Author Archives: Paul Anderson

INTERVENTION TO SAVE SARAJEVO

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Tribune leader, 26 June 1992

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.

NO GAIN IN LIB-LAB VOTES PACT

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Tribune leader, 19 June 1992

The London School of Economics’ simulation of what  would  have happened in the general election if the electoral system had been dif­ferent, conducted by the ICM polling or­ganisation and published last week, is of course only a rough guide to the way that Britain would actually have voted if   the  first-past-the-post  system had been replaced by the additional member system, the alternative vote or the sin­gle transferable vote.
Apart from any considerations of mar­gins of error in opinion polls, even those which survey nearly 10,000 people, vot­ers would almost certainly have be­haved differently in a real-life election under a new system than they did when asked by the LSE’s pollsters to play a game of “what if?”.
Nevertheless, the LSE survey, commis­sioned in the expectation that there would be a hung parliament and that electoral reform would be at the top of the political agenda, is the best guide we have to the effects of electoral reform for Westminster elections. Its findings are directly relevant to Labour’s de­bates on electoral reform and, more sur­prisingly, on relations with the Liberal Democrats.
As far as electoral reform is con­cerned, the survey suggests that, of the two options for change currently being given serious consideration by Labour’s Plant Commission on electoral systems, the alternative vote and the additional member system, only the latter fully cor­rects the pro-Tory bias inherent in first past the post.
According to the survey, if the April 9 general election had taken place using AV, which retains single-member con­stituencies but requires voters to rank candidates in order of preference, the Tories would have emerged with a share of seats much larger than their share of the vote, a couple of seats short of an overall majority. Labour would have taken a seat less than it did under first-past-the-post.
By contrast, under AMS, in which MPs from single-member constituencies are “topped up” with MPs from regional lists, seats gained by all parties would have been close to proportional to votes cast. The Tories would have got 268 seats (down 68), Labour 232 (down 39) and the Liberal Democrats 116 (up 96), with Plaid Cymru and the Scottish Na­tional Party taking 18 between them (up 11).
These conclusions should reinforce the already strong case for Labour to reject the idea of changing to AV for elections to the House of Com­mons. The LSE survey shows that AV has no significant advantages over first past the post and all the disadvantages of non-proportionality. 
The Plant Com­mission should now explicitly rule out AV just as it has effectively ruled out the single transferable vote, which is favoured by the Liberal Democrats and would do away with single-member con­stituencies.
The next step should be a strong rec­ommendation of AMS, the only model to tackle the problem of proportionality at the same time as keeping single-member constituencies, in good time for a deci­sion at 1993 party conference.
But the survey should also make Labour banish any notion that it should enter into an electoral pact with the Liberal Democrats before the next election. The reason that the Tories would have done so well under AV is that more Liberal Democrat voters would choose a Tory as their second preference vote than would choose a Labour candidate. This means that an electoral   pact   in   which   the   Liberal Democrats   stood   down   in   Tory-held Labour target seats   would do Labour no good at all, and would possibly save several Tories’ skins.
The only anti-Tory electoral pact that might work would be a unilateral deci­sion by Labour not to stand in certain Tory-held Liberal Democrat target seats, but the political costs of such a gift to the centre, in terms of internal strife and Labour’s credibility as a national party, make such generosity distinctly unappealing.

EASY DOES IT? INTERVIEW WITH JOHN SMITH

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Tribune, 19 June 1992


Paul Anderson talks to the man almost certain to lead the Labour Party

“I’ve yet to be persuaded of the merits of a referendum on Maastricht,” says John Smith. “It was not our view that there should be a referendum prior to the Danish vote and I don’t think the Danish vote changes that as a matter of principle.”

The 53-year-old MP for Monklands East is treading delicately, and with good reason. The Danes’ rejection of the Maastricht treaty on European union has left its future uncertain and has blown open the debate on the future of Europe throughout the European Community.

Smith’s first task as leader of the Labour Party, which he is almost certain to be within a month, will be the difficult one of working out an approach to Maastricht that does maximum damage to the divided Tories at the same time as keeping Labour together. With signs of a potential split inside the Parliamentary Labour Party already apparent, he is understandably keen to keep all options open on parliamentary tactics.

He carefully emphasises both his enthusiasm for greater European integration and his criticisms of the Maastricht agreement.

