Category Archives: Journalism

One thing we’re unlikely to witness in the coming election campaign is Labour’s general secretary appearing before the press to announce that the National Executive Committee has full confi­dence in the party leader, as Jim Mortimer did so memorably in 1983.

That sort of thing just isn’t the party’s style any more. Apart from being rather more careful about what is said in public – some say exces­sively so – Labour has decided that elected politi­cians will play all the public roles in the cam­paign. Larry Whitty, who took over from Mor­timer in 1985, will be keeping out of the lime­light. “I’ll be running the machine here,” he says, sitting in his office in Labour’s Walworth Road headquarters.

Whitty seems confident that the machine will function smoothly. “There are obviously some things one leaves to the last minute in terms of the precise sequence of themes in the campaign,” he says. “But logistically and resource-wise we are very well prepared indeed. We had a false start for last June and a false start for Novem­ber. We’re better prepared now than we were for either of those.

“We’re clear how we’re going to run the cam­paign nationally – we’ve just set up the political authority for the campaign. The detail will depend on when John Major calls the election.

“At local level, I think the situation is consid­erably better than it was in the middle of last year. We still, of course, need more people on the ground. There’s pretty good organisation in most of .our key seats but we can always do better with more people mobilised. We know more about the key seats, we know more about the kind of cam­paigns we can run in those key seats than we did in 1987 and I think we’re fairly well-geared to ensure that they maximise their potential.”

Labour is planning to spend more than £6 mil­lion on the campaign, compared with £4 million in 1987. That is a lot of money, but it is far less than the Tories are expected to spend in their at­tempt to retain power. Some reckon they could splash out as much as £20 million, but most esti­mates of Tory plans are around the £15 million mark.

Much has been made by the media of Labour’s attempts to raise cash using American-style political fundraising techniques – direct mail, tele­phone fundraising, credit cards, financial ser­vices packages for members and, most controver­sially, £500-a-head dinners, the second of which took place last Thursday at the Park Lane hotel in Mayfair, netting the party some £150,000.

But for all the success of such methods, the source of most of the general election war-chest is the traditional one. “The bulk of the general” election fund will come from the unions, as previously,” says Whitty. Unlike in 1987, however, union contribution will not turn out at the minute to be less than expected, nor will the bull of it end up being provided by a handful of unions. One of Whitty’s most important initiatives as general secretary was to persuade the unions that a proportion of their affiliation fees should go automatically into the party’s election fund.

“The restructuring of affiliation fees in 1988 means that we’ve got a guaranteed income from the union side which is equitably shared among the unions,” he says. “We don’t have to go cap-in-hand to the unions: it’s part of the constitution that they pay towards the general election and European election funds.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Whitty says that he is “not one of those who believes that there should be any serious distancing between the party and the unions”. “There is some updating of the relationship needed. But we have to do that in a way that doesn’t dilute or diminish the union involve­ment in the party. The best way forward is to have far more members of trade unions who are also individual members of the party.

So far, however, attempts to recruit trade unionists to individual membership, one of the key elements of the mass membership drive launched after the 1987 election, have failed mis­erably. One reason, say Walworth Road insiders, has been that the national membership scheme, which was supposed to make it easier to join the party, has been plagued by teething problems – the result, according to Whitty, of underestimat­ing the amount of work involved in setting up a system from scratch, often with inaccurate infor­mation from constituencies. Around one-quarter of the 320,000 members Labour thought it had at the beginning of 1991 still have not paid their 1991 membership subscriptions.

Now, however, says Whitty, the worst of the chaos has been sorted out and the membership scheme is working reasonably efficiently. “We’ve learned some lessons and I think we’ve a better idea of what recruits and retains members and what doesn’t. It’s a hard slog. I think that the election itself will bring in a lot more supporters whom we need to turn into members. We now have a reasonable system for following them up nationally and locally. Having said that, I’m not expecting miracles.”

It would certainly take more than the sub­scriptions from the new recruits who come for­ward in an election to put Labour’s non-election bank account back into the black. The party’s general fund is around £2 million overdrawn and the party apparatus faces severe cut-backs once the election is over, win or lose. Optimists say that Labour will be able to mitigate these with the introduction of state funding for political par­ties; pessimists say that this assumes a Labour Victory and that, if Labour loses, the unions, themselves strapped for cash, will be in no posi­tion to bail out the party. Some have even claimed that Labour would not have the money to fight another general election campaign less than two years after the one that is about start -as it might have to in the event of a hung parliament.

