Friday 12 February 1993

CRISIS MANAGER: INTERVIEW WITH LARRY WHITTY

Tribune, 12 February 1993

Labour's general secretary tells Paul Anderson about the party's problems with cash and morale

"It is clear that there is a morale and in­volvement problem in many constituen­cies," says Larry Whitty.

"We need to give new life to party branches. The whole party organi­sation needs a big shake-up. We need to change the whole ethos of the organisation. The level of mem­bership at the moment is worrying. We need to take some major new initiatives. While the more alarmist figures about our real membership are wrong, we are on a declining trend and that needs some dramatic initiatives to reverse it."

It is unusual to find a politician prepared to ad­mit that his or her party is in a terrible mess, but it is hardly surprising that Labour's general secre­tary is prepared to go public about the state of the organisation of which he is manager-in-chief.

Whitty, who was appointed in 1985 and is now aged 49, has just finished presiding over production of a draconian cost-cutting plan, passed by the par­ty's National Executive Committee last month, which will see Labour's organisation slimmed down as never before in living memory. And his next task will be to steer the potentially explosive debate that will follow publication of the report on links with the trade unions.

Labour's financial plight is grave, he says, and the main reason is a projected decline in income from the unions and from membership fees. "The fundraising is going very well. But on all our esti­mates we are going to face a real income cut next year of at least 30 per cent compared with where we were before the election. A very substantial part of our support will continue to come from the trade unions but they are going to suffer further losses of membership. The worst case scenario would be that unions vote no in their political fund ballots. But income could go down further than 30 per cent in any case.”
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The upshot is that, even with increases in trade union affiliation fees and levies on MPs, MEPs and councillors, massive cuts in spending arc unavoid­able: the only question is where they are made. Whitty, now backed not just by Labour's finance working party but also by the NEC, argues that the choice had to be made on the basis of the experi­ence of the last general election. The Tories had a pathetic central organisation and an almost non­-existent regional one," he says. "But they did have very effective local organisation and they did shift national resources to the local level.

"Similarly, the greatest success of the election was our performance in some key marginals. We need to shift resources closer to the ground for a longer period, away from head office and away from regional offices. Unless we shift personnel and money closer to where the battleground is going to be at the next general election and in the Euro-elections, we're not going to have the organisation that we need."

Last month the NEC agreed to change the ratio of party expenditure on head office, regions and lo­cal parties from 75:20:5 to 60:20:20. The number of staff at Labour's Walworth Road headquarters will be reduced from 130 to 90, with research particu­larly badly hit, while the party's English regions will be cut from nine to six or seven.

Other cuts will include a reduction in the regu­larity of Labour's youth, women's, local government and European conferences, the replacement of re­gional conferences with regional input into the pro­posed national policy forum process, abandonment of the bookshop and library service and a reduction in the volume of bumf put out by Labour.

Whitty puts a brave face on the cuts, arguing that the shift of resources to local parties will mean that Labour will be able to regenerate itself from the bottom up and that the paring down at the cen­tre will force greater openness on the policy-mak­ing process. The party plans a series of campaigns for ordinary members to get stuck into and hopes to draw into the policy-making process many of the experts whose services were shunned by Labour when Neil Kinnock was leader.

"I do not consider that we need to issue as many detailed policy statements as we did," Whitty says. "We need real strategic thinking about policy. Our policy-making also needs to be more outward-look­ing. We need to inspire and mobilise outside exper­tise, which to some extent we phased out in the past few years. The relationship with the pressure groups and the academic community is not as good as it should be."

He hopes that changes in policy-making will im­prove that relationship "There are resource con­straints, but the principle of a rolling programme and the principle of involving all elements of the party will be maintained. The suspicions about this process are misplaced. Policy-making will be more open than in the past."

Meanwhile, he goes on, the teething troubles of Labour's national membership system are well on the way to being ironed out. "It's been one of my most serious headaches in the past few years. But although there are still problems with it, we've got over the worst. We made a mistake in trying to in­troduce the whole system at once and by not having communication with branches, which is where members are made, not at constituency level. There were also a number of technical and staffing prob­lems." Now, however, the national party has direct communication with branches and the regions will soon be linked into the national membership scheme's computers.

As for Labour Party News, the free magazine sent to all party members, it will be slimmed down and become a newspaper but will not be closed, "It's essential that the national party has some way of communicating half-a-dozen times a year with all party members."

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Whitty’s worries do not stop with money: he is also charged with the unenviable task of acting as midwife to a new settle­ment between Labour and the trade unions.

Last week, the NEC working party on the union-party link met to discuss an options paper which, says Whitty, “will almost certainly form" the basis of its submission to the NEC. "The working party reaffirms the role of the trade unions and states that the unions will continue to have a major part in our policy-making and organisation. We want to preserve involvement by the trade unions in the party, both through their delegations to conference and as a means of generating substantial support for the party among affiliated trade union mem­bers."

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Whitty is not very hap­py about the way that Labour's debate on the union link has turned at times into spectacular public feuding. "There are some very fundamental debates going on in the party which need to go on, not just on trade unions but also on social justice, economic policy and the electoral system. All will be subject to wide consultation. They need to be taken slowly and seriously and not degenerate into a sort of Mods versus Rockers confrontation."

The author of Labour's official post-mortem on last year's election defeat, he is particularly an­noyed at the way Labour's warring factions have learned from Bill Clinton's winning American Pres­idential campaign.

"The Clinton campaign did not have an argu­ment about whether to concentrate on the Democrats' core vote or whether to reach out to new constituencies. It first of all consolidated the core vote then extended the appeal outwards. We need to do the same. That's a real long haul.

"Having a leadership contest immediately after the election defeat, and the government being on the ropes during the autumn, delayed the self-anal­ysis that the party needed to engage in. I'm not un­happy about that. We needed the dust to settle a bit. Now we've got to structure the debate. People who are asking for immediate answers are not do­ing the party a service. The party is not in great shape in many parts of the country and is undoubt­edly disheartened by this current argument.”