Category Archives: Journalism

Red Pepper, March 1997

Tony Blair looks set to win the general election. That’s good, but the left shouldn’t expect radical change, says Paul Anderson

Labour has been ultra-cautious with its pre-election policy commitments for a long time now. Avoiding hostages to fortune was a crucial element of the pre-1992 campaign strategy – and John Smith as leader decided to make it the guiding light of Labour policy-making. Since Tony Blair became leader in 1994, however, “safety first” has been taken to new extremes in just about every area of policy.

ECONOMY
The priorities for Blair and shadow chancellor Gordon Brown have been to reassure taxpayers and to calm business nerves. They have repeatedly announced that they will run a tight anti-inflationary fiscal and monetary regime. In January, Brown promised not to change either the top rate or the standard rate of income tax – and said that, with the exception of the money he gets from his windfall tax on the excess profits of privatised utilities, he will stick to the Tories’ plans for public spending for his first two years in office. That means a continuing clamp-down on public-sector pay and only small increases in spending on health, education and local government.

EUROPE
Policy on Europe has changed little since 1994 – although shadow foreign secretary Robin Cook has adopted a marginally more sceptical position on economic and monetary union than Labour had before. The idea of the EU running a counter-cyclical macro-economic policy, very popular with both Brown and Cook, has been downgraded, although this is in part because the Delors plan on which it was based was scuppered by the British government in the Council of Ministers.

WORK
Labour has stuck to its promise to sign up to the Social Chapter of the Maastricht treaty. But since 1994 it has watered down its commitments to rights for part-time and temporary workers and has abandoned plans to allow trade unions to engage in sympathy actions in certain circumstances. It has also changed its policy on its promised minimum wage: instead of announcing what it will be before the election, as in 1992, it will leave it up to a commission to set it afterwards at a “sensible” level.

WELFARE
In education, the key change since 1994 is that Labour has made it clear that it will not now abolish grammar or grant-maintained schools. In health policy, the party’s opposition to the internal market and GP fundholding has softened. Labour will not now abolish Jobseeker’s Allowance and go back to Unemployment Benefit, and its pensions policy is in limbo after last year’s row at its party conference. The welfare state in its broadest sense is, however, an area where Labour could well prove radical in government. Its plans for “lifelong learning” and a “university for industry” are ambitious, and its “welfare to work” strategy for tackling unemployment contains much that makes sense.

CONSTITUTION
Changing the constitution was the one thing about which Labour under Smith was not ultra-cautious. Reformers looked forward to a Labour government legislating for a Bill of Rights, an elected second chamber and devolution to a Scottish parliament, a Welsh assembly and directly elected regional councils in England. Labour also promised a referendum on the electoral system. Now devolution to Scotland, Wales and the English regions will happen only if people vote for it in referendums, and Lords reform will be limited for now to removal of the voting rights of hereditary peers. There are persistent rumours, denied by Blair’s office, that he has decided to ditch plans for a referendum on electoral reform.

ENVIRONMENT AND TRANSPORT
Labour has downgraded the profile of environment policy since 1994 – to the disappointment of green campaigners (see Charles Secrett in last month’s Red Pepper) – but has not formally changed it. On transport, its key shift has been on what to do about the privatised rail network, where it is now promising something less than wholesale renationalisation.

Review of Changing States by Glyn Ford, Glenys Kinnock and Arlene McCarthy (eds) (Mandarin, £7.99), Tribune, 8 November 1996

Labour’s MEPs don’t get the attention they deserve. The European Parliament has long since ceased to be a mere talking shop: it now has considerable powers to influence decisions that affect us all. And Labour plays a major role in every aspect of its business. The party is the largest single national group in the Party of European Socialists, itself the parliament’s biggest party, and Labour MEPs hold a string of key positions.

Yet the European Parliament goes largely unreported by the British media, which still consider, entirely wrongly, that political life begins and ends in Westminster and that Europe is essentially a matter of foreign policy. In the Labour Party, MEPs are too often viewed, equally wrongly, as second-rate politicians with the cushiest jobs going.