On economic and monetary union, he favours creation of a single currency and a European central bank. But, aware of criticism of the deflationary effects of an over-valued Deutschmark, he does not rule out a realignment of currencies before monetary union. And he wants the central bank to be subject to stricter political control.

“The exchange rate mechanism of the European Monetary System is not a fixed-exchangerate system,” he says. “It’s adjustable. A general realignment could occur. Indeed, I rather anticipate there will be a realignment of some kind before we reach the point of decision on economic and monetary union.

“We would have preferred there to have been a more directly politically accountable regime for the central bank,” he goes on. “There was a contest between the Bundesbank tradition and the Franco-British tradition, and the Bundesbank model was the decision of the majority “However, there is a way in which we can strengthen democratic accountability and that is by giving Ecofin [the Council of Economic and Finance Ministers of the EC] a much more powerful role in carrying forward the economic policy of the Community. Article Two of the Maastricht treaty includes the objectives of social cohesion, solidarity, full employment and growth. Ecofin should assert an influence in favour of these wider economic objectives.

“Labour is very close to the French socialist government on this. Together with our socialist colleagues, we should be arguing for stronger democratic accountability and for wider aims of economic policy than the bankers would like to see. It’s a matter of building up the mechanisms of democratic political accountability as the system evolves.” On political union, Smith tempers his belief in closer EC integration with the assertion that he is not a European federalist.

“Federalism is a word that is charged with non-meaning in the European Community I’ve never been in favour of a European super-state. What we are building in the European Community is not something that’s analogous to any existing nation-state.”

Europe is not, of course, the only problem that will face Smith as Labour leader, nor is it the biggest. The party has just suffered its fourth general election defeat in a row and its morale is at an all-time low.

Perhaps predictably, Smith argues that there is “no reason for the party to be defeatist at the moment”, pointing to the substantial gains made on April 9 and the high calibre of Labour’s Shadow Cabinet and its new MPs. But, stung by criticism that he is the “business as usual” candidate, short of ideas and over-cautious, he is equally at pains to emphasise the need for “changes to broaden our appeal”. He promises a radical new approach to constitutional reform, a fundamental re-examination of Labour’s approach to the welfare state (overseen by a crossparty commission) and, perhaps most important, a reassertion of Labour’s claim to the moral and intellectual high ground.

“I’m going to be paying more attention to the philosophy of the party,” he says. “I’m a bit of an unashamed intellectual in that respect. I really do think that we’ve got to win the battle of ideas and take on the Right. We lost out badly in the seventies because we started losing the arguments. I start my politics with a set of moral propositions and I’m not going to hide that in the slightest. The party has got to speak very confidently on this.

The altruism has got to shine through.” In line with this, Smith rejects the argument that his redistributionist tax policies cost the party dear on April 9. “I don’t retreat an inch from the shadow budget,” he says. “I’m slightly puzzled by some of the criticism, especially when it has come from people allegedly on the left. rd like them to tell me how they would have done it differently. I’ve seen one or two contributions on this subject in Tribune which have caused me to raise my eyebrows slightly.

“I’m deeply troubled about the way in which western societies are developing. John Kenneth Galbraith , writes about it clearly in The Culture of Contentment: two-thirds of the people are not doing too badly thank you, but there’s one-third knocked out. The Labour Party cannot in good conscience turn away from that. But I want to get a wider consensus: there are decent people who don’t vote Labour yet who are troubled about it too. I want to reach out to them.”

Not all critics of Smith’s role as shadow chancellor in the run-up to the election have focused on his shadow budget: some have argued that his major failing was as one of the main architects of Labour’s industrial and employment policies. After Labour dropped its traditional interventionism in favour of a “supply-side” approach which emphasised education and training, the argument goes, the party appeared to have no way of getting Britain out of recession.

Smith says that the charge is unfair: Labour was interventionist, although “perhaps we undersold it a bit”, and he intends to keep things that way. “I would strongly dispute the idea that I am not an interventionist. The idea that the British economy, in particular its manufacturing side, is going to recover on its own, is misplaced.

“I’m a very strong supporter of development agencies because I think they can have a catalytic effect on a region. That is not command-economy-style intervention, directing from the top, but it’s nonetheless intervention. Similarly, a strong technology policy, in which we co-ordinate the activities of our science and technology institutes together with industry is vital.”

This said, education and training remain at the heart of his conception of industrial policy. “I see education as the great enabling instrument. I am shocked at the notion of youngsters not having training and stimulus. I see them leaving school at 16 and I see them a year later pushing trolleys round an Asda supermarket. That’s not good enough.

