Category Archives: Journalism

THE ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF MR LAMONT

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Tribune leader, 31 July 1992

Less than four months into their fourth term, the Tories are in an almighty mess on the economy. The re­covery they promised has foiled to mate­rialise. Every economic indicator shows that the recession is as deep as ever. Company failures are still growing. So is unemployment. A Confederation of British Industry survey published this week reports that 57 per cent of manufac­turers’ order books are below normal and two-thirds of manufacturers are working below capacity.
True to form, the Chancellor, Norman Lamont, has responded by claiming yet again that recovery is imminent and ar­guing for patience while his anti-infla­tionary policies create the foundations for sustained growth. He has ignored crit­ics who have argued that sterling is over­valued, that the fight against inflation is not the main priority at the depth of a re­cession or that the reduction of public spending is idiotic in an economy suffer­ing a collapse in demand.
In such circumstances, and with its new Shadow Cabinet in place, there is no reason why Labour cannot have a field day baiting the Government over its performance – and indeed this week Gordon Brown, the new Shadow Chancellor, set to work with relish.
But it is one thing to attack the Govern­ment and another to come up with an altentative to its policies. And Labour is rather short of ideas about how it would do things differently.
It is true that the party has, since the election, made it clear that it would not be averse to devaluation of sterling, al­beit by way of a general realignment of currencies within the exchange rate mechanism of the European Monetary System involving, crucially, the revalua­tion upwards of the Deutschmark. It is true, too, that Labour has said that a re­cession is not the time to engage in public spending cuts, which will remove yet more demand from an already depressed economy. Then there are Labour’s long­standing commitments to “supply-side” measures: extra spending on training, tax breaks for investment and so on.
All of this is most sensible. Sterling is over-valued, spending cuts are a bad idea and supply-side measures are essential. But it does not add up to a radical alter­native to the Tories* basic approach. De­valuation of the pound against the Deutschmark within the ERM would certainly ease the pressure on British ex­porters for a while, which is what makes it necessary. 
But it is no panacea. Be­cause of the import-reliance of the British economy, its most significant effect would be to cut real wages for a while – hardly die stuff of socialist dreams, even if it temporarily improved competitivity. Sim­ilarly, the spending cuts, effectively the downside of over-generous pledges in the run-up to the election, are not particular­ly significant in macroeconomic terms (although they could well be viciously shared out). And supply-side measures are not a short-term answer to recession. 
So what should Labour do? The traditional left response is to call for a reflationary alternative economic strategy for Britain. But any nation-state-based at­tempt to reflate would founder in the face of a massive flight of capital. Britain sim­ply is not big enough to cope with the mo­bility of capital in the contemporary glob­al economy. What would be possible, how­ever, is a co-ordinated Europe-wide reflationary strategy, organised either inter-governmentally or through new Euro­pean economic institutions. Labour should start work now with its European social democratic sister parties on pre­cisely such a programme, making the call for Europe-wide reflation the core of its assault on the Tories’ miserable economic record.

PARTY NEEDS A CUTTING EDGE

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Tribune leader, 24 July 1992

If the talk in the corridors of Westmin­ster is correct, two of the key posts in the new Shadow Cabinet, due to be an­nounced today (Friday), have been decid­ed for weeks. Unless John Smith decides at the last minute to change his mind, Gordon Brown will be the new Shadow Chancellor and Tony Blair will become Shadow Home Secretary.
Both are well fitted to their new jobs. Mr Brown has proved himself a capable trade and industry spokesman with a good grasp of the economic realities cur­rently facing Britain – not always hither­to a precondition for being given the post – and promotion should give him the au­thority and confidence to develop the Eu­rope-based strategy for redistribution, demilitarisation, environmentalism and growth that he knows Labour needs.
Mr Blair, taking over from a decent but unimaginative sixties social democrat, Roy Hattersley, has a chance, well within his capacity, to develop his brief as a nineties libertarian, more conversant than his predecessor with the politics of race, gender, electoral reform and rights that has energed at the centre of British radical politics in the past decade.
Beyond these two, however, the picture is hazy – and for good reason. The result of the Shadow Cabinet ballot was not known when Tribune went to press. With more than 50 contenders for the 18 or so places up for election by the Parliamen­tary Labour Party and the likelihood of several surprises, everything was up for grabs.
Mr Smith has indicated that he will ap­point a Shadow Cabinet of all the talents, and that those who opposed him and Margaret Beckett in the leadership and deputy leadership contests will be consid­ered fairly for posts in the new line-up. He has also promised a welcome promo­tion to senior positions of some of Labour’s most able women politicians. But much remains vague. In particular, the third “big” job in the Shadow Cabinet, Shadow Foreign Secretary, is apparently a contest between Jack Cunningham and Robin Cook, with the “loser” being given trade and industry.
Mr Cook is the man to go for. Unlike Mr Cunningham, he has shown a sustained interest in, and engagement with, the world outside Britain, and he is unencumbered with the old cold-war Atlanticist baggage that has debilitated Labour thinking on foreign policy for too long. Mr Cunningham has given no indication that he sees the future of foreign policy as anything but business as usual. Mr Smith should appoint the man who might be prepared to break the old mould.
Perhaps, though, the old hierarchy of tasks is no longer what it was. There is no reason, for example, to consider that the defence or environment portfolios are any leas important these days than the “big three”. On one hand, there is no more important question facing Britain or the world than the burgeoning ecologi­cal crisis; on the other, whoever takes the defence spokesperson’s job will have to preside over Labour’s response to the massive cut-back in war preparations that is attending the end of the cold war.
Yet there has been no speculation about who gets either defence or environ­ment. For Tribune, the best bet would be to keep Bryan Gould where he is at envi­ronment – for him to shadow William Waldegrave on the Citizen’s Charter would be a waste of one of Labour’s best talents on one of the Tories’ least con­vincing initiatives. On defence, the im­portant thing is that whoever is appoint­ed must be given the autonomy to push the case for reducing the role in the coun­try’s affairs of the military-industrial complex. As with Shadow Foreign Secre­tary, it would be best to appoint someone who is not a cold-war Atlanticist. Mr Smith has a chance to give the Shadow Cabinet a radical cutting edge. With the leadership and deputy leader­ship in such safe hands, he should reward imagination and flair rather than seniori­ty and solidity.