This collection of essays by a group of 14 members of the European Parliamentary Labour Party should go some way towards changing all this. Between them, the authors, all from the pro-European (but not-quite-federalist) mainstream of the EPLP, cover just about every aspect of European Union politics, from economic and monetary union to consumer protection. No one who reads this book from cover to cover will come away doubting that the EU has to be at the centre of Labour’s political concerns.

All the contributions are intelligent, well-written and easy to understand – itself uncommon in writing about European politics – and the book sends a clear message to Labour’s leaders in Westminster as it prepares for power: flirt with Euroscepticism at your peril. It will not be easy in the heat of an election campaign for Labour to remain essentially pro-European. With Sir James Goldsmith threatening them from the right, the Tories are setting themselves up to run a vicious xenophobic anti-European campaign, and they will be given strong backing by much of the press. The temptation for Labour to respond by adopting a much more Eurosceptic line than it has taken for the past decade, particularly on the single currency, will be great.

That, however, would be a major mistake. As several of the authors argue, the EU needs to be reformed and democratised, and there are undoubted risks in economic and monetary union. But the risks that would be involved in Britain turning its back on Europe are greater. A “positive, proactive approach to Europe”, in the words of Glyn Ford’s excellent introductory essay, is the only option that makes sense. And, as Alan Donnelly and David Martin make clear in their respective contributions, that includes engaging actively in the negotiations leading up to the single currency and backing a massive increase in the powers of the European Parliament.

Red Pepper, November 1996

Labour’s conference last month was an even easier ride for Tony Blair than last year’s. But, says Paul Anderson, the unity on show might not last much beyond the general election

Like it or loathe it, Labour is more united today than at any time in living memory. Last month’s party conference in Blackpool was all smiles and standing ovations. Not one vote went against Tony Blair – even after Barbara Castle’s impassioned call for the basic state pension to be linked again to earnings not prices.

But the party is united for one purpose only: winning the next election. After that, it is unlikely that Labour’s unity will survive long. New Labour is a fragile coalition, and a Labour government will have its work cut out to keep it together. Even now, it’s easy to predict what will stimulate Labour opposition to prime minister Blair – at least some of which will give strength to the pro-European green libertarian left.

Europe The most contentious decision Labour will have to make in office is whether to join the single European currency in 1999. Labour is divided on European monetary union, but unlike the Tories, not on straightforward left-right lines.

The official position is that Labour is in favour of EMU in principle, but against joining unless there is “real economic convergence”. Not only should inflation and government borrowing be low all round – as the Maastricht treaty dictates – unemployment should be low and growth high. This line will probably see Labour through to the election, although it is anathema to the party’s hard-line nationalist Eurosceptics (some hard left, some right-wing Keynesian devaluationists) who are against a single currency in principle.

Once Labour comes to power, however, “the fireworks could start almost at once”, as one centre-left MP put it in Blackpool. A decision on participation in EMU from the outset will have to be made soon after the election, and the best guess is that membership will be on offer only on the terms laid down by Maastricht (albeit flexibly interpreted). It’s most likely that Labour will have to decide whether to join without “real economic convergence” – and that means an unenviable choice. Joining EMU will be a disaster if the convergence criteria turn out to be so tough that they crash the economy. But staying out will be bad news if it means British exclusion from a continental European boom or an EMU-wide job-creation programme.

Unsurprisingly, Labour is divided right to the top on what to do. Gordon Brown apparently wants to take a deep breath and jump in the deep end – but Robin Cook would rather stand on the side and see whether the water is as cold as it looks. Blair is in two minds, but inclined to follow Cook. According to insiders, a majority of the shadow cabinet is wary of EMU, but the balance in a real cabinet will tilt in favour if Blair promotes some of the younger modernisers now in junior front-bench posts. Whatever the leadership decides, at least a significant minority of MPs will disagree, as will a fair number of MEPs, key advisers and trade unions. A referendum on EMU, touted as a way out of Labour’s dilemma, would exacerbate its divisions more spectacularly even than the 1975 Common Market membership referendum.

