Category Archives: Journalism

Try as one might, it is impossible to suppress feelings of unease about last weekend’s public show of Christianity by John Smith and several other Labour front-benchers.

Not that there is anything particularly wrong with Labour making a pitch for the “moral high ground” (as long as that is not all it does): the Tory government is shabby and dishonest and Labour needs to live down its reputation for being pre­pared to say just about anything to get a whiff of power. Nor is there any problem about senior members of the Labour Par­ty holding any particular religious views or, indeed, none: freedom of religious be­lief is a fundamental Labour principle.

But publicly presenting Christianity as the basis of an appeal for morality in poli­tics is a deeply distressing thing for a se­nior Labour politician to do, even with Mr Smith’s caveat that “an ethical ap­proach to life and politics can be held as firmly by people of other faiths and by those who hold no religious conviction”.

Despite its historical origins in non­conformist Christianity, Labour has been an essentially secular party for at least 50 years. Although people of all religious be­liefs and none are members, the basis on which they come together for political ac­tivity assumes that such matters are pri­vate, not part of politics, and that politics is best conducted without the interfer­ence of religion.

This secularism has been too often hon­oured in the breach, even in recent times: if the days of Chapel dominance of Welsh Labour politics are over, Catholicism still has too much influence in large swathes of the party’s Scottish and north-west En­glish heartlands. And there have been plenty of Labour MEPs unwilling to con­demn the death sentence on Salman Rushdie because of their worries about the Muslim vote.

Nevertheless, in the past few years, Labour leaders have at least made an ef­fort not to undermine the party’s commit­ment to secular politics: they have not made a big deal of their own personal opinions about religion.

This is not simply because Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock were not (and are not) believers. There are good reasons to keep religion out of politics. Most obviously, we are living in an increasingly secular society: there are few votes to be had by talking up religion. Only a tiny minority of our fellow citizens now participate reg­ularly in any sort of organised religious activity (and, of that tiny minority, very few are Anglican Christians). Most self-styled believers in a deity have only the haziest notion of what their preferred supreme beings supposedly do.

More important than any electoral consideration, however, are the real dangers inherent in allowing reli­gion back into political life. One reasoned speech by a mild-mannered Christian so­cialist does not presage an imminent col­lapse of UK politics into the sectarian ha­treds of Northern Ireland or even the va­pid protestations of faith that have in­creasingly come to characterise American politics. But there is no doubt that the as­sumption of secularism has civilised British politics. It would be a tragedy for Labour to throw that achievement away.

“There was a lot of frustration and heart-searching in Scotland after the election,” says Tom Clarke, the Shadow Scottish Secretary. “That was inevitable given the huge disappointment. There was this expectation of at very least a hung Parlia­ment and at best a Labour victory. In the end, we won 49 seats out of 72 in Scotland and lost in the UK.”

Last year’s general election was indeed a bad shock to Labour in Scotland. The party had believed that the To­ries’ representation in Scotland could he reduced from ten to four or five MPs, with Labour gains in Ayr, Dum­fries, Edinburgh Pentlands and Stirling. Instead, all four target seats stayed Conservative and, to make matters worse, the Tories defeated Labour’s sitting MP in afflu­ent Aberdeen South, Frank Doran.

Labour’s poor showing unleashed a storm inside the party. Sections of the Left joined prominent members of the Scottish TUC and the Scottish National Party to sup­port Scotland United, a pressure group calling for a ref­erendum on Scottish constitutional arrangements: others denounced them for making overtures to the SNP, Labour’s main enemy in Scotland. When Clarke, now aged 52, took over from Donald Dewar as shadow Scot­tish Secretary in July, having made it into the Shadow Cabinet for the first time, his first task was to calm frayed nerves in the Scottish Labour Party.

He did this by promising to campaign on the bread-and-butter issues (the economy, the welfare state, water privatisation) while keeping up the pressure on the con­stitutional question and shunning the SNP. It is a deli­cate balancing act, and Clarke knows that the constitu­tional question remains potentially dangerous for Labour: while he was out of action with a viral infection late last year, a demonstration for home rule largely or­ganised by Scotland United attracted 25,000 people on to the streets of Edinburgh, the biggest protest in the coun­try for more than a decade. He is nevertheless confident that the approach he promised last summer is the best option.

On the constitution, he says that he wants a revival of the Scottish Constitutional Convention, the body, group­ing Labour, the Liberal Democrats, trade unions and churches (but not the SNP, which withdrew), that forged a consensus for a Scottish parliament within the UK in the run-up to the 1992 election.

