Tribune leader, 17 July 1992
The election of John Smith to the Labour leadership has been
so certain for so long that this weekend's special Labour conference will be
something of a non-event. After the initial outrageous behaviour of the union
bosses in bouncing Labour into an early election which only Mr Smith had a
hope of winning, the leadership and deputy leadership contests have been dull
in the extreme. Despite the best efforts of Bryan Gould to raise issues of
substance, there has been little intelligent discussion either of why Labour
lost on April 9 or of what its direction should be in the next four or five
years. Since it became obvious, a month or so ago, that Margaret Beckett was
clear favourite for the deputy leadership, observing the contest has been worse
than watching paint dry.
Mr Smith faces a daunting task as leader. Although since
April 9 Labour has seen little of the back-biting that characterised the
aftermath of the 1979 defeat, and despite the likely size of his majority on
Saturday, the party is deeply divided over the most important questions currently
facing it: Europe, electoral reform and its links with the trade unions. Having
expected to win on April 9, moreover, the party faces a severe crisis of
morale, worse even than after the 1983 debacle. Forget about the electoral
mountain that Mr Smith will have to climb if he is to become Prime Minister – first he has to act to bring the party together and give its worn-out,
disillusioned members a renewed sense of purpose.
He will not be able to do either if, when he dishes out
positions in the Shadow Cabinet next week, he is seen to reward his supporters
and punish the losers. Even though Mr Gould and Mr Prescott have proved unable
to win sufficient support among Labour Party members and affiliated trade unionists
to come close to winning on Saturday, they remain representatives of strong
currents of opinion in the party, particularly among activists, and their
records as front-bench spokesmen in recent years, on the environment and
transport respectively, should be enough to secure them places in the top rank
of the Labour leadership. At very least, they should keep their current jobs in
the reshuffle.
The Shadow Cabinet is only the first of many challenges that
Mr Smith must face, however, and it is by no means the most important. Once the
new front bench is in place, he and his colleagues will have to address the far
bigger problem of the party's woeful shortage of ideas and hick of confidence
about its raison d'etre.
In the nine years of Neil Kinnock's leadership, Labour
threw out a large amount of ideological baggage, much (but not all) of which
was undoubtedly outmoded. But, with the exception of Roy Hattersley's vague and
arid redefinition of the philosophical basis of social democracy, in all that
time Labour never came up with anything to replace the old baggage. Iconoclasm
and argument were discouraged in the interests of unity and marketing men
made all the key decisions.
Labour now desperately needs to think through its political
project – not its detailed policies or its core values, but what it wants to
achieve in the next 20 or 30 years. To do that it has to have at least two
years of open, wide-ranging discussion, in which heterodoxy, experimentation
and participation by people outside the narrow confines of the Labour leadership
are positively encouraged by the party at every level.
That does not mean opening up the party again to Leninist
parasites. But it does mean the creation of an atmosphere of tolerance and
pluralism. One of Mr Smith's first acts should be to declare that, for a little
while at least, he will play the role of gardener while a thousand flowers
bloom.
