Tribune leader, 9 May 1992
The preliminary report on the general election campaign by Larry Whitty, Labour's general secretary,
has come in for a lot of stick in the week since it was presented to the party's
National Executive Committee. Supporters of Bryan Gould have described it as a
"whitewash", complaining that it skates over criticisms of the
organisation and content of the campaign, and others have denounced it as
superficial. Some of this criticism is justified: the document does not have
enough detail on several key questions, notably the effects of Labour's
taxation policy, and barely mentions others, for example the role of
the Shadow Communications Agency in the campaign
organisation, which many believe was too great.
But on the whole the criticism is unfair. Given Mr Whitty's
brief, to assess Labour's performance in the four weeks before election day, he
has not done a bad job. He correctly identifies Labour's main problem during
the campaign - a late swing away from the party in the last couple of days
before April 9 - and rightly cautions against blaming any specific event or
failure of the campaign before the last few days for what happened, although
he is critical, albeit mildly, of the national campaign's clumsy handling of
tax, health, education and constitutional reform, and he is cutting about the
triumphalist rally in Sheffield a week before polling day.
He praises Labour's organisation and its concentration on
key seats, which indeed yielded impressive results, and he argues, again
rightly, that Labour's poor showing among older women and younger men needs
fuller analysis, as do its lacklustre performances among its core voters (council
tenants, semi-skilled and unskilled manual workers and the unemployed) and in
Scotland. It is not a masterpiece of political analysis, but then it was not
intended to be. For what it is, a preliminary report on what went wrong,
concentrating exclusively on the election campaign proper, it is difficult to
imagine what Mr Whitty could have done very differently. The campaign was a
good one and the party cannot make scapegoats of the campaign organisers for
the defeat.
This is not, however, to argue that Mr Whitty’s paper should
be the last word on Labour's defeat. However well he has done his job, there is
another to be done. The party needs to look long and hard at what happened
before the campaign itself started.
The election might indeed have been lost as a result of a
late swing away from Labour caused by "general perceptions of the party”,
in particular the ideas that the party's leadership was not up to scratch and
that a Labour government could not be trusted.
* * *
But this does not mean that there was anything Labour could
have done differently in the few weeks before the election radically to improve
its performance.
Deep-rooted perceptions of competence and trustworthiness
are built up over years, not weeks. At the very least, the post mortem needs to
expand its terms of reference to take in the whole of the past five years.
If Labour's tactics need to be chewed over at greater
length, its strategy needs to be subjected to a thorough, no-holds-barred
critique. Better still, the party could open up a discussion of its values, its
culture, its very raison d'etre.
* * *
Unfortunately, however, there is little indication of
willingness to engage in anything quite so interesting at the top of the party.
John Smith is now almost certain to be the next party leader. There are some
hopeful signs in his manifesto for the leadership campaign, launched last
week: he is, he says, in favour of a serious discussion of the way forward, he
has an open mind about constitutional reform, he wants to democratise the
party, he will be an "accessible" leader. His proposed all-party
commission to examine social justice could be an exciting forum for new ideas.
But the general impression given by his manifesto remains
that of "business as usual": the discipline of the exchange rate
mechanism, the importance of re-distributive taxation and supply-side measures
as the core of macro-economic policy, going with the flow on Europe. It is a
decent, solid social democratic package, completely consistent with Labour's
thinking in the past couple of years, probably election-winning - if only we
were fighting the election we have just lost.
If Labour had fought the 1992 election on an
uncompromisingly traditional leftist manifesto, if Labour had been obviously
influenced by the 1968 generation's libertarianism, if it had even just done a
little better than it did on solid, decent, cautious redistributive austerity
social democracy – if it had not been as it was, Mr Smith’s approach might have
been just the ticket. As it is, Labour looks as if it is hanging on to nurse.
Safety first fits the mood of the electorate today, perhaps, but it is already
looking like a high-risk strategy for the next election.