“We want a reborn Convention that’s out there cam­paigning, much more representative of the whole of Scot­land,” he says, arguing against the idea of replacing it with a new forum. The Liberal Democrats, who had been lukewarm about reviving the Convention, are back on board following a meeting last week. “It was perceived, I think wrongly, that people like Malcolm Bruce, the Lib­eral Democrat MP for Gordon, did very badly in the elec­tion because the Lib Dems were too closely associated with Labour. But we had a very good meeting and the Convention’s still in business. The Liberal Democrats were outspoken and very helpful.”

As for the SNP, he says: “I don’t think there will ever be a really close working relationship between the SNP and the Labour Party. There’s a lot of contempt among the grass roots of the party for the SNP if only because it fights the party harder than anybody else.” This week, Clarke came down heavily on the SNP for negotiating a deal with the Government during the House of Commons debate on the European regional council. His hope is clearly that the SNFs apostasy will turn even the most nationalist in Labour’s ranks against the idea of SNP-Labour co-operation.

Meanwhile, “we’re trying to be very careful that issues like unemployment, health and water privatisation are kept in view” as well as constitutional issues. The Scot­tish economy is in a dire state, Clarke says. “There has been closure after closure in every field. I used to repre­sent a steel and mining area. We no longer have any steelworks or any pits.” Labour has to keep pushing its vision of a “modern industrial Scotland”, maintain the pressure over the welfare state and assert itself as “the leading organisation which has been fighting water pri­vatisation” – which, unlike in England where water privatisation passed off with barely a squeak in 1989, has sparked a major public controversy.

Clarke is confident that Labour can be at the forefront in all this campaigning, although he admits that there was a small blip in its water privatisation efforts a fort­night ago after a furore followed his being misinterpreted on Labour’s plans for bringing privatised Scottish water back into public ownership. This weekend’s Scottish par­ty conference is expected to back calls for water to be re­turned to the public sector, a prospect which Clarke is “very happy” to accept.

The spectre haunting Labour in all of this is, of course, its response to popular antipathy to the poll tax after 1989, when Labour caution was wide­ly seen as benefiting the SNP and Militant. Now as then, the SNP and Militant are doing what they can to take on Labour in its urban heartlands, with Militant, now firm­ly outside the Labour Party as an electoral rival, making significant gains in council by-elections.

Clarke clearly believes that the best way to deal with the danger of being outflanked on the left is to insist that Labour is the only party that can actually make a difference. “The party in Scotland is very keen that we keep our separate identity as the biggest party in Scot­land, the opposition, the alternative government, the only party that can deliver a Scottish Parliament.”

Militant, he says, has “done well” in taking council seats from Labour and “should be taken seriously”. “Be­cause of the attacks by the Tory Government on local government, it’s very easy to condemn local Labour coun­cils and the Militant is very good at that. Without being complacent about the genuine concerns of ordinary work­ing people, we have to make it clear that Militant cannot deliver.”

One of Labour’s problems is that it is seen as the es­tablishment in much of Scotland. Another, related, prob­lem is that it has a very small membership in Scotland by comparison with its electoral support. According to of­ficial Labour Party statistics, the average membership of a Constituency Labour Party in Scotland is 283, com­pared with 440 in the UK as a whole.

“It makes a very strong case for a mass party,” says Clarke, while stressing that there are some very active CLPs with large memberships. “I’d like to see the mod­ern Labour Party in Scotland taking over the role that the Co-op had in an earlier day, when everyone went to the Co-op and it was a real part of the local community.”

Clarke is a Catholic – his opposition to abortion has made him unpopular with feminists – and his Monklands West constituency, centred on the town of Coatbridge, consists of the Catholic part of the area covered by Mon­klands council (the Protestant part, Monklands East, is represented by John Smith).

The council, run by Labour, has been in the news recently after allegations that it has discriminated in favour of Catholics, and the local party was the subject of an inquiry by Labour’s Scottish executive, the results of which were published last week demanding reorganisa­tion of its procedures in line with party rules.

There is no suggestion that Clarke has been involved in any local skulduggery – executive members went out of their way last week to emphasise that he and Smith had given full support to the inquiry – but the Monk-lands affair has given new life to old complaints about re­ligious tribalism in Scottish politics. Clarke counters such rumblings by pointing out that more of Labour’s Scottish MPs are Protestant than are Catholic and argues that religion is no longer the force it used to be in Scottish politics.

“Historically, the party has taken most Catholic votes because most Catholics were Irish and saw themselves as underdogs,” he says. “As time has gone on, some Catholics are more reflective and don’t necessarily vote Labour as instinctively as earlier generations did. And in 1992 the party took five times the number of votes as there are Catholics. I don’t see it as a major factor in Scottish politics – although obviously I want the party to appeal to Catholic voters.”

