Category Archives: Journalism

Although it is understandable that Neil Kinnock decided to resign the Labour leadership after last week’s general election defeat, there was no need for the trade unions to bounce the party into an instant lead­ership election. It would have been per­fectly easy to find a caretaker accept­able to all for the silly season from July to party conference, and such a course of action would have allowed party members at every level to chew over the reasons for the defeat, debate the way forward and come to informed con­clusions about which politicians they prefer to lead it. If the move to rush the leadership elections was not an attempt to stifle discussion and fix the result for John Smith, it looked remarkably like one.

Still, the National Executive Commit­tee managed to get an extra three weeks before the special conference, and the time must be used by all affili­ated unions and Constituency Labour Parties to ballot their members. If it is not, the new leader will lack democrat­ic legitimacy.

The immediate priorities for Labour’s democratic left are to ensure that the debate over the party’s future direction is the defining feature of the leadership election campaign and that the debate is not ended as soon as it is over or, per­haps worse, simply marginalised and ignored. More has got to change in the Labour Party than the face of its leader if it is to win next time. Whoever wins must preside over a transformation of the party.

This is not most importantly a matter of changing detailed policy (even on taxation) nor is it about improving pre­sentation, though these things have a part to play later on. Before getting bogged down in detail, the party needs to address the big questions: how British society has changed in the past decade; how the European economy can be managed for social democratic purposes in an era in which the capaci­ties of the individual European nation states are wholly inadequate to the task; whether there is any future for so­cialism except as redistribution; how a root-and-branch democratisation of Britain and Europe can be achieved; how the impending collapse of Britain’s military industries can be handled; what can be done about the runaway crises of Third World poverty and envi­ronmental degradation. In other words, Labour needs to do what it failed to do after 1987: subject itself to a thorough­going political critique.

Tribune believes that the results of this process should include adoption of proportional representation for the Commons, an unambiguous embrace of the goal of a democratic federal Europe and development of Europe-wide strategies for economic management, environmental policy, and global development of Europe-wide strategies for economic management, environmental policy and global development. But at this stage, what is important is not what Tribune or anyone else thinks but the party’s willingness to engage in the process.

At the same time, Labour needs radi­cally to democratise its own structures. One member one vote for all major de­cisions and elections is essential and urgent. So too is a serious attempt to revitalise the party’s political culture and membership, emphasising not just recruitment but participation, particu­larly of women, and political education.

No single leader can possibly deliver all this on his or her own, but the lead­ership can make some difference. What Labour needs now is people at the top who are open-minded, dynamic, intel­lectually creative and above all adven­turous. Both the contenders so far de­clared for the leadership are capable men, and both are up to the task of leading Labour during a period of pro­found reassessment. Bryan Gould has more of a record as a creative thinker and is more influenced by radical democratic and environmentalist ideas; John Smith has a much better grasp of the need for an essentially European orientation for Labour. If the choice re­mains as it was when we went to press on Wednesday, on balance Tribune prefers Mr Gould, but will of course give both sides ample opportunity to make their cases.

Obviously, however, there is no reason for the choice to re­main as it is. Indeed, the best thing that could happen between now and the closing date for nominations would be the emergence of more candidates so that party members can choose among the full range of political positions put forward in the Labour Party.

Paddy Ashdown has made it dear that he would refuse to give support to any party attempting to form a government if it did not promise in its Queen’s Speech to legislate for “fair votes” before the general election after this one. It is a ridiculous posi­tion, and he knows it. The only major party that might possibly introduce electoral reform for the House of Commons is Labour – but Labour is still only halfway through working out what it really wants.

After years of backing the first-past-the-post system for all elections, Labour is now open to change for the Commons, probably to a version of the German addi­tional member system, as its choice of AMS for its pro­posed Scottish parliament indicates. But, as the interim report of Labour’s commission on electoral systems, chaired by Raymond Plant, made clear last year, the party is some way from making a decision in principle about which electoral system it wants for the Com­mons, let alone finalising all the details. Indeed, just about all that the Plant commission has firmly decided for the Commons is that it should not be elected by the single transferable vote (STV) system – which is what Mr Ashdown’s party has traditionally backed.

If Labour is moving towards AMS, there is a vocal lobby within the party for the statut quo and a smaller one for the alternative vote system. Among supporters of AMS there are crucial differences, particularly over the percentage of the vote, at regional or national level, that parties would have to reach to secure representa­tion in the Commons. Tribune, for example, while sup­porting the principle of AMS, would not support a ver­sion including a threshold of more than 5 per cent, which would discriminate against Green representation in the Commons. Others would make thresholds high to exclude fascists.

All this is going to have to be worked out – and not just by Labour. For all the Liberal Democrats’ shouting about “fair votes”, they have not thought through how, if at all, they are prepared to compromise on their in­sistence on STV. Changing the electoral system cannot legitimately be done by party leaders on the basis of a few back-of-the-envelope calculations in smoke-filled rooms: it demands public debate about principles and details and consensus within parties and among them.

By saying that it will open up the Plant commission to other parties and to a wide range of organisations from civil society, and by saying that the expanded in­quiry will report within a year, Labour has gone as far as anyone could reasonably expect. Mr Ashdown should stop making demands for instant solutions and commit his party to backing Labour’s attempt to secure a new consensus on the electoral system, just as it did with the Scottish Constitutional Convention.

