Category Archives: Journalism

New Statesman & Society, 30 September 1994


In a Brighton courthouse, the government is being put on trial for its Criminal Justice Bill. It has the right to remain silent – but not for much longer. Steve Platt and Paul Anderson report

“Order!” demands the judge. “Disorder!” shouts a man with a mohican haircut in the public gallery. And the jury cracks up laughing – followed by the judge, who is wearing a bright blue mask and a fake leopardskin rug for a robe.

Then the counsel for the defence joins in too, along with the witness in the witness box (who looks a little the worse – or should that be better? – the wear for drugs). Everyone in the public gallery cheers and whoops. A large black dog barks wildly and runs around the courtroom floor wagging its tail. “Everyone should get mellow and party,” says the man in the witness box, and the cheering and whooping in the public gallery start again.

Not Alice in Wonderland, but a courtroom in Brighton, opposite the Royal Pavilion. The setting is authentic enough, but the old courthouse hasn’t dealt with the usual round of drunk and disorderlies, prostitutes and petty crooks for five years.since a new courthouse was built up the hill. The “trial” taking place opposite the Pavilion has no legal status – indeed, under the provisions of the Criminal Justice Bill, which, barring a political earthquake, should complete its passage through parliament next month, it could itself be an illegal act. For the courtroom has been squatted, and the trial participants are trespassing.

Which, of course, is precisely the point. Brighton’s old courthouse was squatted a fortnight ago in protest against the Criminal Justice Bill by Justice?, a local campaign collective, which, in less than 72 hours, transformed it into a social centre with a vegetarian cafe, meeting and exhibition spaces and regular film, music and poetry events. More than 600 people passed through its doors in the first few days afterits occupation. The “trial”, with the government in the dock, is being staged by the squatters, with the help of a handful of outside witnesses (Liberal Democrat MP Simon Hughes, down in Brighton for the Lib Dem conference, is one) as an alternative to a boring public meeting. As with the other events organised by the old courthouse’s new occupants, it works. Some 200 young people turn up to pack the public gallery – and they love it.

One of those present is Clara, 16 years old and, with all of three months experience now behind her, a hardened campaigner against the bill. She comes from a council estate in Nottingham, where 600 turned out for a protest march last Saturday. Her grandfather used to be “something to do with the Labour Party”, but she “hadn’t had a thing to do with politics” until someone told her that the outdoor party she’d enjoyed so much earlier this summer would be illegal under a new law going through parliament, and the people organising it would be liable to arrest and imprisonment, and their vehicles and equipment seized by the police.

Now she can recite chapter and verse on the bill’s provisions. “Did you know that if 20 of you get together to have a protest against what they’re doing, the police can ban it – and stop anyone coming within five miles? You could be having one in the town where you live arid they could stop you going home. That’s like China or Haiti orsomewhere.”

Her friend, Millie, pierced lips,Lycra leggings and a lurid pink T-shirt, is slightly less well-informed but no less articulate. “If you’re homeless, they can arrest you. If you’re arrested, they can fit you up. If they fit you up, they’ve got new prisons waiting to take you in. And all because they don’t like your way of life. What’s so good about theirs that they take all this trouble to stop us living ours ?”

She offers a leaflet, all swirling patterns and packed text. “If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything,” it announces. It’s a “Free Information Network” publication, listing more than 200 events for September alone, music mixed with anti-motorway protests, a “Glastonbury Tor Gathering” with a “Walk for Wildlife”, a demonstration against the occupation of Tibet in London, a “Buskers Against the Bill” parade in Guildford. A list is printed of Lords to be lobbied: “Write now to the Lord of your choice!” it reads. “(But don’t ALL write to the ones with silly names.)” The address given is “The House of the Living Dead”, London SW1A 0PW. “It’s got the postcode, so they’ll get the letters,” says Millie.

Another leaflet comes from a similar stable: “There is a need to dance. There is a need to travel. There is a need to squat. There isaneedfor protest. There is a need for open spaces. There is a need to celebrate. There is a need for community. There is a need to communicate. There is a need for tolerance. THERE IS A NEED to be heard.”

Sixty thousand people made their voices heard against the bill earlier this year, when they turned out for a demonstration in London (see NSS, 29 July). On 9 October, perhaps twice as many again will express their opposition – including ten double-decker-buses-full mobilised by Justice? in Brighton. (We know it will be that big because the police have said so, refusing the organisers permission to rally in Trafalgar Square because “it won’t hold 100,000 people or more”.)

As with the last march, the organisation is proceeding along two rather different models. The first is a loose, often anarchic alliance of groups and individu¬als, many of them linked through the Freedom Network, which coordinated “DIY Week”, a series of events around the country last weekwhose aim was, according to the Network, “to alert communities to the dangers of the Criminal Justice Bill. It is also designed to show the government that we are not dole-scrounging drop-outs but the voice of a new generation, which has more vision than all of the Tory cabinet put together. We feel we have been totally abandoned by this gov¬ernment and the only way we are going to get our voice heard is through peaceful direct action and encouraging people to become part of ‘DIY Culture’ – ie, ‘There’s no point in complaining about things. If you want change, you’ve got to get offyour arse and Do It Yourself.'”And people do – from a beach party in Scarborough to a banner drop in Archway.

The other organisational model is provided by the more traditional left, with the Socialist Workers Party – and, more recently, the whole gamut of other, smaller, left groupuscules – to the fore. It makes for interesting juxtapositions – the crustie traveller and the besuited trade unionist, the hardened raver and the committed anti-racist.

“Jimmy Knapp might be willing to speak at the demonstration,” says a Labour left diehard at one of the organising meetings. “Who’s he?” asks a man who’s come to see how many sound systems they’ll let him bring into Hyde Park. While one group of people talk about trying to get trade union backing for the Coalition Against the Criminal Justice Bill, another is planning to “squat” Hyde Park for the weekend of the march.

SWP national organiser, and Coalition steering group member, Weyman Bennett has mixed feelings about the organisational abilities of some of the newer activists involved in campaigning against the bill. For every successful event organised by the likes of Justice?, there is another that flounders in anarchic inexperience. “Sometimes they don’t put the work in. They don’t realise that protests don’t just happen, even if people are angry about something. They’ve got to be organised.”

Bennett and other opponents of the bill have spent a lot of time trying to get across that it’s not just about ravers and travellers. They’ve tried to emphasise the abolition of the right to silence, the new police powers of stop and search, whereby if they believe a “violent incident” may take place in an area, they can search any person or vehicle without giving a reason, and the anti-terrorist provisions, whereby the possession of information or materials that may be of use to terrorists could result in prosecution.

Clara again: “Did you know that you could have a fishing line, scales, a clock and some harmless chemicals and you could be charged with ‘going equipped for terrorism’ and get ten years, and that it’s up to you to prove that you weren’t going to use them to make a bomb?”

