Author Archives: Paul Anderson

BENN IS WRONG ON MAASTRICHT

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Tribune leader, 19 February 1993

On Monday, the Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, told the House of Com­mons that the government’s law offi­cers had advised him – contrary to previ­ous advice – that Labour’s amendment to the Maastricht bill would, if passed, nei­ther bring down the bill nor make the government accept the social chapter.
Labour has rightly condemned the shabbiness of Mr Hurd’s performance. It is quite clear that the government sought legal opinion from the law officers, whose credibility is in tatters after the Matrix-Churchill affair, simply because it faced parliamentary defeat.
The more important question, however, is one of democracy. As well as reporting on his new legal advice, Mr Hurd at­tempted to reassure the Commons that the government had no intention of rati­fying the Maastricht bill “except through the normal parliamentary procedures”. It  would not, in short, use the royal prerog­ative to ignore Parliament.
As Tony Benn has pointed out, the real problem is not whether or not the government is going to ignore the Commons in this particular instance but the very fact that it has powers to do so – powers that will be increased once the Maas­tricht treaty comes into force.
Mr Benn was alluding to two giant “democratic deficits” in our political sys­tem. First, the creaking British constitu­tion allows the government to get away with far too much. Secondly, the EC set­tlement reached at Maastricht, giving pride of place in the EC’s political struc­tures to the (intergovernmental) Council of Ministers, gives governments even more unaccountable power.
Mr Benn believes that the way to deal with this unaccountable power is to reassert the powers of national parliaments over governments and to scupper Maas­tricht.
He is right on the first point but wrong on the second.
The time when nation states of the size of those in the EC were capable of run­ning independent economic policies is long since gone. If there is to be any pos­sibility of the countries of Europe controlling their own economic destinies, economic policy will have to operate at European level. We need European eco­nomic union. The key question is how we make it accountable.
National parliaments are wholly inade­quate to the task. With or without Maas­tricht, so is the European Parliament. But the European Parliament at least has the potential to become a body that can ade­quately control EC executive bodies. Bet­ter still, it could become a parliament from which a federal EC executive is drawn and to which it is accountable. This week’s Tory manoeuvring gives Labour the opportunity to spell out a vi­sion of a democratic federal Europe. It should seize it with alacrity.

CRISIS MANAGER: INTERVIEW WITH LARRY WHITTY

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Tribune, 12 February 1993

Labour’s general secretary tells Paul Anderson about the party’s problems with cash and morale
“It is clear that there is a morale and in­volvement problem in many constituen­cies,” says Larry Whitty.