Whitty is optimistic. “We’re assuming that there will be a cleat and positive result to this election. All our indications are that we can take enough of those key seats to have a clear majori­ty,” he says. Nevertheless, “were we just short of an overall majority, which I suppose is just con­ceivable, we’d have fewer resources for a second election, but the psychology of a second election would be much better. I don’t think resources would be as serious a constraint as some people are making out.”

For now, of course, the priority is winning this time. Whitty says that Labour will be using its front-bench politicians to get the message across, rather than relying on advertising. The media are no longer in awe of the kind of campaign we surprised them with last time. We’ll have to be a little bit more flexible.

“The leader’s campaign will be a major tone-setting and theme-setting operation but we’ll also be deploying the team in a very positive way. We’ve got pretty good back-up advertising, but our main asset is not large amounts of advertis­ing space in newspapers but the way in which our team is consistently outshining theirs. As far as the leadership is concerned, clearly the Tories are going to run a very leader-oriented campaign – Major is just about the only asset they think they have. But Neil Kinnock’s the best cam­paigning politician we’ve seen for decades in this country. When the campaign starts he will thrive and Major will be increasingly exposed. I think the four weeks of the campaign will see us mov­ing significantly ahead.”

If Whitty is right, he will become the first Labour general secretary for 13 years to have to deal with a Labour government. In the past, par­ty-government relations have often been marked by strife; Whitty hopes to be a mediator, and he believes he will be helped by the changes to par­ty conference now in the pipeline, which will give Labour a rolling programme and, through pre-conference “policy forums”, formally involve Labour MPs, MEPs and local councillors in poli­cy-making.

“The policy forums are a way of keeping the party and the government much closer together than in previous eras of Labour government, when there have been serious breakdowns in the relationship at various points,” he says. The role of Walworth Road, unlike Transport House, which was sometimes almost the internal opposi­tion, will be as a means of keeping government ministers in touch with the party and the party informed of and responsive to the problems of ministers. That is a major secretariat role, which has not been performed in the past. In the past the party has done its own thing and the govern­ment has done its own thing, which has caused lots of tensions and problems.

“This year’s conference will have put to it the rule changes that will set up the new system. The NEC has the power to set up the policy fo­rums before this year’s conference, but it’s ex­tremely unlikely. It will be from this year’s con­ference onwards that we’ll start drafting the proper rolling programme.”

But all that is for later. Whitty is keen to get back to the task immediately in hand. This campaign could be won or lost in four weeks. It will be won in relatively few constituencies with a few hundred or a few thousand votes either way. We must get more people out there working for those four weeks. Tribune readers’ efforts could make the difference.”

Labour can win an outright majority at the election. Despite what the pundits say, Labour is not doing badly in the opinion polls; with a good campaign it is certainly capable of achieving the four-point lead it needs to gain an absolute majority in the House of Com­mons. Like party members everywhere, that is what Tribune wants and that is what we will work to achieve.

This does not mean, however, that Labour will neces­sarily win the outright majority it wants. It is possible that the election will have some other result: a hung Parliament of some description or a reduced Tory ma­jority. And it is not an act of disloyalty to speculate about Labour’s actions in such circumstances.

Indeed, in the bars and cafes of Westminster and among Labour’s electoral reformers, talk turns repeat­edly these days to the question of what Labour could or should do If it finds itself the largest single party but short of an overall majority, with the Liberal Democrats (or perhaps, at a pinch, some combination of the Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru and the Scottish National Party) holding the balance of power. Labour’s traditional position is simple: Labour should form a mi­nority government on its own and challenge the Lib Dems (perhaps plus others) to bring it down, perhaps of­fering a few succulent policy scraps (freedom of infor­mation legislation, Scottish devolution, maybe a Speak­er’s Conference on electoral reform) as an incentive for toleration.

Until recently, most Labour Party members would have accepted this approach without question: antipa­thy to anything smacking of coalition runs deep in the Labour Party. Now, however, there are signs of heresy abroad. No one senior in the party is saying anything of the sort in public, but a surprising number of Labour people are mumbling, off the record, that, given that so little separates the two parties, it might not be a bad idea to give the Liberal Democrats a cabinet seat and a constitutional reform package – including a clear com­mitment to the Additional Member System for the Com­mons and a democratic second chamber – in return for five years in power.

Are these would-be coalitionists right? They are cer­tainly open to the criticism that their scenario is im­probable because the Lib Dems are unlikely to hold the balance of power on their own. More importantly, there are arguments of principle and party advantage. Labour advocates of retaining the first-past-the-post electoral system are implacably opposed to any deal on electoral reform with Paddy Ashdown for obvious rea­sons.

