Author Archives: Paul Anderson

It is by no means guaranteed, but it is increasingly likely that within six months Britain will have a Labour Prime Minister, if not a majority Labour gov­ernment. The focus of British politics has shifted from Europe, on which .the Tories, however dismal their ac­tual performance, had a significant advantage over Labour simply by dint of being in office. From now un­til the election, Labour should be able to get the upper hand by focusing attention on the domestic issues that touch everyone’s everday life: the recession, the health service, the housing crisis, the appalling state of the economic infrastructure and so on.

It is possible that Labour will fail to turn all this to its advantage. Accidents and the possible effects of Tory accusations about Labour’s tax plans apart, a com­manding opinion poll lead could be undermined by a giveaway budget in March. Nevertheless, it is not un­reasonable to ask again what has seemed for most of the past decade a daft question: What will the next Labour government be like?

A minority Labour government would put together a Queen’s Speech largely composed of measures with which the Liberal Democrats and nationalists had little argument and challenge them to vote against it. If they didn’t, Labour would spend a few months doing all it could to give the impression of being a new broom then, as in 1974, go to the country again, perhaps on a quite different manifesto. (Here, the bets must be on adop­tion of electoral reform.)

A government with a small Commons majority would be only slightly different. Given the dire state of the economy and the tiny amount of room any government now has for macroeconomic manoeuvre, the best any­one can expect from a Labour government without a large majority is small but significant changes and clear signals of radical energy and intent. Socialism, in any commonly understood sense of the word, is not on the agenda for some time yet, if at all.

But a start can be made on repairing some of the damage done to our economy, our society and our poli­tics by 13 years of Tory misrule. Labour can take Britain into the European social democratic main­stream. If Labour manages to increase spending on pensions, child benefits, education, health and public transport, sets up its new industrial relations frame­work and makes a vigorous start on implementing its ambitious plans for democratic reform, it will earn it­self the respect of the British people and a thumping election victory when it goes to the country again. If it dithers, it will fail, with consequences almost too horri­ble to contemplate.

Last week, a Yorkshire policeman shot dead Ian Bennett, a drunk wielding an ornamental gun who had just had a blazing row with his girlfriend. The killing has provoked much argument about whether replica guns should be banned, but that is not the most important question it should raise. The police made only a cursory attempt to talk Bennett into surrender­ing and the warning given him before he was shot was wholly inadequate. The police should use firearms only as a last resort in exceptional circumstances. In this case, they fired first and made their excuses later. Guidelines for police use of guns need to be tightened up at once.

With few exceptions, the democratic left in the west has responded to Mikhail Gorbachev’s de­parture from the Kremlin with praise for his record in office.

Much of it is understandable. Gorbachev presided over a period of extraordinary, and for the most part welcome, change, both domestically and in Soviet rela­tions with the rest of the world. When he gained the up­per hand in the political apparatus, tension between the super-powers was at its height, east-central Eu­rope was under Soviet domination and war raged be­tween Soviet occupying forces and Mujahedin guerril­las in Afghanistan; at home, the regime was one of the most oppressive in the world. Today, the cold war is over and the Soviet Union, having given up east-cen­tral Europe, has ceased to exist. Most of the former satellite states are now functioning democracies and several of the former republics of the Soviet Union seem to be on the way to joining them. Despite the im­mense challenges ahead for the post-communist world, all this is cause for the democratic left to be pleased.

Yet, although much was Gorbachev’s responsibility, almost none of it was what he intended. The changes associated with his name were mostly by-products of an attempt to modernise and revitalise the stagnant Soviet system without fundamentally changing it. From any point of view, the attempt failed.

When Gorbachev and his team of ambitious tech­nocrats came to power (he was never elected by popu­lar vote), the only part of the Soviet economy operating at anything like contemporary western levels of tech­nology and quality was the military sector; and the mil­itary sector was an unbearable burden for the rest of the economy. Economic growth had slowed almost to a standstill. The Soviet workforce was apathetic and unproductive, the ruling bureaucracy corrupt and immobile.

Gorbachev’s “modernising” reforms merely exacer­bated the crisis. The disengagement from the cold war and the arms race, culminating in the withdrawal from east-central Europe, won Gorbachev many friends in the west; but it happened too late (and latterly too fast) to benefit the domestic economy, in the process losing Gorbachev the support of the military-industrial com­plex.

Meanwhile, the succession of half-baked plans for introducing market forces to the creaking mechanisms of production and distribution foundered against bureau­cratic antipathy and the growing resistance of the working class. By the end of the eighties, the economy was in tatters.

Cultural liberalisation and the policy of “openness” – initially at least intended as little more than part of an anti-corruption campaign – won the support of the in­telligentsia for a while but also unleashed demands for national self-determination and democracy which inexorably undermined the very foundations of the Soviet political system. Slowly but surely, Gorbachev’s popu­larity ebbed away as the crisis intensified. Last Au­gust’s coup and its bizarre collapse left Gorbachev with just one card to play: his status as world statesman. Boris Yeltsin and the republican leaders soon found they could trump it (although it remains an open ques­tion whether they will make it even more of a pig’s ear).

Gorbachev’s is a heroic record, perhaps, but it is a heroic record of failure. Western left-wing politicians would be advised not to adopt him as a role model.