“We need to give new life to party branches. The whole party organi­sation needs a big shake-up. We need to change the whole ethos of the organisation. The level of mem­bership at the moment is worrying. We need to take some major new initiatives. While the more alarmist figures about our real membership are wrong, we are on a declining trend and that needs some dramatic initiatives to reverse it.”
It is unusual to find a politician prepared to ad­mit that his or her party is in a terrible mess, but it is hardly surprising that Labour’s general secre­tary is prepared to go public about the state of the organisation of which he is manager-in-chief.
Whitty, who was appointed in 1985 and is now aged 49, has just finished presiding over production of a draconian cost-cutting plan, passed by the par­ty’s National Executive Committee last month, which will see Labour’s organisation slimmed down as never before in living memory. And his next task will be to steer the potentially explosive debate that will follow publication of the report on links with the trade unions.
Labour’s financial plight is grave, he says, and the main reason is a projected decline in income from the unions and from membership fees. “The fundraising is going very well. But on all our esti­mates we are going to face a real income cut next year of at least 30 per cent compared with where we were before the election. A very substantial part of our support will continue to come from the trade unions but they are going to suffer further losses of membership. The worst case scenario would be that unions vote no in their political fund ballots. But income could go down further than 30 per cent in any case.”
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The upshot is that, even with increases in trade union affiliation fees and levies on MPs, MEPs and councillors, massive cuts in spending arc unavoid­able: the only question is where they are made. Whitty, now backed not just by Labour’s finance working party but also by the NEC, argues that the choice had to be made on the basis of the experi­ence of the last general election. The Tories had a pathetic central organisation and an almost non­-existent regional one,” he says. “But they did have very effective local organisation and they did shift national resources to the local level.
“Similarly, the greatest success of the election was our performance in some key marginals. We need to shift resources closer to the ground for a longer period, away from head office and away from regional offices. Unless we shift personnel and money closer to where the battleground is going to be at the next general election and in the Euro-elections, we’re not going to have the organisation that we need.”
Last month the NEC agreed to change the ratio of party expenditure on head office, regions and lo­cal parties from 75:20:5 to 60:20:20. The number of staff at Labour’s Walworth Road headquarters will be reduced from 130 to 90, with research particu­larly badly hit, while the party’s English regions will be cut from nine to six or seven.
Other cuts will include a reduction in the regu­larity of Labour’s youth, women’s, local government and European conferences, the replacement of re­gional conferences with regional input into the pro­posed national policy forum process, abandonment of the bookshop and library service and a reduction in the volume of bumf put out by Labour.
Whitty puts a brave face on the cuts, arguing that the shift of resources to local parties will mean that Labour will be able to regenerate itself from the bottom up and that the paring down at the cen­tre will force greater openness on the policy-mak­ing process. The party plans a series of campaigns for ordinary members to get stuck into and hopes to draw into the policy-making process many of the experts whose services were shunned by Labour when Neil Kinnock was leader.
“I do not consider that we need to issue as many detailed policy statements as we did,” Whitty says. “We need real strategic thinking about policy. Our policy-making also needs to be more outward-look­ing. We need to inspire and mobilise outside exper­tise, which to some extent we phased out in the past few years. The relationship with the pressure groups and the academic community is not as good as it should be.”
He hopes that changes in policy-making will im­prove that relationship “There are resource con­straints, but the principle of a rolling programme and the principle of involving all elements of the party will be maintained. The suspicions about this process are misplaced. Policy-making will be more open than in the past.”
Meanwhile, he goes on, the teething troubles of Labour’s national membership system are well on the way to being ironed out. “It’s been one of my most serious headaches in the past few years. But although there are still problems with it, we’ve got over the worst. We made a mistake in trying to in­troduce the whole system at once and by not having communication with branches, which is where members are made, not at constituency level. There were also a number of technical and staffing prob­lems.” Now, however, the national party has direct communication with branches and the regions will soon be linked into the national membership scheme’s computers.
As for Labour Party News, the free magazine sent to all party members, it will be slimmed down and become a newspaper but will not be closed, “It’s essential that the national party has some way of communicating half-a-dozen times a year with all party members.”
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Whitty’s worries do not stop with money: he is also charged with the unenviable task of acting as midwife to a new settle­ment between Labour and the trade unions.
Last week, the NEC working party on the union-party link met to discuss an options paper which, says Whitty, “will almost certainly form” the basis of its submission to the NEC. “The working party reaffirms the role of the trade unions and states that the unions will continue to have a major part in our policy-making and organisation. We want to preserve involvement by the trade unions in the party, both through their delegations to conference and as a means of generating substantial support for the party among affiliated trade union mem­bers.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Whitty is not very hap­py about the way that Labour’s debate on the union link has turned at times into spectacular public feuding. “There are some very fundamental debates going on in the party which need to go on, not just on trade unions but also on social justice, economic policy and the electoral system. All will be subject to wide consultation. They need to be taken slowly and seriously and not degenerate into a sort of Mods versus Rockers confrontation.”
The author of Labour’s official post-mortem on last year’s election defeat, he is particularly an­noyed at the way Labour’s warring factions have learned from Bill Clinton’s winning American Pres­idential campaign.
“The Clinton campaign did not have an argu­ment about whether to concentrate on the Democrats’ core vote or whether to reach out to new constituencies. It first of all consolidated the core vote then extended the appeal outwards. We need to do the same. That’s a real long haul.
“Having a leadership contest immediately after the election defeat, and the government being on the ropes during the autumn, delayed the self-anal­ysis that the party needed to engage in. I’m not un­happy about that. We needed the dust to settle a bit. Now we’ve got to structure the debate. People who are asking for immediate answers are not do­ing the party a service. The party is not in great shape in many parts of the country and is undoubt­edly disheartened by this current argument.”

SMITH STATES THE BLEEDING OBVIOUS

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Tribune leader, 12 February 1993

  
Why did John Smith’s big speech at ‘Labour’s local government confer­ence in Bournemouth last weekend get so much coverage in the media? Cer­tainly not because of its novelty. Mr Smith did little more than repeat things he said during his campaign for the Labour leadership, in some cases using precisely the same formulations.
To be sure, it was a coherent speech. There were some good jokes and a couple of noteworthy rhetorical flourishes. But too much was dull and predictable. Mr Smith is in favour of “change”, against “extreme ideology” and for a “new politi­cal approach” for a “new political era”: precisely what one would expect of any politician in a modern democratic soci­ety.
Even his much-reported remarks about the irrelevance of ownership in the mod­ern economy were scant reason for fuss, even though, taken literally, they make nonsense of his apparent enthusiasm for such non-state forms of social ownership as co-operatives and employee share own­ership schemes.
According to Mr Smith, “In the Labour Party we see clearly the merits of a mixed economy and the need for an active and creative partnership between the public and private sectors.”
Those words could have been uttered by any Labour leader since Hugh Gaitskell. More important, for the best part of a decade they could have been uttered without fear of a serious re­action from the left.
Enthusiasm for extensive nationali­sation has evaporated in recent years: only a small minority in the Labour Party wants anything other than a mixed economy, and the debate about the pre­cise mix rouses few passions. Like it or not, and contrary to the claims of the Tory press, Mr Smith was not executing a stunning policy U-turn. He was saying that Labour is a mainstream social democratic party, something that has been ob­vious for ages.
Of course, it is sometimes necessary for politicians to state the bleeding obvious but Mr Smith really should have done more last weekend. Labour desperately needs to rediscover its sense of purpose and to define a radical populist politics. The most important task is to develop economic policies that command public confidence, yet Mr Smith did no more than show that he realises this.
There was even less of substance on the other areas where Labour needs to get its finger out. He said nothing about the fu­ture of the welfare state or his vision of Europe after Maastricht. There was nothing new on the environment or the democratisation of the British state.
No one expects a single speech to set the world to rights, and Mr Smith will have plenty more opportunities to show that he understands that there is more to radical new thinking than declaring that it would be a good idea. For now, howev­er, Labour’s direction remains as ill-de­fined as it was a week ago.

