Author Archives: Paul Anderson

JUST SHEER MERIT

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Tribune, 5 July 1991

What’s it like to be Britain’s first black trade union leader? Paul Anderson talks to Bill Morris, who has just been elected head honcho of the Transport and General Workers’ Union
“Coming in as a new general secretary, you have to have a sense of your priorities,” says Bill Morris, who last month won the election to take over from Ron Todd at the head of the Transport and Gener­al Workers’ Union, Britain’s largest union.
Morris is in no doubt about the most urgent task facing him be­fore he takes over from Todd in March 1992. “Priority number one is to unite the TGWU,” he says.
His battle for the general secre­taryship against George Wright, the TGWU’s Welsh regional secretary, was one of the hardest-fought union elections in recent memory and, although Morris won clearly with 118,206 votes to Wright’s 83,059, the union re­mains divided as it meets for its biennial conference in Blackpool next week.
The next challenge is to do something about the TGWU’s fi­nances. Since the Tories came to office in 1979, the TGWU’s membership has fallen by 40 per cent, from more than 2 million to just over 1,200,000. Last year, the union’s income of £54 million fell short of its expenditure by £12 million.
“It is essential that the union’s finances are brought within credible bounds,” Morris says. “We have a deficit, which was planned insofar as, when the first recession of the early eighties came, we took a very conscious decision that we would not pursue a policy of retrenchment, sacking officers and staff and closing pre­mises, because it would give the wrong signals to the Labour movement. A lot of people – and not just TGWU members – rely on the union. We would have been letting all of them down if we had said we weren’t going to give any more voluntary support.
“Unfortunately, we did not see that the recession was going to last as long as it did and that we were going to have two recessions in a decade. Nor did we foresee that there would be a major shift from manufacturing into the ser­vice sector. We suffered from a double squeeze, a big shake-out where we were strong, while our organisation in the service sector was not well developed. We’ve spent the last five years re­positioning the union to cope with this change.”
Morris has been closely associ­ated with the “Link-Up” cam­paign to recruit part-time, casual and temporary workers, particu­larly women, which has been cen­tral to this re-positioning. Since the campaign started in 1985, TGWU recruitment has risen from 220,000 to 285,000 a year.
“But ‘Link-Up’ wasn’t simply a matter of recruiting a few tem­porary and part-time workers,” he says. “It was about giving trade unionism back to the ex­ploited, the oppressed, those who need it most. It involved consoli­dating in our existing strongholds to take account of changes in the workplace, using modern methods to promote our values, and making structural changes in the union, for example to encour­age women to get involved. There had to be a cultural revolution here so that, when we spoke, people knew that we meant it.”
Morris says he wants to build on the success of “Link-Up”. “We need to rebuild the union’s numerical strength. Along with robust recruiting and organising in the areas of the economy where we are already established, we need to pursue a strategy of mer­gers and joint ventures with other unions.
“The only criterion for mergers is the industrial logic of what we do,” he says. Among the prime candidates for merger is the National Union of Mineworkers, also meeting in Blackpool next week. “We have spoken to the miners,” says Morris. “Coal has to be at the heart of Britain’s future energy strategy. I want to see a balanced energy policy. We be­lieve we can facilitate that pro­cess with a united energy orga­nisation and yes, there is a home for the miners in the Transport and General Workers’ Union, ni be pursuing that vigorously.”
Transport is another area for possible mergers, he says, and there are plenty of other ways that the TGWU under his leader­ship will be open to co-operation, particularly Europe, on which, he says, no single union has the resources to operate effectively on its own.
“I see the Europeanisation of labour and capital and the monet­ary and political developments as key issues which have to be addressed by trade unions work­ing together. It’s a big challenge, the Europeanisation of trade un­ionism, but we’ve got to pick it up.”
In   the   shorter   term,   Morris says, the main political challenge is closer to home: the election of a Labour government. He pledges full support for Labour’s cam­paign from his union. “We are not going to wake up the morning after a general election with a healthy political fund and John Major still in Number Ten Down­ing Street. We will put the politic­al resources to work to ensure the election of a Labour government. The TGWU will be playing its usual special role in Labour’s campaign.”
Morris is keen on Labour’s plans for a statutory minimum wage and critical of the leaders of craft unions who have attacked it for eroding differentials. “We’re now convinced that there’s no good reason that the state should continue to subsidise bad em­ployers who underpay their workers. That essentially is what is happening. People on low wages have to ask for income support handouts from the state. A statu­tory minimum wage is the way forward. But we’ve got to do more than make statements of inten­tion. If the statutory minimum is going to work, it will need proper enforcement.
“Of course people have to be rewarded for skills and for effort but, if we are serious about tack­ling low pay, to denounce the minimum wage at this stage, almost on the basis of greed in some instances, doesn’t seem to me to be the best way of getting the debate going.”
He is similarly enthusiastic ab­out Labour’s plans for trade union law reform. “We need a new framework of labour law,” he says. “What Labour has proposed so far is a major extension of rights. I’ve always been a suppor­ter of the closed shop, but we are in a new ball game. The unions’ big problem today is riot main­taining the closed shop, it’s get­ting recognition. If I have to choose between a closed shop and statutory recognition, I’ll choose statutory recognition.”
Morris remains a firm oppo­nent of incomes policy and rejects the idea that Labour’s proposed National Economic Assessment would effectively be one. “If the National Economic Assessment is about incomes policy then frankly the TGWU is not interested. I can’t put it any clearer than that. If it’s about informing bargain­ing, if it’s about looking to see how we can influence priorities, seeking to develop a whole new debate about creating economic prosperity, we want to be part of the process.”
“Whatever happens,” he says, “we will be right at the sharp end attempting to influence develop­ments in the workplace. We will be very aggressive in maintain­ing living standards and in prom­oting training. We’ll be pushing very strongly for a diversification strategy for the defence indus­tries and for infrastructural in­vestment in the regions. And we do not accept that there is inevi­tability about unemployment. We must restore the goal of full em­ployment.”
Morris is, of course, Britain’s first black trade union secretary and, according to the Financial Times, the most powerful black man in Britain. But he plays down the importance of his col­our. “We live in a society where people are judged not by their personality or their character but by their colour, which I find abhorrent. Because I am black, I think I’m best placed – I won’t make any concession of modesty here – to understand the prob­lems of racism and discrimina­tion.
“But I said throughout my cam­paign that I was not the black candidate, I was a candidate who was black, and I was elected on my policies. My position is quite clear. I’m not a representative of the black community, I’m a pro­fessional trade unionist. My un­ion of opportunity will be a union of opportunity for all. No favours, no privileges, just sheer merit.”

