Paul Anderson, review of Labour Rebuilt: The New Model Party by Colin Hughes and Patrick Wintour (Fourth Estate, £6.95), Sanity, March 1990
The Labour Party has had a rough ride since Neil Kinnock became leader in 1983, just after the worst general election defeat suffered by the party for 50 years.
His appointment was followed by a small improvement in Labour's opinion poll ratings, but it was not until 1986, in the wake of the Westland affair, that the party overtook the Tories – and by early 1987 it was back in the doldrums. After the drubbing in the Greenwich by-election came a general election defeat almost as bad as the previous one.
For 18 months after that there was no relief, and in late 1988, despite being re-elected as leader by a massive majority, Kinnock was seriously considering resigning. He didn't, and within six months his party had won a majority of seats in the European Parliament elections.
Since then, Labour has held a commanding lead in the opinion polls. For the first time since 1981, it does not seem completely improbable that Labour will form a majority govern¬ment after the next general election.
So what explains the turnaround? In part, of course, it is the result of developments over which Labour has had no influence – the implosion of the centre parties and the growth of popular disillusionment with the Tories as interest rates rocketed. But at least some of Labour's improvement can be put down to changes in public perceptions of the party. These days, would-be Labour voters are less prone than in the mid-eighties to be put off by feelings that the party is out-of-date and dominated by trade union barons and extremists. The Labour leadership has obviously been doing something right.
The problem is that is is difficult to work out exactly what. Under the influence of opinion pollsters and advertising executives, the party has undergone a whole series of dramatic changes – so many that today it is difficult to recognise Labour as the party that was once led by Michael Foot. In the run-up to the 1987 election, Labour trans¬formed its corporate image and its campaigning techniques. Since then, it has changed its method of policy-making and its policies. Fundamental reform of the party organisation, intended to replace the current federal structure with one based on individual membership, is under way.
The architects of the changes would have us view them as interconnected elements of a a grand modernising project with the aim of turning Labour into the 'natural party of government' in the nineties. Hughes and Wintour, the political correspondents on the Independent and the Guardian respectively, to a large extent concur with this analysis in their minutely-detailed account of Labour's internal politics.
For them, the whole package – changing the party logo from red flag to red rose; the presidential glitz of the 1987 election campaign; the policy review's ditching of commit¬ments to unilateral nuclear disarmament, high taxation and abolition of Tory union laws; the moves towards ending the block vote – was essential if Labour was again to be a serious contender for office.
Of course, there were cock-ups along the way – the farcical Labour Listens events in early 1988, the reaffirmation of unilateralism at party conference that autumn, Michael Meacher's obstinate refusal to go along with the line of union law the next year. Hughes and Wintour are good journalists, and they don't miss the cock-ups. They are also rightly critical of Labour's sloth in taking environmentalism on board and its failure to embrace proportional representation.
But on the whole their tone is congratulatory. I'm inclined to greater scepticism. In particular, the party's shift on defence and foreign policy, the subject of Hughes and Wintour's best chapter, far from equipping Labour for the nineties, looks more and more like a throwback to the sixties and seventies. According to the defence section of the policy review, passed last year at Labour conference, Britain under Labour would keep its nuclear weapons until they were negotiated away in multilateral negotiations (which might never happen) and would allow an American military presence in Britain for as long as the Americans wanted. If the Labour leadership gets its way, the party will enter the general election campaign without any commitment to reducing British military expenditure.
This return to orthodox nuclear Atlanticism might be more popular with the electorate than Labour's previous unilateralist non-nuclear position (though it's arguable that the old policy could have been a positive asset had Labour not treated it as an embarrassment), but it is curiously out of joint with the times. With the collapse of the party-states of eastern Europe, there has never been a stronger case for rapid demilitarisation and denuclearisation of the continent, withdrawal of both superpowers' military forces and abandonment of the bloc system. Instead, Labour advocates sitting tight and hoping for the best.
But the weaknesses of the 'new model party' are not just a matter of foreign and defence policy. The unwillingness of the party leadership to put forward detailed economic and social policy proposals that the Tories can run through the Treasury computer is perhaps understandable, given Labour's vulnerability to the charge of profligacy, but it cannot help but encourage suspicions that Labour doesn't really know what to do, or that it's planning to do very little. Then there's the problem of membership. As Hughes and Wintour make clear, Labour's precarious financial position demands a rapid growth in membership, as does the move away from a federal structure. But if the 'new model party' gives the appearance of being run from the top as a consum¬mately 'moderate' electoral machine with little or no role for most members in determining political priorities, who's going to sign up?