John Edmonds is not pleased that the British gov­ernment opted out of the so­cial provisions agreed by the other 11 European Community govern­ments at the Maastricht summit last month. But, he says, it all could have been much worse.

“I went to Brussels the Friday before Maastricht and talked to people in the Socialist Group of the European Parliament to get their views of what was going on,” he says. “And their worry was not that Britain would effectively opt out. It was that an attempt would be made by Helmut Kohl to accommodate John Major, and the social chapter would be so diluted, par­ticularly in respect of majority vot­ing, that it would lose a lot of its force. That really was a nightmare scenario.”

Instead, the French government stood firm against a last-ditch at­tempt to water down the social chapter of the treaty to make it ac­ceptable to Britain. Major refused to budge and the 11 signed a proto­col committing them to develop common policies on workers’ rights which they will transcribe into na­tional law.

“I was delighted by the attitude of the French,” says Edmonds. “They played a blinder. Their atti­tude throughout was that if Britain didn’t want to come along with the social chapter it would have no involvement whatsoever. The French insisted that the proto­col signed by the 11 excluded Britain.”

The priority now, he says, is to get a Labour government which will sign up with the 11. Failing that, although “a lot of companies will be operating from 1993 onwards through standard policies applied to Britain as elsewhere”, the unions “will have to take ac­tion with individual companies to ensure that they match the rights they have to give elsewhere. There are plenty of options for us. In the long term, no one can see Britain standing aside from the social di­mension because more and more the social issues are going to be in­tegrated with economic decisions.”

Edmonds is scathing about the Tories’ attempts to justify the re­fusal to back the social chapter, ac­cusing Michael Howard, the Em­ployment Secretary, of lying in his claim that signing up would have cost Britain £5,000 million. “I don’t know where he got that figure from,” he says. “The first batch of measures are to do with consulta­tion and information rights. There are no costs at all.”

“The other point where the gov­ernment lied was when Major said that the social chapter would drive a coach and horses through the trade union legislation of the eighties. This is absolutely untrue. The social chapter is all about individual rights. It has nothing to do with trade union rights. In fact, freedom of association is specifical­ly excluded as an issue.”

So far, there has been no at­tempt to prescribe the precise in­stitutional framework within which workers’ rights to be con­sulted and informed will be exer­cised. But the 11 are likely to  agree that works councils be set up in larger companies, either on the German model, where works councils consist only of workers, or the French, involving workers and management. In either case, the trade unions have no formal role in representing workers at workplace level: works councils are elected by balloting workers directly, regardless of whether or not they are in a union.

The British trade unions are tra­ditionally hostile to works councils, but Edmonds’ union, the GMB, Britain’s second largest, believes that the German model is the way forward. “We’re going to get it any­way as a result of increasing EC integration,” he says. “The trade union movement can fight a rear­guard action against it, but that would be stupid.

“The German model of industri­al relations is much better than the British model. Here, in order to have proper rights at work you have to be a member of a trade union, your employer has to recog­nise the union, you have to get an agreement establishing your rights and then you have to have the industrial power to enforce them, Many workers in Britain don’t have all that. A system that pro­vides for rights in law of represen­tation and consultation is  much better.”

Not that Edmonds wants simply to copy the German system with no modifications: “No one is argu­ing that the German system is the perfect one. If the support given by the trade unions to elected repre­sentatives was rather more direct than in Germany I think that would be a good thing. One of the worries about the German system is that the German unions don’t have the constant commitment to recruiting people that we have in Britain. The level of unionisation is comparable but it is sustained in many industries by a series of campaigns. Normally when you start work in Britain you get a form pushed at you and you’re asked ‘Would you like to join the trade union?’ That isn’t so much the norm in Germany.”

On the other hand, “pay bar­gaining can come out of the work­place and be made regional or na­tional. That does seem to be an ad­vantage. The local representatives are not obsessed with pay bargain­ing and the local committee has more time to deal with and promo­tional opportunities, health and safety issues and so on.”

All this fits in neatly with anoth­er of Edmonds’ ideas which has been the cause of much controver­sy. He was the principle architect of Labour’s proposals for rational­ising the structure and timing of Britain’s pay bargaining by intro­ducing an annual National Eco­nomic Assessment.

Critics say that this is just an old-fashioned incomes policy in disguise, but Edmonds disagrees. “There is nothing in the proposals that would mean wage controls. The whole thing is about whether trade unions can co-ordinal* col­lective bargaining with employers. It’s an attempt to work out a new set of pay-bargaining arrange­ments so we’re less caught up in chasing each other’s tails.

“With the system contemplated by the Labour Party and strongly supported by the TUC, we’d have a well-informed debate involving the social partners in the run up to Xmas and a pay-bargaining period that lasted the first three months of the year. Most of the keynote settlements would be made at that time – everybody knows which ones they are: Ford, ICI, local government manual workers and so on – instead of playing this silly game when everyone ends up feel­ing very unhappy because every­one feels that someone, somewhere is getting a better deal. We’d try to co-ordinate the pay settlements in the light of the economic perfor­mance of the country. The govern­ment would find it much easier to manage the economy because the Chancellor would have a much bet­ter view of the level of pay settle­ments before the budget.”

