Politics
Kinnock's Cop Out Book
As we know, Mr Neil Kinnock has such a full diary that he cannot manage to appear at any of the current NUM rallies. There are unbreakable dates with Sand- wich Cooperative Society, the 77th anniversary dinner of the Amalgamated Society of Furniture Polishers (Leicester branch), receptions at the embassy of the People's Republic of Ruritania, all-day multi-racial rugby matches, and many more not-to-be missed appointments now being confirmed and invented. According to spokesmen, the Labour leadership is conducting what is now always called a 'damage limitation exercise', in which it 'distances itself from Mr Scargill.
Like many exercise regimes, this one seems rather questionable. If you think your politics need damage limitation, don't buy the Neil Kinnock Cop Out Book.
• Experts suggest that it only aggravates whatever problems you are already suffer- ing from. For Mr Kinnock, burdened with first generation middle-class guilt about
• not going down the pit and with being the Member for Islwyn, supports 'the minerS' with all that last drop of fibre and final ounce of breath that Mr Foot was always squeezing from his body in defence of socialism. According to Mr Kinnock, using the Shirley Williams trick of trying to sound tougher by swearing, the miners 'have a damn good case, and they must win'. He said this loudest when it rather; looked as if they might win, and when he had to make speeches at the TUC and the Labour Party conferences, but he is still saying it, if rather more sotto voce, when he knows they won't. And he has not merely said that we should have a jolly large coal industry with lots of jobs: he has endorsed the NUM's demand that no pits should be closed on economic grounds. It therefore seems unsatisfactory that he does not want to go and speak in support of the damn good case — he must know that the alternative to Mr Scargill's victory is acceptance of the Coal Board's offer, which he claims is unacceptable.
Make all these admittedly very obvious points to a Kinnockian, and he will fix you with a look of pitying scorn. Of course Neil must support the miners . . . he does support the miners; but he wants Scargill destroyed. Scargill is now clearly losing, but until he has all but lost, do not condemn him, just steer clear of him. . . . 'It is a rule in politics,' one shadow spokesman said this week, 'never to kick a man until he is down.' In short, the strategy of all the mini-Machiavels who have got Labour where it is today is to sit quiet and let the miners, whom they 'support', work out their own salvation.
This is obviously a terrifically worldly and sly way to carry on, but as with many intensely pragmatic, feet-on-the-ground political exercises, one wonders whether it really is all that brilliant. After all, it has been inevitable from the beginning that the Labour leadership would be called treacherous by the Left unless, which it could never have done, it underwrote everything that Mr Scargill did and said. In recent weeks, the Left, having more or less spared Mr Kinnock during the party con- ference, has been working up the myth of betrayal. It is difficult to read the mind behind Mr Scargill's jabbering mouth, and so to know whether he yet realises that he will not win, but when he does realise, he will feel free to press on and lose poetic- ally, confident that he can blame it all on the Judases.
Mr Kinnock has therefore done nothing to save himself from the ridicule and contempt of the people from whom he originally arose. But he has also done nothing to appeal to the larger set of people who tend to believe that a man ridiculed and condemned from such a quarter cannot be all bad. Judas he has not been; Pilate, perhaps, he has. Pilate's position, of course, was very understand- able. He behaved just as a civilised, cowardly Foreign Office man would in a tight spot; definitely a man to condemn violence from whatever source it comes, Pilate. Perhaps by permitting the Crucifi- xion, 'regrettable' though it obviously was, Pilate succeeded in 'defusing the situation'. Nevertheless, the judgment of posterity continues to be that he did not do terribly well. In this distinctly lesser matter, it will be the same with Mr Kinnock. He could have led a party and a trade union move- ment whose most important members would have agreed not to countenance Scargillism: instead he washed his hands.
'No,' says the Kinnockian, 'you must understand what an emotional issue the miners are in the Labour Party. Labour must always support a miners' strike, never do anything to undermine it. . . . You'd be surprised how strongly my very moderate and reasonable constituency association feels on this point. You just have to let the tide of feeling run, and then try to clean up afterwards.' All of which is a way of saying that Labour's unity and morale depend on believing what is not true. It is bad for Scargill to win, but good for people to go around thinking that the fight which his union is fighting is a good fight; bad for industrial relations to be in the hands of militant ideologues, but good to pretend that it is only through the historic struggle of the vanguard of the working class that workers' emancipation can come; true that British coal is expensive and that ti htly-
knit communities are at one another's throats, also true that miners are lionhearts, men capable of killing ten Germans with their bare hands. In short, the Right offers a trade-off to the Left — let us win all the battles, and you can have all the good songs. If the Left ever was content with this offer, it certainly is not today. When Mr Scargill does appear 011 the same platform with Mr Kinnock on 30 November (for Mr Kinnock's 'too busy' excuse cannot be applied to rallies organ- ised not by the NUM but by the Labour Party), he will surely make this clear. It has been one of Mr Kinnock's themes that Labour has to modernise itself, that it has to appeal not only to the man on the dole but to the man with a mortgage, not only to a manual labourer, but to a computer expert; it has to redefine its idea of class to accomodate social trends. The miners' strike has been conducted by the NUM as the most old-fashioned of class wars, so that when the generals find that a third of their soldiers deserts them, they either heap abuse upon them or pretend that they do not exist. When Mr John Cunningham the elder, the NUM branch secretary at Ellington colliery, returned to work, his son, John Cunningham the younger, could only bring himself to refer to his father as 'him' or 'the former secretary'. It was as if the elder Cunning- ham was no longer really there. But as the strikers treat those who disagree with them with a 'complete ignor- al', the disagreers are busy. What might be called the Tebbit theory of union members is being borne out by events. This year there have been two abortive dock strikes, soon, I hopefully guess, one abortive coal strike, and the steady refusal of most workers to express anything resembling solidarity with Mr Scargill; and now We have a muddle at Austin Rover in which union practices are challenged by mem- bers, and, in the courts, by the companY. Not only the Electricians, but the En: gineers and even Mr Clive Jenkins s ASTMS seem to think that they could use the money which the Government has been setting aside for ballots. Trade union members are not just suspicious of Mr Scargill as being a bit extreme: they are coming to reject all his premises, let alone his conclusions. In doing so, they have no encouragement whatever from Labour. lo relying on the law and the ballot, they have acted alone without their normal leaders. They must by now have found it an exhilarating, if dangerous, experience. Now that they know that they are not beholden to the people who claim to lead them, they despise those people's claims more and more. The men who cross the picket lines are just the sort of men that Mr Kinnock needs for his new Labour Party, but they are leaving Labour, and he does not dare to try to stop them.
Charles Moore
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