Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.
- Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
The death of John Smith on 12th May 1994 was one of those events which sticks in the memory. He was cut down at the moment that it looked as if he was set to become the next Prime Minister after a long political career and after successive electoral defeats for his party. This book, published to mark the thirtieth anniversary of his death, offers a comprehensive assessment of his leadership of the Labour Party, with chapters written by academic experts, on their chosen fields, and by those who knew him as advisers, MPs and journalists. There are two themes running through the book. The first seeks to examine the extent to which there was a John Smith 'effect' in terms of politics and policy and assess whether he succeeded in establishing his own agenda or simply followed that of his predecessor. The second examines the extent to which Smith was a representative of 'Old' Labour or 'New' Labour.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 393
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:
Ähnliche
iiiii
Contents
Foreword
Dame Margaret Beckett MP
The conventional wisdom surrounding John Smith at the time was that John, as leader of the Labour Party, came across to the public like the ideal bank manager – someone who might be friendly, not unsympathetic and would provide sound advice on which you could rely.
While John was all the above, it does not fully capture who he was or what he was like as leader. He had great energy and determination. Simon Hoggart once quoted a colleague who described him ‘steaming down the Committee corridor like a small rhinoceros’!
I once saw a photograph of John as a boy that I would describe as a Just William kind of picture. He had a wicked grin from ear to ear, his tie around his ear. Colleagues who spent time in his company had no difficulty in detecting that small boy in the statesman and the leader.
John had eloquence and wit, as well as passion for the less fortunate. He was prepared from very early in his parliamentary career to viiido what he believed to be right, whether or not it would be popular with the party hierarchy.
It was while shadowing the industry portfolio that he seems first to have identified a theme he pursued vigorously for the rest of his life and which has pervaded Labour’s approach to economic policy ever since – though he is rarely given the credit he deserves. It is easy now to forget the conventional wisdom of the day, which was that you either had social justice or economic competence, not both. John, by contrast, argued that they were the two sides of the same coin – you have both or you probably don’t have either.
John had another quality, so unusual in my experience as to be almost unique. He had calm, serene, almost untroubled self-confidence. He wasn’t arrogant or cocky or conceited. He just knew what he could do.
Unlike many other politicians, he was never looking over his shoulder at the competition. He wasn’t worried. Without jealousy, he enjoyed and celebrated the achievements of others without worrying that they might eclipse him. John had no difficulty getting on with everyone across the party, whatever the shade of their opinions.
I first worked closely with John after the 1987 election, when he chaired the economic and social policy group. Not only egalitarian, John was also non-hierarchical in his attitudes, willing – even eager – to hear everyone’s point of view and open-minded about taking on board what he heard.
The impact of his egalitarianism and open-mindedness speedily became evident. Emma MacLennan, then a policy officer at Labour Party HQ, told me of an encounter with him. He said he had had an ixidea about pensions he wanted to run by her, and Emma responded enthusiastically that it was a great idea. He stopped in his tracks, swung round and said, ‘NEVER do that again. I want to hear what the problems are. I want you to think about the downsides. I don’t want to hear the downside in the Chamber.’
In the policy group, he was the same. He wanted to know what everyone thought – even the most junior in the room. One idea was abandoned when cogent objections were raised by a student on an internship.
At about this time the party decided to enlarge the shadow Cabinet, and I was elected to join it in 1989. Neil Kinnock asked John, as shadow Chancellor, who he wanted to take over from Gordon Brown as shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury – the enforcer of financial discipline.
John said, ‘I want Margaret Beckett.’
It may seem odd now, but the idea of having someone from the left of the party in such a role and working with an acknowledged ‘right-winger’ was thought extraordinary. John was, characteristically, not worried. As shadow Chancellor, he was both a formidable opponent in the House of Commons and an advocate for the less fortunate.
Immediately after the 1992 election Neil Kinnock resigned, and it was clear that John would run for the leadership. My husband, Leo, and I agreed that it had to be the best possible person. It was clear to us that was John.
Within a day or so, I heard a BBC report that John and I were running as a team. I was appalled. I rang the BBC and told them it was completely untrue. x
Then my phone rang and rang and rang.
By Monday morning, I had accepted what seemed to be the inevitable. John appeared. ‘I came,’ he said, ‘to tell you that you’d got to run, but I hear you’ve already decided to.’
Once John and I were elected as leader and deputy leader respectively, John told me he wanted me to handle all aspects of our campaigning and to be ‘a real deputy’. I wasn’t quite sure what that meant, but I soon found out.
John had a very clear view and vision. The job of the leader was to set a clear direction and vision for the party – to concentrate on pursuing that and not allow himself to be diverted by day-to-day trivia.