“Young Germans are getting the chance for proper training. We neglect it. I’m a missionary about this.” Smith is also concerned about the state of the British constitution. “It’s antiquated,” he says.

“We’re heading for a new century with a medieval House of Lords, for example, which is really intolerable. “I’m unhappy about the power of the legislature against the executive. I find myself not understanding what some of the people who talk a lot about parliamentary sovereignty in our European debates are actually talking about because it’s not as strong as it should be.

“I’m also worried about over-centralised government, the way that local government has been undermined, and I’m strongly committed to devolution. It’s not just a question of Scotland and Wales, it’s also the English regions. People want to touch power more closely, they want to be involved. Socialism for me is a decentralising and liberating philosophy.

“Finally, I’m in favour of a Bill of Rights. Labour should be a bastion of the individual against big government and big business. One of the ways of being that is to give people known legal rights which cannot be trampled upon.”

Electoral reform, however, “is more complicated”. “There’s a good and healthy debate going on within the party and I don’t want to prejudge it,” says Smith, although he praises the ,work of Labour’s commission on electoral systems, chaired by Raymond Plant, for writing “the best explanation of the issues that I’ve ever seen”.

Smith sounds similarly cautious on internal party affairs — partly, no doubt, because he knows he will soon have the unenviable job of getting the party and unions to agree to a new relationship. “We’re at a very interesting time in the development of the party internally,” he says enigmatically. “We’ve made great progress on one member one vote. Ordinary members are absolutely delighted that they’re able to cast an individual vote in the ballot for the leadership and deputy leadership. They will not wish to surrender these rights now, and they’re right. It’s a healthy and happy thing.” Would that everyone else agreed.

MAASTRICHT IS NOW UP FOR GRABS

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Tribune leader, 12 June 1992
The result of last week’s Danish refer­endum on the Maastricht treaty has killed the treaty in its present form. Of that there can be no doubt Maas­tricht took the form of an amendment to the Treaty of Rome and all amendments to the Treaty of Rome must be endorsed by all member states. A few thousand Danes put paid to that.
There is therefore no point, at least at this stage, in calling for a referendum on Maastricht or in wasting parliamentary time discussing ratification of Maastricht: Maastricht has fallen.
But this is not the end of the story. Al­though no one is quite sure yet of the me­chanics of the operation, it is certain that Maastricht will be resurrected in some form, probably by way of amending part of the Maastricht deal but possibly through some more thorough renegotiation, per­haps including changes to the Treaty of Rome to remove its awkward insistence on unanimity.
The British government, which holds the EC Presidency from next month, is do­ing all it can to ensure that only minor changes to the Maastricht treaty are agreed before another attempt is made to get the Danes’ assent. It is easy to see why. Maastricht without any changes is the best tike Government can hope for from a treaty on European union. It makes the fight against inflation the overwhelming priority in European macro-economic poli­cy. It allows Britain to opt out of common policies on employment rights. It empha­sises the role of the intergovernmental Council of Ministers in overseeing the European Commission, gives few new powers to the European Parliament, says nothing about “federalism” and makes much of the principle of “subsidiarity”, interpreted by the Tories as meaning that as much EC business as possible should be thrashed out behind closed doors by representa­tives of national governments.
The British government’s particular fear is that, if Maastricht is subjected to a more thorough renegotiation, Britain will be forced to accept measures to reduce the “democratic deficit” by granting substan­tial new powers to the European Parlia­ment. Far better, think John Major and Douglas Hurd, to opt for a quick fix, first adding an “explanatory memorandum” to the existing treaty emphasising the impor­tance of “decentralisation” and then get­ting the Danish government to hold an­other referendum later in the year.
This strategy is fraught with danger for the Tories. There is little support for the British position among the other 11 EC Governments (although what the others actually want is unclear). At home, anti-EC Tory backbenchers al­ready see an opportunity for wrecking any possibility of European federalism, with a parliamentary majority of only 21, Mr Ma­jor’s position is extremely shaky.
So how should Labour respond? It is clear that it cannot continue simply to tag along with whatever the government does: at the very least, Labour must insist that the government drops the Maastricht bill and submits another after amend­ments to the treaty have been agreed by the 12. But it would be foolish for Labour to leave it at that. There is a real possibili­ty of putting the government under seri­ous pressure on Maastricht, particularly on the Social Chapter and, more impor­tantly, on the crucial question of making the EC democratically accountable. Labour must not let it pass.
After this week’s meeting of the Par­liamentary Labour Party, it is clear that there is the potential for a consensus among Labour MPs to vote against Maastricht unless, first, the gov­ernment reverses its decision to opt out of the Social Chapter and, secondly, the treaty is made more democratic.
Here, decentralisation, although desir­able, is not in itself enough: it must be ac­companied by measures to democratise the EC at every level, especially at the cen­tre. Labour must argue consistently and loudly for a massive increase in the pow­ers of the European Parliament to rein in the Commission and the Council of Minis­ters. If it doesn’t get what it wants, it should do all it can to bring the govern­ment down.
Kaufman goes: good riddance