Clara needs no lessons now about the far-reaching nature of Michael Howard’s ragbag of prejudices. “They’ve united us all against them, haven’t they?” she says. The government has been put on trial over the Criminal Justice Bill – and it’s not only the young people of Brighton who are finding them guilty.

New Statesman & Society leader, 16 September 1994


Not for the first time, Bosnia faces a critical month – and, not for the first time, the story we are being told about it by the majority of the British media bears scant relationship to the truth

According to the received wisdom – and at times it’s almost as if it were dictated by the Foreign Office directly to the leader-writers and television commentators – the danger now is that the fragile peace among the “warring factions” will collapse as a result of the intransigence of the Bosnian Serbs, who, unlike the Bosnian Muslims and Croats, have refused to accept the peace plan put together by the “contact group” of big powers, whereby Bosnia would be split in half between the Serbs, on the one hand, and the Muslims and Croats, on the other. To make matters worse, the United States is promising to lift the arms embargo on the (mainly Muslim) Bosnian government next month if the Bosnian Serbs do not accept the plan.

The upshot, according to the received wisdom, is that the two key priorities are, first of all, to persuade Radovan Karadzic and his Bosnian Serbs to change their minds; and, secondly, to persuade the US not to do anything so rash as lifting the arms embargo. In line with this, the British and French are using a mixture of carrot and stick on the Bosnian Serbs, leaning on Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic to lean on Karadzic, and promising a tightening of sanctions on the Bosnian Serbs if they don’t comply. Meanwhile, the British and French have threatened to with-draw their troops from the country if Bill Clinton lifts the arms embargo.

There has been barely a squeak of protest against this British and French strategy – yet the best that can be hoped is that it fails completely. It is utterly misconceived, not just in principle but in just about every detail. At root, of course, as NSS has argued consistently, the problem is that the British and French have always seen the Bosnian war as essentially a civil war, rather than what it is:

a war of aggression by the Bosnian Serbs, backed by Serbia, against an internationally recognised multi-ethnic democratic state. It is because of this misunderstanding that the British and French have been so tied to the idea that the solution to the crisis in Bosnia is some sort of “equitable” ethnic partition.

It should have become clear by now that this whole approach is not only repugnant, but is also doomed to failure because of its total misapprehension of the nature and aims of both Serbia and the Bosnian Serbs. Put simply, the Milosevic regime is a brutal expansionist dictatorship that will do anything to realise the dream of a Greater Serbia; and Karadzic, whatever appearances to the contrary, is Milosevic’s puppet. Neither Milosevic nor Karadzic will settle for an “equitable” division of Bosnia: they want, if not the lot, then everything they have grabbed already and more besides. And they will play every diplomatic game to achieve their goal.

Right now, that means Milosevic posing as sweet reason, backing the latest partition plan, and Karadzic doing the hard-liner act. The purpose is to seduce the allies into removing the economic embargo on Serbia, which is currently the major obstacle to the achievement of Serbia’s war aims and a source of growing popular discontent – and so far the strategem has worked perfectly.

Of course, the price for Milosevic is having to disown Karadzic – but mere words are cheap. Anyone who believes that there is now an unbridgeable gap between Milosevic and Karadzic, or that Milosevic will really participate in a blockade of the Bosnian Serbs, is living in a fantasy land. And in any case, if the worst comes to the worst, there’s always the option of Karadzic being “persuaded” by Milosevic to back the partition plan.

After all, it does legitimise the Serbs’ land-grab in Bosnia, even if it doesn’t give them everything they want. And it wouldn’t necessarily be forever: once the gaze of the international communitv was averted, it would be relatively easy to start the invasion anew. In the meantime, the Serbian dictator could bask in the glow of international acclaim as a man of peace. His position thus strengthened, Milosevic could turn confiden-tly to his next project, the “ethnic cleansing” of Kosovo and Macedonia.

The alternative to the bolstering of Milosevic through appeasement is simple: inflicting on his vile regime and its Bosnian Serb satellite a decisive military defeat. The Bosnian army is potentially in a position to do just that if it can acquire the arms – but it isn’t quite ready yet. According to military experts, it needs another two or three months before launching a winter offensive against the Serbs’ relatively immobile heavy tanks and artillery. In the meantime, Bosnia remains reliant on UN protection.

Which is why the British and French threat to withdraw their troops if the US lifts the arms embargo is doubly vicious. Lifting the arms embargo might not be completely necessary for the Bosnians to acquire the arms they need: since the peace deal between the Bosnian government and the Bosnian Croats, there has been a substantial flow of arms to Bosnia through Croatia. But lifting the embargo would undoubtedly be a major boost to the Bosnians’ fighting strength – and, given the Bosnian Serbs’ intransigence, there can be no excuse for refusing to do it.

For Britain and France to oppose the lifting of the embargo would be bad enough; to back up the opposition with the threat of withdrawal is little short of criminal. As Britain and France know, UN withdrawal from Bosnia would be tantamount to an invitation for the Serbs to take Sarajevo and the other beseiged Bosnian cities. It is true that lifting of the arms embargo would necessitate a different, more active and explicitly pro-government, role for foreign troops in Bosnia: but Britain and France should be spending the next few weeks working out what that role should be, not preparing to pull out.

New Statesman & Society leader, 9 September 1994

It would be easy to dismiss this week’s TUC Congress in Blackpool as a complete non-event. There were no giant bust-ups, no gauntlets thrown down before the Labour leadership, no significant changes in TUC policy. The speeches were bland, the debates cursory, the fudges entirely successful.

But, in many ways, the absence of a story is the story. Just a couple of months ago, Black¬pool 1994 was being trailed as the first battle in the trade unions’ autumn offensive to get Labour to embrace specific targets for full employment and for a minimum wage – so the fact that the big unions decided not to fire a single shot to spoil Tony Blair’s honeymoon as Labour leader is extremely significant. The motions on full employment and the minimum wage were carefully composited to produce a lot of vague and unembarrassing flannel, and Blair had nothing to worry about when he arrived for supper with the TUC general council on Tuesday.

Although some in the big unions were hinting this week that they would be doing their utmost to commit Labour to specific targets when they come back to Blackpool in four weeks’ time for the Labour Party conference, it seems that Blair’s overwhelming popularity in the opinion polls has at least temporarily silenced his union critics.

The absence of any argument with Blair is not the only interesting non-story of this Congress. Quite a few commentators were looking forward to rows over the signal workers’ dispute and over the “relaunch” of the TUC by its new general secretary, John Monks. In the event, neither happened. Monks defused potential left criticism of the TUC’s inadequate support for the signal workers, by declaring that he personally supported them unequivocally, and by inviting RMT leader Jimmy Knapp on to the platform at an eve-of-congress rally. Acouple of Trotskyists hoisted a banner demanding that the TUC got off .its knees, but no one took any notice.