It is clear that Edmonds does not see the TUC playing as large a part in the National Economic Assessment as it did in previous labour-union arrangements. “It would have a role in the co-ordi­nated pay bargaining, providing a forum for discussion and from time to time some leadership,” he says, but he is also keen to emphasise that “the TUC is going to have to change very rapidly” to provide more services to member unions, mainly on the research and legal front.

The reason for this attitude to­wards the TUC is simple: with the growth of giant super-unions in re­cent years as a result of mergers the TUC’s co-ordinating function has waned considerably. The GMB has been one of the most active in the merger field and is likely to re­main so in the nineties: Edmonds even raises the distant possibility of continent-wide union mergers, He will not, however, be drawn on the rumours that the next merger on the cards is with the Transport and General Workers’ Union – a joining of forces that would create a super-super-union.

“It is obviously the case that the TGWU and the GMB will work more closely together in the fu­ture,” he says. “We should do that because we overlap to such an ex­traordinary extent in our member­ship. There are all sorts of influ­ences pushing us in that direction. Neither of us is rich enough to waste resources. The services we could provide if we complemented each other would be a lot better. And if we have a continental sys­tem of works councils, it would force us to have a different, closer relationship at a local level.

“I think we ought to put a lot of effort into a closer working ar­rangement. If it leads to something else, so be it.”

This week, Tribune returns to 12 pages after more than ten months at eight pages a week. The reason is simple: using desktop publishing equipment, it now costs us very little to produce extra pages. Before DTP, a 12-page paper cost around £500 a week to type­set and paste up; using DTP; the equivalent process costs under £200. After two months of learning how to use the DTP equipment, we can just about manage to produce 12 pages instead of eight on current staffing levels. We work harder: you get more for your money.

Despite the expansion, Tribune remains in a finan­cially precarious position. Sales and advertising rev­enue are stagnant, partly as a result of the recession and partly because we have not had adequate funds to spend on promotion. Next year, the paper will have to raise at least £30,000 in donations just to ensure bare survival. More is needed if the paper is to expand its circulation as well as the number of pages.

It will not be easy to secure the funding we need. The trade unions, on which Tribune has relied for much of its recent life, are broke. Although several have pledged sub­stantial support, the total guaranteed is down on last year. Most unions are spending all their political fund cash on helping Labour – itself in dire straits – to win the general election.

This means that, yet again, we will be asking you, our readers, for your support. In the past 12 months, you have given more than £20,000, enough to allow us to in­troduce the new technology. In the coming year, we will have to ask you to give as much again.

Is it worth it? We think so, and not just because our livelihoods depend on keeping our jobs. A lively, open, democratic left press is an essential element of our political culture – and without Tribune, there would be precious little of the democratic left press left.

The past five years have seen an extraordinary casualty rate among left publications in Britain. The Labour Party killed off Labour Weekly then let New So­cialist die on the vine. Incompetence destroyed News on Sunday. City Limits ceased to be left in any mean­ingful sense last year when it was forced to sell up to Bernard Clark. This year has seen the end of Sanity and the death of Marxism Today. Discounting local and specialist periodicals, the democratic left press in Britain now consists of the New Statesman, Tribune and socialist, the new Socialist Movement fortnightly, which has just announced that it needs £60,000 by March if it is to survive.

Marxism Today would have it that the reason is sim­ple: that sadly there is no market for left periodicals and that the left no longer has anything to say that anyone wants to hear. Many of its obituarists in the na­tional newspapers gleefully agree. But that is too easy an explanation. Nearly all the left press failures of re­cent times have been publications that simply did not have enough money to promote themselves adequately in the modern marketplace. For the most part, the left press, caught in a vicious circle of undercapitalisation and declining subsidies of various kinds, starved of commercial advertising, has never had the opportunity even to find out whether it has a mar­ket.

We are as confident as we can be that Tribune will survive. But mere survival is not enough. We need to break out ofthe vicious circle – and to do that we need serious money or a Labour government to establish the right to distribution for political papers. The latter is more likely, but anyone offering us £100,000 will not be turned away lightly.

Militant is a political party with its own rules, programme and democratic centralist discipline which has run candidates against Labour and plans to do so again. On Monday, Militant launched Scottish Militant Labour in Glasgow, the main purpose of which is to fight selected constituencies – probably Garscadden, Donald Dewar’s seat, and Pollok, Jimmy Dunnachie’s – against Labour at the next general election. Other Mili­tant candidates are likely to stand in Merseyside.

Labour’s rules clearly and quite rightly exclude from Labour Party membership members of rival political parties, and MPs are no exception to the rules, however hard-working, however pleasant and however popular with their local constituency parties.

Unfortunately, it is impossible to judge whether the evidence shows that Mr Fields and Mr Nellist are lying or telling the truth when they say they are not current members of Militant. Labour’s policy on disciplinary hearings is that they are private and that evidence is confidential; and no one has leaked the documentation on Mr Fields and Mr Nellist to Tribune or, as far as it is possible to judge, anyone else.

If justice has been done, it has not been seen to be done. No one wants show-trials but, unless some way is found to open Labour’s disciplinary processes to scruti­ny by party members, many will continue to suspect that it is arbitrary and unfair. Worse, they could easily be right.

