Category Archives: Journalism

Wednesday’s announcement that the Prince and Princess of Wales are to separate could have come as little surprise to anyone who has seen even the smallest snatch recently of the low-grade soap opera that is the British royal family. It had been obvious for years that the marriage was on the rocks.

Equally unsurprising were the syco­phantic expressions of concern for the royal ex-couple to be heard from all in the House of Commons but a handful of left-wing Labour MPs after John Major had made the announcement. However repel­lent they find the candyfloss and waste of the House of Windsor, politicians of all parties feel the need to pander to what they perceive as widespread royal ism among the voters. Rather than say what they think about the monarchy, they keep quiet.

They would be better off speaking out. The monarchy’s excesses in the past few years have combined with a general de­cline of deference to weaken popular sup­port for the institution.

The passenger on the Clapham omnibus knows that the breakdown of a long-term relationship is an unhappy experience for anyone. He or she also knows that it is far more easily bearable for someone with several homes and a massive income for life, paid out of public funds, for an unde­manding job with unlimited holidays.

There is a growing popular sense that the British monarchy’s time is up – that if we are to have a monarchy at all it should be on the Scandinavian model, with the monarch an ordinary citizen and the relatives of the monarch required to earn a living like the rest of the popula­tion.

For Tribune, that does not go far enough. The underlying problem with the monarchy is not that it has become a farce, although it has, but the hereditary principle on which the whole institution rests. In a democracy, a person should not have political power simply on ac­count of who his or her parents were. Yet, as all the solemn discussion of the consti­tutional implications of the royal separa­tion made clear, that is, in the end, what the monarchy is all about.

By all means tax the parasites and make them travel around London by bicycle, but the solution is a republic with an elected head of state.

This Wednesday, 300 trade unionists from Royal Ordnance, the arms com­pany privatised in 1987 and now run by British Aerospace, lobbied Parliament in a last-ditch attempt to stave off factory closures that will put up to 2,500 workers on the dole.

It is unlikely that their campaign will succeed. Royal Ordnance workers are just the latest in a long list of arms indus­try supplicants, for, in the wake of the ending of the cold war, the market for Britain’s arms industries has collapsed. Aerospace, shipbuilding, fighting vehicles and fefence electronics have all been hit. Trade unions estimate that, since the Berlin Wall came down, some 120,000 workers in the defence industries have lost their jobs, half of them in aerospace alone. Another 120,000 or so in related in­dustries have lost their jobs as a result. Many thousands more redundancies are in the pipeline.

Unlike miners, defence industry work­ers do not readily command public sympathy for their plight. The arms industry is generally considered a nasty business. On the left, anti-militarism has often proved more deep-rooted than concern for workers losing their livelihoods.

Yet the crisis in the defence industry is not something that can be shrugged off or ignored. The military sector has taken a disproportionate role in the British econ­omy since the industrial revolution; in re­cent years, it has been the single most im­portant British manufacturing sector. Be­tween 1980 and 1990, the share of indus­trial production taken by the defence in­dustries grew from 6 per cent to 11 per cent.

Most crucially, the defence sector has been an oasis of high technology in the desert of “low-tech, no-tech” Britain. The defence jobs that are being lost are highly skilled: in aerospace, three professionally qualified engineers have been made re­dundant for every blue-collar worker. There is a real danger that the collapse of the defence sector will shrink for ever the skills base of the British economy.

Labour’s response to all this has been entirely inadequate. Instead of arguing forcefully that the defence industry crisis shows the desperate need for an interven­tionist industrial policy, Labour front­benchers have done little but refer apolo­getically to the party’s proposal for a de­fence diversification agency to manage the transition from military to civilian production.

The reason for this sorry story is simple: no substantial detailed work has been done on the policy for nearly a year and the Labour front bench knows it. The unions are quite right to be telling the party that it is time to get its finger out.

In the wake of last month’s autumn statement, Labour is having to do some serious thinking about its economic poli­cy. The party’s line on Norman Lament’s “recovery package” remains that it is no such thing. “Too little, too long delayed and too inadequate to boost confidence for more than a weekend,” said Gordon Brown, the Shadow Chancellor.

But even at Labour’s highest level there are worries that Lamont stole some of Labour’s best ideas for his autumn state­ment: tax breaks for industrial investment, an end to car tax, lease-buying of trains, re­laxation of constraints on the use of re­ceipts for council house sales, easing of Treasury rules on capital spending, direct intervention in the housing market.

