Author Archives: Paul Anderson

CND IS STILL AS RELEVANT AS EVER

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Tribune leader, 13 September 1991

The cash crisis at the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament has prompted several premature obituaries in the right-wing press. They are premature not just because CND members have responded generously to its appeal for money (although more is needed) but because the campaign still has a crucially important role to play.
Despite the end of the cold war and the collapse of Soviet communism, despite the seemingly rosy prospects for far-reaching arms control agreements, the political and military establishments of the nuclear powers (with the apparent exception of what was the Soviet Union) remain as committed as ever to the insane idea that threatening the use of weapons of mass destruction is essential to maintain credible defences.
Even as the Soviet Union ceases to be capable of threatening the security of Western Europe and the United States, the Western military and its political friends raise the spectre of nuclear-armed Third World dictatorships as the justification for maintaining their nuclear arsenals. Even as obsolete weapons systems are negotiated away, new weapons systems are being de­veloped. The American and French nuclear weapons programmes are still racing ahead.
All this is absurd and obscene. Yet without CND there would be barely a squeak of criticism in British political life. Labour in particular has spent most of the past four years running away from a critical stance on nuclear weapons. Unilateral nuclear disarmament was jettisoned in 1989. In the past few months Labour’s leaders have gone further. Instead of remaining vague about how they propose to negotiate away British nuclear arms, first Gerald Kaufman (ambiguously) and now Neil Kinnock (unambiguously) have promised that a Labour govern­ment would keep British nuclear weapons for as long as anyone else was nuclear-armed. Meanwhile a Labour government would do its best to get British nuclear arms included in the second round of the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks, and would press hard for rapid prog­ress towards massive cuts in the world’s nuclear arsenals.
Looking on the bright side, this position is still better than the Tories’, which remains unambiguously pro-deterrence, opposed even to British involvement in START 2. So far, Labour’s leadership has not gone so far as to embrace the notion that nuclear arms really do constitute a deterrent: they remain, at least in the small print of party policy, merely bargaining chips to secure reductions all round. A Labour Prime Minister would not, one can safely surmise, press the button.
But by promising to keep British nuclear arms as long as anyone else has them, the Labour leadership has come perilously close to making a mockery of its criticisms of deterrence and, in the process, has made any future Labour government a hostage to the willingness of the other nuclear powers to negotiate total elimination of nuclear weapons.
A nuclear-weapons-free world is cer­tainly desirable, and a Labour government should attempt to facilitate it in any way it can. But it is easy to construct scenarios in which British insistence on retain­ing nuclear weapons as long as anyone else has them scuppers a far-reaching nuclear disarmament deal which nevertheless falls short of total elimination of all nuclear weapons in the world – for example, an agreement to eliminate all submarine-launched ballistic nuclear mis­siles. It will be essential to put pressure on a Labour government, from inside and outside parliament, on nuclear arms. Without CND, that task will be infinitely more difficult. The campaign deserves our support in its hour of need.

END OF THE LINE

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Tribune, 6 September 1991

Has the Communist Party of Great Britain got a future after the collapse of the Soviet Union?  Paul Anderson talks to its general secretary, Nina Temple
Strange as it might seem to anyone unfamiliar with the recent history of the Com­munist Party of Great Britain, its leadership is rather pleased at the way things have turned out in the Soviet Union.
The CP condemned the August 20 coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, welcomed its collapse and even backed the suspension of the Com­munist Party of the Soviet Union, for so many years its political master.
“I think it is essential that the party’s monopoly of power is broken,” says Nina Temple, the CP’s general secretary. “When you’re talking about the Soviet Communist Party you’re talking about a cross between a political party as we know it and something like the Freemasons. The top level of the party was so involved in the coup that it is impossible complete­ly to distinguish the party from the coup organisers, and the coup orga­nisers have to be brought to justice. We will be moved to protest if there isn’t the development of a climate of tolerance and pluralism in which legitimate left voices can be heard.”
For most of the party’s 70-year existence, such a response would have been unthinkable. Until 1968, when the CP condemned the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the par­ty had loyally .supported every twist and turn of Soviet foreign policy, and it was not until the early eighties that its criticisms of Soviet foreign policy were more than half-hearted. Foreign policy aside, the party’s programme identified the “actually existing socialism” of the Soviet bloc as essentially benign until the late eighties.
Yet the position of the CP lead­ership should not really cause sur­prise. The seventies and eighties saw the party drift further and further away from its traditional pro-Soviet position. Last year, prompted by the collapse of “actual­ly existing socialism” in Eastern Europe, a special party congress abandoned Leninism, opting to “transform” the CP into a non-vanguardist organisation with a new name – Democratic   Left”  if the leadership gets its way at a party conference this November. One reason for the party leadership’s enthusiasm for the failure of the coup and collapse of the Soviet party is that it will have the effect of reducing to impotence the resist­ance to the change of name.
Whether the CP will get through to November without itself being reduced to impotence is a moot point, however. The party was at its weakest ever even before the coup and is unlikely to have been done any favours by the Soviet crisis. An obituary might be premature, but it is certainly difficult to credit that for its first 50 years the CP domin­ated political life to the left of Labour.
It was never an effective electoral force, winning only three par­liamentary seats in all that time, and it never really achieved a mass membership. Before the second world war, at no time did it have more than 18,000 members. After peaking at 64,000 m 1942, at the height of popular enthusiasm for the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union, its membership de­clined inexorably, hitting 45,000 in 1945 and 30,000 ten years later.
More than 10,000 members, in­cluding most of the party’s leading intellectuals, left after the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian re­volution in 1956. By the early seventies, membership was 15,000 and still falling, and the CP had yielded its dominance of the far-left to the 57 varieties of Trotskyism.