EUROPE IS SOLUTION TO BALKAN CRISIS

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Tribune leader, 5 July 1991

Unlike previous Balkan crises, the current upheaval in Yugoslavia is hardly the stuff on which continental or world wars are made: the collapse of Soviet power in eastern Europe has seen to that. But this is not to say that the attempt of the Yugoslav federal army and airforce to suppress Slovenian aspirations to indepen­dent nationhood can be dismissed by the rest of Europe as an internal Yugoslav affair. Already scores of people have died in the fighting. To avert disaster, it is impera­tive that the other European states, acting in concert and using every diplomatic means available to them, do their utmost to secure a binding ceasefire and withdrawal of federal forces from Slovenia.
Nevertheless, it has to be recognised that such mea­sures will probably not be enough. The unavoidable fact is that Yugoslavia is falling apart. The Slovenes and Croats have had enough of being dominated by the Serbs and want to be out of the federation, preferably becoming part of an enlarged European Community. The federal armed forces, the last remaining functioning part of the old communist federal apparatus, whose officer corps is dominated by Serbs, are prepared to go to war to preserve Serbian hegemony.
Even if a ceasefire can be secured, it seems unlikely that the protagonists can be brought to the negotiating table; it is even more unlikely that negotiations will produce a way of keeping Yugoslavia in one piece. Sooner or later, probably sooner, the rest of Europe is going to have to decide whether it will take a constructive role in the creation of several new states out of Yugoslavia or whether it will merely be a passive witness as those new states attempt to go it alone.
Established governments do not like nascent states because such states are, at best, unpredictable and, at worst, pose a threat to international security; states that are the products of secessionism are almost anathe­ma. If Slovenia can do it, what about (to take just a few examples close to home) Northern Ireland, Wales, Scot­land, Brittany, Corsica, Catalonia and the Basque coun­try? It is perhaps hardly surprising that the chancellories of Europe have so far been unwilling to grasp the nettle of recognising Slovenia as an independent state.
Eventually, however, the nettle will have to be grasped – which in turn will raise the question of how the new state should be integrated with its neighbours. It is not too Utopian to suggest that the problem could best be solved neatly by rapid, simultaneous enlargement and deepening of the European Community. In a “Europe of the regions”, with a judicious mix of pan-European control of economic, defence and foreign policy and regional (or small nation) control of most of the rest, Slovenian independence would threaten no one. But to get from here to there requires that the governments of the EC put aside the sterile debate between the deepeners, who want to exclude rich neutral and poor ex-communist states from an affluent militarist EC, and the enlargers, who want to hold on to national sovereignty at any price.
The real task is the creation of a democratic federal European polity that takes in the entire continent.