There are also those who argue that the Liberal Democrats, particularly after their party conference last year, are an explicitly pro-free-market anti-trade union party, radically at odds with Labour’s own pro­gramme even after the changes of the past four years, and are thus unsuitable coalition partners. And then there are many who object on principle to the building of coalitions behind closed doors. Add the argument that there would be a very real danger of Labour split­ting over the prospect of coalition, and the case against is strong.

But it is not so formidable as to rule out coalition in all circumstances or on all terms. A centre-left coali­tion is preferable to a centre-right one, if that is the choice. The Labour leadership should not tie its hands during the coming campaign by saying that it would never consider forming a government with anyone else.

The relationship between the British Labour Party and the Soviet Union is a fascinating subject. 

The diplomatic reports from the Soviet embassy in Lon­don on meetings with Labour politicians during the eighties, unearthed by Tim Sebastian, are without a doubt a legitimate, if unreliable, source for researchers. 

But they are not news. There was nothing in the Sun­day Times “exclusive” last weekend on what the paper’s promotions department called “Kinnock’s Kremlin con­nection” which told anyone anything not already wide­ly known. The opinions of Denis Healey and Michael Foot on the arms race and the dangers of Reaganism were expressed forcefully in speeches and articles throughout the early eighties. That Neil Kinnock was critical of Arthur Scargill’s leadership of the 1984-85 miners’ strike can surprise no one who sat through Mr Kinnock’s speech at the 1985 Labour Party conference. The Labour National Executive Committee’s arguments over the declaration of martial law in Poland in 1981 were widely reported at the time.One could go on.

It could be that the Sunday Times‘s decision to splash Mr Sebastian’s report was simply a matter of misjudgment on the part of Andrew Neil, its editor. But such an explanation is too charitable to Mr Neil and his paper. The “Kremlin connection” story is nothing more or less than a traditional red-scare smear, an attempt, in the run-up to an election, to encourage voters to speculate that maybe there was something in the idea of Labour being part of a giant Soviet conspiracy to take over the world.

One expects this sort of garbage from the Sun, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express. They have always been lower than vermin. But the Sunday Times used to have a reputation as a serious paper. Mr Neil severely damaged that reputation with his handling of the Gibraltar shootings. Now he should hang his head in shame.

Bryan Gould is a busy man. On top of a massive brief as Labour’s front-bench environment spokesman, which covers everything from standard spending as­sessments to global warming, he is due to play a major role in Labour’s election campaign, just as he did in 1987.

When Neil Kinnock is out of London, John Cunningham, the party’s campaigns co-ordinator, will take the chair for Labour’s morning cam­paign press conferences. And when Cunningham is away – as he often will be, not least because his own constituency, Copeland, is anything but safe – Gould will be master of ceremonies.

He also has particular responsibility for the campaign in London, where Labour could win or lose the election and where the reputation of Labour councils is likely to be a major factor. At present, though, there is no doubt what is most on his mind: making sure that Labour wins the campaign battle on local government taxation.

“The poll tax is certain to be a dominant elec­tion issue whether the election is on April 9 or May 7,” he says. “I think it has got to be one of those two dates now. If it’s April 9, the election will take place when the bills have just arrived. If it’s May 7, the campaign will start the week the bills go out.

“The question is whether we can repeat our success so far in equating poll tax with the Tory Government. Michael Heseltine will be doing all he can to blame Labour local authorities for high poll tax bills. On everyone’s bill there will be a figure for ‘other adjustments’, which is really a euphemism for non-collection costs, and he will say: ‘That’s what’s pushed up your bill.’

“So we’re working very hard right now and through to the election to explain that these are problems intrinsic to the poll tax. They are not the fault of any local authority, Labour or otherwise. Even the Prime Minister described the poll tax as ‘virtually uncollectable’. We’re going to dump it on the Tories’ doorstep and say: ‘That’s where responsibility lies’.”

In line with this, Labour has done its best in the past fortnight to emphasise the extent of the chaos created by the poll tax. Last week, David Blunkett, the party’s local government spokesman, released figures showing that more than 10,500,000 summonses for poll tax debt had been issued. Both he and Gould have repeatedly blamed government incompetence for the recent breakdown in poll-tax non-payment prosecutions caused by the refusal of several magistrates’ courts to refuse to accept computerised records as valid evidence.

So far, the Labour poll tax assault seems to be working, although it is a moot point what happens if the Tories are panicked into using the budget on March 10 to reduce bills, as they did last year.

