WHERE NEXT FOR CND?

Tribune, 22 November 1991

Britain's largest peace movement organisation is going through a difficult patch. Paul Anderson reports

It has not been the best of years for the Campaign for Nu­clear Disarmament.

Last autumn, despite all its ef­forts, it proved incapable of turn­ing public opinion against the use of force to get Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. Once the war started, CND was marginalised and incapacitated by the political wran­gling among its supposed allies in the anti-war movement.

In the spring, it only narrowly missed severe political embarrass­ment when it went ahead with plans to hold its annual Easter demonstration in Barrow-in-Furness, where Britain's new Trident nuclear missile submarines are be­ing built, within a fortnight of the announcement of massive job loss­es at the town's VSEL shipyard.

Since then, CND has made the headlines less for its campaigns than for losing Neil and Glenys Kinnock as members and for being short of cash. Amid accusations of financial incompetence, its monthly magazine, Sanity, has been shut down. Staffing at every level of the organisation has been drastically pruned. Last week came the news that CND had lost the Glastonbury Festival to Greenpeace, the environmentalist pressure group.

But perhaps none of this should come as much of a surprise. CND grew in the eighties in response to a spectacular  increase in tension between the two superpower-dominated blocs, in the wake of the So­viet invasion of Afghanistan and, crucially, Nato's December 1979 decision to station new intermedi­ate-range nuclear force (INF) mis­siles (ground-launched cruise and Pershing II) in western Europe.

On the crest of a wave of popu­lar opposition to the plans for cruise bases at Greenham Com­mon and Molesworth, the cam­paign's national membership grew from 3,000 to more than 100,000 within a year of the Nato decision. But through the late eighties the international tensions which revived CND slowly disappeared.

Under Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union, wilting under the pressure of military spending, made concession after concession to the United States to secure de­tente and arms control. The 1985 Geneva summit between Ronald Reagan and Gorbachev broke a lit­tle ice; by the time of the Reyk­javik summit a year later, the thaw was well and truly under way. In 1987, the United States and the Soviet Union signed the INF Treaty, agreeing to scrap all ground-launched INF missiles. Commentators began to say that CND's work had been done.

At first, CND responded by em­phasising how much had not changed. Nato was still commit­ted to an aggressive nuclear war-fighting strategy and was planning "modernisation" of its non-INF nu­clear systems in Europe (short-range ground-launched missiles and artillery and air-launched and sea-launched weapons); Britain was still insistent on build­ing Trident.

True as all this was, however, it was increasingly unconvincing. CND seemed out of touch with popular sentiment: for most people in Britain, as elsewhere in Europe, the new detente meant that the threat of nuclear war had passed. The high-profile celebrity and intellectual supporters drifted away to other causes. CND's mem­bership slowly but inexorably de­clined.

The campaign's influence in par­ty politics went the same way. The peace movement, ineffective during the 1987 general election, was powerless to prevent Labour from dropping unilateral nuclear disar­mament in 1988-89. By the time that the 1989 revo­lutions overthrew the Soviet Union's client states in eastern Europe, the core message of the early-eighties peace movement seemed strangely obsolete even to many who had turned up on the big Hyde Park demonstrations.

In the face of all this, CND could have simply decided to contract and bang away regardless on the same old themes. Instead, perhaps over-impressed by the share of the vote taken by the Green Party in the 1989 European elections, it at­tempted to broaden its agenda, away from nuclear weapons and nuclear strategy and towards more general peace and security themes: the "peace dividend", low-flying military aircraft, the future of Eu­rope after the collapse of commu­nism and the Warsaw Pact, the arms trade, the Middle East.

The result was a much better magazine – Sanity was at its best in its last months – but an increasingly confused and direction­less campaign which did not seem to know its priorities. Morale in the campaign's head office reached an all-time low.

The international crisis that fol­lowed the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August last year changed all that at a stroke. CND suddenly found a sense of purpose in oppos­ing military intervention in the Gulf.

Unfortunately, however, not least because it never managed to get its arguments for sanctions against Iraq to be heard above the din of Trotskyist calls for Iraqi vic­tory against the imperialists, that sense of purpose failed to make any impact on British public opin­ion.