The spin fromthe government’s public relations boys is that Maastricht was a grand victory for John Major. But in domestic political terms he has got a very bad deal. His agreement in principle to eco­nomic and monetary union will alienate the anti-European right of his own party even with the “opt-out” clause; and his “success” in avoiding the social dimen­sion agreed by the other 11 European Community states is an easy target for Labour attack.

The provisions of the social chapter of the treaty, par­ticularly after they had been watered down in a vain at­tempt to secure British agreement, could cause offence only to the most diehard anti-worker free-marketeer. Mr Major’s stance in Maastricht is proof, if any were needed, that the Tories are opposed to any extension of workers’ rights. The original draft of the social chapter proposed that workers should have the right to be con­sulted and laid down minimum wages and limits on the length of the working week. Much of that was ditched during the negotiations as the 11 tried to get Britain on board – but still Mr Major held out, even against the vaguest of formulations of rights to health and safety, information and equal opportunities for women. It was a shabby performance in defence of the worst forms of exploitation for which Mr Major should be attacked re­lentlessly in the run-up to the general election.

Labour’s opposition to common European Commu­nity defence and security policies, whether based upon the EC itself or the Western European Union, is long-standing and commands widespread assent in the party.

On one side, the Atlanticist Right believes that com­mon European defence and security policies would has­ten American military withdrawal from Europe and the collapse of NATO. On the other, the Left, still essential­ly anti-nuclear (if, in many cases, only in private), be­lieves that they would result in the creation of a new nuclear-armed super-power – particularly if based on the WEU, a relic of the cold war which excludes the EC’s neutrals and NATO’s least enthusiastic members.

Both sides fear that France and Germany would call the shots on common EC defence and security policies, that there would be an expansion of capacity for mili­tary interventions “out-of-area” if the EC took up a de­fence role and that an EC defence role would put off neutral countries which want to join the EC.

There are some sound arguments here. In particular, it is crucial that Labour continues to resist creation of a new nuclear super-power, with its own rapid deploy­ment force to police the Middle East and with the French force de frappe playing the role that American nuclear weapons played during the cold war.

Nevertheless, there are good reasons for reconsider­ing Labour’s antipathy to the EC taking on a defence and security role. It is becoming more and more obvi­ous that NATO is moribund, incapable of working out its raison d’etre in the post-cold-war world and utterly closed to the former communist countries of Eastern Europe. The Americans, meanwhile, are already with­drawing from Europe: soon their military presence will be little more than symbolic. With the whole of Eastern Europe increasingly unstable and the former Soviet Union breaking up, the creation of a new European se­curity structure is an urgent necessity.

The best means of achieving this would be a transna­tional body including the United States and Russia as well as the countries of central and western Europe: the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) has frequently been suggested for such a role. The problem is that the other countries of Western Eu­rope show no enthusiasm for any such thing – which effectively rules it out. As time goes by, a defence and security role for an EC open to the east is looking more and more like the only viable basis for a peaceful conti­nent.

No one could accuse Peter Shore of inconsistency on the European Community. He was one of the most prominent Labour opponents of British entry into the Common Market in the early seventies and one of the most senior cabinet figures to call for a “No” vote in the 1975 referendum on EC membership.

He has stuck to his guns ever since, consistently railing against what he sees as the absurdities of the Common Agricultural Policy, the wastefulness of the Brussels bureaucracy and, most crucially, the threat to British sovereignty from creeping European union.

In recent months, he has been by far the most outspoken Labour critic of the direction the EC has taken in the run-up to next week’s Maastricht summit, which – John Major willing – will result in agreement among the EC’s 12 member states on economic and monetary union (EMU) and Euro­pean political union (EPU).

Shore’s willingness to ally with right-wing nationalist Tory anti-federalists has earned him fierce criticism from his colleagues on the Labour benches. But, although he shares many of the dissident Tories’ worries, the focus of his concern is different. Shore is an old-fashioned expansionist

Keynesian who sees the nation-state as the main instrument of economic policy. Far from singing the praises of “sound money”, he wants to devalue the pound.

“What is proposed in the eco­nomic and monetary union side of the treaty is the renunciation of the remaining strategic controls over the national economy without establishing any alternative con­trols at the European level,” he says. “The danger to the next Labour government is acute. The disastrous decision to join the ex­change rate mechanism of the Eu­ropean monetary system makes us a prisoner of the Deutschmark. We’re in the middle of a great re­cession and we know that one of the most urgent steps needed is a radical cut in the interest rate. But we can’t do it because it will break us out of the ERM bands.

“I see no possible way that the British economy can converge with the strong German economy without changes in the present burden­some interest rate and without an adaptation of the exchange rate.”

So why not go for a one-off de­valuation, followed by renegotia­tion of sterling’s ERM band before accepting EMU, the policy advo­cated by Ken Livingstone and oth­er pro-European devaluationists?

“That would be quite unrealis­tic,” says Shore. “It would be possi­ble to stay within the ERM if it were possible to move the currency in a way that restored competitive­ness. There’s nothing wrong with a system of ‘fixed but changeable’ ex­change rates. But you must be able to change when a fixed rate be­comes no longer sustainable. The real danger is that we shall not be able to move the exchange rate at all because we’re already in the first stage of economic and mone­tary union. The aim of virtually ev­eryone in it is to go straight to­wards absolutely rigid exchange rates followed by a single currency and a central bank.”