There is certainly less mileage for Labour in the council tax, the Government’s replacement for the poll tax from spring 1993. A banded property tax, it is not so radically different from Labour’s own proposed “fair rates” system. Indeed, there has been much speculation that a Labour government might find it useful to adapt the council tax to its own purposes.

Gould says that Labour has considered this option but has now rejected it. “One thing we’ve always been clear about is that we are detennined to get rid of the poll tax as early as possible  – which now means, unfortunately, April 1 1993. When we get to office we will pursue whatever course takes us most directly to a position on that date when poll tax ends and the fair rates system begins. Now, we did concede last year, because it made sense and it was reassuring to local government, that, if it had emerged that the council tax preparations offered the quickest way; to get rid of the poll tax and pick up on our fair: rates proposals, we would not be dog in the manger on political or ideological grounds and; say: ‘No, it’s a Tory idea and we’ll have nothing to do with it.’

“But that was only ever a possibility if preparations for the council tax were acceptable to us, if the valuation was a proper valuation and not a Mickey Mouse operation. In the event, the coun­cil tax preparations are a lot of rubbish and virtually unusable by us. In almost any conceivable circumstances we will be legislating to pick up the 1973 rates valuations which were in opera­tion until 1990, not because it’s ideal but because it’s the quickest way.”

In anticipation of Tory attacks on the profliga­cy of Labour councils, the Labour leadership has pulled out all the stops to dissuade Labour local authorities from going on a spending spree in the expectation of a Labour government, as many did in the run-up to 1987. The implicit message is that Labour will not bail out anyone who gets into trouble under the existing Tory rules.

“A lot of people got their fingers burnt last time,” says Gould. “Our message now is that councils should frame budgets and take other de­cisions on the basis of known facts and not future hopes and expectations. One can’t stop people from hoping, but no prudent and sensible author­ity will budget other than on the assumption that the current regime will apply during the next financial year. We’re not saying that with a Labour government there would not be some relaxation of rules on spending, but that’s a sepa­rate issue.”

The main areas for relaxation are the ending of the “ring-fencing” of receipts from council house sales, which earmarks them for repayment of borrowing, and the abolition of central govern­ment “capping” of local government taxation (al­though not until 1993).

“On the capital side, there’s a total of between £6,000 million and £8,000 million in capital re­ceipts and we think it’s crazy that this should be tied up when it’s desperately needed, especially for house-building,” says Gould. “We’ll progres­sively relax those constraints, although not overnight. The construction industry resources just aren’t there to use it all.

“On the revenue side, we can promise nothing for the next year. In future years, we’re absolute­ly clear: no capping. We’re certainly looking to local authorities being responsible when setting fair rates bills, but it will be their judgment as to what they think is a proper programme to put before the electors. Annual elections will subject their judgment to the judgment of the electors. In terms of grant, we’re not promising more tax­payers’ money, but we are promising a better and fairer distribution.”

Tb ensure that councils provide “value for mon­ey”, Labour plans to introduce a “Quality Com­mission” to oversee standards of services, with powers to send in its own management to take over and improve a poor service or to compel the council to put it out to tender. That, says Gould, is the only area where Labour will retain the compulsory element in competitive tendering: in all other cases, councils which want to put ser­vices out to tender will be free to do so but will not have to.

That existing councils spend and do is only part of the election problem, however. The Tories have also begun to attack on grounds of cost Labour’s plans for regional government in England. Inside the Labour Party, the scheme has been widely criticised as nothing more than a sop to get northern English MPs to vote for Scottish devolution. Many commentators believe that the commitment to regional government will be qui­etly forgotten as soon as a Scottish parliament is up and running.

Gould insists that regional government will not be ditched. “The objective will be to lead, within the lifetime of a first Labour government, to legislation which will provide for regional gov­ernment,” he says. “We can’t be absolutely certain that the legislative framework we will establish will be implemented by that first government.

“But, to give a flavour of the sort of timing we’d be thinking of, it has been suggested, and I wouldn’t dissent from it, that it might be possible to hold the first election for regional assemblies at the same time as the general election after next.” As for paying for regional government, he says it “would be financed by block grant”.

The Tories have attempted as well to raise the spectre of a free-spending “Greater London Council Mark Two” emerging from Labour’s plans for an all-London authority. Gould is keen to emphasise that it won’t be like that at all. “It will have no powers to intervene in what the bor­oughs do now,” he says. “What we need is a strategic authority which does what is not being done at present and does in a democratically ac­countable way what these numberless quangos now do.” Land-use, economic and environmental planning, emergency services and transport would come under the new body, but not housing.