On the non-xenophobe left, there’s a real argument going on, between EMU sceptics, who would like a renegotiation of the Maastricht conditions (Unison, the TGWU, Tribune, Roger Berry, Peter Hain, Alan Simpson, Jonathan Michie), and EMU enthusiasts, who argue for signing up and then pressing for compensatory measures to cope with the resulting austerity (the GMB, the TUC, Denis MacShane, most of the European Parliamentary Labour Party, John Palmer, Stuart Holland).

This one will run and run – but if Labour signs up for EMU, the protagonists will almost certainly come together behind a Europe-wide employment programme like that being promoted by Labour MEP Ken Coates, which is backed by an impressive coalition of socialists and greens throughout the continent.

Public spending One of the arguments advanced by opponents of participation in EMU is that it requires draconian cuts in public spending; even pro-EMU Labour politicians concede that it means fiscal discipline. But it’s quite possible that a Labour government will decide to squeeze expenditure – except on education, on which Labour is committed to spend – even if it stays out of EMU.

Having made so much of the Tories’ lies about tax, Gordon Brown cannot easily raise income tax or VAT if he needs to reduce public sector borrowing, as he will have to if it overshoots the government’s estimates (as seems likely). There are other options for raising revenue – such as windfall taxes and green taxes – and, in the medium term, growth might ease Brown’s problems. If, however, he decides he has to cut spending (for example to curb inflation), there will be howls of protest from the PLP left, from the constituencies, from the public sector unions and from Labour local government.

Even a refusal to increase public spending beyond the minimal promises in Labour’s manifesto document will be unpopular. Local authorities have high expectations of a Labour government. And the public sector unions are in no mood to be told that big pay rises are out of the question. They will be especially angry if a nugatory minimum wage eventually emerges from the government.

Relations with the unions It’s at this point that big union trouble could start for Blair, and the he knows it. Measures that give substance to the slogans of “social partnership” and “stakeholding” will go down well with the unions – but they might still insist on exerting their influence inside the Labour Party. Because they still dominate Labour’s conference and National Executive Committee, they have the power to make the party ungovernable if they fall out with the government.

Labour’s general secretary, Tom Sawyer, is looking at ways that party structures could be reformed to minimise the damage if the unions get awkward; and if that doesn’t work, there’s the option, floated by junior employment spokesman Stephen Byers during TUC week, that the leadership could cut the party adrift from the unions. As the furore that followed Byers’ remarks shows, that would start a bloody battle that the leadership could well lose.

All the same, it’s not just the modernisers in the New Labour camp that reckon a divorce might not be a disaster. The unions increasingly feel that money they spend on Labour could be better used. Few union leaders are likely to join Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party, but the TGWU, MSF and Unison – at very least – are already thinking seriously about life without. Using all their political funds on their own campaigning is looking more and more attractive.

Welfare reform There have been tastes of the potential for welfare policy to generate Labour dissent in recent months – not just the conference row over the proposals from Barbara Castle and welfare expert Peter Townsend on pensions, but also the less-public spats over Gordon Brown’s plans to drop universal child benefit for 16- to 18-year-olds and to retain the Job Seekers’ Allowance.

How much of a hot potato welfare will be in government is unclear, however. If Labour’s welfare-to-work programme really does reduce the dole queues, there will be few complaints; but if benefits are cut – or if Labour embraces some of the wilder privatisation schemes being hatched by Frank Field and others – there will be mayhem, and not just from the parliamentary left and the unions.

The network of left-leaning academic and pressure group welfare experts is out of the New Labour loop: the Castle-Townsend collaboration on pensions could be a portent of trouble to come from politicians acting in league with the Child Poverty Action Group, Shelter and others. There’s also growing interest across the political spectrum in the (originally radical left) idea of a basic income, which will find increasing purchase if a Labour government fails the poor.