The award of £200,000 damages and the same again in costs against The Face magazine for libeling Ja­son Donovan shows once again the urgent need for action to reduce the amounts of libel awards. It is ab­surd that a magazine should face closure just because it has wrongly claimed that a pop singer lied when he de­nied that he was gay. (Would he have been so lavishly rewarded if a magazine had wrongly claimed that he was lying when he denied he was straight?) It is time for the amount that can be awarded in damages and costs to be limited to a total of £50,000, pending a thor­ough review of the whole of the law of libel.

“Yesterday was another day of achievement for Britain and British actors at the Oscar cere­monies in Hollywood,” John Smith told the thousands of Labour supporters in the Sheffield Arena for Labour’s “Rally of the Decade” last Wednesday.

“A triumph for Anthony Hopkins that is well deserved,” he went on. “But I have to admit that one long-running saga failed even to get a nomi­nation. Starring John Major, the Conservatives’ very own box-office disaster – Honey, I Shrunk the Economy.”

At least it was better than John Major’s feeble line in cinematic humour when he warned of a “Nightmare on Kin nock Street”. It wasn’t very good, though. Nor, frankly, were any of the other gags at the Labour extravaganza. The music was pretty dire too.

But none of that really mattered. It didn’t mat­ter either that the giant hall wasn’t quite as full as the party had hoped, with rows of empty seats at the back and along the sides. It didn’t even matter that the harsh acoustics and lighting and the giant video screen behind the podium gave most of the speakers a sinister demagogic air.

This was the Labour Party with the scent of power tingling in its nostrils. Nothing in the world could have stopped every Labour-support­er present from experiencing the show as a run­away success. Three opinion polls earlier in the day had given Labour the sort of lead it needs to win a thumping Commons majority. No one knew as the rally got under way that the next batch of polls, while still giving Labour a lead, were less favourable. Everyone, from Neil Kinnock down to the 10,000 or so ordinary Labour Party members who had come to the rally by coach and car from all over the country, was in triumphalist mood.

The audience lapped up everything, no matter how routine or corny. They cheered when the Shadow Cabinet marched down the central aisle waving and smiling, they went wild when the giant video screen showed Neil and Glenys arriving outside in a helicopter, they erupted into ecstatic whoops when the spotlight picked out the Kinnocks making their way into the arena, shaking hands, saluting the crowd, embracing what appeared to be long-lost friends.

John Smith gave a typically competent speech. Roy Hattersley sounded positively radical in his egalitarianism. There were endorsements from show business celebrities – Mick Hucknall, the singer with Simply Red, Steve Cram, the athlete, Nigel Kennedy, the violinist, Stephen Fry, the actor. Barbara Castle nearly brought the house down when she declared: “This is like 1945. They never dreamed we could win then and we did.”

But the climax was Kinnock, cocky and expansive – “Well, all right!” he shouted at the audience as he came on stage, Mick Jagger-style. There followed a rousing attack on the Tory record concentrating on education and housing policies: “The decent people of Britain are revolted by: Government that has broken the consensus of 40 years, a government that has created poverty as a matter of policy just as it has used unemployment as the main instrument of economic management,” he said. He even tried another film joke. “Recall their impeccable timing on the day that Anthony Hopkins won the Oscar in Hollywood, when they described me as ‘Hannibal’,” he grinned. Needless to say, it worked a treat.

* * *

Sheffield got plenty of coverage on the television and in all the papers, not least because it was the glitziest and biggest political rally ever held in Britain. It also produced some useful film clips for use in Monday’s party election broadcast.

But its main purpose was to boost Labour morale before the last week of the campaign. In 1987, the big razzmatazz rally of the Labour campaign took place in London on the Sunday before polling day – and it effectively marked the end of Labour’s national campaign. After the ral­ly, Labour sat exhausted on its laurels for four days, watching the Liberal-Social Democrat Al­liance, which it thought it had effectively squeezed, claw its way back in the opinion polls at Labour’s expense.

This time, Labour has done all it can to inten­sify, the campaign over the last week, making a particular point of trying to woo wavering centre voters.

The most spectacular part of this was the re­launch of Labour’s constitutional reform proramme by Neil Kinnock and Roy Hattersley at the end of last week, which has dominated the agenda for the heavy newspapers ever since.

In many ways, however, the effort on the ground in the marginals has been more impor­tant. By the end of last week, Labour had shifted nearly all its resources and personnel into its target seats and had let its local activists know that there should be no let-up before the ballot boxes were sealed.

Labour’s daily agents’ briefing, Winning Post, made the strategy clear: “Momentum means in­creased campaign visibility relative to the con­tenders – showing that we are moving forwards the last three weeks. We must be positive, urgent and attractive.” Parties were urged to increase their presence on the streets, “blitz” selected ar­eas with propaganda, balloons and stickers, get as many posters into windows as possible and continue canvassing right up to the last day of the campaign.

“The Liberal vote is very soft,” the briefing went on. “The chances are that you won’t have a high number of defined Liberal supporters show­ing up in your canvass figures.” In the final week, local Labour parties were directed to “con­centrate strongly on the key issues of concern to Liberal voters: health, the economy and particu­larly education^”, while emphasising that “the choice is between a Labour government and a Conservative government”. In Scotland and Wales, the same tactics were recommended to deal with the Scottish National Party and Plaid Cymru.

According to Labour headquarters, the local parties in the marginals have responded vigorously to the call to arms. “It’s going very well in­deed. Very positive,” said Sally Morgan, Walworth Road’s key seat co-ordinator, early this week.

* * *

Of course, no one will know until the results are in whether such optimism is justified. But, whatever the result, Labour has good reason to be pleased with the way that the campaign has gone. Although in 1987 Labour had, on the whole, a bet­ter national campaign than the Tories, the party failed to make its national campaign timetable dominant, and locally Labour’s efforts were patchy.