NOW TO OPEN UP A PROPER DEBATE

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Tribune leader, 17 July 1992

The election of John Smith to the Labour leadership has been so certain for so long that this weekend’s special Labour conference will be something of a non-event. After the initial outrageous behaviour of the union bosses in bounc­ing Labour into an early election which only Mr Smith had a hope of winning, the leadership and deputy leadership con­tests have been dull in the extreme. Despite the best efforts of Bryan Gould to raise issues of substance, there has been little intelligent discussion either of why Labour lost on April 9 or of what its di­rection should be in the next four or five years. Since it became obvious, a month or so ago, that Margaret Beckett was clear favourite for the deputy leadership, observing the contest has been worse than watching paint dry.
Mr Smith faces a daunting task as lead­er. Although since April 9 Labour has seen little of the back-biting that charac­terised the aftermath of the 1979 defeat, and despite the likely size of his majority on Saturday, the party is deeply divided over the most important questions cur­rently facing it: Europe, electoral reform and its links with the trade unions. Hav­ing expected to win on April 9, moreover, the party faces a severe crisis of morale, worse even than after the 1983 debacle. Forget about the electoral mountain that Mr Smith will have to climb if he is to be­come Prime Minister – first he has to act to bring the party together and give its worn-out, disillusioned members a renewed sense of purpose.
He will not be able to do either if, when he dishes out positions in the Shadow Cabinet next week, he is seen to reward his supporters and punish the losers. Even though Mr Gould and Mr Prescott have proved unable to win sufficient sup­port among Labour Party members and affiliated trade unionists to come close to winning on Saturday, they remain repre­sentatives of strong currents of opinion in the party, particularly among activists, and their records as front-bench spokes­men in recent years, on the environment and transport respectively, should be enough to secure them places in the top rank of the Labour leadership. At very least, they should keep their current jobs in the reshuffle.
The Shadow Cabinet is only the first of many challenges that Mr Smith must face, however, and it is by no means the most important. Once the new front bench is in place, he and his colleagues will have to address the far bigger prob­lem of the party’s woeful shortage of ideas and hick of confidence about its raison d’etre.
In the nine years of Neil Kinnock’s lead­ership, Labour threw out a large amount of ideological baggage, much (but not all) of which was undoubtedly outmoded. But, with the exception of Roy Hattersley’s vague and arid redefinition of the philosophical basis of social democracy, in all that time Labour never came up with anything to replace the old baggage. Iconoclasm and argument were discour­aged in the interests of unity and market­ing men made all the key decisions.
Labour now desperately needs to think through its political project – not its de­tailed policies or its core values, but what it wants to achieve in the next 20 or 30 years. To do that it has to have at least two years of open, wide-ranging discus­sion, in which heterodoxy, experimenta­tion and participation by people outside the narrow confines of the Labour leader­ship are positively encouraged by the party at every level.
That does not mean opening up the par­ty again to Leninist parasites. But it does mean the creation of an atmosphere of tolerance and pluralism. One of Mr Smith’s first acts should be to declare that, for a little while at least, he will play the role of gardener while a thousand flowers bloom.