It is remarkable how quickly political reputations can change. During the gen­eral election campaign, Labour’s Shad­ow Foreign Secretary, Gerald Kaufman, was so invisible that he became an object of ridicule among political journalists. Last week, just a couple of months on, the same journalists greeted his announce­ment that he was retiring from the Shad­ow Cabinet with hymns of praise for his political skills.
There is no doubt that Mr Kaufman will be missed by Labour, and even those who have disagreed with him cannot deny that he has had his good moments in debate. He has even taken distinctive and princi­pled stands on some of the great issues of modern international politics, notably South Africa and Israel/ Palestine.
But it is unlikely that the history books will be as kind to him as his political obit­uarists. Mr Kaufman will be remembered as the man who got Labour to ditch uni­lateral nuclear disarmament and adopt a policy of keeping nuclear arms for as long as anyone else has them – a move com­pleted just weeks before the final collapse of Soviet communism which destroyed for ever any rationale for the British nuclear deterrent.
On Europe, Mr Kaufman’s deep-rooted Atlanticist hostility to the EC has been a major factor in denying Labour any coher­ent vision of the future of the continent. On Hong Kong after Tiananmen Square, he adopted a stance less principled than Paddy Ashdown’s. During the Gulf crisis of 1990-91, he meekly followed the govern­ment’s line. His pronouncements on eastern Europe were consistently timid and ill-informed before the collapse of commu­nism and have not improved since. He gave the impression that the leaders of last year’s coup in Moscow were people with whom the west could do business. And so one could go on.
Labour must replace Mr Kaufman with someone whose approach is governed less by considerations of Realpolitikand more by principle. It would also help if he or she had a worked-out idea of what Britain’s place in the world ought to be. Absence of vision has been at the root of most of Mr Kaufman’s many failings.

COMMON OWNERSHIP IS STILL AN AIM

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Tribune leader, 5 June 1992
“To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable dis­tribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common owner­ship of the means of production, distri­bution and exchange, and the best ob­tainable system of popular administra­tion and control of each industry and service.”
Clause Four part four of the Labour Party constitution was not the most ele­gantly phrased statement of political in­tent even When Sydney Webb formulated it in 1918: today, its language seems not just clumsy and vague but archaic.
But it does make two points very clearly. First, Labour is a party of redis­tribution: it does not believe that the in­equalities of wealth thrown up by capi­talism are acceptable. Secondly, Labour is a party of common ownership: it does not believe that the means of produc­tion, distribution and exchange should be owned by a small minority of people.
It is the latter point that has been most controversial since the mid-fifties, when many “revisionists’* on the Labour right concluded that the party’s com­mitment to common ownership – seen essentially as nationalisation – had been rendered obsolete by the Keynesian rev­olution in macro-economic manage­ment. With progressive taxation and an expansion of the welfare state funded by growth, they argued, a “mixed” economy could now deliver all that Labour wanted.
After the election defeat of 1959, Hugh Gaitskell decided that Clause Four had to go as a symbol of the party’s willingness to march with the times. He was de­feated by party conference, of course, and Clause Four stayed – but ever since it has been honoured largely in the breach, particularly when Labour has been in government. Since the mid-eighties Labour has spurned promises of nationalisation even when in opposi­tion.
One reason is simply that nationalisation has grown ever more unpopular among voters for most of the past 40 years. During the sixties and seventies, the nationalised industries came in­creasingly to be seen as bureaucratic, unresponsive and inefficient. The fierce hostility to nationalisation articulated by Margaret Thatcher’s Tories struck a rich seam of popular feeling. By the late eighties, with the collapse of the economies of “actually existing social­ism” and the palpable Improvement in the quality of service from the utilities privatised by the Thatcher govern­ments, nationalisation was virtually unsaleable.
But this is not the whole story. A deep­er reason for Labour’s move away from nationalisation has been a growing scepticism about its usefulness as a tool of economic policy. Today, there is widespread Labour support for the idea that the main public utilities (gas, wa­ter, electricity), the communications in­frastructure (railways, roads, telecom­munications) and perhaps energy (coal, oil) should be controlled, if not wholly owned, by the state. Most are natural monopolies, some are inherently unprof­itable yet necessary, and all need to be carefully planned in the interests of all.
But few would insist that traditional nationalisation is necessarily the best model for these industries, and virtually no one believes that an extension of na­tionalisation much beyond this infrastructural base would be effective in se­curing Labour’s goals of increased in­vestment in manufacturing, sustained growth and improvements in efficiency. Indeed, there is a consensus at the top of the party that Labour’s advocacy of such an extension of nationalisation would actually undermine the credibili­ty of its macro-economic policies be­cause it would scare off multinational corporations from doing business in Britain.
So should Clause Four at last be con­signed to the dustbin of history? If it could be interpreted only as a call for ever-increasing nationalisation on the model adopted by Labour between 1945 and 1951, the answer would be “yes”. But nationalisation is not the only form of common ownership – and whatever the limits on Labour’s aspirations to nation­alise, there should be no doubt about the continuing relevance of the project of extending other types of common ownership.
Producer co-operatives and other forms of employee ownership are em­powering, with huge advantages over traditional privately owned firms even in capitalist terms: they could play a massively increased role in the British economy. There are also strong argu­ments for extending the co-operative sector in housing and for expanding mu­nicipal ownership, particularly in trans­port. A self-managed, non-bureaucratic common ownership should be at the centre of Labour’s vision. Clause Four is not the millstone round the party’s neck that its detractors claim.