Scotland On Blair’s insistence, Labour is now promising referendums on devolution for Scotland and Wales in the first year of a Labour government. And the Scottish one, considered a sell-out on Home Rule by many Scottish Labourites and ridiculed by nationalists, is set to be a particular problem.

The Scots will decide whether they want a Scottish parliament and whether it should have tax-raising powers. If the result is “yes-yes”, Labour will be laughing. ”Yes-no”, the next most likely result, will spark apoplexy not just in the Scottish Labour Party but among everyone – from the Scottish TUC and the Lib Dems to the churches and the Greens – who backed the Scottish Constitutional Convention agreement on self-government for Scotland.

Electoral reform Labour is committed to holding a referendum on electoral reform for the Commons – and, if it’s ditched, the party’s electoral reform lobby will be livid. There is also potential for conflict over the wording of the referendum and in the referendum campaign itself, in which senior Labour figures will back different systems.

Once again, Robin Cook is a key player (he is the most senior enthusiast for the German additional member system of proportional representation), and once again there is not a simple left-right divide. Although MPs tend to be sceptical about anything that might threaten their hold on their seats, several, many on the left, are enthusiasts for PR (Ken Livingstone, Clare Short, Richard Burden), and their numbers will swell after the election. They have backing from younger party activists and some unions – as well as from non-party pressure groups such as Charter 88. Cross-party alliances will be key, particularly when it comes to deciding on the particular electoral system the PR lobby supports if the referendum goes ahead.


Civil liberties With Jack Straw as shadow home secretary, Labour has relentlessly asserted its enthusiasm for getting tough on crime, playing down civil libertarian themes. In opposition, internal Labour criticism has been muted – largely because Straw has not come up with concrete proposals that are particularly authoritarian even though his rhetoric has often echoed Michael Howard’s.

The tests here will come in office: in the scope of the Freedom of Information legislation Labour has promised, in the content of its Bill of Rights, in its replacements for Tory laws restricting asylum rights, immigration and freedom of assembly. There is a strong civil libertarian movement outside party politics, part of it long-established and single-issue (Liberty, Amnesty International), part of it new and as involved in questions of social justice and environmentalism (The Big Issue magazine, the new squatting movement, the campaigns against the Criminal Justice Act and road-building).

It would be rash to predict a flowering of a radical new left after Tony Blair makes it to Number Ten. But the pond life is stirring. And it will certainly be more exciting than Blackpool last month.

Review of The Blair Agenda by Mark Perryman (ed) (Lawrence and Wishart, £9.99), Tribune, 4 October 1996

After the closure of the Communist Party magazine Marxism Today in late 1991, its marketing manager, Mark Perryman, was at a loose end. So, with a handful of north London buddies, he set up a discussion group, Signs of the Times, to keep exploring some of the ideas about “New Times” that had been central to the magazine’s thinking in its final years.

Ever since, a shifting group of people, some but by no means all ex-CPers, have met for two series of seminars every year. The group has heard from speakers from a wide range of backgrounds: old Marxism Today stalwarts, writers on cultural studies, right-wing libertarian activists, feminist columnists.

 This collection of essays is based on papers given to last autumn’s seminars, and it’s a typically mixed bag. The best two pieces are by Andrew Gamble, professor of politics at Sheffield University, who contributes a typically pithy analysis of the legacy of Thatcherism, and Kevin Davey, a regular on Tribune’s reviews pages, who writes with great insight on the likely tensions inside the Labour Party if Tony Blair wins the next election.

I also liked the contributions by Helen Wilkinson, project director at the think tank Demos, on Blair as the first “post-1960s, post-Beatles, party leader”, and Gerry Hassan, on the impact of Scottish devolution.

But too many of the contributors exaggerate the novelty of the Blair “project”, and there are too many occasions on which authors lapse into pretentious gobbledygook, with buzz-words taking the place of clear thinking – an all-too-common trait of Marxism Today, as I remember. Perryman’s introduction is a case in point. Try as I might, I can’t find much meaning in his claim that “Tony Blair remains the supreme arbiter of the fluid of British politics” or his talk of “the millennial terrain on which Tony Blair and his colleagues will be tip-toeing as they ponder over their red boxes in Whitehall”. Which is a pity, because much that Perryman says is really quite sensible.

