POLITICS
The Labour leader and the little bleeder
FERDINAND MOUNT
Hatton is apparently an Old English surname meaning 'place on a heath'. And, for all I know, Mr Derek Hatton may be of sturdy Saxon stock. But he inescapably reminds me of the third of Hilaire Belloc's 'Three Races':
The most degraded of them all Mediterranean we call His hair is crisp, and even curls, And he is saucy with the girls.
Despite the standard Mersey Militant voice — duet for sandblaster and foghorn — Mr Hatton is immediately identifiable as one of nature's lightweights, a know-what- I-mean-squire-fell-off-the-back-of-the- lorry-come-on-darling-fancy-a-quick-one sort of character. He utterly lacks the authority of, say, the Sheffield leader, David Blunkett, whose dignity is enhan-ed by the marvellous stillness of the blind. That, I fancy, is why the slothful media made so little of the Great Liverpool Crisis, not only because we do not care a straw about what happens north of Wat- ford, but because we never thought Derek had it in him. And for once we were right.
And Mr Kinnock? Well, he has sort of won too. A rumbling, festering political situation in Liverpool would continue to corrode Labour's chances. And I suspect he is right to proceed rather gingerly in trying to reassert control of the Labour Party in Liverpool. The local party will have to be totally re-formed, for one thing. Expelling Mr Hatton and a handful of the Militant leaders there would not be enough to do the trick, since Militant would simply bob up again to plague Mr Kinnock with accusations of a witch-hunt. But expulsions there will have to be, and one should not take too seriously Mr Kinnock's warnings about the difficulty of gathering hard evi- dence that these people actually belong to the Militant Tendency. If the National Executive's enquiry really is short of evi- dence, perhaps I could help. . . .
' At 6.45 p.m. on 1 October last, I pro- ceeded in plain clothes to the Wessex Hotel, Bournemouth, where I commenced observation of a meeting, described as the 'Militant meeting'. Certain persons on the platform who identified themselves as 'Derek Hatton', 'Tony Mulhearn', and 'Terry Fields' began to address the meeting in loud and offensive terms about a certain `Kinnock' — whom they stated to be guilty of treachery and other serious crimes against the Labour Party. Suspecting these allegations to constitute insulting be- haviour, if not an actual breach of the political peace, I commenced to make notes which I place at the service of the court. . . .
But the whole imbroglio is much odder and more far-reaching than a mere Labour Party punch-up, even an unusually bitter one. The place to start, I think, is with Mr Kinnock's passionate declaration in his famous Bournemouth speech: 'I owe this party everything I've got, every life chance since I was a child . . the chance of a comfortable home . . . the chance of an education . . the chance of work' — in fact, everything including free orange juice.
Now as a matter of historical fact, this is not quite accurate, since when Mr Kinnock was a small child, almost all the relevant services were provided by local govern- ment under Acts passed by Conservative- dominated Parliaments: the Local Govern- ment Act of 1888, the Balfour Education Act of 1902 and the Butler Act of 1944, the Housing Acts of 1919 and 1923. It was only the orange juice that came from the Gov- ernment, or to be strictly accurate, from the Americans, under Lend-lease. Through- out this century, the typical Conservative social reform has been to pile fresh powers and duties on to local government. Labour, by contrast, nationalised things — coal, hospitals, railways.
To Conservatives, handing functions over to local authorities has seemed a harmless, innocent, somehow un-socialist activity. It engenders the warm inner glow of altruism without the bother of having to exereise direct responsibility. The Civil Service likes it for the same reason; one can supervise, monitor and sponsor 'at arm's length', without actually having to take the blame for high costs or low standards of service. It is a strategy of least embarrassment, a cop-out, which leads in the end to precisely the politicisation that was feared, because politics and politicians follow where power lies. And the evasion of responsibility leads precisely to those inequalities and inefficiencies which the system was supposed to remedy. This general attitude was surely a symptom of what Mr Malcolm Muggeridge would de- scribe as 'a ruling class on the run' — a governing caste which had lost faith in the ability of people to run their own lives but lacked the self-confidence to take over the management itself.
What has happened now is that the same loss of nerve has afflicted the Labour Party. The roles are spectacularly re- versed. Now it is the Labour Party which is busily recoiling from responsibility and opting for the strategy of least embarrass- ment. Read the two Fabian lectures deli- vered this month by the party leader and deputy leader; each is a highly sophisti- cated and thoughtful effort, thoughtful in much the same way as the products of Rab Butler's backroom boys after the war, sodden with defeatism, wriggling to find an accommodation with a new electorate. No, no, Mr Hattersley assures us over and over again, socialism has nothing to do with nationalisation, whatever gave you that idea? Markets are an absolutely wonderful idea for everything except health, and education and transport, oh and fuel and power and one or two other things as well. What socialism means is 'social owner- ship', cuddly things like co-operatives and, er, municipal things. What socialism needs, Mr Kinnock tells us, is 'assessment and redevelopment', 'a shift in attitudes and presentation, not a change in princi- ples. . . not an abandonment or dilution of values'. Splendid, and what does this assessment, this redevelopment, this shift produce exactly?
There is one and only one precise route to reform advanced in Mr Kinnock's ex- tremely long Fabian lecture. In it, he attacks the Government's 'squeeze' on local democracy; asserts that 'the soul goes marching on'; applauds 'the models de- veloped — even in adversity, in the revival of municipal efforts at socialism, in the Enterprise Boards, in the transport under- takings and — perhaps most interesting — in the efforts to introduce true decentral- isation of administration'; and promises that the next Labour government will do much, much more in this direction.
And indeed such is Labour's policy, insofar as it is to be deciphered. The police, the Health Service, buses and tubes, gas and water and electricity — all are to be brought under greater 'local government control'. Rate-capping is to end, so is personal surcharge and disqual- ification for erring councillors. The NEC wants to give local authorities a power of 'general competence' — to do whatever is not forbidden by law, even, according to Mr John Prescott, the power to band together to plan the car industries in their areas. In other words even for the official Labour Party, Hatton days are here again. The Labour leader and the little bleeder are brothers under the skin.
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