THE YEAR LABOUR GETS BACK?

Tribune leader, 10 January 1992

It is by no means guaranteed, but it is increasingly likely that within six months Britain will have a Labour prime minister, if not a majority Labour gov­ernment. The focus of British politics has shifted from Europe, on which the Tories, however dismal their ac­tual performance, had a significant advantage over Labour simply by dint of being in office. From now un­til the election, Labour should be able to get the upper hand by focusing attention on the domestic issues that touch everyone's everday life: the recession, the health service, the housing crisis, the appalling state of the economic infrastructure and so on.

It is possible that Labour will fail to turn all this to its advantage. Accidents and the effects of Tory accusations about Labour's tax plans apart, a commanding opinion poll lead could be undermined by a giveaway budget in March. Nevertheless, it is not un­reasonable to ask again what has seemed for most of the past decade a daft question: What will the next Labour government be like?

A minority Labour government would put together a Queen's Speech largely composed of measures with which the Liberal Democrats and nationalists had little argument and challenge them to vote against it. If they didn't, Labour would spend a few months doing all it could to give the impression of being a new broom then, as in 1974, go to the country again, perhaps on a quite different manifesto. (Here, the bets must be on adop­tion of electoral reform.)

A government with a small Commons majority would be only slightly different. Given the dire state of the economy and the tiny amount of room any government now has for macroeconomic manoeuvre, the best any­one can expect from a Labour government without a large majority is small but significant changes and clear signals of radical energy and intent. Socialism, in any commonly understood sense of the word, is not on the agenda for some time yet, if at all.

But a start can be made on repairing some of the damage done to our economy, our society and our poli­tics by 13 years of Tory misrule. Labour can take Britain into the European social democratic main­stream. If Labour manages to increase spending on pensions, child benefits, education, health and public transport, sets up its new industrial relations frame­work and makes a vigorous start on implementing its ambitious plans for democratic reform, it will earn it­self the respect of the British people and a thumping election victory when it goes to the country again. If it dithers, it will fail, with consequences almost too horri­ble to contemplate.

SHOOTING TO KILL

Last week, a Yorkshire policeman shot dead Ian Bennett, a drunk wielding an ornamental gun who had just had a blazing row with his girlfriend. The killing has provoked much argument about whether replica guns should be banned, but that is not the most important question it should raise. The police made only a cursory attempt to talk Bennett into surrendering and the warning given him before he was shot was wholly inadequate. The police should use firearms only as a last resort in exceptional circumstances. In this case, they fired first and made their excuses later. Guidelines for police use of guns need to be tightened up at once.

SO FAREWELL THEN, MIKHAIL SERGEYEVICH

Tribune leader, 3 January 1992

With few exceptions, the democratic left in the west has responded to Mikhail Gorbachev's de­parture from the Kremlin with praise for his record in office.

Much of it is understandable. Gorbachev presided over a period of extraordinary, and for the most part welcome, change, both domestically and in Soviet rela­tions with the rest of the world. When he gained the up­per hand in the political apparatus, tension between the super-powers was at its height, east-central Eu­rope was under Soviet domination and war raged be­tween Soviet occupying forces and Mujahedin guerril­las in Afghanistan; at home, the regime was one of the most oppressive in the world. Today, the cold war is over and the Soviet Union, having given up east-cen­tral Europe, has ceased to exist. Most of the former satellite states are now functioning democracies and several of the former republics of the Soviet Union seem to be on the way to joining them. Despite the im­mense challenges ahead for the post-communist world, all this is cause for the democratic left to be pleased.

Yet, although much was Gorbachev's responsibility, almost none of it was what he intended. The changes associated with his name were mostly by-products of an attempt to modernise and revitalise the stagnant Soviet system without fundamentally changing it. From any point of view, the attempt failed.

When Gorbachev and his team of ambitious tech­nocrats came to power (he was never elected by popu­lar vote), the only part of the Soviet economy operating at anything like contemporary western levels of tech­nology and quality was the military sector; and the mil­itary sector was an unbearable burden for the rest of the economy. Economic growth had slowed almost to a standstill. The Soviet workforce was apathetic and unproductive, the ruling bureaucracy corrupt and immobile.

Gorbachev's "modernising" reforms merely exacer­bated the crisis. The disengagement from the cold war and the arms race, culminating in the withdrawal from east-central Europe, won Gorbachev many friends in the west; but it happened too late (and latterly too fast) to benefit the domestic economy, in the process losing Gorbachev the support of the military-industrial com­plex.