NEW RADICAL? INTERVIEW WITH JACK STRAW

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Tribune, 5 February 1993

On the eve of Labour’s local government conference, the party’s environment spokesman talks to Paul Anderson
“I understand how difficult it is to be a councillor,” says Jack Straw, Labour’s envi­ronment spokesman. “I was a councillor myself 20 years ago in Islington.”
Not that things are quite as they were in the ear­ly seventies. “The only problem we faced was spending money fast enough,” he says. “We used to have urgent housing meetings because the deadline for spending money was running out.”
Straw, now 46, has been MP for Blackburn since 1979 and a Labour front-bencher since 1980. But he is new to his current brief: from 1987 until John Smith’s Shadow Cabinet reshuffle last summer, he was Labour’s education spokesman. Many saw him move to environment as demotion, particularly as it was announced that he would be concentrating on local government, leaving the big green issues to Chris Smith. Bryan Gould, the previous environ­ment spokesman, had dealt with global warming as well as refuse collection.
Straw thinks otherwise. “Local government is a key power base for Labour,” he says. “We run ur­ban Britain, quite a lot of rural Scotland and Wales and a bit of rural England. Since we’ve been out of power nationally for 14 years, it’s the main experi­ence people have of Labour making decisions. How we run local government is central to Labour’s sur­vival and success.”
He admits, however, that most people find the experience of Labour in local government less than glamorous. “Partly as a result of the denigration of local government by the Tories and partly be­cause local councillors have had to manage their services in a defensive way, councillors have been seen to have a very prosaic role.” As well as expos­ing the Tories* attacks on local government, he says, he wants “to make local government exciting to people and relevant to what they think they can get out of their lives. Local government is more than just a service provider for poor people. Apart from all the services that everyone uses, the urban environment is something that affects everyone.”
Straw rejects the idea that the Conservatives have so reduced the autonomy and powers of local government that it has ceased even to be the “dent­ed shield” that Neil Kinnock talked of in the mid-eighties.
“I understand the problems,” he says. “But at any level of service, there’s an efficient, sensitive way of delivering it and an inefficient, insensitive way. Even within the current constraints, there are lots of ways in which Labour makes a difference. They may appear limited but they can be very im­portant.” He goes on to mention councils’ roles in education and social services and the ways in which their planning decisions and initiatives on transport can transform the built environment.
At the moment, however, his most immediate problem is not selling the idea that local govern­ment makes a difference but convincing a sceptical public that Lambeth, currently rocked by a giant corruption scandal, is not typical of Labour coun­cils. “I’m damned if we’re going to be tarred with the brush of Lambeth,” he says. “Especially as we cleared out the 13 semi-Trotskyist councillors. It is since the new leadership has been installed that ac­tion has been taken.” Labour will be using Lam­beth to warn people of the dangers of “ultra-left” politics, he goes on.
“Corruption, wherever it happens, whether in government or private business, needs to be stamped on firmly. It rips people off. There are at least as many examples of corruption in central government and in Tory authorities as in Labour authorities. The insinuation that Labour equals corruption is completely untrue.” All the same, he reckons that the Lambeth scandal should prompt a “thorough review” of local government accounting systems and that a new statement of ethics for councillors and officers needs to be drawn up.
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In the longer term, ways of improving the quality of councillors need to be found. Labour should take seriously all the options, from paying full-time councillors to introducing American-style elected mayors, says Straw. Rather than defending exist­ing local government structures, he says, “We must not forget that the status quo is a status quo creat­ed by the Tories.”
On policy, however, he is prepared to accept two of the key changes introduced by the Conservatives in recent years. Compulsory competitive tendering and the council tax would be retained by Labour, he says. “There is wide acceptance that the division between contractor and provider that CCT has pro­duced has been sensible. It has meant that in areas of basic services there are now clear definitions of what services should be provided. But, while I have seen the case for CCT for the provision of basic ser­vices such as refuse collection, I’m very sceptical about using it for core management functions. I’m not in favour of following the Tories’ agenda. They want wholly contracted-out public services.”
He takes a similar line on the council tax. “The underlying principle of council tax is OK – it’s a property tax. But some of its practice is bad. We’ll be working out how it can be changed so that it be­comes much more like what we wanted in the fair rates system.”
In particular, Labour would ditch the “capping” system to control the level of council tax. “On that Fm, absolutely clear,” says Straw. “Central govern­ment should not have control over what local au­thorities raise locally. What I want to see is a sys­tem in which central government makes its alloca­tion of grant based on what it thinks is needed and, beyond that, what an authority raises is a matter between it and its electors.” There should be annu­al local elections, and their timing should be changed so that voting takes place immediately af­ter council budgets are set.
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In recent weeks, of course, Straw has been making the headlines not for his pronounce­ments on local government finance but for speaking out on the monarchy and on Clause Four of Labour’s constitution, which commits the party to social ownership.
He says that he is amazed at the reaction to his speech calling for a Scandinavian-style monarchy, a conclusion he came to after reading Diana: Her True Story by Andrew Morton, “a remarkably subversive document that exposes a deeply decadent and detached system for which we are all paying”.
“It hadn’t occurred to me before that the royals were at the apex of a separate society of extremely rich people,” he says, adding that he has had as many supportive letters as critical ones in the fort­night since his speech.
On Clause Four, on which he has been writing a “small treatise”, he complains that he has been misrepresented. “It doesn’t follow that if you mention the words and suggest that there should be some alteration that you have the blood of the traitor within you. I passionately believe in the role of public ownership and control within the econo­my.
“But we have to develop a much deeper analysis of the defects of free markets. We ought to have the confidence to develop from that analysis a new set of words to express our beliefs for the next century. What I want to do is stimulate a debate about ide­ology, and Clause Four is at the heart of the argu­ment about what the party stands for.”
Straw’s willingness to rethink Clause Four caused the Sunday Times to describe him as “the leader of Labour’s new radicals” but on several of the key issues now facing the party he is what Wapping journalists usually describe as a conser­vative. Although he reckons that there is “a fair amount” to learn from Bill Clinton’s campaign in the United States – the Democrats won middle America, concentrated on the economy and re­sponded quickly to Republican attacks – he is no uncritical admirer of the American President or his programme. “Workfare is just barmy,” says Straw.
Similarly, on the thorny question of Labour’s re­lationship with the unions, he favours “close consti­tutional links”, while on electoral reform he is a bit­ter enemy of anything smacking of proportional representation for the House of Commons. On Eu­rope, he is one of the most sceptical members of the Shadow Cabinet.
So is Straw inconsistent? Perhaps, but the real problem is the categories used by the Sunday Times(along with the rest of the media and much of the Labour Party) to describe Labour’s current arguments. As Straw himself says, “The debate is damaged by the tendency to pigeon-hole people and issues and come up with pejorative terms for them. What we need is a cool debate, not one conducted in slogans and with megaphones.”

