POLITICS
Signs of the old Adam in the new model Labour Party
NOEL MALCOLM
Miss Cossey is very beautiful. A highly successful model, she has appeared in a James Bond film and is due to feature on the cover of Playboy. She is also, according to the British Government and the Euro- pean Court, a man. Christened Barry Cossey, and brought up as a boy, she later underwent surgery and hormone treatment to become the ravishing creature she now is. Last week, after the failure of her appeal to the European Court, she was interviewed on television. Everything ab- out her seemed glamorously feminine, except for one detail: she still has a distinctly deep, husky and, let's face it, mannish voice.
And why have I been thinking about her? Not because of Tuesday's debate which decided, in the slightly ambiguous words of one news report, 'that half the party's MPs should be women by the end of the decade'. No, Miss Cossey's role is more profoundly symbolic than that. It is the Labour Party itself that is the Caroline Cossey of British politics. It has been transformed. It has had the operation. It has been pumped full of hormones by Mr Mandelson, and has become appealing in all sorts of places where it was not appeal- ing before. And yet every now and then, when it opens its mouth, you can hear something of the old Adam (or the old Barry).
Frank Dobson's conference speech as shadow Energy Secretary was a classic example. Mr Dobson is one of those responsible, right-of-centre Kinnockites who are said to understand the role of the market. But his speech, about 'the rip-off at the petrol pumps', the 'unbridled power of the petrol companies' and the 'greedy speculators', was a piece of tub-thumping and market-bashing of a very old- fashioned kind. The cost of oil production has not risen, he said, and the quantity produced had not fallen: therefore it was all 'speculation', and speculation is some- thing which governments must stop. This is the sort of reasoning which would have the Stock Exchange abolished overnight. And Mr Dobson's speech was thunderously applauded.
The point here is not that the delegates lack understanding of the fine detail of market mechanisms — they need not be blamed heavily for that. Rather, it is that they retain the urge to resent, to find culprits, to hate. This urge now simmers beneath the surface, denied an outlet for most of the time in the deliberations of the new, moderate Labour Party. So any chance they are given to find an object of personal hatred is seized on with all the more gratitude. The most strongly ap- plauded part of Gordon Brown's speech was his personal attack on Tory ministers- turned-directors as 'arch-practitioners of the politics of greed'. Jack Straw, the Education spokesman, brought the house down with his attack on Conservative ministers who do not send their children to state schools. Michael Meacher raised a great cheer by denouncing the high salaries of top executives. And John Smith re- ceived his first really passionate applause late on in his speech, when he said that income tax rates would be raised for 'the minority who received enormous bounty from Mrs Thatcher'.
So while the surface of the debate discourses in a solemn, statesmanlike way about long-term economic factors, structu- ral deficiencies, and so on, the old message can still break through. It is a message which says: things have gone wrong in Britain because of a small number of greedy people — bosses, speculators and snobs. Therefore we can remedy our ills by taxing their money off them, outlawing speculation and forcing them to send their children to comprehensives.
It is certainly easier, and may also be more human, to feel hatred for a few individuals rather than benevolence to- wards whole categories of people. Hatred is much more specific in the measures it aims at. The Labour Party's official policy now is full of benevolence towards categor- ies of all kinds: the young, the old, the female, the part-time worker, the unem- ployed, the under-skilled. And if you are not on that list, you will be glad to know that John Smith has also promised to 'expand the horizons of personal develop- ment for all our people'. The 'supply-side socialism' which Labour now offers, with its promise to 'invest in skills, invest in people', is a politician's dream machine: it is so long-term a policy that there will never be any moment when people can turn round and say it has failed; and it is so general in its aims that there will never come any point at which people can turn round and complain that it is not being implemented. Electorally, much of it is not so much a policy which one asks the public to consider as a warm glow which one invites them to share. After this week's conference, for example, the public will know that education is Labour's 'big idea'. (Though in fact Labour has not officially said this — it has merely allowed the press to dress it up as such.) But although 80 per cent of the public might know this, and 90 per cent approve, how many of them would be able to specify a single Labour policy on education? How many would know about the plans for a National Education Council and a General Teachers' Council — or, if they knew, care?
The only thing that people will be sure of is that Labour plans to spend more money. How much more, nobody knows, though Phillips and Drew have estimated it at £20 billion extra a year, and Midland Montagu at between £12 billion and £50 billion. This will be the central issue of the next election. The Tories will try to persuade the public that this money must flow either out of the pockets of ordinary people, or not at all. And Labour will be able to say to the pensioner, the student or the mother, 'Vote for us: we shall give you more money', while denouncing the Tories all the while as arch-practitioners of the poli- tics of greed.
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