Meanwhile, the succession of half-baked plans for introducing market forces to the creaking mechanisms of production and distribution foundered against bureau­cratic antipathy and the growing resistance of the working class. By the end of the eighties, the economy was in tatters.

Cultural liberalisation and the policy of "openness" – initially at least intended as little more than part of an anti-corruption campaign - won the support of the in­telligentsia for a while but also unleashed demands for national self-determination and democracy which inexorably undermined the very foundations of the Soviet political system. Slowly but surely, Gorbachev's popu­larity ebbed away as the crisis intensified. Last Au­gust's coup and its bizarre collapse left Gorbachev with just one card to play: his status as world statesman. Boris Yeltsin and the republican leaders soon found they could trump it (although it remains an open ques­tion whether they will make it even more of a pig's ear).

Gorbachev's is a heroic record, perhaps, but it is a heroic record of failure. Western left-wing politicians would be advised not to adopt him as a role model.

EUROPE IS STILL THE FOCUS

Tribune, 3 January 1992

John Edmonds, the general secretary of the GMB, Britain’s second largest union, talks to Paul Anderson about the aftermath of last month’s European summit in Maastricht

John Edmonds is not pleased that the British gov­ernment opted out of the so­cial provisions agreed by the other 11 European Community govern­ments at the Maastricht summit last month. But, he says, it all could have been much worse.

“I went to Brussels the Friday before Maastricht and talked to people in the Socialist Group of the European Parliament to get their views of what was going on,” he says. “And their worry was not that Britain would effectively opt out. It was that an attempt would be made by Helmut Kohl to accommodate John Major, and the social chapter would be so diluted, par­ticularly in respect of majority vot­ing, that it would lose a lot of its force. That really was a nightmare scenario.”

Instead, the French government stood firm against a last-ditch at­tempt to water down the social chapter of the treaty to make it ac­ceptable to Britain. Major refused to budge and the 11 signed a proto­col committing them to develop common policies on workers’ rights which they will transcribe into na­tional law.

“I was delighted by the attitude of the French,” says Edmonds. “They played a blinder. Their atti­tude throughout was that if Britain didn’t want to come along with the social chapter it would have no involvement whatsoever. The French insisted that the proto­col signed by the 11 excluded Britain.”

The priority now, he says, is to get a Labour government which will sign up with the 11. Failing that, although “a lot of companies will be operating from 1993 onwards through standard policies applied to Britain as elsewhere”, the unions “will have to take ac­tion with individual companies to ensure that they match the rights they have to give elsewhere. There are plenty of options for us. In the long term, no one can see Britain standing aside from the social di­mension because more and more the social issues are going to be in­tegrated with economic decisions.”

Edmonds is scathing about the Tories’ attempts to justify the re­fusal to back the social chapter, ac­cusing Michael Howard, the Em­ployment Secretary, of lying in his claim that signing up would have cost Britain £5,000 million. “I don’t know where he got that figure from,” he says. “The first batch of measures are to do with consulta­tion and information rights. There are no costs at all.”

“The other point where the gov­ernment lied was when Major said that the social chapter would drive a coach and horses through the trade union legislation of the eighties. This is absolutely untrue. The social chapter is all about individual rights. It has nothing to do with trade union rights. In fact, freedom of association is specifical­ly excluded as an issue.”

So far, there has been no at­tempt to prescribe the precise in­stitutional framework within which workers’ rights to be con­sulted and informed will be exer­cised. But the 11 are likely to  agree that works councils be set up in larger companies, either on the German model, where works councils consist only of workers, or the French, involving workers and management. In either case, the trade unions have no formal role in representing workers at workplace level: works councils are elected by balloting workers directly, regardless of whether or not they are in a union.

The British trade unions are tra­ditionally hostile to works councils, but Edmonds’ union, the GMB, Britain’s second largest, believes that the German model is the way forward. “We’re going to get it any­way as a result of increasing EC integration,” he says. “The trade union movement can fight a rear­guard action against it, but that would be stupid.

“The German model of industri­al relations is much better than the British model. Here, in order to have proper rights at work you have to be a member of a trade union, your employer has to recog­nise the union, you have to get an agreement establishing your rights and then you have to have the industrial power to enforce them, Many workers in Britain don’t have all that. A system that pro­vides for rights in law of represen­tation and consultation is  much better.”

