POLITICS
The Labour Party's new social contract with the 'loony' Left
ANDREW GIMSON
The longer the Tories hold office, the less useful the record of the last Labour government becomes to them. The 15 Budgets introduced by the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr Denis Healey, while the administration lurched from one finan- cial crisis to another, seem, despite the survival of their author, to belong to a remote era. Seven years is an even longer time than a week in politics. We have grown used to sounder money. The winter of discontent, which helped bring about the Labour defeat in 1979, has likewise lost most of its power to alarm the voter. The trade unions have become governable. Look what happened to Sogat and the NGA last week.
So a disposition to find more recent examples of Labour's unfitness for office undoubtedly exists. But it would be most unjust to the Left in local government to attribute their growing prominence mainly to this. They could not have hoped to fill the gap left by the eclipse of the trade unions if they had not, like some trade union leaders of old, been prepared to act with an irresponsibility amounting to an assault on civil society. In vain it used to be observed that the campaigns which certain union• leaders waged against the govern- ment of the day hurt their own members more than anyone else. It is as useless to protest at the behaviour of local councillors when they saddle their localities with enor- mous debts, or subvert the local police, thereby doing most harm to local people.
`We're very lucky to have him,' I heard a Tory MP remark at the Tory Conference in 1985, listening to a debate about law and order of which Mr Bernie Grant was, in absentia, the star. The Labour leader of Haringey council and prospective par- liamentary candidate for Tottenham (Labour majority over 9,000), had just made his notorious remarks about the bloody good hiding given to the police at the Broadwater Farm riot, in which PC Blakelock was murdered. If Mr Grant were an aberration, he might be dis- counted. Mr Kinnock's recent request to left-wing councillors to shut up until after the general election amounts to an admis- sion that he is not. He is, moreover, only one of a number of hard-Left candidates selected for Labour-held parliamentary seats in London. Others are Mildred Gor- don in Bow and Poplar, Paul Boateng in Brent South, Diane Abbott in Hackney North and Stoke Newington, and Deirdre Wood in Greenwich.
They represent only one faction within the Labour Party, it may be objected. But the consultative paper on local government reform in England and Wales which was submitted to the local government confer- ence in Leeds, having been approved by the NEC, offers the hard Left much of what it wants. In particular, it proposes giving locally elected police authorities `statutory responsibility in determining the policing policies, priorities and methods of their force'. It has been curious to hear the Labour Party denounce alleged political control of the Special Branch, apropos the raid on the BBC in Glasgow, when it is itself contemplating a far more extensive politicisation of the police. The local `democratisation' of the health service is also being considered. There are already far too many local councillors for local government to work well (1900 in London alone), but the creation of more is envis- aged.
It is a common complaint that politics, as a career, attracts a disproportionate num- ber of cranks, busybodies and fanatics. At a local level, the ability of such people to self-select themselves into power, after- wards claiming a 'democratic' mandate, could be ended if elections were conducted by lot. The supervision of local administra- tors would thereby become, for those unfortunate enough to be picked out of a hat, a disagreeable but obligatory form of public service.
If none of the parties is prepared to enact so radical a reform, it becomes all the more important to limit the scope of local government. Only in this way will the power of busybody and fanatic councillors be restrained. It is impractical to expect enough relatively normal people to give up their evenings to the task.
The Labour Party envisages a different approach. Not only will it abandon any attempt to control rates, abolish the sur- charge and disqualification of councillors who overspend, and consider how to com- pensate those who have been surcharged. It will also give local councils large addi- tional sums with which to create jobs.
On Wednesday of last week, for exam- ple, Mr John Prescott, Labour's shadow Employment Minister, went to Islington, to hear how it plans to create 4,167 jobs at a cost of £51 million. This is one of the eight London boroughs described by the Audit Commission, in its recent report, as notably ill-managed, compared to eight other boroughs facing problems of similar gravity. In the worst boroughs, officials are often unable, on political instructions, to introduce any reform which would upset one of the public sector trade unions. Far from existing to serve the community, as the theory of local democracy would sug- gest, councils have come to serve the interests of the providers of services.
Just as the previous Labour government formed a social contract with the trade unions, conferring on them fresh privileges and expecting them in return to limit wage demands, so a future Labour government would attempt to form a social contract with local government, conferring fresh privileges and grants of money on local councils and expecting them in return to create jobs. The new alliance is unlikely to be more successful than the old. Especially after the creative accountancy of the last few years, local government's appetite for funds is greater than any central govern- ment could satisfy. The party's over, Tony Crosland told the local councils a decade ago, but that is a message they will never voluntarily accept.
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