This week, the government announced its long-awaited sop to Scottish demands for home rule -some minor administrative devolution and an in­creased role for Scottish MPs in the Scottish Grand Com­mittee.

Clarke has had a field-day with this “weak unworthy whimper of a plan”. The solutions offered by the govern­ment only make the democratic deficit worse,” he told the Commons on Tuesday. “This is a cosmetic exercise. It does not represent the aspirations of the Scottish people.” Judging by the sheepish look on the face of the Scot­tish Secretary, Ian Lang, as Clarke savaged him, the government knows that most Scots share Clarke’s low opinion. The big question is whether Labour can manage to make itself the beneficiary of such sentiment

In Germany, the Social Democrats dropped a stunning 8 percentage points in local elections in their Hesse heart­land last weekend, even though Helmut Kohl’s Centre-Right coalition Govern­ment in Bonn is in the doldrums. The French Socialist Party is heading for hu­miliation in next weekend’s general elec­tion.

Meanwhile, the Italian Socialist Party, utterly compromised by its corruption, faces near-extinction at the next general election, likely later this year, with the former-communist (and relatively clean) Party of the Democratic Left, now also a member of the Socialist International, slumping to around 17 per cent of the popular vote. Spain’s ruling Socialist Workers’ Party is also on the slide in the wake of revelations that it has been in­volved in bribery rackets.

If one adds the electoral failures in re­cent years of the Greek, Swedish and Dutch socialists and the miserable experi­ence of democratic socialists in the for­mer communist countries of eastern Eu­rope, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that social democracy is in a real mess across the continent. And that is before Labour’s plight in Britain is taken into account.

So what has gone wrong with European social democracy? There is, of course, no single answer. In eastern Europe, social­ism is understandably unpopular, even in democratic garb. In the west, each social­ist party has particular reasons for not doing well: corruption here, an incompe­tent leadership there.

But, once the east-west divide is taken into account, to consider only the prob­lems faced by each party in its own coun­try is to miss the point. It is not merely a coincidence of unpropitious national cir­cumstances that is responsible for the mess in which west European socialists find themselves.

Every socialist party is suffering from the collapse in the past 20 years of the na­tional Keynesian model of economic man­agement, a collapse that has pushed so­cial democracy inexorably towards accommodation with economic neo-liberal-ism. Not one left party in Europe has an economic strategy capable of persuading voters that it can do any more about un­employment than the free-market right.

Every socialist party has also been hit by much the same social changes. Every­where in western Europe, the manual working class has declined. Everywhere, social democracy’s attempts to augment class-based politics with technocratic managerialism have failed to provide a stable new electoral base. Young people in particular find social democratic par­ties a major turn-off throughout the continent.

In short, European social democracy faces a crisis – not the one so long pre­dicted by Leninists, according to whom social democrats would be outflanked by a militant working class under Leninist leadership, but something just as pro­found. The fact that so few in the Labour Party have recognised that this crisis ex­ists (let alone thought it through) is a deeply depressing comment on the parochialism and lack of intellectual depth that now characterises Labour’s political culture.

The second of John Smith’s promised series of keynote speeches, on the state of the constitution, was better than his first, on Labour’s values.

Speaking on Monday at a meeting or­ganised by Charter 88, Mr Smith laid out a coherent programme of constitutional reform, with a conviction entirely lacking in Labour’s statements during Neil Kin-nock’s leadership.

Mr Smith’s package is well short of per­fect. In particular, if Labour’s enthusiasm for pluralism is to be credible, the party cannot echo Mr Smith’s silence on the question of electoral reform for the House of Commons. Nor should Labour opt for a referendum on electoral reform instead of coming out with a strong recommenda­tion for a particular electoral system.

As Tribune has argued, the way in which the people are represented at na­tional level must be changed to ensure that the House of Commons really is a re­flection of the whole spread of opinion across the country. Of the options now being considered by Labour’s Plant Commission on electoral systems, the only one that makes sense in this context is a ver­sion of the German additional member system of proportional representation for the Commons.

The commission should make a recom­mendation of AMS and the party should adopt it at its next conference. A referen­dum on changing the electoral system, as advocated by Charter 88, is no more nec­essary than a referendum on the Maas­tricht treaty. For Labour to support one would signal a singular loss of nerve.

But back to what Mr Smith did say. His proposals include a great deal that de­serves support: incorporation into British law of the European Convention on Human Rights, greater openness in the bud­get process and a new Ministry of Justice, as well as Labour’s familiar promises of a new tier of government for Wales, Scot­land and the English regions, reform of the House of Lords and freedom of infor­mation legislation.