FEAR AND LOATHING IN WALTON

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Tribune, 21 June 1991

Paul Anderson visits the by-election campaign in Eric Heffer’s old seat
The by-election campaign  in Liverpool Walton got under way in earnest last weekend as members of the Militant Tenden­cy from all over the country arrived to canvass for Lesley Mahmood, the Militant  member  standing  as  a “Real  Labour” candidate  against Labour’s Peter Kilfoyle.
Most went home on Sunday, but there is still a large Militant pre­sence on the rubbish-strewn streets of the north Liverpool constituency, dishing out leaflets and stickers printed in the same colours as Mr Kilfoyle’s, though without the Labour rose. “They’re doing their best to confuse the voters,” says one of Mr Kilfoyle’s campaign workers. “They’re trying to give the impress­ion that Kilfoyle was imposed on Walton by the Labour leadership even though Mahmood was the loc­al choice. They’re also insinuating that Kilfoyle voted for redundancies on the city council – and he’s not even a councillor.”
Ms Mahmood, a Liverpool city councillor expelled from the Labour Party this year for opposing the setting of the council’s poll tax, denies the charge that she is run­ning a dirty campaign or trying to confuse the voters. “I don’t see how anyone can be confused,” she says. “We are the real Labour Party in this city. I was selected by Walton Real Labour supporters. They’ve built the party in the area. I wouldn’t want to be known as the official Labour candidate. He’s Kinnock’s yes-man.”
Mr Kilfoyle makes a great show of steering clear of arguments about Liverpool Labour politics and Mili­tant, at least for the time being. Labour is confident that Ms Mahmood will do herself damage by her constant repetition of Militant slogans – “everything from nationalise the top 150 monopolies to a workers’ MP on a workers’ wage,” says a Kilfoyle supporter – and that any confusion about the identity of the Labour candidate will be quickly cleared up by the media coverage of the campaign.
The unspoken fear is not that Labour will lose but that its victory will not be crushing. Militant has few firm friends among the Walton electorate: an opinion poll pub­lished in the Liverpool Echo on Tuesday gave Mr Kilfoyle 40 per cent, with Paul Clark, the Liberal Democrat candidate, on 16 per cent and Ms Mahmood trailing on 9 per cent, just 2 points above the Tories’ Berkeley Greenwood.
Nevertheless, there are worries in the Labour camp that the Kil­foyle campaign could be hampered by Militant intimidation of canvassers and that Ms Mahmood could yet benefit from popular opposition to the 1,000 council job cuts current­ly planned by Liverpool City Coun­cil’s official Labour group in the face of a growing financial crisis.
The council is the largest single employer in the city, and feelings are running high, particularly among the council bin-men, whose industrial action against the cuts has left 12,000 tons of rubbish on the city’s streets.
Ms Mahmood supports the in­dustrial action. She is campaigning on a platform of “no redundancies and no rent rises”, and is hoping to emulate the success of the “Real Labour” candidates run by the Mili­tant-dominated Broad Left in last month’s local elections. Five out of six candidates put up against offi­cial Labour candidates for the city council won their seats, one of them in Walton.
Her opponents argue that she is advancing not practical policies but Trotskyist “transitional demands”, designed to be attractive but im­possible to implement. The idea, according to the theory, is that workers “taken through the experi­ence” of having their hopes dashed will become more receptive to re­volutionary socialism.
If there is any place where work­ers should have been radicalised by Militant slogans, it is Walton. The constituency is the cradle of the entrist sect: as long ago as 1955, Ted Grant, the leader of the Trots­kyist group that became the Revolutionary Socialist League later the same year and started pub­lishing Militant newspaper in 1964, just missed being selected as Labour parliamentary candidate for Walton. In the 1959 general elec­tion, the Labour candidate, George McCartney, who lost to a Tory, was an RSL sympathiser.
Although Eric Heifer, who was MP for Walton from 1964 and whose death caused the by-election, was never in Militant, Walton was the base that Militant used to ex­tend its influence throughout the Liverpool Labour Party as the old right-wing Labour machine de­clined in the sixties and seventies, coming eventually to dominate the city council in the early eighties.
Even though its sway over the constituency Labour Party has been much reduced by expulsions in the past five years, many of them the responsibility of Mr Kilfoyle, until recently Labour’s north-west re­gional organiser, the tendency re­tains a strong influence in the area, particularly in the trade unions. The Walton by-election seemed to Militant to be an ideal opportunity to exact its revenge on its tormentors in the Labour Party nationally and locally.
If the opinion polls are anything like accurate, however, it seems more likely that Militant, either through desperation or stupidity, has overplayed its hand. Certainly, whatever happens in the by-election, the future now looks almost impossible for Militant in­side the Labour Party.
It is difficult to see how Militant supporters who have managed to stay in the Labour Party since the expulsions began can possibly sur­vive the wrath of all sections of the party after their organisation has run a candidate against Labour in a parliamentary by-election: the posi­tion of the two Militant MPs, Dave Nellist and Terry Fields, is particu­larly sticky.
Militant knew this before decid­ing to run Ms Mahmood, but was gambling on using a good showing in Walton as the basis for estab­lishing itself as a credible Leninist party far more outside Labour than inside. If, however, as seems likely, Ms Mahmood does badly, the Tendency’s credibility will be wrecked. As Trotsky himself might have put it, The Revolutionary Socialist League seems to be head­ing straight for the unemptied dust­bin of history.