There is a consensus among Labour poli­cy-makers that, although the party can in the short-term make much of the small scale of Lamont’s measures and attack the spending cuts that were the other side of his autumn statement, in the medium-term Labour needs to come up with some new ideas. This view is reinforced by a widespread belief that the economic poli­cies on which Labour fought the last elec­tion failed to convince voters that Labour would make very much difference to Britain’s dire economic plight.

Brown is now taking soundings on the options from economists and advisers with a view to presenting a major new policy package early next year. What he will come up with is not yet clear, but there are indications of his direction in the policy document he launched immediately before the  autumn statement,  Labour’s Campaign for Recovery.

On one hand, the document calls for a “British New Deal for the nineties” with an emergency employ­ment programme at its core. This is, for the most part, familiar stuff except that it would be paid for not by income tax in­creases but by keeping stamp duty on share transactions and by slapping a one-off tax on the profits of privatised utilities.

Brown justified the abandonment of in­come tax increases by arguing that they would depress consumer demand at a time of deep recession, but he is clearly also looking for ways to raise money for public spending which do not leave Labour as vul­nerable to Tory attack as it was last April.

More significantly in macro-economic terms, the document also backs co-ordinat­ed international action to stimulate the economy (dubbed “new Keynesian”) by the Group of Seven leading industrial countries and the European Community, According to aides, Brown is now taking very serious­ly the European recovery package proposed last week by Jacques Delors, the EC Presi­dent.

It is another matter whether Brown swallows the argument that reflation in one country will not work, as advanced by several influential Labour economists, in­cluding Meghnad Desai and Stuart Hol­land.

According to Desai, a Tribunecolumnist and a key Labour economic adviser in re­cent years, “capitalism has reconstituted it­self through its crisis in the seventies as a global system in which nation states are no longer able to exercise autonomous control over capital”. The EC, however, as a rela­tively closed economy, might be able to in­stitute Keynesianism as applied by individ­ual nation states in the fifties and sixties.

Holland, the author of the most coherent outline of Labour’s Alternative Economic Strategy of the seventies and early eight­ies, The Socialist Challenge, has long since abandoned the AES’s package of “Keynesianism in one country” plus import con­trols and more public ownership. Most re­cently, the former MP for Vauxhall has been examining the possibilities of an am­bitious European reflation programme, far bigger than that suggested by Delors, which would see the EC gain borrowing and lending facilities and give a “social di­mension” to economic policy. His number-crunching is the basis for the European Re­covery Programme launched at Labour’s Europe conference last month by Ken Coates, the Labour MEP for Nottingham.

According to the Coates manifesto, joint action for European recovery “should be led by the European Commission and co-ordi­nated with member Governments. Not only will this be easier than the arrangement of convergent national initiatives outside the framework of the EC, it will provide a nec­essary catalyst to cross-border flows which can be calculated to maximise development possibilities and the multiplier effect which these can exert.”

The idea of a co-ordinated European re­flation, let alone an EC-based recovery pro­gramme, has plenty of critics. Most obvi­ously, there are many, particularly among Labour’s Eurosceptics, who question the very premise that reflation in one country is no longer possible.

Bryan Gould, the MP for Dagenham and an unashamed advo­cate of “Keynesianism in one country” and interventionist industrial policies, says: “What the economy desperately needs is reflation. We are suffering  a ter­rible hangover from Thatcherite policies, and we ought not to be afraid to adopt Keynesian   policies,   which have a very respectable pedigree. We have to get back to the notion that monetary policy is not a given. For Labour to opt out of the debate on mone­tary policy is really quite remarkable. We are in danger of capitulating to the views of those who have always created recession and depression.”

Further to the left, Seumas Milne, a Tri­bune columnist and one of the authors of Beyond the Casino Economy, a recent re­statement of the most left-wing version of the AES, argues that advocates of Euro-re­flation have massively underestimated the continuing role of the nation-state in macro-economic management.

According to Milne, a staunch opponent, like Gould, of the Maastricht treaty, Britain needs a lot more than old-fashioned Keynesian refla­tion: “The events of the last few months have forced back on to the agenda policies, such as exchange controls and public own­ership, that were previously suppressed in the name of realism”.