Monks’ support for the signal workers also went a long way to silence the critics of the way he’s pointing the TUC. What has grabbed the headlines in the year since Monks took over from Norman Willis has been his moderation: the arguments for partnership with industry, the openness to discussion with political parties other than Labour (even – horror of horrors – the Tories), the emphasis that unions are good for productivity.

Unsurprisingly, none of this has gone down too well with some on the left – and, to make matters worse, there’s a definite touch of dangerous media-friendliness in the Monks regime. He has radically restructured and re-oriented the labyrinthine bureaucracy of Congress House, pruning its useless committees, and using the savings to establish a campaigns department to ensure that all the TUC’s research work is pushed out to MPs, the media and pressure groups, instead of merely being “noted” at general council meetings. To traditionalists, it all seems a little too close to Mandelsonism for comfort.

The moderation and media-friendliness were on display in abundance this week – but so too was Monks’ radicalism. It wasn’t just a matter of the signal workers. Unlike his predecessor and most of the current generation of Labour politicians, Monks does not squirm with embarrassment at the thought of industrial action: he is perfectly at ease with the notion that, sometimes, strikes are essential for unions to do their job. He is equally at ease with the idea that, as the economy recovers, a rise in wage militancy can be expected. Once he’d made all that clear, there was little for the left to get its teeth into.

But if Monks is a breath of fresh air at the TUC, it’s difficult to be entirely optimistic about the state of British trade unionism after this week’s conference. The overwhelming gloom that hung over TUC gatherings in the last years of Willis has lifted, butjthe unions are still facing major problems. Membership is still falling, finances are still dodgy, the

government is still unremittingly hostile. Despite a widespread commitment to organising the increasingly large part of the workforce that is in casual, part-time or temporary work, the reality is that few unions have made significant headway in such recruitment. More and more employers are going for individual contracts with workers; unions are recognised in fewer and fewer workplaces.

Plenty of people in Blackpool were prepared to acknowledge all this – but few had many ideas for reversing the long-term slide in the unions’ fortunes, apart from working for a Labour government, and continuing to improve the unions’ services to their members and their overall image.

Of course, the unions’ position would be improved by a Labour government, which would grant them the same rights enjoyed by their continental European counterparts. And, as many unions have already found, members and would-be members do find such services as cheap insurance and pensions schemes very attractive. But Labour in power and improved services are nothing like enough to cope with the changed conditions of the labour market. The growth in the importance of part-time, temporary and casual work demands nothing less than a transformation of Britain’s trade union culture – a move away from the male domination (still) of most trade unions, a move away from the all-too-prevalent assumption that a workplace cannot be unionised if management won’t co-operate and, most crucial of all, a move away from reliance on passive recruitment to active organising.

However much they have improved their services and their image, British unions, for the most part, still urgently need to improve their ability to get new members to join. This won’t happen overnight – and it won’t happen unless British unions adopt the American practice of employing full-time local union organisers to go into unorganised workplaces and recruit. It’s time to get back to basics.

New Statesman & Society, 2 September 1994

A year after the BNP’s Millwall by-election win, it is standing in nearby Shadwell. But this time the Labour Party is confident of victory, writes Paul Anderson

“This isn’t going to be another Millwall,” says Shadwell Labour councillor and Tower Hamlets council deputy leader Pola Manzila Uddin. “We’re going to keep control of Shadwell on 15 September. If people round here were going to vote BNP this time, they’d have voted Liberal in May.”

Her confidence is shared by other Labour activists in Shadwell, the ward in the east London borough of Tower Hamlets where the death of veteran Labour councillor Albert Lilley has necessitated a by-election. The fascist British National Party is standing a candidate, Gordon Callow, in the hope of emulating its success a year ago in nearby Millwall, the Isle of Dogs ward where Derek Beackon won its first-ever council seat, after a rancourous campaign in which both Labour and the Liberal Democrats shamelessly pandered to white working-class racism. But this time Labour does not feel vulnerable.

“It would be stupid to be over-confident,” says Labour candidate Michael Keith, a 34-year-old urban geography lecturer at Goldsmith’s College who lives in the area. “But the campaign’s not going too badly, and if things continue as they have done we should be alright on 15 September.” Labour ward organiser David Kershaw is more emphatic. “It’s going absolutely superbly,” he says. ‘The canvassing has been more thorough than in the local elections in May. We had 25 people out last Thursday – unheard of in a council by-election. We reckon we can increase our majority.”

It is not difficult to see the reasons for the optimism. Most obviously, Labour is starting from a far stronger position than it did in Millwall last year. Whereas in Millwall the party ran a shambolic campaign, even though it had barely scraped a victory against the Liberals in a by-election there a year before (in which the BNP took 20 per cent of the vote), in Shadwell it has a highly professional machine in place even though it appears to be a safe Labour ward and even though the BNP has no electoral base.

In May’s council elections Labour swept away the Liberal Democrat administration that had ruled Tower Hamlets since 1986. Shadwell returned three Labour councillors for its three seats – just as it had in 1990. The late Albert Lilley topped the poll with 1,870 votes, with Uddin second on 1,652 and their colleague Abdur Shukur third on 1,635. The three Liberal Democrat contenders took 889, 776 and 730 votes, with the best-placed Tory on just 367 votes, behind a Bengali “Inde¬pendent Labour” candidate who had fallen out with Labour. The BNP didn’t stand.

Given that Labour is riding high in the national opinion polls and that the new Tower Hamlets Labour council has not yet had enough time to make itself unpopular, it might at first sight seem odd for Labour to expend much effort in the run-up to the Shad-well vote. Yet the party is leaving nothing to chance.

The London regional Labour Party has made Shadwell its number one priority, and, for the past fortnight, teams of Labour canvassers have been tramping round the ward every weekend and most weekday nights drumming up support. The several hundred activists from all over the south-east who turned out to help Labour’s succesful campaign to defeat Beackon in Millwall in May have been contacted again with a plea for help – and the response has been good. Any worries that Labour might have had about its Shadwell branch being a typically small and inactive inner-city party have been easily banished. Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrats, still reeling after their drubbing in May following the row over their racist propaganda, are fighting an extremely low-key campaign, as indeed are the Tories.

So has Labour over-reacted? Not really. Despite the party’s apparent strength, the belt-and-braces approach makes a lot of sense. Many if not all of the underlying social factors that gave the BNP its breakthrough in Millwall last year are present in Shadwell too – and it’s better to be safe than sorry.

Like Millwall, from which it is separated only by the gleaming postmodern office blocks of the Canary Wharf complex, Shad-well is a place where the rapid development of London’s derelict docklands in the past decade has created dramatic social polarisation. The ward is split in two by the Highway, one of two main roads running east from the City to Canary Wharf. To the north, towards Commercial Road (the other main east-west artery), is some of the most run-down council housing in London, much of it dating back to the 1930s, with unemployment running at more than 50 per cent in some places. To the south, between the Highway and the ward’s southern boundary, the Thames riverbank between Wapping and Limehouse is a stretch of affluence: gentrified terraced houses (one David Owen’s), converted-warehouse offices and yuppie flats built during the 1980s boom, with surveillance cameras outside and BMWs parked in their gated courtyards.