TO SAVE INDUSTRY, GET OUT OF DEFENCE

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Tribune leader, 10 July 1992
“We are not a global power, nor do we have aspirations to be a global power. We are primarily a middle-ranking European power.”
So said Malcolm Rifkind, the Secretary of State for Defence, on Tuesday, the day he published the Government’s 1992 de­fence White Paper, and it is difficult to disagree with the sentiments. Britain’s world empire is long gone, its economy is only the fourth biggest in Europe (and sixth biggest in the world) and its influ­ence in world affairs is minimal.
Yet the practice of Mr Rifldnd’s Min­istry of Defence does not match his mod-eat rhetoric. For all the talk of a new de­fence strategy in the White Paper and for all the spending cuts planned in the next five years, British military procurement decisions are still being made as if the cold war were in full swing.
The most obvious sign of this is the MoD’s decision to place the long-delayed order for the fourth Trident nuclear sub­marine with the VSEL shipyard in Bar­row. That decision will be widely wel­comed there because it will save the yard from closure for a few more years. But there is absolutely no rationale for the fourth Trident boat except as a job-creation scheme. In the absence of a Soviet nuclear threat, precisely whom is Trident supposed to deter? Is it really worth spending £33,000 million or so over the next 30 years to provide insurance against the unlikely eventuality of a rogue Third World state acquiring not just nuclear weapons but also the ability and desire to threaten Britain with them?
But Trident is not the only evidence of continuing MoD delusions of grandeur. Almost as telling is its response to the German government’s decision last week to pull out of the production phase of the four-nation European Fighter Aircraft. The Germans, after more than two years of weighing up the options, have decided that EFA is not the sort of fighter that they will need at the turn of the century. Because it is designed to counter the very best Soviet aircraft, it is extremely com­plex and therefore expensive. But because the cold war has ended, there is no need to counter the very best Soviet air­craft. The Germans believe that they can make do with a cheaper fighter.
There is no reason that Britain cannot do the same. Indeed, as with Trident, the only rationale for continuing with EFA in its current form is as a job-creation scheme. There is no military reason for producing such a high-tech aircraft and the export market for EFA is shrinking by the month.
Labour has responded to all this by ex­pressing concern about jobs and the preservation of Britain’s manufacturing base, which is fine as far as it goes. In the long run, however, the fact is that Britain cannot remain reliant on military indus­try if it is going to compete in the interna­tional markets of the next century. Labour must make it clear that, rather than paying billions to keep the shipyard workers of Barrow employed on Trident and the British Aerospace workforce beavering away on EFA, the answer is to switch that expenditure to civilian projects, particularly retraining and research and development, to give British high-tech manufacturing a chance to prosper beyond the end of the decade.

A FINE MESS OVER MAASTRICHT

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Tribune, 10 July 1992

Paul Anderson explains why Labour MPs and MEPs are arguing over Europe
The first big policy question that John Smith will confront when he becomes Labour leader next week has vexed the party for three decades: Europe.
Since last month’s rejection of the Maastricht treaty in the Dan­ish referendum, Labour’s fragile consensus on the European Com­munity, carefully constructed to minimise argument in the run-up to the election, has all but col­lapsed. However the 12 EC gov­ernments eventually decide to deal with the Danish rejection of the treaty, Smith is going to have to work hard to prevent a Labour split over the British govern­ment’s Maastricht bill.
Smith recognises the difficulties ahead and has taken care to rule out nothing in the way of tactics. Last weekend, he made it clear that he expects dissent among Labour MPs and MEPs whatever line the leadership eventually agrees, telling a television inter­viewer that “it is just impossible to expect on an issue of this kind that they will all vote in the same way and there has to be some respect for differing opinions”.
The problem is not really that either the Parliamentary Labour Party or the European Parliamen­tary Labour Party are particularly divided in their opinions of the treaty. With the exception of a small group of Euro-fanatics (30-strong at most among MPs) who want to vote for Maastricht, there is a consensus that the terms of the treaty are far from perfect.
On economic and monetary union, there is a widespread belief in both the PLP and EPLP that the treaty is too deflationary and that its criteria for convergence be­fore the creation of a single Euro­pean currency are too narrowly fo­cused on interest rates, inflation and state spending. There is a sim­ilar agreement that the British government’s “opt-out” on the so­cial provisions agreed by the other 11 signatories is indefensible. On political union, there is near-con­sensus that the Maastricht deal does not give enough extra power to the European Parliament.
But none of this makes for agreement on how the party should respond to the govern­ment’s Maastricht Bill. Just about everyone apart from a handful of anti-EC diehards reckons that Labour should vote for the Maas­tricht bill if it can secure an end to the social chapter opt-out – but no one really believes that Labour can force the Tories to climb down on this. So Labour is heading for a show-down between those who think that Maastricht without the social chapter should be opposed and those who believe that the party cannot in the end oppose Maastricht because the only con­ceivable alternative is worse: no progress at all towards European union. The depth of disagreement already suggests that Labour would split down the middle if it came to a referendum on the bill.
The most articulate of the anti-Maastricht pro-Europeans is Peter Hain, MP for Neath and secretary of the “soft left” Tribune Group of MPs, who was the author of a Tri­bune Group motion calling for op­position to the Bill put to the PLF last month. His move, which has the support of perhaps one-third of Labour MPs, has caused ructions in the PLP, which agreed to post­pone coming to a decision on Maastricht bill tactics, and Tri­bune Group MEPs are now threat­ening to split with their Westmin­ster colleagues because they were not consulted about it.
Hain is unrepentant. “It’s not a factional issue,” he says. “It’s about establishing a socialist cri­tique of Maastricht.”
For him, the Tories’ disarray on Europe is something for Labour ruthlessly to exploit. Labour has nothing to lose by making it clear that it will vote against the Maastricht Bill unless the Government changes its line on the social chap­ter. With a little help from Tory rebels, Labour could ensure that Britain did not ratify Maastricht, killing the treaty for good whatev­er happens with Denmark and forcing the 12 to negotiate a new, more democratic, growth-oriented European union agreement.
Some critics of this position, no­tably Neil Kinnock in the PLP meeting at which it was discussed, have argued that Labour would destroy its credibility with its con­tinental sister parties if it decided to vote against Maastricht. Accord­ing to Giles Radice, MP for Durham and a long-time pro-Euro­pean whose book Offshore: Britain and the European Idea has just been published, “There is little doubt that a U-turn on Maastricht would cut Labour off from the con­structive dialogue with continental socialist parties which has been such a feature of the last five years.”
Others say that the main prob­lem with the Hain position is that it implies that if Maastricht falls a better treaty on European union could be negotiated, when in fact it couldn’t. Maastricht was the prod­uct of intensive negotiations among EC governments, they say, and it is difficult to see how they could reach agreement on a differ­ent compromise if negotiations were reopened. Wayne David, MEP for South Wales, is typical. “It’s Maastricht or nothing,” he says. “We should stop kidding our­selves.”
He could well be right. The cen­tre-right German government will not budge in its insistence that the Bundesbank should be the model for the European central bank and, for reasons deeply root­ed in German history, will not sanction any attempt to downplay the centrality of price stability in the criteria for convergence and as a goal of EMU.
If it came to renegotiation, it is hard to conceive of French president Mitterrand extracting any more concessions from the Ger­mans than he got first time around: the role of Ecofin, the Council of Economic and Finance Ministers of the EC countries, in overseeing the central bank, and the rather vague commitments to goals of growth and social cohesion. There would also be very little likelihood of renegotiation removing the British opt-out on the social chapter.
On political union, there seems to be just as little room for ma­noeuvre. Kohl has suggested that a way out of the impasse created by the Danish referendum might be to bring forward negotiations, scheduled to begin in 1996, on in­creasing the powers of the Euro­pean Parliament. But this is anathema to the British govern­ment, which is committed to the principle that intergovernmentalism should be the foundation of EC decision-making, with the Council of Ministers playing the key role. John Major has suggested that the way to get the Danes back on board is to emphasise the impor­tance of “subsidiarity”, the doc­trine that decisions should be made at the lowest level possible, interpreted by his government as meaning “the level of the nation-state”.
Of course, the 12 might have no option but to start again if no way is found of getting the Danes to change their minds, which would mean the end of the British Maas­tricht bill regardless of what Labour does. While that remains a strong possibility, it is perhaps un­derstandable that the Labour lead­ership sees the value of making soothing noises and keeping its op­tions open. Eventually, however, Labour is going to have to make up its mind about what it wants from Europe.