It was during this period that the unifying benefits of John’s approach to colleagues really came to the fore. He genuinely wanted, for example, to hear the views of the whole shadow Cabinet on policy. Genuine dialogue and debate without a preconceived conclusion were fostered – not interminably but thoroughly. Clear and firm conclusions were reached, and decisions, once made, were adhered to. Reconsideration of a decision thrashed out and concluded was not impossible, but you proposed it at your peril and you had to be very sure of the necessity and of your ground.
Over the subsequent months he embarked on a substantial programme of change. Within the party he proposed new structures, moving to a ‘one member, one vote’ system. He set up a Commission for Social Justice to independently reassess the full scale and picture of the nation’s social problems and how they might be tackled. He committed himself to constitutional reforms, such as a Human Rights Act, greater freedom of information and greater devolution of power away from Whitehall. xi
Sometimes since his death it has been tacitly suggested that John was a status-quo man, content to wait for it to be Labour’s ‘turn’ to govern again. But nothing could be further from the truth. In his view, the job of the leader was to set a clear direction and vision, and he did just that. xii
Introduction
Kevin Hickson
The death of John Smith on 12 May 1994 was one of those events that sticks in the memory. He was cut down at the moment it looked as if he was set to become the next Prime Minister, after a long political career and after successive electoral defeats for his party.
Thirty years on, it is timely to look back on his period as Leader of the Opposition. The book is not a biography, not least because this has been done elsewhere very ably by both Andy McSmith and Mark Stuart.1 Instead, it follows the approach of similar books I have produced on party leaders including Harold Wilson, James Callaghan, John Major and Neil Kinnock.2 It seeks to bring together both academic writers and those involved in the political process as either politicians, advisors or journalists in the belief that the divide between academics and non-academics should be reduced. It also provides pieces from authors with different perspectives, in the belief that diversity of opinion is to be encouraged. It offers no overall argument and no concluding chapter, instead leaving the reader to make xivup their own mind – hopefully more informed by the time they have finished the book than when they started it.
The premature end of Smith’s tenure as Leader of Her Majesty’s Official Opposition has inevitably led to a series of speculative questions. Most obvious of all is whether Smith would have won the next general election, with most people concluding that he would have but disputing what the majority would have been. Whether he would have won subsequent elections has also been speculated on. Other questions are: what would Smith have been like as Prime Minister – would he have been presidential like Tony Blair or more consensual; what would he have done in response to particular events; and what policies would he have pursued? Though they are interesting questions to ask, none are particularly useful since there is, of course, no way of knowing for sure.
Instead, this book asks better questions – better in the sense that they can be answered more definitively. The book is concerned with how Smith became leader, how he managed relationships with key stakeholders such as his shadow Cabinet, the Parliamentary Labour Party and the trade unions. How he fared in opinion polls and in the electoral contests he faced and what his policy positions were. In other words, it discusses his time as leader rather than speculating on what might have been and in so doing offers a fresh account of his time in office.
The question that forms the subtitle to this book provides an overarching theme: whether or not Smith should be seen, as New Labour modernisers tended to do, as the last stand of Old Labour or whether he could have avoided the new tensions within the party which the xvmodernisers created. Thirty years on from his death, debate on these points remains.
STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK
In addition to the foreword by John Smith’s deputy leader Margaret Beckett MP, the book is divided into three parts.
The first part explores the context within which Smith served as leader. Keith Laybourn provides an account of Smith’s aims and record as leader, looking at how he fits into the historical traditions of the Labour Party. Kevin Hickson then examines the framework of ideas within which his leadership occurred. In the next chapter, Philip Norton evaluates Smith’s record as a parliamentarian. In the final chapter in this section, Mark Garnett and David Denver examine public opinion and electoral performance under Smith.
The second part goes on to examine policy development under Smith. Wyn Grant explores economic policy, while Ben Williams discusses social policy. Joseph Tiplady examines the evolution of Labour’s education policy in the Smith period. This is followed by a chapter on constitutional reform by Jasper Miles, an issue which became more prominent at this time and on which Smith had a radical approach. An issue long associated with Smith is devolution and this is explored by Neil Pye. Finally in this section, Richard Johnson examines the nature of Smith’s pro-Europeanism.
In the final part, a range of commentaries are provided by political practitioners including some of those who worked very closely xviwith Smith. Ann Taylor provides an account of what it was like to be a member of the shadow Cabinet at this time. Bryan Gould, who was defeated by Smith for the leadership in 1992, provides a personal perspective. David Ward, who was head of policy in the leader’s office, examines the nature of his leadership, finding the criticism of the ‘modernisers’ wanting. That critical perspective is then given a more sympathetic hearing by John Rentoul in the following essay. In the final piece, Andy Burnham sets out what Smith’s contemporary relevance is.
