Author Archives: Paul Anderson

Labour has got off to a tremendous start in this election campaign. Neil Kinnock’s first major speech of the campaign at the party’s Scottish conference in Edinburgh last Friday made John Major’s effort at the Tory local government conference the next day look wooden and unconvincing.

On Monday, John Smith’s shadow budget trumped Norman Lament’s “real” budget and the Tories* persis­tent jibes that Labour would increase taxes for all: only the most easily led will now believe the Tory claims. It also knocked the Liberal Democrats’ manifesto launch from the top slot in the television news. Mr Smith’s effi­cient demolition of Mr Lamont on Monday night’s Panorama was a joy for Labour supporters to behold.

On Wednesday, when both Labour and the Tories launched their manifestos, the Labour politicians looked buoyant while their Conservative counterparts appeared lacklustre. More important, Labour’s pro­gramme appeared sensible and attractive, the Tories’ absolutely threadbare. At the national level, Labour has seized the initiative, making the Tories look like unin­spired and uninspiring losers. Even such hardy profes­sional politicians as Douglas Hurd, Christopher Patten and Michael Heseltine seem to have lost their touch, while Mr Major himself, supposedly the Tories’ greatest electoral asset, is clearly out of his depth. This week’s Tory party political broadcast was utterly unconvincing.

But it is not just a matter of Labour doing well in what Tony Bonn once described as the constituency of Television Central. By all accounts, the party’s ‘head­quarters in Walworth Road is operating with an un­heard-of breezy enthusiasm. More important, Labour is also doing extraordinarily well on the ground. In seat after seat, local Labour Parties are reporting that they have taken the campaigning initiative: first on to the streets with leaflets, first to get the posters out, first to canvass.

In many places, including many of its target marginals and, remarkably, several inner-city areas where pessimists believed Labour’s organisation to be moribund, Labour has been the only party with any vis­ible presence in week one. The Tories seem incapable of anything so far, apart from computerised direct-mail shots and expensive (and easily amended) advertise­ments on hoardings. Labour is more optimistic than at any time since 1974. We all think we’re going to win.

But it would be wrong to take anything for granted. High morale can be useful for winning general elec­tions, but only if it inspires party members and sup­porters to go out and do the hard graft. And there is still a lot of hard graft to be done. A good start is better than a bad one – and so fear Labour is doing much bet­ter than in 1987, when its campaign was widely ad­mired – but a couple of polls showing a five-point Labour lead do not guarantee the election result.

In the wake of the shadow budget, the Tory tabloids have shaken off the uncertainty of last week, which saw even the Sun pronouncing Mr Lamont’s £2-a-week giveaway a flop, and have unleashed a ferocious assault on Labour. By the weekend, Labour’s mood could all too easily be punctured if it turns out that Tuesday’s Harris poll in the Daily Express, giving the Tories a three-point lead, was not a freak.

Even if the polls have swung in Labour’s favour, there are plenty of obstacles to be overcome before we can be sure of Labour victory. It is probably best to keep the champagne on ice.

And so, at long last, we know for certain that the election is on April 9. John Major’s announcement on Wednesday means that the tedious phoney war is over. Now the battle can begin in earnest.

This election is a make or break election both for Britain and for Labour. If the Tories were to win again, the country would face up to five more years of eco­nomic mismanagement, sleaze, contempt for democra­cy, obstructionism in Europe and crumbling public ser­vices. Labour, having lost four elections in a row, would be disastrously broke and demoralised. It is essential for Labour and for the country as a whole that it wins. Labour might well be fighting this election on policies somewhat different from those that Tribune would have preferred. But that is as may be. Along with party members of all persuasions, Tribune knows that a Labour government is the only hope for getting Britain back on to its feet again economically, the only hope for a fairer and more humane society, the only hope for modernising our creaking constitution.

Luckily, Labour is well placed to win. The effects of the Tories* assault in January on Labour tax policies has worn off, and this week’s budget was a damp squib. Labour is now 3 percentage points ahead in most opin­ion polls, and governing parties tend to lose support during election campaigns.

There is, however, no room for complacency. The opinion polls are desperately close, and every vote will count. The election could be won or lost during the campaign. As Larry Whitty said a couple of weeks ago, the efforts of Tribune readers could make all the differ­ence. It’s time to get those fingers out.

