Friday 8 May 1992

SAFETY FIRST IS A RISK TOO FAR


Tribune leader, 9 May 1992

The preliminary report on the gen­eral  election campaign  by Larry Whitty, Labour's general secretary, has come in for a lot of stick in the week since it was presented to the par­ty's National Executive Committee. Sup­porters of Bryan Gould have described it as a "whitewash", complaining that it skates over criticisms of the organisa­tion and content of the campaign, and others have denounced it as superficial. Some of this criticism is justified: the document does not have enough detail on several key questions, notably the ef­fects of Labour's taxation policy, and barely mentions others, for example the role   of  the   Shadow   Communications Agency in the campaign organisation, which many believe was too great.

But on the whole the criticism is un­fair. Given Mr Whitty's brief, to assess Labour's performance in the four weeks before election day, he has not done a bad job. He correctly identifies Labour's main problem during the campaign - a late swing away from the party in the last couple of days before April 9 - and rightly cautions against blaming any specific event or failure of the campaign before the last few days for what hap­pened, although he is critical, albeit mildly, of the national campaign's clum­sy handling of tax, health, education and constitutional reform, and he is cutting about the triumphalist rally in Sheffield a week before polling day.

He praises Labour's organisation and its concentration on key seats, which in­deed yielded impressive results, and he argues, again rightly, that Labour's poor showing among older women and younger men needs fuller analysis, as do its lacklustre performances among its core voters (council tenants, semi-­skilled and unskilled manual workers and the unemployed) and in Scotland. It is not a masterpiece of political analysis, but then it was not intended to be. For what it is, a preliminary report on what went wrong, concentrating ex­clusively on the election campaign prop­er, it is difficult to imagine what Mr Whitty could have done very differently. The campaign was a good one and the party cannot make scapegoats of the campaign organisers for the defeat.

This is not, however, to argue that Mr Whitty’s paper should be the last word on Labour's defeat. However well he has done his job, there is another to be done. The party needs to look long and hard at what happened before the campaign it­self started.

The election might indeed have been lost as a result of a late swing away from Labour caused by "general perceptions of the party”, in particular the ideas that the party's leadership was not up to scratch and that a Labour government could not be trusted.

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But this does not mean that there was anything Labour could have done differently in the few weeks before the election radically to im­prove its performance.

Deep-rooted perceptions of compe­tence and trustworthiness are built up over years, not weeks. At the very least, the post mortem needs to expand its terms of reference to take in the whole of the past five years.

If Labour's tactics need to be chewed over at greater length, its strategy needs to be subjected to a thorough, no-holds-barred critique. Better still, the party could open up a discussion of its values, its culture, its very raison d'etre.

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Unfortunately, however, there is little indication of willingness to engage in anything quite so interesting at the top of the party. John Smith is now almost certain to be the next party leader. There are some hope­ful signs in his manifesto for the leader­ship campaign, launched last week: he is, he says, in favour of a serious discus­sion of the way forward, he has an open mind about constitutional reform, he wants to democratise the party, he will be an "accessible" leader. His proposed all-party commission to examine social justice could be an exciting forum for new ideas.

But the general impression given by his manifesto remains that of "business as usual": the discipline of the exchange rate mechanism, the importance of re-distributive taxation and supply-side measures as the core of macro-economic policy, going with the flow on Europe. It is a decent, solid social democratic pack­age, completely consistent with Labour's thinking in the past couple of years, probably election-winning - if only we were fighting the election we have just lost.

If Labour had fought the 1992 election on an uncompromisingly traditional leftist manifesto, if Labour had been ob­viously influenced by the 1968 genera­tion's libertarianism, if it had even just done a little better than it did on solid, decent, cautious redistributive austerity social democracy – if it had not been as it was, Mr Smith’s approach might have been just the ticket. As it is, Labour looks as if it is hanging on to nurse. Safety first fits the mood of the elec­torate today, perhaps, but it is already looking like a high-risk strategy for the next election.