251NOTES
1 A. McSmith, John Smith: A Life, 1938–94 (London: Mandarin, 1994) and M. Stuart, John Smith: A Life (London: Politico’s, 2005).
2 A. Crines and K. Hickson (eds.) Harold Wilson: The Unprincipled Prime Minister? (London: Biteback, 2016); K. Hickson and J. Miles (eds.) James Callaghan: An Underrated Prime Minister? (London: Biteback, 2020); K. Hickson and B. Williams (eds.) John Major: An Unsuccessful Prime Minister? (London: Biteback, 2017) and K. Hickson (ed.) Neil Kinnock: Saving the Labour Party? (London: Routledge, 2022).
Part I
2Contexts
1
Tribune of the People: The Popularity, Appeal and Legacy of John Smith
Keith Laybourn
John Smith enjoyed only the briefest of moments in office as leader of the Labour Party. Yet during that period he transformed the political fortunes of the Labour Party, establishing a commanding lead in the opinion polls over the Conservative government and a substantial personal lead over John Major.1 His untimely death provoked outpourings of grief across the nation and across political divides. Indeed, his early death has given rise to the suggestion that he was Labour’s lost Prime Minister, the legacy of his achievements being seen in the subsequent success of Labour under Tony Blair. Yet his obvious popularity within his own party, the electorate and trade unions belies the fact that the policies he developed were often controversial and potentially divisive. This raises 4the question: why did Smith’s Labour leadership become an almost overnight success? How was it that he was able to improve the fortunes of the Labour Party and turn a seemingly unelectable party into one of government? Was it simply due to the declining popularity of a Conservative government riven by sleaze and driven on by the neo-liberal policy of promoting inequality and a low-wage economy? Was it because of Smith’s obvious integrity as a politician? Was it his commitment to widening participatory citizenship in a period of centralisation of government, his advocating for devolution, a Bill of Rights and modernising the Labour Party that proved politically attractive? Alternatively, was it simply that his inclusive leadership and intuitive understanding of people united his party and the nation?
Tangentially, it has been suggested that it is possible to see Smith’s successful Labour leadership as a break from Old Labour and the basis of the emergence of New Labour. But was this so? Rather, was his period in office – a unique one of Labour leadership based upon himself – distinct from either traditional Old Labour or the emerging New Labour? Indeed, was it one in which he simply sought to reform Old Labour, trundling along established, recognisable and popular paths of support, but made it more an effective and democratically associated New Deal Labour, aimed at creating genuine citizenship?
Any assessment of Smith’s popularity – a fleeting and transient concept in its own right – can at best be only tentative, but it is not unreasonable to suggest that it emerged from his personal qualities as a consistent opponent of Conservative sleaze and incompetence. As a man of integrity, his traditional Labour demands for a widening of citizenship resonated at many levels in society, and his leadership style of inclusivity was vital in his move to reform Old Labour while 5not actually encouraging the more specific social policies of New Labour.
Despite the controversial nature of the policies he promoted, particularly in the development of the European Community and the Commission on Social Justice, and his gradual, reasoned approach to change – which frustrated some like Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, and Peter Mandelson – he united and energised the Labour Party. Given that style of leadership was, and is still, so vital in British politics, it was possibly Smith’s personal qualities and inclusivity that made powerful connections with the electorate. Indeed, it seems likely that his style of leadership and beliefs brought about a unique period in the Labour Party, which saw him attempt to reform the Old Labour Party and take it back to its democratic roots, rather than to define the contours of New Labour. It is often said that it is for governments to lose elections rather than for the opposition to win them, and John Major’s government was a shrunken, pale imitation of a government, but in Smith’s case his leadership would probably have won a general election had he lived on, even without Tory failures.
MYTHS, HOPES, ASPIRATIONS AND BEGINNINGS
Smith was a political enigma. Widely admired, he was a political leader of substance who demanded a change in the political system. Yet this was often against the particular interests of those who supported him, as with his support for one member, one vote (OMOV) at the 1993 Labour Party conference, which he made an issue of 6confidence in his leadership. To achieve these changes in the face of almost intractable odds required his own personal brand of Labour politics.
It is perhaps also a marvellous myth, perpetuated and embroidered over time, that his gradual reformism was a transient stage towards New Labour. The fact is that his gradual reformism was abandoned and superseded after his death. Nevertheless, Smith’s calming, uniting and firm influence on British politics was able to inspire change by moving to reform the Labour Party and pressing for a more democratic political system and devolution, based upon increasing the right of citizens over the state and its institutions. That may explain his popular appeal as a radical, if moderate and conservative, reformer who sought to combine the traditional social democratic values of citizenship with a measure of cautious modernisation, ensuring the rights of the individual and community in the increasingly centralised state, which stripped local authorities of their powers and replaced them with state control and quangos, substantially unelected Tory-dominated committees with wide financial powers to determine expenditure in the community.