The official Labour position, of course, is that devaluation is not on the agenda. The Shadow Chan­cellor, John Smith, and his team have concentrated on the need to make the European central bank politically accountable, suggesting that the Council of Economic and Finance Ministers, Ecofin, should be given an enhanced role in over­seeing its workings.

Shore is scathing about this po­sition: “There’s no way that a Eu­ropean central bank could be made accountable to European finance Ministers collectively,” he says. The Dutch draft of the Maastricht treaty, the basis for the current ne­gotiations, “contains provisions specifically designed to maintain the inviolability of the bank from political interests”.

“This is what it says about inde­pendence in Article 107: ‘Neither the European central bank nor the national central banks shall seek or take instructions from Commu­nity institutions or bodies from any Government of a member state or other body.’ The rest of the clause is very significant: ‘The Community institutions’ – that includes Ecofin – ‘and bodies and the governments of the member states undertake not to seek to in­fluence the members of the deci­sion-making bodies of the Euro­pean central bank and the nation­al central banks.’

“Tough stuff, and to make dou­bly sure, the president of the Euro­pean central bank is appointed for one term only of eight years. If that doesn’t secure his indepen­dence, nothing else will.”

Worse, he says, the draft treaty virtually guarantees the imposi­tion of tight fiscal policies, dashing the hopes of those who would like Europe to adopt expansionary poli­cies.

“Article 105 reads: ‘The primary objective of the European system of the central bank will be to main­tain price stability.’ Nothing is spelt out in the treaty about furthering other economic priorities apart from one single clause say­ing ‘We shall go for growth, em­ployment and all these other good things.’ It’s a purely declamatory article. All the detailed clauses are about the independence of the bank and the relationship between the bank and the Council of Minis­ters or Ecofin.

“So you have to be a great opti­mist, frankly, to believe that this treaty allows for any development of the kind that’s wanted. The plain truth is that only some Gov­ernments in Europe are actually in the expansionist high-employment tradition. Many of them are not. Germany is quite content with a tough deflationary bias.”

“There is nothing in the draft treaty which foreshadows interventionism at the European level. At least two or three of the gov­ernments sitting round the table claim to be socialist but they have put forward no such proposal – or if they have done their voices have been so feeble that they have not been reflected in a single draft clause of the treaty.”

Shore is also critical of the draft treaty proposals on excessive bud­get deficits. “Article 104b reads: ‘Member states shall avoid exces­sive government deficits’ – a plain, unequivocal instruction to all governments. And then an ex­cess deficit is defined. The public sector borrowing requirement must not be more than 3 per cent of gross domestic product. And government debt must not be more than 60 per cent of gross domestic product. We’re caught badly on the 3 per cent rule. No Labour govern­ment can afford to have its hands tied on public expenditure and the borrowing requirement.”

“We abandoned controls over trade when we went into the Euro­pean Community. More recently, we have abandoned control over capital. The Single European Act allows for the totally untrammeled movement of capital, forbids any preferential use of public purchas­ing power to assist our own nascent or troubled industries as we have done in the past, and pro­vides for any takeover bids and mergers to be decided only by the European Commission.

“All those powers of intervention have gone and we’re left with just two macro-economic powers: one is to determine interest rates and exchange rates, and that goes completely if you have a single curren­cy; the second is, of course the PSBR. That is what is being hand­ed over. You tell me what a Labour government can do.”

“Supposing all the arguments of the front bench are right and all we need to do is converge. How on earth do you converge? The economy is already in a state of mass unemployment, the balance of pay­ments problem is worse than it’s ever been. How do you deal with that, frankly, without changing the value of the pound? Supply side measures are excellent, but they take five years before they begin to yield a dividend. And if, in the end, we’ve trained and educat­ed people to find jobs somewhere on the Rhine, that isn’t what the British people want. Is Labour go­ing to live with more than 2 mil­lion unemployed for five years? That would show an extraordinary poverty of ambition and relaxation of the political will.”

As for the notion that a Euro­pean federal interventionism might develop in the longer term, “It’s wishful thinking. If you say to me ‘Right, take a really long view, after 20 years of miseries inflicted on the whole of Europe, after the breakdown of the system that’s now being envisaged, is it possible that something might emerge, a federal Europe government, with federal powers of intervention across the whole continent?’ Well, nothing is impossible, but it’s a long way off.”

In any case, he says, he does not find a federal Europe particularly attractive or believe it workable. “I’m not basically wedded to the idea that good government comes on a continental scale. The United States is the only example we have of a modern continental economy but, my god, very special circum­stances enabled it to be created. People were poured into a pre-set institutional mould. There was a common language and a lot of oth­er things which have made for rea­sonably strong federal govern­ment. Try to translate that into European terms.”

The British, he says, “have much more confidence in trying to decide their own fate through their own elected institutions rather than putting their faith in a Euro­pean Parliament in which we’d be one-seventh of the total and which would involve, if it were to be workable, huge transfer payments from the wealthy countries to those that are most disadvantaged.”