After some impressively large demonstrations before war broke out, CND and the rest of the anti-war movement was sidelined dur­ing the conflict, its representatives reduced to claiming that the demonstrations would get bigger when the body bags started com­ing home. The rapid collapse of Iraqi resistance in Kuwait after the land offensive began left the argument in tatters and CND's credibility badly damaged. The Kurds^’ rebel­lion saw CND as dumbfounded as George Bush. Since the end of the Gulf war, CND has drifted, its energies sapped by a burgeoning financial crisis and staff morale sinking ever lower as political differences have deepened.

Meanwhile, Greenpeace (which employs several former CND staff) has effectively taken over the CND campaign on the safety of Britain's ancient Polaris submarines. Other nuclear weapons issues are in­creasingly dealt with by former CNDers working independently, notably the British American Se­curity Council (BASIC), which has cornered the market on radical re­search into NATO. Unlike the en­vironmentalist pressure groups, CND now does little original re­search.

CND's annual conference this weekend in London is likely to see the fiercest argument for a decade over the campaign's direction. Es­sentially, the choice is between re­trenchment on CND's traditional anti-nuclear weapons platform and endorsement of a much more general anti-militarist perspective.

The campaign's chair, Marjorie Thompson, is in favour of broaden­ing, the agenda. "Trident, non-pro­liferation, the arms trade – all these issues, as well as beginning to right the wrongs perpetrated in our own lives by racism and vio­lence, form the basis of CND coming of age as a movement for peace and justice," she wrote re­cently in the New Statesman.

Others are sceptical about the desirability and feasibility of such a process, pointing to CND's per­ilous financial circumstances and to the unfinished business from the campaign’s traditional agenda: Trident, the surviving elements of Nato’s  nuclear moderni­sation programme, particularly the tactical air-to-surface missiles that are still planned to replace the alliance's stock of free-fall nu­clear bombs. Why bother to dupli­cate the work of the Campaign Against the Arms Trade and anti-racist organisations, they ask.

As is the way with conferences, a neat resolution of the argument is unlikely to take place this weekend. Unless CND gets its act to­gether, however, it is difficult to believe that the future of the cam­paign will be anything but bleak.

FAREWELL TO THE COMMUNIST PARTY

Tribune leader, 22 November 1991

Unless there is a last-minute upset, the Communist Party of Great Britain will cease to exist this weekend. Few win mourn its death. Of course, many good comrades went through the CP. Even disillu­sioned former communists talk warmly of the rare sense of comradeship they experienced in the party. But in its three-quarters of a century existence, the CP has caused a vast amount of harm to the British left. In the end it is difficult to think of anything worth­while it has done that would not have been done as well by others in its absence.

Indeed, even without playing the game of "what if”, the list of concrete CP achievements is short. In the thirties, it organised the unemployed workers' move­ment and had a significant (although not dominant) role in opposing fascism on the streets and in the corri­dors of power. But it threw away nearly all its credibil­ity with its acceptance of the Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939. Since then, practically all it has to boast about is some effective trade union organisation in the sixties and seventies, a certain amount of influence over Labour economic policy at the time of the Alternative Econom­ic Strategy and an almost-successful monthly maga­zine, now alas on its last legs, in the eighties.

Against this, there are the CP’s many failings. Most sickening, of course, there is its long acquiescence in the crimes of its Soviet master – Stalin's forced collec­tivisation of agriculture, the show trials, the commu­nist suppression of the radical left in the Spanish civil war, the imposition of communist dictatorship on east­ern Europe after 1946 and its maintenance by brute force.

Only in 1968, after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslo­vakia, did the British party first distance itself from Moscow; it now emerges that it was still receiving substantial subsidies from the Kremlin as late as 1979.

But other, smaller things are almost as difficult to forgive: the attempts to take over autonomous move­ments, the front organisations, the ballot-rigging, the everyday lies, authoritarianism and manipulation vali­dated by the Leninist nostrum that the end justifies the means.

Enough, however, of the ashes. What of the phoenix apparently rising from them, Democratic Left? It is cer­tainly a very different creature from the old CP. It is no longer a Leninist "democratic centralist" party, and there is much in its programme with which anyone from the democratic left – an older, larger and livelier political current than that represented by today's "transformed" communists – could agree. The new par­ty (or non-party) looks as if it will be impressively open, democratic, libertarian, environmentalist and feminist. Perhaps, if we were starting to build British social democracy from scratch, we would start with something like Democratic Left rather than attempting to create the hotch-potch that is the Labour Party.