KEEPING TABS ON THE TAPPERS

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Tribune leader, 21 June 1991

Last week’s official announcement that, in 1990, 539 warrants to tap telephones were authorised by the Home Secretary and the Scottish Secretary sounded very reassuring. It gave the impression that there is only one tapped telephone for every 100,000 people hi Britain. Given the prevalence of crime and terrorism, we are supposed to conclude that the extent of telephone-tapping could not possibly concern anyone but a con­firmed paranoiac.
Unfortunately, the official figure is absolutely meaning­less. Only one warrant is required to cover an entire organisation. According to insiders in British Telecom, the number and deployment of telephone engineers and support staff employed on tapping are consistent with many more lines – possibly as many as 35,000 – being snooped upon by the state.
If anything like accurate, these estimates are cause for serious concern. They indicate that the state has an unprecedented and frightening capacity for engaging in surveillance of the population. Perhaps we are not yet staring 1984 in the face, but the right to privacy is being systematically undermined.
Labour is committed to bringing telephone-tapping under tighter control, but a Labour government will have a hard time putting the party’s commitments into practice against the resistance of state surveillance and security bureaucracies. As became clear last week, police plan­ners are already meeting in secret to work out how they will obstruct or circumvent a Labour government’s attempts to carry out policies they do not like, among them the proposed restrictions on telephone-tapping. If Labour is serious about even modest reductions in the size and influence of the surveillance state, let alone about making what remains democratically accountable, it will have to be well prepared for a very tough battle.
What’s wrong with federalism?
It is always pleasant to see Tories at each other’s throats, and it is quite understandable that Labour is for the moment sitting back and laughing as they tear one another to bits over Europe.
In the longer term, however, the Tories’ current row raises a crucial question that Labour cannot duck. Giving the vague impression to the voters that Labour is now the pro-European party is all very well, but before many months are out, Labour will have to decide whether it is in principle in favour of the eventual creation of a federal united states of Europe.
Largely because it knows what damage splits on Europe can cause to British political parties, Labour has concentrated on more immediate, everyday matters of European Community politics – the Social Charter, re­gional policy, making the Commission more democrati­cally accountable, ensuring that a European Central Bank is supervised by elected politicians, reforming the Common Agricultural Policy and so on. If Labour be­lieves Britain is in the EC to stay and if it endorses, with whatever conditions, European Monetary Union and a European central bank, it makes sense for it explicitly to embrace the idea of giving directly democratically accountable all-European institutions the primary re­sponsibility for European government within 20 years.