HOT AIR ON THE ROAD TO RIO

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Tribune leader, 29 May 1992
The United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development, which opens next week in Rio de Janeiro, is set to be one of the biggest political jamborees of all time: no one in politics or the media can resist the idea of a meeting to sort out the fate of the planet.
But it is unlikely that the Earth Summit will come up with the goods. On global warming, the central environmental issue at UNCED, the govern­ments of the industrialised and the de­veloping countries have completely dif­ferent priorities, with no sign that they are anywhere near a workable and substantive consensus on what needs to be done.
For the governments of the industri­alised countries, UNCED is essentially a matter of public relations. They all want to give their voters, worried about the environment, the impression that they are “doing something” about global warming. But, also for electoral reasons, none of them will agree to a radical cut in their own countries’ use of fossil fuels, which is the single most effective thing that could be done about the “green­house effect”. (The United States and Britain go even further: they won’t agree to any significant action on carbon diox­ide emission reductions.)
Far better, think the powers-that-be in the industrialised countries, to let their voters keep their high-energy-consump­tion lifestyles and to concentrate instead on forcing the developing world not to cut down forests or follow the industri­alised countries’ model of development.
Understandably, the governments of the developing countries do not see why they should take the lion’s share of responsibility for action to combat global warming, particularly when the rich countries caused the problem in the first place.
There is a widespread feeling that, af­ter a decade of unremitting austerity imposed by the World Bank and the Inter­national Monetary Fund as a “cure” for indebtedness, the poor countries are now being asked to forgo forever their dreams of affluence. It is hardly surpris­ing that Third World Governments want Rio to reassert the importance of devel­opment and the need for global redistri­bution of wealth and power.
The upshot of all this is that UNCED will probably come up with little more than vague declarations that develop­ment is very important and that every­one ought to do all they can to preserve forests and reduce greenhouse gas emis­sions. After Rio, it will be back to busi­ness as usual.
But it would be wrong to dismiss the Earth Summit as a complete waste of time. Even if it produces nothing but hot air, the simple fact that it is happening has already given a tangible boost to the public profile of the issues it was set up to address. That can only be welcome. Throughout the industrialised world, global development and the burgeoning environmental crisis are generally out of the po­litical limelight, a concern only for ex­perts and a small group of activists. The complacent consensus among politicians and pundits – apparently borne out by events – is that elections in the industrialised countries are decided by taxation policies and the voters’ sense of econom­ic well-being.
In the normal course of things, politi­cians steer clear of suggesting that the consumer society as we now know it is dependent on the pauperisation of the Third World and incompatible with the survival of the planet.
This is true of left-wing as well as right-wing parties. Labour might be better than the lories on the big environmental issues and develop­ment (it would be hard to be worse), but it remains dangerously cautious and am­biguous. At the election, Labour offered no more on global warming than a promise to stick to the EC’s target of re­ducing carbon dioxide emissions to 1990 levels by the end of the decade.
Despite an undoubted enthusiasm for public transport, the party has said nothing to suggest that it wants dramat­ic reductions in car use. Its energy poli­cy, despite gestures in the direction of renewable sources of energy, remains based on fossil fuels. On development, Labour’s commitment to increase aid to the 0.9 per cent of gross domestic prod­uct recommended by the UN was hon­ourable but, frankly, a drop in the ocean. The scale of the problems of global warming and development are such, however, that the politicians in the de­veloped world win have to grasp the net-or later – and the sooner the better. If all the hype surrounding UNCED increases the pressure on the politicians to cease beating about the bush, it will have been worth it.