But the influence of the CP was never primarily a matter of size or electoral success. Its strengths were its ability to set the left’s political agenda and its strong organisation in trade unions.
In the twenties, the arrival of the CP, singing the praises of a “suc­cessful” socialist revolution in the Soviet Union, transformed British socialism, effectively eclipsing the participatory democratic socialism, with workers’ control at its core, that had made the running among British socialists in the first two decades of the century.
As John Callaghan put it in his recent history of the left, Socialism in Britain, “Leninism changed the radical socialist catechism. Hence­forward the focus of Marxist activ­ity was party-building for the pur­pose of smashing the bourgeois state, crudely understood as ‘bodies of armed men’. Meanwhile, social­ism rapidly came to mean the sys­tem of power in the Soviet Union which, it was noted, was perfectly compatible with the most barbarous practices developed in capitalist in­dustry.”
The CP rapidly established a power base in the trade unions despite the opposition of the right. By the late thirties, with the econo­mies of the capitalist world in crisis, social democracy seemingly ineffec­tual and the Soviet Union apparent­ly the only bulwark against fasc­ism, the CP’s identification of the Soviet Union as a beacon of socialist hope had become almost hegemonic on the British left.

Uncritical pro-Soviet feeling on the non-communist left dwindled after the Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939. It was revived by the wartime alliance, and then underwent a long post-war decline with the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe after 1945, the suppression of the Berlin workers’ revolt in 1953, Hungary 1956, the building of the Berlin Wall and the invasion of Czechoslo­vakia in 1968.
Yet, even as late as the sixties, many, if not most, British socialists still saw the Soviet Union as a model for a successful socialist eco­nomy, however much they dis­agreed with its lack of democracy or its foreign policy. The CP retained a degree of intellectual credibility.
The party’s economists were among the main proponents of the Alternative Economic Strategy which became Labour policy in the early seventies. Communist indust­rial organisation remained potent, though hardly as influential as was claimed by politicians and the popu­lar press right up to the beginning of the eighties.
The party played a significant role in student politics in the seven­ties and a smaller one in the peace movement in the early eighties. It lost a few members over the 1977 draft of its programme, The British Road of Socialism, with a diehard pro-Soviet faction defecting over some rather mild criticism of “actually existing socialism” to form the New Communist Party (which distinguished itself last month by backing the coup; but at the begin­ning of the eighties, the CP remained a force to be reckoned with in British left politics.
Today, all that seems very dis­tant. The eighties saw the CP riven by feuding – first between pro-Soviet advocates of “class politics”, grouped around the Morning Star newspaper, and the rest of the par­ty, and subsequently, after the ex­pulsion of the Morning Star group (some of whom formed another Stalinist breakaway, the Communist Party of Britain), among the va­rious factions that remained in the party.
Membership, long in decline, be­gan to plummet, and the party’s trade union base shrank rapidly. Outside Scotland, where the CP retained its influence in the Scot­tish TUC and was instrumental in reviving interest in home rule, just about the only CP success story of the eighties was its monthly maga­zine, Marxism Today, edited by Martin Jacques.
In mid-decade, Marxism Today analysis of “Thatcherism” as a hege­monic project of the Right played an important part in persuading the Labour left that it should support the Labour leadership’s attempt to shift Labour towards the centre. Later, its advocacy of the idea that capitalism had entered a new era of “post-Fordism”, and that these “New Times” demanded a wholly new response from the left, lent left intellectual credibility to Lab­our’s abandonment of the tradition­al socialist programme of nationa­lisation and planning.
Ironically, Marxism Today’s suc­cess served to weaken the CP still further: as the magazine moved away from Leninism, pressure grew from within the party to retain the word “communist” in its title, and many in Scotland said they would create an independent Scottish Communist Party if the name-change went ahead. After the momentous events of the last two weeks, such voices have been less in evidence, but even among supporters of “transforma­tion” there are worries that whatev­er emerges from the process will either lie directionless or insuffi­ciently politically distinct to sur­vive.
Temple, who has been general secretary since early 1990, when she look over from Gordon McLennan, brushes aside such criticism. Democratic Left, she says, has a clear purpose. “We’re hoping to use our organisation and resources to give a kick-start to a culture of progressive democratic left politics in Britain. Labour suffers from a deep-rooted anti-intellectualism and is too tied to electoral politics; Democratic Left will help to fill the gap.
“We’re not trying to do the same thing as the Labour Party,” she says, “There’s a great need for Labour to win the next general election, and I don’t accuse the Labour leadership of betrayal. But as well as a progressive govern­ment, you need people demanding change from below. I see Democra­tic Left as a forum where people try to develop their politics and where they can network together.
“I’m not saying that all move­ments will come from Democra­tic Left but I do see it as facilitating the development of broad, bottom-up campaigning movements.”
Even Temple admits that there is plenty still to sort out about the whole project, however. “Whether our objective is the creation of a new left party or whether our role is to facilitate development of co­operation among existing parties is still being discussed.”
For the time being, the priority is to seek out partners in other politic­al parties and organisations for discussions. No one left-of-centre is ruled out but it is clear that the main targets are the Labour’s “soft left”, the Greens, the Liberal Democrats and non-party social movements.
Whether anyone will want to play ball with Democratic Left is as yet unknown, however. There are few signs at present of much interest outside the CP. Another problem is whether the CP’s remaining trade union base will adapt to a more amorphous structure. “We still have a lot of members who have positions of re­sponsibility within their unions,” says Temple “But that’s a resource that hasn’t been very effectively used in recent years.