LABOUR MUST GO FOR AMS

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Tribune leader, 29 January 1993

Labour’s working party on electoral systems, chaired by Raymond Plant, is soon to publish its final report.

Given how long it has been deliberating – it was set up after the Labour Party conference in 1990, produced a weighty interim report in July 1991 and a smaller one last summer – it might seem strange that there is still no firm indication of what it will recommend as an electoral system ” for the House of Commons.

But it is really not too surprising. The implications for Labour, whatever the Plant commission comes up with, will be massive, and the members of the commission know it. The absence of any sign of a recommendation is an indication of continuing disagreement among people with strongly held views. The commission has narrowed its choice to one among three: no change, a version of the alternative vote system and a version of the additional member system. Each has its fervent champions and bitter enemies: none can command unanimous support.

So what is the way out of the impasse? Given the intensity of opinion on the matter, there is a temptation for the commission to avoid making a recommendation – which must also be felt by the Labour leadership. With plenty of other public rows already going on, a set-to on electoral reform might appear an unaffordable luxury.

Such sentiments are misguided. However painful it might be now for Labour to get off the fence on electoral systems, it will be worse if it does so closer to an election. And Labour has to get off the fence. The farcical refusal to spell out a policy in the last week of the 1992 election campaign made Labour look stupid and slippery. It must not happen again.

 So which of the options on offer should the Plant commission and the party go for? None is perfect, although all satisfy the requirement of maintaining the link between MPs and their constituencies and none would rule out the possibility of a majority Labour government.

In Tribune‘s view, the worst choice would be the one that looks at first sight the best hope of a compromise, a version of the alternative vote. It is not a proportional representation system, and thus has all the disadvantages of the status quo in yielding parliaments that do not accurately reflect the whole spread of opinion in the country. Worse, in any of its variants it would mean that many MPs were elected because they are considered least bad by voters, a recipe for ever-increasing blandness in politics, possibly the greatest enemy of honest democracy.

The real choice is between AMS and no change – and here the key question is whether or not to adopt the principle of proportionality as a goal of the system of representation. The great advantage of AMS is that it would yield parliaments that accurately reflect the whole spread of opinion in the country. Its disadvantage is that, as a consequence, it might give small parties of the Centre disproportionate influence.

The status quo, however, will by the next election have given the Conservative Party near-total control of the state machine for nearly two decades, with results we know all too well: the destruction of Britain’s manufacturing base and creation of a low-skill, low-technology economy, the endemic corruption of public life and the erosion of the pluralism on which democracy must be based.

In the circumstances, the risk that the Liberal Democrats might behave as the German Free Democrats do seems one worth taking. Labour should adopt AMS for the Commons without delay.

BOY WONDER: INTERVIEW WITH TONY BLAIR

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Tribune, 29 January 2003

The shadow home secretary talks to Paul Anderson about how he would like to see Labour modernise its appeal


Tony Blair has not had the easiest of rides of late. The MP for Sedgefield has been looked at askance by those who suspect his ambition or his politics ever since he was put on the Labour front bench by Neil Kinnock in 1984 at the tender age of 31. But in the past couple of months he has become a bogeyman of his party’s Left. John Prescott and Clare Short are only the most senior figures to have made barely veiled venomous public attacks on Blair.

The reasons for the intensification of the left’s dislike for Blair are complex. Long-standing resentments about his meteoric rise, which critics claim has more to do with his television-friendly good looks and middle-class manners than with anything more substantial, have been reinforced by his continued progress.

Since last year’s election defeat, Blair has landed the job of shadow home secretary, one of the three most senior front bench positions, has made it on to Labour’s national executive committee at his first attempt and has emerged as the clear favourite to succeed John Smith as Labour leader, particularly if Smith goes after losing the next election.

But what has caused the outbreak of Blairophobia at this particular juncture is something much more specific: his position on the relationship between Labour and the unions and his apparently boundless enthusiasm for learning lessons from Bill Clinton’s successful American Presidential campaign. Blair, for the Prescotts and Shorts, is the arch-moderniser who wants to cut Labour’s links with the unions, ditch the party’s commitments to the poor and move ever further to the right.