MILITANT PUTS ITSELF BEYOND THE PALE

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Tribune leader, 14 June 1991

The Militant tendency had few friends even on the far-left of the Labour Party before the Liverpool Broad Left, which it dominates, decided to field its own candidate, Lesley Mahmood, in the by-election for the Walton seat left vacant by the death of Eric Heffer. Now it has quite simply put itself beyond the pale.
Peter Kilfoyle was chosen 16 months ago as Labour’s prospective parliamentary candidate for Walton accord­ing to the party’s agreed selection procedure. It is wholly irrelevant that many people believe that the selection procedure needs to be reformed: it is the one the party has lumbered itself with. It is equally irrelevant that Mr Heffer did not approve of Mr Kilfoyle: Labour MPs do not appoint their successors as prospective parliamentary candidates, nor should they.
Like him or loathe him, Mr Kilfoyle is the official Labour candidate, and publicly to support rivals to official Labour election candidates is rightly considered by the party constitution as one of the most serious disciplinary offences a party member can commit. Party members who campaign against Mr Kilfoyle will deserve no sympathy from anyone, left or right, when they are expelled.
Nevertheless, the most important thing about the Broad Left’s decision to run a rival candidate is not what it means for Labour Party members who back that candi­date but its impact on Labour’s chances in the general election.
If Mr Kilfoyle is beaten as a result of the Broad Left intervention, either directly by Ms Mahmood or because she takes enough votes from Labour to allow a Liberal Democrat victory, Labour’s standing nationally will be severely damaged, just as it was by its by-election defeats in Bermondsey in 1983 and Greenwich in 1987. The damage might be reparable, but it will be far better for Labour if the Broad Left challenge in Walton is crushed.
Whether it will be depends on how far the Broad Left is able to turn the substantial support it has had in local politics into by-election votes, and there are good reasons for believing that it will not. Militant and its dupes and cronies inspire no great loyalty or idealism among the people of Liverpool: it is just that many people in a city where the council is the predominant employer and provider of housing are prepared to vote for prom­ises of no cuts in council jobs and no increases in council rents. That the gang making the promises is corrupt and dishonest is well known – Alan Bleasdale’s portrayal of brutish boss politics in his GBH will strike a chord throughout Merseyside – but short-term self-interest easily trumps such considerations for many voters at local election time.
In the by-election, on the other hand, self-interest on the part of the voters could well work against the Broad Left. Although the Militant central committee might consider it worth taking the risk of sabotaging Labour’s chances in the general election on the grounds that a Labour government led by Neil Kinnock would be worse than a Tory government, it is unlikely that the voters of Walton agree. If Labour can convince them that voting for the Broad Left is the most effective way of helping the Tories to retain office, Mr Kilfoyle will be returned with a thumping majority.

MAKING A EUROPEAN BANK ACCOUNTABLE

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Tribune leader, 7 June 1991

This week, Neil Kinnock delivered a speech to Euro­pean socialists in Luxembourg in which he argued that the European Community’s council of economic and finance Ministers – Ecofin in Europeak – should play a “strategic role” in formulating member states’ domestic monetary policies, overseeing the operations of a new European central bank.