Norman Lamont sprung a surprise in his budget on Tuesday: instead of simply reducing the basic rate of income tax by Ip or 2p, as everyone had ex­pected, he reduced the tax rate from 25p in the pound to 20p for the first £2,000 of taxable income. Most peo­ple in work will get £2.64 a week extra in their wage packets.

That made Neil Kinnock’s job in replying to the bud­get address on Tuesday afternoon just a little more dif­ficult than it would have been if Mr Lamont had done what he had been predicted to do. Introducing a lower band of tax for the first £2,000 of taxable income is bet­ter targeted on the low-paid than a Ip or 2p reduction in the basic rate: it is less easy to portray as a handout to the already well-off.

It is, nevertheless, just as much an attempt at elec­toral bribery as the Ip or 2p would have been, and Mr Kinnock was right to describe it as such. And, despite the Tories’ crowing, it will almost certainly prove a sin­gularly ineffective bribe. A Ip or 2p reduction in the ba­sic rate would have put significant amounts of money (more than a fiver a week, in other words) into the pockets of many skilled working class and lower middle class voters – the very people that will determine the outcome of the election in the key marginals.

For these moderately affluent voters, £2.64 is peanuts, the equiva­lent of a packet of cigarettes or a couple of pints of beer or a takeaway Chinese meal. It looks even more measly after the effects of raised excise duties are taken into account. It is emphatically not an election-winning bribe. Labour’s campaign has been given some unex­pected help.

For most of the newspapers, what mattered about last Fri­day’s Labour rally in Swansea, on the eve of the Wales Labour Party’s conference, was ei­ther devolution or the running ar­gument over tax cuts and public spending.

“Kinnock’s pledge: Welsh assem­bly promised in his first term of government,” proclaimed the front page of the Cardiff Western Mail on Saturday, above a report on the Labour leader’s speech the previ­ous evening. The Independent and most of the other London papers found great significance in Kinnock’s promise that a Labour gov­ernment would borrow not to pay for tax cuts but for investment.

Of course, these were both real stories. Kinnock had never before been quite as clear on the timing of the proposed Welsh assembly, nor had Labour politicians previ­ously spelled out quite so explicitly that their objection to the Tories’ plans to borrow to pay for tax cuts was not an objection to borrowing as such.

But there was more to the Swansea rally than that, at least in the eyes of the 1,000-plus party faithful packed into the city’s Guildhall to listen to the speeches and cheer. To them, the rally marked the official start of Labour’s election campaign, not just for Wales but for the rest of Britain too. In many ways they were absolutely right.

That might seem just a little bold. On one hand, there has been no end of beginnings for Labour in the past couple of months: the launch of Made in Britain, the eco­nomic policy document, the rally in York, the local government confer­ence. On the other, nobody knows for certain whether another launch will be needed a month hence if John Major decides to postpone the election until May.

But Swansea was special. Labour for the first time laid out in public its package for the elec­tion campaign, and it did so with a conviction that has eluded it for much of the pre-election phoney war.

Kinnock’s speech was long, at times prolix, but unexpectedly ag­gressive and populist. He was al­most frighteningly ebullient, and he hammered home his theme with great force: the Tories are re­sponsible for the worst recession in living memory – and now they are on the run.

Kinnock made a particular point of attacking Major in person (an attack echoed later by Bryan Gould, who told the rally that “be­ing a nice guy isn’t enough to be a good Prime Minister”). 

Labour has clearly decided that the best way to defend itself against Major’s personal popularity u to repeat in­sistently that he cannot escape the blame for the mess the country is now in, to challenge him again and again to take part in a televised debate with Kinnock.

In similar vein, the party has decided to take on the Tories directly on tax and public spending. Kinnock was unashamedly redistributionist in rhetoric. His answer to the expected tax-cutting budget was simple: the government’s promise of a penny or two off the basic rate, paid for by borrowing, was a simple electoral bribe.

“They’re putting Britain in hock to keep themselves in office,” he said. The key difference in the coming election was between Tory bribers and Labour builders”. “We are the builders!” he exclaimed, and brought the house down.

Much of this was unremarkable – “standard campaign-trail stuff”, as the man from the BBC re­marked to me – and there is no doubt that Kinnock, on home ground, was playing to the audi­ence’s need for a morale boost be­fore the grisly business of canvass­ing in the wind and rain begins in earnest.