Indeed, his aim was to remove a system whereby, as he stated in his famous Charter 88 speech, ‘We do have an elective dictatorship.’2 In that speech he added, ‘I believe we must replace the out-of-date idea of an all-powerful nation state with a new dynamic framework of government.’3 This obvious desire to decentralise in an age of Tory centralisation certainly galvanised his appeal with the electorate, a vital factor in appeasing those within the Labour Party who might be adversely affected by his reforms. His appeal for the widening of citizenship and the democracy of the community certainly held sway 7in the early 1990s, embedded as it was in his desire to assert the rights of ordinary citizens in law and create a new constitution for Britain. Indeed, as one historian has suggested, Smith offered the message of ‘democratic optimism’.4
Nevertheless, Smith began his Labour leadership role in the doldrums of defeat, following the Conservative victory in the general election of April 1992 when the Conservatives won 336 seats to Labour’s 271. Labour’s defeat, apparently grasped from the jaws of victory, was widely blamed upon the ‘shadow Budget’ which Smith, as shadow Chancellor, had put before the electorate. Driven by the desire of Neil Kinnock not to increase the tax of anyone earning more than £22,000, Labour’s tax burden would have fallen on middle-income earners because of the intended rise of the top rate of tax from 40 per cent to 50 per cent. Those middle-income earners then voted against Labour, and the 3-point Labour lead in the opinion polls at the outset of the 1992 general election evaporated.
In the wake of this defeat, Kinnock resigned, and the mood message of Labour became ‘bury the shadow Budget’. Despite this setback, Smith won the Labour leadership contest in July 1992, heavily defeating Bryan Gould, the British and New Zealand Labour politician, by a majority of more than nine to one: 91.016 per cent to 8.984 per cent.5 This was achieved through his almost total dominance of the electoral system, which gave trade unions 40 per cent of the vote to the 30 per cent each enjoyed by the Constituency Labour Parties and MPs.6 This success may have benefitted from the early 1980s exodus of those Labour figures from the centre-right of the Labour Party to form the Social Democratic Party – namely David Owen, Shirley Williams, Roy Jenkins and Bill Rodgers. Yet, given the runaway nature of 8the actions of the ‘Gang of Four’ it is an imponderable factor, and one doubts any one of them would have been able to unite and transform the Labour Party as Smith did. Indeed, Smith’s metier was as a unifying figure in the mould of Harold Wilson who could unite the left, centre and the right of Labour, although he invariably expected loyalty from them all for the wider Labour cause. This might explain why critics such as Kinnock and Blair felt that Smith’s leadership was slow to modernise, based upon the need to compromise and driven by a policy of ‘one more heave’, to use a phrase popularised by Peter Mandelson, which was soon widely used within the Labour Party.
When Smith became Labour leader he was determined to erase the stigma of his failed shadow Budget.7 He succeeded in this. Smith’s personal opinion poll rating was 6 per cent behind that of John Major in the summer of 1992, but by September 1993 he held an almost 30-point personal lead over Major, one which still remained high, at 21 points, at the time of his death.8 The opinion poll ratings for the Labour Party moved similarly.9 What had happened to achieve this remarkable turnaround in public opinion?
Vital to understanding Smith’s success is his background and upbringing. Raised in Scotland in a Church of Scotland family and educated at Glasgow University, during which time he won the famous Observer Mace (which after his death became the John Smith Memorial Mace) competition for his debating skills, he became a solicitor and libel lawyer. He joined the Labour Party in 1955, contested various parliamentary seats and eventually entered Parliament as MP for North Lanarkshire in 1970 but represented Monklands East after 1983 due to boundary changes. He quickly gained ministerial office, rising to become Secretary of State for Trade in 1978–9 in the last 9throes of James Callaghan’s government. Between 1979 and 1992 he held a succession of posts, although he is mostly remembered for his role as shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer between 1987 and 1992. During these years, Smith began to develop the views that were to shape his unique period of office.