As the Financial Times said, the speech was “the clearest indication yet that Labour is ready to hand over some control of the UK’s internal economic policy to a supranational agency”.

For many on the left, the idea of relinquishing national sovereignty over key elements of economic policy to any supranational agency is anathema. Yet national sovereignty over the economy is, for countries as small as Britain, part of the past. Like it or not, supranational agencies are essential for the development of viable alternative economic strategies: the crucial question is whether they are democratically accountable.

A European central bank, overseen by national econo­mic and finance ministers who are answerable to nationally elected parliaments, is of course much more democratic than a European central bank overseen by bureaucrats who are not answerable to any elected body. But it is far less democratic than a European central bank overseen by directly elected MEPs.

Labour shies away from any such arrangement, believ­ing that the powers of the European Parliament “must complement but not replace” those of national parlia­ments. In line with this, during his visit to Luxembourg Mr Kinnock made clear his opposition to the creation of a single European socialist party.

But it is difficult to think of any reason apart from sentimentality for this attitude. If Labour accepts that national sovereignty over the economy is now severely limited and that economic policy should be determined at a European level, it should surely accept that the Euro­pean Parliament will increasingly replace Westminster as the focus of democratic politics.

TURN ON, TUNE IN …

It is unusual for Tribune to agree with Judge James Pickles, but his call for the decriminalisation of cannabis makes perfect sense. Use of cannabis is now so widespread in Britain, among all classes and ethnic groups, that the law banning it has become a joke – except for the 30,000-odd people convicted each year for posses­sion of small quantities for personal use.

The drug is not addictive and there is no evidence that it causes significant harm to health, as alcohol and tobacco undoubtedly do. If a tiny proportion of cannabis-users move on to addictive and debilitating illegal drugs, it is not because of any property of cannabis but because its very illegality means it is sold by black-market traders who also sell drugs that are dangerous.

Decriminalisation of possession would not remove can­nabis from the black market – supplying it would still be illegal – and it is arguable that complete legalisation, with the state regulating or even monopolising supply, is a more coherent option. But Judge Pickles’ proposal is at least a step hi the right direction.

By contrast, merely adjusting the law to make posses­sion a less serious offence, as Justice, the British section of the International Commission of Jurists, recommended this week, would continue unnecessarily to clog up the courts. Dope-smokers have found an unlikely friend.

THE SPECTRE HAUNTING LABOUR

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Tribune leader, 31 May 1991

According to reports in most of the quality papers, the Tories have decided to give a high priority during the forthcoming general election campaign to alleg­ing that Labour offers only a return to the politics of Harold Wilson. If these reports are true, and there seems to be no compulsive reason to disbelieve them, the Conservatives are making a quite extraordinary political blunder.

Most apparently, they are assuming that the British people remember the Wilson years with horror. But, although Wilson has few admirers these days among politicians, journalists and historians, it is far from obvious that his reputation among the electorate as a whole, insofar as he still has one after so long out of the political limelight, is particularly bad. Indeed, Labour might even benefit from being associated with the man who was Prime Minister when England won the World Cup and the Beatles recorded all their hits.

More important, it is difficult to see how the Conserva­tives can seriously draw parallels between Wilson’s Labour Party and Neil Kinnock’s. There are, of course, superficial similarities. Kinnock, like Wilson, came from the Left of the party and has ditched much ideological baggage in pursuit of electoral success. Labour today, like Labour in 1963-64, has a clean-cut managerial image, is strong on the rhetoric of economic and social mod­ernisation, and is well ahead in the opinion polls.

Beyond this, however, the differences are immense. In particular, Wilson came to power in 1964 with promises of massive state intervention to transform the British eco­nomy, including widespread nationalisation, with the trade unions playing a key role in planning. By compar­son, Labour’s proposals today are extremely modest. Nationalisation and corporatism are out; so too is increas­ing state expenditure unless growth allows it. If unethusiastically at times, Labour does recognise the limits on state economic intervention now imposed by multination­al capital. Should the Tories claim that nothing has changed in Labour’s outlook since the early sixties, it should not be difficult to prove them wrong.