But not all the critics of the European road to reflation are old-fashioned Eurosceptics or nationalisers: some even have Brown’s ear. Dan Corry, a senior economist with the Institute for Public Policy Re­search who was one of the architects of Labour’s economic policy in the run-up to the last election, says: “I don’t think Europe will rescue us. If we could have co-ordinat­ed European expansion, I’d say: ‘Fantastic!’ But I’m not convinced. It would be simple if we all had the same problems but it’s not very helpful to tell people to leave it all to Europe.”

At the same time, however, Corry is scep­tical of home-grown cures. “Brown is being criticised for not being Keynesian enough,” he says. “But he has to consider the compli­cations: a ballooning public sector borrow­ing requirement as well as balance-of-payments problems and a huge debt overhang. That said, he could be more relaxed, and use the space to explain the case for public investment. Then, the old anti-taxation rhetoric might not have such resonance.”

According to Corry, the difficulty is as much political as strictly economic. “Ex­plaining multiplier effects to political jour­nalists is not easy, as I discovered in the last election. The alternative to making a case for investment was to go out of our way to sound decent and sensible, which is what we did. Today, it really comes down to whether Labour would put something like £10,000 million into the economy. If Labour proposes to do that, it will have to explain itself.”

Corry’s point of view is echoed by An­drew Gamble, a former AES supporter who has written several books on the British economy and was one of Marxism Today‘s main writers in the eighties. He is doubtful about the political possibility of a Europe-wide recovery programme and sees any plan for independent reflation as “extremely risky”.

“The British economy is much more vul­nerable than in the sixties or seventies,” he says. “It was difficult enough then to pur­sue independent policies. The changes put in place through the eighties, particularly the removal of exchange controls, make it hard to conceive today. It is difficult to imagine a Labour government standing up to the pressures exerted through the finan­cial markets. A co-ordinated European re­flation is probably the most attractive route and should still be a priority for Labour, but the tactical problems in securing co-op­eration across Europe would be immense.

“There is also the domestic route. First, find a way of keeping the financial markets happy and devise a policy that puts all the emphasis on infrastructure and education and training, This would be a targeted poli­cy, fiscally prudent and crafted to direct money to particular areas of the economy that would yield disproportionate gains.”

There would, however, be political costs in such an approach: spending would have to be held down, and so probably would pay claims. It is a project that Michael Heseltine would probably feel more comfortable with than Labour. Gamble believes that Labour could get away with it only if it sold the programme as part of a long-term strat­egy for transforming British society.

Andrew Glyn, an economist at Oxford University who was one of the main left critics of the AES in the early eighties, is also sceptical about the options available to Labour. Although “the worm is beginning to turn” in economic thinking and “the pro-marketeers are on the defensive”, it is diffi­cult to work out what the left ought to be saying, he argues. While “it is very hard to dispute the view” that reflation in one country has become highly problematic, there are other ways of restoring high levels of employment.

“The alternative, which is hardly ex­plored, is to expand public services, in other words to redistribute income to the social wage. It is possible to have much higher levels of public spending. There’s not some economic logic that puts a natural limit on public expenditure.

“This is precisely what was done in Swe­den in the eighties. But that case is instruc­tive, because it shows that you need popu­lar support to do it, and you can go too far. It reached a limit in Sweden, but at a huge­ly higher level of welfare than here. So if people object, and you lose political sup­port, you’re up a gum tree.”

Unsurprisingly, there is no consensus among left economists about the direction in which Brown should be moving: just about the only thing they can agree about is that, whatever Labour opts for, it will not provide a miracle cure for Britain’s econom­ic malaise and it will be difficult to imple­ment. More than ever before, breaking with economic orthodoxy is more easily proposed than executed.

The shabbiest performance by a gov­ernment minister this week – and, like most weeks recently, it has been filled with shabby performances – was provid­ed by Malcolm Rifkind, the Defence Sec­retary, on television last Sunday.

Questioned by Brian Walden about the government’s policy on Bosnia, he ac­cepted that the war there was the worst thing to have happened in Europe since the Nazi Holocaust. But, he opined blithe­ly, there really was no point in trying to do anything serious about it. Military in­tervention to support “safe havens” for the besieged Bosnians like those provided for the Iraqi Kurds was out of the ques­tion.