One final gripe: again like Marxism Today, the book is peculiarly parochial in its focus. It desperately needs more on the international context of New Labour, particularly on the impact of Bill Clinton’s “New Democrats” and on how other west European social democratic parties have adapted to globalisation and the end of the Keynesian era. Britain might be a peculiar little country, but it has rather more in common with abroad than you’d think from The Blair Agenda.

New Statesman & Society, leader 19 April 1996

The miserable failure of the Conservative candidate in last week’s by-election suggests that they are doomed to lose the next general election

Voters’ behaviour in by-elections is notoriously untrustworthy as a means for predicting what they do in a subsequent general election. Every single one of the seven seats the Tories lost in by-elections between 1987 and 1992 returned to the fold at the 1992 general election. Only a fool would claim that, next spring or perhaps this autumn, Staffordshire South East (or rather the Tamworth constituency that will encompass all but 5,500 of its voters) couldn’t go the way that Vale of Glamorgan, Mid-Staffordshire, Monmouth and Langbaurgh went four years ago.

But it would be equally foolish to deny the significance of Labour’s victory last week. The Staffordshire South East campaign began in circumstances as favourable as they could have been for John Major’s administration. The economy was on the up at last, the government had survived the Scott report on arms sales to Iraq, and the backbench Tory rebellion over Europe appeared to be over. In Jimmy James, the Conservatives had the best by-election candidate they had fielded for ages – and the seat seemed pretty safe, with a majority of more than 7,100 over Labour.

In other words, it appeared that the by-election offered Major a good chance to demonstrate that the tide had turned for his party and that Labour’s popularity had passed its peak. If Labour failed to win, it would hardly be a disaster on the scale of Bermondsey in 1983 or Greenwich in 1987, but a Tory victory would do untold damage to Labour morale. Even a narrow Labour victory could be portrayed as proof that the party could not win the next election, much as happened with the Langbaurgh by-election in 1992.

That nothing of the sort happened has a little to do with the Tories’ bad luck: the mad cow crisis blew up just as the campaign got into gear, and it did immense harm in what is still a farming constituency. It’s also a tribute to an effective Labour campaign to get local council leader Brian Jenkins elected. But the scale of his victory – he took 60 per cent of the vote and a 13,762 majority over James – suggests something more profound at work.

Given the state of the economy, the affluence of the constituency, the quality of the candidate and all the rest, the Tories should at least have made a close fight of it. Their failure suggests an unprecedented level of disillusionment with the government among the voters – and it is difficult to imagine how the Conservatives can possibly counter it. Even if they manage to hang on until next spring before calling an election – for which they will need a combination of cooperation from the Ulster unionists and an absence of defections and deaths among their own MPs – and then pull off a 1992-style scare on Labour’s tax plans, it’s hard to imagine them being returned to office.

For Labour, the message from Staffordshire South East is as optimistic as it is pessimistic for the Tories. The result shows that the party can now win in Middle England even when the economy is going the Conservatives’ way. For a change, the opinion polls seem to be an accurate reflection of people’s voting intentions. If it keeps up the momentum, Labour could be looking at a Commons majority of 1945 proportions after the next general election. Tony Blair had good reason to look as pleased as he did when he gave his news conference outside the White House after hearing the result.

Of course, Labour cannot afford to be complacent, as Blair never ceases to remind us. But the big question in British politics is increasingly not whether Labour will win but what it will do once it has won. Up to now, Labour has preferred to be vague about its intentions on most things: indeed, it is only on certain constitutional reform issues that its detailed plans have been made public (although the broad outline of Labour policy is clear enough in several other areas) . But with the imminence of the general election, it is going to have to get specific sooner rather than later. If it does so without either alienating its traditional supporters or scaring off the middle-class voters who backed it in Staffordshire South East last week, Tony Blair will have pulled off a political trick that none of his predecessors since Harold Wilson has managed to master.

