POLITICS
The lions of Labour's Left lie down with the lambs of the Right
FERDINAND MOUNT
Not for the first time, one can only say that politics is a peculiar business. There we all were, sitting comfortably, waiting for the Labour Party to begin its usual post-election blood-letting, a process nor- mally reminiscent of one of the more action-packed chapters of the Second Book of Kings, full of smitings and aveng- ings and the houses of the sodomites being broken down and those who did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord getting their come-uppance. Instead, we have a re-run of Isaiah xi with the Meacher lying down with the Kaufman, and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together (the last-named believed to be the first refer- ence in the scriptures to Mr Roy Hatters- ley). They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain, Mr Kinnock told the Parliamentary Labour Party last week, or words to that effect.
It was a breathtaking speech. The most startling, nay, barefaced of all its assertions was that the Labour Party stood for `self- interest', but this was 'not the same as selfishness or self-indulgence'. Indeed, it is not the same, but every Labour Party activist from Keir Hardie onwards has, unambiguously and obsessively, claimed that it was. Labour the party of self- interest, Clem Attlee and Adam Smith soul brothers — the number of graves being turned in must be creating a severe subsidence hazard in North London cemeteries. Yet Mr Kinnock's remarks were apparently listened to by Labour MPs with unruffled good humour, much as though he had said it was not much of a summer and he was fed up to the teeth with British Telecom.
'I hope,' Mr Kinnock declared, 'there will not be continued attacks on me and fellow members of the Shadow Cabinet when we carry out the reappraisal and we will not be accused of being guilty of bad faith, or sell-out or treachery.' But these have been the principal occupations of the Left from time• immemorial. After Labour has just lost an election, let alone three in a row, it is customary for the bitching to go on for years. After the debacle of 1959, for example, I bet the 17-year-old Neil Kin- nock took his pleasure like every red- blooded young socialist and denounced Gaitskell's betrayal and chuckled at those endless Vicky cartoons: Gaitskell as a doorstep pollster asking a bewildered housewife, 'Which party would you like Labour to resemble?' and Gaitskell as the manager of 'Labour Stores' with notices in the window saying 'Gigantic Sell-Out' and `Socialist Principles Practically Given Away'. And young Neil must have been thrilled to hear his hero Michael Foot at Blackpool that year. It was one of Foot's greatest rants. How they cheered as he called on Gaitskell to stop imitating the Tories and to seek victory by deoun- cing this 'evil and disgraceful and rotten society'.
Well, society, not to mention the Tories, must surely be twice as rotten now. But now good socialists, despairing of beating them, are to join them. Mr Pat Wall, once of Militant and now MP for Bradford South, says Labour must appeal to the 51 per cent who are better off than the average. Mr Chris Mullin, who was once thought too left-wing to edit Tribune and is now MP for Sunderland South, makes a fulsome declaration of loyalty to his leader, and raises his hands in a gesture of mock surrender.
Why can Mr Kinnock embark on what he himself advertises as a major reapprais- al of the best-loved parts of Labour policy without evoking one tenth of the fury which nearly destroyed Gaitskell? Mr Kin- nock's election campaign was acclaimed within the party; but so, at the time, was Gaitskell's. I am not even sure that the decline in the old working class and other much noticed social trends provide a full answer. Most of these were visible back in 1959. Public hostility to nationalisation was already intense. Mark Abrams's opinion survey for the Gaitskellite organ Socialist Commentary in July 1960 reported that the image of the Labour Party seemed 'in- creasingly obsolete' to both its friends and enemies.
The real difference between then and now, I think, is that the Left is in control in the Parliamentary Labour Party. The short way to silence the squabbles in the party is always to have a leader who draws his main support from the Left and thus will give his own placemen a decent share of the places. Remember those Freds who kept on crop- ping up on Harold Wilson's front bench to the mystification of outsiders who could discern no merit in them.
Mr Kinnock's shadow team is a nicely calculated mixture of the Bryans and Jacks — neat, sortable, articulate types — and the Kevins and Allans, verbose and erratic characters but with unimpeachable prove- nance. As long as Mr Kinnock can offer advancement to left-wing MPs who, else- where in the world, would not stand a chance of being promoted beyond Assis- tant Lesbian Co-ordination Officer, he can reappraise to his heart's content. Power shifts first, policy shifts later.
And after all, to the elastic political mind, what do these policy shifts really amount to? The day after Gaitskell's appeal for the rewriting of Clause Four (`Do we want to nationalise everything every little pub and garage?'), Nye Bevan made a wonderful speech composed in equal parts of wind and glue, containing the immortal words: 'Therefore I agree with Barbara, I agree with Hugh and I agree with myself.' He too did not wish to nationalise every corner shop, or, as Ian Mikardo put it in that lordly Edwardian style of his, 'every bootblack'. But he thought Gaitskell had bogged it, and if he himself could cash in on the party's affec- tion for an old shibboleth to seize the leadership, he would.
At the end of it all, Gaitskell was not replaced by Bevan and Clause Four was not replaced by the 'New Testament'; in fact, the new statement would not have helped Labour's election chances much, since, despite its watering-down intentions, it was this and not the party's constitution that contained the off-putting commitment to take 'power over the commanding heights of the economy'. Gaitskell himself came to wish he had never raised the question; many other right-wingers thought that it was a mistake, in Attlee's words, to attack the Thirty-Nine Articles. Yet the shibboleth was and is a millstone. Gaitskell's only mistake was to imagine that the Left would let him get away with dropping it.
Mr Kinnock is a much freer agent and he knows it. Only de Gaulle could ditch Algerie francaise. Only a left-wing Labour leader could ditch Clause Four, or, more precisely, Paragraph Four of Clause Four. I can see him feeling his way instead towards an upgrading of Paragraph Five, which contains no embarrassing mention of `common ownership' and calls on the party `generally to promote the Political, Social and Economic Emancipation of the Peo- ple'. True, Mrs Thatcher got there first, but then, as R. A. Butler showed after 1945, plagiarism is often the art of politics.
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