POLITICS
Unilateralism and the first strike use of resignations
NOEL MALCOLM
`If you look at the manner, and the wording, of his resignation', said Mr Bryan Gould with a not very enigmatic smile, 'I think you will see that this was essentially a matter of personalities, not a disagreement about policies.' Well, yes. The usual method of resignation is to have one of those delightfully courteous public ex- changes of letters, which yield their true meanings, like old-fashioned recommenda- tions for household servants, only after much skilful reading between the lines. By ringing the Press Association at one a.m. with the words, 'I'm fed up with being humiliated by Mr Kinnock — he never consults me on anything', Mr Davies was going for a quick kill, sweetened by the knowledge that this time it was Mr Kin- nock's turn to discover what it feels like not to be consulted.
Mr Gould's comment can be accepted, but with one extra proviso: before you can have a proper disagreement on policies, you need to have some way of knowing what the policies are. There are two different levels of uncertainty here: an uncertainty about what Labour's policies will be over the next year or so, and a fundamental lack of clarity in the party's official position on nuclear disarmament during the last five or six years.
For the short-term future, Labour's main position on defence matters is a policy of not having detailed policies. The `Britain in the World' group has produced the thinnest draft report of all Labour's policy review committees, and has concen- trated on foreign affairs to the virtual exclusion of defence. Preparation of a proper document on defence issues has been officially postponed for a year. Given the possibilities of new negotiating posi- tions between the superpowers, Labour's Micawberish prudence is not quite as weak-minded as it seems. But it must have been galling for Mr Davies, trying as best he could to toe an almost invisible line, to read the remarks of Mr Frank Cook, the Labour defence whip, in the latest issue of CND's magazine. Asked about the prob- lems of 'selling' Labour's policy on nuclear arms, Mr Cook replied: 'If it were left to me, I could do it. Honestly, I think it's a question of who you get to put it over. You can't just pussyfoot around.'
To the deliberate evasions of Labour's current position we must also add the confusions of the past few years. In 1983, when support for CND was at its peak in the Labour Party, their manifesto intro- duced the subject with the memorable words: 'Unilateralism and multilateralism must go hand in hand if either is to succeed.' This sounded rather like saying that teetotalism and moderate drinking must go hand in hand if either is to succeed. Of course any temperance refor- mer confronted with a society of roaring alcoholics will welcome both abstinence and moderation as improvements; but it's that `if either is to succeed' which poses the real puzzle. Unilateralism assumes that the reduction of nuclear weapons is an end in itself: a government which unilaterally disarms 'succeeds' in achieving the purpose of unilateralism by the very fact of dis- arming. If its good example encourages others to disarm too, that is not a condition of success but simply an extra bonus. To talk about conditions of success is to imply that disarmament is a means to some other end. And that is the position of multi- lateralism, which assumes that strategic stability between the nuclear powers is a more important goal than the mere reduc- tion of weapons, because it is more vitally conducive to peace.
Ever since the 1983 election, Labour has been toying with different ways of combin- ing the uni- and multilateral positions. One way was to say that they would bargain away our nuclear weapons against equiva- lent reductions in Soviet missiles, on the understanding that if the bargain didn't come off, the British missiles would be abandoned anyway. To the obvious objec- tion that this was a bargaining position so weak that it virtually guaranteed failure, Labour could reply that Mr Chernenko had promised to match the scrapping, of Polaris missile-for-missile. But, as Mr Healey himself has pointed out, this was an offer to match the British missiles with SS20s; now that SS20s are covered by the agreement on medium-range missiles, it is not clear if the Russian offer stands.
Another version of uni-multilateralism was to claim that unilateral disarming by Britain would break the stalemate and prompt other governments to 'respond' with cuts of their own. That was the idea, anyway, even though most multilateralists were reminded of the officer's tactics in Beyond the Fringe: 'We need a futile gesture at this stage'. In an interview last December in END (the journal of Euro- pean Nuclear Disarmament), Mr Martin O'Neill said that Labour's commitment to disarmament had stemmed from 'the feel- ing that something had to be done to break the nuclear logjam. Now, the logjam has been broken.' This remark was copied quite faithfully by Mr Kinnock in his now famous BBC interview; when the Guar- dian pointed this out last week, it must have added to Mr Davies's frustration to see that the ball of Labour policy was now being tossed to and fro between a junior defence spokesman and Mr Kinnock, with himself as an ignominious pig-in-the- middle. But the logic of Mr O'Neill's argument is almost exactly back-to-front. For a CND supporter such as Mr O'Neill, the breaking of the superpowers' logjam should be an excuse for abandoning all inhibitions about unilateralism.
Logic is not the only thing that seems to be back-to-front this week: As a result of Mr Kinnock's lurch towards multilateral- ism, Mr O'Neill, a CND member with a `soft Left' position on defence, now re- places Mr Davies, who does not belong to CND and whose position, if only on defence, is soft right. Mr Davies has long defended British membership of Nato; Mr O'Neill, in his END interview, describes the special relationihip with America as `more a matter of sentiment than of real- ity'. Mr Davies has fought hard to win support for the strengthening of British conventional forces; Mr O'Neill defends this policy purely in terms of gaining votes in the armaments factories and the dock- yards. This apparently, is what passes in the Labour Party for 'new realism'. Before long, even left-wingers might prefer a few new policies instead.
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