“We’ve rejected the old way of working in the unions – small groups of people meeting in smoke-filled rooms deciding who they’re going to put forward and what the line is – but we’ve not found a new way. Part of the problem is that the party has been organised on a branch basis. A lot of trade union­ists weren’t involved in their local branch so they didn’t have input into the party.”
Meanwhile, CP membership now stands at 5,000, down 1,700 from the end of last year but up 1,500 from May. The party is smaller than at any time since the twenties and short of cash. If it can gain some solace from the argument that, af­ter the collapse of communist power in the Soviet Union, it would be even worse off if it had not decided to embark on its present course, its future does not seem too rosy.

COMMUNISTS AT ODDS OVER COUP

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Tribune diary, 30 August 1991

The British politician with most egg on face after the failed coup in the Soviet Union has to be Eric Trevett, general secretary of the tiny ultra-Stalinist New Communist Party. In a letter to the Morning Star on August 22, the day that the coup collapsed, he welcomed the removal of Mikhail Gorbachev as “a setback to US imperialism, whose plans for global domination have been dealt a body blow”.
“In the Soviet Union the emergence of a leadership dedicated to communist values deserves our full solidarity and support,” he went on. “Nor should we waver in giving this in the face of some social unrest.”
The Morning Star itself surprised many readers by refusing to give the coup its backing: “It is difficult to see how democratic economic and political change can be brought about by authoritarian means,” it warned on August 20, adding that “what has happened could have the opposite result to that intended”. A similar line was taken by the Communist Party of Britain, the small pro-Soviet party that split from the Eurocommunist Communist Party of Great Britain in the mid-eighties. (The NCP split in the late seventies). Its general secretary, Mike Hicks, called for a peaceful resolution to the crisis “fully involving the Soviet people in resolving political and economic difficulties that have been exacerbated by a narrow form of nationalism in some republics”.
Less surprisingly, the CPGB unambiguously conde­mned the coup, calling for the immediate release and re-instatement of Gorbachev. “The complex economic and constitutional crises that have developed in the Soviet Union will never be solved by resorting to Stalinist methods”, proclaimed a group of leading figures in a letter to the Guardian published on August 21.
After the collapse of the coup, the CPGB, which is almost certain to adopt a new democratic constitution and change its name to “Democratic Left” in Novem­ber, gave a warm welcome to suggestions that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union should dissolve itself into a new democratic left party. But the Morning Star and the CPB were not so sure. Monday’s Star leader announced that “the Soviet people will need a reformed democratic Communist Party .. . So­cialism and democracy remain the only way out for the working people in the Soviet Union”. If only the working people of the Soviet Union saw it that way …

THE DEATH AGONIES OF SOVIET COMMUNISM

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Tribune leader, 30 August 1991

The extraordinary events of the past fortnight in Moscow, Leningrad and the other major cities of the Soviet Union have transformed world politics. The Soviet Union, the second super-power, has imploded and might not survive the shock. “Actually existing social­ism” is dead.