On one hand, the situation in former Yugoslavia was a “civil war” and there was no precedent for United Nations mili­tary intervention in civil wars. On the other, any military intervention would in­volve the “probability, if not the certain­ty, of very large casualties”. “We might very well be there for many years,” he said. “I do not think it would bring the fighting to an end.”

Mr Rifkind, in other words, has no re­grets about the obvious failure of the west’s Bosnia policy in the past year and the government has no intention of changing tack now. The desperate plight of the Bosnian Muslims as winter takes its grip, the rising tide of refugees and the unchanging Serb policy of territorial aggrandisement and ethnic cleansing nuke not a blind bit of difference. All we can do is give a little protection to hu­manitarian relief convoys, maintain inef­fectual sanctions against Serbia and Mon­tenegro – and wring our hands.

The message is one that will confirm the Bosnians’ sense of hopelessness and isolation while giving the Serbian aggres­sors yet another fillip as they pursue their bloody goal. What Bosnia needs, what Bosnia has always needed, is the means to loosen the aggressors’ strangle­hold.

Militarily enforced “safe havens” at this stage are not as good as international military guarantees of Bosnian borders would have been six or nine months ago. But they are the least that the international community should be insisting upon. Not to insist upon them (as a mini­mum measure) is to give up on Bosnia. That would be disastrous for the Bosni­ans, disastrous for the Kosovans and Macedonians who are next in line for Ser­bian ethnic cleansing and disastrous for the principle of self-determination of sovereign peoples, a cornerstone of democracy.

With notable exceptions, Labour has unfortunately still not recognised this. Af­ter a summer when the front bench wit­tered on about the complexity of the situ­ation when it should have been pressing for military intervention, it has treated the war as little more than a refugee is­sue.

Of course, the refugees are important, and the government’s refusal to take in more is despicable. But the refugee crisis will not be solved unless Serbian aggres­sion is stopped. Unless the world acts now it will be too late. Labour should come out now both for the United Nations to create adequately defended safe havens in Bosnia and for an end to the arms embargo against Bosnia. If that means more deployments of troops and air power, so be it: the alternative is too horrible to contemplate.

There is, of course, plenty in Norman Lamont’s public spending plans, an­nounced in his autumn statement last Thursday, with which Labour can make hay. It will give little in the way of a boost to the economy, as Mr Lamont’s own growth projections testify. He decided not to increase taxes or borrowing but to stick to the public spending target set months ago by the Treasury. As a result, every pound of extra spending on one scheme is paid for by cutting spending elsewhere.

Spending will decline in real terms in several crucial areas: local government, the National Health Service, defence, ed­ucation and training, transport, legal aid and overseas aid. Because of inflation, the public sector wage freeze of 1.5 per cent next year is a programme of vicious pay cuts for some of Britain’s worst-off workers. Millions will feel the pinch of Mr Lamont’s measures.

In line with the general modesty of the statement, most of the positive elements of the package are not as positive as they might have been. The relaxation of the constraints on use of money from council-house sales should have covered past re­ceipts – all £5,000 million worth – as well as those for the period between now and the end of next year.

Similarly, Mr Lamont could easily have relaxed the Treasury rules on capital spending much more than he did and giv­en British Rail freedom to lease-buy trains where it needed them rather than arbitrarily limiting the concession. Mere generally, the measures in the autumn statement relating to transport favour read over rail, which is a ludicrous poli­cy, both on environmental grounds and because the railways have been starved of investment for so long.

Add the small scale of the tax-breaks for investment, of the export guarantee cover and of the direct intervention in the housing market, and it might seem that Labour should have no problem in savaging the Government’s plans.

But it is not quite as simple as that. Whatever the many faults in Mr Lamont’s approach, there is also no doubt that he has stolen many of Labour’s best econom­ic policy ideas: interest-rate cuts, tax breaks for industrial investment, an end to car tax, lease-buying of trains, direct intervention in the housing market, free­ing of right-to-buy receipts.

That puts Labour in a difficult position. In economic policy, big differences in de-gree are differences in kind, and Labour’s recovery package, announced last week by Gordon Brown, is significantly larger than Mr Lamont’s exercise in trying to have it both ways.

But it will do Labour’s credibility on the economy no good if it appears that all the party can say about most of the Gov­ernment’s economic policy is that it would do the same only more so (or less bo in the case of spending cuts and con­straint).