More generally, it is entirely welcome that Mr Smith’s speech embraced whole­heartedly the rhetoric of citizenship rights. While much of the most interest­ing thinking on the intellectual left in Europe in the past decade has been about reclaiming the language of citizenship and rights for the left, Labour has tend­ed to fight shy of such concerns – the left on the Marxist grounds that bourgeois property rights are cover for exploitation, the right on the basis of a deep-seated belief in corporatism. One speech by the leader does not mean that the party as a whole is changing the way it thinks about politics but at least Mr Smith is moving in the right direction.

It is remarkable how much cant has poured from the press in the week since John Major issued his libel writ against New Statesman and Society.

At some point in the two years before last week’s events, nearly every national newspaper had made some knowing refer­ence to the rumour about Mr Major and Claire Latimer, who runs a catering company that does parties for Number Ten.

Those references were made only be­cause of the wide knowledge of the ru­mour among the public. Gossip spreads exponentially and this snippet had been doing the rounds for some time. By the time the Statesman published, it was com­mon currency in saloon bars throughout the land. Millions had heard it.

Journalists, particularly the diary and gossip columnists who make their livings by making their readers feel like insiders, knew that titillating references to the ru­mour would be widely recognised. The Guardian, the Sunday Times, the Evening Standard, the Observer, Today and the In­dependent on Sunday all ran items with precisely this goal. Yet these same papers, in unison, condemned the New Statesman for having the gall to publish a sober, well-researched article making it clear that “no one has produced a shred of evidence” to support the rumour. The writs from Mr Major and Ms Latimer were what the Statesman deserved, they crowed.

In Tribune‘s view, this consensus is not just hypocritical but wrong. Unlike the big newspapers, which ran the rumours as pure nudge-nudge, wink-wink, never making it clear that there was no evidence for them, the Statesmantreated the story re­sponsibly and without sensationalism. Far from suing for libel, Mr Major and Ms Latimer should both have been grateful to the authors of the article for having cleared the air and exposed the rumour machine for what it is.

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Mr Major acted impulsively in decid­ing to sue. The costs of defending against a libel action being what they are, the New Statesman‘s survival will be imperilled if the case goes much further. If the Statesman goes under, the British left will be deprived of one of its few remaining peri­odicals committed to open debate, and British democracy will lose one of its most important gadflies. If Mr Major brings the Statesman down, he will do infinitely more damage to his reputation among democrats than the most calamitous con­ceivable libel could ever do.

The  rumbling crisis at Mirror Group Newspapers came spectacularly to a head last week as the Labour leader­ship woke up to the danger that the party might lose the support of the Daily Mirror and its Sunday sister titles – support that it has taken for granted for decades.

Labour’s top brass kept quiet last au­tumn when MGN appointed David Mont­gomery, a former editor of Today and the News of the World and regarded as a union-busting right-winger, as chief executive. Although reported to be “concerned”, they issued only mild statements of regret after he fired two editors, the Mirror’s freelance journalists and a string of experienced staffers.

MGN’s assurances that Montgomery would not change the political stance of the group’s newspapers -he was being employed solely to get rid of over-staffing and waste, according to MGN – apparently convinced Labour’s leaders that they had nothing to fear.

No doubt this had much to do with the fact that Montgomery had been brought in by Lord Hollick, the Labour peer who rung MAI Group and a key figure in the Labour leadership’s inner circle in the run-up to the 1992 election. Hollick, prevented from taking a majority shareholding in MGN be­cause of his stake in broadcasting, is the brains behind the whole current MGN operation.

But last week the Labour mood turned to one of panic. John Smith publicly expressed worries about the direction of MGN and arranged emergency talks with the board, Last Wednesday, on Neil Kinnock’s initia­tive, 170 Labour MPs signed a House of Commons motion on the subject.

The reason was simple. Montgomery had hired David Seymour, another former To­day hack, as “associate editor (politics)” – an appointment that was completely unac­ceptable to Alistair Campbell, the Daily Mirror‘s political editor. Campbell had protested and by Wednesday was no longer in his job, although whether he was forced to resign is a matter of argument.

Smith and his colleagues were up in arms because Campbell has been the na­tional newspaper journalist most loyal to the Labour leadership for several years. While other pro-Labour journalists often write stories that embarrass the leader­ship, Campbell has always presented Labour Party news sympathetically (his critics say sycophantically). To make mat­ters worse, Seymour was the author of some virulent attacks on Kinnock in the run-up to the 1992 election and has a repu­tation for hostility to trade unions.