But the emphases in his speech have a wider significance. The idea that Labour should sit tight, stay uncontroversial and focus all its efforts on training and the National Health Service seems at last to have been abandoned. There is nothing wrong now with sounding egalitarian, even at times left-wing.

This turn to ideology is symbol­ised (ironically in view of his past reputation) by the elevation of Roy Hattersley to a prominent position in the campaign. After a week of high-profile pronouncements, he was in Swansea on Saturday for a starring role in the conference proper, reinforcing Kinnock’s as­sault on the Tories’ tax-cutting plans.

This is not to suggest that train­ing and the NHS will not be play­ing a big part in Labour’s cam­paigning. Tony Blair opened the proceedings on Friday night with a vigorous attack on the govern­ment’s neglect of training and Robin Cook got the heartiest re­sponse after Kinnock when he wound up the rally with a stinging denunciation of the Tories’ health policies.

Some of the most enthusiastic applause came after he declared: “I do not take back one word we said during the Momouth by-election” on the Tories’ plans to privatise the NHS.

But Labour has decided to adopt a strategy of assault on all fronts in an attempt to open up the four-point lead it needs to stand a good chance of being able to form a ma­jority government after the elec­tion. In Swansea last Friday, with the polls indicating that Labour had clawed back the advantage that the Tories had gained in Jan­uary with their attack on Labour’s tax proposals, Kinnock and his col­leagues gave the strong impression that they really believed Labour could make it.

By the end of the evening, some of their self-confidence had rubbed off on the audience. Who knows, it might yet take the whole country by storm.

One thing we’re unlikely to witness in the coming election campaign is Labour’s general secretary appearing before the press to announce that the National Executive Committee has full confi­dence in the party leader, as Jim Mortimer did so memorably in 1983.

That sort of thing just isn’t the party’s style any more. Apart from being rather more careful about what is said in public – some say exces­sively so – Labour has decided that elected politi­cians will play all the public roles in the cam­paign. Larry Whitty, who took over from Mor­timer in 1985, will be keeping out of the lime­light. “I’ll be running the machine here,” he says, sitting in his office in Labour’s Walworth Road headquarters.

Whitty seems confident that the machine will function smoothly. “There are obviously some things one leaves to the last minute in terms of the precise sequence of themes in the campaign,” he says. “But logistically and resource-wise we are very well prepared indeed. We had a false start for last June and a false start for Novem­ber. We’re better prepared now than we were for either of those.

“We’re clear how we’re going to run the cam­paign nationally – we’ve just set up the political authority for the campaign. The detail will depend on when John Major calls the election.

“At local level, I think the situation is consid­erably better than it was in the middle of last year. We still, of course, need more people on the ground. There’s pretty good organisation in most of .our key seats but we can always do better with more people mobilised. We know more about the key seats, we know more about the kind of cam­paigns we can run in those key seats than we did in 1987 and I think we’re fairly well-geared to ensure that they maximise their potential.”

Labour is planning to spend more than £6 mil­lion on the campaign, compared with £4 million in 1987. That is a lot of money, but it is far less than the Tories are expected to spend in their at­tempt to retain power. Some reckon they could splash out as much as £20 million, but most esti­mates of Tory plans are around the £15 million mark.

Much has been made by the media of Labour’s attempts to raise cash using American-style political fundraising techniques – direct mail, tele­phone fundraising, credit cards, financial ser­vices packages for members and, most controver­sially, £500-a-head dinners, the second of which took place last Thursday at the Park Lane hotel in Mayfair, netting the party some £150,000.

But for all the success of such methods, the source of most of the general election war-chest is the traditional one. “The bulk of the general” election fund will come from the unions, as previously,” says Whitty. Unlike in 1987, however, union contribution will not turn out at the minute to be less than expected, nor will the bull of it end up being provided by a handful of unions. One of Whitty’s most important initiatives as general secretary was to persuade the unions that a proportion of their affiliation fees should go automatically into the party’s election fund.

“The restructuring of affiliation fees in 1988 means that we’ve got a guaranteed income from the union side which is equitably shared among the unions,” he says. “We don’t have to go cap-in-hand to the unions: it’s part of the constitution that they pay towards the general election and European election funds.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Whitty says that he is “not one of those who believes that there should be any serious distancing between the party and the unions”. “There is some updating of the relationship needed. But we have to do that in a way that doesn’t dilute or diminish the union involve­ment in the party. The best way forward is to have far more members of trade unions who are also individual members of the party.