NATO FAILS TO ADAPT

Nato’s announcement on Tuesday that it is to res­tructure its forces, with a “rapid reaction force” under a British commander playing a key role, had been trailed so widely beforehand that it barely made the evening television news bulletins. The announcement is nevertheless worthy of note – largely because it shows how inadequately Nato’s planners have responded to the transformation of Europe in the past two years.

Despite the end of the cold war and the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, Nato remains as committed as ever to the out-dated core assumption that it is necessary to deter a Soviet attack on central Europe by threatening to esca­late any conflict into all-out nuclear war. The force reductions which it is now putting forward are depress-ingly modest, while the proposal for the “rapid reaction force” will exacerbate fears that Nato ispreparing for a much greater “out-of-area” role.

The Labour leadership has tried to calm critics of Nato’s intransigence by claiming that the Alliance is hi a state of flux and increasingly open to new ideas about the future security structure of Europe. This week’s announcement shows that the Nato planners know only one tune and cannot be taught another. It is time for Labour to stop kidding itself that a bloc-free, peaceful, secure Europe can come about without the winding down of Nato.

TOO DANGEROUS TO KEEP AFLOAT

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Tribune leader, 17 May 1981

Last week’s admission by the Ministry of Defence that 50 workers at the nuclear submarine base at Faslane have received doses of radiation above official safety limits is extremely worrying.

The workers have been exposed to excessive radiation because cracks have appeared hi the cooling systems of the nuclear reactors hi Britain’s first-generation nuclear-powered submarines – among them the four Polaris boats that constitute Britain’s “independent nuclear deter­rent”.

These cracks need to be repaired if the submarines are to be kept hi service, and there are few workers willing and able to do the job. Those employed are being worked right up to radiation-exposure limits and some­times well beyond, at severe risk to themselves and to the health of their children and their children’s children.

The reason for this is simple. The Trident nuclear-missile submarine programme, which is supposed to replace Polaris, is running behind schedule because the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston is having severe difficulties with the warheads. If Britain is to maintain without a gap the independent nuclear deterrent, the lifespan of the Polaris boats must be extended until Trident is ready. But is this really worth the risk of ever-increasing exposure of repair workers to radiation?

Tribune, which has long considered British nuclear forces to have no role except that of deluding the British people into thinking that their country is still a major player on the world stage, believes that it is not. But in current international conditions one does not have to be a convinced unilateralist to take such a position.

SOUTH AFRICAN JUSTICE

The six-year prison sentence imposed on Winnie Mandela this week creates problems for the African National Congress, but it would be a mistake to exaggerate them. The credibility of the ANC will inevit­ably suffer some short-term damage among those, black and white, who believe Mrs Mandela to be guilty, and in the short term the beneficiary will be F W de Klerk’s white government, which has an interest in weakening the ANC to extract concessions in negotiations over the future of South Africa.

But Mr de Klerk knows that he needs ANC participa­tion hi the talks if his promises to end apartheid are to have any international credibility, and he knows that time is not on his side. The outcome of the trial will inevitably give added impetus to the already growing pressure on the ANC to withdraw from negotiations with the Government. With reason, black South Africans do not trust apartheid justice. Whatever the truth of the matter, many believe Mrs Mandela to be the innocent victim of a state frame-up, and take the verdict and sentence of proof that nothing has really changed hi the Government’s attitude. Mr de Klerk may have to make concessions to keep the ANC talking.

WHY NOT ADMIT LABOUR WAS RIGHT?

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Tribune leader, 26 April 1991

