Tribune leader, 31 May 1991
According to reports in most of the quality papers, the Tories have decided to give a high priority during the forthcoming general election campaign to alleging that Labour offers only a return to the politics of Harold Wilson. If these reports are true, and there seems to be no compulsive reason to disbelieve them, the Conservatives are making a quite extraordinary political blunder.
Most apparently, they are assuming that the British people remember the Wilson years with horror. But, although Wilson has few admirers these days among politicians, journalists and historians, it is far from obvious that his reputation among the electorate as a whole, insofar as he still has one after so long out of the political limelight, is particularly bad. Indeed, Labour might even benefit from being associated with the man who was Prime Minister when England won the World Cup and the Beatles recorded all their hits.
More important, it is difficult to see how the Conservatives can seriously draw parallels between Wilson's Labour Party and Neil Kinnock's. There are, of course, superficial similarities. Kinnock, like Wilson, came from the Left of the party and has ditched much ideological baggage in pursuit of electoral success. Labour today, like Labour in 1963-64, has a clean-cut managerial image, is strong on the rhetoric of economic and social modernisation, and is well ahead in the opinion polls.
Beyond this, however, the differences are immense. In particular, Wilson came to power in 1964 with promises of massive state intervention to transform the British economy, including widespread nationalisation, with the trade unions playing a key role in planning. By comparson, Labour's proposals today are extremely modest. Nationalisation and corporatism are out; so too is increasing state expenditure unless growth allows it. If unethusiastically at times, Labour does recognise the limits on state economic intervention now imposed by multinational capital. Should the Tories claim that nothing has changed in Labour's outlook since the early sixties, it should not be difficult to prove them wrong.
NATO FAILS TO ADAPT
Nato's announcement on Tuesday that it is to restructure its forces, with a "rapid reaction force" under a British commander playing a key role, had been trailed so widely beforehand that it barely made the evening television news bulletins. The announcement is nevertheless worthy of note - largely because it shows how inadequately Nato's planners have responded to the transformation of Europe in the past two years.
Despite the end of the cold war and the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, Nato remains as committed as ever to the out-dated core assumption that it is necessary to deter a Soviet attack on central Europe by threatening to escalate any conflict into all-out nuclear war. The force reductions which it is now putting forward are depress-ingly modest, while the proposal for the "rapid reaction force" will exacerbate fears that Nato ispreparing for a much greater "out-of-area" role.
The Labour leadership has tried to calm critics of Nato's intransigence by claiming that the Alliance is hi a state of flux and increasingly open to new ideas about the future security structure of Europe. This week's announcement shows that the Nato planners know only one tune and cannot be taught another. It is time for Labour to stop kidding itself that a bloc-free, peaceful, secure Europe can come about without the winding down of Nato.