AGREEMENT TO DISAGREE

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Tribune leader, 3 July 1992

If there was any consensus at last weekend’s conference of Labour’s democratic left, organised by Tri­bune and the Labour Co-ordinating Committee, it was that Labour desper­ately needs a period of free debate about its direction and organisation.
After its fourth consecutive election defeat, the Labour Party cannot re­spond simply by giving support to its new leadership, changing a handful of policies and waiting in hope for the To­ries to hoist themselves with their own petard. The last thing that anyone needs is an immediate return to the at­mosphere which existed in the party from 1989-92, when open discussion was sacrificed in the interests of party unity in the run-up to the election.
But, contrary to the fears of certain of John Smith’s supporters, there is no general enthusiasm on the democratic left for a return to the bad old opposi­tionist days of the early eighties. Nor is there any basis for any such thing.
The democratic left is united by its radical environmental ism and, most importantly, by a strong sense that the empowerment of ordinary people in their everyday lives should be at the centre of Labour’s politics. In line with this, there is agreement that both the European Community and the British state need to be radically democratised.
But there were few signs last week­end of consensus about precisely how this democratic agenda should be translated into political practice.
The voices arguing for a massive in­crease in the powers of the European Parliament and for the introduction of the additional member system for West­minster are more numerous and more insistent than they were five years ago, but they are by no means uncontested.
The differences within the democratic left are even more marked on eco­nomic policy and on the best ways of countering the Tories’ plans for the wel­fare state and local government. On the most immediate issues facing Labour – how it should respond to the Maas­tricht treaty and how, if at all, it should change its relationship with the trade unions – there is no consensus at all.
This does not mean, however, that the democratic left is in a bad way: quite the reverse. Despite the universal dis­appointment over the April 9 defeat, last weekend’s gathering was enthusi­astic and upbeat, brimming with ideas, and the arguments were conducted in a constructive and friendly spirit.
If we can maintain the momentum, particularly in the pages of Tribune and through the network of local Tribune Groups that the parliamentary Tribune Group is planning to encourage, there is a real possibility, with Labour’s hard left a spent force and Leninism utterly discredited, that the democratic left can once again act as the main creative element of British radical politics.

WHERE HAVE ALL THE IDEAS GONE?