A NEW DEMOCRATIC RECIPE FOR EUROPE

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Tribune leader, 22 May 1992

As Tribune went   to   press,   it seemed that, despite the frantic efforts of the Labour Whips, there would be a substantial backbench rebellion on Thursday night against the Labour leadership’s decision to abstain in the vote on the Maastricht treaty, with some diehard pro-European MPs voting with the Government in favour and a  rather larger group voting against.
The rebellion is a welcome sign that, for a little while anyway, Labour MPs are not going to swallow everything the leadership gives them. More important­ly, it also shows that Labour’s fragile pre-election consensus on Europe is wholly inadequate as a basis for ap­proaching the next five years.
Labour’s policy on the EC in the past couple of years has been a fudge de­signed to keep everyone in the Parlia­mentary Labour Party happy. On eco­nomic and monetary union, Labour agreed in principle to the creation of a single European currency and a Euro­pean central bank. 
That pleased the Euro-enthusiasts. But to keep the Euro-sceptics on board, these commitments were hedged around with qualifications. The central bank would have to be su­pervised by Ecofin, the Council of Eco­nomic and Finance Ministers of the EC countries, and monetary union would be backed only when “real economic con­vergence” had taken place.
On political union, the story was the same. Labour argued for increased pow­ers for the European Parliament (but not at the expense of national parliaments) and an increased role for qualified majority voting in the Council of Ministers. But it stood firmly against the creation of a European de­fence community, arguing that NATO should continue to be the basis for Britain’s security. It also rejected the idea of a “European federal super-state”. “Widening” the EC to include the Euro­pean Free Trade Area countries and the ex-communist states of East-Central Eu­rope was given as much priority as ”deepening” the EC of the 12.
The fudge was enough to keep the peace in the party last November, when only 16 backbenchers (an incoherent mixture of Campaign Group left-wingers and right-wing Keynesian Atlanticists) rebelled against the govern­ment’s motion on Maastricht. Now, how­ever, it looks threadbare. A new consen­sus on Europe is needed.
That might seem a tall order. But there are signs that, despite the appearance of for greater labour division on Europe than at any time since the mid-seventies, there is the basis for a wider and more substantive agreement within the party than ever before.
Put simply, the argument has shifted since the mid-seventies. No one really believes now that Britain could or should get out of the EC. Hardly anyone believes even that the pound should be taken out of the exchange rate mecha­nism of the European Monetary System. The days of a medium-sized nation state being able to control its own destiny by means of Keynesian demand management are accepted to be over.
Labour’s debate is not about whether there ought to be management of the economy on a Europe-wide level but about what sort of economic policies Eu­rope should adopt and, most important­ly, how the process of Europe-wide economic policy-formation should be made democratically accountable.
Of course, there are a multitude of dif­ferent positions on all these questions. But there is also much common ground. Everyone, regardless of his or her atti­tude to Maastricht, agrees that economic and monetary union must be matched with convergence of standards of social provision across the EC.
Everyone, regardless of his or her views on devaluation of sterling, also agrees that common European economic and monetary policies should not only be about the establishment and mainte­nance of a stable anti-inflationary framework but must also involve pursuit of growth and the fullest possible em­ployment throughout the EC. There is a general sense on all sides that EC execu­tive institutions, particularly the pro­posed European Central Bank, must be made much more democratically ac­countable. There are near-universal worries about over-centralisation of power.
What this points to is the feasibility of a Labour approach to the EC that em­phasises the importance of Europe-wide alternative economic strategies and makes its central thrust the radical democratisation of all Europe’s institu­tions. That means arguing for massively increased powers for the European Par­liament, particularly over the central bank, and a democratically accountable European executive, with a strong em­phasis on maximising decentralisation of decision-making.
In other words, there is in Labour’s current confusion the germ of a coherent vision of a democratic federalist future for Europe. It would be a tragedy if the leadership turned its back on such a vision because it mistakenly thought that a new fudge would guarantee a qui­eter life.