Many of the offices and flats are empty, but, just as in Millwall, the presence of con-spicuous riches right next to inner-city squalor has created massive resentment among local people, who feel – with reason – that they have not benefited from all the development and that they have been ignored by politicians of all parties. The turnout in May’s local elections was just 40 per cent. There’s plenty of potential here for a protest vote against the established political parties, even if it’s more likely that disaffection expresses itself in still higher levels of abstention.

And then there’s race. Shadwell has a far larger ethnic minority population than Millwall – 47 per cent, most Bangladeshi, as against 20 per cent in Millwall. But, because of the young age profile of the Bangladeshi population, only 30 per cent of voters are from ethnic minorities – so Labour cannot simply rely on mobilising the ethnic minority vote on 15 September. As in Millwall in May, to beat the BNP Labour will have to construct a multi-racial coalition.

And that cannot be taken for granted. There are real racial tensions in the ward. The Bangladeshi community is concentrated in the north west, the white working class in the north east. And, although police statistics show that, overall, Shadwell has nothing like the level of “racial incidents” found in Mill-wall and other parts of Tower Hamlets, the estates where the two ethnic communities meet have a reputation for racial violence. The worst single incident in the area came last September when a 17-year-old Bengali boy, Quddus Ali, was almost beaten to death by a gang of white men outside the Dean Swift pub in Commercial Road, Shadwell’s north¬ern boundary. The Dean Swift subsequently gained a reputation as a BNP hangout.

For all this, there is little in Shadwell of the siege mentality among working-class whites that is so characteristic of the Isle of Dogs – and little evidence of far-right activity in the area. Unlike the Isle of Dogs, it was something of a stronghold for Oswald Mosley both in the 1930s (Cable Street, where anti-fascists famously stopped Mosley’s attempt to march through the then Jewish East End in 1936, runs through the ward) and when he tried to make his comeback in the 1950s. But it was not one of the areas where the National Front did particularly well in the 1970s, again unlike the Isle of Dogs. In recent years, by comparison with much of the rest of the East End, the BNP has for the most part been noticeable by its absence – with the exception of the immediate aftermath of the attack on Quddus Ali – and in the past couple of weeks it has been invisible. “We’ve not seen anything of them,” says Labour organiser David Kershaw. “I’m sure they’ll get a few votes, but I think this could be a real humiliation for them.” Let’s hope he’s right.

New Statesman & Society leader, 2 September 1994

“The potential now exists to move the situation towards a democratic and peaceful settlement. I am satisfied that Irish nationalism, if properly mobilised and focused at home and abroad, now has sufficient political confidence, weight and support to bring about the changes which are essential to a just and lasting peace. This is the considered position I put to the IRA.”

It was with these words on Monday that Gerry Adams, the president of Sinn Fein, gave notice that the Provisional IRA was about to declare a permanent ceasefire. And on Wednesday, the IRA announced a complete cessation of violence. Twenty-five years of bombings and shootings are coming to an end.

Of course, the ceasefire is a good thing. If Northern Ireland’s problem isn’t simply one of violence, stopping the violence is undoubtedly a precondition for any attempt to come up with a political solution. More than 3,100 people have died violent deaths since the beginning of the Troubles in 1969 – and more than half of them were killed by the IRA and other republican paramilitaries. The welcome for the IRA’s decision to end its repugnant campaign of murder has to be tempered by the observation that it should never have been started in the first place.

The big question is what happens next. In the short term, it’s relatively easy to predict. Already, Adams is being hailed in some quarters – particularly in the United States – as a great man of peace: the next few weeks will see a great deal of Sinn Fein triumphalism. On the other side of the sectarian divide, many of Northern Ireland’s Protestants are already starting to panic about the IRA’s coming in from the cold and what it means for them.

How all this pans out in the medium term, however, depends on how it is handled, particularly by the Irish and British governments. There is undoubtedly a real opportunity for bringing about a lasting peaceful political settlement – but there is equally a real danger of the simmering Northern Ireland conflict erupting into full scale civil war, complete with ethnic pogroms..

The crucial thing is to reassure the unionists that the IRA really has given up on violence and that there has been no shady deal stitched up behind their backs. This means that Sinn Fein should not be allowed into negotiations until the ceasefire has been in force for several months and that the ceasefire must be followed as soon as possible by the total disarming of the IRA.

Given that it is difficult to imagine the Proves unilaterally giving up their rifles and Semtex (although they should be challenged to do so), the most realistic way to disarm them is to get their agreement to a schedule for disarming both republican and loyalist paramilitaries and to a credible system for verifying the process. This makes it crucial that every effort is made in the next few weeks to persuade the loyalist paramilitaries that they, too, are welcome participants in multi¬lateral negotiations on the future of Northern Ireland if they, too, commit themselves to a permanent cease fire.

On the other hand, it has to be made clear by both Dublin and London that there is no way that constitutional change will be forced on the unionists against their wishes. The key here is to reiterate the principle behind the Downing Street declaration, that the only way to find a lasting solution to the Northern Ireland problem is for everyone involved to lay down their arms forever and talk until they can come up with a constitutional settlement that is acceptable to all, with all options open for discussion and neither Dublin nor London attempting to “persuade” other players of the desirability of any particular outcome. (As NSS argued earlier this year, this principle means that Labour should abandon its advocacy of “unity by consent” at the first possible opportunity.)

What such a constitutional settlement might be like is currently impossible to say – and there is certainly no quick fix. Republican dreams of an immediate withdrawal of British troops or of a rapid move towards joint British-Irish sovereignty over Northern Ireland are as much recipes for disaster as unionist schemes for some sort of repartition or for maintenance of an unreformed status quo. Of course, the upshot of the absence of quick fixes is that there is a real danger of patience snapping and the talks breaking down – and if that were to happen, the scenario would be bleak indeed.

But there are many ways in which the likelihood of securing agreement could be enhanced. As last year’s Opsahl Commission report argued, there’s plenty of room for all sorts of small confidence-building initiatives that, taken together, could have a major impact on the ways that the two communities in Northern Ireland relate to each other. The Opsahl recommendations – a mixture of de-volving power to the people, beefing up anti-discrimination legislation, developing North-South co-operation and introducing measures to stimulate economic and social regeneration – remain the best way forward.

New Statesman & Society leader, 26 August 1994

This week, Rupert Murdoch raised the price of the Sun from 20p to 22p – leaving it 5p instead of 7p cheaper than the Daily Mirror and just 3p cheaper than the Daily Star – amid speculation that a price hike was also imminent for the Times, which has been selling at 20p for the past two months.