So far, however, attempts to recruit trade unionists to individual membership, one of the key elements of the mass membership drive launched after the 1987 election, have failed mis­erably. One reason, say Walworth Road insiders, has been that the national membership scheme, which was supposed to make it easier to join the party, has been plagued by teething problems – the result, according to Whitty, of underestimat­ing the amount of work involved in setting up a system from scratch, often with inaccurate infor­mation from constituencies. Around one-quarter of the 320,000 members Labour thought it had at the beginning of 1991 still have not paid their 1991 membership subscriptions.

Now, however, says Whitty, the worst of the chaos has been sorted out and the membership scheme is working reasonably efficiently. “We’ve learned some lessons and I think we’ve a better idea of what recruits and retains members and what doesn’t. It’s a hard slog. I think that the election itself will bring in a lot more supporters whom we need to turn into members. We now have a reasonable system for following them up nationally and locally. Having said that, I’m not expecting miracles.”

It would certainly take more than the sub­scriptions from the new recruits who come for­ward in an election to put Labour’s non-election bank account back into the black. The party’s general fund is around £2 million overdrawn and the party apparatus faces severe cut-backs once the election is over, win or lose. Optimists say that Labour will be able to mitigate these with the introduction of state funding for political par­ties; pessimists say that this assumes a Labour Victory and that, if Labour loses, the unions, themselves strapped for cash, will be in no posi­tion to bail out the party. Some have even claimed that Labour would not have the money to fight another general election campaign less than two years after the one that is about start -as it might have to in the event of a hung parliament.

Whitty is optimistic. “We’re assuming that there will be a cleat and positive result to this election. All our indications are that we can take enough of those key seats to have a clear majori­ty,” he says. Nevertheless, “were we just short of an overall majority, which I suppose is just con­ceivable, we’d have fewer resources for a second election, but the psychology of a second election would be much better. I don’t think resources would be as serious a constraint as some people are making out.”

For now, of course, the priority is winning this time. Whitty says that Labour will be using its front-bench politicians to get the message across, rather than relying on advertising. The media are no longer in awe of the kind of campaign we surprised them with last time. We’ll have to be a little bit more flexible.

“The leader’s campaign will be a major tone-setting and theme-setting operation but we’ll also be deploying the team in a very positive way. We’ve got pretty good back-up advertising, but our main asset is not large amounts of advertis­ing space in newspapers but the way in which our team is consistently outshining theirs. As far as the leadership is concerned, clearly the Tories are going to run a very leader-oriented campaign – Major is just about the only asset they think they have. But Neil Kinnock’s the best cam­paigning politician we’ve seen for decades in this country. When the campaign starts he will thrive and Major will be increasingly exposed. I think the four weeks of the campaign will see us mov­ing significantly ahead.”

If Whitty is right, he will become the first Labour general secretary for 13 years to have to deal with a Labour government. In the past, par­ty-government relations have often been marked by strife; Whitty hopes to be a mediator, and he believes he will be helped by the changes to par­ty conference now in the pipeline, which will give Labour a rolling programme and, through pre-conference “policy forums”, formally involve Labour MPs, MEPs and local councillors in poli­cy-making.

“The policy forums are a way of keeping the party and the government much closer together than in previous eras of Labour government, when there have been serious breakdowns in the relationship at various points,” he says. The role of Walworth Road, unlike Transport House, which was sometimes almost the internal opposi­tion, will be as a means of keeping government ministers in touch with the party and the party informed of and responsive to the problems of ministers. That is a major secretariat role, which has not been performed in the past. In the past the party has done its own thing and the govern­ment has done its own thing, which has caused lots of tensions and problems.

“This year’s conference will have put to it the rule changes that will set up the new system. The NEC has the power to set up the policy fo­rums before this year’s conference, but it’s ex­tremely unlikely. It will be from this year’s con­ference onwards that we’ll start drafting the proper rolling programme.”

But all that is for later. Whitty is keen to get back to the task immediately in hand. This campaign could be won or lost in four weeks. It will be won in relatively few constituencies with a few hundred or a few thousand votes either way. We must get more people out there working for those four weeks. Tribune readers’ efforts could make the difference.”