NEW BLOOD NEEDED ON COUNCILS

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Tribune leader, 15 May 1992

Several   leading   Labour   politi­cians have dismissed the party’s dismal performance in last week’s local elections as a simple matter of Labour voters not bothering to turn out so soon after the disappointment of the general election result.
There is some truth in this, and even more in the idea that Labour Party members in many areas were too demor­alised by the defeat and its aftermath to campaign. But it would be wrong to blame the debacle of May 7 entirely on that of April 9.
In several of the councils where Labour did worst, it did not deserve to do any better, simply on the basis of its dire record in office.
The best Labour councils are indeed shining examples of efficiency and responsiveness but in many areas (much of the West Midlands, for example) Labour local government is lacklustre and incompetent. In a few it is simply corrupt and nepotistic.
This is nothing new. Ineffectual or rot­ten Labour councils (most but not all of them Right-wing) have been a feature of British political life for as long as any­one can remember, and for long periods local boss politics was the rule rather than the exception in large swathes of the country.
On the whole, Labour today has clean­er hands than for most of the past 50 years, which says much for the party’s capacity to renew itself from the roots up. Since the early eighties, many of the worst old right machines have been swept aside by party members sickened by the abuse of council office.
There are, however, good reasons to wonder whether this healthy process will continue in the future. Labour’s ability to renew itself in local government has depended on there being a constant stream of vigorous young peo­ple joining the party, getting worked up about the way the local council operates and organising to get rid of the guilty men. That stream has all but dried up in most places and, even where it hasn’t, Labour parties are finding it difficult to interest anyone in becoming a council­lor now that the powers of local govern­ment have been so drastically reduced by the Tories.
Unless Labour finds some way of at­tracting new blood, Tammany Hall poli­tics will become the norm again.

CLASS POLITICS IS NOT OVER

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Tribune leader, 15 May 1992
A consensus is slowly emerging from Labour’s centre-left and right about the way forward. Tony Blair says that Labour should be the party of the “individual against the vest­ed interests that hold him or her back” and Robin Cook declares that Labour should “stand up to big business, pri­vate or public, on behalf of the con­sumer”.
There, is nothing wrong with Labour making a populist appeal to the “little man”, even if such rhetoric comes strangely from someone like Mr Blair, an architect of Labour’s 1987-92 strategy, which made a virtue of not attacking vested interests in the City of London, the military-industrial complex and elsewhere.
But talk of redefining the left’s pro­ject as defending “the individual”, seen essentially as “a consumer”, from “vest­ed interests” is not just a plea for populism: it is also, implicitly, a call to jetti­son the idea that people’s common expe­rience as workers should be the most important factor in mobilising their sup­port for a left party.
Mr Blair and Mr Cook are effectively saying that the days of a party based on the working class (even if it also attracts other voters) are over. The upshot is that Labour must ditch its links with “producer interests”, otherwise known as the trade unions, if it is to survive and prosper.
This is an increasingly popular view among the chattering classes, but it is profoundly mistaken.
Of course, the manual working class has declined and white-collar workers tend to identify themselves as middle-class. Certainly the consumer society has transformed everyone’s expecta­tions of life outside work.
But employment remains the single most important aspect of most people’s everyday lives; class remains the single most important determinant of political behaviour; the trade unions, for all their faults, remain the single most important way in which Labour can keep in touch with and mobilise manual workers.
Labour does have to make itself more attractive to large groups of voters whom it has railed to attract, and one way is to become a party which defends consumers. Another is to embrace elec­toral reform wholeheartedly, adopt a much greener environmental policy and take an uncompromisingly pro-Euro­pean federalist stance – not because all this might make it easier to work with Paddy Ashdown but because it is right and would further squeeze the Liberal Democrat vote.
(Mr Ashdown’s call last weekend for Labour to join him in building “a non-socialist alternative to the Conserva­tives” is a desperate attempt to find a role for his party. It is entirely irrele­vant to Labour’s need to think through how it can win the nest general election and should be shunned without reservation.)
There is also a strong case for Labour to be much more imaginative on a whole series of questions, from European secu­rity to the future of cities, which it has hardly addressed so far.
But Labour needs to broaden ha support without destroying its base. The trade union link should be radically democratised, not severed, and the par­ty’s appeal to voters’ interests as work­ers needs to be augmented and mod­ernised, not abandoned.