The way it happened was simple but bizarre. Key figures in the Soviet Communist Party leadership and the military-industrial complex, the latter for 20 years the only dynamic element of the Soviet economy, decided to take in hand the country’s spiralling economic and political crisis, using as their pretext the imminent signing of a new union treaty which would have given more autonomy to the Soviet republics. For 24 hours after the August 19 coup, it seemed that the military-industrial complex had won. The western media were full of predictions of a new cold war. Western politicians talked of doing business with the junta.

Instead, the coup collapsed. Boris Yeltsin came out from the Russian Parliament and talked to a tank crew in front of camera. Soon a few hundred sympathisers were there too. Demonstrations against the coup were organised by informal networks of activists in the major cities. Slowly but surely, it became apparent that the junta had not thought about the international media, had underestimated the people of Russia’s cities and had overlooked the depth of resentment against the centre in the non-Russian republics. The people were sick of their lot, but the worst possible alternative was a return to a brutally oppressive yesterday. The demonstrations were not, for the most part, large, but they were an embarrassingly public problem for the military. It became clear early on that the conscript soldiers were unhappy about firing on their countrymen.

The junta panicked and surrendered. Mikhail Gor­bachev came back to Moscow and office (although for how long he will stay there is a moot point). The settling of scores began. Under pressure from Yeltsin, the guilty men – nearly the entire leadership of the Communist Party and of the military and security apparatuses – were named and replaced. As the implications of the coup became clear at the end of last week, republic after republic declared independence from the Soviet Union, The authority of the CPSU simply collapsed. Last weekend, struggling to keep abreast of events, Gorbachev resigned as general secretary of the party, recommended dissolution of the its central committee and issued a decree confiscating all its property. Yeltsin issued a string of decrees suspending the party in Russia and several hard-line newspapers and transferring powers from the Kremlin to his own Russian republican Government. Other republics moved against their communist parties as the week went on.

On Tuesday, in what seemed a last-ditch attempt to assert his political authority and prevent a total collapse of the union, Gorbachev threatened to resign unless a new union treaty was signed. Meanwhile Yeltsin came under fire for suggesting that republican borders might be revised to protect Russian minorities in the Ukraine and Kazakhstan. As Tribune went to press, the very existence of the Soviet Union hung in the balance.

Apart from Yeltsin’s worrying remarks on changing borders and the suspensions of the communist parties and the newspapers, which should be lifted at once, it is difficult for a democratic socialist to be other than pleasantly stunned by most of what has happened so far. The “actually existing socialism” fathered by the CPSU was an economic disaster, corrupt, bureaucratic, mendacious, oppressive and militarist; the union was held together only by brute force. The system’s passing is not worth mourning.

Nevertheless, it would be foolish to be too optimistic about the prospects for the Soviet Union or whatever collection of independent states takes its place. Every one of the republics is in a state of severe economic crisis and most are riven by ethnic tensions. There is a constant threat of those tensions becoming bloody and, as the economic crisis deepens with the approach of winter, there is a real danger that authoritarian politics will become increasingly attractive not only to those who supported the failed coup but also to the populists and nationalists who joined the liberals and democrats to resist it. It is imperative that the affluent west pre-empts any such lurch into authoritarianism, first by immediate­ly pledging food aid to avert starvation and secondly by formulating something akin to the Marshall Aid programme of the forties to revive the Soviet economy. Hoping for the best is not enough.

DEMOCRATISING THE LABOUR PARTY

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Tribune leader, 23 August 1991

There was a time, about ten years ago, when the Labour left thought that the most important single  issue in British politics was how the Labour Party selected its parliamentary candidates. Compulsory reselection of MPs was at the core of the Bennite left’s attempt to exact revenge for the Wilson-Callaghan years: today it stands as just about the only monument to the Bennite moment in Labour Party history.
It is worth defending, of course: there is no reason to deprive local Labour Parties of the right to choose their candidates for parliament once every parliament.
Nevertheless, compulsory reselection has not resulted in any great change in the accountability of Labour MPs to their local parties, let alone the sort of transformation of left political culture that the Bennites believed would follow from the procedural changes. Under current rules, even the most indolent and incompetent MPs find it relatively easy to keep their positions. More important, most of the people selected for winnable seats in the next election are, at best, decent folk skilled in the banal arts of local government, public relations or trade union machine politics. Compulsory reselection has resulted in more of the same rather than a rejuvenation and democratisation of the Labour Party.
But what could rejuvenate and democratise Labour? The leadership put its faith in a membership drive to give the party sufficient numbers to sustain a one-member-one-vote organisation which can do without the tradition­al deal with the unions – block votes in return for cash. Unfortunately, the membership drive has not worked.
Partly because of head office mistakes and partly because Labour’s bland centrist image, however essen­tial for winning uncommitted voters, is rather less than inspirational when it comes to membership recruitment, Labour is still as far from being able to get by without union money as it ever was. The party leadership is, moreover, still as reliant as ever on the unions delivering “sensible” candidates for parliament and “moderate” policies at conference.
The upshot is that the leadership faces a serious dilemma. If it goes for one-member-one-vote for selections and key policy decisions, it alienates the unions. They rightly feel that they have kept the show afloat for years and now, with a Labour government at least a strong possibility, do not want to throw away their most impor­tant means of influencing Labour.
If the leadership opts for the status quo, it perpetuates a system which almost invites bureaucratic intervention to stifle democratic decision-making – alienating individual party members and putting off would-be recruits who wonder what point there is in joining Labour if they are to be effectively shut out of important decisions in the party.
In the long term, the only answer is the creation of a democratic party which generates enough income not to need to use the unions as a crutch and in which all members have an equal say. That will not happen overnight, especially if there seems to be little particular­ly exciting or radical in Labour’s programme to attract new members. In the short term, compromises to keep Labour from bankruptcy are essential. The one on offer now on parliamentary selections, for all its potential difficulties, is not as bad as the Labour Co-ordinating Committee has made out. Nevertheless, it is essential that the thrust of these compromises is to advance a model of internal Labour Party democracy clearly based on the simple principle of one-member-one-vote. In the end, there really is no democratic alternative.