The reason for Murdoch’s move, and for the speculation about the Times, is simple. By the time most NSS readers get this issue, his company, News Corporation, will have published its full-year figures. Murdoch was worried that investors would be scared off by the hole that the newspaper price war has blown in News Corporation’s profits – so it was necessary at least to make it look as if he was thinking of calling the whole thing off.

Whether he is really contemplating a truce only time will tell, although it would certainly seem to make sense with the Sun. The latest Audit Bureau of Circulations figures, pub¬lished earlier this month, show the Mirror‘s circulation increasing by 1.28 per cent in July despite its price disadvantage, while the Sun was up by only 0.31 per cent. After a year at 20p, the Sun‘s average daily sale has soared from 3.5 million to 4.2 million, while the Mirror‘s has declined from 2.7 million to 2.5 million. Now, however, the Sun has got just about all the readers that it is going to get by price-cutting – so it would be sensible for News Corporation to start paring back on the costs of the tabloid price war.

The quality market is more complex. Two months at 20p have seen the Times rise to an average daily sale of nearly 600,000. In the first half of 1993, the paper was selling just over 360,000. And the Independent, with an average of just under 260,000 in July, down about a third in 18 months, is suffering badly (although it claims to have recovered sales since it joined the price war it had hitherto shunned by dropping its price to 30p at the beginning of the month). Murdoch might well be thinking that it is worth keeping up the pressure on the Independent for a couple more months in the hope that it will be forced to close.

For that, quite simply, is the sole purpose of Murdoch’s price-cutting. Newspaper reading is declining in Britain, and so is the newspapers’ share of the advertising pot. There is, moreover, no sign of either trend being reversible – and for Murdoch that means one thing. He must kill off the competition to ensure that his titles increase their market share to compensate for the smaller size of the market. At the popular end of the tabloid market, the target is the Daily Star, a paper so bad that only its employees will miss it. In the quality market, the target is the Independent. But the loss of the Independent would be a serious blow to British public life.

This is not to claim that the paper’s politics are wonderful: its mix of free-market economics, civil libertarianism and social concern is not particularly to NSS tastes. Still less is it to deny that the Independent is partially re¬sponsible for its current predicament: if it had not made the mistake of launching the Independent on Sunday to kill off the short-lived Sunday Correspondent, it would not have been forced into the bout of editorial cost-cutting and the desperate search for new investment that, along with a ham-fisted redesign, led it into the spiral of directionlessness and circulation decline from which it has never recovered.

But the Independent remains a serious paper, and its point of view deserves a place in the daily press. Murdoch’s ability to subsidise a price war against the Independent with profits from other parts of his worldwide media empire – just as he used profits from the Sun to subsidise Sky television in its battle with British Satellite Broadcasting – is a grave threat to the press pluralism essential in any democracy.

Yet it is at just this point that Labour has chosen to indicate that it is thinking of relax¬ing its stance on media cross-ownership to allow newspaper publishing companies to own terrestrial broadcasting channels. Labour arts and culture spokesperson Mo Mowlam was reported a fortnight ago to have decided on an essentially deregulatory approach. Although she subsequently claimed that all that was happening was an open-ended review of Labour’s media policy commitments, it is significant that she has not denied that Labour policy is moving in precisely such a Murdoch-friendly direction.

Why the change of heart? The charitable explanation is that Labour is simply recognising brutal economic realities – that, with the media increasingly global, it is going to be giant transnational media conglomerates that matter, and that if Britain is going to be home to some of the major global players, there can’t be too many legal constraints on cross-ownership. That is a coherent argument, although not one with which this magazine agrees: limitations on the extent to which any particular corporation can dominate the media in Britain need have no knock-on effect on that corporation’s ability to compete elsewhere in the world.

The more worrying theory doing the rounds is that Labour hopes to curry favour with Murdoch. Labour politicians know that he is not averse to backing parties nominally of the left when it suits his commercial interests – and of course he has indicated, albeit in the most guarded way, that it is conceivable that he might support Tony Blair. Labour’s dalliance with deregulation, the argument goes, is in preparation for a pre-election Faustian pact like that between Murdoch and the Australian Labor Party of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating. A glance at the cesspit that is Australian Labor politics should be enough to convince anyone tempted by such a course to reject it forever. Whatever he says, Murdoch remains the enemy of everything – equality, democratic pluralism, freedom of expression, decency and honesty – at the centre of the left’s project.

New Statesman & Society leader, 19 August 1994

this week, Labour Party members should be receiving their voting papers for the first-ever one member, one vote elections to the constituency section of the party’s National Executive Committee. This helps to explain, of course, the unusually high media profile of certain Labour politicians at a time when they are more normally to be found in their favoured holiday locations than floating ideas such as Mo Mowlam’s peculiar suggestion about moving the royal family out of Buckingham Palace (whatever happened to republicanism anyway?). There are 21 candidates for seven places, and no one is quite sure what will happen now that they are no longer to be decided by constituency party block votes. The outcome will, however, be crucially important in helping to shape the kind of party that Labour becomes under its new leader.

The NEC is, as it has always been, the most powerful body in the party. Its composition will have a significant effect on the sort of campaign that Labour fights at the next general election. It could even have a significant impact on the next government if Labour wins. This year’s election is rather more than a “beauty contest”.

Of course, it is extremely unlikely that the NEC results will be a major upset for Tony Blair. The days are long gone when the constituency section returned a 100 per cent left slate as a two-fingered salute to the leadership. Indeed, the danger this year is that the NEC ends up without a single member in the constituency section who is not in the shadow cabinet. Although – because Blair, Kinnock and John Prescott have gone on to higher things – there are three constituency places up for grabs (one of which must go to a woman), if all the incumbents are returned, the consensus among the pundits is that the three most likely newcomers are shadow cabinet members Straw, Smith and Mowlam. This is a danger not because there is any¬thing necessarily wrong with any of them.

Smith in particular would bring a welcome green tinge to the NEC. Rather, it is because, as Peter Hain argued last week in NSS as he set out his platform, it is an inherently bad idea for the constituency section to be a mini¬ature shadow cabinet, bound by the principle of collective responsibility and all the inhibitions on free and open discussion that that entails. Neither does the shadow cabinet adequately represent the spread of political opinion in the party as a whole: instead it covers a narrow range between centre-left and right. A voice or two from the left – and the most cogent on offer this year is undoubtedly Hain’s – would not go amiss.

More important than the NEC – and far more trying for Blair – is the shadow cabinet reshuffle that will follow the shadow cabinet elections in late October. Having spurned a reshuffle immediately upon being elected, this is effectively his only chance to change his team before the next election.