Not everything has gone completely according to plan this time. The “war of Jennifer’s ear” over Labour’s health party election broadcast a fort­night ago threw Labour severely off balance. Al­though the party recovered, the affair meant that it has since been unable to give health the prominence that had originally been sketched into the schedule. The furore also eclipsed one Labour attempt to make an issue of poll tax (al­though the party had another go last weekend) and upset the timing of its push on education policy, which looked dangerously like a desperate attempt to catch up with the Liberal Democrats by the time it came last week.

Nevertheless, Labour has dominated the cam­paign agenda nationally as it was never able to in 1987, and the Tories’ undoubted incompetence is by no means the only reason. From the shadow budget onwards, Labour’s initiatives have been detailed, sensible and fully costed, forcing the Tories to respond rather than develop their own campaigning themes. Labour’s senior politi­cians have been better briefed than at any time in living memory, and they have come across as confident and competent on television and radio: gaffes have been relatively few and far between. Perhaps most important, the early stages of the campaign this time did not rely over-heavily on Kinnock, the focus of the 1987 campaign. As a re­sult, he has looked much fresher than the other party leaders since being moved to the centre of Labour’s campaign in the final week.

But the main difference with 1987 is the way in which Labour has managed to intervene local­ly. In the past five years, communications be­tween headquarters and local parties have been transformed. Everything from poster distribution to policy briefings has been better in this cam­paign than ever before. If there’s no room for complacency, there’s plenty for pride in a job done as well as it could be done. Let’s hope that it has all been enough.

When the election campaign started, the Conservatives were confidently predicting that they would win an overall majority of 20. Today, as even they admit off the record, the best they can hope for is to be the largest party, clinging to power with the help of the Ulster Unionists.

Even though most Liberal Democrat voters are former Tories and, whatever Paddy Ashdown may say about being prepared to go into coalition with either of the main parties if the terms are right, the Liberal Democrats know that their credibility would collapse if they agreed to shore up the Tories. The Tory campaign has been alternately lack-lustre and filthy. Their senior politicians look either dull and uninspiring or dangerously mad. This worn-out, dis­credited Government knows that it needs a miracle to win on April 9.

So far, everything in the campaign has gone accord­ing to plan for Labour, apart from last week’s party election broadcast on health. It is now apparent that Labour walked unwittingly into a well-planned Tory ambush, exacerbating its difficulties by not making it clear from the start that the film was a representation of a typical case rather than a straight documentary about a particular one. Although the ambush was even­tually revealed for what it was, Labour’s discomfort was a timely reminder that too much hype can damage a perfectly good case.

This week, Labour has been emphasising its positive agenda for ending the recession, introducing a fair tax­ation system and improving education and the welfare state.

It is right to do so: these are the bread-and-butter issues that will determine most voters’ choices. But, as polling day approaches, it would be foolish for Labour not to give some prominence to its policies on Europe, aid to the Third World, the environment and constitutional reform. With the exception of devolution for Scotland, none of these is likely to swing more than a few middle-class votes – but those few votes could be enough to return the majority Labour government that Britain so desperately needs.

Nothing illustrates better the Tories’ contempt for working people than their attitude to Labour’s pro­posal for a statutory minimum wage of £3.40 an hour. The Labour plan is a modest attempt to improve the lot of those 5 million or so workers, many of them women and part-timers and many of them unorganised, who are currently on scandalously low rates of pay. Its main problem is that it will be very difficult to police and enforce except in larger unionised companies.

Yet the Tories have rubbished the minimum wage, claiming that it will cost billions to introduce in the Na­tional Health Service, that it will increase inflation and will lead to 2 million job losses. Independent ana­lysts disagree on all three counts, with some reckoning that total job losses would be as low as 4,000 in three years, and there is no evidence that a statutory mini­mum wage has had any detrimental effects in any Euro­pean Community country that has one. Why do the To­ries not admit that their real concern is the profits of low-wage employers, some of whom, particularly those in retailing and the hotel and catering trades, are among their biggest backers?

Jack Cunningham, Labour’s cam­paigns co-ordinator, is in bullish mood as he surveys the south London skyline from his office in the party’s Walworth Road headquarters. “The verdict is so far so good,” he beams. “It’s so much easier to keep the momentum going from the front.”

It is 11am in the morning, and he has already been up nearly six hours. He gets to Labour’s temporary media centre at Millbank, across the road from the Houses of Parliament, at 6.30am, and by 6.45am he is in his first meeting of the day with the Labour media team, discussing the day’s tactics. After chairing a press conference for half-an-hour from 7.45am, he does three or four interviews. Then at 9.45am there’s another meeting, this time of Labour’s campaign man­agement team, which assesses the state of play and determines the main messages that the par­ty’s “key campaigners” – the Shadow Cabinet politicians who are touring Britain – should con­centrate upon for the day.

We have caught Cunningham during the hour or so which he puts aside for scouring the news­papers: the day still has a lot more in store. “More broadcast interviews at lunchtime and maybe in the early evening, chats with all the heads of department at Walworth Road, another campaign management team meeting at 7.30am. With luck I’ll be in bed by midnight and then it’s 5.15am all over again.”

A fortnight of that would do most people in – and Cunningham also has the problem that his own constituency, Copeland, in far-off Cumbria, is highly marginal, so he has to fit in campaign­ing there as well at the weekends. But the prospect of winning power is obviously a heady tonic. Cunningham looks as fresh as a daisy – and his enthusiasm is infectious. The party is in bet­ter shape than at any time since the early six­ties,” he says. “Everybody’s just getting stuck in.”