The son of a Scottish headmaster and described as a son of the manse, Smith was a lifelong Christian socialist. That emerges strongly in his essay ‘Reclaiming the Ground: Freedom and the Value of Society’, in which he stressed his Christian faith and allied it with the moral activity of the community – exemplified in the work and ideas of R. H. Tawney, who had based his life on the moral principles of his Christian commitment, which made him an uncompromising ethical socialist.10 Indeed, according to Smith, ‘He [Tawney] saw British socialism as ethical, individualistic, parliamentary and pragmatic.11
’That influence led Smith to reject both rigid communism and unrestrained capitalism and to espouse democratic socialism, which sought to enhance individual freedom in a framework of collective common purpose and opportunity, in which fellowship was the bond of a community of equality.12 Indeed, Tawney’s socialism, and Smith’s, was about citizenship and the active involvement of each citizen in the democratic process. This was a familiar strand in socialist thinking in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and one advocated by Labour’s early leaders such as Ramsay MacDonald and, most obviously, Philip Snowden in his lecture and pamphlet TheIndividualUnderSocialism.13 Here, Snowden supported both municipal and state control of industries and fair wages, which would guarantee the freedom of individuals and release them from excessive burdens of work for poor pay and consequent poverty. Such thoughts 10had also been evident in the writings of T. H. Marshall, whose three-stage evolution of citizenship in Britain – from male contracts to political rights and then social and industrial rights – ended with the idea that all people should have the right to join a trade union and be guaranteed a minimum wage and reasonable hours of work.14 Similar thoughts were clearly evident in the thinking of Tawney and the mind of Smith when he further argued the need for an infrastructure of freedom provided by a collective provision by an enabling state to be ‘the moral basis of democratic socialism’. He went on to state, ‘It is sharply distinguishable from the anti-democratic and totalitarian forms of socialism against which Tawney was such a steadfast opponent.’15
Tawney saw that liberty-creating socialism was only possible in an environment of political democracy and freedom of speech and thought, which was something Smith also strongly believed in. Smith’s commitment to the thinking of Tawney was reflected further in his R. H. Tawney Memorial Lecture on 20 March 1993.16 Here, he attacked the Conservative Party notion that individuals conduct their lives ‘on the basis of self-interested decisions taken in radical isolation of others’, because that ‘ignores the intrinsic social nature of human beings’ that transcends the narrow idea of personal advantage. The whole purpose of his lecture was to explain ‘why I believe that real freedom depends on the interdependence of the individual and society, and why this idea – which has long remained at the centre of democratic socialist thinking – retains its intellectual force and its capacity for popular appeal’.17 Meaningful freedom to Tawney, Smith believed, ‘was positive liberty – the freedom to achieve that is gained through education, health care, housing, and employment’, based 11upon an enabling state and the ‘richer conception of freedom for the individual in society that is the moral basis of democratic socialism’.18
Smith’s ideas were long established within the political Labour movement and they represented a fusion of the noble and radical vision – the ‘social contract’ tradition in political theory and the socialist tradition. The first makes the fundamental assumption that no individual will be able to choose institutions that favour themselves in what is, in effect, a commitment to social justice. The second seeks to create citizens oriented towards community and altruism. Though paradoxically visions of opposite foundations, that they could work together for fairness to individuals is not incompatible with community service and altruism in creating citizenship.
Smith had already expounded his view that the individual rights of citizens were guaranteed through collectivism in a lecture on May Day 1987, in which he presented his view in the context of the destructive economic policies of Thatcherism in the 1980s, which were monetarist and anathema to inequality. He asserted that the New Right had argued that the inequalities of laissez-faire ‘are truly more egalitarian because they will lead to more growth and greater prosperity’, noting that Tawney stated, ‘The argument is that the wealth of the few is the indispensable safeguard for the modest comfort of the many, who, if they understood their own interests, would not harass the rich with surtaxes and death duties, but would cherish and protect them.’19
A similar speech was given to the Labour Rally in Nottingham on 2 May 1987, in which he opened by stating that ‘it breaks my heart to see what is happening in this country today’.20 He added that ‘this Tory government is shameless’, asserting that it was claiming economic success that it had no right to do in the light of high unemployment, 12and declared that instead of running down the British economy, he, now the shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, would establish the British Industrial Investment Bank to provide new sources of finance for British industry. He ended by emphasising that Labour believed in the people and that only Labour believed that people ‘are our most important asset’ for making ‘our way in the world’.21 He returned to the issue in July 1992 on becoming Labour leader, emphasising, ‘Our values of freedom and fairness, and of citizenship and community, are far more relevant to the needs and aspirations of the British people that are the dogmas of laissez-faire and privatisation that continue to dominate the Conservative Party.’22
His strong commitment to Christian moral values, individualism and citizenship and his vision of a fairer distribution of wealth in society were developed further by his attitude towards devolution of central authority to national, regional and local bodies. In April 1976, as Minister of State at the Privy Council Office, he helped pilot through the House of Commons the highly controversial devolution proposals for Scotland and Wales. Having initially opposed the idea of devolution, he changed his mind, as he felt that the best way to ensure the continuation of the Union was to offer devolution, which, in the case of Scotland, would mean devolving powers to a Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh. In the event, Scottish and Welsh devolution did not occur, although the Kilbrandon Commission (1969–73) had found in favour of a Scottish Parliament and devolution. Separate bills for Scottish and Welsh devolution were passed in the House of Commons, but a Labour backbench motion required that 40 per cent of the total electorate had to vote yes or the Acts would have 13to be annulled. This filigree arrangement meant that when the referendums were held on 1 March 1979, though a majority voted yes, this requirement was not met. Despite this turn of events, Smith had steered legislation through the House of Commons and had changed his mind from opposing devolution to supporting it for the continuation of the Union, in the face of the SNP and indeed Plaid Cymru.