Labour can win an outright majority at the election. Despite what the pundits say, Labour is not doing badly in the opinion polls; with a good campaign it is certainly capable of achieving the four-point lead it needs to gain an absolute majority in the House of Com­mons. Like party members everywhere, that is what Tribune wants and that is what we will work to achieve.

This does not mean, however, that Labour will neces­sarily win the outright majority it wants. It is possible that the election will have some other result: a hung Parliament of some description or a reduced Tory ma­jority. And it is not an act of disloyalty to speculate about Labour’s actions in such circumstances.

Indeed, in the bars and cafes of Westminster and among Labour’s electoral reformers, talk turns repeat­edly these days to the question of what Labour could or should do If it finds itself the largest single party but short of an overall majority, with the Liberal Democrats (or perhaps, at a pinch, some combination of the Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru and the Scottish National Party) holding the balance of power. Labour’s traditional position is simple: Labour should form a mi­nority government on its own and challenge the Lib Dems (perhaps plus others) to bring it down, perhaps of­fering a few succulent policy scraps (freedom of infor­mation legislation, Scottish devolution, maybe a Speak­er’s Conference on electoral reform) as an incentive for toleration.

Until recently, most Labour Party members would have accepted this approach without question: antipa­thy to anything smacking of coalition runs deep in the Labour Party. Now, however, there are signs of heresy abroad. No one senior in the party is saying anything of the sort in public, but a surprising number of Labour people are mumbling, off the record, that, given that so little separates the two parties, it might not be a bad idea to give the Liberal Democrats a cabinet seat and a constitutional reform package – including a clear com­mitment to the Additional Member System for the Com­mons and a democratic second chamber – in return for five years in power.

Are these would-be coalitionists right? They are cer­tainly open to the criticism that their scenario is im­probable because the Lib Dems are unlikely to hold the balance of power on their own. More importantly, there are arguments of principle and party advantage. Labour advocates of retaining the first-past-the-post electoral system are implacably opposed to any deal on electoral reform with Paddy Ashdown for obvious rea­sons.

There are also those who argue that the Liberal Democrats, particularly after their party conference last year, are an explicitly pro-free-market anti-trade union party, radically at odds with Labour’s own pro­gramme even after the changes of the past four years, and are thus unsuitable coalition partners. And then there are many who object on principle to the building of coalitions behind closed doors. Add the argument that there would be a very real danger of Labour split­ting over the prospect of coalition, and the case against is strong.

But it is not so formidable as to rule out coalition in all circumstances or on all terms. A centre-left coali­tion is preferable to a centre-right one, if that is the choice. The Labour leadership should not tie its hands during the coming campaign by saying that it would never consider forming a government with anyone else.

The relationship between the British Labour Party and the Soviet Union is a fascinating subject. 

The diplomatic reports from the Soviet embassy in Lon­don on meetings with Labour politicians during the eighties, unearthed by Tim Sebastian, are without a doubt a legitimate, if unreliable, source for researchers. 

But they are not news. There was nothing in the Sun­day Times “exclusive” last weekend on what the paper’s promotions department called “Kinnock’s Kremlin con­nection” which told anyone anything not already wide­ly known. The opinions of Denis Healey and Michael Foot on the arms race and the dangers of Reaganism were expressed forcefully in speeches and articles throughout the early eighties. That Neil Kinnock was critical of Arthur Scargill’s leadership of the 1984-85 miners’ strike can surprise no one who sat through Mr Kinnock’s speech at the 1985 Labour Party conference. The Labour National Executive Committee’s arguments over the declaration of martial law in Poland in 1981 were widely reported at the time.One could go on.

It could be that the Sunday Times‘s decision to splash Mr Sebastian’s report was simply a matter of misjudgment on the part of Andrew Neil, its editor. But such an explanation is too charitable to Mr Neil and his paper. The “Kremlin connection” story is nothing more or less than a traditional red-scare smear, an attempt, in the run-up to an election, to encourage voters to speculate that maybe there was something in the idea of Labour being part of a giant Soviet conspiracy to take over the world.

One expects this sort of garbage from the Sun, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express. They have always been lower than vermin. But the Sunday Times used to have a reputation as a serious paper. Mr Neil severely damaged that reputation with his handling of the Gibraltar shootings. Now he should hang his head in shame.

Bryan Gould is a busy man. On top of a massive brief as Labour’s front-bench environment spokesman, which covers everything from standard spending as­sessments to global warming, he is due to play a major role in Labour’s election campaign, just as he did in 1987.