LABOUR MUST NOT WASTE THE SILLY SEASON

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Tribune leader, 2 August 1991

Has the tide turned in favour of the Conservatives? The pundits in the quality newspapers certainly think so. It has been difficult to keep count of the number of articles in the past fortnight opining that Labour has run out of steam and that the Tories are making the running in British politics again. How diffe­rent from just after the Monmouth by-election, when the word from precisely the same pundits was that the Tories, riven by dissent over Europe, were on the ropes and that Labour was the odds-on favourite to win the next elec­tion.
Whether there are any particularly good reasons for the pundits’ change of heart is arguable. To be sure, there has been a string of opinion polls showing a massive Labour lead turning into a small one. John Major does seem to have emerged stronger from the row over Europe and there is little doubt that the Tories spent the run-up to the parliamentary recess spewing out policy documents and attacks on Labour faster and more furiously than seemed possible in the spring. Labour, meanwhile, has appeared introverted. After a spell of frantic activity when it seemed likely that there would be an election in June, Labour’s supply of policy launches almost dried up. For the past few weeks, Labour has come across as being preoccupied with getting rid of Militant.
Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to exaggerate the dynamism of Mr Major and his party. The big Tory initiatives of the past month, the Citizen’s Charter and the Green Papers on trade unions and local government, are dull and uninspiring, and the emerging themes of the Tories’ attack on Labour – that Neil Kinnock is unim­pressive and his party profligate, weak on defence and dominated by the hard left and the unions – are tired and unconvincing. The Tory split over Europe will be difficult to camouflage as the autumn wears on, and the Tories remain vulnerable on the economy (still in deep reces­sion) and the welfare state. Mr Major’s ministerial team is an electoral liability. Beneath the surface, the Tories remain in deep trouble.
Labour’s apparent loss of momentum is a stickier problem. There are good reasons for believing that it does not amount to much. It was always going to be impossible to keep campaigning throughout the summer at the pitch reached in April and May, and the nasty but necessary business of getting rid of Militant should not be diverting the party from more important matters for very much longer. Moreover, the party can take heart from the consistency of its share of the opinion polls. The cut in its lead has been almost completely the result of Liberal Democrat voters turning to the Tories and, during an election campaign, the Liberal Democrats are likely to win many of them back.
But it is not enough simply to sit back and hope for the best or even to keep thumping out the same old tunes, however good some of them might be. Labour must learn from the skirmishes of the past couple of months, which have revealed several areas where Labour needs to hone its policies during the summer. That does not mean emulating Gerald Kaufman’s incompetent kite-flying on nuclear arms talks: rather it is a matter of ironing out ambiguities by filling in detail missing from agreed policies. In particular, Labour’s proposals for a minimum wage and a defence diversification agency could both be vote-winners with a little extra attention to detail, and a more explicit commitment to European union could reap the party substantial benefits. Labour must use the hiatus of the silly season for a cool assessment of what needs to

A DAMP SQUIB FROM JOHN MAJOR

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Tribune leader, 26 July 1991