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Tribune, 26 June 1992

Labour’s failure to think through the reasons for its April 9 defeat bodes ill for the future, writes Paul Anderson
The analysis of the election defeat presented last week to Labour’s National Executive Committee by the Shadow Com­munications Agency has stirred up a hornets’ nest.
The general conclusion of the post mortem by the party’s public relations advisers is that Labour lost not because of faults in the campaign, nor because of (easily changeable) unpopular policies, but for much the same reason that it lost in 1987. Under Neil Kinnock’s leadership, Labour was simply not trusted by the floating voters it had to attract to win.
According to, the SCA, it is seen as old-fashioned, too concerned with no-hopers and minorities, too re­liant on the trade unions.
Unsurprisingly, this has caused a furore among critics of the SCA’s role in the run-up to the election. John Prescott has accused the SCA, which played a major role in decision-making during the elec­tion campaign, of attempting to divert criticism away from itself.
Supporters of Bryan Gould have detected a different hidden agenda behind the SCA’s findings: they are too convenient by half for all those, particularly the architects of Labour’s tax and economic policies, who want to keep Labour on the same tack that it has taken since 1987.
But, for all the legitimate con­cern about the power and politics of an unelected body at the top of the Labour Party, the reality is that the SCA’s analysis gives no comfort to anyone in the leader­ship. Indeed, it suggests that the whole approach adopted by Labour from 1987 to 1992, designed pre­cisely to address lack of trust in the party and its perceived obso­lescence, failed miserably to achieve its objectives.
The unpalatable truth is that, between 1987 and 1992, Labour did everything in its power to appear modern, responsible and trustworthy. It ditched what the opinion pollsters said were unpopular and impractical policies and it finalised a prudent minimal programme well before the election. It threw out Leninist entrists, played down its links with the unions and exercised an unprecedented collective self-discipline.
The party fought the 1992 election on a cautious social democratic platform, of modest, redistribution and “supply-side” intervention in industry, all carefully costed and easily understandable. Puni­tive taxation was out. So was na­tionalisation. Capital had nothing to fear apart from stricter regula­tion. Labour promised nothing to upset the status quo on defence. On Europe, the line was “go with the flow”.
No party could have gone fur­ther, in pursuit of respectability and media-friendliness, Labour even got the endorsement of the Financial Times.
Yet all this was in vain. Ever with substantial help from the To­ries, in the shape of the poll tax and the recession, Labour failed to persuade the voters’ that Britain would be safe in its hands.
There is indeed no easy excuse to be found in the conduct of the campaign. Far from leading Labour to conclude that its-general approach in 1987-92 was just about right, the result should pro­voke the party into a thorough and self-critical, examination of why the strategy didn’t work: why, af­ter all this effort and all these years, Labour is still widely seen as the party of bureaucratic statism and corporatist carve-up, Is it all about folk memories of the early eighties or the Winter of Dis­content or has it more to do with the party’s current practice and culture?
But so far there are few signs that very many of Labour’s senior politicians have the stomach for debate about fundamentals. Apart from Bryan Gould, members of the Shadow Cabinet have given only the vaguest indications that they have been thinking critically about Labour’s predicament, and the best that most seem capable of coming up with is that things weren’t taken far enough between 1987 and 1992.
A couple of them have said that Labour did not adopt a sufficiently individualist and consumerist rhetoric; rather more have said that Labour’s relationship with the trade unions was still too close; and several appear to think that Clause Pour of the party constitu­tion was a problem.
More helpfully, one or two have listed concerns – notably the envi­ronment and constitutional reform – which could have been exploited more effectively by Labour, and John Prescott has used his deputy leadership campaign as a platform to make some trenchant remarks on Labour’s organisational fail­ings.
For the most part, however, Labour’s leaders have spent the past ten weeks resolutely defend­ing everything they did in the pre­vious five years. Most notably, John Smith, now virtually certain to be the party’s next leader, has gone out of his way to identify him­self with the broad thrust of the Kinnock years. His only significant innovation is a cross-party com­mission on, social justice to re­assess the structure of the welfare state.
By contrast, Gould has made some telling points during his cam­paign for the leadership and the deputy leadership. He has argued convincingly that Labour’s macho style put off many women voters and that Labour needlessly played down several key issues (the envi­ronment, housing, transport) in its campaigning, and he has made a powerful case tor the inadequacy of Labour’s approach to the democratic agenda. Perhaps most importantly, he has dared to criticise the party’s economic policies for being too timid to convince anyone that a Labour government would do anything about unemployment. 
But even Gould’s approach has been flawed. He has been forced to pull too many punches in the struggle for votes and his national Keynesian programme for the economy has taken a battering, for good reason. The distinctive element in his proposed alternative economic policy, devaluation (trimmed to devaluation as part of a general realignment of currencies in the European exchange rate mechanism), is more problematic in electoral terms than anything Labour offered in April. No political party could win an election promising to devalue.
Perhaps the shortage of ideas at the top of the party would not mat­ter quite so much if there were signs of critical life elsewhere. But they are few and far between.
Apart from the few remaining anti-EC Keynesians around Peter Shore, there is no cogent voice of the right independent of the lead­ership these days, and the hard left, although acerbic on Kinnock’s stewardship of the party, seems motivated almost entirely by nos­talgia for the good old days of the seventies and early eighties.
Its politics are dominated by a rhetoric of betrayal-by-the-leadership and its priorities are conservative and uninspiring: defence of the block vote and first-past-the-post elections, opposition to the EC and military spending.
Ken Livingstone is alone on the hard left in articulating a coher­ent programme, but it holds few attractions. He has hit on military spending cuts as the key to all Labour’s problems. But it is a solu­tion that offers as little in electoral terms as Gould’s devaluationism (which Livingstone endorses with knobs on): firing workers in arms factories to pay for teachers and nurses is hardly electorally feasible.
That leaves the amorphous mass of Labour’s “soft left” (or centre-left), slowly coming to terms with the prospects of life under a leader who, unlike Kinnock, cannot claim the sentimental loyally of any section of the left. The centre-left kept its head down in the two years before the general election but it is likely that, with Kinnock gone, it will experience something of a revival as backbench MPs and others feel freer to speak their minds. Already the Tribune Group at Westminster is back to weekly meetings and centre-left MPs say that they detect a hunger for open discussion throughout the party.
As yet, however, this is all promise. Perhaps because of the leadership campaign, the centre-left has as yet contributed little of substance: a handful of articles in the Guardian, Tribune and the New Statesman and a few discus­sion papers for conferences. In­deed, it is difficult to work out ex­actly where the centre-left sees Labour going.
There is no centre-left consensus on most of the big questions that the party will have to face in the next couple of years – Europe, economic policy, environmentalism, electoral reform – let alone on internal party affairs.
Optimists say that it is simply a matter of time before this sorts it­self out; pessimists argue that the centre-left is as short of ideas as the hard left and will almost in­evitably end up meekly following in the footsteps of the “business­es-usual” right.
This weekend’s Tribune/Labour Co-ordinating Committee confer­ence in London (see advertisement on page 10) is a forum for a free and frank exchange of views rather than a meeting to forge a new radical consensus, but it should give a good indication of what we can expect, from the centre-left in the next couple of years.