It was Labour’s failure to convince many working-class voters that its alter­native economic policy really would make any difference to their lot that lost the party the last general election. After Mr Lamont’s big steal, Labour has an even bigger problem than it had in April in differentiating its approach from that of the Tories. More than ever before, Labour desperately needs an injection of radical new ideas.

Following the collapse of the case against the Matrix Churchill company executives accused of busting the em­bargo on military exports to Iraq, at least four government ministers should resign at once.

Michael Heseltine, the President of the Board of Trade, Kenneth Clarke, the Home Secretary, Malcolm Rifkind, the Defence Secretary, and Tristan Garel-Jones, a junior Foreign Office Minister, all signed “public interest immunity cer­tificates” designed to prevent evidence reaching court showing the extent of Government encouragement of military-related exports to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq between 1987 and 1990. If their efforts had not been ruled out of order by the judge in the Matrix Churchill trial, the three defendants could well have gone to prison for long terms.

The ministers say that they were only following orders, that they were under a legal obligation to attempt to prevent the secret documents from entering the pub­lic sphere. That is hogwash. So too is their claim that signing the certificates was not motivated by any desire to sup­press relevant evidence. The only con­ceivable reason for their course of action was to cover the government’s tracks. If any of the four culprits had any decency, they would already have quit.

Instead, of course, the government has adopted the time-honoured strategy of announcing a public inquiry into the whole affair. It hopes that this gambit win turn what is currently a govern­ment-threatening scandal into a dull, technical matter with which the public and the media will be bored rigid.

Labour’s task is to make sure that this does not happen – and the way to do that is to make sure that the main story is kept constantly in the public eye.

The story, in case anyone has missed it, is simple. Despite having announced an embargo on sales of military equipment to both sides during the Iran-Iraq war, the government did everything in its power to maximise exports to Iraq, delib­erately turning a blind eye to what it knew were exports with a primarily mili­tary use and deliberately taking no notice at all of the brutality of Saddam’s regime.

Meanwhile, it deliberately misled Parliament and the British people about its policy. Finally, since Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait exposed its encouragement of military exports as, at very least, a monumental error of judgment, it has contin­ued to go out of its way to attempt to sup­press the truth.

The four ministers caught lying about the relevance of the secret documents to the Matrix Churchill trial should be only the first casualties of the scandal. Both the Prune Minister, John Major, and the Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hard, have played crucial roles in pulling the wool over the eyes of Parliament since the question of British exports to Iraq was first raised in the wake of the execution of the journalist, Farzad Bazoft, in 1990.

Even more crucially, Mr Major and Mr Hurd were the successive Foreign Secre­taries responsible for running the disas­trous “arm Iraq” policy from July 1989 to July 1990.

Given that it is extremely unlikely that the two most senior members of the gov­ernment will easily resign, let alone face charges for embargo-busting as they should, it is up to Labour in Parliament to hound them remorselessly until they are forced out of office. Mr Major’s in­quiry should be treated as the attempt to cover up a cover-up that it really is.

The second most important elections for Britain took place this week. Bill Clinton won the American Presidency and, understandably, much of the British Labour Party is very pleased. His success proves that incompetent right-wing gov­ernments elected on free-enterprise, fam­ily-values tickets can be beaten.

But euphoria is not in order. Mr Clin­ton’s programme for the United States is better than George Bush’s but by no means an adequate answer to the serious­ness of his country’s economic and social crisis. He is likely to be as bad as his pre­decessors for the people who are most di­rectly affected by American foreign poli­cy. He is radically pro-Israeli and shows no sign of deviation from establishment wisdom on Latin America or the poor countries of the Pacific basin. Apart from boosting the morale of European social democrats, his effects this side of the At­lantic will be minimal unless he starts a trade war or brings the boys back home.

Put bluntly, the US does not matter as much to Europe as it once did. If Ameri­ca’s are the second most important elec­tions for Britain, the most important are Germany’s – and the last ones, two years ago, were lost by the Social Democrats. After that, Helmut Kohl’s ill-conceived programme for German unification plunged the whole continent into reces­sion. Mr Clinton has the power to make matters worse but is most likely to have no impact on Europe’s economic predica­ment.

What will make a difference is the re­sponse of European Community govern­ments to the current mess. An immediate co-ordinated reflation of the EC economy is urgently needed, followed by rapid de­velopment of the democratically account­able EC institutions required to pursue employment-oriented macro-economic policies.

