POLITICS
Mr Brown rattles the skeletons in Labour's cupboard
NOEL MALCOLM
It is not my intention to speculate about what Mr Brown thought he was doing when he threw his papers at the Govern- ment front bench, picked up the Mace and dropped it, and then strolled out of the House without a word of explanation. No one has suggested, so far as I know, that he was drunk at the time; and it would of course be an affront to the dignity of Parliament to make any such suggestion. If ingenious Tory MPs find some way, in future late-night sittings, of asking the Hon. Member for Edinburgh Leith a few questions about the Leith police, they must not expect the press to put any improper constructions upon his replies.
Nor do I want to defend Mr Brown's actions in any way. But it must be said that, historically speaking, picking up the Mace and dropping it comes nowhere near the top of the Richter scale of parliamentary disturbances. I leave aside Oliver Crom- well's policy on baubles, or the mugging of the Speaker in 1629, since these are now thought to have been on the whole a Good Thing. And I also leave aside Mr Hesel- tine's Mace-wielding, since we are now told that he was merely 'offering' it to the group of Labour MPs (Mr Kinnock among them) who were singing 'The Red Flag' at the time. (In a few more years, the history books will be telling us that he went down on one knee, carefully polishing the Mace with his handkerchief as he did so.) But what about Mr Beckett in 1930, who seized the Mace and tried to walk out of the Chamber with it? Or Mr Kirkwood in 1937, who told the Speaker: 'Don't "Hon. Member" me. I do not give a damn for you'? Or the 12 Irish Members in 1901, who refused to leave the House and had to be dragged away by the police? Anyone who complains about de- teriorating standards of decorum in the House should read some of the debates about Home Rule in the 1890s. During one debate in 1893, the Liberal MP, Sir J. W. Logan, was grabbed round the neck by a Unionist; breaking free, he punched Sir Edward Carson in the face, whereupon a swarm of Nationalist MPs settled on their great enemy, Colonel Saunderson. In the words of one eye-witness:
This made Col. Saunderson completely hap- py, and with right and left he dealt havoc among the `murdherers% a little man —some said it was Dr Tanner — got up on a bench and dealt him a blow from above on his bald head, but the Colonel sent him spinning from the bench with a careless wave of his arm.
The Liberal Chief Whip tried to pull the combatants apart, but in his haste he had forgotten to take his hat off when he rose to his feet. At length the sergeant-at-arms arrived. Turning not to the fighting MPs but to the Chief Whip, he said: 'I'm sorry, Sir, but you mustn't stand in the House with your hat on.'
Obviously, if Mr Ron Brown has been dealt with at all heavy-handedly for his sins, the reasons lie not in Mr Kinnock's devotion to the honour of the Speaker, pure though that may be, but rather in his wider political concerns. The actions of a Brown or a Nellist are 'unforgivable' (Mr Kinnock's favourite word) because they have let the Government off the hook. This is true, but it is not the whole truth.
The Labour front bench's parliamentary tactics are going through a delicate phase of re-assessment at the moment, as they consider the benefits which accrue from divisions in the Tory ranks. They realise that the best possible outcome, for them, is for the poll tax to go through in as unpopular a form as possible, but with as small a majority as possible. They can only gain by fostering the impression that Par- liament consists of decent, reasonable peo- ple on the one hand (themselves and Tory back-benchers) and the Government on the other. Hence the concentration, in the phrasing of criticism, not on 'the party opposite' but on 'the Government', not on Conservatism but on Thatcherism. The Labour benches are thus beginning to enjoy an almost unintended renaissance of old-fashioned parliamentarianism, reviving the principle that the sacred trust of an MP is to act as an individual who represents the interests of all his constituents. In this context, walloping Mr Brown as hard as possible is just one more way of showing what a good, devoted, old-fashioned par- liamentarian you are.
Mr Kinnock's greatest concern, though, is not with the image of his party in the Palace of Westminster, but with its image in the hearts, minds and opinion polls of the country at large. A spectre is haunting Labour, and has haunted it for a long time: a radical tradition, which it cannot shake off, of contempt for the law and support for extra- or anti-parliamentary activity. The Bennite 'Agenda for Labour', drawn up in January this year, specifically defends conscientious law-breaking; and it is not long since Mr Peter Tatchell complained that the Labour party was 'stuck in the rut of obsessive legalism and parliamentarian- ism'.
It is easy, but wrong, to claim that this tradition has never belonged to the main- stream of the Labour party. The peculiar origins of the party in the 'Labour Repre- sentation Committee' made it, from the start, a different kind of thing from the Liberal and Tory Parties. Labour began not as a party with individual members, but as a mechanism for projecting the interests of a class. This aligned it with Marxist theories of the state, in which Parliament itself was regarded, like the legal system, as an instrument of the ruling class.
Once Labour had tasted government power, it was quickly absorbed into the political establishment. Only the lingering debate about the delegating or mandating of MPs seemed to betray the peculiar nature of its origins. But there is, of course, one part of Labour's peculiar legacy which has never gone away: the special role of the trade unions in its constitution. This, more than anything else, now sets Labour apart from the other parliamentary parties. The spectre of radical anti-parliamentarianism has dwin- dled to the point where Mr Kinnock can deal with it without difficulty. But if, in dealing with his hard Left, Mr Kinnock is seen to rely (in the leadership contest, for example) on the undemocratic votes of the unions, his victory will be a hollow one. It will amount to no more than the defeat of one element in the party by another element of the same archaic, unparliamen- tary tradition.
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