He does not have an easy task. He has no option but to use the material the Parliamentary Labour Party serves up to him – and it has a perverse habit at times of preferring the affable incompetent, the fixer or the bully to the intelligent, creative and able. Then he has to make sure that the best possible team is put together without causing offence to fragile egos that could turn dangerous if they feel that they have been snubbed.

But he is helped by two things: his own job at home affairs is vacant, and Jack Cunningham has put in such a miserable performance at foreign affairs that it would be no problem to remove him (if indeed he makes it back into the shadow cabinet – and there are some in the Blair team who are hoping for a Cunningham defeat to avoid the unpleasantness of a sacking). That means that two of the “big three” jobs are effectively open – which in¬creases his room for manoeuvre.

So what should he do? The crucial posts are shadow chancellor and shadow.foreign secretary. With the 1996 intergovernmental conference coming up and the economy still in a depressed state, Europe and the economy are set to dominate British politics in the next couple of years. Labour needs the right people in post to handle them.

Taking Europe first, because that is where the incumbent is so weak, what is needed is someone with an unerring enthusiasm for Europe and a proven ability to find gaps in the Tories’ armour. Of the four shadow cabinet members who are serious candidates for the job, George Robertson has the former but not the latter, while Robin Cook and John Prescott have the latter without the former. The ideal candidate is Gordon Brown, who has been a consistent advocate of closer European political and economic union and, crucially, an enthusiast for pan-European alternative economic strategies – but the problem is that he’s already got the other key post of shadow chancellor, in which he has done a brilliant job of labelling the Tories as a party of high taxation and low competence, but less well in communicating a convincing alternative strategy of the left.

The answer is to shift Brown sideways and promote Cook to shadow chancellor. In his trade and industry brief, Cook has again shown himself to be Labour’s leading thinker. He understands the necessity for getting to grips with the structures of modern capitalism, as well as grappling with the ethics of modern socialism. He has an extraordinary grasp of detail, a sense of the “big idea”, and he is a great communicator. Most important of all, his appointment would be a signal that a Blair government really would be interven¬tionist in its economic policies – Labour’s greatest weakness on the economy these days is that it sometimes seems as if it wouldn’t do anything different from the Tories except on education and training. If Blair wants the best possible government-in-waiting, he really ought to explore the possibility of building his team around Cook as shadow chancellor and Brown as shadow foreign secretary.

New Statesman & Society leader, 12 August 1994

There can be no doubt that Tony Blair’s arrival in the Labour leadership has had the effect of inducing near-panic among the Liberal Democrats. With the opinion polls showing the Lib Dems los¬ing ground to Labour, three of the Gang of Four who left Labour in 1981 to form the SDP have declared that Blair is their kind of Labour leader, prompting Paddy Ashdown to disown them and their views. Lib Dem publications are stuffed with arguments about what to do next.

Old-fashioned Labour types who never much liked the 1980s fashion for talk about cooperation between Britain’s two centre-left parties are crowing. But it would be wrong to take too much notice of them. Even though the Lib Dems are in a mess, they are not in such a mess that they can be written off as an electoral force. And there remain strong political reasons for the left to back cross-party collaboration.

To take the electoral arithmetic first: it is still the case that, in large parts of Britain, it is the Lib Dems and not Labour who are best placed to beat incumbent Conservatives at the next general election. In the current parliament, there are 92 Tory seats vulnerable on a swing of 5 per cent to the second-placed opposition party: on the 1992 result, the Lib Dems are the second-placed party in 19, mostly in the south-west and the rural south-east, with Labour the challenger in 70, mostly in the north, the Midlands, and the urban south. Even if one takes the extraordinary Labour performance in the 1994 European elections as a starting point, Labour can consider that only three of the Lib Dems’ 19 most promising Tory-held seats are three-way marginals in which it has a realistic chance of coming from third to win.

The Euro-elections showed the Lib Dem vote holding up well in the areas where its key marginal Westminster seats are to be found even though the overall Lib Dem perfor¬mance expressed.as a percentage of the total vote was poor. Much the same goes for recent opinion polls: the Lib Dems might be losing ground overall, but they are not doing as badly where it matters to them.

What’s more, Labour has an interest in the Lib Dems doing well. As Labour’s Last Chance?, the recent study of the 1992 election by Anthony Heath, Roger Jowell and John Curtice, shows conclusively, Labour is the main beneficiary of any shift from Tory to Lib Dem because, as the Tory vote falls, Labour starts to win seats where it is just behind the Tories, and there are far more of these than Tory seats where the Lib Dems are in second place. Heath, Jowell and Curtice calculate that a 4 per cent swing from Tory to Lib Dem would produce 29 Labour gains from the Tories and just 14 Lib Dem gains.

In similar vein, there is a serious downside for Labour if the Lib Dems do badly. Of the 11 Lib Dem seats that are vulnerable on a 5 per cent swing to the party placed second in 1992, three are vulnerable to Labour and eight to the Tories. A Lib Dem slump could be enough for the Conservatives to keep power.

But enough of psephology. No one knows what will intervene between now and the election to determine the performance of the parties on the day. Blair has not yet secured his passage to No 10: his honeymoon could prove to be short. With a little luck on the economy and a couple of tax-cutting budgets, John Major could still be Prime Minister in the year 2000.

In any case, the best argument for Labour’s not writing off the Lib Dems was never about numbers but about policy. As NSS has argued consistently, there has been precious little dividing the two parties since the mid-1980s, when Labour ditched its Alternative Economic Strategy. Like it or not – and much of Labour’s rightward drift has been far from the liking of this magazine – since Labour’s late-1980s policy review, the policy differences have been so small as to be unimportant on

economic and social policy, on the environment and transport, on Europe, on defence, and on every important constitutional issue bar one – proportional representation. The Lib Dems favour a single transferable vote system for the Commons; Labour has promised only to hold a referendum on electoral reform, and Blair has made it clear that he is not prepared to take the party any further.

And this is precisely why the radical left really needs the Lib Dems. Without the introducion of proportional representation for the Commons, no package of constitutional reform will be adequate to the task, in other respects admirably embraced by Blair, of turning Britain into a genuinely pluralist modern democracy. Labour’s commitments to a Bill of Rights, Scottish and Welsh parlia¬ments, devolution of powers to the English regions and abolition of the House of Lords are all excellent and long-overdue reforms – but the country also needs an electoral system for Westminster’s lower house that allows it adequately to reflect the spread of opinion across the country.

Proportional representation is the great blind spot of those who style themselves “modernisers” in today’s Labour Party. They are still, for all their rhetoric of pluralism, interested in the winner-takes-all game, still scared of sharing power, still afraid that their own party’s culture would somehow be tainted by contact with the Lib Dems – not to mention the new green and left groupings that would come into being with the advent of PR. There is a serious danger that, when push came to shove, a majority Labour govern¬ment would decide that the promised referendum on electoral reform could wait until a second term or maybe even for ever. That’s why NSS still reckons, as in 1992, that a degree of Liberal Democrat influence over any future Labour government would be no bad thing. Let’s wish Paddy Ashdown a speedy recovery.

