Tribune, 21 February 1992
Paul Anderson talks to Labour's general secretary, Larry
Whitty, about the organisation behind Labour's bid for power
One thing we're unlikely to witness in the coming election
campaign is Labour's general secretary appearing before the press to announce
that the National Executive Committee has full confidence in the party leader,
as Jim Mortimer did so memorably in 1983.
That sort of thing just isn't the party's style any more.
Apart from being rather more careful about what is said in public - some say
excessively so - Labour has decided that elected politicians will play all
the public roles in the campaign. Larry Whitty, who took over from Mortimer
in 1985, will be keeping out of the limelight. “I’ll be running the machine
here,” he says, sitting in his office in Labour's Walworth Road headquarters.
Whitty seems confident that the machine will function
smoothly. “There are obviously some things one leaves to the last minute in
terms of the precise sequence of themes in the campaign,” he says. “But
logistically and resource-wise we are very well prepared indeed. We had a false
start for last June and a false start for November. We're better prepared now
than we were for either of those.
“We're clear how we're going to run the campaign nationally
- we've just set up the political authority for the campaign. The detail will
depend on when John Major calls the election.
“At local level, I think the situation is considerably
better than it was in the middle of last year. We still, of course, need more
people on the ground. There's pretty good organisation in most of .our key
seats but we can always do better with more people mobilised. We know more
about the key seats, we know more about the kind of campaigns we can run in
those key seats than we did in 1987 and I think we're fairly well-geared to
ensure that they maximise their potential.”
Labour is planning to spend more than £6 million on the
campaign, compared with £4 million in 1987. That is a lot of money, but it is
far less than the Tories are expected to spend in their attempt to retain
power. Some reckon they could splash out as much as £20 million, but most estimates
of Tory plans are around the £15 million mark.
Much has been made by the media of Labour's attempts to
raise cash using American-style political fundraising techniques - direct mail,
telephone fundraising, credit cards, financial services packages for members
and, most controversially, £500-a-head dinners, the second of which took place
last Thursday at the Park Lane hotel in Mayfair, netting the party some
£150,000.
But for all the success of such methods, the source of most
of the general election war-chest is the traditional one. “The bulk of the
general” election fund will come from the unions, as previously,” says Whitty.
Unlike in 1987, however, union contribution will not turn out at the minute to
be less than expected, nor will the bull of it end up being provided by a
handful of unions. One of Whitty's most important initiatives as general
secretary was to persuade the unions that a proportion of their affiliation
fees should go automatically into the party's election fund.
“The restructuring of affiliation fees in 1988 means that
we've got a guaranteed income from the union side which is equitably shared
among the unions,” he says. “We don’t have to go cap-in-hand to the unions:
it's part of the constitution that they pay towards the general election and
European election funds.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Whitty says that he is “not one of
those who believes that there should be any serious distancing between the
party and the unions”. “There is some updating of the relationship needed. But
we have to do that in a way that doesn't dilute or diminish the union involvement
in the party. The best way forward is to have far more members of trade unions
who are also individual members of the party.
So far, however, attempts to recruit trade unionists to
individual membership, one of the key elements of the mass membership drive
launched after the 1987 election, have failed miserably. One reason, say
Walworth Road insiders, has been that the national membership scheme, which was
supposed to make it easier to join the party, has been plagued by teething
problems - the result, according to Whitty, of underestimating the amount of
work involved in setting up a system from scratch, often with inaccurate information
from constituencies. Around one-quarter of the 320,000 members Labour thought
it had at the beginning of 1991 still have not paid their 1991 membership
subscriptions.
Now, however, says Whitty, the worst of the chaos has been
sorted out and the membership scheme is working reasonably efficiently.
"We've learned some lessons and I think we've a better idea of what
recruits and retains members and what doesn't. It's a hard slog. I think that
the election itself will bring in a lot more supporters whom we need to turn
into members. We now have a reasonable system for following them up nationally
and locally. Having said that, I'm not expecting miracles."
It would certainly take more than the subscriptions from
the new recruits who come forward in an election to put Labour's non-election
bank account back into the black. The party's general fund is around £2 million
overdrawn and the party apparatus faces severe cut-backs once the election is
over, win or lose. Optimists say that Labour will be able to mitigate these
with the introduction of state funding for political parties; pessimists say
that this assumes a Labour Victory and that, if Labour loses, the unions,
themselves strapped for cash, will be in no position to bail out the party.
Some have even claimed that Labour would not have the money to fight another
general election campaign less than two years after the one that is about start
-as it might have to in the event of a hung parliament.
Whitty is optimistic. "We're assuming that there will
be a cleat and positive result to this election. All our indications are that
we can take enough of those key seats to have a clear majority," he says.
Nevertheless, "were we just short of an overall majority, which I suppose
is just conceivable, we'd have fewer resources for a second election, but the
psychology of a second election would be much better. I don't think resources
would be as serious a constraint as some people are making out."
For now, of course, the priority is winning this time.
Whitty says that Labour will be using its front-bench politicians to get the
message across, rather than relying on advertising. The media are no longer in
awe of the kind of campaign we surprised them with last time. We’ll have to be
a little bit more flexible.
"The leader's campaign will be a major tone-setting and
theme-setting operation but we'll also be deploying the team in a very positive
way. We've got pretty good back-up advertising, but our main asset is not large
amounts of advertising space in newspapers but the way in which our team is
consistently outshining theirs. As far as the leadership is concerned, clearly
the Tories are going to run a very leader-oriented campaign - Major is just
about the only asset they think they have. But Neil Kinnock's the best campaigning
politician we've seen for decades in this country. When the campaign starts he
will thrive and Major will be increasingly exposed. I think the four weeks of
the campaign will see us moving significantly ahead."
If Whitty is right, he will become the first Labour general
secretary for 13 years to have to deal with a Labour government. In the past,
party-government relations have often been marked by strife; Whitty hopes to
be a mediator, and he believes he will be helped by the changes to party
conference now in the pipeline, which will give Labour a rolling programme and,
through pre-conference "policy forums", formally involve Labour MPs,
MEPs and local councillors in policy-making.
"The policy forums are a way of keeping the party and
the government much closer together than in previous eras of Labour government,
when there have been serious breakdowns in the relationship at various
points," he says. The role of Walworth Road, unlike Transport House, which
was sometimes almost the internal opposition, will be as a means of keeping
government ministers in touch with the party and the party informed of and
responsive to the problems of ministers. That is a major secretariat role,
which has not been performed in the past. In the past the party has done its
own thing and the government has done its own thing, which has caused lots of
tensions and problems.
“This year's conference will have put to it the rule changes
that will set up the new system. The NEC has the power to set up the policy forums
before this year's conference, but it's extremely unlikely. It will be from
this year's conference onwards that we'll start drafting the proper rolling
programme."
But all that is for later. Whitty is keen to get back to the
task immediately in hand. This campaign could be won or lost in four weeks. It
will be won in relatively few constituencies with a few hundred or a few
thousand votes either way. We must get more people out there working for those
four weeks. Tribune readers' efforts could make the difference."
