POLITICS
Labour puts its shaky faith in aspirations
NOEL MALCOLM
The sun shines all day long, the posters advertising Rocky Horror Show — Live on Stage gleam fluorescently at passing prom- enaders, and all is well with the world. A hundred yards from the conference centre, the Anglia Building Society advertises its 'Stockbrokerline — the complete and sim- ple service for buying and selling shares'; and from there it is only a short distance downhill to the Ramada Renaissance Hotel, a glinting confection of cafe-au-lait concrete and Perrier-green glass, where Labour has taken up its abode. Inside the hotel there is a huge central atrium, five storeys high, paved with cool white marble and furnished with pink sofas and exotic potted plants: the style is plutocratic desig- ner chic, reminiscent of nothing so much as the new interior of Coutts' Bank in the Strand. Nobody knows what 'Ramada Renaissance' means (at my first hasty misreading I thought it must be appealing to the Islamic fundamentalist market), but everyone knows what Dennis Skinner means when he warns Labour not to go down 'the road to Ramada'.
Mr Kinnock's conference address saun- tered quite a long way down that primrose path. He asked the delegates to consider the plight of a docker earning £400 a week, with a house, a car, a video, a microwave oven and a flat in Marbella. Socialism, he explained, should be 'beckoning, attractive and useful to the relatively affluent'. Socialism 'is about ordinary people getting on' Socialism (and here the urge to be lapidary overcame him) 'is related to the realities in which people must live their lives'.
Many parts of this speech, like much of the NEC's pep-report Moving Ahead and most of Bryan Gould's recent remarks, were in a sort of code. In one sense this cryptic tendency seems quite unnecessary, since everyone knows what the code means. It means that Labour must gain support among the haves, because there are not enough have-nots to elect a Labour government on their own. That much is plain, even if it does conveniently pass over the fact that many have-nots have not enough confidence in the Labour Party's economic policies to vote for them anyway. But in another sense the need for encoding is genuine, because no one (not even, I suspect, Mr Gould) has quite worked out yet what the basic theoretical justification of this new approach will be. Should Labour construct its policies on the basis of what people want? Or on the basis of what would be good for them, whether they want it or not? Or on the basis of what people ought to do, whether they will personally benefit from it or not? I have not heard much talk of people's 'wants': that is a word tainted with Thatcherism, suggestive of crude, unbridled desires and the 'politics of greed'. There has certainly been some talk of people's 'needs'; but that is a word which has its own special consti- tuency of the poor, the sick and the old, and which therefore cannot be expected to supply majorities at elections. 1 have heard no mention whatsoever of 'duties': and although there is much use of the word `rights', it is a term too strongly associated with campaigning minorities to serve the purposes of the new publicists.
Fortunately there is a code-word, of great talismanic power, which apparently means none of these things and sounds impressively positive and idealistic: 'aspira- tions'. Blunkett, Shore, Hattersley and Gould have all used it in the last week, in almost word-for-word phrases about 'iden- tifying with people's aspirations'. Cynics might suspect that it was a euphemism for `wants', just as 'perspiration' is genteel for `sweat'. But that would be unfair; what it means is something rather like wants but rather different, and the real coded mes- sage is that they have not yet decided how different it can afford to be. Even Mr Hattersley has been murmuring plaintively that he wishes someone would tell him. Until that happens, however, I offer a provisional explanation: when Labour spokesmen talk about identifying' with people's aspirations, they mean that they no longer wish to be identified with people who drop their aitches.
The theoretical issues behind all this logomancy may have passed Mr Kinnock by. To do him justice, he has never claimed to be a philosopher. When philosophical scruples are raised, his instinct, now more than ever, is to kick at the hard rock of `Break step!' electoral defeat and cry, 'Thus I refute them.' Whatever our policieS should be, he says, we need to get into power to carry them out — so let's start off by having the policies which , will get us into power, whatever they may turn out to be.
Faced with this new dispensation, one cannot help syinpathising with the old believers, the Skinners and Heifers, who say what they think and continue to think what they have always said. (Mr Kinnock, perhaps, also says what he thinks, which is why no one can quite understand what he says.) While the New Statesman declares that the time has come for Labour to perform an act of contrition, the old believers refuse to make any confessions, because they cannot feel contrite about anything they ,have done. They are ge- nuinely convinced that the only way to get Labour out of its hole is to keep digging. Indeed, of the three parts of penance confession, contrition and satisfaction this conference has seen some of the first, not much of the second and very little of the third. The Kinnock-Gould line is to confess to errors but not to faults; they are preoccupied not with feeling contrition for their sins but with finding some new sins which they might be able to get away with more successfully. Meanwhile the old be- lievers carry on with the kind of certainty which is vouchafed only to saints — a,4:1 to incorrigible sinners.
I think of Pinkie's gang in Brighton Rock, struggling to keep going despite defeat after defeat by the heavy mob from London. The weaker members gradually fell away: Dallow cracked in the end, Cubitt was overawed by the big mob's success, and Spicer wanted to go off and lead a respectable, upwardly-mobile life running a pub in Leicester. But Pinkie stuck to his course, even though he knew it was leading him to eternal damnation. Rose, who knew so little, understood this perfectly: `I don't know, Pinkie, I got confused. 1 thought I'd go to confession.' He grinned at her. `Confession? That's rich.' ... `I went and rang the bell and asked for Father James. But then I remembered. It wasn't any good confessing. I went away.' She said with a mixture of fear and pride, 'We're going to do a mortal sin.'
Not many people would vote for Rose and Pinkie. But .at least they knew what they were doing.
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