A simple case of an enemy of Labour tak­ing over from a friend? Not quite. Seymour has his reasons for distrusting Kinnock, who used to be a personal friend. They fell out in 1986 after Kinnock lent his Welsh cottage to Seymour’s then wife, Hilary Coffman (chief press officer in the Labour lead­er’s office) and David Hill (then Roy Hattersley’s chief adviser but now the party’s di­rector of communications), who needed a bolt-hole to pursue an affair. Seymour is still a little sore.

Campbell, by contrast, is still a personal friend of Kinnock. They went to the ballet together on the evening that Campbell had his run-in with Montgomery over the appointment of Sey­mour. Kinnock last week defended Camp­bell in an article in the London Evening Stan­dard.

In response, Sey­mour says that he is as committed to Labour as Campbell is and that the support for Campbell in the Parliamentary Labour Party is a simple product of Kinnock’s per­sonal friendship – a point echoed by George Galloway and six other Labour MPs who last week presented a Commons motion supporting Seymour’s appointment. Gal­loway himself has reasons to dislike Camp­bell, however, because of his coverage of the affairs of War on Want, the charity that Galloway ran before becoming an MP.

With this colourful story of sex and well-ground axes as a backdrop, the Mirror in an editorial promised undying support for Labour. Montgomery has made it clear that he thinks that Campbell’s closeness to the Labour leadership is unhealthy for any journalist.

The banks, which have owned MGN since the collapse of Robert Maxwell’s busi­ness empire, have expressed worries that the MGN papers will not make money un­less they back Labour. And Hollick has been reported to be at daggers drawn with Montgomery over the papers’ political stance.

+++

It is  unclear what will happen next, al­though a showdown of some description seems inevitable. Montgomery’s position is vulnerable unless he can persuade the board, on which the banks are dominant, not only that he does not want to drop Labour but that his strategy of cost-cutting and sending the MGN titles further down­market will soon yield results.

On cost-cutting, he is probably safe: the banks applaud the vigour with which Mont­gomery has axed “surplus” staff. He is also almost certainly capable of finding a form of words that satisfies the board on the commitment to Labour – at least insofar as that commitment has to do with the Mirror calling for a Labour vote at election time. But when it comes to looking at the broad marketing strategy for the newspapers, which of course includes the backing for Labour, he has a more difficult task.

The MGN tabloids have been engaged in a bitter circulation war for more than 20 years with the two mass-circulation papers owned by Rupert Murdoch, the Sun and the News of the World, both of which have been sold on sex, sensationalism and a sometimes-rabid anti-establishment right-wing populism that affects not to take politicians too seriously most of the time.

The Sun has been one of the great news­paper marketing successes of all time, par­ticularly among younger working-class readers: the Mirrorhas been on the defen­sive for most of the circulation war, unsure whether to copy the Sun formula or to take the moral high ground. For the most part, this lack of certainty has led the Mirror into the worst of all possible worlds: trying to do what the Sun does, but doing it half-heartedly and failing miserably both edito­rially and in circulation terms.

Of course, the Mirrorhas not simply tak­en over the  Sun’s territory. It has remained pro-Labour, its political and social coverage has remained (until recently) infinitely more serious than its rival’s, and perhaps out of regard for the sensibilities of its ageing readership, it has generally been a little less prurient.

But, with the exception of a brief period under the editorship of Roy Greenslade, when the Mirrorasserted a clear identity for itself, the Mirrorhas copied more and more from the Sunsince well before Maxwell bought MGN in 1984. Now Mont­gomery wants to take this process still fur­ther.

Even if he will allow the Mirror to call for a Labour vote at election time, he clearly wants to dilute the Mirror‘s political content, mod­erate its campaigning and make it even more of an “entertain­ment” paper. Under David Banks, with whom he replaced Richard Stott as editor last autumn, the Mirror‘s coverage of politi­cal and social stories has been pitiful. Its tone has become increasingly crass and sensationalist.

Montgomery’s problem is that this strat­egy of inexorable cheapening is not only questionable on the grounds that it repre­sents a final abandonment of what was good about the Mirror, even if it is associat­ed with a “vote Labour” line at elections. It is also bad for sales. Just as under previous regimes that have taken the Mirror down­market, circulation has continued to plum­met since he seized the controls.

Meanwhile, rumours abound that Mur­doch is planning to turn Today into a Labour paper to cream off the top of the Mirror market. Belatedly, it seems that the MGN board is realising that there could be something in the notion that there might be some model other than the Sun for a successful popular newspaper.

+++

None of this resolves precisely what sort of relationship the Mirror ought to have with Labour, however. It is clear that it would be a disaster for the Mirror if it ceased to back Labour and that further depoliticisation and trivialisation of the paper will seriously damage its credibil­ity and circulation.

But it is not obvious that the paper will benefit if it is seen to be in the pocket of the Labour leadership. The reputation of politicians is low. If they are seen to be controlling a newspaper’s every move, its credibility suffers.