The campaign management team which Cunningham heads co-ordinates the work of five campaign groups: projec­tion, under David Hill; organisation, un­der Joyce Gould; monitoring, under Larry Whitty; internal communications; administration.

The projection group is probably the most glamorous and is certainly the biggest, with nearly 140 people listed in Labour’s special cam­paign internal telephone directory, although not all are squeezed into Walworth Road. Projection includes the Shadow, Communications Agency, under Philip Gould, based at Transport House, which is more or less in charge of party election broadcasts and oversees events and propaganda; and it co-ordinates the activities of Neil Kinnock, the other “key campaigners”, the media office and a campaign assessment unit headed by Patri­cia Hewitt, also at Transport House.

As far as public perceptions of the campaign concerned, the most important part of this is probably the key campaigners unit, which is re­sponsible for getting the 14 or 15 Labour high-ups on to the television and for making sure that they do not make fools of themselves. Every “key campaigner” can be contacted at any time by telephone and by fax wherever he or she may be, and each has at least one member of staff at Walworth Road, working on background briefings.

So far, the system has worked a treat. While the Tories have lost cabinet ministers on the road for hours at a time, Labour has been able to keep track of its politicians constantly, keeping them informed of what is going on. That has meant fewer gaffes and fewer television journal­ists frustrated because they cannot get the pic­tures they want.

All the campaign events except photo-opportu­nities are run by an office headed by Jim Parish. “Anything that has to happen we make happen,” he says, puffing at a cigar. Today his tasks have already included the 7.45am press conference in Millbank and a 9am press conference in Glasgow.

Still to come are a lecture by Kinnock at 3pm in Manchester, an afternoon policy launch with Robin Cook in London and an evening rally in Norwich. Parish is in charge of two road teams, complete with stage set, sound, lighting and stage management, which are touring the coun­try for nightly rallies. The biggest was due to start in Sheffield as this issue of Tribune went to press. “That lighting worked well this morning,” he tells a passing colleague as we leave his office.

The monitoring group directs Labour’s opinion polling (in league with Patricia Hewitt), tracks the media, watches what the opposition is up to and, along with the organisation group, keeps an eye on the cam­paign in the target marginals. For the duration of the campaign, Larry Whitty is effectively Labour’s intelligence chief, and he seems to enjoy the role, even though he gets up even earlier than Jack Cunningham.

“Everything’s going quite smoothly,” he says. “More people than we hoped have become active, although some extra effort is still needed in the marginals. And the Tories’ campaign can’t get much worse. They’re on the ropes. They haven’t had the same degree of planning that we’ve had, and Central Office isn’t as experienced or as clear as we are about our roles. They’re certain to get better, but we’ll get bet­ter too. We’ll be getting different people in on the creative side for the last couple of days, and of course we’ll run down some of the routine stuff and get people out to the constituencies.”

The opposition-watching unit now has more than 1,000 quotes from Tory politicians on its computer database which it feeds out to the projection people – the first time ever that gaffes have been computerised by Labour – and there are spies in the Tory press conferences collecting raw material every day. “We’re expecting some­thing big in the next few days,” say Whitty. “Per­sonal attack on Neil, nasty stuff…”

Most of the times when Joyce Gould hits the headlines it is for expelling members of Militant from the Labour Party, but now, as head of organisa­tion, she is in charge of liaison with the trade unions and regional Labour Parties, advice to agents, targeting key groups of voters (particu­larly women), keeping Labour’s computers at work, the legal support unit and a share of re­sponsibility for target seats.

Gould breaks off a meeting with Sally Morgan, the target seats supremo, to tell us that it is all going very well indeed. “We haven’t got the major problems we had in 1987 and we know where the minor ones are. Labour is going very well. In the West Midlands, there has been a complete switch among the C2s. The north-west is looking good too.”

”We’ve been planning this campaign for two years – and now we’re seeing it happen,” she says. “It’s going absolutely to schedule. We still need more effort in the key seats, though. Why don’t you tell people to find out what their near­est one is?”

Agents and candidates are getting daily brief­ings which even the hardest-nosed politicians praise, there are direct phone lines to most con­stituencies and the key seats are all connected to electronic mail for thrice-daily missives. There is instant telephone policy advice available to can­didates, and more than 100,000 pocket policy handbooks have gone out. “There’s more activity than at any election I’ve fought since 1974,” says Geoff Bish, Labour’s veteran policy director.

Behind the scenes is an army of em­ployees and volunteers, each one as cru­cial as any high-profile spin-doctor, poli­cy boffin, strategist or bureaucrat at the top of the pile.

The computer department has 300 constituen­cies on its database for direct mail and canvass­ing lists (it had 30 in 1987), and it turned out 20 million labels for direct mail in three weeks after the publication of the new electoral rolls in February. Most of its work is over now but it is still running helplines for local Labour parties that can’t get their computers to work properly. The heaviest pressure is also off the writers and sub-editors in the propaganda unit, who have turned round countless leaflets and docu­ments and whose greatest feat was getting the manifesto into printable shape within four hours of the politicians deciding what they wanted in it. “We were working at fever-pitch in the fort­night before the election was called. We’re still busy but the worst is over now,” says Charles Foster, one of three writer-subs now engaged on transforming bureaucratese into English for the various daily briefings.

The external print-buying operation is awe­some: Mo Caldon, the print buyer, reckons that she has ordered more than 12 million leaflets, 65,000 posters, 30,000 estate-agent-style boards and 10,000 to 15,000 stickers emblazoned with candidates’ names.