Not that Edmonds wants simply to copy the German system with no modifications: “No one is argu­ing that the German system is the perfect one. If the support given by the trade unions to elected repre­sentatives was rather more direct than in Germany I think that would be a good thing. One of the worries about the German system is that the German unions don’t have the constant commitment to recruiting people that we have in Britain. The level of unionisation is comparable but it is sustained in many industries by a series of campaigns. Normally when you start work in Britain you get a form pushed at you and you’re asked ‘Would you like to join the trade union?’ That isn’t so much the norm in Germany.”

On the other hand, “pay bar­gaining can come out of the work­place and be made regional or na­tional. That does seem to be an ad­vantage. The local representatives are not obsessed with pay bargain­ing and the local committee has more time to deal with and promo­tional opportunities, health and safety issues and so on.”

All this fits in neatly with anoth­er of Edmonds’ ideas which has been the cause of much controver­sy. He was the principle architect of Labour’s proposals for rational­ising the structure and timing of Britain’s pay bargaining by intro­ducing an annual National Eco­nomic Assessment.

Critics say that this is just an old-fashioned incomes policy in disguise, but Edmonds disagrees. “There is nothing in the proposals that would mean wage controls. The whole thing is about whether trade unions can co-ordinal* col­lective bargaining with employers. It’s an attempt to work out a new set of pay-bargaining arrange­ments so we’re less caught up in chasing each other’s tails.

“With the system contemplated by the Labour Party and strongly supported by the TUC, we’d have a well-informed debate involving the social partners in the run up to Xmas and a pay-bargaining period that lasted the first three months of the year. Most of the keynote settlements would be made at that time – everybody knows which ones they are: Ford, ICI, local government manual workers and so on – instead of playing this silly game when everyone ends up feel­ing very unhappy because every­one feels that someone, somewhere is getting a better deal. We’d try to co-ordinate the pay settlements in the light of the economic perfor­mance of the country. The govern­ment would find it much easier to manage the economy because the Chancellor would have a much bet­ter view of the level of pay settle­ments before the budget.”

It is clear that Edmonds does not see the TUC playing as large a part in the National Economic Assessment as it did in previous labour-union arrangements. “It would have a role in the co-ordi­nated pay bargaining, providing a forum for discussion and from time to time some leadership,” he says, but he is also keen to emphasise that “the TUC is going to have to change very rapidly” to provide more services to member unions, mainly on the research and legal front.

The reason for this attitude to­wards the TUC is simple: with the growth of giant super-unions in re­cent years as a result of mergers the TUC’s co-ordinating function has waned considerably. The GMB has been one of the most active in the merger field and is likely to re­main so in the nineties: Edmonds even raises the distant possibility of continent-wide union mergers, He will not, however, be drawn on the rumours that the next merger on the cards is with the Transport and General Workers’ Union – a joining of forces that would create a super-super-union.

“It is obviously the case that the TGWU and the GMB will work more closely together in the fu­ture,” he says. “We should do that because we overlap to such an ex­traordinary extent in our member­ship. There are all sorts of influ­ences pushing us in that direction. Neither of us is rich enough to waste resources. The services we could provide if we complemented each other would be a lot better. And if we have a continental sys­tem of works councils, it would force us to have a different, closer relationship at a local level.

“I think we ought to put a lot of effort into a closer working ar­rangement. If it leads to something else, so be it.”

STILL PRECARIOUS

Tribune leader, 20 December 1991

This week, Tribune returns to 12 pages after more than ten months at eight pages a week. The reason is simple: using desktop publishing equipment, it now costs us very little to produce extra pages. Before DTP, a 12-page paper cost around £500 a week to type­set and paste up; using DTP; the equivalent process costs under £200. After two months of learning how to use the DTP equipment, we can just about manage to produce 12 pages instead of eight on current staffing levels. We work harder: you get more for your money.

Despite the expansion, Tribune remains in a finan­cially precarious position. Sales and advertising rev­enue are stagnant, partly as a result of the recession and partly because we have not had adequate funds to spend on promotion. Next year, the paper will have to raise at least £30,000 in donations just to ensure bare survival. More is needed if the paper is to expand its circulation as well as the number of pages.

It will not be easy to secure the funding we need. The trade unions, on which Tribune has relied for much of its recent life, are broke. Although several have pledged sub­stantial support, the total guaranteed is down on last year. Most unions are spending all their political fund cash on helping Labour – itself in dire straits – to win the general election.

This means that, yet again, we will be asking you, our readers, for your support. In the past 12 months, you have given more than £20,000, enough to allow us to in­troduce the new technology. In the coming year, we will have to ask you to give as much again.