INTERVENTION TO SAVE SARAJEVO

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Tribune leader, 26 June 1992

The left is, justifiably, generally op­posed to military interventions by big powers in other people’s wars. However they are dressed up for public consumption, they are usually at­tempts by the big powers to extend or defend their influence. Far from bring­ing about peace, they usually cause esca­lation and prolongation of wan look at south-east Asia, Afghanistan, the Gulf, the Horn of Africa, Chad, Angola.
But there are times when big-power military intervention in a small war is the only way of preventing something worse. It is becoming increasingly clear that Bosnia today is a case in point.
It is difficult to see how anything short of military intervention from outside will dislodge the Serbian nationalist ir­regular forces, backed by the Govern­ment of Slobodan Milosevic and former Yugoslav federal troops, which are cur­rently laying siege to Sarajevo and ter­rorising the civilian population with random mortar fire. Unless they are dis­lodged, the future for Sarajevo, Bosnia and the rest of what used to be Yu­goslavia is bleak indeed.
A ceasefire alone (if it could be made to hold, which seems unlikely) is not enough. It would simply allow the Ser­bian militias, currently in a psychotic, expansionist mood, to consolidate their current stranglehold on Sarajevo and to get on unmolested with the grisly busi­ness of “ethnic cleansing” in the areas of Bosnia they control, as a prelude to incorporating them into a Greater Serbia. Encouraged by their success, the mili­tias would then turn their attentions to the Albanians in Kosovo and then to the Macedonians.
Everything that the international com­munity has done so for to restrain Ser­bian expansionism has failed. The agree­ment on Croatia brokered by the United Nations special envoy, Cyrus Vance, in January allowed the Serbs to consoli­date their territorial gains there.
The EC’s plans for “cantonisation” of Bosnia on ethnic lines, put for­ward in March, only encouraged Serb ambitions to annex large areas of that country: if the EC sticks to this approach, it is almost certain that the Croats will join in the carve-up, effec­tively wiping Bosnia from the map. The sanctions imposed on Serbia and Mon­tenegro by the EC and the United Na­tions last month have had no apprecia­ble effect on the Serbian agression.
A limited military intervention to re­open and secure Sarajevo’s airport – its only transport link with the outside world – and to force the Serbian artillery units to retreat from their positions overlooking the city is logistically feasi­ble. It now appears to be the only way that tie world can show the Serbs that it is serious about not tolerating, unpro­voked aggression.
Obviously, there are political a military problems with such a course of action. Any intervention would have to have the backing of the UN, but it would be very difficult for any operation to save Sarajevo actually to be conducted by UN Blue Helmet troops, whose role is traditionally limited to peace-keeping. Intervention is also outside the remit of Nato, the purpose of which is to defend its own members from attack, yet Nato forces would have to be used. Unless the Western European Union were brought in, some sort of ad hoc coalition would need to be set up to do the job. This would take time and might be somewhat chaotic. There is also the possibility that what started as a limited intervention would become an endless commitment.
But none of this constitutes a convinc­ing case against intervention. The or­ganisational difficulties can be over­come if the political will is there, and there is no reason that any military action should not be strictly limited in scope and duration. In any case, there is no alternative on offer and time is gettting short. It is time to grasp the nettle.