The internal print (the briefings for candi­dates, the press material and so on) is printed on the premises. One of the printers, Bob Smith, says that he has been on the go constantly since the campaign started – “Not overtime, just ex­tended hours, you could say” – and the people in charge of getting the stuff out have had a similarly exhausting time. “We’ve been doing 10 or 11 hours on the trot, but no complaints,” says Ivy Smith, who runs the internal despatch unit in the Walworth Road basement. “The cost of the postage is just too frightening.”

The bulk of the mail bill, however, is spent by external despatch, which took over an old Post Office building in Union Street near Southwark Bridge 24 hours after John Major announced the election date and since then have shifted most of the leaflets, posters, rosettes and so forth or­dered by Walworth Road to constituency parties and individual Labour supporters. The proud boast is that everything goes out within 24 hours. The efficiency of the operation has meant that Labour has won the poster war hands down just about everywhere except in a few Liberal Democrat strongholds.

So who pays for all this? Well, the unions and Labour Party members’ sub­scriptions, of course, but also the indi­vidual donors who answer Labour ap­peals for cash. Last Thursday, the fundraising unit near King’s Cross station broke off for cele­bratory champagne at the beginning of the af­ternoon having reached, nearly a fortnight before schedule, the £1 million target which had been set for the whole campaign. Unsurprisingly, the fundraising organisers and their volunteer helpers, many of them pensioners, are pleased as punch. “It’s incredible,” says Tony Manwairing, the fundraising supremo. “Really fantastic.”

Making sure that too much isn’t spent still re­mains a nightmare, however. “This five or six weeks is the equivalent of six months of normal activity,” says a hassled-looking Peter Ballard, pouring over spread-sheets in the office manage­ment department.

It has been an exhausting day in an ex­hausting campaign, and there is still plenty of time to go. But the Labour headquarters exudes an optimism that rubs off. This time, Labour really believes that it is going to win.

I think so too, but a word of caution is in order. On hearing my report of high morale and opti­mism at Walworth Road, a friend who was there in 1987 tells me: “It was just like that last time. They even had a cabaret for election night – and people really thought victory was possible right to the very last minute. After the first few re­sults came through, the whole place simply col­lapsed. I’ve never seen anything like it.” Even this hardened politico has money on Labour this time, but sanity demands that we temper our op­timism of the will with plenty of pessimism of the intellect.

When John Prescott was given the job of shadowing the Minister of Transport, then Paul Channon, in 1988, there were plenty of people around (including Tribune’s reporter) who inter­preted it as a demotion.

His previous job, from 1987, had been as ener­gy spokesman, where he was replaced by the up-and-coming Tony Blair, and before that trans­port, between 1983 and 1984. Prescott’s move back to transport, the generally accepted story went, was punishment for standing against Roy Hattersley for Labour’s deputy leadership at the 1988 party conference: Hattersley was saved em­barrassment only because he piled up the union block votes.

If it was punishment, however, it soon back­fired. No sooner had Prescott taken over than a series of transport accidents – the Clapham Junction, Purley and Bellgrove train disasters and the Kegworth air crash – propelled him on to the nation’s television screens to denounce the Tories for reducing investment and allowing safety standards to slip. By mid-1989, the pugna­cious, plain-speaking MP for Hull East had a higher public profile than any other Labour front-bencher except Neil Kinnock and perhaps John Smith.

Since then, Prescott has been in the news con­sistently for his energetic harrying of the Tories over the dilapidated state of Britain’s transport system. He saw off the unfortunate Channon in July 1989 and consistently got the better of his successor, the ineffectual and smug Cecil Parkin­son. After Parkinson resigned when John Major became Prime Minister, Prescott had almost 18 months of humiliating Malcolm Rifkind.

He has not won over all his former Labour critics. Most obviously. Peter Mandelson, the for­mer Labour director of communications who is Hartlepool’s Labour candidate in this election, used his column in the Sunday People recently to have a dig at Prescott for claiming that the To­ries were spreading nasty rumours about his pri­vate life around the Commons press gallery. But most of his colleagues now at least grudgingly share the Sun’s admiration for his bluntness, extraordinary energy and capacity for hard work. In short, Prescott has been rehabilitated.

Now he is busy on the campaign trail, where his knockabout speaking style, though a little short on soundbites, does wonders for party morale. At the London Labour Party rally which launched the campaign proper in the capital a fortnight ago, he was the only speaker who man­aged to provoke the rather polite audience into gales of laughter, and he has since pulled off the same trick at meetings throughout the country.

He is looking forward to taking over the De­partment of Transport from Rifkind on April 10. Indeed, he brims over with enthusiasm at the prospect of getting to grips with the DoT – and changing it beyond recognition.

“There are seven times as many civil servants on the road programme as there are anywhere else,” he says. “It’s ridiculous. The DoT ought to be the strategic thinker. The first step is to de­volve the roads programme to the regions. The second is to integrate the Department so that road and rail and the rest think together what they’re trying to achieve. The third is to produce every year a rolling programme of infrastructure planning.”

The view among civil servants is apparently that a Labour DoT would be an exciting place to be because of the radicalism of Prescott’s pro­posed shake-up, but how far it would cease to be the “Department for the Private Motor Car”, as environmentalists have dubbed it under the To­ries, is a moot point.

Most of Labour’s transport policy reflects the fact that Prescott’s advice comes mainly from transport experts who more or less accept the en­vironmentalist arguments that the private motor car is wasteful of energy and a major source of the carbon dioxide emissions that cause global warming, and that there is no way of building a road system that can solve the problem of con­gestion. But Labour is also under pressure from car industry trade unions which desperately want, a Labour government to stimulate the cur­rently deeply depressed market for new cars.