What’s more, Labour would benefit if the Mirror took a more critical attitude to the party leadership. During the Kinnock years, the Mirror became far too close to the Labour leader’s of­fice, giving every Labour initiative a fair wind. A little more friendly candour might have shaken some of the comfortable  as­sumptions that lost Labour the last elec­tion.

The Mirror will die if it is not a Labour pa­per. But no one will care if it dies if it has no function apart from parroting the Labour leadership line. Montgomery might be dis­astrously wrong about the Mirror‘s market­ing strategy but he is right when he says that political journalists should not be too close to the politicians on whose affairs they are supposed to report and comment.

The claim that Labour is “soft on crime” is a hardy Tory perennial and Labour has usually been torn between two responses.

One is to argue that being “tough on crime” in the manner that the Tories say they are – recruiting more police and making the penal system more severe -does not actually do much to stop crime: it is far more effective to address the causes of crime* introducing measures to reduce unemployment and poverty, to prevent the fragmentation of families and communities, and to improve the urban environment. The other response is to protest that the Tories are simply malign­ing Labour, which is just as tough as any­one else.

The first response has all too often opened Labour to the charge that it does not really want to punish criminals, while the second has always seemed somehow unauthentic.

In the past week, however, Tony Blair, the shadow Home Secretary, has come up with the wheeze of employing both re­sponses at the same time. “We need to tackle this problem in a concerted way,” he said. “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.”

In a week in which the whole country has been shocked by the death of James Bulger, the toddler allegedly abducted and then murdered by two ten-year-old boys, few will dissent from the urgency of Mr Blair’s conviction that something must be done about crime.

But unless he does a lot more to explain how Labour would be “tough on the caus­es of crime”, it will be difficult to avoid the conclusion that his brave new formu­la is, at best, a neat piece of rhetoric.

Although much of what the law-and-order lobby wants would be utterly undesir­able in any civilised society, there is a case for some measures that are “tough on crime”.  A rather better example than locking up persistent young offenders, on which Mr Blair says that he has been mis­represented, would be changes in the law to make it impossible for crack dealers to operate openly on the streets.

This, however, is the easy populist part of Mr Blair’s big idea. The difficult bit is persuading people that Labour knows what the causes of crime actually are, let alone how to deal with them.

Of course, poverty and unemployment are part of the story, but by no means all of it. As Mr Blair has said, the breakdown of a sense of community is just as impor­tant.

Yet this breakdown is not something that can easily be reversed. It has result­ed from some of the most profound changes that capitalism has undergone in the past 40 yean. As Britain has become

more affluent, people have increasingly led essentially private lives. They tend to stay at home and watch television rather than socialise. They use a car rather than public transport and change jobs fre­quently.

Meanwhile, the family has changed dra­matically. Women are far more likely to work than before, marriages are less sta­ble and the way in which children are so­cialised has been transformed by televi­sion.

Add to this the way our cities were wrecked by the disastrous housing poli­cies of the sixties and seventies, when hu­man-scale housing was replaced by tower blocks, and it is clear that dealing with the causes of crime involves nothing less than re-inventing society, the family and the city, with a view to transforming the way we live our lives.

If that is what Mr Blair means by being tough on the causes on crime, his inter­ventions of the past week can only be welcome. He should be warned, however, that it commits Labour to a great deal of imaginative policy work. As things stand, Labour’s thinking about reviving a sense of community and dealing with the crises of the family and the city is at best pedes­trian and at worst non-existent.

More importantly, it is also radically at odds with his own enthusiasm for align­ing Labour with the private, consumerist aspirations of middle England and with Labour’s more general acceptance of the leading role of the market in shaping our lives.

On Monday, the Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, told the House of Com­mons that the government’s law offi­cers had advised him – contrary to previ­ous advice – that Labour’s amendment to the Maastricht bill would, if passed, nei­ther bring down the bill nor make the government accept the social chapter.

Labour has rightly condemned the shabbiness of Mr Hurd’s performance. It is quite clear that the government sought legal opinion from the law officers, whose credibility is in tatters after the Matrix-Churchill affair, simply because it faced parliamentary defeat.

The more important question, however, is one of democracy. As well as reporting on his new legal advice, Mr Hurd at­tempted to reassure the Commons that the government had no intention of rati­fying the Maastricht bill “except through the normal parliamentary procedures”. It  would not, in short, use the royal prerog­ative to ignore Parliament.

As Tony Benn has pointed out, the real problem is not whether or not the government is going to ignore the Commons in this particular instance but the very fact that it has powers to do so – powers that will be increased once the Maas­tricht treaty comes into force.