The problem is that we are not starting from scratch: Labour already exists, and, whatever its faults, they are not sufficient, at least in the eyes of most of the democratic Labour Left, to justify demolition and re­building. The ex-communists might be able to set up an interesting debating society and they might be able to initiate some successful campaigns. But Democratic Left is never going to attract sufficient support to be­come a significant electoral force or even to play a ma­jor role in setting the left agenda. It is difficult to see why the comrades did not simply dissolve the CP and join the Labour Party.

ANOTHER CLANGER ON THE DOORSTEPS

Tribune leader, 15 November 1991

Local government finance is hardly the most excit­ing political issue facing Britain today. But it is one of the most electorally telling. Local taxation affects everyone and one of the main reasons the Tories are in such a mess is their extraordinarily incompetent experiment with the poll tax.

The poll tax is unfair, uncollectable and universally unpopular and it is not surprising that the Tories want to put it behind them. They had been hoping, however, to do so in a leisurely fashion after winning an autumn election this year. Instead, the election was postponed in the face of opinion polls showing that the Tories would not win – and Michael Heseltine was made to bring forward the council tax legislation. The council tax bill will be rushed through parliament in time to give the Tories the option of calling the election before next year's poll tax bills, which are certain to be mas­sive because of the level of non-payment, drop on to the nation's doormats. With this in mind, the government has allowed the bare minimum of parliamentary time for scrutiny of the legislation.

The upshot is that we will be lumbered with a local government tax which, if marginally less regressive than the poll tax, is almost as unfair and just as un­workable. The council tax valuation process is laugh­ably arbitrary and appeals against valuation decisions will overload any conceivable system. The discount for single-person households is virtually an invitation to tax avoidance. And the retention of draconian central government capping powers makes a mockery of the principle of local accountability. Add the patent unfair­ness of the banding structure, which means that a fami­ly in a suburban semi will pay the same as one in a country mansion, and the council tax has all the makings of a disaster. A return to the rates with an improved rebate system, as Labour has advocated, would have been simpler, fairer and above all infinitely more practicable.

Facing up to racism

The Conservative Party has never been averse to us­ing race to win elections: since the fifties, it has con­sistently stood as the party that is "toughest on im­migration" and most insistent that minority ethnic groans conform to the "British way of life". The Asylum Bill, as mean-minded a piece of legislation as any put forward under Margaret Thatcher, is entirely consis­tent with the Tory record. So too is the slimy treatment meted out to Ashok Kumar by the Tories in the Langbaurgh by-election last week. However much Chris Pat­ten and John Major deny it, the Tories are playing the race card in the run-up to the general election.

That, however, is only the start of the problem. If a significant proportion of voters were not themselves racist, there would be no point in the Tories, or anyone else, trying to grab votes by playing up race issues. It is quite right for Labour to deplore the Tories’ tactics, but it would be far better for the party to spend a little more time and energy developing long-term policies to combat the racism endemic in British society. A Black Socialist Society within the party and pledges to tight­en up the law on racial discrimination are not enough.

WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE

Tribune leader, 8 November 1991

Whether he fell, jumped or was pushed from his yacht, Robert Maxwell is dead. Few in the Labour movement will mourn him, although many will claim to. He was never a popular figure during his brief period as Labour MP for Buckingham in the six­ties, and he made few friends as a businessman.

Yet many Labour politicians felt that they simply had to get on with him. From 1984, he was the megalomaniac hands-on proprietor of the Daily Mirror and its Sunday and Scottish sister papers - and the Mirror, Britain's second most-popular newspaper, was Labour's only friend on Fleet Street. The  politicians believed that Maxwell, accountable to no one, could make or break Labour and they acted accordingly: they crawled.

How far this affected Labour policy is arguable. But Labour would certainly have moved to the right dur­ing the eighties more slowly without the weight of Maxwell pulling it in that direction. And some felt that the influence of his uncritical enthusiasm for Israel on Labour's Middle East policy was considerable.

Labour is now watching nervously as the fate of Mir­ror Group Newspapers, 51 per cent of which is owned by the Maxwell family, is decided. The assumption is that Ian Maxwell, the deputy chairman until his fa­ther's death, will continue the newspapers' backing for Labour, but no one is sure. There is even speculation that the Maxwell empire's debt problems will force the sale of the family's share, perhaps to a Tory press baron, thus eliminating support for Labour from the popular press. This very possibility should stiffen Labour resolve to legislate to ensure press pluralism as soon as it comes to office.

