Mr Callaghan's legacy
If Mr Callaghan had any worthwhile political life left, he would be fighting for it in Brighton next week. As it is, it will be his reputation he will chiefly be striving to preserve. Indeed, he will hope to improve it, for it stands pretty low. When he went to the TUC last year it stood at its modest Peak; but he ran away from an autumn election into the Winter of discontent and defeat in the spring. He can blame the unions for their winter strikes, but he had failed, and feared, to go to the country when he might have won and Chose instead to cling to weak and foolish office. He dithered into defeat. He fought a good campaign but his troo ps had no heart for the fight. He cannot expect to lead the Labour Party into another general election. The best he c, an hope to do is to patch up his tattered reputation by holding his party together and passing on to his successor an inheritance no worse than he received from Sir Harold. No great task that, it .might be thought. But it may prove beyond Mr Callaghan, and will do if Mr Benn and his friends have their way. If Mr Callaghan cannot pass on to his successor the same powers as party leader that he received, has exercised and still enjoys, the damage he will ,h,ave done will not be confined to one lost election, but will live on long after he has gone. He will have enfeebled the Party for a long time to come, possibly permanently, possibly even fatally. He knows this. He has belatedly woken up to the unPleasant fact that if he is not careful his legacy as leader Will be a hobbled leadership. He cries to his party that it sh, ould not lightly abandon the system which has obtained s,Inee the days of Keir Hardie. Ramsay MacDonald did not _Impair it; Attlee inherited it; Gaitskell received it intact; Wilson did not damage it; Callaghan enjoys it. But now it is at risk; and it is thanks to Mr Callaghan that the system is new attacked, for had he won the election none could have s i,liceessfully challenged his authority. Many in the Labour r arty have wanted to change the system for years. Now is their chance, when the system can be blamed. The system did not lose the election. Callaghan's cowardly miscalcula tion, and the unions, did that no system of leadership can remove from a Prime Minister the right to pick the wrong time to go to the country, or prevent trade union leaders from discrediting the Labour Party in the eyes of the electorate. But although it is unfair to blame the system for the defeat, it is clear enough that the system did not produce victory. Instead, it produced Mr Callaghan.
What Mr Benn wants is a system which would have produced Mr Benn. He and those who think with him want to change the system so that instead of Labour MPs alone picking the leader, the unions and the constituency parties should have a say. But they also want the power to decide the content of the party manifesto removed from the leader and handed over to the party's National Executive Committee, as custodian of party conference decisions. The NEC, like the conference, is in the hands of the unions and the constituency parties. Under Benn's 'reforms', the power is removed from MPs to choose their leader, and from the leader to choose his policy. Although he professes that the changes are democratic, Mr Benn must know that their effect would be to take away authority from Parliament and put it in the corporate hands of the unions and the activists in the local parties. The third 'reform' would bring MPs themselves to heel by making them seek reselection and thus subject them to the regular inquisition of activists.
The unions will be foolish if they go along with Mr Benn and rub Mr Callaghan's nose in the dirt for they could end up appointing the leader and writing the manifesto, if only in order to prevent the activists from doing so. This would be a terrible fate for the unions and Labour Party alike (and it would serve Mr Benn right if he became leader under the terms he now proposes). If such is to be Mr Callaghan's legacy, he will have served his party very ill indeed.
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