New Statesman & Society leader, 5 August 1994

Oh, well, at least it’s novel. Presenting his annual report on Monday, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Paul Condon, laid the blame for at least part of the crime wave on the public’s ambivalent attitude to crime, citing as an example our affection for Arthur Daley. On this view, if we really are to be “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”, as Tony Blair wants, it is obviously imperative that Minder is never shown again on British television.

But there is a serious side to all this. Condon’s remarks about the deleterious effect of a television comedy character were very much in tune with his whole presentation. His message on Monday was simple: the Met takes full responsibility for its successes, but where it fails it is always someone else’s fault. Burglaries are down in London because of the success of the Met’s “Operation Bumblebee”, targeting known burglars and handlers of stolen goods. But racial and sexual assaults are up because of increased reporting by victims, and firearms offences (particularly against police officers) are up because gun control legislation isn’t tough enough. As for the increase in muggings, well, that’s nothing to do with the police either.

Worse, some people just don’t appreciate what sterling work the Met does. Particularly reprehensible are those lawyers who specialise in legal actions against the police. Condon’s report reveals that the Met paid out £1.8 million in damages in the past year for assault, false imprisonment, malicious prosecution and other misconduct. In the previous year, the figure was £1.1 million, and in 1991-92 a paltry £571,000. Clearly, there is a conspiracy to do down our wonderful boys in blue. “One of the things that we fear is that more and more people are suing the police, and the Metropolitan Police is being seen as a soft target,” the commissioner complained.

Of course, there is another possible explanation – that the police have indeed been guilty of assault, false imprisonment and so on, and that they have been getting their come-uppance because their victims have refused to take this lying down. Similarly, it could be that the rise in muggings has something to do with the absence of police on the beat in certain areas – and that the rise in racial assaults relates at least in part to the Met’s lack of seriousness in tackling racist violence. It might even be that the lack of cooperation from the public that Condon blames on Arthur Daley is actually down to a decline in public confidence in the police brought on by the relentless flow of stories of police corruption and by bitter experience of the Met’s inadequacies.

Condon’s refusal even to consider the most obvious explanations for the problems that his force undoubtedly faces is a symptom of a worrying bunker mentality all too common among Britain’s police. In some ways, of course, it is quite understandable. During the postwar boom years, the British police en-joyed a reputation for fairness, decency and non-violence unrivalled by any other police force in the world. Until the mid-1970s, there was a cross-party consensus that Britain’s tradition of unarmed, decentralised policing was simply the best.

But then everything started to go wrong – and the scale of the disaster was such that the police are still reeling. First, the Met was revealed to be riddled with corruption. Then, as the economy went into crisis in the 1970s, the police were pushed further and further into adopting a politically charged public-order role – defending strike-breakers against pickets, neo-fascists against the Anti-Nazi League, nuclear bases against protesters. Increasingly, ethnic minority groups complained of police racism and women of police attitudes to domestic violence.

Then came the riots of the early 1980s, then the miners’ strike, then revelations of police frame-ups in the cases of the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four, then more corruption scandals. And all the time crime rose inexorably, including violent crime – even as the Conservative government increased expenditure on the police. By the mid-1980s, the British bobby’s reputation was in tatters.

Things have improved since then in some ways. Safeguards against abuses of police powers have been strengthened, complaints procedures introduced and refined. Corrupt officers have been sacked (although rarely prosecuted). Serious efforts have been made to eliminate police racism and to get police forces to take domestic violence seriously. There has been a genuine attempt to get police back on the beat in the inner cities. Condon has some right to feel that all his critics don’t appreciate just how much has been done to put the police back on course.

But more is required. To gain the trust and confidence of the public, justice must be seen to be done with officers who fiddle evidence or take bribes. Measures must be taken to connect the police to local communities and to gain the confidence of ethnic minorities. Resources must continue to be shifted from harassing drug-takers, prostitutes and drunks to deterring and catching muggers, burglars and rapists.

And, yes, there need to be changes in the law too – but not just on guns. One of the defining characteristics of this Tory government has been its enthusiasm for criminalising more and more behaviour – picketing, drinking at football matches, squatting, computer hacking – a tendency that has reached its nadir with the Criminal Justice Bill. Most of this anti-libertarian legislation serves only to waste police time.

If an incoming Labour government is serious about being tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime, as soon as it takes office it should embark on a radical programme of decriminalisation to allow the police to concentrate on stopping real villainy.

New Statesman & Society, 22 July 1994


At first sight, the Labour left looks washed up with nowhere to go. But Paul Anderson wonders whether Tony Blair’s election could revive its fortunes

It is customary to write off the Labour left – and it is easy to see why. In the past ten years it has suffered an inexorable decline in numbers and in influence, both in the Parliamentary Labour Party and among Labour’s ordinary members. Tony Benn’s narrow defeat by Denis Healey for the party’ s deputy leadership in 1981 seems a lifetime away. Almost as distant are the GLC and the 1983 election manifesto – the infamous “longest suicide note in history” – with its promises of withdrawal from Europe, unilateral nuclear disarmament and widespread nationalisation.

In parliament, the left is hopelessly split between the 26-strong hard-left Campaign Group, which no longer has a single representative on the party’s national executive committee or in the shadow cabinet, and the 100-strong but ineffectual and inactive soft-left-cum-centre-right Tribune Group, whose left-wingers are in an increasingly beleaguered minority to the centre-right (Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson are all members of Tribune).

Outside parliament, the left has lost its local government base and is weak in all but a handful of constituency parties and trade unions. In Labour’s leadership election, the two left-leaning candidates, John Prescott and Margaret Beckett, (both of them accomplices, however unwilling, in Labour’s rightward drift since the mid-1980s), were outside chances from the start. Ideologically, the Labour left is divided on economic policy, Europe, electoral reform and a host of other key questions.

In the circumstances, talk of an impending Labour left revival might seem little short of lunatic. Yet the prospect of Blair as leader does seem to have led to an outbreak of cautious left optimism at Westminster. Some Labour left-wingers reckon his brand of centrist social democracy will encourage the left to pull together in the opposite direction; others reckon Prescott’s expected strong performance will give the left greater influence.

According to Peter Hain, the MP for Neath, “the prospects for a new alliance on the left are better today than for ages. There’s a sense of flux on the left of the party. And after the Euro-elections and with a new leadership, there’s a curious contradiction in the party between optimism about our chances in the next election and a sullen demoralisation at the grass roots. People recognise that we can’t win by default, that we have to build a new agenda for radical policies. It’s a great opportunity.”