Uneasy with Europe

The enthusiasm for Europe currently being shown by Labour stops well short of embracing the creation of a democratic federal European government, either chosen by direct election of a president or drawn from the European Parliament by a prime minister who is also an MEP.

The reasons for this are multiple. In the short term, there is no doubt that Labour's position is a simple matter of electoral opportunism: avoiding an explicit commitment to democratic European government avoids a damaging split in the party and does not frighten those of the party's older supporters who dis­like foreigners and believe that Britannia still rules the waves.

At a deeper level, Labour's leaders are all politi­cians who decided to make Westminster the focus of their political careers in the belief that the government of Britain was what really mattered. They are ill at ease with Europe and know that embracing the goal of democratic European federal government would amount to an admission that they were wrong – some­thing politicians hate doing. Far better for them to pre­tend that an ill-defined greater role for the Council of Ministers and other ministerial forums, along with a small increase in the powers of the European Parlia­ment, would suffice to keep the EC democratically ac­countable after economic and political union.

In reality, Labour's current proposals involve en­dorsement of plans to give more power to Brussels bu­reaucrats with only the scantest thought about how to make them more answerable to the people whose lives their decisions will affect. They are wholly inadequate if Labour really means to "democratise" the EC. If its rhetoric is to be taken seriously, sooner or later Labour will have to come out in favour of a democratically ac­countable federal European government.

MAKING A CENTRAL BANK ACCOUNTABLE

Tribune leader, 1 November 1991

Labour has welcomed the draft treaty on European monetary union tabled by the Dutch presidency of the European Community this week, although it is rightly scornful of the ridiculous "get-out" clause in­cluded only to help John Major avoid a massive schism in the Tory Party. Labour believes that many of the points it has been arguing for have been taken on board by the Dutch – most of all, an enhanced role for Ecofin, the European Council of Finance Ministers, in overseeing the workings of the planned European cen­tral bank, particularly in determining exchange rate policy.

Tribune shares Labour's enthusiasm for a single Eu­ropean currency. Much detail remains to be sorted out, and the transition period in the run-up to Euro­pean monetary union will be difficult for a British economy weakened by more than a decade of Tory mismanagement. But there is no alternative: the era in which medium-sized nation states had the ability to exercise a substantial measure of control over their economies is long since past, and the creation of a sin­gle European currency is a precondition for the EC be­ing able effectively to fill the economic policy gap.

Labour is also right to argue that the European cen­tral bank must be made politically accountable. Its role will be far too important to be left to the Euro­pean equivalent of Treasury bureaucrats. But Labour's position does not go anywhere near for enough.

Giving increased powers of oversight over the central bank to the EC's finance ministers is better than nothing, but it is not as good as giving those powers to a select com­mittee drawn either from the national parliaments of the EC or, better still, from the European Parliament. The European Parliament is directly elected in EC-wide elections, and is the nearest thing we have to a democratically representative EC institution. There is no reason that it should not oversee the European central bank just as the United States Congress oversees the Federal Reserve.

LABOUR MUST SORT OUT SELECTIONS

Tribune leader, 25 October 1991

By-elections, particularly those just before gen­eral elections, have for years been national rather than local political events, and the cost of failure is immense. The defeats for Labour in Bermondsey in 1983 and Greenwich in 1987 dealt savage blows to the party's morale throughout the country and severely damaged its credibility with the voters.

No one in the Labour Party wants anything like those defeats to happen again, and it is reasonable for Labour nationally to do what it can to minimise the risk of by-election embarrassment. Regrettably, but un­avoidably given the vulnerability to hostile media cov­erage of Labour candidates, that includes the national party intervening in the local selection procedure to ensure that candidates can withstand the inevitable heat during the campaign – even in seats in which the proverbial donkey wearing a Labour rosette would have no difficulty in a general election. Hemsworth might be one of the safest Labour seats in the country, but then so were Glasgow Govan and Bermondsey.