If local government is already a focus for the election campaign, the same cannot be said for Gould’s other responsibilities as environment spokesman: carbon dioxide emissions and cli­mate change, destruction of the ozone layer, chemical waste, nuclear reprocessing and so on.

With the economy deep in recession and the Green Party at around 2 per cent in the opinion polls, the received wisdom is that there are fewer votes in green issues than there were three years ago.

Nevertheless, they remain important, says Gould, and, especially in the south-east and among younger voters, they could affect the elec­tion result. “One of the reasons that they have gone off the boil is that, while the Tories have lost interest, we have established a good compre­hensive position. While I wouldn’t say that the environment campaigners have given up press­ing us, they feel they’ve made their number with us. Our job now is to bring these issues back to the fore.” With the profile of environmental poli­tics due to be given a much-needed boost by the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, coming up in June, he could be making a shrewd judgment.

It is difficult not to have some sympathy with Neil Kinnock over last week’s upset about Labour’s taxa­tion plans. If any of the journalists eating at Luigi’s had bothered to read the string of policy documents produced in the past two-and-a-half years – and, how­ever dull the documents, that is part of their job – it would Have come as no surprise to any of them that Labour planned to introduce its tax increases on higher incomes gradually rather than in one fell swoop. As it was, Mr Kinnock’s off-the-cuff remarks came over to them as desperate back-tracking in the face of an un­favourable opinion poll. When members of the Labour Treasury team subsequently also showed only a hazy acquaintance with the small print, the journalists had a good story on their hands almost by accident.

Nevertheless, the episode did show that taxation re­mains a banana-skin for Labour, and that is cause for concern. Tax, along with public spending, is at the heart of the Tories’ election campaign against Labour.

The Tories believe that voters who tell pollsters that they would rather have public spending than tax cuts are not telling the truth and that Labour has failed to convince the electorate that it would not increase in­come tax for those on average as well as high incomes. The Tories are already getting up a head of campaign­ing steam on tax. If Labour starts to look evasive on its tax plans, the Tories will punish it mercilessly.

That means two things. First, the front bench needs to work out precisely how a Labour government will in­troduce its new taxes and everyone needs to stick to the same story. Secondly, and crucially, Labour needs to toll the whole truth about its tax plans as soon as possible.

It is not enough to state, in the words of the party’s election campaign pack, that “nobody earning leas than £21,000 annually – about £400 a week – will pay a penny extra in income tax or in national insurance contribu­tions”. Particularly in the south-east, it is not unusual to earn between £21,000 and £30,000, nor, because of housing and commuting costs, is such an income neces­sarily a guarantee of notable affluence. Voters in that income bracket have to be reassured that they are not going to be stung by Labour.

Of course, they are not going to be stung: Labour’s plans mean that a single person on £25,000 a year will pay less than £10 extra a week. Given that it will pay for improved child benefits and pensions, that should not be too difficult to sell except to the extraordinarily self­ish. But Labour has to make all this absolutely clear. Until it produces accurate and credible “What you will pay under Labour” charts, it will remain vulnerable to Tory attack.

“The next Labour government has no intention of legalising cannabis,” Roy Hattersley said last week in response to a suggestion from Tony Banks to the contrary. Mr Hattersley should reconsid­er. Cannabis is non-addictive and not harmful to health, and the law banning it is a joke – except to the 30,000-odd people every year who are prosecuted for possession: Even the Home Office reckons that 1,500,000 people have smoked it. Does Mr Hattersley really want to turn them off voting Labour at the election?

It is almost incredible that the Tories have decided to make a big issue of Labour’s defence policy in the election campaign. Almost, but not quite.

Although fear of the Soviet threat is no more, it has been replaced in the popular mind by a vague sense of unease at what the former Soviet republic will be like; and, in the wake of the Gulf war, many people are wor­ried by what nuclear-armed Third World dictators might do. The military industries, despite large-scale redundancies, in the past year, remain major; employ­ers and workers in those industries are worried about their future. There are probably also a few votes in pandering to nostalgia among older members of the electorate for the days when Britain really mattered in the world.

The Tories believe Labour to be vulnerable on de­fence, despite its policy U-turns in the past four years, on several grounds. First, they think that Labour can­not live down having so recently  advocated unilateral abandonment of British nuclear weapons. Then there is the detail of Labour’s current policy. The party leader­ship might now say that a Labour government would retain British nuclear weapons as long as other states kept theirs, but Labour would not build the fourth Tri­dent (unless it turns out cheaper to build than to can­cel) nor develop a British tactical air-to-surface nuclear missile. Labour conference, although disowned by the leadership, has consistently voted to reduce arms spending to the “average European level”.

