POLITICS
The remarkable creation of the new fromage-coloured Labour Party
FERDINAND MOUNT
Blackpool roserose is a rose is, I suppose, a rose, even when it is entwined with maidenhair fern and sported by Mr Roy Hattersley. Is Mr Hattersley a better writer than Ger- trude Stein? Which of the two would you say was the — but no, we must not sink to vulgar weightism, for we are all of us on our best behaviour this week. Just as the Liberals last week were supposed to have become sober and responsible citizens, so the Labour Party has apparently been transformed overnight into a mixture of Lord Chesterfield and M. Sacha Distel. Every kind of undesirable has been kept out or thrown out — Mr Derek Hatton and the Mersey Militants, Mr Frank Johnson and the Wapping Scabs. Mr Eric Heifer has been ejected from the National Execu- tive as a punishment for so rudely walking out on Mr Kinnock at Bournemouth last year. He is replaced by Mr Tam Dalyell, the first Old Etonian to reach the NEC for donkey's years, another triumph for the equal opportunities policy.
Instead of those grubby roneoed sheets of hate-filled propaganda and denuncia- tion, we are now issued with shiny packs in that shade of cream which, I believe, is known among the better paint merchants as 'fromage'. This too is adorned with the ubiquitous red rose (in fact, it has the unconvincing, non-herbaceous quality of the roses you see on soap and toilet tissue). I dwell on the technicalities only to marvel at them, since nothing less filled with the desire to please could be imagined than the old Labour Party. It is like coming upon Mr Dennis Skinner serving at the gift counter at Aspreys.
The new fromage-coloured Labour Par- ty is a remarkable creation. Who now remembers the days when Tony Benn lost the deputy leadership by a whisker and threatened to create a thousand socialist peers? Ideology is dead, and we are left with an age of sophisters and pollsters.
How has Mr Kinnock managed it? By a mixture of public charm and private bul- lying; by his understanding of how to fix the NEC and the trade union leaders; but, above all, by surrendering, gently and discreetly, on all the things that matter. He has surrendered to the unions on the repeal of the three Tory trade union acts (at one time, we were told he was going to stand firm). He has quietly surrendered to the Left on the 'alternative economic strategy' of exchange controls and import controls, so fiercely resisted by previous Labour leaders. Above all, he has surrendered to CND, to his own inclinations and to Glenys on defence. On the main fronts, the battle is over.
I never thought to see the day when a Labour Party Conference would find socialism boring. Mr Robin Cook, one of Mr Kinnock's lieutenants, pointed out that there had been only seven resolutions submitted on the economy: 'We're going to have to show more interest in economic policy than that.'
The only subjects to stir real enthusiasm nowadays are things like police harassment and gay rights. In Jo Richardson's immor- tal words on behalf of the NEC, 'There is no lesbian and gay liberation without socialism, and no socialism without lesbian and gay liberation.'
A few niggles do still crop up. Mr David Blunkett, now really the Left's only leader with any authority, points out the grotes- que implausibility of paying for Labour's programme without raising taxes for peo- ple earning a good deal less than £27,000 a year. Mr Ian Mikardo signs off after 40 years of making trouble by pointing out how easy it would be to get round Mr Hattersley's new-style exchange controls. Mr Denis Healey mischievously hazards that it is 'not inconceivable' that the rest of the Nato allies could persuade a Kinnock government not to close all the American bases, and then tries to unsay it, on the grounds that the Americans are being too interfering and dictatorial.
But what matters to the Conference is that Mr Kin nock himself went much furth- er in the other direction. Not merely would all American nuclear weapons and bases be removed from British soil, he would not wish the US to protect Britain with nuclear weapons: 'I think it would be immoral to do so.' This rejection of the umbrella sounds effectively like the end of Britain's participation in Nato -- and indeed like the beginning of a gradual but irreversible unravelling of the Western Alliance, spreading from this country to the Low Countries and then to West Germany. It is of course a comfort to know that Mr Kinnock is ready to throw himself in the path of the advancing Russian tanks, but I doubt whether the Americans will be totally reassured to hear that they will still be given house room at Fylingdales and GCHQ if they behave nicely. How dramatically the defence issue has sprung on to the centre of the stage. How marked the shift in what, only a few weeks ago, had looked like tolerably fixed posi- tions. To use the old pencil-scale, there used to be a party marked 'H', one marked `HB', and one marked 'B', each with its own catchment area. Now there is clearly only one Hard party, with the Alliance distinctly B-ish and Labour clearly identifi- able as 2B or 3B.
The Owen-Steel Euro-fudge would never have stood up to the rigours of the election campaign, and the Liberals might well win back some soft-centre votes from Labour by advertising their distaste for nuclear weapons. What is sure is that the Tories now have the strong-defence field to themselves — at a time when strong defence is beginning to pay dividends in disarmament talks. Just as Mr Kinnock sat down he had to welcome the news of the Reagan-Gorbachev meeting in Iceland through teeth more than somewhat gritted.
If the Stockholm Accords on troop movements are followed by the first agree- ments on the reduction of troop levels and even on intermediate nuclear missiles, then the Alliance will look just as silly as Labour — a fact of which Dr Owen is well aware (that is why he keeps on appearing on television alongside these tough eggs from the Pentagon in the hope that some of it will rub off on him). Mr Steel, on the other hand, deserves a bit of a rest. After being roughed up by Dr Owen, he was roughed up by his own conference and looked woefully tired and out of sorts by the end of it.
Mr Kinnock, by contrast, glows. He is in that rapturous, exalted state which briefly overcomes a party leader when he first feels he has the party with him. The sail fills, the keel slides off the sandbank, who cares in what direction. What was actually in his speech? Oh, lots of morality and lots of sentiment and quite a bit of alliteration, along with some less alluring cargo such as renationalisation and unilateral nuclear disarmament.
He told them pretty well everything they wanted to hear, and he cheered them up. At the end, they stamped their feet and chanted 'Here We Go'. Nobody seemed bothered that this had been Mr Scargill's marching song too.
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