In the 1980s, while in opposition, Smith also emphasised his belief in strengthening Britain by it becoming a major member of the European Community, which Britain had joined under the Conservative premiership of Edward Heath in the early 1970s. Indeed, he was one of only five Labour MPs who voted against the Labour Party and for joining the European Community on 28 October 1971.23 His strong pro-European attitude became even more evident in the debates in the House of Commons on 21 November 1991 when he revealed that he felt that British governments had underestimated the importance of the European Community in the 1950s and that the current Conservative government was doing the same when there was a pressing need to discuss the European Community’s industrial and financial policies and the Social Chapter – these were to become a sticking point during the 1993 negotiations when the Maastricht Treaty on increased European unity was under discussion.24
Smith clearly saw that the idea of the nation state was outmoded and that a new form of government – the European Community – was a necessary, if not perfect development, in which national, regional and local democracy could thrive. In particular, the social aspects of the European Community had to be brought into British law, since he felt that the Social Chapter was vital in creating social citizenship. 14
THE FAILURES OF THE CONSERVATIVE GOVERNMENT
Even before Smith projected himself forward to the British public as Labour leader, there is no doubt that he and the Labour Party benefitted from the incompetence and the sleaze of the Conservative government. Indeed, Labour fortunes were given a quick fillip by the disastrous actions of the Conservative government. Having set the exchange rate of the pound too high, the UK government was forced to withdraw sterling from the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) after interest rates were raised twice and half the British reserves were spent defending the existing exchange rate.
There was instant newspaper criticism anticipating the end of the Conservative government, with The Independent going so far as to suggest that ‘it is hard to see Norman Lamont continuing in his present post, John Major is gravely damaged’.25 Most polls, which were volatile in the summer months, had the Conservatives and Labour running neck and neck. However, after ‘Black Wednesday’ there was a dramatic shift in polling intent, with the Harris/Observer poll of 16–17 September 1992 recording 44 points for Labour, a lead of 8 points over the Conservatives and a substantial increase from the 1-point lead in the ICM/Guardian poll of 4–5 September 1993.26 At that point, Smith pointedly described John Major as ‘the devalued Prime Minister of a devalued Government’ and felt that the Tories were doomed after their debacle.27 Thereafter, both Labour and Smith held persistently large leads over the Conservative government and Major without any real challenge from the Liberal Democrats, who had nothing to offer Labour in an alliance, despite the recurrent 15tendencies of Paddy Ashdown, in what David Steel once said would be a ‘one way bargain’ in favour of the Liberal Democrats.28
Increasingly, exposure of the lack of Tory integrity became a central theme of Smith’s campaigning throughout 1993. He challenged the integrity of Norman Lamont, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, focusing on the disquiet and cynicism growing throughout the country about what he called the ‘declining standards of government’.29 He had not received an adequate answer from the Prime Minister after it emerged that taxpayers had paid towards the legal fees of the Chancellor of the Exchequer in evicting a tenant from his London house.30 He felt that the Prime Minister was clearly out of touch with the anger of the public mood on this matter, stating, ‘This is a government from which nobody resigns unless absolutely forced to do so by overwhelming pressure from the public, the media and their own backbenchers. They mislead parliament, they break the law, they jettison policies which once formed the cornerstone of their entire programme.’ He added to this the charge of the arrogance of power and the movement of Tory politicians from ‘senior positions in the Cabinet to influential posts in privatised industries’.31
On 12 January 1994, it was reported in the minutes of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) Committee that ‘the Leader referred to the Opinion Polls published that morning which showed the Party on 50 per cent’, adding that ‘he thought that the political situation was on the whole quite favourable’.32 On the same day, Smith was determined to respond to the attack levelled by Lord Howe on the inquiry led by Lord Justice Scott into the long-drawn out Matrix Churchill affair, which revealed that businessmen put on trial for illegally exporting potential items of war to Iraq had been advised about 16how to avoid the restrictions by government ministers. Smith drew up a press release stating that he was appalled at the attack on Lord Justice Scott and his inquiry just four days before John Major was to give evidence: ‘Lord Howe is attempting to discredit the inquiry which is likely to be critical of the Tory Government and Tory ministers and to protect the Prime Minister from further huge embarrassment that this will cause to him and his beleaguered government.’ He demanded that the Prime Minister reaffirm his confidence in Lord Justice Scott, adding, ‘If he does not, then I can only assume that Lord Howe’s crude attack was made with the blessing of the Prime Minister.’33