So what should Labour be say­ing about Europe? “There’s no question of withdrawal from the European Community,” says Shore, nor should the EC simply be left as it is: he agrees with the front bench that the Community should be extended to eastern and northern Europe. But that is about as far as he is prepared to go in praising Labour’s official line. He does not even accept that, bad as EMU and EPU might be, the alter­native of staying out would be even worse.

“We’ve handled it very badly tac­tically as well as strategically,” he says. “For reasons that I really don’t understand, we’ve been say­ing that we ought to immerse our­selves ever more deeply in a feder­al Europe.

“The clear message to the British people is that the Labour Party no longer believes that it can seriously solve the problems of the United Kingdom without embark­ing on the wrong and perilous path to a federal union in which all the strategic decisions affecting the welfare of the British people are taken by others and not by people who are directly elected. That is a terrible thing to have to deal with in terms of winning the battle for public opinion.

“I’m not saying that I hope there is hostility towards Europe in British public opinion. That kind of sentiment is no good at all. But there is still a very strong belief in this country that despite all our imperfections we can run our own democracy pretty well. Long may we continue to believe it.”

For British politicians of all persuasions, the year since John Major moved into Number Ten Downing Street has been the jumpiest and most exhausting in living memory. With the exception of the period of the Gulf war, all the parties have been on permanent election alert;   electioneering   rhetoric,   speculation about the date of the election and talk of opinion polls have drowned out just about everything else for all but the past couple of months, when the Tories’ deep splits on Europe started to make the headlines again.

It has not been a bad year for Labour. Major’s eleva­tion was a blow to the party, which had carefully con­structed its political strategy on the assumption that Margaret Thatcher would not be removed in mid-term. After the success – in military terms – of the Gulf war, Labour politicians were terrified that Major would go for a “khaki election” in the spring and win.

Instead, luckily for Labour, the British public turned out to be more concerned about the recession, the poll tax and the state of the health service. The Tories lost Kibble Valley to the Liberals in March, did poorly in the local elections in May and lost Monmouth to Labour later the same month. Major abandoned the idea of a spring election, hoping to go to the country in the autumn. The Tories edged ahead in the polls by the end of the summer but then lost their advantage dur­ing the conference season. Major postponed the elec­tion again and hastily cobbled together a legislative programme to last until next spring. Today, the two main parties are neck and neck in the polls.

Labour can afford to be reasonably pleased with this position, but not too pleased. Given the Tories’ record, Labour should be doing better. Very little of sub­stance has emerged from Major’s year as Prime Minis­ter; a VAT increase to pay for cuts in poll tax, a handful of forgettable charters, a bill to replace the poll tax, another bill to tighten up asylum procedures, a slight relaxation in public sector borrowing. The Tories are in chaos on Europe, the economy is in deep recession and there is widespread popular concern about the fu­ture of the welfare state. Labour has a decent chance of victory, but it still has a mountain to climb.

Miscarriages of justice as a result of police fab­rication of evidence are inevitable under any con­ceivable legal system – but the English one is pe­culiarly prone both to convicting people for crimes they have not committed and to taking an extraordi­narily long time to make amends for wrongful convic­tions. The case of the Tottenham Three, Winston Sil­cott, Engin Raghip and Mark Braithwaite, wrongly convicted for the murder of PC Keith Blakelock in the 1986 Broadwater Farm riot, brings into sharp relief, yet again, the need for reforms both of the rules of admissi­ble evidence and to make appeal against conviction easier and quicker.

It is true that, since 1985, the police have introduced tape-recorders to interview-rooms, making the sort of fabrication involved in the Silcott case much more dif­ficult. But coercion before the tape-recorder starts run­ning remains possible even now. If the police are to be trusted, nothing short of making uncorroborated con­fessions inadmissible in court will do.

Giles Radice, the Labour MP for Durham North, de­scribes Labour’s change of policy on Europe as “perhaps the most profound and important in its post-war history”; the Sunday Timesquotes with approval a Tory backbencher calling it “the most spectacular conversion since St Paul saw the light”.

Indeed, party policy is emphati­cally not what it was in the early eighties. Then Labour called for British withdrawal from the Euro­pean Community. Now it is in favour in principle of economic and monetary union (EMU) and Euro­pean political union (EPU). It has spent much of the past year berat­ing the Government for its luke­warm attitude in the Intergov­ernmental Conferences on EMU and EPU in the run-up to next month’s summit in Maastricht. The Labour message today is that Britain under the Tories lags be­hind the other 11 EC countries on the single European currency, the European central bank, the Social Charter, greater powers for the European Parliament, qualified majority voting in the Council of Ministers and expansion of the EC.

As Neil Kinnock, Labour’s leader, put it this week: “It is essential that we are central to the process in the Community in order to serve the vital national interests of the United Kingdom in a future which is inextricably linked with that of the rest of Europe.”

It would be wrong, however, to exaggerate the extent of the transformation. Labour’s position falls a long way short of endorsing a fed­eral Europe. Indeed, it shows all the signs of being a compromise between Euro-enthusiasts and Euro-sceptics in the party leader­ship. It is skilfully constructed to allow everyone in the Parliamen­tary Labour Party but a handful of out-and-out federalists and diehard anti-Marketeers to inter­pret it as an endorsement of his or her own position – and it is quite feasible that Labour’s unity be­hind it will hold until the general election. But it is a compromise nonetheless.

