New Times, May 1999
Paul Anderson talks to Peter Hain about Welsh devolution and his plea for the left to engage with the Blair government
'A friend said to me the other day: "You've worked your guts out on the referendum campaign and ever since to do yourself out of a job,"' says Peter Hain in his room in the Welsh Office in Whitehall. 'And he was right. The powers that go with my job as a Welsh Office minister will transfer as from 1 July to the new Welsh assembly.'
The MP for Neath is in London only briefly. His main job until 6 May, when Wales votes for the 60-member assembly, is as co-ordinator of Labour's election campaign in Wales, and it's a job that does not allow him much time in Westminster.
After the controversy surrounding the choice of Labour's leader in Wales – Alun Michael, favoured by Tony Blair, beat Rhodri Morgan for the position, but only because several unions backed him with their block votes without balloting their members – Labour's commanding lead in the opinion polls has slipped alarmingly.
The party is still almost certain to emerge as the biggest party in the assembly, but there is a strong possibility that it will not win an overall majority. The election is using the additional member system of proportional representation, and the latest polls suggest that Plaid Cymru will do better than anyone expected, particularly in the 'top-up' seats elected on a regional basis to make the overall result more accurately reflect parties' shares of the vote.
Hain is sceptical about some of the more extravagant interpretations of the poll data that have appeared in the press. 'Some of the people being polled think they're being asked what their second choice is,' he says. 'There's a lot of confusion.' He dismisses the idea that Michael might fail to win a top-up seat in the Mid and West Wales electoral.
But he is candid about Labour's task. 'The party's gone through a really rough time over the past year. And I think the government has failed to get its message across to its core supporters.'
With this in mind, Labour is concentrating its focus on bread-and-butter issues. ' We have to connect the devolution of power with better decisions on schools and jobs and so on.'
Labour's campaign in Wales has a distinctly more left-wing feel to it than the 1997 general election campaign – which is hardly surprising as Hain has a reputation as one of the most left-wing members of the government.
It is nearly 30 years since he first came to public attention as a South African Young Liberal advocate of direct action against apartheid and more than 20 since he first established himself as a spokesman of the Labour left. But even as recently as 1995, his book Ayes to the Left laid out a 'libertarian socialist' strategy for Labour that in many of its key elements – Keynesian expansionism in economics at United Kingdom and European level, interventionism in industrial policy, radical civil libertarianism – was implicitly critical of Tony Blair's conception of 'modernisation'.
His latest pamphlet, A Welsh Third Way?, recently published by Tribune, holds back on criticising the government of which he is part. Indeed, it buzzes with enthusiasm, arguing that new Labour is the true inheritor of the libertarian socialist tradition.
Hain dismisses the notion that he wrote it because he had been put under pressure from on high. 'I simply thought that the Third Way debate needed some positioning in terms of socialist traditions. You can't write a pamphlet unless it's been cleared. But it was my idea and I wrote it myself.'
Too many on the left seem unwilling to recognise just how much the Blair government has achieved, he says. 'On the economy, what's very striking is that we've done what no Labour government has done before: we haven't blown it in the first two years after hitting an enormous crisis. We've enjoyed the confidence of the markets and the City. And yet we are injecting record amounts of spending into health and education and other public service priorities in the next three years.
'The pitch of the government has been to middle England and to the Daily Mail rather than the Daily Mirror. Yet there is a huge amount of redistribution. The minimum wage, the working families tax credit, the increases in child benefit and the 10p starting rate of income tax, all have attacked poverty and boosted low incomes. I wouldn't call Gordon Brown a traditional Keynesian chancellor – and he wouldn't want to accept that label – but people on the left should at least acknowledge that it's significant that a government of the left has managed to implement some radical economic policies while not being under furious attack in traditional fashion.'
Not that success is confined to the economy. 'The constitutional agenda – I mean, here we have a supposedly right-wing Labour leader and government about to roll over the House of Lords – fairness at work, the right to roam, they're considerable achievements.' The pamphlet, he says, is a plea to the rest of the left to engage. 'Engaging doesn't mean sacrificing principles. It means getting into the Realpolitik of the Labour Party and engaging with it. The Labour government is the only show in town. If the left doesn't get involved, it will have sold the pass. But, with the exception of a few small groups, I don't feel there's any serious engagement from the left at all.’
