Tribune, 6 March 1992
Paul Anderson reports from the Welsh Labour conference in
Swansea
For most of the newspapers, what mattered about last Friday's
Labour rally in Swansea, on the eve of the Wales Labour Party's conference, was
either devolution or the running argument over tax cuts and public spending.
"Kinnock's pledge: Welsh assembly promised in his
first term of government," proclaimed the front page of the Cardiff
Western Mail on Saturday, above a report on the Labour leader's speech the
previous evening. The Independent and most of the other London papers found
great significance in Kinnock's promise that a Labour government would borrow
not to pay for tax cuts but for investment.
Of course, these were both real stories. Kinnock had never
before been quite as clear on the timing of the proposed Welsh assembly, nor
had Labour politicians previously spelled out quite so explicitly that their
objection to the Tories' plans to borrow to pay for tax cuts was not an
objection to borrowing as such.
But there was more to the Swansea rally than that, at least
in the eyes of the 1,000-plus party faithful packed into the city's Guildhall
to listen to the speeches and cheer. To them, the rally marked the official
start of Labour's election campaign, not just for Wales but for the rest of
Britain too. In many ways they were absolutely right.
That might seem just a little bold. On one hand, there has
been no end of beginnings for Labour in the past couple of months: the launch
of Made in Britain, the economic policy document, the rally in York, the local
government conference. On the other, nobody knows for certain whether another
launch will be needed a month hence if John Major decides to postpone the
election until May.
But Swansea was special. Labour for the first time laid out
in public its package for the election campaign, and it did so with a
conviction that has eluded it for much of the pre-election phoney war.
Kinnock's speech was long, at times prolix, but unexpectedly
aggressive and populist. He was almost frighteningly ebullient, and he
hammered home his theme with great force: the Tories are responsible for the
worst recession in living memory - and now they are on the run.
Kinnock made a particular point of attacking Major in person
(an attack echoed later by Bryan Gould, who told the rally that "being a
nice guy isn't enough to be a good Prime Minister").
Labour has clearly
decided that the best way to defend itself against Major's personal popularity
u to repeat insistently that he cannot escape the blame for the mess the
country is now in, to challenge him again and again to take part in a televised
debate with Kinnock.
In similar vein, the party has decided to take on the Tories
directly on tax and public spending. Kinnock was unashamedly redistributionist
in rhetoric. His answer to the expected tax-cutting budget was simple: the government's
promise of a penny or two off the basic rate, paid for by borrowing, was a
simple electoral bribe.
"They’re putting Britain in hock to keep themselves in
office," he said. The key difference in the coming election was between
Tory bribers and Labour builders". "We are the builders!" he
exclaimed, and brought the house down.
Much of this was unremarkable - "standard
campaign-trail stuff", as the man from the BBC remarked to me - and there
is no doubt that Kinnock, on home ground, was playing to the audience's need
for a morale boost before the grisly business of canvassing in the wind and
rain begins in earnest.
But the emphases in his speech have a wider significance.
The idea that Labour should sit tight, stay uncontroversial and focus all its
efforts on training and the National Health Service seems at last to have been
abandoned. There is nothing wrong now with sounding egalitarian, even at times left-wing.
This turn to ideology is symbolised (ironically in view of
his past reputation) by the elevation of Roy Hattersley to a prominent position
in the campaign. After a week of high-profile pronouncements, he was in Swansea
on Saturday for a starring role in the conference proper, reinforcing Kinnock's
assault on the Tories' tax-cutting plans.
This is not to suggest that training and the NHS will not
be playing a big part in Labour's campaigning. Tony Blair opened the proceedings
on Friday night with a vigorous attack on the government's neglect of training
and Robin Cook got the heartiest response after Kinnock when he wound up the
rally with a stinging denunciation of the Tories' health policies.
Some of the most enthusiastic applause came after he
declared: "I do not take back one word we said during the Momouth
by-election" on the Tories' plans to privatise the NHS.
But Labour has decided to adopt a strategy of assault on all
fronts in an attempt to open up the four-point lead it needs to stand a good
chance of being able to form a majority government after the election. In
Swansea last Friday, with the polls indicating that Labour had clawed back the
advantage that the Tories had gained in January with their attack on Labour's
tax proposals, Kinnock and his colleagues gave the strong impression that they
really believed Labour could make it.
By the end of the evening, some of their self-confidence had
rubbed off on the audience. Who knows, it might yet take the whole country by
storm.