It is this message that Labour must press home at its European conference this weekend. After this week’s (neces­sary) attempt to give John Major a bloody nose in the Maastricht “paving debate” in the House of Commons, which was still going on as Tribune went to press, the party must reassert its pro-European credentials and make clear its commitment to the process of European economic and political union laid out in the Maastricht treaty. Maastricht may not be perfect but the alternative, no progress at all towards European union, is even worse.

For too long, Labour has fudged its way through European policy, carefully avoid­ing mention of “federalism” and assuring us all that it believes Westminster to be where the most important decisions about Britain’s future should be made. The party must show how it wants Eu­rope to evolve after Maastricht, in partic­ular how it would like to see the EC’s “democratic deficit” addressed.

“Giving the principle of subsidiarity real force”, “strengthening the appropri­ate powers of the European Parliament”, “making the Commission more account­able” and “ensuring that the Council of Ministers is more open”, the main propos­als in the policy document passed at last month’s Labour conference, are not enough. Labour should embrace the idea of an EC in which an executive drawn from and answerable to the European Parliament takes control of macro-eco­nomic policy and sets a “level playing field” for social and environmental stan­dards. If that is “federalism”, so be it.

Westminster is buzzing with rumours that the government’s brave new economic policy will have three key elements: increases in several of the supposedly index-linked welfare benefits well below the rate of inflation; a public-sector wage-freeze or something very close to it; and increases in public works programmes. In other words, spending on infrastructure will be paid for by some of the poorest in our society.

If this is indeed the government’s plan, it is not only immoral: it also flies in the face of economic rationality. Keeping in­creases in benefits and public sector wages below the rate of inflation will cut the living standards of those who can least afford it: most public-sector workers are extremely low-paid. Worse, inflation is set to rise from now until this time next year because of the devaluation of the pound.

There is a morally preferable way which also makes economic sense: increasing taxes for those who can afford to pay rather than cutting real wages and benefits for those who cannot.

Poor people tend to spend rather than save their money and to buy goods pro­duced domestically rather than imports. Taxing the better off will have a less harmful effect on the level of demand in the economy than reducing the spending power of the poor. The Tories are clearly less concerned with growth than with not hurting their friends.

“I find it slightly strange that Jack Cunning­ham is responsible both for Outer Mongolia and for Europe,” says Glyn Ford, the leader of the European Parliamentary Labour Party. “It’s not his fault. But it really is a different ball game. With Europe we’re talking about day-to-day legisla­tion. With Outer Mongolia you have a crisis every ten or 20 years.”

Ford, at 42 one of the most senior Labour politi­cians of his generation, is deadly serious about the importance of Europe to Labour. He hopes that the party’s first-ever European conference in Brighton this weekend will get MPs and activists to stop thinking about the European Community as a “for­eign policy” question. For Ford, as for a majority of his fellow MEPs, Europe is a central domestic issue – and the future of the EC is still something that too many in the Labour Party have either not thought about sufficiently or, worse, have approached as if nothing had happened to the Common Market since Britain joined in 1973.

An MEP for Greater Manchester East since 1984, he has been leader of Labour’s MEPs since just after the 1989 European elections, which saw the party take 40 per cent of the vote and 45 of Britain’s 78 seats in the European Parliament. He is an unashamed Euro-enthusiast who describes the cre­ation of a democratically accountable federal execu­tive for Europe as “the direction in which things are going and the direction in which we should be go­ing”. Mindful, perhaps, of Labour’s official hostility to what John Smith calls a “European super-state”, he adds diplomatically that he does not see a federal Europe happening in his lifetime.

Unsurprisingly, he has little time for those Labour voices arguing that his Westminster colleagues should do all in their power to prevent rati­fication of the Maastricht treaty by voting against  the governments Maastricht Bill at Third Reading, although he backed the decision to vote against this week’s Maastricht “paving motion”.

He is in favour, he says, of ending the govern­ment’s opt-outs on the social chapter and the single currency and is worried that the Tories are intent on watering down the provisions in the Maastricht treaty dealing with powers for the regions. But Maastricht “is the best we can get at the moment”.

“Maastricht will allow us to move forward on eco­nomic and monetary, environmental and social is­sues,” he wrote recently in Tribune. “Without it we will have a lopsided single market rather than a community, where the needs of business are paramount and the needs of citizens come a very poor second.”

