Review
of Labour Lives by Andy McSmith (Verso, £16) and What Needs to Change
by Giles Radice (ed) (Harper Collins, £9.99), Tribune, 13 September 1996
Andy
McSmith, Observer political correspondent, biographer of John Smith and one-time Walworth Road press officer, has
written a timely book, using the format of Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians,
on seven people he sees as figures whose stories epitomise the life and times
of the Labour Party in the past decade or so.
It’s
not a collection of biographies of the shadow cabinet or even of the most powerful
figures in “New Labour”. Tony Blair,
Peter Mandelson, Clare Short and David Blunkett are four of the seven, but the
others are Neil Kinnock, Ted Grant (the leader of Militant) and the late Jim
Murray, a working-class Tyneside socialist and engineering union activist whose
main claim to fame in the world of high Labour politics is as the man who swung
the block vote of the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers behind mandatory
reselection of Labour MPs back in 1979.
Of
course, it’s possible to quibble with McSmith’s choice of characters. Some will
undoubtedly bemoan the absence of various obvious high-profile movers and
shakers: Gordon Brown, John Edmonds, Roy Hattersley, Ken Livingstone, Margaret
Beckett or whoever. My own feeling, however, is that he has erred on the side
of the predictable. The best piece in the book by a long chalk is that on
Murray; the least gripping are those on Kinnock, Blair and Mandelson, where
McSmith covers a lot of familiar ground.
But
this is a small point. McSmith has an extraordinary feel for the subtleties of Labour politics,
and he manages to write about them without ever getting bogged down in tedious
minutiae. Throughout, his fondness for the people and causes of “Old Labour” is
apparent – but, for all his antipathy to the culture of glitz and spin that
characterises the party under Blair, he
stops well short of sentimentalism for the good old days when Labour appeared
incapable of ever winning an election again. All in all, it’s an excellent
read, the most insightful book yet published on Labour’s cultural revolution
since the 1983 general election.
By
contrast, What Needs to Change, now published in paperback, is a
disappointment. A collection of essays edited by Giles Radice with an
introduction by Blair, it has its moments – indeed, just about every
contribution is competently argued if not stylishly written – but never quite
catches fire. The problem is that almost all its authors, from Patricia Hewitt
on the family through Frank Field on the welfare state to David Marquand on
community and the left, are summarising arguments that they have made more forcefully
elsewhere.
If
in the past couple of years you’ve been reading the thoughts of the best-known
figures of the British centre-left intelligentsia in the papers, What Needs to
Change will have few surprises for you. If, on the other hand, you’ve just
returned to Britain after a long spell away without even the Guardian Weekly,
you’ll be able to catch up with the minimum of inconvenience. For me, the only
intriguing thing about this plodding collection is that the one truly
iconoclastic piece – by Geoff Mulgan on reinventing democracy – is by the
contributor closest to Blair. Weird.