SAFETY FIRST IS A RISK TOO FAR

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Tribune leader, 9 May 1992
The preliminary report on the gen­eral  election campaign  by Larry Whitty, Labour’s general secretary, has come in for a lot of stick in the week since it was presented to the par­ty’s National Executive Committee. Sup­porters of Bryan Gould have described it as a “whitewash”, complaining that it skates over criticisms of the organisa­tion and content of the campaign, and others have denounced it as superficial. Some of this criticism is justified: the document does not have enough detail on several key questions, notably the ef­fects of Labour’s taxation policy, and barely mentions others, for example the role   of  the   Shadow   Communications Agency in the campaign organisation, which many believe was too great.
But on the whole the criticism is un­fair. Given Mr Whitty’s brief, to assess Labour’s performance in the four weeks before election day, he has not done a bad job. He correctly identifies Labour’s main problem during the campaign – a late swing away from the party in the last couple of days before April 9 – and rightly cautions against blaming any specific event or failure of the campaign before the last few days for what hap­pened, although he is critical, albeit mildly, of the national campaign’s clum­sy handling of tax, health, education and constitutional reform, and he is cutting about the triumphalist rally in Sheffield a week before polling day.
He praises Labour’s organisation and its concentration on key seats, which in­deed yielded impressive results, and he argues, again rightly, that Labour’s poor showing among older women and younger men needs fuller analysis, as do its lacklustre performances among its core voters (council tenants, semi-­skilled and unskilled manual workers and the unemployed) and in Scotland. It is not a masterpiece of political analysis, but then it was not intended to be. For what it is, a preliminary report on what went wrong, concentrating ex­clusively on the election campaign prop­er, it is difficult to imagine what Mr Whitty could have done very differently. The campaign was a good one and the party cannot make scapegoats of the campaign organisers for the defeat.
This is not, however, to argue that Mr Whitty’s paper should be the last word on Labour’s defeat. However well he has done his job, there is another to be done. The party needs to look long and hard at what happened before the campaign it­self started.
The election might indeed have been lost as a result of a late swing away from Labour caused by “general perceptions of the party”, in particular the ideas that the party’s leadership was not up to scratch and that a Labour government could not be trusted.
* * *
But this does not mean that there was anything Labour could have done differently in the few weeks before the election radically to im­prove its performance.
Deep-rooted perceptions of compe­tence and trustworthiness are built up over years, not weeks. At the very least, the post mortem needs to expand its terms of reference to take in the whole of the past five years.
If Labour’s tactics need to be chewed over at greater length, its strategy needs to be subjected to a thorough, no-holds-barred critique. Better still, the party could open up a discussion of its values, its culture, its very raison d’etre.
* * *
Unfortunately, however, there is little indication of willingness to engage in anything quite so interesting at the top of the party. John Smith is now almost certain to be the next party leader. There are some hope­ful signs in his manifesto for the leader­ship campaign, launched last week: he is, he says, in favour of a serious discus­sion of the way forward, he has an open mind about constitutional reform, he wants to democratise the party, he will be an “accessible” leader. His proposed all-party commission to examine social justice could be an exciting forum for new ideas.
But the general impression given by his manifesto remains that of “business as usual”: the discipline of the exchange rate mechanism, the importance of re-distributive taxation and supply-side measures as the core of macro-economic policy, going with the flow on Europe. It is a decent, solid social democratic pack­age, completely consistent with Labour’s thinking in the past couple of years, probably election-winning – if only we were fighting the election we have just lost.
If Labour had fought the 1992 election on an uncompromisingly traditional leftist manifesto, if Labour had been ob­viously influenced by the 1968 genera­tion’s libertarianism, if it had even just done a little better than it did on solid, decent, cautious redistributive austerity social democracy – if it had not been as it was, Mr Smith’s approach might have been just the ticket. As it is, Labour looks as if it is hanging on to nurse. Safety first fits the mood of the elec­torate today, perhaps, but it is already looking like a high-risk strategy for the next election.