POLITICS
A prospect more inviting than Labour's moral nullity
FE RDINAND MOUNT
As I entered the Royal Agricultural Hall, the Rasta poet, Benjamin Zepha- niah, was just finishing:
You can't judge my woman's heart By looking at her breasts.
Indeed not, and I hope nobody would think of trying at a Labour Party rally. We then had a delectable guitar interlude by John Williams, before Ben Elton, de- scribed as 'the doyen of alternative com- edy', bounded on to complain that `we've got four million unemployed and all the press goes on about is how large Fergie's bum is'. This is the nearest Labour Party's `Family Day' gets to being rude. By the standards of the Conservative Party's `Family Rally' at the Wembley Conference Centre the same afternoon, the occasion is positively raffine.
The bum joke count at Wembley is far higher, including the Irish lavatory seat joke, but not the joke about the IRA and the Pakistani curry told at earlier Con- servative rallies. At Wembley, you also have Bob Monkhouse telling the one about Neil Kinnock on honeymoon. Here in Islington, by contrast, we have Miss Glen- da Jackson (better known to younger viewers for her televison commercials for the Hanson Trust) telling us in that flat snarl that we are `celebrating the last four days of Thatcherism'. Once again, I cannot help pointing out to readers the severe shocks to sensibility that we commentators are forced to undergo, for relatively mod- est reward, in our professional capacity.
It is the vulgarity of the Conservative Party which repels thoughtful readers of the Spectator such as Mrs Susan Crosland, the civilised nature of die Labour Party which attracts others such as Mr Peter Jay. Sometimes these attributes are described in moralistic terms, as Tory greed versus Labour altruism. But the argument always has a strongly aesthetic flavour.
The chattering classes apparently remain solid for Labour, with only a few sliding off towards the Alliance, while Tory canvas- sers find a friendlier welcome on the council estates. It is the tightly-knit com- munities of NW1 which constitute Mr Kinnock's new heartland, the walkways of Clement Attlee House which shelter the floating voters.
That may help to explain why Labour's campaign, so universally acclaimed in the public prints, has, up to the last moment at least, made so few converts in the places where it really needed to recover from the disaster of 1983, most notably the Mid- lands, both West and East. For all its virtues, Labour's campaign has lacked a sense of working-class movement. This has been partly inevitable. The trade union leaders have had to be kept out of sight because of the bitter memories they evoke, and Labour councils have had to be rather selectively mentioned as examples of socialism in action. There is so much that cannot be said. And when things cannot be said, gentility creeps in.
Many viewers get the impression from the famous `Chariots of Fire' Labour elec- tion broadcast that Mr Kinnock must be frightfully good in bed, or at any rate think he is. This was because of the use of such well-known Barbara Cartland style euphemisms as 'strong' and 'gentle' words also much used in advertisements for Andrex. The sheer softness of the tissue of Labour's campaign does have a kind of blurring, devitalising effect.
As Mr Kinnock hoarsely thunders on to the ecstatic Islington workers by hand and brain in their long ethnic dresses, and the amateur clowns wander round the back of the hall spreading melancholy, my eye falls on a notice on the table in front of me. It says 'Arts for Labour — please throw streamers as balloons fall.' As I am looking for the streamers, my eye is caught by a clown on ten-foot stilts falling, rather heavily, up the steps leading to the podium. The stewards have `Sogat's back- ing Labour' on their T-shirts with a red rose curling across their bellies. These veterans of the Retreat from Wapping prove that they have lost none of their old skill when a Trotskyite heckler is picked up and ejected from the hall at the double.
Labour's new niceness is often skin- deep. To see Mr Kinnock last week at one of his rare London press conferences talk- ing about cuts in the NHS, flanked by Michael Meacher and Margaret Beckett, was to take a trip down memory lane, for was not Mr Meacher once described by Mr Kinnock as `Benn's vicar on earth'? And was not the last time I saw Mr Kinnock sitting next to Mrs Beckett that night of vitriol at Brighton, when she had just been turfed off the NEC and in her fury she tore him apart for not voting for Benn as Deputy Leader with the menacing words `Your turn will come'? Mrs Beckett suffers from the appalling disability of looking exactly like Princess Anne, so that when she laid into 'Judas' Kinnock (pieces of silver were thrown at him when he left the platform, though probably not as many as thirty), it looked more like HRH ticking off a spectator for standing too close to the water jump. So much is better forgotten, so many challenges better ducked for fear of what might be revealed. That is really the trouble. There is no sense of anyone bracing themselves or of anything much being attempted. There is a slackness and vagueness about Labour's policies for inflation and taxation which suggest not so much evasiveness as lack of serious preparation for power. On all sorts of topics, such as reform of the rating system and the timing of the removal of American nuclear weapons, Mr Kinnock had to improvise policy in the later stages of the campaign. The wool began to unravel.
Historically, a sense of effort has been crucial to the success of all radical parties. Mr Gladstone, speaking at the closing of the great North London Working Classes Industrial Exhibition in this very hall, said: It is not possible in a well organised society that any one class should make essential progress in any way except through its own exertions. Depend upon it that, under the favour of Almighty God, it is upon yourselves you must rely.' Well, you know who talks like that nowadays. Labour Party leaders have naturally been more inclined than Gladstone to stress the enabling role of government in helping the working classes to rise. Yet until recently there was mixed in with their collectivism a sturdy belief in self-help and self- improvement. In Mr Kinnock's Labour Party, that belief has lost its vigour and exists only in the perverted form of cam- paigns for this or that bundle of rights.
Nobody could say that Mrs Thatcher and the Tories fought a brilliant campaign. They started late, seemed bewildered by the fact that their prime enemy turned out to be Labour and not the Alliance: most of the time, they sounded a bit tired and stale. Even so, there still came across a feeling that they were offering people an oppor- tunity to 'make something of their lives', a phrase risible no doubt, but a prospect more inviting and flattering than the moral nullity of a return to Labour. The legend will no doubt grow that 'Neil Kinnock won the 1987 campaign'. If so, it was a victory that had its costs.
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