One crucial indicator of who has the upper hand will be what happens to road-building if Labour wins. New roads have been at the centre of the Tories’ transport policy for the past 13 years, and just over a fortnight ago they an­nounced a £750 million boost to the already mas­sive road-building programme. Labour’s mani­festo promises that “within six months we will review the roads programme” and Prescott em­phasises that the review will lead to cuts, even though Labour “wouldn’t do anything about the contracts that had been signed”.

“The government has said that the number of cars could increase by 140 per cent in the next 25 years,” he says. “The road programme it has at the moment increases road capacity by less than 10 per cent. So you simply can’t build your way out of the problem.

“That means you must review the road prob­lem to achieve a better order of priorities – main­tenance, by-passes if you like – plus give a greater priority to the development of public transport. The party’s priority is to encourage travellers to shift from the private motor car to public transport.”

Not that Labour wants to plough tax­payers’ money into subsidising trains and buses or bringing privatised trans­port services back to state or municipal ownership: there simply isn’t the money to do it. Instead, a Labour government would adopt low-cost strategies for encouraging public transport investment to coax travellers away from their cars.

In essence, Labour’s plans for improving the railway system consist of keeping British Rail in the public sector, streamlining its planning, and relaxing the Treasury rules governing railway investment to allow BR to lease-buy equipment instead of buying it outright at once, thus spreading costs over several years.

That is the way continental European railways finance investment, and Prescott is withering about the Tories’ insistence that leasing is not a good idea. “Their dilemma on leasing is that they’ve just leased the European sleeper trains and the freight trains because our European partners said that we’re not into this silly non­sense of paying in one year. I’ve embarrassed them, right?” he says.

The emergency recovery programme in the Labour manifesto promises to allow BR “to pro­ceed with a leasing scheme of 188 new Networker trains on the North Kent line”, which it de­scribes as “the first step in securing private in­vestment to help modernise Britain’s railways”.

Prescott says that the next steps after that will almost choose themselves.

“Take the inter-city line on the west coast from Euston. That’ll cost about £800 million to up­grade. We’ve already been in consultation with finance houses and the manufacturers to look at a new leasing deal so that we can pay for it over 10 to 15 years. That means that we wouldn’t have to find so much money immediately but we’d get the benefit of the investment.

“It’s the same with the Channel Tunnel rail link, which will cost £4,000 million. We need a high-speed Channel Tunnel rail link by the end of this decade. The Tories would take until the end of the next decade. So we’re talking about a joint public-private operation that may be funded by a bond system like that used by French rail­ways, which Neil Kinnock has talked about.”

In the longer term, Labour is keen to see more electrification, a nation-wide high­-speed train network, an outer circle railway for London, major expansions in regional rail services and a whole lot more besides – but only “as resources allow”, and the detail on most of these proposals has yet to be worked out.

With buses, the key to Labour’s plans is to end the instability caused by deregulation and to in­troduce a series of measures to give buses priori­ty on urban streets. The 1985 Transport Act, which privatised the National Bus Company, forced local authority bus services to become or­dinary companies and to open themselves up to competition from other operators.

Prescott says that the result of deregulation has been underinvestment and chaos. “Return­ing to a regulated system gives you the stability that will allow the bus companies to raise the money themselves to finance new investment,” he says. “It doesn’t cost us anything.”

“In urban areas, the buses could do a lot more in attracting passengers if we gave them green priority routes. We give the bus priority on the road, priority at the roundabouts and reduce the journey time. By reducing the journey time we can increase the frequency of the bus and its reli­ability, and the ridership will begin to increase. We’ll not then need to pump money into revenue support for the urban areas.”

Labour would do all it could to encourage ex­periments in urban public transport. Prescott talks enthusiastically of trying out road-pricing in Cambridge, with the revenues going to public transport, of metros in Manchester and Birming­ham, of an integrated rail and guided bus scheme for the Southampton conurbation. “We’re interested in the network,” says Prescott. “We believe in maintaining the network.”

In line with this, he is opposed to Richard Branson’s attempts to muscle in on British Air­ways’ position as the only significant British air­line. “We need a large British aviation interest to combat the Americans in global competition,” he says: allowing Branson’s Virgin Airways to un­dermine the profitability of BA by running flights to America but not on BA’s unprofitable routes “raises questions of major importance^”.

“Branson rang me up on a earphone and said did I agree with him going from Heathrow and I said no I didn’t,” he says. Heathrow itself is al­ready too congested and then there is the prob­lem of easing congestion on the transport system that gets people to the airport. “I told Branson, there’s nothing wrong with Gatwick.

“What our transport policy is about is simple. The market solution is not an adequate one. You know, it’s only in Britain that this is an ideologi­cal party argument. Everywhere else in Europe, it doesn’t matter who’s in power, they accept all these arguments for a role for government, for planning, for use of public money. We in Britain are on our own. That’s why we’re in such a mess.”

Just as in 1987, a small but vocal lobby is urging vot­ers to vote tactically at the election. Last week, the New Statesman even went so far as to suggest that Labour candidates should stand down in Tory seats where Liberal Democrats have a good chance of winning, as should Liberal Democrats in Tory seats where Labour is best placed.

Of course, this is not going to happen, not least be­cause any electoral pact at this stage would seriously damage the credibility of the participants as national parties and would cause all sorts of debilitating acrimony. Tactical voting is a different matter. There is no is doubt at all that some anti-Tory tactical voting will take place – not because the New Statesman and Democratic Left, the former Communist Party, want it, but because it always happens.