Unsurprisingly, Blair says that he is a little fed up with all this. He particularly rejects the idea that he is an uncritical admirer of Clinton who wants to import his methods and policies to Britain. “I simply thought it was sensible to see what could be learned from the Democrat victory,” he Says. “But, frankly, if we carry on debating what has been called by others, although never by myself, `Clintonisation’, then I think we’ll just waste our time. There are of course huge differences between the United’ States and here and huge differences between Labour and the Democrats.”

Nevertheless, he goes on, there is definitely something to learn from Clinton. “The Clinton team was tremendously effective, in having a central economic message around the notion of active government. The dedication to putting across that message, thee refusal to be diverted, is .a very important lesson for us.

“Secondly, some of the problems that the Democrats had, particularly that they seemed trapped with a declining base of support, are not dissimilar to the problems that Labour has faced here. The Clinton campaign reached out to a broader section of the population and we’ve got to do that too. Now how we do that, what policies we have, is going to be completely different.”

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If Blair is unhappy about the way his line on Clinton has been portrayed, he is positively annoyed by the way his opponents have characterised his attitude to union-Labour links. He has not been pressing the NEC working party on the subject, on which he sits, to go for divorce and an American Democrats-style settlement, he says. All he wants is a more democratic relationship, with one member one vote elections for the party leadership and for choosing Labour candidates, along with reform of the block vote at Labour conference.

“I think it is extremely important that Labour should not sever its relations with the trade unions,” he says. “What I do believe, however, is that we should make the democracy of our party as real as is possible, ‘”The idea that rna.’ tiying to distance Labour from the trade unions by advocating one member one vote is just extraordinary. To most people outside, the idea that we should select our candidates for the Labour Party on the basis of an individual franchise of members doesn’t seem a very revolutionary proposition.

“This has nothing to do with any idea that the trade unions are associated with the past or that they’re part of an ‘image problem’. What it’s actually about is getting a modern democracy for the Labour Party. To me it is simply common sense that that democracy should be based on one member one vote.” Blair says that he is “anti-block vote” but will not elaborate further on how he sees party conference being reformed. As far as union representation on local Labour Party general committees is concerned, “of course unions will maintain a role there and on the NEC”.

Most of the other members of the NEC working party have backed proposals for electoral collegesystems for leadership elections and selections, in which a share of the vote would be given to “registered supporters” recruited from among trade unionists who pay the political levy.

Blair thinks that the idea is unworkable and that it would be far better simply to cut subscriptions for full party members and recruit supportive trade unionists to party membership. “I certainly want to get more trade union levy-payers involved in the Labour Party,” he says. “My objection to the registered supportersscheme has been on the grounds of practicality. The motives behind it I fully applaud.

“But I think that the whole way we structure membership in the Labour Party is absolutely wrong. The high membership fee means that we’re going to end up with a small membership. I’d like to see us dramatically reducing the fee and going for a large membership.” Blair is waiting for the results of pilot schemes which will attempt precisely such a low-fee strategy before coming to final conclusions on the question of party organisation: if they don’t work, he says that he doesn’t rule out the possibility of a version of the registered supporters scheme being an acceptable compromise.

If Blair feels misrepresented on Clinton and on the unions, he nevertheless thinks that the fact that Labour is talking about its future is a healthy sign. “It would be absolutely bizarre if Labour did not conduct a debate after its election defeat,” he says. “After the election, the Tories went into a nosedive: it’s hardly surprising that Labour people took time out from the party’s debate to attack the Tories. But now the debate is beginning in earnest.”

There are, he believes, deep-rooted differences within the party about, how political strategy should be developed. “The real issue is whether you say: We’ve got these policies for women, these policies for ethnic minorities, these policies for the poor, these policies for trade unionists’ and so on and add all the minorities together in a sort of rainbow coalition to create a majority. That is just a false political perspective that’s dogged socialist and social democratic parties in recent years. I think you address the problems of the broad mass of people in the country and that you address people as individuals, not compartmentalised into various groups. For example, our central economic message has got to be the development of economic opportunity whether you’re employed or unemployed – not ‘here’s a package for those in work, here’s a package for those out of work’.”

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As far as his own portfolio is concerned, the key task is not so much taking on the big questions of constitutional reform as relating Labour’s approach to the law-and-order concerns of ordinary people. “It is important to show that we identify with the victims of crime,” he says.

“We should be giving our young people rights and opportunities and chances but we should also be demanding responsibilities. David Blunkett is saying much the same thing. Roy Hattersley took our policy quite a way but we’ve got to go further. That in no sense means embracing the Tory agenda on law and order.”

More generally, Labour now has to embrace the idea that it will have to change its approach in the run-up to the next election: the detail is less important, for now, than a commitment to flexibility of thinking and openness to innovation. “We’ve got to go beyond the traditional labels of left and right in the party. We should be prepared to take on board new ideas and consider them. The idea that the ‘left’ position in the Labour Party is that what we’ve done all the way along is fine, we’ve just got to do it with greater intensity – that is not radical. We should be prepared to open up the debate.

“We shouldn’t worry at the moment that the media will make something of it – of course they will. We’ve got to realise that, three or four years down the road, Labour, under John Smith’s leadership, has got to be in a position to ensure that what has happened at the last four elections is not repeated.” On that, it is difficult to disagree. Whether Blair has the recipe for success is, however, another question.