The government’s Citizen’s Charter, unveiled on Monday, is based on two contentious underlying  assumptions. The first is that “citizenship” is all about being a consumer: there is nothing in the Charter’s 50-plus glossy pages to suggest that citizenship has anything whatsoever to do with political rights or active participation in the democratic political process. The grand themes with which the idea of citizenship has always been associated – freedom of speech, conscience and assembly, the right to vote and so on – are entirely absent. John Major’s idea of an active citizen is someone who wants to complain about the lateness of the 7.55 train from Surbiton.
The second assumption is that the problem with Britain’s public services is their lack of efficiency. If only the chaps who run our hospitals, schools, trains, buses and council housing pulled their socks up, its reasoning goes, everything would be fine and dandy. The Charter is essentially a list of measures designed to secure “value for money”: improved complaints and compensation procedures, consumer rights to information, performance-related pay for public service workers and the opening up of yet more of the public service sector to competition through privatisation.
Some of the Charter’s proposals, such as those on consumer rights and complaints procedures, are perfectly sensible if unexciting. Others are simply banal. Controls on coned-off lanes on motorways and the introduction of name-tags for public service workers who deal with the public are not urgent priorities.
In many areas, the Charter does not go far enough. It contains no commitment to a Freedom of Information Act and there is nothing at all on extending consumer rights in the private sector. Its proposals for strengthening the power of regulatory bodies are tame and its ideas about tenant control of council housing stop far short of advocating democratic self-management of socially owned housing.
Worse, several of its proposals are the sort of baloney that only dogmatic free-marketeers could advance with a straight face. The service provided by the Post Office would be severely harmed if a private rival were allowed to cream off its most profitable business, and the privatisation of British Rail and London Buses would only worsen the crisis in Britain’s creaking public transport system.
The main problem with the Charter, however, is that its identification of what is wrong with Britain’s public services is extraordinarily wide of the mark. The reason that British Rail, London Underground or London Buses run such lousy services is not that they are particularly inefficient but that they have been starved of investment since the Tories came to power in 1979. Streamlining the complaints procedure will not make the trains run on time. Similarly, the main reason that hospital waiting-list times are too long is not that the National Health Service is inefficient (although it is) but that the NHS does not have enough money. Tougher standards for schools and publication of exam results and truancy rates are all very well but, without more cash, the education system will continue to fail. Much the same goes for the social security system.
The Citizen’s Charter is an attempt to get quality public services on the cheap. For all the hyperbole in the Tory press, Mr Major’s “big idea” is really rather threadbare. It is certainly not an election-winner.