When Neil Kinnock is out of London, John Cunningham, the party’s campaigns co-ordinator, will take the chair for Labour’s morning cam­paign press conferences. And when Cunningham is away – as he often will be, not least because his own constituency, Copeland, is anything but safe – Gould will be master of ceremonies.

He also has particular responsibility for the campaign in London, where Labour could win or lose the election and where the reputation of Labour councils is likely to be a major factor. At present, though, there is no doubt what is most on his mind: making sure that Labour wins the campaign battle on local government taxation.

“The poll tax is certain to be a dominant elec­tion issue whether the election is on April 9 or May 7,” he says. “I think it has got to be one of those two dates now. If it’s April 9, the election will take place when the bills have just arrived. If it’s May 7, the campaign will start the week the bills go out.

“The question is whether we can repeat our success so far in equating poll tax with the Tory Government. Michael Heseltine will be doing all he can to blame Labour local authorities for high poll tax bills. On everyone’s bill there will be a figure for ‘other adjustments’, which is really a euphemism for non-collection costs, and he will say: ‘That’s what’s pushed up your bill.’

“So we’re working very hard right now and through to the election to explain that these are problems intrinsic to the poll tax. They are not the fault of any local authority, Labour or otherwise. Even the Prime Minister described the poll tax as ‘virtually uncollectable’. We’re going to dump it on the Tories’ doorstep and say: ‘That’s where responsibility lies’.”

In line with this, Labour has done its best in the past fortnight to emphasise the extent of the chaos created by the poll tax. Last week, David Blunkett, the party’s local government spokesman, released figures showing that more than 10,500,000 summonses for poll tax debt had been issued. Both he and Gould have repeatedly blamed government incompetence for the recent breakdown in poll-tax non-payment prosecutions caused by the refusal of several magistrates’ courts to refuse to accept computerised records as valid evidence.

So far, the Labour poll tax assault seems to be working, although it is a moot point what happens if the Tories are panicked into using the budget on March 10 to reduce bills, as they did last year.

There is certainly less mileage for Labour in the council tax, the Government’s replacement for the poll tax from spring 1993. A banded property tax, it is not so radically different from Labour’s own proposed “fair rates” system. Indeed, there has been much speculation that a Labour government might find it useful to adapt the council tax to its own purposes.

Gould says that Labour has considered this option but has now rejected it. “One thing we’ve always been clear about is that we are detennined to get rid of the poll tax as early as possible  – which now means, unfortunately, April 1 1993. When we get to office we will pursue whatever course takes us most directly to a position on that date when poll tax ends and the fair rates system begins. Now, we did concede last year, because it made sense and it was reassuring to local government, that, if it had emerged that the council tax preparations offered the quickest way; to get rid of the poll tax and pick up on our fair: rates proposals, we would not be dog in the manger on political or ideological grounds and; say: ‘No, it’s a Tory idea and we’ll have nothing to do with it.’

“But that was only ever a possibility if preparations for the council tax were acceptable to us, if the valuation was a proper valuation and not a Mickey Mouse operation. In the event, the coun­cil tax preparations are a lot of rubbish and virtually unusable by us. In almost any conceivable circumstances we will be legislating to pick up the 1973 rates valuations which were in opera­tion until 1990, not because it’s ideal but because it’s the quickest way.”

In anticipation of Tory attacks on the profliga­cy of Labour councils, the Labour leadership has pulled out all the stops to dissuade Labour local authorities from going on a spending spree in the expectation of a Labour government, as many did in the run-up to 1987. The implicit message is that Labour will not bail out anyone who gets into trouble under the existing Tory rules.

“A lot of people got their fingers burnt last time,” says Gould. “Our message now is that councils should frame budgets and take other de­cisions on the basis of known facts and not future hopes and expectations. One can’t stop people from hoping, but no prudent and sensible author­ity will budget other than on the assumption that the current regime will apply during the next financial year. We’re not saying that with a Labour government there would not be some relaxation of rules on spending, but that’s a sepa­rate issue.”

The main areas for relaxation are the ending of the “ring-fencing” of receipts from council house sales, which earmarks them for repayment of borrowing, and the abolition of central govern­ment “capping” of local government taxation (al­though not until 1993).