Wishful thinking? Perhaps. Hain, who isrunning for the NEC this year on a “friend of the activists” ticket, has been attempting to engineer a rapprochement between the Tribune left and the Campaign Group since 1987 – and every attempt has ended in failure. Most recently, as secretary of the Tribune Group from summer 1992 until late last year, he tried to use opposition to the Maastricht treaty and to Labour’s cautious economic policy as the basis for a left realignment. He was rewarded with the secession of the (pro-Maastricht) European Parliamentary Labour Party Tribune Group from its Westminster sister and the emnity of Gordon Brown. Main was ultimately ousted (along with his allies among the group’s officers) after publishing a pamphlet considered too explicitly critical of the shadow chancellor. Even he admits that, if Blair adopts the sort of inclusive style of leadership associated with John Smith, it could take some time for the left to get its act together.

But there are signs that things might just be moving in Main’s direction. On the parliamentary left, the Tribune Group coup against Hain and his comrades reinforced the already strong feeling among Tribune left-wingers that the group is beyond redemption and that a new, genuinely left, initiative is required – a feeling that has been further strengthened by four of the five current Tribune Group officers nominating Blair for the Labour leadership. Several left Tribunites are expected to allow their membership of the group to lapse this year, although there is disagreement among them about what to do next: a few will join the Campaign Group but most will not.

Meanwhile, the Campaign Group has also changed as the influence has waned of the old guard who can remember why Campaign split from Tribune in 1982 (for the record, the crunch issue was the register of internal party groups designed by the party leadership as a means of getting rid of Militant). Campaign’s current chair, Alan Simpson, is open to the idea of working with left Tribunites – he was on the platform at the “What’s Left?” conference earlier this month organised by Tribune newspaper, whose board has been chaired for the past year by Hain. He is less sanguine than Hain about the likelihood of a rapid realignment of the left, but nevertheless detects an air of promise. “There are big dilemmas over the organisational framework of the left in parliament,” he says. “I don’t see any prospect for a new organisational alignment for a little while yet. What’s good is the growing dialogue about issues. That’s a really helpful change.”

On its own, this wouldn’t amount to much. In the absence of a resurgence of the left in the constituencies, manoeuvring between parliamentary caucuses involving, at most, some 50 MPs, nearly all on the back benches, is, in itself, inconsequential. But there is more. Least significant is the speculation that a defeated Margaret Beckett might make an explicit pitch to lead the left from the back benches; far more important is the decision by the front-benchers and NEC members closest to the Tribune Group left to attempt to revive the Supper Club, the secretive soft-left forum set up in the Kinnock era to allow such politicians as Bryan Gould, Michael Meacher, Clare Short and David Blunkett to talk politics out of earshot of colleagues who would report to the leader’s office anyone who dissented from the Kinnock line.

So far, there has been only one poorly attended meeting, and that after months of talking about a revival – but the very fact that it happened shows that there are worries that Blair will reintroduce a Kinnock-style disciplinarian regime. Soft-left front-benchers are particularly concerned about the future role of Peter Mandelson, the Labour public relations chief in the late 1980s and a hate figure at the time for soft-left shadow cabinet members, who accused him of manipulating the media against them. Mandelson has worked on Blair’s campaign, and the soft left is looking out to see how he is rewarded. “If he’s allowed to go round trashing people again there will be all-out revolt,” says one frontbencher. “That said, it’s early days yet. Blair’s not like Kinnock. He’s basically a nice bloke.”

But the most difficult area for Blair to manage in the short run will probably not be the shadow cabinet soft left or left backbenchers but relations with the unions. The issue here is not so much the constitutional niceties of their relationship to Labour – although plenty of union leaders are sore about Blair’s role in the Omov row last year, no one expects any attempt at further constitutional change this side of a general election – but economic policy.

The unions’ disaffection with Labour on the economy goes back to the run-up to the 1992 general election, when they were unhappy at the party’s refusal to adopt sufficiently aggressive policies against unemployment. The disgruntlement went public, however, only with shadow chancellor Gordon Brown’s refusal to endorse devaluation of the pound, even after Black Wednesday forced sterling out of the ERM. Ever since then, there has been barely coded trade union criticism of Brown’s excessive caution, most consistently from GMB general secretary John Edmonds (another speaker at the Tribune “What’s Left?” conference) and Transport and General Workers Union general secretary Bill Morris. It was Edmonds whose series of interventions on the need for full employment forced Smith to declare at the TUC Congress in Brighton last year that full employment was a central Labour goal, and both union leaders have made a string of speeches during this leadership election campaign carefully designed to force each one of the candidates to endorse the unions’ economic policy agenda.

Where all this gets interesting is in the unions’ determination to press their case through Labour conference this year – blockbuster motions from the big unions are expected giving targets for full employment and for a minimum wage – and in their increasingly fraternal relations with the left in parliament and outside. It’s not just a matter of Tribune conferences. Although Edmonds himself is pro-Europe and the GMB backed Maastricht, his union has made a point of endorsing Full Employment Forum, the think-tank set up by Bryan Gould last year after his resignation from the shadow cabinet over the party’s pro-Europe economic policy in 1992. (Full Employment Forum has also set up its own group of MPs, which, som believe, might form the basis for the realignment of the parliamentary left sough by Peter Hain.)

This hardly means that the split on Europe that debilitated the Labour left’s response to Maastricht is no longer significant: with the 1996 intergovernmental conference on European Union coming up, there is still potential for spectacular bust-ups. But the fact that Brown’s Eurosceptic and Euro-Keynesian critics are now prepared to act together should be causing alarm bells to ring in the Blair camp, particularly if he has decided to keep Brown in the shadow chancellorship as a reward for his backing in the leadership contest.

None of which is to say that Labour is set for civil war under Blair. There is no appetite for a return to the bad old days of the early 1980s in any section of the party – and the left remains weak and divided, whatever the signs that it might b getting over the worst of its impotent fractiousness. Most important of all, Blair himself can ensure Labour’s political differences are successfully contained. He has written to several soft-left shadow cabinet members who did not back his leadership to say that he wants them on board, and his pronouncements on dissent in the party during the campaign have been relaxed.

“I don’t mind having a debate with peopl on the left,” he told NSS last week. “I think it’s very important. What is tiresome is when you don’t actually get people debating with you. They just sort of abuse you by saying ‘Oh well, it’s SDP Mark Two’ or ‘It’s not really socialism’ without ever explaining what they mean by socialism. I’ve put forward what I believe the Labour Party and socialism is about. If people want to knock that down, that’s fine, but they should use arguments to do so.”.

As long as his promises of tolerance an openness are put into practice, and as long as the soft left feels wanted in Blair’s shadow cabinet, he should have no more difficult a ride than his predecessor. But Smith did not have a particularly easy time, and Blair honeymoon will not last forever – it might even come to an end this October in Blackpool if the unions win their trial of strength. Whether he has the management skills necessary to deal with the run-ins when they inevitably start is one of the many unknowns about him.