New Statesman & Society, 12 April 1996

Last week’s Labour back-bench revolt on new police powers to combat terrorism worked a treat, writes Paul Anderson

For anyone who thought that new Labour wasn’t vulnerable to back-bench revolt, last week must have been a salutary experience.

On the Monday, Home Secretary Michael Howard announced a surprise bill of new police powers as an extension of the Prevention of Terrorism Act. His shadow, Jack Straw, after a briefing by the security service, agreed that Labour would not oppose it. On the Tuesday, the measures were rushed through the Commons. The cursory debate was remarkable only for Straw’s miserable performance and for the barracking he got from his own backbenchers. Thirty Labour MPs, rather than abstaining, rebelled against their whips and voted in opposition to the government’s guillotine motion to speed passage of the bill (see below), a figure that would have been larger had many MPs not already left Westminster for the Easter break before Howard’s announcement.

Plenty more abstained ashamedly or toed the line only after several drinks as the sitting wore on until the small hours of Wednesday. And at the weekend, after a deserved rubbishing not just from civil libertarians but from the columnists in the quality press who are normally most sympathetic to new Labour, Straw sheepishly made it known that a Labour government would abandon the most controversial part of the PTA, the provisions for “exclusion orders” to prevent “suspected terrorists” from travelling from Northern Ireland to the rest of the UK.

It wasn’t quite a U-turn. But the backbench revolt, aided by some acerbic press comment (a Martin Kettle column in the Guardian hit home particularly hard), had at least managed to push Straw into making an unambiguously civil libertarian policy promise in public for the first time since he was given his job. This week, libertarian Labour MPs sounded unusually chirpy. “Straw got a nice fright,” said one of the many who felt like rebelling last week but didn’t have the bottle. “He’ll think twice before doing anything quite so stupid again.”

It would be wrong to claim that the revolt says too much about Labour MPs’ capacity for bloody-minded independence: by the end of the night it had dwindled to 12 on the third reading of Howard’s bill, all but three of them the usual suspects from the hard-left Campaign Group. By comparison with the May 1993 rebellion against ratification of the Maastricht treaty, when 68 Labour MPs defied the whips to vote against rather than abstain, it was small beer. Nor do last week’s events prove that libertarians hold sway on the Labour back benches: the number of dissidents even on the guillotine motion was smaller than the number of Labour MPs (39) who voted against a homosexual age of consent of 16 two years ago. It is notable, too, that last month, when the PTA proper came up for its annual renewal and Straw backed abstention rather than Labour’s traditional opposition, there were only 23 rebels – and that was arguably a much more important policy shift than last week’s little kow-tow to the Tories.

The rebellion is nevertheless significant. Considering how close a general election might be, and how tough Labour’s parliamentary discipline has been of late as a consequence, it was big and just a little reckless, particularly given the widespread suspicion on the opposition benches that Howard had introduced the bill mainly to sow dissent in Labour’s ranks – but it worked all the same. That will undoubtedly give heart to any MP worried about the powerlessness of the humble backbencher under a Labour government.

More important, the back-bench revulsion at the Labour leadership’s backing for Howard’s illiberal reinforcement of police powers is a welcome signal – at last – that there are limits to at least some Labour MPs’ tolerance of the authoritarian populism on law and order that has come to characterise Labour’s approach to home affairs in recent years.

Tony Blair’s period as shadow home secretary, best remembered for his coining the phrase “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”, marked the start of the process with Labour’s stupid and unprincipled abstention on the Criminal Justice Bill. Since Straw took over in 1994, we’ve had in rapid succession the slapping down of Clare Short for suggesting that it might be legitimate to discuss legalisation of cannabis, the hysterical anti-drugs sloganeering of the Littleborough and Saddleworth by-election campaign, Straw’s own ill-advised remarks last year on “squeegee merchants, winos and addicts” and Labour’s distinctly half-hearted opposition to the Asylum and Immigration Bill.