Is it worth it? We think so, and not just because our livelihoods depend on keeping our jobs. A lively, open, democratic left press is an essential element of our political culture – and without Tribune, there would be precious little of the democratic left press left.

The past five years have seen an extraordinary casualty rate among left publications in Britain. The Labour Party killed off Labour Weekly then let New So­cialist die on the vine. Incompetence destroyed News on Sunday. City Limits ceased to be left in any mean­ingful sense last year when it was forced to sell up to Bernard Clark. This year has seen the end of Sanity and the death of Marxism Today. Discounting local and specialist periodicals, the democratic left press in Britain now consists of the New Statesman, Tribune and socialist, the new Socialist Movement fortnightly, which has just announced that it needs £60,000 by March if it is to survive.

Marxism Today would have it that the reason is sim­ple: that sadly there is no market for left periodicals and that the left no longer has anything to say that anyone wants to hear. Many of its obituarists in the na­tional newspapers gleefully agree. But that is too easy an explanation. Nearly all the left press failures of re­cent times have been publications that simply did not have enough money to promote themselves adequately in the modern marketplace. For the most part, the left press, caught in a vicious circle of undercapitalisation and declining subsidies of various kinds, starved of commercial advertising, has never had the opportunity even to find out whether it has a mar­ket.

We are as confident as we can be that Tribune will survive. But mere survival is not enough. We need to break out of the vicious circle – and to do that we need serious money or a Labour government to establish the right to distribution for political papers. The latter is more likely, but anyone offering us £100,000 will not be turned away lightly.

JUSTICE MUST BE SEEN TO BE DONE

Tribune leader, 13 December 1991

As expected, the past week has seen the expulsion of Dave Nellist and Terry Fields from the Labour Party. Whether or not they should have been expelled is, in Tribune's view, solely a matter of whether there really is adequate evidence of their current membership of Militant.

Militant is a political party with its own rules, programme and democratic centralist discipline which has run candidates against Labour and plans to do so again. On Monday, Militant launched Scottish Militant Labour in Glasgow, the main purpose of which is to fight selected constituencies – probably Garscadden, Donald Dewar's seat, and Pollok, Jimmy Dunnachie's – against Labour at the next general election. Other Mili­tant candidates are likely to stand in Merseyside.

Labour's rules clearly and quite rightly exclude from Labour Party membership members of rival political parties, and MPs are no exception to the rules, however hard-working, however pleasant and however popular with their local constituency parties.

Unfortunately, it is impossible to judge whether the evidence shows that Mr Fields and Mr Nellist are lying or telling the truth when they say they are not current members of Militant. Labour's policy on disciplinary hearings is that they are private and that evidence is confidential; and no one has leaked the documentation on Mr Fields and Mr Nellist to Tribune or, as far as it is possible to judge, anyone else.

If justice has been done, it has not been seen to be done. No one wants show-trials but, unless some way is found to open Labour's disciplinary processes to scruti­ny by party members, many will continue to suspect that it is arbitrary and unfair. Worse, they could easily be right.

John Major's shabby deal

The spin from the government's public relations boys is that Maastricht was a grand victory for John Major. But in domestic political terms he has got a very bad deal. His agreement in principle to eco­nomic and monetary union will alienate the anti-European right of his own party even with the "opt-out" clause; and his "success" in avoiding the social dimen­sion agreed by the other 11 European Community states is an easy target for Labour attack.

The provisions of the social chapter of the treaty, par­ticularly after they had been watered down in a vain at­tempt to secure British agreement, could cause offence only to the most diehard anti-worker free-marketeer. Mr Major's stance in Maastricht is proof, if any were needed, that the Tories are opposed to any extension of workers' rights. The original draft of the social chapter proposed that workers should have the right to be con­sulted and laid down minimum wages and limits on the length of the working week. Much of that was ditched during the negotiations as the 11 tried to get Britain on board – but still Mr Major held out, even against the vaguest of formulations of rights to health and safety, information and equal opportunities for women. It was a shabby performance in defence of the worst forms of exploitation for which Mr Major should be attacked re­lentlessly in the run-up to the general election.

BUILDING BLOCK FOR PEACE?

Tribune leader, 6 December 1991

Labour’s opposition to common European Commu­nity defence and security policies, whether based upon the EC itself or the Western European Union, is long-standing and commands widespread assent in the party.

On one side, the Atlanticist Right believes that com­mon European defence and security policies would has­ten American military withdrawal from Europe and the collapse of NATO. On the other, the Left, still essential­ly anti-nuclear (if, in many cases, only in private), be­lieves that they would result in the creation of a new nuclear-armed super-power – particularly if based on the WEU, a relic of the cold war which excludes the EC's neutrals and NATO's least enthusiastic members.