So how should Labour respond to the Tory assault? It certainly should not trim any more. Further “minor ad­justments” in Labour’s position, particularly on the fourth Trident, would be a very bad idea. As Tribune has argued tune and again, there is now no significant nuclear threat to Britain that anyone can convincingly identify as a justification for “deterrence”: the “independent deterrent” serves no function apart from deluding the British public that Britannia still rules the waves. Three Tridents are three too many; a fourth might-stave off the collapse of VSEL in Barrow-in-Furness for four years, but in the long run far more jobs would be saved, and still more created, if the money earmarked by the present government for the fourth Trident submarine were diverted at once into funding a comprehensive arms industry conversion programme. The same goes for the European Fighter Aircraft and several other large-scale military spending projects.

In the Labour Party’s current mood, however, such arguments are unlikely to dissuade the leadership from moving still closer to the Government on defence. What might dissuade it are electoral considerations. The par­ty’s shifts on defence policy since 1987 have been moti­vated by the belief that affluent working-class voters were particularly turned off by namby-pamby, middle-class nuclear pacifism. Now those voters are back on board – but Labour has lost a great deal of credibility among those who were broadly in favour of nuclear pacifism. So far, most have stuck to Labour but if the leadership goes any further, it risks losing even their grudging support. Party strategists should remind themselves just how big CND was in the mid-eighties – and remember that the explicitly anti-nuclear Greens took 15 per cent of the vote in the 1989 European elec­tions. Of course, times have changed, and defence poli­cy is unlikely to be the sole determining factor in even the most ardent CNDer’s choice at the general election. 

   But with the polls as tight as they are, for Labour to throw away the (already wavering) nuclear pacifist vote could be to throw away the chance of office.

It is by no means guaranteed, but it is increasingly likely that within six months Britain will have a Labour Prime Minister, if not a majority Labour gov­ernment. The focus of British politics has shifted from Europe, on which .the Tories, however dismal their ac­tual performance, had a significant advantage over Labour simply by dint of being in office. From now un­til the election, Labour should be able to get the upper hand by focusing attention on the domestic issues that touch everyone’s everday life: the recession, the health service, the housing crisis, the appalling state of the economic infrastructure and so on.

It is possible that Labour will fail to turn all this to its advantage. Accidents and the possible effects of Tory accusations about Labour’s tax plans apart, a com­manding opinion poll lead could be undermined by a giveaway budget in March. Nevertheless, it is not un­reasonable to ask again what has seemed for most of the past decade a daft question: What will the next Labour government be like?

A minority Labour government would put together a Queen’s Speech largely composed of measures with which the Liberal Democrats and nationalists had little argument and challenge them to vote against it. If they didn’t, Labour would spend a few months doing all it could to give the impression of being a new broom then, as in 1974, go to the country again, perhaps on a quite different manifesto. (Here, the bets must be on adop­tion of electoral reform.)

A government with a small Commons majority would be only slightly different. Given the dire state of the economy and the tiny amount of room any government now has for macroeconomic manoeuvre, the best any­one can expect from a Labour government without a large majority is small but significant changes and clear signals of radical energy and intent. Socialism, in any commonly understood sense of the word, is not on the agenda for some time yet, if at all.

But a start can be made on repairing some of the damage done to our economy, our society and our poli­tics by 13 years of Tory misrule. Labour can take Britain into the European social democratic main­stream. If Labour manages to increase spending on pensions, child benefits, education, health and public transport, sets up its new industrial relations frame­work and makes a vigorous start on implementing its ambitious plans for democratic reform, it will earn it­self the respect of the British people and a thumping election victory when it goes to the country again. If it dithers, it will fail, with consequences almost too horri­ble to contemplate.

Last week, a Yorkshire policeman shot dead Ian Bennett, a drunk wielding an ornamental gun who had just had a blazing row with his girlfriend. The killing has provoked much argument about whether replica guns should be banned, but that is not the most important question it should raise. The police made only a cursory attempt to talk Bennett into surrender­ing and the warning given him before he was shot was wholly inadequate. The police should use firearms only as a last resort in exceptional circumstances. In this case, they fired first and made their excuses later. Guidelines for police use of guns need to be tightened up at once.

With few exceptions, the democratic left in the west has responded to Mikhail Gorbachev’s de­parture from the Kremlin with praise for his record in office.