RAIDS CAN ONLY STRENGTHEN SADDAM …

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Tribune leader, 22 January 1993

Saddam Hussein is, as we all know, a brutal dictator. His regime is one of the most oppressive in the world. Worse, nothing seems to change it.
In the past two years, Saddam has sur­vived military defeat, creation of Kurdish safe havens, destruction of the worst of his war machine by the United Nations, sanctions and “no-fly zones” – and he is still as prepared to push his luck diplo­matically and militarily as he ever was. There can be no doubt that his behaviour in the run-up to last week’s raid on his country by American warplanes was de­signed to provoke a showdown.
Bui none of this provides an adequate rationale for the raids on Iraq. However frustrated the rest of the world might be with Saddam, a demonstration of Ameri­can airpower (backed rather half-heart­edly by Britain and France) is not the way either to undermine his power or to get him to change.
Indeed, the raids were precisely what Saddam needed to renew his credibility among his subjects as a defender of the Arab nation against the imperialist west. They were not full-scale war (which would be somewhat difficult for the allied governments to sell back home) but they were big enough to give fright (and kill civilians). Nothing could have suited Sad­dam better.
More important, the raids have only the weakest of justifications in international law. The “no-fly zones” in northern and southern Iraq that they were designed to enforce have not been backed by the UN: they were imposed by the US, Britain and France without any reference to the UN. Yet they seem to carry far more weight than many UN resolutions – particularly those on Israel.
In short, the raids have strengthened Saddam and reinforced the impression throughout the Third World that the west operates an imperialist policy based on double standards and flouting the law when it suits it. As such, they sum up per­fectly George Bush’s approach to foreign policy since he entered public life. Is it too much to hope that Bill Clinton really will turn out to be a new broom?
 … BUT WE SHOULD NOT KOW-TOW TO CLINTON
Bill Clinton’s inauguration was just the sort of feel-good event that every­one expected it to be. But he does not have much time to get things right. His victory has raised expectations across the board in America, particularly among those who have been hit by recession in the past couple of years. If he does not get the economy working again, and fast, his honeymoon will be short and the disillu­sionment deep.
Of course, no one knows whether he will succeed or not – a fact that makes much of the British Labour Party’s argument about what Mr Clinton can teach it little more than hot air. Within six months, Mr Clinton could be completely discredited, completely vindicated or, more likely, something in between.
Nevertheless, there are good reasons for working on the assumption that Mr Clinton will not work miracles. Most im­portant, the US economy is in a dire state and there are few indications that “Clintonomics” has any real answer to the economic challenges posed by the Japanese sphere of influence, to the de­cay of the inner cities or to the burgeon­ing budget deficit. His policies on health and welfare are unimaginative and con­servative.
But the problems do not stop with domestic policy. Mr Clinton has given only the vaguest of signs that he wants to change the basis of American foreign poli­cy away from the shabby realpolitik in­herited from the cold war years and be­fore. Most worrying, he has given good reason for the world to suspect that he will be even easier on Israel than his pre­decessor.
It will be a little while before we can judge Mr Clinton fairly on his record. But signs of his direction will be clear within three or four months. The European left can hope for the best, but it must also keep an open mind and avoid the tempta­tion to kow-tow to Washington’s new boss.

PRESS FREEDOM TRUMPS PRIVACY

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Tribune leader, 15 January 1993

For a change, the editors of the Sun and the Sunday Times are right. The new report on the press by Sir David Calcutt QC, widely leaked in last Sunday’s papers, makes recommendations that, if implemented, would seriously undermine the ability of the press to do the job it should do in a free society.
The most dangerous proposal is that the Press Complaints Commission be replaced by a new tribunal, consisting of a judge (appointed by the Lord Chancellor) and two lay assessors” (appointed by the Her­itage Minister), with powers to impose big fines on newspapers if they breach a statu­tory code of conduct.
The press is already over-deterred from tackling the rich and powerful by the costs of defending libel actions (to say nothing of the size of libel damages); it is already over-constrained by Britain’s ludicrous se­crecy laws. A government-appointed body with powers to decide what constitutes proper journalistic practice and to penalise newspapers that do not conform is an af­front to democracy. It should be opposed in Parliament and, if that does not work, its findings should be ignored by editors.
Other parts of the new Calcutt report are less worrying. Nevertheless, new criminal offences covering trespass, long-distance photography of people on private property and electronic surveillance could have a significant impact on investigative journal­ism, even if a “public interest” defence is allowed. They too should be vigorously op­posed.
This is not to claim that the attitude of the British press to privacy is blameless. But the breaching of privacy is not the press’s main fault, nor are the Calcutt mea­sures the best way of dealing with it.
There have been far fewer breaches of privacy than is popularly believed and the most famous (from Virginia Bottomley’s love-child to the “Squidgy” tapes) have in­volved public figures whose private lives are relevant to their public positions. Far more important than breaches of privacy are the concentration of press ownership, the lack of political diversity in the nation­al press and the political bias, cultural prejudice and trivialisation that characterise the tabloids – none of which figure in Calcutt
In any case, the costs of clamping down on press breaches of privacy, in terms of preventing exposure of real wrongdoing, are far greater than any supposed benefits: press freedom is more important than pri­vacy. The Calcutt report should be spiked without further ado.
Much the same goes, unfortunately, for Clive Soley’s Freedom and Responsibility of the Press Bill. Mr Soley is a decent and honourable man, and the idea behind his proposal, that newspapers and magazines should correct inaccuracies in reports, is a worthy one. The problem is the means proposed by Mr Soley to secure this end: the imposition on editors of a duty to correct inaccuracies, with a statutory, lay-dominat­ed Independent Press Authority being giv­en the power to adjudicate contested cases and, in the last resort, to take miscreants to court.
If Mr Soley’s bill became law, it would give another weapon to the nuisances and bullies who currently use the threat of libel proceedings to extract apologies from newspapers that have done nothing worse than annoy or embarrass. It should be op­posed by all supporters of a free press.