From Labour’s point of view, however, it is by no means clear that it should be encouraged. Of course, it will do Labour no harm if Lib Dem supporters switch to Labour in most of its target seats, which are Tory-held and where Labour came second in 1987.

Else­where, however, the message that supporters of tactical voting are putting across is irrelevant or harmful to Labour.

There are 40 or so constituencies where Labour is at­tempting to unseat Liberal Democrats, Social Democrats or Scottish Nationalists, where Labour faces strong non-Tory challenges or where contests are three-way or four-way. In these seats, the message that supporters of tactical voting are trying to put across (that it doesn’t really matter which way you vote as long as it’s not Tory) will at best confuse voters and at worst do severe damage to Labour’s chances.

Then there are the 30 or so Labour-held constituen­cies which are vulnerable to the Tories on small swings, where, if the idea of tactical voting catches on, Liberal Democrat supporters might back the Tory as the lesser evil.

With the election race neck-and-neck and Labour des­perate for every seat it can get, tactical voting is a minefield for the party and it is quite right to skirt around it. Labour will get the best possible result if it sticks to appealing unequivocally for a straight Labour vote.

Labour has got off to a tremendous start in this election campaign. Neil Kinnock’s first major speech of the campaign at the party’s Scottish conference in Edinburgh last Friday made John Major’s effort at the Tory local government conference the next day look wooden and unconvincing.

On Monday, John Smith’s shadow budget trumped Norman Lament’s “real” budget and the Tories* persis­tent jibes that Labour would increase taxes for all: only the most easily led will now believe the Tory claims. It also knocked the Liberal Democrats’ manifesto launch from the top slot in the television news. Mr Smith’s effi­cient demolition of Mr Lamont on Monday night’s Panorama was a joy for Labour supporters to behold.

On Wednesday, when both Labour and the Tories launched their manifestos, the Labour politicians looked buoyant while their Conservative counterparts appeared lacklustre. More important, Labour’s pro­gramme appeared sensible and attractive, the Tories’ absolutely threadbare. At the national level, Labour has seized the initiative, making the Tories look like unin­spired and uninspiring losers. Even such hardy profes­sional politicians as Douglas Hurd, Christopher Patten and Michael Heseltine seem to have lost their touch, while Mr Major himself, supposedly the Tories’ greatest electoral asset, is clearly out of his depth. This week’s Tory party political broadcast was utterly unconvincing.

But it is not just a matter of Labour doing well in what Tony Bonn once described as the constituency of Television Central. By all accounts, the party’s ‘head­quarters in Walworth Road is operating with an un­heard-of breezy enthusiasm. More important, Labour is also doing extraordinarily well on the ground. In seat after seat, local Labour Parties are reporting that they have taken the campaigning initiative: first on to the streets with leaflets, first to get the posters out, first to canvass.

In many places, including many of its target marginals and, remarkably, several inner-city areas where pessimists believed Labour’s organisation to be moribund, Labour has been the only party with any vis­ible presence in week one. The Tories seem incapable of anything so far, apart from computerised direct-mail shots and expensive (and easily amended) advertise­ments on hoardings. Labour is more optimistic than at any time since 1974. We all think we’re going to win.

But it would be wrong to take anything for granted. High morale can be useful for winning general elec­tions, but only if it inspires party members and sup­porters to go out and do the hard graft. And there is still a lot of hard graft to be done. A good start is better than a bad one – and so fear Labour is doing much bet­ter than in 1987, when its campaign was widely ad­mired – but a couple of polls showing a five-point Labour lead do not guarantee the election result.

In the wake of the shadow budget, the Tory tabloids have shaken off the uncertainty of last week, which saw even the Sun pronouncing Mr Lamont’s £2-a-week giveaway a flop, and have unleashed a ferocious assault on Labour. By the weekend, Labour’s mood could all too easily be punctured if it turns out that Tuesday’s Harris poll in the Daily Express, giving the Tories a three-point lead, was not a freak.

Even if the polls have swung in Labour’s favour, there are plenty of obstacles to be overcome before we can be sure of Labour victory. It is probably best to keep the champagne on ice.

And so, at long last, we know for certain that the election is on April 9. John Major’s announcement on Wednesday means that the tedious phoney war is over. Now the battle can begin in earnest.

This election is a make or break election both for Britain and for Labour. If the Tories were to win again, the country would face up to five more years of eco­nomic mismanagement, sleaze, contempt for democra­cy, obstructionism in Europe and crumbling public ser­vices. Labour, having lost four elections in a row, would be disastrously broke and demoralised. It is essential for Labour and for the country as a whole that it wins. Labour might well be fighting this election on policies somewhat different from those that Tribune would have preferred. But that is as may be. Along with party members of all persuasions, Tribune knows that a Labour government is the only hope for getting Britain back on to its feet again economically, the only hope for a fairer and more humane society, the only hope for modernising our creaking constitution.

Luckily, Labour is well placed to win. The effects of the Tories* assault in January on Labour tax policies has worn off, and this week’s budget was a damp squib. Labour is now 3 percentage points ahead in most opin­ion polls, and governing parties tend to lose support during election campaigns.

There is, however, no room for complacency. The opinion polls are desperately close, and every vote will count. The election could be won or lost during the campaign. As Larry Whitty said a couple of weeks ago, the efforts of Tribune readers could make all the differ­ence. It’s time to get those fingers out.

Norman Lamont sprung a surprise in his budget on Tuesday: instead of simply reducing the basic rate of income tax by Ip or 2p, as everyone had ex­pected, he reduced the tax rate from 25p in the pound to 20p for the first £2,000 of taxable income. Most peo­ple in work will get £2.64 a week extra in their wage packets.