Mr Benn was alluding to two giant “democratic deficits” in our political sys­tem. First, the creaking British constitu­tion allows the government to get away with far too much. Secondly, the EC set­tlement reached at Maastricht, giving pride of place in the EC’s political struc­tures to the (intergovernmental) Council of Ministers, gives governments even more unaccountable power.

Mr Benn believes that the way to deal with this unaccountable power is to reassert the powers of national parliaments over governments and to scupper Maas­tricht.

He is right on the first point but wrong on the second.

The time when nation states of the size of those in the EC were capable of run­ning independent economic policies is long since gone. If there is to be any pos­sibility of the countries of Europe controlling their own economic destinies, economic policy will have to operate at European level. We need European eco­nomic union. The key question is how we make it accountable.

National parliaments are wholly inade­quate to the task. With or without Maas­tricht, so is the European Parliament. But the European Parliament at least has the potential to become a body that can ade­quately control EC executive bodies. Bet­ter still, it could become a parliament from which a federal EC executive is drawn and to which it is accountable. This week’s Tory manoeuvring gives Labour the opportunity to spell out a vi­sion of a democratic federal Europe. It should seize it with alacrity.

“It is clear that there is a morale and in­volvement problem in many constituen­cies,” says Larry Whitty.

“We need to give new life to party branches. The whole party organi­sation needs a big shake-up. We need to change the whole ethos of the organisation. The level of mem­bership at the moment is worrying. We need to take some major new initiatives. While the more alarmist figures about our real membership are wrong, we are on a declining trend and that needs some dramatic initiatives to reverse it.”

It is unusual to find a politician prepared to ad­mit that his or her party is in a terrible mess, but it is hardly surprising that Labour’s general secre­tary is prepared to go public about the state of the organisation of which he is manager-in-chief.

Whitty, who was appointed in 1985 and is now aged 49, has just finished presiding over production of a draconian cost-cutting plan, passed by the par­ty’s National Executive Committee last month, which will see Labour’s organisation slimmed down as never before in living memory. And his next task will be to steer the potentially explosive debate that will follow publication of the report on links with the trade unions.

Labour’s financial plight is grave, he says, and the main reason is a projected decline in income from the unions and from membership fees. “The fundraising is going very well. But on all our esti­mates we are going to face a real income cut next year of at least 30 per cent compared with where we were before the election. A very substantial part of our support will continue to come from the trade unions but they are going to suffer further losses of membership. The worst case scenario would be that unions vote no in their political fund ballots. But income could go down further than 30 per cent in any case.”

.

The upshot is that, even with increases in trade union affiliation fees and levies on MPs, MEPs and councillors, massive cuts in spending arc unavoid­able: the only question is where they are made. Whitty, now backed not just by Labour’s finance working party but also by the NEC, argues that the choice had to be made on the basis of the experi­ence of the last general election. The Tories had a pathetic central organisation and an almost non­-existent regional one,” he says. “But they did have very effective local organisation and they did shift national resources to the local level.

“Similarly, the greatest success of the election was our performance in some key marginals. We need to shift resources closer to the ground for a longer period, away from head office and away from regional offices. Unless we shift personnel and money closer to where the battleground is going to be at the next general election and in the Euro-elections, we’re not going to have the organisation that we need.”

Last month the NEC agreed to change the ratio of party expenditure on head office, regions and lo­cal parties from 75:20:5 to 60:20:20. The number of staff at Labour’s Walworth Road headquarters will be reduced from 130 to 90, with research particu­larly badly hit, while the party’s English regions will be cut from nine to six or seven.

Other cuts will include a reduction in the regu­larity of Labour’s youth, women’s, local government and European conferences, the replacement of re­gional conferences with regional input into the pro­posed national policy forum process, abandonment of the bookshop and library service and a reduction in the volume of bumf put out by Labour.

Whitty puts a brave face on the cuts, arguing that the shift of resources to local parties will mean that Labour will be able to regenerate itself from the bottom up and that the paring down at the cen­tre will force greater openness on the policy-mak­ing process. The party plans a series of campaigns for ordinary members to get stuck into and hopes to draw into the policy-making process many of the experts whose services were shunned by Labour when Neil Kinnock was leader.

“I do not consider that we need to issue as many detailed policy statements as we did,” Whitty says. “We need real strategic thinking about policy. Our policy-making also needs to be more outward-look­ing. We need to inspire and mobilise outside exper­tise, which to some extent we phased out in the past few years. The relationship with the pressure groups and the academic community is not as good as it should be.”

He hopes that changes in policy-making will im­prove that relationship “There are resource con­straints, but the principle of a rolling programme and the principle of involving all elements of the party will be maintained. The suspicions about this process are misplaced. Policy-making will be more open than in the past.”