The commitment to a European central bank is qualified by a call for an enhanced role for Ecofin, the Council of Economic and Finance Ministers. If Labour had its way, Ecofin would set the external ex­change rate of the new single cur­rency. According to the Shadow Chancellor, John Smith, this week, this means that interest rates would be determined in the medi­um term by “a dialogue between Ecofin and the central bank”.

The formulation is vague (al­though probably not vague enough to be acceptable to several EC countries, notably Germany, that want the central bank to be fully independent). But it is adequate to secure support not just from the PLP’s growing band of Euro-en­thusiasts but also from those MPs, many of them centre-left former anti-Marketeers, who are worried that a central bank will be politi­cally unaccountable and inevitably fiscally conservative.

Similarly, the agreement in principle to a single currency is hedged around with the proviso that “real economic convergence” takes place beforehand. Again, the phrase is indeterminate enough for those who want EMU in any event but just enough to placate the large number of PLP doubters who believe that, in its current state (and at the pound’s current valuation), the British economy simply cannot cope with EMU.

On political union, the story is much the same. Labour’s endorse­ment of greater powers for the Eu­ropean Parliament and qualified majority voting in the Council of Ministers on social and environ­ment policy is supported as a small step forward by Euro-enthusiasts; most Euro-sceptics are satisfied by its rejection of a “European federal super-state” and insistence that the EC be expanded as well as deepened.

In the same vein, Labour’s firm stance against a European defence community pleases both the major­ity of the Atlanticist Right, which is concerned not to undermine NATO, and the tendentially (but these days not overtly) nuclear-pacifist Left, which does not want the creation of a West European nuclear super-power.

It is a measure of the success of the compromise on Europe that only 16 anti-Market Labour MPs refused to back the Labour leader­ship’s amendment to the Govern­ment’s motion on Maastricht in the Commons last Thursday. A mix of hard-left Campaign Group members and Atlanticist Keynesian right-wingers, they do not constitute a coherent group.

Most would agree with the as­sertion of Peter Shore, the veteran right-wing Labour MP for Bethnal Green and Stepney, that “we shall find ourselves handcuffed and chained under economic and monetary union. No instruments of policy will be left for us to use”. Most would also accept his argument that British democratic self-gov­ernment is under threat. But the Campaign Group anti-Marketeers – now close to becoming a minori­ty even in the Campaign Group – are repelled by what they see as the anti-Market Labour right’s nationalist rhetoric, its assump­tion that common European foreign policies are wrong because they would downgrade Britain’s alliance with the United States, and its willingness to work with Tory right-wingers for a referendum on EMU. The Labour anti-Marketeers are unlikely to be able to put up much of a fight in the next few months.

Nevertheless, it is unlikely that party peace on Europe will be maintained much beyond the elec­tion, whether Labour wins or loses, if indeed .it lasts that long. Al­ready, politicians at every level of the party express worries, mostly off the record, about the ambiguities of the current policy.

By no means all of them are Eurosceptics. Although Mr Kinnock is scathing about federalism (“No one serious is arguing for it,” he told a press conference this week) there are plenty of Labour MPs, from Ken Livingstone and Harry Barnes on the hard left, through several senior shadow cabinet figures on the centre-left, to the traditional right-wing Euro-enthusiasts, who are now prepared more or less explicitly to advocate federalism, in some cases even expressing support for a European defence community.

If the government manages to steal Labour’s pro-Europe clothes by finding a way to sign the EPU and EMU treaties at Maastricht, there will be significant pressure for Labour to stop hedging its bets and adopt an even more pro-EC position before the general elec­tion.

But there will also be counter­vailing: pressure from Euroscep­tics, who, although diminished in number, remain a significant force even in the Shadow Cabinet. Ger­ald Kaufman, Bryan Gould, Margaret Beckett and Michael Meacher are discernibly cooler towards the EC than many of their colleagues, and will do what they can to resist embracing Europe any more enthusiastically either before or, more probably, after Britain goes to the polls.

There is little doubt that Labour is less divided on Europe than the Tories – but it is by no means as united as first impressions sug­gest. Even if the current compro­mise holds until the election, which is by no means certain, the party can look forward to some hard-fought battles over European policy in the next couple of years, particularly if it is in office.

It has not been the best of years for the Campaign for Nu­clear Disarmament.

Last autumn, despite all its ef­forts, it proved incapable of turn­ing public opinion against the use of force to get Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. Once the war started, CND was marginalised and incapacitated by the political wran­gling among its supposed allies in the anti-war movement.

In the spring, it only narrowly missed severe political embarrass­ment when it went ahead with plans to hold its annual Easter demonstration in Barrow-in-Furness, where Britain’s new Trident nuclear missile submarines are be­ing built, within a fortnight of the announcement of massive job loss­es at the town’s VSEL shipyard.

Since then, CND has made the headlines less for its campaigns than for losing Neil and Glenys Kinnock as members and for being short of cash. Amid accusations of financial incompetence, its monthly magazine, Sanity, has been shut down. Staffing at every level of the organisation has been drastically pruned. Last week came the news that CND had lost the Glastonbury Festival to Greenpeace, the environmentalist pressure group.