What is surprising is that it has taken quite so long for a significant minority to say “enough”. But it’s better late than never.

WHAT THE NEW POWERS MEAN

The Prevention of Terrorism (Additional Powers) Act, which sped through parliament and acquired royal assent last week, is the fourth major revision of the original 1974 Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA). On each of the previous three occasions – 1976, 1984 and 1989-the powers contained within the act were significantly expanded and strengthened, and the most recent offering is no exception.

The new powers agreed by parliament will need to be renewed on an annual basis in the same way as the previous version of the PTA, which was given its latest 12-month extension just last month.

The PTA contains a wide range of provisions, which can be divided into a number of distinct headings: arrest, search and detention; “exclusion orders”; banning of organisations; port and airport control; and withholding of information from the police about terrorism. Of the five measures in the new act, three provide the police with new search powers.

First, on the authority of a police officer of ACPO rank (the Association of Chief Police Officers represents chief and assistant chief constables), the police may stop and search any pedestrian within a given area over a specified period (maximum 28 days). Similar provisions already exist in the 1994 Criminal Justice Act for vehicles, their passengers and any objects carried by pedestrians: the new measure extends them to pedestrians themselves. It is apparently designed to allow searches for small incendiary devices which may be carried by terrorists in their pockets-but civil libertarians fear that the “stop-and-search” powers mark a return to the old “sus” laws and are likely to be abused.

Second, the police may obtain granted search warrants to cover several non-residential premises. Any such warrant must be executed in full within 24 hours and cannot be used to search a home. According to the Home Office, the intention is that they be used “when police have intelligence warning of a general threat” so that, for example, several streets of buildings may be searched after a bomb warning that does not give the device’s precise location.

The third measure is intended to rectify an apparent deficiency in the law: unaccompanied goods entering into the country may now be searched at ports and airports without permission.

The other two measures contained in the additional powers legislation allow the police absolute control over pedestrian and vehicle movements within a certain area. An officer of superintendent rank or above may cordon off a specified area of any size for a “limited period” (again, up to a maximum of 28 days), while an ACPO rank officer may prevent parking and remove vehicles underthe same terms. The police decision must be ratified by the Home Secretary within 48 hours.

The purpose is to give the police instant power to clear an area, although it is less than obvious how they were previously lacking in this respect. A police spokesman said: “There is no intention to designate areas unless there is good intelligence or a reasonable suspicion that a terrorist act is imminent or to prevent one taking place.”

The timing of the introduction of the new act was determined largely by political factors, although Home Secretary Michael • Howard has insisted that “the police have asked me for these extra powers now, both to protect the public and to help them prevent further terrorist outrages”. Whether the new measures will have any effect at all on the incidence of terrorism is a moot point, however: perhaps the most telling criticism of the PTA is that, in more than 20 years, it has failed utterly to prevent terrorism-and the new act is unlikely to change that. (Patrick Fitzgerald)

THE REBELS

The following Labour MPs voted with the Liberal Democrats and various small-party MPs against the government’s guillotine motion on the Prevention of Terrorism (Additional Powers) Bill last week: Diane Abbott (Hackney North);Tony Banks (Newham NW); Harry Barnes (Derbyshire NE); Tony Benn (Chesterfield); Andrew Bennett (Denton and Reddish); Richard Burden (Birmingham Northfield); Dennis Canavan (Falkirk W); Ann Clwyd (Cynon Valley); Harry Cohen (Leyton); Robin Corbett (Birmingham Erdington); Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North);Terry Davis (Birmingham Hodge Hill); Neil Gerrard (Walthamstow); Norman Godman(Greenock); Bernie Grant (Tottenham); Lynne Jones (Birmingham Selly Oak);Terry Lewis (Worsley); Ken Livingstone (Brent E); Eddie Loyden (Liverpool Garston); Andrew Mackinlay (Thurrock); Kevin McNamara (Hull N); Max Madden (Bradford W); Alice Mahon (Halifax); Jim Marshall (Leicester S); Bill Michie (Sheffield Heeley); Peter Pike (Burnley); Brian Sedgemore (Hackney S); Dennis Skinner (Bolsover); Rob Wareing (Liverpool W Derby); Audrey Wise (Preston).