In the event, the heavily redacted Scott Report, published in 1996, exposed the lack of accountability of government ministers to Parliament, the misuse of public interest immunity certificates and the extent of government obfuscation.34 Two weeks after Smith’s press statement, it was reported in the minutes of the Parliamentary Committee that ‘the Leader said that some satisfaction could be drawn from the fact that the long drawn out campaign to get across the dishonesty of the Tory Party on the question of trust had begun to bear fruit’.35 Blair added that ‘the campaign against the Tories had been brilliantly successful’.36
SMITH’S EFFECTIVENESS AS LABOUR LEADER
Tory sleaze was certainly important in improving the fortunes of Labour, but the improved opinion poll ratings were also driven by 17Smith’s Labour leadership, which saw him establish control of his own party and the unions, whose recent record had been seen as a challenge to Labour control. Indeed, the first thing Smith did when he came to power was to start the process of reorganising and reshaping the Labour Party. It had been undermined by the defection of the Labour right to the Social Democratic Party in the early 1980s and under Neil Kinnock had faced the twin challenges of entryism by the Militant Tendency and an essentially right-wing trade union movement that exerted considerable control over the Party. Kinnock had sought to eject the first and reduce the power of the second, dominating Labour through its National Executive Committee (NEC) and his impassioned performances at party conferences. This did not work, and Smith therefore inherited from Kinnock a party whose hopes had been shattered and whose image was still one of being controlled by the unions, who were themselves adversely associated with the unpopular and demonised industrial conflict of the ‘Winter of Discontent’ of 1978–9. However, Smith was an entirely different character to Kinnock – much more the collegiate type of leader – and was famed for his wit in the House of Commons.
The first thing that Smith had to do was to demonstrate that he was in control of the Labour Party and that it spoke with a united voice. At his first meeting as leader, he spoke at the PLP Committee to announce that he ‘wanted to build a collegiate attitude within the Shadow Cabinet, based on confidence and trust’.37 For this he appointed his close friend Murray Elder, general secretary of the Scottish Labour Party, as his chief of staff; Hilary Coffman, previously press officer for Neil Kinnock, as his spokesperson; David Ward as his advisor and head of policy; and David Hill as Labour’s director of 18communications, to ensure that party headquarters and the leader’s office ‘[were] in tune with each other’.38
This last appointment revealed the style that Smith was to adopt. Unlike Kinnock, who sought to destroy his opponents, Smith listened to what his opponents had to say and tried to incorporate them into the party. He listened to the Labour left, such as Dennis Skinner and Clare Short, and even indulged Tony Benn, who had just been ejected from Labour’s NEC after many years’ service. Smith had never been elected to the NEC until he became leader but worked with it, through Elder, to encourage it to vote on issues but also to be in line with leadership policies. He launched new Joint Party Committees (JPCs) and a National Policy Forum (NPF) in November 1992. The latter could only offer policies to the JPCs, which Smith appointed. Despite allowing for different views to be expressed, it was Smith who controlled the NEC, and Peter Shore declared in 1993 that ‘no previous leader had enjoyed such personal and institutional control over party policy’.39
Smith’s real means of control was, however, the PLP, the corporate body of Labour MPs, which, until 1983, had elected the leader and deputy leader of the Labour Party. The PLP minutes are often terse, but they reveal Smith’s strategy in controlling his MPs, as this was the forum for all Labour MPs and all the parliamentary divisions in Labour. Smith used the PLP as a means by which he informed Labour MPs of his policies and as a sounding board to keep abreast of the issues within the rank-and-file of the party.40
Party policy was opposed to the ideas of a Central European Bank, but Smith was committed to the Maastricht Treaty – which the Central Bank was a part of – as the best possible policy for the future.4119Many Labour MPs, including Peter Shore, felt that the Central Bank was undemocratic and not in Britain’s interests and that Smith’s amendment to support it was, in Bryan Gould’s words, ‘infamy’. Gould argued that the Treaty was ‘an outstanding audacious statement of the bankers’ ambition to achieve power’. But in the end, Smith carried the PLP vote overwhelmingly by 112 votes to forty-five. In March 1993, Smith backed this with the commitment that the next Labour government would bring the European convention on political and social rights into British law, thereby guaranteeing freedom of speech, a controversial issue in its own right.42