But perhaps none of this should come as much of a surprise. CND grew in the eighties in response to a spectacular  increase in tension between the two superpower-dominated blocs, in the wake of the So­viet invasion of Afghanistan and, crucially, Nato’s December 1979 decision to station new intermedi­ate-range nuclear force (INF) mis­siles (ground-launched cruise and Pershing II) in western Europe.

On the crest of a wave of popu­lar opposition to the plans for cruise bases at Greenham Com­mon and Molesworth, the cam­paign’s national membership grew from 3,000 to more than 100,000 within a year of the Nato decision. But through the late eighties the international tensions which revived CND slowly disappeared.

Under Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union, wilting under the pressure of military spending, made concession after concession to the United States to secure de­tente and arms control. The 1985 Geneva summit between Ronald Reagan and Gorbachev broke a lit­tle ice; by the time of the Reyk­javik summit a year later, the thaw was well and truly under way. In 1987, the United States and the Soviet Union signed the INF Treaty, agreeing to scrap all ground-launched INF missiles. Commentators began to say that CND’s work had been done.

At first, CND responded by em­phasising how much had not changed. Nato was still commit­ted to an aggressive nuclear war-fighting strategy and was planning “modernisation” of its non-INF nu­clear systems in Europe (short-range ground-launched missiles and artillery and air-launched and sea-launched weapons); Britain was still insistent on build­ing Trident.

True as all this was, however, it was increasingly unconvincing. CND seemed out of touch with popular sentiment: for most people in Britain, as elsewhere in Europe, the new detente meant that the threat of nuclear war had passed. The high-profile celebrity and intellectual supporters drifted away to other causes. CND’s mem­bership slowly but inexorably de­clined.

The campaign’s influence in par­ty politics went the same way. The peace movement, ineffective during the 1987 general election, was powerless to prevent Labour from dropping unilateral nuclear disar­mament in 1988-89. By the time that the 1989 revo­lutions overthrew the Soviet Union’s client states in eastern Europe, the core message of the early-eighties peace movement seemed strangely obsolete even to many who had turned up on the big Hyde Park demonstrations.

In the face of all this, CND could have simply decided to contract and bang away regardless on the same old themes. Instead, perhaps over-impressed by the share of the vote taken by the Green Party in the 1989 European elections, it at­tempted to broaden its agenda, away from nuclear weapons and nuclear strategy and towards more general peace and security themes: the “peace dividend”, low-flying military aircraft, the future of Eu­rope after the collapse of commu­nism and the Warsaw Pact, the arms trade, the Middle East.

The result was a much better magazine – Sanity was at its best in its last months – but an increasingly confused and direction­less campaign which did not seem to know its priorities. Morale in the campaign’s head office reached an all-time low.

The international crisis that fol­lowed the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August last year changed all that at a stroke. CND suddenly found a sense of purpose in oppos­ing military intervention in the Gulf.

Unfortunately, however, not least because it never managed to get its arguments for sanctions against Iraq to be heard above the din of Trotskyist calls for Iraqi vic­tory against the imperialists, that sense of purpose failed to make any impact on British public opin­ion.

After some impressively large demonstrations before war broke out, CND and the rest of the anti-war movement was sidelined dur­ing the conflict, its representatives reduced to claiming that the demonstrations would get bigger when the body bags started com­ing home. The rapid collapse of Iraqi resistance in Kuwait after the land offensive began left the argument in tatters and CND’s credibility badly damaged. The Kurds^’ rebel­lion saw CND as dumbfounded as George Bush. Since the end of the Gulf war, CND has drifted, its energies sapped by a burgeoning financial crisis and staff morale sinking ever lower as political differences have deepened.

Meanwhile, Greenpeace (which employs several former CND staff) has effectively taken over the CND campaign on the safety of Britain’s ancient Polaris submarines. Other nuclear weapons issues are in­creasingly dealt with by former CNDers working independently, notably the British American Se­curity Council (BASIC), which has cornered the market on radical re­search into NATO. Unlike the en­vironmentalist pressure groups, CND now does little original re­search.

CND’s annual conference this weekend in London is likely to see the fiercest argument for a decade over the campaign’s direction. Es­sentially, the choice is between re­trenchment on CND’s traditional anti-nuclear weapons platform and endorsement of a much more general anti-militarist perspective.

The campaign’s chair, Marjorie Thompson, is in favour of broaden­ing, the agenda. “Trident, non-pro­liferation, the arms trade – all these issues, as well as beginning to right the wrongs perpetrated in our own lives by racism and vio­lence, form the basis of CND coming of age as a movement for peace and justice,” she wrote re­cently in the New Statesman.

Others are sceptical about the desirability and feasibility of such a process, pointing to CND’s per­ilous financial circumstances and to the unfinished business from the campaign’s traditional agenda: Trident, the surviving elements of Nato’s  nuclear moderni­sation programme, particularly the tactical air-to-surface missiles that are still planned to replace the alliance’s stock of free-fall nu­clear bombs. Why bother to dupli­cate the work of the Campaign Against the Arms Trade and anti-racist organisations, they ask.