid to convince anyone that a Labour government would do anything about unemployment. 

But even Gould’s approach has been flawed. He has been forced to pull too many punches in the struggle for votes and his national Keynesian programme for the economy has taken a battering, for good reason. The distinctive element in his proposed alternative economic policy, devaluation (trimmed to devaluation as part of a general realignment of currencies in the European exchange rate mechanism), is more problematic in electoral terms than anything Labour offered in April. No political party could win an election promising to devalue.

Perhaps the shortage of ideas at the top of the party would not mat­ter quite so much if there were signs of critical life elsewhere. But they are few and far between.

Apart from the few remaining anti-EC Keynesians around Peter Shore, there is no cogent voice of the right independent of the lead­ership these days, and the hard left, although acerbic on Kinnock’s stewardship of the party, seems motivated almost entirely by nos­talgia for the good old days of the seventies and early eighties.

Its politics are dominated by a rhetoric of betrayal-by-the-leadership and its priorities are conservative and uninspiring: defence of the block vote and first-past-the-post elections, opposition to the EC and military spending.

Ken Livingstone is alone on the hard left in articulating a coher­ent programme, but it holds few attractions. He has hit on military spending cuts as the key to all Labour’s problems. But it is a solu­tion that offers as little in electoral terms as Gould’s devaluationism (which Livingstone endorses with knobs on): firing workers in arms factories to pay for teachers and nurses is hardly electorally feasible.

That leaves the amorphous mass of Labour’s “soft left” (or centre-left), slowly coming to terms with the prospects of life under a leader who, unlike Kinnock, cannot claim the sentimental loyally of any section of the left. The centre-left kept its head down in the two years before the general election but it is likely that, with Kinnock gone, it will experience something of a revival as backbench MPs and others feel freer to speak their minds. Already the Tribune Group at Westminster is back to weekly meetings and centre-left MPs say that they detect a hunger for open discussion throughout the party.

As yet, however, this is all promise. Perhaps because of the leadership campaign, the centre-left has as yet contributed little of substance: a handful of articles in the Guardian, Tribune and the New Statesman and a few discus­sion papers for conferences. In­deed, it is difficult to work out ex­actly where the centre-left sees Labour going.

There is no centre-left consensus on most of the big questions that the party will have to face in the next couple of years – Europe, economic policy, environmentalism, electoral reform – let alone on internal party affairs.

Optimists say that it is simply a matter of time before this sorts it­self out; pessimists argue that the centre-left is as short of ideas as the hard left and will almost in­evitably end up meekly following in the footsteps of the “business­es-usual” right.

This weekend’s Tribune/Labour Co-ordinating Committee confer­ence in London (see advertisement on page 10) is a forum for a free and frank exchange of views rather than a meeting to forge a new radical consensus, but it should give a good indication of what we can expect, from the centre-left in the next couple of years.

The left is, justifiably, generally op­posed to military interventions by big powers in other people’s wars. However they are dressed up for public consumption, they are usually at­tempts by the big powers to extend or defend their influence. Far from bring­ing about peace, they usually cause esca­lation and prolongation of wan look at south-east Asia, Afghanistan, the Gulf, the Horn of Africa, Chad, Angola.

But there are times when big-power military intervention in a small war is the only way of preventing something worse. It is becoming increasingly clear that Bosnia today is a case in point.

It is difficult to see how anything short of military intervention from outside will dislodge the Serbian nationalist ir­regular forces, backed by the Govern­ment of Slobodan Milosevic and former Yugoslav federal troops, which are cur­rently laying siege to Sarajevo and ter­rorising the civilian population with random mortar fire. Unless they are dis­lodged, the future for Sarajevo, Bosnia and the rest of what used to be Yu­goslavia is bleak indeed.

A ceasefire alone (if it could be made to hold, which seems unlikely) is not enough. It would simply allow the Ser­bian militias, currently in a psychotic, expansionist mood, to consolidate their current stranglehold on Sarajevo and to get on unmolested with the grisly busi­ness of “ethnic cleansing” in the areas of Bosnia they control, as a prelude to incorporating them into a Greater Serbia. Encouraged by their success, the mili­tias would then turn their attentions to the Albanians in Kosovo and then to the Macedonians.

Everything that the international com­munity has done so for to restrain Ser­bian expansionism has failed. The agree­ment on Croatia brokered by the United Nations special envoy, Cyrus Vance, in January allowed the Serbs to consoli­date their territorial gains there.

The EC’s plans for “cantonisation” of Bosnia on ethnic lines, put for­ward in March, only encouraged Serb ambitions to annex large areas of that country: if the EC sticks to this approach, it is almost certain that the Croats will join in the carve-up, effec­tively wiping Bosnia from the map. The sanctions imposed on Serbia and Mon­tenegro by the EC and the United Na­tions last month have had no apprecia­ble effect on the Serbian agression.

A limited military intervention to re­open and secure Sarajevo’s airport – its only transport link with the outside world – and to force the Serbian artillery units to retreat from their positions overlooking the city is logistically feasi­ble. It now appears to be the only way that tie world can show the Serbs that it is serious about not tolerating, unpro­voked aggression.

Obviously, there are political a military problems with such a course of action. Any intervention would have to have the backing of the UN, but it would be very difficult for any operation to save Sarajevo actually to be conducted by UN Blue Helmet troops, whose role is traditionally limited to peace-keeping. Intervention is also outside the remit of Nato, the purpose of which is to defend its own members from attack, yet Nato forces would have to be used. Unless the Western European Union were brought in, some sort of ad hoc coalition would need to be set up to do the job. This would take time and might be somewhat chaotic. There is also the possibility that what started as a limited intervention would become an endless commitment.

But none of this constitutes a convinc­ing case against intervention. The or­ganisational difficulties can be over­come if the political will is there, and there is no reason that any military action should not be strictly limited in scope and duration. In any case, there is no alternative on offer and time is gettting short. It is time to grasp the nettle.