POLITICS
Mr Benn's tragedy: a second performance is announced
NOEL MALCOLM
Hegel remarks somewhere', as Marx remarks somewhere else, 'that all important historical characters and events occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.' This is one of the Left's favourite quotations. They like it so much because it seems to apply only to their opponents, feebly imitating the past as they slither towards the trap-door of history. True progress, on the other hand, is inexorable and cumulative — at least, that's how it's meant to be.
Looking back to Mr Benn's last cam- paign, when he contested the deputy lead- ership of the party with Mr Healey in 1981, it comes as something of a shock to recall just how strongly history seemed to be on Mr Benn's side. Never mind that he lost the battle (by a margin of less than one per cent). The important thing was that he was obviously winning the war. He had cap- tured more than 80 per cent of the votes in the constituency section of the new elector- al college, and Mr Healey owed his success mainly to a large majority among the party's MPs. With mandatory reselection looming ahead for all Labour MPs, and with defections to the newly formed SDP still mounting, it seemed only a matter of time before the Parliamentary Labour Party was pumped full of Bennites by the constituency activists.
At each subsequent general election the Tories have issued their usual warnings about the coming influx of 'hard Left' Labour MPs. But no sooner does one batch of new Members enter the spectrum at the far Left end, than the rest of the MPs seem to shift a few bands further to the Right in order to make room for them. Last summer we were promised the most radical new entrants to the House of Commons since Guy Fawkes; yet Mr Benn cannot be sure now of more than 40 supporters on the Labour benches. The Right wing of the party has fallen, it is true, from roughly 90 members to roughly 75; but the biggest change has been the growth of the soggy centre, the habitat of old Tribunites and new-style Gouldish Kin- nockites. There seems to be some law of nature which decrees that all hard Left movements in the Labout Party soften as they grow older — and only Mr Benn, in Harold Wilson's perceptive phrase, imma- tures with age. Oh my Tribune group, or even my Labour Co-ordinating Commit- tee, of long ago!
If a symbol of these changes is needed, it can be found in the primly respectable figure of Mr Michael Meacher, shadow Employment Secretary and former Benn- ite firebrand. 'It was my own experience', he now says, 'of that 1981 campaign, which I supported, seeing how readily radicalism can degenerate into factionalism, that makes me oppose another such campaign now.' Judged by his previous standards, these are weasel words: if contesting elect- ions is always to be dismissed as factional- ism, then radicalism might as well shut up shop altogether. In the demonology of the Left, Mr Meacher has been viewed as a Judas ever since he supported Mr Kin- nock's attack on the NUM at the 1985 Labour Conference. But he cannot be dismissed simply in personal terms: he is a representative figure, standing for the en- tire meaching tendency of the softening Left. (To meach is, according to the OED, a variant spelling of the verb to `miche', which means to play truant, to shrink, skulk or retire from view.) The psychology of meaching is complex, and its causes are many. The responsibili- ties of office play their part — whether shadow office, as in Mr Meacher's case, or real power, as in the case of Mr Living- stone, disowned by the hard Left for his failure in the end to set an illegal rate. Parliament also works its spell, weaving a net of protocol and clubland camaraderie from which only the most stout-hearted (i.e. Mr Dennis Skinner) can break free.
But the main theoretical justification of meaching is the one voiced by the Meacher himself: 'divisiveness' is to be avoided at all costs, and pragmatism is trumps. This too was the message of the arrogant and illiterate statement issued by Messrs Kin- nock and Hattersley when they learned of the Benn-Heffer challenge to their lead- ership. 'This decision', they announced, 'is only about division and distraction.' Neil Kinnock is, after all, the biggest meacher of them all, and his leading argument, ever since he first parted company with the hard Left in 1979, has been the need for pragmatism and party unity. In 1980 he expressed his opposition to Bennism as follows: 'The Labour Party faces a choice between . . . socialism by prescription and socialism by plod. The former is all say and no do, all plans and no power.' One of his favourite catch-phrases is 'plod and slog': it refers to gradualism in the pursuit of political power.
What is deceptive about this way of putting things is that it assumes the dis- agreement between Mr Kinnock and Mr Benn is only over the choice of routes to socialism, and not over the nature of the final destination itself. 'Socialism' is of course a word which thrives on vagueness, and one doubts whether many self- proclaimed socialists could in fact give a simple coherent definition of it. (Mr Hat- tersley would certainly fail this test, if his book on the subject is anything to go by.) Real socialism is not just social egalitarian- ism or welfarism; it offers a complete socio-economic system to replace capital- ism and remove workers from the ini- quities of the 'wage relationship'. That is what Mr Heffer, bless him, believes in and it is not what Messrs Kinnock, Hattersley and Gould are offering, no matter how ingeniously they fiddle about with workers' share ownership schemes.
There is, in other words, a real point at issue in this divisive and distracting cam- paign and since Mr Kinnock is going to win it, he might as well win it properly by tackling the ishoo head-on. If you consider the contest only at the level of pragmatic advantage and disadvantages, it does in- deed seem like a disastrous diversion: it cuts across the path of the party's policy review, and it appears to weaken Labour's image just at the moment when disillu- sioned SDP members might be returning.
But if you are prepared to take the contest seriously, at the level of fun- damental ideology, then the difficulties will turn into opportunities. If policies are to be reviewed, the pressures of this campaign can ensure that they are realigned in a decisively anti-Bennite direction. Clause Four must go: the goal of common own- ership which it proclaims is wildly unrealis- tic, and the gradual discovery of just how unrealistic it is has been the cause of much demoralised meaching over the years. A real ideological spring-cleaning might be just the thing to attract some SDP prodigal sons back into the true church. They claim to have left Labour only when it lurched towards Bennism. When a 17th-century Protestant (was it Sir Henry Wotton?) was asked by a Jesuit, 'Where was your church before Luther?' he gave the memorable reply: 'Where was your face before you washed it?'
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