The core of Ford’s case is simple: business is al­ready operating at a European level and, if the Left is going to have a hope of keeping capital under con­trol, it must create institutions at the same level. “What is done in a single member state does not control the multinational companies,” he says. “We need economic and monetary union and political union, with elected politicians – that is the Euro­pean Parliament – having a much stronger say.”

He dismisses the argument advanced by much of the Left that the conditions for economic and mone­tary union laid down by Maastricht are essentially deflationary. “The Treaty of Rome was written in the language of Keynesianism,” he says. “Maastricht is written in the language of monetarism. But that’s not actually a terribly important issue. The real problem in Europe is the balance of political forces -and the way to solve the problem is to get more so­cialists elected. We are in opposition in six out the 12 member states, in coalition in four and in power in two. The reality is that we don’t have the majori­ty of voters on our side.”

Instead of laying into Maastricht, says Ford, the left should be engaging with the reluctance of Europe’s current governments to pursue co-ordinated economic policies to pull Europe out of recession. “What we should be arguing for is a pan-European reflation programme. If we win that argument, we have the capability, within Maastricht, to imple­ment those programmes. Maastricht in itself doesn’t stop a Labour government from doing anything.”

Of course, no one knows whether Maastricht will survive the Danish no vote in June’s referendum – the reason Labour gave for voting against the Gov­ernment in this week’s debate. Ford reckons that the Danes will find a way to ratify the treaty but the worst case could still just about happen: “a small in­ner core making a multilateral agreement, steaming ahead on economic and monetary union” and forget­ting all the social and environmental aspects of the Maastricht deal.

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He is confident that Labour will not treat this week’s paving motion vote as a precedent for swinging against Maastricht. Last month’s Labour conference gave an overwhelming endorse­ment to the pro-Europe position that has been de­veloped in the past five years, he says. “There’s been a massive change of mood,” he goes on, quoting the very existence of this weekend’s conference as evi­dence.

It is difficult to disagree with this sentiment. While, five years ago, Labour’s Euro-enthusiasts cloaked their enthusiasm with criticism of the EC, today it is the Euro-sceptics who feel that they have to camouflage their opinions by asserting defensive­ly that they are “pro-European but…”

Even in the past six months there has been no­ticeable movement towards acceptance of Europe as Labour’s future, perhaps most significantly in John Smith’s ready endorsement of plans to set up a Eu­ropean Socialist Party, largely to ensure better so­cialist co-ordination in the European Parliament. Neil Kinnock had always blocked any such thing, Next week, a meeting of EC socialist parties in The Hague is almost certain to back the Euro-party, of which the EPLP will become the British section.

It will, of course, be a long time before most Labour Party members see themselves as members of a British section of a European party. In the meantime Labour has some serious business to do. The next national elections that Labour faces are the 1994 European Parliament elections. As things stand, Ford is optimistic that the party can do well in them, even better than in 1989. “We’re in the po­sition where we could conceivably gain seats,” he says. “There are three seats which we lost by less than 3,000.”

Before the polls in 18 months there is another, possibly more lucrative, challenge. Last month, after having his draft definition of “subsidiarity” rejected by EC governments, the president of the European Commission, Jacques Delors, offered £140,000 to anyone who could come up with a definition of the idea on one side of paper. Ford reckons that the prize would be easy money.

“I don’t understand why Delors was so desperate­ly looking for a definition,” he says. “In the Maastricht treaty there’s a definition of subsidiarity which is that things should be done at (he appropri­ate level. That’s perfectly logical. You do not empty dustbins at European level. Equally, you do not make foreign policy in the parish council. There are not insuperable problems in the US about what should be decided locally and what should be decid­ed. Why should there be in Europe?”

With Labour sacking headquarters staff and the trade unions broke, maybe Ford and his colleagues should enter Delors’s competition.

It now seems that last weekend’s head­lines suggesting that John Major would call a general election if he lost next Wednesday’s Commons vote on the Maas­tricht Bill were the result of a misunder­standing.

We were assured this week that he had not intended to give the impression to “senior officials” travelling with him on his trip to Egypt that defeat would mean going to the country for the second time in a year.

What he (and they) meant to convey, ex­plained the self-same “senior officials” unashamedly, was simply that a defeat on Maastricht would be terribly serious. Mr Major would rather go for an election than give up the Tory leadership to some anti-Maastricht figure. An early election was not on the cards, they told journal­ists.