“On the capital side, there’s a total of between £6,000 million and £8,000 million in capital re­ceipts and we think it’s crazy that this should be tied up when it’s desperately needed, especially for house-building,” says Gould. “We’ll progres­sively relax those constraints, although not overnight. The construction industry resources just aren’t there to use it all.

“On the revenue side, we can promise nothing for the next year. In future years, we’re absolute­ly clear: no capping. We’re certainly looking to local authorities being responsible when setting fair rates bills, but it will be their judgment as to what they think is a proper programme to put before the electors. Annual elections will subject their judgment to the judgment of the electors. In terms of grant, we’re not promising more tax­payers’ money, but we are promising a better and fairer distribution.”

Tb ensure that councils provide “value for mon­ey”, Labour plans to introduce a “Quality Com­mission” to oversee standards of services, with powers to send in its own management to take over and improve a poor service or to compel the council to put it out to tender. That, says Gould, is the only area where Labour will retain the compulsory element in competitive tendering: in all other cases, councils which want to put ser­vices out to tender will be free to do so but will not have to.

That existing councils spend and do is only part of the election problem, however. The Tories have also begun to attack on grounds of cost Labour’s plans for regional government in England. Inside the Labour Party, the scheme has been widely criticised as nothing more than a sop to get northern English MPs to vote for Scottish devolution. Many commentators believe that the commitment to regional government will be qui­etly forgotten as soon as a Scottish parliament is up and running.

Gould insists that regional government will not be ditched. “The objective will be to lead, within the lifetime of a first Labour government, to legislation which will provide for regional gov­ernment,” he says. “We can’t be absolutely certain that the legislative framework we will establish will be implemented by that first government.

“But, to give a flavour of the sort of timing we’d be thinking of, it has been suggested, and I wouldn’t dissent from it, that it might be possible to hold the first election for regional assemblies at the same time as the general election after next.” As for paying for regional government, he says it “would be financed by block grant”.

The Tories have attempted as well to raise the spectre of a free-spending “Greater London Council Mark Two” emerging from Labour’s plans for an all-London authority. Gould is keen to emphasise that it won’t be like that at all. “It will have no powers to intervene in what the bor­oughs do now,” he says. “What we need is a strategic authority which does what is not being done at present and does in a democratically ac­countable way what these numberless quangos now do.” Land-use, economic and environmental planning, emergency services and transport would come under the new body, but not housing.

If local government is already a focus for the election campaign, the same cannot be said for Gould’s other responsibilities as environment spokesman: carbon dioxide emissions and cli­mate change, destruction of the ozone layer, chemical waste, nuclear reprocessing and so on.

With the economy deep in recession and the Green Party at around 2 per cent in the opinion polls, the received wisdom is that there are fewer votes in green issues than there were three years ago.

Nevertheless, they remain important, says Gould, and, especially in the south-east and among younger voters, they could affect the elec­tion result. “One of the reasons that they have gone off the boil is that, while the Tories have lost interest, we have established a good compre­hensive position. While I wouldn’t say that the environment campaigners have given up press­ing us, they feel they’ve made their number with us. Our job now is to bring these issues back to the fore.” With the profile of environmental poli­tics due to be given a much-needed boost by the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, coming up in June, he could be making a shrewd judgment.

It is difficult not to have some sympathy with Neil Kinnock over last week’s upset about Labour’s taxa­tion plans. If any of the journalists eating at Luigi’s had bothered to read the string of policy documents produced in the past two-and-a-half years – and, how­ever dull the documents, that is part of their job – it would Have come as no surprise to any of them that Labour planned to introduce its tax increases on higher incomes gradually rather than in one fell swoop. As it was, Mr Kinnock’s off-the-cuff remarks came over to them as desperate back-tracking in the face of an un­favourable opinion poll. When members of the Labour Treasury team subsequently also showed only a hazy acquaintance with the small print, the journalists had a good story on their hands almost by accident.

Nevertheless, the episode did show that taxation re­mains a banana-skin for Labour, and that is cause for concern. Tax, along with public spending, is at the heart of the Tories’ election campaign against Labour.

The Tories believe that voters who tell pollsters that they would rather have public spending than tax cuts are not telling the truth and that Labour has failed to convince the electorate that it would not increase in­come tax for those on average as well as high incomes. The Tories are already getting up a head of campaign­ing steam on tax. If Labour starts to look evasive on its tax plans, the Tories will punish it mercilessly.