Meanwhile, he goes on, the teething troubles of Labour’s national membership system are well on the way to being ironed out. “It’s been one of my most serious headaches in the past few years. But although there are still problems with it, we’ve got over the worst. We made a mistake in trying to in­troduce the whole system at once and by not having communication with branches, which is where members are made, not at constituency level. There were also a number of technical and staffing prob­lems.” Now, however, the national party has direct communication with branches and the regions will soon be linked into the national membership scheme’s computers.

As for Labour Party News, the free magazine sent to all party members, it will be slimmed down and become a newspaper but will not be closed, “It’s essential that the national party has some way of communicating half-a-dozen times a year with all party members.”

+++

Whitty’s worries do not stop with money: he is also charged with the unenviable task of acting as midwife to a new settle­ment between Labour and the trade unions.

Last week, the NEC working party on the union-party link met to discuss an options paper which, says Whitty, “will almost certainly form” the basis of its submission to the NEC. “The working party reaffirms the role of the trade unions and states that the unions will continue to have a major part in our policy-making and organisation. We want to preserve involvement by the trade unions in the party, both through their delegations to conference and as a means of generating substantial support for the party among affiliated trade union mem­bers.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Whitty is not very hap­py about the way that Labour’s debate on the union link has turned at times into spectacular public feuding. “There are some very fundamental debates going on in the party which need to go on, not just on trade unions but also on social justice, economic policy and the electoral system. All will be subject to wide consultation. They need to be taken slowly and seriously and not degenerate into a sort of Mods versus Rockers confrontation.”

The author of Labour’s official post-mortem on last year’s election defeat, he is particularly an­noyed at the way Labour’s warring factions have learned from Bill Clinton’s winning American Pres­idential campaign.

“The Clinton campaign did not have an argu­ment about whether to concentrate on the Democrats’ core vote or whether to reach out to new constituencies. It first of all consolidated the core vote then extended the appeal outwards. We need to do the same. That’s a real long haul.

“Having a leadership contest immediately after the election defeat, and the government being on the ropes during the autumn, delayed the self-anal­ysis that the party needed to engage in. I’m not un­happy about that. We needed the dust to settle a bit. Now we’ve got to structure the debate. People who are asking for immediate answers are not do­ing the party a service. The party is not in great shape in many parts of the country and is undoubt­edly disheartened by this current argument.”

  

Why did John Smith’s big speech at ‘Labour’s local government confer­ence in Bournemouth last weekend get so much coverage in the media? Cer­tainly not because of its novelty. Mr Smith did little more than repeat things he said during his campaign for the Labour leadership, in some cases using precisely the same formulations.

To be sure, it was a coherent speech. There were some good jokes and a couple of noteworthy rhetorical flourishes. But too much was dull and predictable. Mr Smith is in favour of “change”, against “extreme ideology” and for a “new politi­cal approach” for a “new political era”: precisely what one would expect of any politician in a modern democratic soci­ety.

Even his much-reported remarks about the irrelevance of ownership in the mod­ern economy were scant reason for fuss, even though, taken literally, they make nonsense of his apparent enthusiasm for such non-state forms of social ownership as co-operatives and employee share own­ership schemes.

According to Mr Smith, “In the Labour Party we see clearly the merits of a mixed economy and the need for an active and creative partnership between the public and private sectors.”

Those words could have been uttered by any Labour leader since Hugh Gaitskell. More important, for the best part of a decade they could have been uttered without fear of a serious re­action from the left.

Enthusiasm for extensive nationali­sation has evaporated in recent years: only a small minority in the Labour Party wants anything other than a mixed economy, and the debate about the pre­cise mix rouses few passions. Like it or not, and contrary to the claims of the Tory press, Mr Smith was not executing a stunning policy U-turn. He was saying that Labour is a mainstream social democratic party, something that has been ob­vious for ages.

Of course, it is sometimes necessary for politicians to state the bleeding obvious but Mr Smith really should have done more last weekend. Labour desperately needs to rediscover its sense of purpose and to define a radical populist politics. The most important task is to develop economic policies that command public confidence, yet Mr Smith did no more than show that he realises this.

There was even less of substance on the other areas where Labour needs to get its finger out. He said nothing about the fu­ture of the welfare state or his vision of Europe after Maastricht. There was nothing new on the environment or the democratisation of the British state.

No one expects a single speech to set the world to rights, and Mr Smith will have plenty more opportunities to show that he understands that there is more to radical new thinking than declaring that it would be a good idea. For now, howev­er, Labour’s direction remains as ill-de­fined as it was a week ago.