RETHINKING THE LEFT: INTERVIEW WITH CORNELIUS CASTORIADIS

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Tribune, 15 January 1993

In the second of Tribune‘s occasional series on key contemporary left thinkers, Paul Anderson talks to one of France’s leading libertarian left intellectuals
If the pundits who appear on The Late Show and write for the Sunday reviews pages are to be believed, the days of the politically engaged French intellectual are over.
The great figures who made Paris the centre of the intellectual left’s world for 40 years after the war – Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser – are all dead, the argument goes. The only intellectuals around nowadays in France either don’t care about left politics or else don’t matter.
This is, of course, partly true. With television in­exorably squeezing print culture, there is no doubt that intellectuals do not have the importance that they had 25 years ago. And, since communism lost its last shreds of credibility, Marxism went out of fashion and Francois Mitterrand’s Socialist gov­ernment became an embarrassment, the idea that intellectuals ought to be publicly identified with the left has taken a pounding.
But there are exceptions, and none more distin­guished than Cornelius Castoriadis, the Greek-born philosopher, psychoanalyst and political writ­er, now 70, who is the nearest to a guru that the European environmentalist libertarian left has. Not that he sees himself playing any such grand role. “I’m just someone who attempts in an unsatis­factory way to rise to the intellectual challenges of the time,” he says with a shrug.
Nor is his political engagement of the sort that one associates with French left intellectuals. He never fell for the French Communist Party (PCF) in the forties or fifties: indeed, he has been an implacable enemy of Stalinism for half-a-century. More recently, he did not throw in his lot with the Socialist Party (PS) after Mitterrand’s election to the Presidency in 1981: for Castoriadis, the PS, like social democratic parties everywhere else in Eu­rope, has been going through “intellectual decom­position” ever since the first oil shock of 1974-75 brought to an end the “30 glorious years” of Keynesian growth in the developed west.
“After one year of repeating stale slogans, the so­cialists became the bastion of liberal capitalism in France,” he says. “The only difference with Mar­garet Thatcher was their maintenance of the social safety net. But that was in the interests of the rul­ing class.”
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The “official left”, he says, has failed even to reassert the Keynesian message against the new right. When it comes to the really im­portant questions – the massive global inequalities in power and wealth, the global ecological crisis – mainstream socialists have been hopeless, failing utterly to grasp the scale of the problems.
Castoriadis’s sense of the inadequacies of ortho­dox social democracy goes back a long way. At first, it was expressed as Leninism: he joined the Greek communists at the age of 15, founded an opposition current in 1941 after the German occupation of Greece and in 1942 be­came a Trotskyist. After the war, however, he left his homeland for Paris and he began to leave Leninism behind, break­ing with the Trotskyists in 1948 over the nature of the Soviet Union and founding, with Claude Lefort and others, the journal Socialisme ou Barbarie.
S ou B ceased publication in 1965, was plagued by schism and never sold more than a few hundred copies of each issue. But the anti-Leninist, post-Marxist libertarian socialist “politics of self-activi­ty” which it developed from the mid-fifties, largely through Castoriadis’s essays under the pen-names Paul Cardan and Pierre Chaulieu (used because he was working as an economist with the Organisa­tion for Economic Co-operation and Development), was enormously influential on many of the activists who played a major role in the events of May 1968. Subsequently, S ou B had a big influence on the post-1968 new left throughout continental Europe, In Britain, Castoriadis’s work was published by the libertarian socialist group, Solidarity, but its im­pact was relatively small.
These days, some of his writings from S ou B re­cently collected in English in two volumes of Politi­cal and Social Writings, seem dated: they deal with a world we have lost, in which the PCF was almost hegemonic on the French left, when “actually ex­isting socialism” actually existed and fundamentalist Marxist catastrophism was left commonsense.
But much from S ou Bremains as fresh as when it was written: the sketch of a society run by self-managed workers’ councils in “On the content of so­cialism”, the sustained cri­tique of Marxian eco­nomics in “Modern capitalism and revolution”, the assault on Marx’s technological determinism in “Marxism and revolutionary theory”, a long essay which was to become the first part of Castoriadis’s magnum opus, The Imaginary Institution of Society.
Castoriadis now says that some of his earlier S ou B work was too Marxist in its assumptions, and for several years he has preferred to describe his goal as “autonomous society” rather than “social­ism” because “the term is irretrievably prostituted by the history of the last 70 years, both the history of communism and that of social democracy in the west”. But he sticks by most of what he did for the journal – even the advocacy of revolution. “The project I still pursue is a radical social transforma­tion,” he says. “And that’s what I call a revolution, not storming the Winter Palace or mounting barri­cades. In broad outline, I’m still committed to the project which I outlined in the fifties.”
After S ou B, Castori­adis co-authored by far the best instant book on May 1968, La Breche (The Break), with Claude Lefort and Edgar Morin, then in 1970 left his job with the OECD to study to become a psychoanalyst.
Since then, he has written on a bewildering range of topics. In the mid-seventies, in a series of incisive essays, he developed his critique of the “to­talitarian bureaucratic capitalism” of Soviet-type societies; at the same time, he was one of the first thinkers to take seriously the implications of the ecological crisis. Meanwhile, The Imaginary Insti­tution of Society (published in 1975 in France but not until 1987 in Britain), with its defence of the central importance of creativity in human life and its extraordinary intellectual scope, was widely recognised as a major work of social philosophy. Castoriadis has followed up its arguments in a sev­eral learned articles, published in English in two collections, Crossroads in the Labyrinth and Philos­ophy, Politics, Autonomy.
In the late seventies, Castoriadis played a key role in resisting the Parisian intellectual craze for structuralism (his demolition of Althusser’s Stalin­ist structural Marxism is second to none) and the “god-that-failed” rantings of the nouveaux philosophes. He has also written many polemics on French politics and psychoanalysis.
But he created the biggest furore in 1981 with a book, Devant la Guerre (Facing War), which took up the peren­nial Castoriadis theme of the critique of Soviet so­ciety, arguing that the Soviet Union was becoming a society dominated by the military and that it was pursuing an active pol­icy of expansionism towards Western Europe. The book earned Castoriadis, by now director of studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, the enmity of the peace movement, but he dismisses accusations that he adopted a cold-war position: if anything, he says, it now seems that he underestimated the importance of the military in the Soviet system during its last years.
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Today, with “actually existing socialism” a thing of the past, Castoriadis’s main political concern is once more the dire state of the de­veloped West. He is as scathing as he ever was about the depoliticisation and atomisaiion of the consumerist societies of “fragmented bureaucratic capitalism”, as he describes the developed west, talking of a “paralysis of political imagination and activity” now that it seems to so many people that there is no alternative to consumer capitalism.
With ecological crisis threatening to engulf us, he argues that it is essential that we find a new sense of responsibility for our actions – and the only way of achieving this is a simultaneous radical democratisation of society and transformation of the ways that people understand the meaning of their lives. “In current conditions, ecology and the radicalisation of democracy are inextricably linked,” he told Le Monde in a recent interview.
“I’ve written that the only way to avert an ecolog­ical catastrophe is to go back to 1929 standards of living,” he says. “We need a humanity that’s able to live with frugality. But people are not like that. They want more and more of everything. We must change the realm of imaginary significations that hold this together.
“People need to find within themselves new meanings for life and new things to die for – not just a change of car every two years. This is, frankly, a fantastic change.”