KAUFMAN’S KITE STUCK IN TREE

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Tribune, 26 July 1991

Gerald Kaufman’s attempt to ‘clarify’ Labour’s policy on nuclear arms reductions leaves it as ambiguous as ever, writes Paul Anderson
The current dispute over Lab­our’s policy on nuclear weapons, which has been sim­mering since Gerald Kaufman, Lab­our’s foreign affairs spokesman, hinted in a Guardian article a fort­night ago that a Labour govern­ment would keep nuclear weapons “as long as anyone else had them”, is unlikely to degenerate into inter­necine strife as previous Labour defence rows have done.
With the possibility of a general election in November, even the ster­nest Labour critics of the leader­ship’s apparent political trajectory are likely to fall silent in the in­terests of party unity. Unless it does something really stupid, the worst the leadership can expect is a few murmurs of dissent at October’s party conference.
Unlike in 1983 and 1987, it is the anti-nuclear Left rather than the pro-nuclear Right that is unhappy about the policy – and, however fractious in between election cam­paigns, the Left at election time tends to keep its reservations to itself. The Right, as James Callaghan demonstrated famously in 1983, is often less self-disciplined.
Nevertheless, Kaufman’s remarks have undoubtedly touched a raw nerve. He wrote that “Britain should remain as a participant” in nuclear arms reduction talks “until they are successfully and finally concluded with an agreement by all thermo-nuclear powers completely to eliminate these weapons”, and journalists were apparently briefed that this implied that Labour would keep Britain’s “independent deter­rent” for as long as the other nuc­lear powers retained nuclear weapons.
On this interpretation, Kaufman was flagging a radical change in Labour policy. The party had never before advocated retaining nuclear weapons until everyone else got rid of theirs. Unsurprisingly, the reac­tion from the Left was unenthusiastic.
Bruce Kent, Labour’s prospective parliamentary candidate for Oxford West and Abingdon, writing in Tri­bune last week, said that the article was “a final surrender to David Owen, Peter Jenkins, Robert Max­well, Alf Garnett and all”.
But it is possible to put a different spin on Kaufman’s words. It is perfectly feasible for a country to remain a participant in arms reduc­tion talks after its own stocks of a particular sort of weapon have been negotiated away or unilaterally abandoned.
Indeed, that is precisely the situa­tion Britain is in today in the talks aimed at the elimination of chemic­al weapons: Britain unilaterally abandoned chemical weapons in 11957 but has remained a partici­pant in talks ever since.
On  this  reading,  Kaufman’s statement did not imply that Lab­our would keep the bomb as long as anyone else had one. All he was saying was that a Labour govern­ment would stay in nuclear arms reduction talks to the very end – which would include the possibility that Labour would bargain away the “independent deterrent” but stay in the talks in order to press the remaining nuclear powers to reach agreement on reductions.
Stated explicitly, this would in­deed have been a clarification of Labour policy rather than a change. But Kaufman has refused to elabo­rate on the precise meaning of his words. His intervention has merely stirred some already muddy waters. Labour’s position on Britain nuc­lear arms remains as ambiguous as before.
According to the policy passed at party conference in 1989, the year that Labour dropped unilateral nuc­lear disarmament, the line is that British nuclear arms do not consti­tute a deterrent: they are useful only as “bargaining chips” in nuc­lear arms reduction negotiations.
Because it would be too expensive to cancel the Trident nuclear mis­sile submarine project at this late stage, a Labour government would build three of the four boats cur­rently planned. But it would attempt to get Trident and its Polaris predecessor included in the second round of the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START-2), and it would drop Tory plans to replace the ageing WE-177 free-fall nuclear bombs with new air-to-surface mis­siles, either bought from the United States or developed jointly with France.
The crucial vagueness in the poli­cy is that it says nothing about how Labour would get Britain into START-2 and little about what its negotiating position would be once it was in.
In part, this is for the very good reason that no one could possibly know in 1989 what the situation in the START process would be when Labour came to power. But the vagueness was also a means of papering over differences.
Those on the Left accepted put­ting British strategic nuclear forces into START-2 only on condition that the talks would quickly result in a deal to bargain them away; those on the right saw the policy as meaning that Labour would keep the deterrent if Britain’s entry into START-2 was blocked or if the talks got bogged down.
Kaufman’s intervention is perhaps best understood as a piece of “kite-flying” to see what would happen if he made an explicit commitment to keeping British nuclear arms as long as anyone else had them. He expected to he de­nounced by the hard left and by the peace movement but to be given the benefit of the doubt by the centre-left of the party.
Instead, the centre-left, includ­ing senior Shadow Cabinet and National Executive Committee politicians and the normally mild-mannered Labour Co-ordinating Committee, stuck its neck out. It is clear that Kaufman would provoke a really serious row if he tried explicitly to change the position on START before the manifesto is drawn up and it seems likely lhat he will now let the matter rest.
Which is not to say that Labour’s position on other nuclear weapons isues will remain the same. The party is coming under increasing union pressure both on Trident and on Polaris, and the signs are that, at least on Trident, the leadership is set tn change course.
The unions at the VSEL shipyard in Barrow-in-Furncss, situated in a Labour target marginal constituen­cy, are pressing hard for Labour to commit itself to building lour rather than three Tridents because the yard will shed thousands of jobs, and almost certainly close, if the fourth submarine is not built.
Martin O’Neill, Labour’s defence spokesman, has already indicated that a Labour government might build the fourth submarine if can­cellation charges in the (yet-to-be-signed) contract made it more ex­pensive to cancel than to build. Further movement is expected in the run-up to the election.
Polaris is a potentially far more difficult problem. Unions representing fitters working on maintaining the ancient and decrepit Polaris fleet are becoming increasingly con­cerned at the radiation exposure dangers their members now face.
Only one of the four submarines is now fully operational: the other three are suffering from cracks in the coolant systems of their nuclear reactors. Fitters are being exposed to levels of radiation close to or above the maximum permitted in a desperate attempt to patch up the damage so that Britain has a nuc­lear missile submarine force until Trident becomes operational in the late nineties.
If the unions’ radiation exposure fears prove justified in the run-up to the election, Labour will have little option but to say that it will scrap Polaris on safety grounds. Because the missiles for the Trident sub­marines have been seriously de­layed by the inability of the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment in Aldermaston to build the war­heads, this would effectively amount to ial least temporary) un­ilateral nuclear disarmament. The more cynical Labour leaders must be praying that no one comes up too soon with authoritative evidence that Polaris is too dangerous to keep afloat.

FIELDS SHOULD BE INVESTIGATED

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Tribune leader, 19 July 1991