The following Labour MPs voted against the third reading of the bill: Harry Barnes; Tony Benn; Andrew Bennett; Bernie Grant; Ken Livingstone; Kevin McNamara; Max Madden; Bill Michie; Brian Sedgemore; Dennis Skinner. Jeremy Corbyn and Dennis Canavan were tellers.

New Statesman & Society, leader 12 April 1996

The Labour leader’s warm reception in the United States does not mean that the “special relationship” is due for a revival

This week, for the first time since Labour left government in 1979, a Labour leader is making an official visit to the United States in the expectation that it will be a rip-roaring success. Tony Blair has been preceded across the Atlantic by the sort of press coverage that politicians dream about – and the political class in Washington is dying to meet him.

Despite the Tories’ crude attempts to smear him for “un-American activities”, Blair can be sure that there will be no repeat of Neil Kinnock’s humiliation in 1987. Then, the Labour leader, still an enthusiast for unilateral nuclear disarmament, was given a frosty 2o-minute audience by Ronald Reagan, who also famously mistook Denis Healey for the British ambassador. Blair, by contrast, can expect a warm reception from Bill Clinton.

The two men share the conviction that they have rescued political parties that appeared to have gone into terminal decline (although Blair has yet to win power) – and Clinton sees Blair as something of a political protégé who has taken up many of his own themes, particularly on crime, tax and economic policy. The defence and security policy stances that caused Reagan to shun Kinnock nine years ago are now ancient history. These days, Labour is an impeccably Atlanticist party, its antipathy to nuclear weapons and its criticisms of Nato and US foreign policy long forgotten. Clinton even shares Blair’s antipathy to John Major: he has not forgiven the Tories for backing George Bush in 1992 and helping the Republicans dig for dirt on his days as a student in Oxford.

All of which makes for a good photo-opportunity for both men – but what does the razzmattazz mean in the long term? It certainly makes it difficult for the Tories to claim in the run-up to the election that Labour is somehow disloyal to the Atlantic alliance (which, as we all know, has preserved the peace for nearly 50 years). And it probably presages warmer relations between Britain and the US if Clinton is re-elected and Blair makes it to Number Ten.

But that’s about it. What it doesn ‘t mean is that a return to the “special relationship” between Britain and America is on the cards, at least as the “special relationship” has normally been construed. Of course, Britain and the US will continue to share the English language, and the cross-fertilisation of cultures that has marked the past 200 years will go on as before (with America inevitably having far more influence here than Britain has there). Britain will be reliant on the US to remain a nuclear weapons power, just as it has been since the early 1960s; and the links between the two countries’ intelligence services will still be close. As long as Britain stays a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council and retains substantial military capabilities, it will be a key ally of the world’s only superpower.

But none of this is particularly “special”. The fact is that, with the end of the cold war, Britain’s role as America’s favoured partner in western Europe no longer makes much sense to US policy-makers. During the cold war, the French were too independent for Washington’s liking and the Germans too prone to neutralism. Britain, by contrast, under both Tory and Labour governments, could be relied upon to back the US on every key policy decision. When the Americans said “Jump!”, we jumped, in other words, and in return felt mightily pleased to be patted on the head.

Today, however, the value of such unquestioning loyalty is much reduced – and, with Tory Britain a bit-player in the process of European integration and Germany increasingly dominant in Europe both economically and politically, Washington has looked more and more to Bonn as its most important European ally. That is unlikely to change even if Labour wins.

The upshot, as Blair himself has recognised, is that the best way for Britain to develop its relations with the US is as part of Europe. Crucial as the Atlantic alliance is, it is with the countries the other side of the Channel and the North Sea that a Labour government will have to work most closely. However much the photographs of this week’s trip remind everyone of the young Harold Wilson’s visit to see the young John Kennedy in 1963, the world today is a very different place – like it or not.