That does not, however, excuse the heavy-handed way in which the National Executive Committee panel dealt last week with the selection for the November 7 by-election in Hemsworth in Yorkshire. Ken Capstick, the vice-chair of the National Union of Mineworkers  Yorkshire area, had been nominated by half the con­stituency's branches and most of its affiliated unions. Hemsworth is a mining constituency and Mr Capstick is, from all accounts, a decent man and a popular local figure. He is on the left and perhaps a little unenthusiastic about certain elements of current Labour policy; but he is by no means a wild-eyed Trotskyist, and it is no crime to have views at variance with party policy – just about everyone does on something or other. It is difficult to see how his selection could possibly have prejudiced Labour's chances in either Hemsworth or Langbaurgh, the Tory-held marginal which also has a by-election on November 7 and which Ashok Kumar should win for Labour.

In short, on almost any grounds Mr Capstick would seem to be an acceptable candidate. Yet the NEC panel decided to remove his name from the shortlist and, when the constituency party refused to make a selec­tion from a shortlist that did not include him, simply imposed Derek Enright as the Labour candidate.

The Hemsworth party is up in arms, and it has good reason to be, although not because the NEC committee decision has somehow deprived the NUM of a god-giv­en right to choose whomsoever it wants to sit for Hemsworth. One of the main advantages of an electoral system based on single-member constituencies is sup­posed to be that MPs are first and foremost representa­tives of a local community rather than mere parliamen­tary lobby fodder. For this reason, local parties should have the major say in selecting parliamentary candi­dates. In Hemsworth that did not happen.

Mr Enright is a good candidate and will no doubt get full support from the Hemsworth party as soon as the campaign gets into swing; he will undoubtedly retain the seat for Labour. But Mr Capstick was the members' choice. At very least, the members deserve an explana­tion of why he was deemed unsuitable: the criteria used by the NEC panel in judging by-election candi­dates should immediately be made public. In the longer term, the Hemsworth selection debacle should force Labour into a serious reconsideration of its procedures for by-election candidate selections.

WHY NOT CALL IT PRIVATISATION?

Tribune leader, 18 October 1991

Like the Citizens' Charter before it, John Major's long, boring speech at Tory Party conference last week will soon be forgotten. Indeed, it is already difficult to remember exactly what it was about – apart, of course, from the boy from Brixton made good. Just about the only bit of policy that sticks in the mind is the pledge not to privatise the National Health Ser­vice, and it does so only because Tory party managers have spent so much time repeating in an attempt to wrest the initiative on health from Labour.

They are unlikely to succeed. Perhaps the Tories do not intend to float hospitals on the stock market. But their record of starving the NHS of resources suggests that they are quite happy to see it turned into a safety – net service used only by those who cannot afford to go private: in that sense, Labour has been quite right to accuse them of wishing to privatise health care. Equal­ly important, their current programme of introducing market forces into the NHS shows that they are more worried about the cost of the service to the taxpayer than its quality to the patient. Even if that is not, strictly speaking, privatisation (though it could all too easily be a prelude to it), it is commercialisation, an in­troduction of the ethics of private enterprise to a sphere in which most voters do not wish to see them.

The NHS is a potential election – winning issue for Labour: the party should shun the advice of those now suggesting that it should let up in its assault. But it will not be enough simply to attack the Tories. In the peri­od between now and the election, Labour must make its positive alternatives to Tory policies on the NHS much clearer and much more detailed.

On the wrong track

Two events in the past fortnight have illustrated perfectly how little John Major's 11 months in office have changed Tory policy on the railways.

First, Malcolm Rifkind announced last week that the high-speed rail link from the Channel Tunnel to Lon­don would not, after all, pass through Tory south- east London but would instead be diverted through Labour east London. The change means that the completion date for the line, already laughably distant by conti­nental standards, is put off to 2002 at the earliest — four years after the tunnel opens. British Rail, its plans in tatters, was understandably outraged.

Then, this week, BR announced fare increases of roughly double the rate of inflation (except, that is, on routes which Mr Major believes offer a poor service, in­cluding that from King's Cross to his own constituen­cy). The reason is simple. The government, alone in Europe, wants to privatise the railway system and, alone in Europe, is reducing its subsidies while BR, its revenue hit by recession, does not want to cut its in­vestment programme. BR's only option is to increase fares. The increase will drive more and more passen­gers into using the private motor car – leading to more pollution, more traffic jams and, unless there is a change of government, more fare increases next year.

Everywhere else in Europe, the railway has been recognised as worthy of massive subsidy and invest­ment on any number of economic and environmental grounds. Here, it is starved of cash and developed only half- heartedly and belatedly. The British railway sys­tem, once the best in the world, is now one of the worst in Europe. While the Tories remain in charge, it can only fall further behind.