The Maastricht Treaty remained a running sore amongst Labour MPs, however, and it emerged as an issue again on Wednesday 10 March 1993 when Denzil Davies rejected the idea, under the Treaty, of member states not being able to run up a financial deficit of more than 3 per cent. Davies, supported by Austin Mitchell, argued that the Treaty would allow the Central Bank to rule the national economies. However, Smith won by ninety-four to thirty-five votes to support it. The only reservation was that the shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, suggested that a future Labour government would not contemplate joining the single currency until five stringent economic tests were met. But alternative views had been expressed at least, with Peter Hain, a leading opponent of Maastricht, saying after the PLP’s votes that ‘we’ve lost, but at least we’ve been heard’.43 Smith, having got his way, had George Robertson, the shadow Secretary of State for Scotland, harry the government over the bill. When the vote was taken, sixty-eight Labour MPs voted against the Maastricht Treaty, including Kate Hoey, a junior party spokesperson whom Smith sacked. 20
Smith’s demonstrable control of the Labour Party depended upon one vital thing: his reduction of the power of the trade unions within the Labour Party. The overriding demonstration of his control was the securing of one member, one vote (OMOV) system at the Labour Party conference in Brighton in September 1993. The conference had already made it clear in 1990 that it would reduce the block vote at conferences from 90 per cent to 70 per cent, and this was implemented in 1992, at Smith’s first conference as Labour leader. In making his bid for the Labour leadership on 14 April 1992, Smith argued that he would continue with the modernisation of the party, emphasising, ‘I believe that we must continue to develop a wider democracy within the Party based, wherever appropriate, on the clear principle of one member one vote.’44
At the September 1993 Labour Party conference, the method of electing the Labour leader was altered to give equal weighting to the three parts of the electoral college – MPs/MEPs, trade unions and Constituency Labour Parties (CLPs) – and to change the system so both trade unions and the CLPs had to ballot their members before casting a vote.45 This itself was not that problematic but the extension of OMOV to the selection of parliamentary candidates, which was designed to weaken the power of activists over their MPs, was divisive. The democratisation of the election procedure in the 1980s had empowered activists and trade unions at conferences to force the mandatory reselection of MPs, thus retaining some control over future Labour governments. Kinnock tried to reform the system in the mid-1980s and gradually won over the CLPs, but some key left-wing unions opposed and threatened to defeat the measure, and he was unable to win support for it at the 1992 Labour Party 21conference. John Edmonds, general secretary of the GMB Union, was strongly opposed to the changes and told his union’s conference at Portsmouth in June 1993 that he ‘will not compromise in the battle to retain the trade union block vote at Labour conferences’.46 This was in response to Smith’s appearance on Radio 4’s The World This Weekend to put the case for change. The following day, Smith had Brown and Robin Cook start the campaign for OMOV by writing to each constituency party, who already had seen their vote share increase from 10 per cent to 30 per cent at the last conference.
A month before the Labour Party conference, Smith made a passionate speech at the TUC Conference on 7 September.47 After offering a parody of Tory failures, Smith attempted to woo the TUC with his commitments to public services, which Smith asserted the Tories did not truly believe in, minimum wage legislation and the Maastricht Treaty – to ensure that the Social Chapter was accepted, giving the working people of Britain what the members of other states of Europe were receiving. Pursuing this commitment to industrial democracy, Smith emphasised that Labour was proposing a new Charter of Rights, which would ‘give all workers basic employment rights which will come into force on the first day of a Labour government’.48 Indeed, that meant equal rights for part-time and full-time, temporary and permanent workers, including protection against unfair dismissal and the right of all workers to join unions, which would have to be recognised by their employers. It was the type of message that the much-reduced membership of the TUC wished to hear.
Despite this, it was reported that Smith would face a humiliating defeat over the OMOV resolution. John Monks, the new TUC general secretary, felt that ‘Labour must put more flesh on the bones and 22say what it stands for’.49 The GMB was also to hold a fringe meeting at the Brighton Conference, which, according to the Sunday Times, ‘[threatened] to overshadow Smith’s address to the conference’.50 There was particular opposition from the National Union of Public Employees (NUPE), the Union of Communication Workers and the Transport and General Workers’ Union about the part of the OMOV resolution that suggested that 5.5 million trade union members who paid a levy to the Labour Party would have to pay £3 extra to be able to vote on the selection of parliamentary candidates.51 There was a widespread expectation that Smith would be humiliated and some feeling that Smith would have to go further than the ‘one more heave’ approach that OMOV represented, alongside the Bills of Rights, the Freedom of Information Bill, electoral reform, devolved power and electoral reform that Labour was offering for the next election.52
Nevertheless, in a master stroke, Smith linked OMOV and the £3 extra payment by trade unionists to vote with the implementation of a quota system for women where the seats were winnable. This meant that the Manufacturing, Science and Finance Union (MSF), which was strongly opposed to OMOV but held a commitment to all-women shortlists, abstained. This turned out to be vital: MSF held 4.5 per cent of the vote and the winning margin for OMOV was only 3.1 per cent.53