Labour’s National Executive Committee is right to have launched an investigation into Terry Fields, the MP for Liverpool Broadgreen – although not because he deserves to be disciplined simply for his refusal to endorse  or campaign  for Peter Kilfoyle, the Labour candidate in the recent Walton by-election.
Inaction or lack of enthusiasm during election cam­paigns is not in itself grounds for disciplinary investiga­tion of Labour Party members by the NEC, nor should it become so: members of the Labour Party have a perfect right to be as indolent and unenthusiastic as they choose. Terry Fields’s lack of support for Mr Kilfoyle is on a par with the refusal of Frank Field, the MP for Birkenhead, to endorse Lol Duffy, the Labour candidate for Wallasey in the 1987 general election. Frank Field’s reasons may have been rather better than those of Terry Fields (Mr Duffy was a member of Socialist Organiser, a Trotskyist entrist group), but that is beside the point. Were it a simple matter of refusing to endorse an official Labour candi­date, Terry Fields would no more deserve investigation than did Frank Field.
But Terry Fields’s lack of enthusiasm for Mr Kilfoyle is not the reason that the NEC has set up the investigation. Nor is it that he has made a fool of himself by getting himself banged up for non-payment of poll tax. Rather it is that the NEC believes that there is now enough evidence of his membership of the Militant tendency to have him expelled from Labour.
If indeed there is such evidence, he can expect no sympathy from the democratic libertarian Left if he is given the boot. The same would go for Dave Nellist, the MP for Coventry South East, if an investigation were to find against him on similar grounds. Membership of Militant, a Trotskyist entryist party with its own disci­pline and programme, is quite simply incompatible with membership of the Labour Party, a democratic socialist party. That goes for MPs as much as for anyone else.
Nothing perfect
The weighty interim report of Labour’s working party I on electoral reform, chaired by Raymond Plant, is right to reject the idea that any particular electoral system is intrinsically the fairest, and it is right to insist that the system used to elect the House of Commons should maintain the link between MPs and constituen­cies.
Although the Additional Member System yields repre­sentation in parliament approximately proportional to votes cast, it has the disadvantages of creating two classes of MPs and of virtually guaranteeing Centre parties far more power in coalition governments than their support warrants. The Alternative Vote system gets round the problem of two classes of MP, but most versions yield excessive representation in parliament to MPs from Centre parties elected on second-preference votes. The Second Ballot system suffers from a similar weakness and, like the status quo, tends to produce parliaments in which the seats held bear scant relation to the votes cast.
In short, nothing is perfect, and Tribune will continue the debate. The priority, however, is winning under the current system. It would be a mistake to distract Labour from that mammoth task.

A DAY IN THE DEATH OF LENINIST DELUSIONS

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Tribune leader, 12 July 1991

The humiliating defeat of Militant’s Lesley Mahmood by Labour’s Peter Kilfoyle in last week’s Liverpool Walton by-election has caused widespread rejoicing on the democratic left.  Ms Mahmood’s miserable per­formance shows conclusively that Leninist vanguard politics is incapable of securing popular support in this country unless it has the cover of the Labour Party.
Indeed, considering everything that appeared to be going in her favour – in particular Liverpool City Coun­cil’s redundancy programme but also Militant’s uniquely strong local base – Ms Mahmood’s showing was derisory. She and her comrades in Britain’s largest Leninist party, backed to the hilt by Britain’s second-largest Leninist party, the Socialist Workers’ Party, have made revolu­tionary vanguard politics of any variety a laughing stock.
In the process, they have also managed to give added impetus to the Labour Party’s attempt to rid itself of Militant. Campaigning for anti-Labour candidates is rightly considered one of the most serious disciplinary offences in Labour’s constitution, and those who cam­paigned for Ms Mahmood, many of them shipped in by Militant, are now going to get their come-uppance: expulsion from the Labour Party. They deserve no sympathy and they will not be missed.
Members of Militant who did not campaign for Ms Mahmood, particularly the two Militant MPs, Terry Fields and Dave Nellist, pose a thornier problem. This is not because it is somehow wrong to expel members of Militant from the Labour Party. The Militant tendency, more properly speaking the Revolutionary Socialist League, is a manipulative authoritarian sect with its own disciplinary structure and its own (deranged and in many ways reactionary) programme. Its ideology and practice are utterly incompatible with democratic socialism, and it has no legitimate place in a democratic socialist party.
Rather, the difficulty is the practical one of ensuring that those expelled for Militant membership really are members of Militant. Democratic socialists who accepted Labour’s rules were often in the past disciplined merely for expressing opinions at odds with those of the leader­ship, and it is better to err on the side of caution than to allow that to happen again. If, in the aftermath of Walton, Labour decides that it is time to accelerate the currently steady but slow process of expelling Militant, it is essen­tial that the party adheres scrupulously to the principle of presumption of innocence and uses reliable evidence only.
Kaufman’s capitulation
The announcement by  Gerald  Kaufman,  Labour’s foreign affairs spokesman, that a Labour government will remain in nuclear arms reduction talks until all nuclear weapons are eliminated was rightly reported as an indication that he believes Britain should keep nuclear weapons as long as anyone else has them. As such, it represents a breath-taking capitulation to the Conserva­tives. Instead of simply ignoring Tory jibes that Labour remained unilateralist at heart, Mr Kaufman has panick­ed. In the process, he has effectively promised to retain the “independent deterrent” well into the next century if not for ever, even though it has no function other than reinforcing Britain’s delusions that it is still an imperial power. With half-a-dozen ill-chosen words, Mr Kaufman has gone against the spirit and letter of Labour policy, which is based on a rejection of nuclear deterrence.