That means two things. First, the front bench needs to work out precisely how a Labour government will in­troduce its new taxes and everyone needs to stick to the same story. Secondly, and crucially, Labour needs to toll the whole truth about its tax plans as soon as possible.

It is not enough to state, in the words of the party’s election campaign pack, that “nobody earning leas than £21,000 annually – about £400 a week – will pay a penny extra in income tax or in national insurance contribu­tions”. Particularly in the south-east, it is not unusual to earn between £21,000 and £30,000, nor, because of housing and commuting costs, is such an income neces­sarily a guarantee of notable affluence. Voters in that income bracket have to be reassured that they are not going to be stung by Labour.

Of course, they are not going to be stung: Labour’s plans mean that a single person on £25,000 a year will pay less than £10 extra a week. Given that it will pay for improved child benefits and pensions, that should not be too difficult to sell except to the extraordinarily self­ish. But Labour has to make all this absolutely clear. Until it produces accurate and credible “What you will pay under Labour” charts, it will remain vulnerable to Tory attack.

“The next Labour government has no intention of legalising cannabis,” Roy Hattersley said last week in response to a suggestion from Tony Banks to the contrary. Mr Hattersley should reconsid­er. Cannabis is non-addictive and not harmful to health, and the law banning it is a joke – except to the 30,000-odd people every year who are prosecuted for possession: Even the Home Office reckons that 1,500,000 people have smoked it. Does Mr Hattersley really want to turn them off voting Labour at the election?

It is almost incredible that the Tories have decided to make a big issue of Labour’s defence policy in the election campaign. Almost, but not quite.

Although fear of the Soviet threat is no more, it has been replaced in the popular mind by a vague sense of unease at what the former Soviet republic will be like; and, in the wake of the Gulf war, many people are wor­ried by what nuclear-armed Third World dictators might do. The military industries, despite large-scale redundancies, in the past year, remain major; employ­ers and workers in those industries are worried about their future. There are probably also a few votes in pandering to nostalgia among older members of the electorate for the days when Britain really mattered in the world.

The Tories believe Labour to be vulnerable on de­fence, despite its policy U-turns in the past four years, on several grounds. First, they think that Labour can­not live down having so recently  advocated unilateral abandonment of British nuclear weapons. Then there is the detail of Labour’s current policy. The party leader­ship might now say that a Labour government would retain British nuclear weapons as long as other states kept theirs, but Labour would not build the fourth Tri­dent (unless it turns out cheaper to build than to can­cel) nor develop a British tactical air-to-surface nuclear missile. Labour conference, although disowned by the leadership, has consistently voted to reduce arms spending to the “average European level”.

So how should Labour respond to the Tory assault? It certainly should not trim any more. Further “minor ad­justments” in Labour’s position, particularly on the fourth Trident, would be a very bad idea. As Tribune has argued tune and again, there is now no significant nuclear threat to Britain that anyone can convincingly identify as a justification for “deterrence”: the “independent deterrent” serves no function apart from deluding the British public that Britannia still rules the waves. Three Tridents are three too many; a fourth might-stave off the collapse of VSEL in Barrow-in-Furness for four years, but in the long run far more jobs would be saved, and still more created, if the money earmarked by the present government for the fourth Trident submarine were diverted at once into funding a comprehensive arms industry conversion programme. The same goes for the European Fighter Aircraft and several other large-scale military spending projects.

In the Labour Party’s current mood, however, such arguments are unlikely to dissuade the leadership from moving still closer to the Government on defence. What might dissuade it are electoral considerations. The par­ty’s shifts on defence policy since 1987 have been moti­vated by the belief that affluent working-class voters were particularly turned off by namby-pamby, middle-class nuclear pacifism. Now those voters are back on board – but Labour has lost a great deal of credibility among those who were broadly in favour of nuclear pacifism. So far, most have stuck to Labour but if the leadership goes any further, it risks losing even their grudging support. Party strategists should remind themselves just how big CND was in the mid-eighties – and remember that the explicitly anti-nuclear Greens took 15 per cent of the vote in the 1989 European elec­tions. Of course, times have changed, and defence poli­cy is unlikely to be the sole determining factor in even the most ardent CNDer’s choice at the general election. 

   But with the polls as tight as they are, for Labour to throw away the (already wavering) nuclear pacifist vote could be to throw away the chance of office.