Much of it is understandable. Gorbachev presided over a period of extraordinary, and for the most part welcome, change, both domestically and in Soviet rela­tions with the rest of the world. When he gained the up­per hand in the political apparatus, tension between the super-powers was at its height, east-central Eu­rope was under Soviet domination and war raged be­tween Soviet occupying forces and Mujahedin guerril­las in Afghanistan; at home, the regime was one of the most oppressive in the world. Today, the cold war is over and the Soviet Union, having given up east-cen­tral Europe, has ceased to exist. Most of the former satellite states are now functioning democracies and several of the former republics of the Soviet Union seem to be on the way to joining them. Despite the im­mense challenges ahead for the post-communist world, all this is cause for the democratic left to be pleased.

Yet, although much was Gorbachev’s responsibility, almost none of it was what he intended. The changes associated with his name were mostly by-products of an attempt to modernise and revitalise the stagnant Soviet system without fundamentally changing it. From any point of view, the attempt failed.

When Gorbachev and his team of ambitious tech­nocrats came to power (he was never elected by popu­lar vote), the only part of the Soviet economy operating at anything like contemporary western levels of tech­nology and quality was the military sector; and the mil­itary sector was an unbearable burden for the rest of the economy. Economic growth had slowed almost to a standstill. The Soviet workforce was apathetic and unproductive, the ruling bureaucracy corrupt and immobile.

Gorbachev’s “modernising” reforms merely exacer­bated the crisis. The disengagement from the cold war and the arms race, culminating in the withdrawal from east-central Europe, won Gorbachev many friends in the west; but it happened too late (and latterly too fast) to benefit the domestic economy, in the process losing Gorbachev the support of the military-industrial com­plex.

Meanwhile, the succession of half-baked plans for introducing market forces to the creaking mechanisms of production and distribution foundered against bureau­cratic antipathy and the growing resistance of the working class. By the end of the eighties, the economy was in tatters.

Cultural liberalisation and the policy of “openness” – initially at least intended as little more than part of an anti-corruption campaign – won the support of the in­telligentsia for a while but also unleashed demands for national self-determination and democracy which inexorably undermined the very foundations of the Soviet political system. Slowly but surely, Gorbachev’s popu­larity ebbed away as the crisis intensified. Last Au­gust’s coup and its bizarre collapse left Gorbachev with just one card to play: his status as world statesman. Boris Yeltsin and the republican leaders soon found they could trump it (although it remains an open ques­tion whether they will make it even more of a pig’s ear).

Gorbachev’s is a heroic record, perhaps, but it is a heroic record of failure. Western left-wing politicians would be advised not to adopt him as a role model.

John Edmonds is not pleased that the British gov­ernment opted out of the so­cial provisions agreed by the other 11 European Community govern­ments at the Maastricht summit last month. But, he says, it all could have been much worse.

“I went to Brussels the Friday before Maastricht and talked to people in the Socialist Group of the European Parliament to get their views of what was going on,” he says. “And their worry was not that Britain would effectively opt out. It was that an attempt would be made by Helmut Kohl to accommodate John Major, and the social chapter would be so diluted, par­ticularly in respect of majority vot­ing, that it would lose a lot of its force. That really was a nightmare scenario.”

Instead, the French government stood firm against a last-ditch at­tempt to water down the social chapter of the treaty to make it ac­ceptable to Britain. Major refused to budge and the 11 signed a proto­col committing them to develop common policies on workers’ rights which they will transcribe into na­tional law.

“I was delighted by the attitude of the French,” says Edmonds. “They played a blinder. Their atti­tude throughout was that if Britain didn’t want to come along with the social chapter it would have no involvement whatsoever. The French insisted that the proto­col signed by the 11 excluded Britain.”

The priority now, he says, is to get a Labour government which will sign up with the 11. Failing that, although “a lot of companies will be operating from 1993 onwards through standard policies applied to Britain as elsewhere”, the unions “will have to take ac­tion with individual companies to ensure that they match the rights they have to give elsewhere. There are plenty of options for us. In the long term, no one can see Britain standing aside from the social di­mension because more and more the social issues are going to be in­tegrated with economic decisions.”

Edmonds is scathing about the Tories’ attempts to justify the re­fusal to back the social chapter, ac­cusing Michael Howard, the Em­ployment Secretary, of lying in his claim that signing up would have cost Britain £5,000 million. “I don’t know where he got that figure from,” he says. “The first batch of measures are to do with consulta­tion and information rights. There are no costs at all.”