That made Neil Kinnock’s job in replying to the bud­get address on Tuesday afternoon just a little more dif­ficult than it would have been if Mr Lamont had done what he had been predicted to do. Introducing a lower band of tax for the first £2,000 of taxable income is bet­ter targeted on the low-paid than a Ip or 2p reduction in the basic rate: it is less easy to portray as a handout to the already well-off.

It is, nevertheless, just as much an attempt at elec­toral bribery as the Ip or 2p would have been, and Mr Kinnock was right to describe it as such. And, despite the Tories’ crowing, it will almost certainly prove a sin­gularly ineffective bribe. A Ip or 2p reduction in the ba­sic rate would have put significant amounts of money (more than a fiver a week, in other words) into the pockets of many skilled working class and lower middle class voters – the very people that will determine the outcome of the election in the key marginals.

For these moderately affluent voters, £2.64 is peanuts, the equiva­lent of a packet of cigarettes or a couple of pints of beer or a takeaway Chinese meal. It looks even more measly after the effects of raised excise duties are taken into account. It is emphatically not an election-winning bribe. Labour’s campaign has been given some unex­pected help.

For most of the newspapers, what mattered about last Fri­day’s Labour rally in Swansea, on the eve of the Wales Labour Party’s conference, was ei­ther devolution or the running ar­gument over tax cuts and public spending.

“Kinnock’s pledge: Welsh assem­bly promised in his first term of government,” proclaimed the front page of the Cardiff Western Mail on Saturday, above a report on the Labour leader’s speech the previ­ous evening. The Independent and most of the other London papers found great significance in Kinnock’s promise that a Labour gov­ernment would borrow not to pay for tax cuts but for investment.

Of course, these were both real stories. Kinnock had never before been quite as clear on the timing of the proposed Welsh assembly, nor had Labour politicians previ­ously spelled out quite so explicitly that their objection to the Tories’ plans to borrow to pay for tax cuts was not an objection to borrowing as such.

But there was more to the Swansea rally than that, at least in the eyes of the 1,000-plus party faithful packed into the city’s Guildhall to listen to the speeches and cheer. To them, the rally marked the official start of Labour’s election campaign, not just for Wales but for the rest of Britain too. In many ways they were absolutely right.

That might seem just a little bold. On one hand, there has been no end of beginnings for Labour in the past couple of months: the launch of Made in Britain, the eco­nomic policy document, the rally in York, the local government confer­ence. On the other, nobody knows for certain whether another launch will be needed a month hence if John Major decides to postpone the election until May.

But Swansea was special. Labour for the first time laid out in public its package for the elec­tion campaign, and it did so with a conviction that has eluded it for much of the pre-election phoney war.

Kinnock’s speech was long, at times prolix, but unexpectedly ag­gressive and populist. He was al­most frighteningly ebullient, and he hammered home his theme with great force: the Tories are re­sponsible for the worst recession in living memory – and now they are on the run.

Kinnock made a particular point of attacking Major in person (an attack echoed later by Bryan Gould, who told the rally that “be­ing a nice guy isn’t enough to be a good Prime Minister”). 

Labour has clearly decided that the best way to defend itself against Major’s personal popularity u to repeat in­sistently that he cannot escape the blame for the mess the country is now in, to challenge him again and again to take part in a televised debate with Kinnock.

In similar vein, the party has decided to take on the Tories directly on tax and public spending. Kinnock was unashamedly redistributionist in rhetoric. His answer to the expected tax-cutting budget was simple: the government’s promise of a penny or two off the basic rate, paid for by borrowing, was a simple electoral bribe.

“They’re putting Britain in hock to keep themselves in office,” he said. The key difference in the coming election was between Tory bribers and Labour builders”. “We are the builders!” he exclaimed, and brought the house down.

Much of this was unremarkable – “standard campaign-trail stuff”, as the man from the BBC re­marked to me – and there is no doubt that Kinnock, on home ground, was playing to the audi­ence’s need for a morale boost be­fore the grisly business of canvass­ing in the wind and rain begins in earnest.

But the emphases in his speech have a wider significance. The idea that Labour should sit tight, stay uncontroversial and focus all its efforts on training and the National Health Service seems at last to have been abandoned. There is nothing wrong now with sounding egalitarian, even at times left-wing.

This turn to ideology is symbol­ised (ironically in view of his past reputation) by the elevation of Roy Hattersley to a prominent position in the campaign. After a week of high-profile pronouncements, he was in Swansea on Saturday for a starring role in the conference proper, reinforcing Kinnock’s as­sault on the Tories’ tax-cutting plans.

This is not to suggest that train­ing and the NHS will not be play­ing a big part in Labour’s cam­paigning. Tony Blair opened the proceedings on Friday night with a vigorous attack on the govern­ment’s neglect of training and Robin Cook got the heartiest re­sponse after Kinnock when he wound up the rally with a stinging denunciation of the Tories’ health policies.

Some of the most enthusiastic applause came after he declared: “I do not take back one word we said during the Momouth by-election” on the Tories’ plans to privatise the NHS.

But Labour has decided to adopt a strategy of assault on all fronts in an attempt to open up the four-point lead it needs to stand a good chance of being able to form a ma­jority government after the elec­tion. In Swansea last Friday, with the polls indicating that Labour had clawed back the advantage that the Tories had gained in Jan­uary with their attack on Labour’s tax proposals, Kinnock and his col­leagues gave the strong impression that they really believed Labour could make it.

By the end of the evening, some of their self-confidence had rubbed off on the audience. Who knows, it might yet take the whole country by storm.