LABOUR’S DEPRESSING CLINTON CONTROVERSY

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Tribune leader, 8 January 1993

The current Labour row about what, if anything, the party should learn from Bill Clinton’s American Presidential victory is not really about Mr Clinton.
Everyone involved in the argument knows that Mr Clinton won a particular election in a particular place at a particu­lar time and that there is no way that his campaign can simply be copied in Britain. We do not have Presidential elec­tions, there is no British equivalent of Ross Perot and our political culture is radically different from America’s.
Various prominent Labour figures are actually at each other’s throats about what went wrong in the British general election last year and who is to blame.
On one hand, the “Clintonisers” – most prominently, Patricia Hewitt and Philip Gould, two of the key Labour strategists in the run-up to the election, but also a group around Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson who see themselves as “modernisers” of Labour’s message and organi­sation – are saying that the problem was that the party had not gone far enough in distancing itself from the trade unions and making itself trustworthy in the eyes of the affluent working class (in Clintonese, the working middle class). What is needed now, they argue, is more change along the lines pursued by Labour be­tween 1987 and 1992.
On the other hand, their opponents, led by John Prescott, say that the problem was that, precisely because of all the changes between 1987 and 1992, Labour came across in the run-up to the election as lacking all conviction. Far from contin­uing the 1987-92 process of change, Labour needs to return to its traditional values and do it with feeling.
The row is undoubtedly something of a spectacle in an otherwise boring time for Labour politics, and it is conceivable that it will yield something of substance be­fore it fizzles out. So for, however, it has generated more heat than light.
The self-styled modernisers, for their part, have nothing more substantial to of­fer than making Labour ever more bland in pursuit of elusive affluent working-class and centrist middle-class voters. They have failed to recognise that Labour needs to appeal not just to these voters but also to poor working-class voters, among whom Labour performed miser­ably last time. More importantly, they
have also failed to see that the main rea­son for “lack of trust” in Labour, con­stantly recorded by opinion polls of the party’s target voters, is that people can see through politicians who appear to be all packaging and no substance.
The traditionalists, meanwhile, have done little better. They have failed miser­ably to recognise that it is not enough to keep on playing the same old tunes and that Labour is desperately out of touch with young people and with affluent non-unionised workers in the private sector, particularly white-collar workers and particularly in the south-east. The tradi­tionalists have nothing better to offer than sentimental rhetoric.
In other words, Labour desperately needs to change, but not in the direction that the modernisers want. Instead of be­coming blander or retreating into yester­day’s slogans, the party needs a new cutting edge in politics, a new intellectual creativity and a new confidence. What is most depressing about the past week’s controversy is that no one apart from the proponents of an even more vacuous Labour Party seems prepared to put for­ward an alternative to business as usual. It is impossible to dismiss out of hand the possibility that the columnists who are crowing about Labour’s intellectual bankruptcy are absolutely right.