“The other point where the gov­ernment lied was when Major said that the social chapter would drive a coach and horses through the trade union legislation of the eighties. This is absolutely untrue. The social chapter is all about individual rights. It has nothing to do with trade union rights. In fact, freedom of association is specifical­ly excluded as an issue.”

So far, there has been no at­tempt to prescribe the precise in­stitutional framework within which workers’ rights to be con­sulted and informed will be exer­cised. But the 11 are likely to  agree that works councils be set up in larger companies, either on the German model, where works councils consist only of workers, or the French, involving workers and management. In either case, the trade unions have no formal role in representing workers at workplace level: works councils are elected by balloting workers directly, regardless of whether or not they are in a union.

The British trade unions are tra­ditionally hostile to works councils, but Edmonds’ union, the GMB, Britain’s second largest, believes that the German model is the way forward. “We’re going to get it any­way as a result of increasing EC integration,” he says. “The trade union movement can fight a rear­guard action against it, but that would be stupid.

“The German model of industri­al relations is much better than the British model. Here, in order to have proper rights at work you have to be a member of a trade union, your employer has to recog­nise the union, you have to get an agreement establishing your rights and then you have to have the industrial power to enforce them, Many workers in Britain don’t have all that. A system that pro­vides for rights in law of represen­tation and consultation is  much better.”

Not that Edmonds wants simply to copy the German system with no modifications: “No one is argu­ing that the German system is the perfect one. If the support given by the trade unions to elected repre­sentatives was rather more direct than in Germany I think that would be a good thing. One of the worries about the German system is that the German unions don’t have the constant commitment to recruiting people that we have in Britain. The level of unionisation is comparable but it is sustained in many industries by a series of campaigns. Normally when you start work in Britain you get a form pushed at you and you’re asked ‘Would you like to join the trade union?’ That isn’t so much the norm in Germany.”

On the other hand, “pay bar­gaining can come out of the work­place and be made regional or na­tional. That does seem to be an ad­vantage. The local representatives are not obsessed with pay bargain­ing and the local committee has more time to deal with and promo­tional opportunities, health and safety issues and so on.”

All this fits in neatly with anoth­er of Edmonds’ ideas which has been the cause of much controver­sy. He was the principle architect of Labour’s proposals for rational­ising the structure and timing of Britain’s pay bargaining by intro­ducing an annual National Eco­nomic Assessment.

Critics say that this is just an old-fashioned incomes policy in disguise, but Edmonds disagrees. “There is nothing in the proposals that would mean wage controls. The whole thing is about whether trade unions can co-ordinal* col­lective bargaining with employers. It’s an attempt to work out a new set of pay-bargaining arrange­ments so we’re less caught up in chasing each other’s tails.

“With the system contemplated by the Labour Party and strongly supported by the TUC, we’d have a well-informed debate involving the social partners in the run up to Xmas and a pay-bargaining period that lasted the first three months of the year. Most of the keynote settlements would be made at that time – everybody knows which ones they are: Ford, ICI, local government manual workers and so on – instead of playing this silly game when everyone ends up feel­ing very unhappy because every­one feels that someone, somewhere is getting a better deal. We’d try to co-ordinate the pay settlements in the light of the economic perfor­mance of the country. The govern­ment would find it much easier to manage the economy because the Chancellor would have a much bet­ter view of the level of pay settle­ments before the budget.”

It is clear that Edmonds does not see the TUC playing as large a part in the National Economic Assessment as it did in previous labour-union arrangements. “It would have a role in the co-ordi­nated pay bargaining, providing a forum for discussion and from time to time some leadership,” he says, but he is also keen to emphasise that “the TUC is going to have to change very rapidly” to provide more services to member unions, mainly on the research and legal front.

The reason for this attitude to­wards the TUC is simple: with the growth of giant super-unions in re­cent years as a result of mergers the TUC’s co-ordinating function has waned considerably. The GMB has been one of the most active in the merger field and is likely to re­main so in the nineties: Edmonds even raises the distant possibility of continent-wide union mergers, He will not, however, be drawn on the rumours that the next merger on the cards is with the Transport and General Workers’ Union – a joining of forces that would create a super-super-union.

“It is obviously the case that the TGWU and the GMB will work more closely together in the fu­ture,” he says. “We should do that because we overlap to such an ex­traordinary extent in our member­ship. There are all sorts of influ­ences pushing us in that direction. Neither of us is rich enough to waste resources. The services we could provide if we complemented each other would be a lot better. And if we have a continental sys­tem of works councils, it would force us to have a different, closer relationship at a local level.

“I think we ought to put a lot of effort into a closer working ar­rangement. If it leads to something else, so be it.”