Michael Heseltine’s scheme for local govern­ment finance has pleased his party, which is hardly surprising. Just about anything that was not poll tax and did not involve an explicit admission that Labour was right all along would have done nicely for the desperate Tories. A tax that can be portrayed as a means of ensuring smaller average bills must seem little less than a godsend.
The problem, however, as Bryan Gould said immediate­ly after the announcement of the new “council tax” on Tuesday, is that, by refusing to admit that Labour was right all along – in other words, by refusing to go back to the rates – the Tories have opted for a scheme that is not only impossible to introduce for several years but is also patently unfair. The “banding” system for Mr Heseltine’s new tax and the reintroduction of 100 per cent rebates mark a belated admission that “ability to pay” has to be taken into account hi local taxation. But the way the “banding” has been set up means that the very richest will get off with disproportionately small bills.
Getting this message across in the last week of the local election campaign will be quite a challenge amid the clouds of sycophantic Tory hype in the newspapers. It is unlikely, however, that the Tories will reap too many benefits from Mr Heseltine’s announcement. His coup de theatre cannot obliterate the popular sense that the poll tax fiasco has revealed the Tories as incompetent and pig-headed; still less can it conceal the extent of the economic crisis in which the Tories have landed us. Labour is still set to do well on May 2.
Germany moves Left
The extraordinary result in the Rhineland-Palatinate Land elections at the weekend, which saw the Social Democrats take 45 per cent of the vote, pushing Helmut Kohl’s Christian Democratic Union into a poor second place with 39 per cent, is cause for rejoicing for the Left not just in Germany but throughout Europe.
If the SPD can win hi Rhineland-Palatinate, it can sweep Germany. Its victory ends 44 years of CDU hege­mony in one of Germany’s most prosperous states, just five months after Chancellor Kohl won a dramatic gener­al election victory on the back of his success in securing unification of the two Germanies.
Mr Kohl has now lost his majority in the Bundesrat, Germany’s upper house, and his grip on power, so recently seemingly unassail­able, suddenly looks tenuous. Put simply, the West Germans recognise that Mr Kohl lied to them about the costs of unification, while the SPD told the truth. Mr Kohl’s party is worn out ideologically, charmless and vulnerable.
These are early days, but the prospects for an SPD-dominated government hi Germany are now better than at any time since 1983. And that, given the central role of Germany in Europe, means that the prospects for a Europe dominated by social democracy are better than at any time in living memory.
The last thing Labour needs right now is to start working on the assumption that a future SPD general election victory will sort out all its problems: there was too much of that attitude in the late eighties, when Labour’s belief in the inevitability of SPD victory took the place that should have been occupied by serious thought about European security policy. Nevertheless, the Rhine­land-Palatinate election result gives real cause for re­newed hope. It is now up to the SPD to sustain it.

FEW SURPRISES IN LABOUR DOCUMENT

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Tribune, 19 April 1991

Paul Anderson takes a look at the policies that will be the basis for the party’s election manifesto

The main surprise in the f Labour policy document launched this week is just how few surprises it contains.

Labour’s Better Way for the 1990s, which will form the basis for the Labour election manifesto, was agreed by the party’s National Executive Committee on Monday and publicly unveiled at a press conference on Tuesday. Neil Kinnock told journalists that the document reaffirmed the approach of Looking to the Future, taking “further account of changes in the condition of our country and our world”. Indeed there is little in it that is not familiar from previous policy meats and speeches.

Nevertheless, there has been no clearer statement of. Labour’s current “social democratic austerity” programme, particularly on the economy. The process of drawing up Labour’s Better Way was closely supervised by Labour’s Treasury team to exclude ambitious spending commitments, and the final document, drafted by Patricia Hewitt, is notable for its pro-Europe stance and its extreme caution about the role of the state except as the provider of “a stable national economic framework” for private enterprise and as the rectifier of the failure of the market.”

Kinnock sets the tone in his preface, where he argues that “the old ideologies – command economy at one extreme, crude free market economics at the other – do not work”. The priority of a Labour government would be. “the modernisation of Britain”, he writes, “creating the conditions in which business can succeed – getting interest and inflation rates down to German and French levels and keeping them down, improving investment in science, research and development and new technologies as others do”.

The document itself emphatically rules out expansionary fiscal and monetary policies: “There will be no irresponsible dash for growth under Labour”. Instead, it stresses the role of government working “in partnership with industry to meet clearly defined goals – improving skills, crossing new technological frontiers, encouraging long-term investment and securing balanced economic growth in every region”.

The state should also ensure “that consumers are protected, monopolies restricted or dismantled and the environment protected”. Government “has a particular responsibility for securing long-term investment in education, transport and regional development which the market, left to itself, has failed to provide”.