POLITICS
Has Mr Kinnock done a Gaitskell at last?
FERDINAND MOUNT
Bournemouth ell,ell, the outer circles at least, must be rather like getting into the Bournemouth International Centre. First, the sinner, trapped between lines of crush barriers, is forced to tramp at a painful shuffle up an endless winding pavement. From either side, faces and hands thrust terrible mes- sages at him: Stop the Horror in the Gulf, Support the Heroic Fight of the Liverpool Labour Party, Troops Out, Smoking Kills, Smash Capitalism, Release All Jailed Min- ers Now, End the Public Executions, Hang Thatcher, Women for Peace. The hands pluck at your sleeves; some of the faces snarl; some of them wear that fixed half- smile you often see on the hard Left. The sea-fret sweeps up over the hill from the sinister pines of Durley Chine, so that the gaunt youth with a mohican haircut selling Militant might be looming out of some murky Gustave Dore illustration to the Inferno. But it is worse when you finally reach the Centre, for security reasons, by way of the underground car park. The toilers by hand or brain have to plod round and round this damp-stained concrete crypt, past frightful banners about rape or mass starvation, embroidered by clumsy feminists, while policemen pass their hands and their magic scanners over you.
How Bournemouth hates the Labour Party. Normally in conference towns, the local residents are rather tactful about these autumnal invasions. But here the fear and the loathing are too violent to be suppressed. The taxi-driver, the man de- livering the laundry at the back of the hotel, the youth washing his motor bike cannot wait to make it clear how much they loathe them and that Scargill, and how they rather fancy the Alliance. Everywhere south of Birmingham, Labour looks like doing just as badly under Kinnock as it did under Foot, and that is saying something.
Not that this prospect is of much interest to the Left. Mr Kinnock emerged from the National Executive meeting on Sunday to confess that even he had not realised quite how loony some of his fellow members were. Joan Maynard had turned on him to utter the immortal words: 'There's been too much talk about electoral victory in this meeting.' Miss Maynard is the veteran guardian of the pure milk of socialism and may be remembered by older readers of this column as Stalin's Nanny. She remains in splendid voice at the Labour Herald rally, now the grand fiesta of the Left, denouncing class traitors all over the place. The list of traitors lengthens daily: Kin- nock, of course, Hattersley a fortiori, Meacher (for casting the deciding vote on Kinnock's side over the miners), Living- stone (for making his peace with Kinnock).
And oh my Hatters and my Maynard long ago – the Labour Party Conference will not be the same without them. I use the possessive pronoun with the sanction of no less an authority than Mr Hattersley himself. In that memorable speech on monday against the setting up of 'black sections' in the Labour Party, he argued that he was not being patronising in talking about 'my Asians', because 'I refer to my Asians, my party, my constituency, my football team, my mother – people I regard as being in my family. As I am theirs, they are mine.'
This is no doubt true of Mrs Enid Hattersley, but do the Sheffield Wednes- day squad really say to one another as they run out on the pitch each Saturday: 'Let's stick one in the net for our Roy'? It all sounds a bit too much like the upper-class usage of m', as in m'tutor or m'butler, and does run the risk of being misunderstood when applied to blacks. So do black sections (in itself an unappetising phrase, reminiscent of some dubious canned fruit). Mr Kinnock can heave a sigh of relief on having won that particular round.
But here we must check ourselves. The Labour Party Conference is so seductively easy to report because it settles naturally into the pattern of a sporting event: Kin- nock two, up and three to play, but then makes a terrible hash of the open ditch, and pots the black at the wrong moment to forfeit the match.
Indeed, that is how the two sides see themselves; there is an inexhaustible supply both of class traitors and of denouncers. Both take up their allotted roles as if born to them. Mr Kinnock, be it remembered, misspent much of his youth on licensed premises denouncing the treachery of Harold Wilson, while Lord Wilson of Rievaulx misspent his youth . In the same way, as Mr Livingstone heads for the parliamentary exit, so his deputy in the GLC, John McDonnell, takes up the blow-torch.
But how spiritedly both sides do their stuff. As the hall began, very politely, to nod off after an hour or so of Mr Kinnock telling them not without nerve, that win- ning the next election was the thing, he pulled the Uproar Lever, with reference to Liverpool – 'the grotesque chaos of a Labour Council hiring taxis to scuttle round the city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers' – and Mr Eric Heifer rose in full majesty to perform the time-honoured ritual of the Angry Walk- out. Mr Derek Hatton, less experienced in these niceties, merely put on his coat and shouted, 'Liar'.
The leadership has managed to instal one or two accommodations with the real world: the end of Labour's opposition to the sale of council houses is now official. And Mr Jeff Rooker managed to get away with the remarkable claim that 'there is nothing paricularly socialist about large- scale public landlordism'. There jolly well is, you know. We are also told that Labour is now the Green party. Aren't they all? If you want to vote for a party which believes in grubbing up hedgerows and pelting otters with acid rain, it's hard to know where to turn these days.
We read, too, in Mr John Prescott's booklet Planning for Full Employment, which has the leader's imprimatur, that `private ownership and consumer sovereignty are major elements in Britain's mixed economy' – which is nice to know. And it emerges that 'nationalisation on the Morrisonian model [i.e. nationalisation] has proved unsatisfactory'. And Mr Kin- nock really seems quite keen that trade unions should ballot their members on this and that, which is nice too, because you would not have guessed it at the time.
But does all this outweigh the terrible ball and chain of Mr Scargill and the NUM? No it doesn't, and Mr Kinnock took the least bad line of defence, which was to attack, knowing that he was all but certain to lose.
The general view is that Mr Kinnock has done a Gaitskell, not before time, and that his Tuesday speech has the greatest thing since Demosthenes. It was bold as any- thing, but the wind and waffle content was still too high for my taste. In his attack on Mr Scargill the morning after, though, he was magnificent — lucid and exact. But he still lost. The great and good Mr John Cole tells viewers that 'The Labour Party will never be the same again.' He must be too young to remember the old headlines, 'Jim Reads The Riot Act' and 'Wilson Flays Left'. The flaying has to he done. The trouble is that the public does not seem to care much for the sight of the blood between the shoulder blades. Mr Kinnock certainly looks more electable now, but does his party?
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