NO GAIN IN LIB-LAB VOTES PACT

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Tribune leader, 19 June 1992

The London School of Economics’ simulation of what  would  have happened in the general election if the electoral system had been dif­ferent, conducted by the ICM polling or­ganisation and published last week, is of course only a rough guide to the way that Britain would actually have voted if   the  first-past-the-post  system had been replaced by the additional member system, the alternative vote or the sin­gle transferable vote.
Apart from any considerations of mar­gins of error in opinion polls, even those which survey nearly 10,000 people, vot­ers would almost certainly have be­haved differently in a real-life election under a new system than they did when asked by the LSE’s pollsters to play a game of “what if?”.
Nevertheless, the LSE survey, commis­sioned in the expectation that there would be a hung parliament and that electoral reform would be at the top of the political agenda, is the best guide we have to the effects of electoral reform for Westminster elections. Its findings are directly relevant to Labour’s de­bates on electoral reform and, more sur­prisingly, on relations with the Liberal Democrats.
As far as electoral reform is con­cerned, the survey suggests that, of the two options for change currently being given serious consideration by Labour’s Plant Commission on electoral systems, the alternative vote and the additional member system, only the latter fully cor­rects the pro-Tory bias inherent in first past the post.
According to the survey, if the April 9 general election had taken place using AV, which retains single-member con­stituencies but requires voters to rank candidates in order of preference, the Tories would have emerged with a share of seats much larger than their share of the vote, a couple of seats short of an overall majority. Labour would have taken a seat less than it did under first-past-the-post.
By contrast, under AMS, in which MPs from single-member constituencies are “topped up” with MPs from regional lists, seats gained by all parties would have been close to proportional to votes cast. The Tories would have got 268 seats (down 68), Labour 232 (down 39) and the Liberal Democrats 116 (up 96), with Plaid Cymru and the Scottish Na­tional Party taking 18 between them (up 11).
These conclusions should reinforce the already strong case for Labour to reject the idea of changing to AV for elections to the House of Com­mons. The LSE survey shows that AV has no significant advantages over first past the post and all the disadvantages of non-proportionality. 
The Plant Com­mission should now explicitly rule out AV just as it has effectively ruled out the single transferable vote, which is favoured by the Liberal Democrats and would do away with single-member con­stituencies.
The next step should be a strong rec­ommendation of AMS, the only model to tackle the problem of proportionality at the same time as keeping single-member constituencies, in good time for a deci­sion at 1993 party conference.
But the survey should also make Labour banish any notion that it should enter into an electoral pact with the Liberal Democrats before the next election. The reason that the Tories would have done so well under AV is that more Liberal Democrat voters would choose a Tory as their second preference vote than would choose a Labour candidate. This means that an electoral   pact   in   which   the   Liberal Democrats   stood   down   in   Tory-held Labour target seats   would do Labour no good at all, and would possibly save several Tories’ skins.
The only anti-Tory electoral pact that might work would be a unilateral deci­sion by Labour not to stand in certain Tory-held Liberal Democrat target seats, but the political costs of such a gift to the centre, in terms of internal strife and Labour’s credibility as a national party, make such generosity distinctly unappealing.

EASY DOES IT? INTERVIEW WITH JOHN SMITH

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Tribune, 19 June 1992


Paul Anderson talks to the man almost certain to lead the Labour Party

“I’ve yet to be persuaded of the merits of a referendum on Maastricht,” says John Smith. “It was not our view that there should be a referendum prior to the Danish vote and I don’t think the Danish vote changes that as a matter of principle.”

The 53-year-old MP for Monklands East is treading delicately, and with good reason. The Danes’ rejection of the Maastricht treaty on European union has left its future uncertain and has blown open the debate on the future of Europe throughout the European Community.

Smith’s first task as leader of the Labour Party, which he is almost certain to be within a month, will be the difficult one of working out an approach to Maastricht that does maximum damage to the divided Tories at the same time as keeping Labour together. With signs of a potential split inside the Parliamentary Labour Party already apparent, he is understandably keen to keep all options open on parliamentary tactics.

He carefully emphasises both his enthusiasm for greater European integration and his criticisms of the Maastricht agreement.

On economic and monetary union, he favours creation of a single currency and a European central bank. But, aware of criticism of the deflationary effects of an over-valued Deutschmark, he does not rule out a realignment of currencies before monetary union. And he wants the central bank to be subject to stricter political control.

“The exchange rate mechanism of the European Monetary System is not a fixed-exchangerate system,” he says. “It’s adjustable. A general realignment could occur. Indeed, I rather anticipate there will be a realignment of some kind before we reach the point of decision on economic and monetary union.

“We would have preferred there to have been a more directly politically accountable regime for the central bank,” he goes on. “There was a contest between the Bundesbank tradition and the Franco-British tradition, and the Bundesbank model was the decision of the majority “However, there is a way in which we can strengthen democratic accountability and that is by giving Ecofin [the Council of Economic and Finance Ministers of the EC] a much more powerful role in carrying forward the economic policy of the Community. Article Two of the Maastricht treaty includes the objectives of social cohesion, solidarity, full employment and growth. Ecofin should assert an influence in favour of these wider economic objectives.

