Tribune, 8 May 1992
In the first of a series of interviews with the contenders
for Labour's leadership and deputy leadership, Paul Anderson talks to the MP
for Dagenham
“I very much regret that we're involved in a leadership
election before we've had time for reflection," says Bryan Gould, who,
despite his regrets, is now running for the party's leadership and deputy
leadership. "We need to work out what we want to take forward to
1996. 'One more heave' isn't good enough."
The 53-year-old environment spokesman is very much the
outside chance for the leadership and he knows it. When he launched his
campaign last week, after managing to get eight more than the necessary 55
nominations from MPs to enter the race, he told journalists that John Smith,
the shadow chancellor, was "clear front-runner" for the top job.
Even some of Gould's supporters say that the best that he can hope for is the
deputy leadership.
Gould, however, is convinced that he can win votes both from
the Constituency Labour Parties and from those trade unions which ballot their
members on the contest and reckons that he might just pip Smith to the post.
“The picture is by no means as clear-cut as people think,” he says. "We've
had a flood of offers of help from all over the country. I’m fighting to win
the leadership."
Whether or not his optimism is justified, there is no doubt
that his criticisms of the "insensitivity* of Smith's proposals, in his shadow
budget, to increase income tax have struck a chord among party members in the
south-east. Labour's plan to abolish the upper earnings limit on national
insurance contributions (NICs), which are currently paid only on the first
£21,000 of earnings, is widely perceived as the main reason for Labour failing
to take many of its target seats in the country's most affluent region.
“I’m not opposed to tax redistribution: no socialist could
be," says Gould. "But a cleverer package could have been put together
which had the same objectives but was not so crude in the way that it resolved
the anomaly on NICs."
For Gould, however, the most important thing about Labour's
tax plans was that they were just about the only macro-economic policy the
party had on offer. "We can't just sit back and say, 'Let everything rip,
let market forces take effect, and we'll come along afterwards and deal with
the problems through redistributive taxation'," he says.
An alternative approach to economic policy is at the core of
Gould's platform: "I don't accept the monetarist line, which 1 think has
been accepted by the party by implication, that the only function of economic
policy is to establish monetary stability."
As Labour's trade and industry spokesman between 1987 and
1989, he developed a much more interventionist industrial policy than was subsequently
adopted, and he is is still in favour of the measures with which he was then
associated: greatly increased planning powers for the Department of Trade and
Industry, legislation to encourage investment in Britain by pension funds and
increased worker participation, strict controls on mergers.
More controversially (at least now that Michael Heseltine's
appointment as President of the Board of Trade has made interventionism
respectable again), Gould is also in favour of devaluation of sterling as part
of a realignment of currencies within the exchange rate mechanism of the
European Monetary System. "We have seen the damage we suffer if we try to
run an over-valued pound. But the right way forward is not to take unilateral action.
There is almost certain to be a realignment and I'd like to see the Labour
Party ahead of the game for once. If we continue to defend an over-valued
exchange rate, we will continue to crucify manufacturing industry."
Surely, though, the inflationary implications of devaluation
would make it even more vulnerable to Tory attack at election time than
promising to put up taxes? Gould agrees - up to a point. "We don't want to
get hooked on these technicalities at the time of a general election, which is why
we need to have the debate now," he says. "Handled correctly, getting
the exchange rate right does not carry severe inflationary consequences. It
stimulates production and that in itself is a powerful anti-inflationary factor. A devaluation does raise the price of imports
by comparison with domestic goods, but we have to do that. That's the only way we
can survive. We have to alter that price and value-for-money equation,
otherwise we continue to go down the drain."
Devaluation is one clear difference between Gould and Smith;
another, intimately related, is Europe. A former parliamentary private
secretary to Peter Shore, Gould was a leading parliamentary opponent of the
European Community for most of the eighties. Although he is at pains to
emphasise that he is not an "unremitting negativist” – "I've always
been much more in favour of a co-ordinated foreign policy than most of my
colleagues," he says, "and the notion that a European central bank
should be in London was my idea" – he remains far more sceptical than
Smith or most of the rest of the Labour front bench.
"I think the common agricultural policy was and is
nonsense," he says. "And I'm very critical of the way in which the
ERM operates as a deflationary mechanism.'' He argues that a single European
currency should be created only after convergence of rates of unemployment and
growth across the EC, and voices support for the creation of something not far
removed from the Tories' long-forgotten "hard ECU", a European
currency operating alongside existing currencies rather than merging the
currencies into one.
Gould recognises that there is a strong argument from the
left that there is now no alternative to European management of the economy,
but he is uneasy about its implications. 'The Left in postwar Britain and
post-war Europe got very close to a very substantial achievement: within the
confines of the national economy it had sorted Out a deal with capital to give
labour had a fair share. But what then happened, almost as we were talking about
it, was that capital found a way of escaping that deal by going international.
The more we've gone down the road of deregulation of the movement of capital
and all the rest of it, the more difficult it has become for labour to keep
that deal in place, to exercise control over capital.
"The obvious response is that, if capital is operating
internationally, we must have international political organisations able to
deal with it. Of course, that's part of the answer, but it is also fraught with
difficulties. It's very easy to say, 'Right, let's step up European
institutions.' But, in the process of doing so, we're conceding defeat, on at
least part of the socialist project, which is to keep power close and diffuse,
so people have as much power over their own destinies as possible."
Decentralisation is one of the things that Gould wants to
see being discussed in a United Kingdom constitutional convention, modelled on
the Scottish Constitutional Convention, which draws in all the Opposition
political parties and a broad range of non-party bodies. He is open to
electoral reform, he says, but believes that the most important thing is for a
wide-ranging debate to take place. "Our role as the major Opposition party
is not just to contest damn thing and to go in sot product differentiation in
respect of everybody. We should consciously be making common ground with other
groups and parties where that's possible, in an attempt to isolate the Tories.
That general approach would also do a great deal to overcome the gender gap,
which is still a very worrying aspect of our performance. Many women are put
off by the macho style of our adversarial politics."
On Labour’s internal organisation, Gould is a cautious
reformer. Although he wants to see a party far more controlled by individual
members, and an electoral college for the leadership in which only individual
members vote, he doesn't want to see the end of the party's link with the
unions or the abolition of the union block vote at party conference.
"What I want to see is a means by which individual
political levy-payers who want that money to support the Labour Party are
somehow entitled to indicate that, and that then becomes an individual
membership of the Labour Party. I don't say that that's an easy thing to arrange,
but that must be the way forward. At the same time, I think it's perfectly
right for the trade unions as organisations to have a vote on all conference decisions:
there should be a substantial proportion of votes, at least 20 per cent, for
affiliated organisations. They should also have representation on the
National Executive Committee."
Now, though, his priority is winning under the current
system – and that means a period of hectic activity between now and July 18,
the day of Labour's special leadership conference. The Gould campaign has set
up in offices in the same building as the Fabian Society's headquarters and is
busy organising meetings at trade union conferences and with constituency
parties, stuffing envelopes and canvassing support, on the telephone. Any weariness
in anyone's manner can only be because so recently they were all doing exactly
the same in the hope of winning the general election.
