Friday 8 May 1992

THE IDEAS MAN: INTERVIEW WITH BRYAN GOULD


Tribune, 8 May 1992

In the first of a series of interviews with the contenders for Labour's leadership and deputy leadership, Paul Anderson talks to the MP for Dagenham

“I very much regret that we're involved in a leadership election before we've had time for reflection," says Bryan Gould, who, despite his regrets, is now running for the party's leadership and deputy leadership. "We need to work out what we want to take for­ward to 1996. 'One more heave' isn't good enough."

The 53-year-old environment spokesman is very much the outside chance for the leadership and he knows it. When he launched his campaign last week, after managing to get eight more than the necessary 55 nominations from MPs to enter the race, he told journalists that John Smith, the shad­ow chancellor, was "clear front-runner" for the top job. Even some of Gould's supporters say that the best that he can hope for is the deputy leadership.

Gould, however, is convinced that he can win votes both from the Constituency Labour Parties and from those trade unions which ballot their members on the contest and reckons that he might just pip Smith to the post. “The picture is by no means as clear-cut as people think,” he says. "We've had a flood of offers of help from all over the country. I’m fighting to win the leadership."

Whether or not his optimism is justified, there is no doubt that his criticisms of the "insensitivity* of Smith's proposals, in his shadow budget, to in­crease income tax have struck a chord among party members in the south-east. Labour's plan to abol­ish the upper earnings limit on national insurance contributions (NICs), which are currently paid only on the first £21,000 of earnings, is widely perceived as the main reason for Labour failing to take many of its target seats in the country's most affluent region.

“I’m not opposed to tax redistribution: no social­ist could be," says Gould. "But a cleverer package could have been put together which had the same objectives but was not so crude in the way that it resolved the anomaly on NICs."

For Gould, however, the most important thing about Labour's tax plans was that they were just about the only macro-economic policy the party had on offer. "We can't just sit back and say, 'Let every­thing rip, let market forces take effect, and we'll come along afterwards and deal with the problems through redistributive taxation'," he says.

An alternative approach to economic policy is at the core of Gould's platform: "I don't accept the monetarist line, which 1 think has been accepted by the party by implication, that the only function of economic policy is to establish monetary stability."

As Labour's trade and industry spokesman be­tween 1987 and 1989, he developed a much more interventionist industrial policy than was subse­quently adopted, and he is is still in favour of the measures with which he was then associated: greatly increased planning powers for the Depart­ment of Trade and Industry, legislation to encour­age investment in Britain by pension funds and in­creased worker participation, strict controls on mergers.

More controversially (at least now that Michael Heseltine's appointment as President of the Board of Trade has made interventionism respectable again), Gould is also in favour of devaluation of sterling as part of a realignment of currencies with­in the exchange rate mechanism of the European Monetary System. "We have seen the damage we suffer if we try to run an over-valued pound. But the right way forward is not to take unilateral ac­tion. There is almost certain to be a realignment and I'd like to see the Labour Party ahead of the game for once. If we continue to defend an over-val­ued exchange rate, we will continue to crucify manufacturing industry."

Surely, though, the inflationary implications of devaluation would make it even more vulnerable to Tory attack at election time than promising to put up taxes? Gould agrees - up to a point. "We don't want to get hooked on these technicalities at the time of a general election, which is why we need to have the debate now," he says. "Handled correctly, getting the exchange rate right does not carry severe inflationary consequences. It stimulates production and that in itself is a pow­erful anti-inflationary fac­tor.  A devaluation does raise the price of imports by comparison with domestic goods, but we have to do that. That's the only way we can survive. We have to alter that price and val­ue-for-money equation, otherwise we continue to go down the drain."

Devaluation is one clear difference between Gould and Smith; another, intimately related, is Europe. A former parliamentary private secretary to Peter Shore, Gould was a leading parliamentary opponent of the Euro­pean Community for most of the eighties. Although he is at pains to emphasise that he is not an "un­remitting negativist” – "I've always been much more in favour of a co-ordinated foreign policy than most of my colleagues," he says, "and the notion that a European central bank should be in London was my idea" – he remains far more sceptical than Smith or most of the rest of the Labour front bench.

"I think the common agricultural policy was and is nonsense," he says. "And I'm very critical of the way in which the ERM operates as a deflationary mechanism.'' He argues that a single European cur­rency should be created only after convergence of rates of unemployment and growth across the EC, and voices support for the creation of something not far removed from the Tories' long-forgotten "hard ECU", a European currency operating along­side existing currencies rather than merging the currencies into one.

Gould recognises that there is a strong argument from the left that there is now no alternative to European management of the economy, but he is uneasy about its implications. 'The Left in post­war Britain and post-war Europe got very close to a very substantial achievement: within the confines of the national economy it had sorted Out a deal with capital to give labour had a fair share. But what then happened, almost as we were talking about it, was that capital found a way of escaping that deal by going international. The more we've gone down the road of deregulation of the move­ment of capital and all the rest of it, the more diffi­cult it has become for labour to keep that deal in place, to exercise control over capital.

"The obvious response is that, if capital is oper­ating internationally, we must have international political organisations able to deal with it. Of course, that's part of the answer, but it is also fraught with difficulties. It's very easy to say, 'Right, let's step up European institutions.' But, in the process of doing so, we're conceding defeat, on at least part of the socialist project, which is to keep power close and diffuse, so people have as much power over their own destinies as possible."

Decentralisation is one of the things that Gould wants to see being discussed in a United Kingdom constitutional convention, modelled on the Scottish Constitutional Convention, which draws in all the Opposition political parties and a broad range of non-party bodies. He is open to electoral reform, he says, but believes that the most important thing is for a wide-ranging debate to take place. "Our role as the major Opposition party is not just to contest damn thing and to go in sot product differentiation in respect of everybody. We should consciously be making common ground with other groups and parties where that's possible, in an at­tempt to isolate the Tories. That general approach would also do a great deal to overcome the gender gap, which is still a very worrying aspect of our performance. Many women are put off by the ma­cho style of our adversarial politics."

On Labour’s internal organisation, Gould is a cautious reformer. Although he wants to see a party far more con­trolled by individual members, and an electoral college for the leadership in which only in­dividual members vote, he doesn't want to see the end of the party's link with the unions or the aboli­tion of the union block vote at party conference.

"What I want to see is a means by which individ­ual political levy-payers who want that money to support the Labour Party are somehow entitled to indicate that, and that then becomes an individual membership of the Labour Party. I don't say that that's an easy thing to arrange, but that must be the way forward. At the same time, I think it's per­fectly right for the trade unions as organisations to have a vote on all confer­ence decisions: there should be a substantial proportion of votes, at least 20 per cent, for affili­ated organisations. They should also have represen­tation on the National Ex­ecutive Committee."

Now, though, his priori­ty is winning under the current system – and that means a period of hectic activity between now and July 18, the day of Labour's special leadership conference. The Gould campaign has set up in offices in the same building as the Fabian Society's headquarters and is busy organising meetings at trade union conferences and with constituency parties, stuffing envelopes and canvassing support, on the telephone. Any weariness in anyone's manner can only be because so recently they were all doing exactly the same in the hope of winning the general election.