“Labour is very close to the French socialist government on this. Together with our socialist colleagues, we should be arguing for stronger democratic accountability and for wider aims of economic policy than the bankers would like to see. It’s a matter of building up the mechanisms of democratic political accountability as the system evolves.” On political union, Smith tempers his belief in closer EC integration with the assertion that he is not a European federalist.

“Federalism is a word that is charged with non-meaning in the European Community I’ve never been in favour of a European super-state. What we are building in the European Community is not something that’s analogous to any existing nation-state.”

Europe is not, of course, the only problem that will face Smith as Labour leader, nor is it the biggest. The party has just suffered its fourth general election defeat in a row and its morale is at an all-time low.

Perhaps predictably, Smith argues that there is “no reason for the party to be defeatist at the moment”, pointing to the substantial gains made on April 9 and the high calibre of Labour’s Shadow Cabinet and its new MPs. But, stung by criticism that he is the “business as usual” candidate, short of ideas and over-cautious, he is equally at pains to emphasise the need for “changes to broaden our appeal”. He promises a radical new approach to constitutional reform, a fundamental re-examination of Labour’s approach to the welfare state (overseen by a crossparty commission) and, perhaps most important, a reassertion of Labour’s claim to the moral and intellectual high ground.

“I’m going to be paying more attention to the philosophy of the party,” he says. “I’m a bit of an unashamed intellectual in that respect. I really do think that we’ve got to win the battle of ideas and take on the Right. We lost out badly in the seventies because we started losing the arguments. I start my politics with a set of moral propositions and I’m not going to hide that in the slightest. The party has got to speak very confidently on this.

The altruism has got to shine through.” In line with this, Smith rejects the argument that his redistributionist tax policies cost the party dear on April 9. “I don’t retreat an inch from the shadow budget,” he says. “I’m slightly puzzled by some of the criticism, especially when it has come from people allegedly on the left. rd like them to tell me how they would have done it differently. I’ve seen one or two contributions on this subject in Tribune which have caused me to raise my eyebrows slightly.

“I’m deeply troubled about the way in which western societies are developing. John Kenneth Galbraith , writes about it clearly in The Culture of Contentment: two-thirds of the people are not doing too badly thank you, but there’s one-third knocked out. The Labour Party cannot in good conscience turn away from that. But I want to get a wider consensus: there are decent people who don’t vote Labour yet who are troubled about it too. I want to reach out to them.”

Not all critics of Smith’s role as shadow chancellor in the run-up to the election have focused on his shadow budget: some have argued that his major failing was as one of the main architects of Labour’s industrial and employment policies. After Labour dropped its traditional interventionism in favour of a “supply-side” approach which emphasised education and training, the argument goes, the party appeared to have no way of getting Britain out of recession.

Smith says that the charge is unfair: Labour was interventionist, although “perhaps we undersold it a bit”, and he intends to keep things that way. “I would strongly dispute the idea that I am not an interventionist. The idea that the British economy, in particular its manufacturing side, is going to recover on its own, is misplaced.

“I’m a very strong supporter of development agencies because I think they can have a catalytic effect on a region. That is not command-economy-style intervention, directing from the top, but it’s nonetheless intervention. Similarly, a strong technology policy, in which we co-ordinate the activities of our science and technology institutes together with industry is vital.”

This said, education and training remain at the heart of his conception of industrial policy. “I see education as the great enabling instrument. I am shocked at the notion of youngsters not having training and stimulus. I see them leaving school at 16 and I see them a year later pushing trolleys round an Asda supermarket. That’s not good enough.

“Young Germans are getting the chance for proper training. We neglect it. I’m a missionary about this.” Smith is also concerned about the state of the British constitution. “It’s antiquated,” he says.

“We’re heading for a new century with a medieval House of Lords, for example, which is really intolerable. “I’m unhappy about the power of the legislature against the executive. I find myself not understanding what some of the people who talk a lot about parliamentary sovereignty in our European debates are actually talking about because it’s not as strong as it should be.

“I’m also worried about over-centralised government, the way that local government has been undermined, and I’m strongly committed to devolution. It’s not just a question of Scotland and Wales, it’s also the English regions. People want to touch power more closely, they want to be involved. Socialism for me is a decentralising and liberating philosophy.

“Finally, I’m in favour of a Bill of Rights. Labour should be a bastion of the individual against big government and big business. One of the ways of being that is to give people known legal rights which cannot be trampled upon.”

Electoral reform, however, “is more complicated”. “There’s a good and healthy debate going on within the party and I don’t want to prejudge it,” says Smith, although he praises the ,work of Labour’s commission on electoral systems, chaired by Raymond Plant, for writing “the best explanation of the issues that I’ve ever seen”.

Smith sounds similarly cautious on internal party affairs — partly, no doubt, because he knows he will soon have the unenviable job of getting the party and unions to agree to a new relationship. “We’re at a very interesting time in the development of the party internally,” he says enigmatically. “We’ve made great progress on one member one vote. Ordinary members are absolutely delighted that they’re able to cast an individual vote in the ballot for the leadership and deputy leadership. They will not wish to surrender these rights now, and they’re right. It’s a healthy and happy thing.” Would that everyone else agreed.