POLITICS
Reading the entrails: what Labour needs to win
NOEL MALCOLM
as it just coincidence that on Sun- day night, while the Euro-election results came in, Britain underwent one of its most severe electrical storms this century, with the Aurora Borealis visible even in the south of England?
A rottweiler hath whelped in the streets, And graves have yawn'd and yielded up their dead; Fierce fiery warriors fight upon the clouds In ranks and squadrons and right forms of war. . . .
The signs are uncertain, but the augurs and soothsayers have come out in force. Some are already predicting (or demanding) the end of Thatcherism, the end of Mrs Thatcher or the end of Mrs Thatcher's attitude to Europe.
Of these demands, the last is the most plausible on the face of it — what could be a more fitting reaction to a defeat in a European election? — but the least sus- tainable in reality. It is very likely that some of the people who failed to vote last week do share Mrs Thatcher's misgivings about ceding sovereignty. But it would be absurd to say that the swing of votes against the Conservatives consisted of peo- ple who wanted to see a greater yielding of sovereign powers to Europe. The swing was to the Labour Party which, as I have previously pointed out, has the same basic position as Mrs Thatcher on this issue. Most people were not voting on any fundamental issues of sovereignty. Those who wanted to vote for a shift of power towards Europe — for example, for grea- ter legislative powers for the European Parliament — could do so, of course, by voting for the SLD, the only party to pledge support for such things in its man- ifesto. And support for the SLD plum- meted in this election by more than 15 per cent.
Some Tory Euros may have been put off voting in this election by the feeling that Mrs Thatcher was not representing their position. But on the whole the Euro- enthusiasts are the ones who do vote in European elections: the fluctuating part of the Conservative vote consists of those who are more sceptical about the whole European project — of which the Euro- pean Parliament is the most shining and in the long run the most constitutionally threatening symbol. So the poor turn-out of Tory voters may even indicate a growth of support in the party for Mrs Thatcher's
view of Europe: if so, this is the sort of support which becomes an obvious liability at a European election, but can hardly be given as a reason why she should change her view.
What she should change, as everyone realises, is her Euro-election campaign strategy. The odd thing is that not only does everyone realise this now, but every- one realised it from the moment the campaign started: it was like one of those dream sequences in which you know what is going to happen and are just compelled to watch it proceed as if in slow motion. The only real surprise was the awfulness of some of the posters, which exceeded all expectation. 'Stay at home on 15 June and you'll live on a diet of Brussels': was this a sophisticated play on. the continental term for a parliament, a 'diet'? Nobody knows.
If anything is clear, it is that Labour won this election on a predominantly domestic campaign. Mr Kinnock is treating his victory as a full-hearted endorsement of his policy review, and it is hard to grudge him his sense of being on the move at last. Because the secret of Labour's success in the election was that more Labour voters were roused to go and vote, there is a case for discussing the victory in terms of internal Labour Party psychology.
Neil Kinnock has benefited from good luck as well as good judgment and good presentation. The unveiling of his policy review happened at the same time as the Government's shaky economic perform- ance began to reduce Conservative support in the opinion polls: this, broadly speaking, was sheer coincidence. It was coincidence too that this happened at the same time as the dwindling of support for the SLD and SDP — stimulated by Dr Owen's decision to go public on his party's true membership figures. And it was good judgment, making use of a further coincidence, to unveil the policy review in the run-up to a European election in which the Conservative cam- paign was likely to be ragged, divided and negative. If we had only had last week's Glasgow and Vauxhall by-election& to go by, we would all be talking not in terms of a new dawn for Labour but in terms of a solid, standard mid-term opposition per- formance.
Tue policy review has taken the Labour Party further down the road to electability for government, but it is certainly not there yet. I can think of at least three big steps
that Labour must take, and none of them will be easy. The first is to find a realistic macro-economic policy: the policy review document is full of measures to stoke up inflation (the minimum wage, increased negotiating powers for unions, more public spending and borrowing and a downward- floating pound), and almost empty of measures to control it. The second step will be to do away with the trade union block vote at the Labour conference, and the union-biased 'electoral college' which appoints the Labour leader. There have been murmurings to this effect within the Labour Party during the last year, and some of the more enlightened union bosses (such as Mr John Edmonds of the GMB) would probably go along with it. But it is an immensely sensitive issue; even the latest full statement of 'revisionist' Labour thinking (Giles Radice's Labour's Path to Power: the New Revisionism, to be pub- lished next week) gives only one rather hesitant paragraph to it, suggesting that the union vote might be 'diminished by stages'.
It is the third step, however, that will be the most awkward of all. This is the one that they dare not discuss or even mention in public; and if Labour MPs utter it in their sleep they probably wake up in panic at the thought that they may have been overheard. The third great move that Labour could make to fulfil Neil Kinnock's dream of a future Labour government is to get rid of Neil Kinnock. The thought of Mr Kinnock as Prime Minister is not one which has really figured in most people's minds up till now; but the more electable Labour seems for other reasons, the more of a visible obstacle it will become. The re-writing of procedures and the placing of Kinnockites in key positions which Mr Kinnock has carefully engaged in over the last two years have made his position impregnable: he can be evicted only by another general election defeat, and if that happens many of his new-look policies will be evicted with him. Yet everyone knows that a Labour Party with the same policies and John Smith as its leader would raise its election performance by three, four or five percentage points.
So the next three years will be a tale of two leaders: both of them unevictable, but one of them looking weaker when her party's performance is poor, and the other seeming more and more of a liability as his party's performance improves.
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