Nevertheless, the frisson of excitement that all those headlines sent down spines throughout Britain was significant. There is undoubtedly a growing feeling in the country that Mr Major and his govern­ment have run out of steam and that a general election should take place sooner rather than later.

It is easy to see why. In the past six months, Mr Major and his team have shown themselves to be incompetent al­most beyond belief. Instead of the recov­ery we were promised, Britain has suf­fered ever-deepening recession. Redun­dancies were making news even before the shocking announcement that 30,000 jobs would go in the pits.

Instead of a strong currency in the ex­change rate mechanism and zero infla­tion, Mr Major has presided over with­drawal of sterling from the ERM and a 20 per   cent   devaluation   which   will   in­evitably cause import prices to rocket.

The government’s economic strategy is in tatters and Mr Major is giving the im­pression of having no idea of what to do next, apart from pinching a few ideas from Labour’s economic policy. Tory backbenchers are in open revolt over Eu­rope. Public confidence in the govern­ment has collapsed.

In the circumstances, Labour should have no hesitation in going all out to force the government into an early election.

Voting against the government next Wednesday, on a Maastricht paving mo­tion or an adjournment debate, makes perfect sense. There is a real but slim chance that, with the Tories in disarray, defeat for the government could panic Mr Major to gamble on going to the polls.

At the same time, however, it is crucial both that Labour recognises that its ef­forts might not have the effect that it wants and that the party does nothing that compromises its integrity as a pro-European party.

No one should be too down-hearted if the attempt to bring the government down does not come off this time  – and the message that Labour sees Europe as the key to its alternative economic policy must be heard loud and clear above the hubbub of parliamentary manoeuvring.

The government’s change of tack on coal closures in the past week has not been a complete U-turn. Even though only 10 pits are now to shut at once, with the fate of the other 21 pits originally ear­marked for closure to be reviewed, the government’s intention remains to imple­ment the whole closure programme as soon as it can.

Nothing that Mr Heseltine has said this week has even approached an admission that the root of the coal crisis lies in the idiotic blunder of electricity privatisa­tion. All that he offered on Monday was a moratorium on two-thirds of the pit clo­sures, pending examination of the com­petitiveness of individual pits in prevail­ing market conditions. He explicitly ruled out any review of the energy policy that has created those market conditions.

By Tuesday, the government had backed down in the face of continued criticism from its backbenchers. The re­view is now going to take in the question of Britain’s strategic energy needs. John Major agrees with Labour that the Com­mons Select Committee on Trade and In­dustry should be given a key role in ex­amining the closure programme.

Labour has not got everything that it wanted. The government has pointedly refused to think again about the 10 pits which it still wants to shut at once. But with British Coal forced by the courts to keep even these pits open until mid-Jan­uary, the party can afford to be pleased with the first stage of its campaign against the pit closures. It has played an honourable part in winning time for the case to be made against the Government’s plans. The question now is what it does with that time. Part of Labour’s effort must, of course, be to pursue in Parlia­ment the case against the closures and for a coherent energy policy for Britain.

Labour can hammer the government for the disaster of electricity privatisation, with its protection for nuclear power and its de facto encouragement of the “dash for gas” by the electricity distri­bution companies. It can press home its insistence that the Government conduct a thorough examination of the long-term future of the coal industry and take ac­count of the social and economic costs of pit closures. But a wide-ranging assault on the government in Parliament is not enough. Labour must also do all it can to mobilise opposition to the pit closures outside the corridors of Westminster.

The change in popular mood since the pit closures announcement is tangible even in Fleet Street and the Tory home counties. Those who were prepared to give the Tories the benefit of the doubt after “Black Wednesday” a month ago, thankful that interest rates had not, after all, gone up to 15 per cent, have turned against them. For thousands of British people, the destruction of the coal mining industry is the last straw. The govern­ment has lost its credibility.

It is crucial that Labour articulates this change of mood, not just in Parliament but throughout the country. This Sun­day’s demonstration in London against the pit closures should be a stepping stone towards a massive campaign of popular mobilisation, with Labour taking the lead, against the government’s whole economic strategy.

People demonstrating in the streets will not remove Mr Major from Number Ten but, with the government drifting and its Commons majority vulnerable to back-bench rebellion, there is a real possibility that a sustained show of popular anger could force a genuine U-turn.