Both sides fear that France and Germany would call the shots on common EC defence and security policies, that there would be an expansion of capacity for mili­tary interventions "out-of-area" if the EC took up a de­fence role and that an EC defence role would put off neutral countries which want to join the EC.

There are some sound arguments here. In particular, it is crucial that Labour continues to resist creation of a new nuclear super-power, with its own rapid deploy­ment force to police the Middle East and with the French force de frappe playing the role that American nuclear weapons played during the cold war.

Nevertheless, there are good reasons for reconsider­ing Labour's antipathy to the EC taking on a defence and security role. It is becoming more and more obvi­ous that NATO is moribund, incapable of working out its raison d'etre in the post-cold-war world and utterly closed to the former communist countries of Eastern Europe. The Americans, meanwhile, are already with­drawing from Europe: soon their military presence will be little more than symbolic. With the whole of Eastern Europe increasingly unstable and the former Soviet Union breaking up, the creation of a new European se­curity structure is an urgent necessity.

The best means of achieving this would be a transna­tional body including the United States and Russia as well as the countries of central and western Europe: the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) has frequently been suggested for such a role. The problem is that the other countries of Western Eu­rope show no enthusiasm for any such thing – which effectively rules it out. As time goes by, a defence and security role for an EC open to the east is looking more and more like the only viable basis for a peaceful conti­nent.

Defence of privilege

There is no doubt that Greville Janner, the Labour MP for Leicester West, was the subject of an appalling slander during the Leicestershire children's home child abuse trial, to which he could not respond because of the law of contempt of court. He deserves ev­ery sympathy. But it would be a mistake to conclude from his ordeal that the principle of absolute privilege, which means that reporting of proceedings in open court is not open to prosecution for defamation, should be abandoned. The Solicitor-General, Sir Nicholas Lyell, is right, for once. The right freely to report pro­ceedings in open court, like the right freely to report parliamentary proceedings, is a crucial press freedom that must not be ditched simply because of the irre­sponsible actions of certain newspapers.

ANTI-MAASTRICHT MAN

Tribune, 6 December 1991

Labour's leading Euro-maverick is the veteran Peter Shore. Paul Anderson asks him what makes him tick

No one could accuse Peter Shore of inconsistency on the European Community. He was one of the most prominent Labour opponents of British entry into the Common Market in the early seventies and one of the most senior cabinet figures to call for a "No" vote in the 1975 referendum on EC membership.

He has stuck to his guns ever since, consistently railing against what he sees as the absurdities of the Common Agricultural Policy, the wastefulness of the Brussels bureaucracy and, most crucially, the threat to British sovereignty from creeping European union.

In recent months, he has been by far the most outspoken Labour critic of the direction the EC has taken in the run-up to next week's Maastricht summit, which – John Major willing – will result in agreement among the EC's 12 member states on economic and monetary union (EMU) and Euro­pean political union (EPU).

Shore's willingness to ally with right-wing nationalist Tory anti-federalists has earned him fierce criticism from his colleagues on the Labour benches. But, although he shares many of the dissident Tories' worries, the focus of his concern is different. Shore is an old-fashioned expansionist

Keynesian who sees the nation-state as the main instrument of economic policy. Far from singing the praises of "sound money", he wants to devalue the pound.

"What is proposed in the eco­nomic and monetary union side of the treaty is the renunciation of the remaining strategic controls over the national economy without establishing any alternative con­trols at the European level," he says. "The danger to the next Labour government is acute. The disastrous decision to join the ex­change rate mechanism of the Eu­ropean monetary system makes us a prisoner of the Deutschmark. We're in the middle of a great re­cession and we know that one of the most urgent steps needed is a radical cut in the interest rate. But we can't do it because it will break us out of the ERM bands.

"I see no possible way that the British economy can converge with the strong German economy without changes in the present burden­some interest rate and without an adaptation of the exchange rate."

So why not go for a one-off de­valuation, followed by renegotia­tion of sterling's ERM band before accepting EMU, the policy advo­cated by Ken Livingstone and oth­er pro-European devaluationists?

"That would be quite unrealis­tic," says Shore. "It would be possi­ble to stay within the ERM if it were possible to move the currency in a way that restored competitive­ness. There's nothing wrong with a system of 'fixed but changeable' ex­change rates. But you must be able to change when a fixed rate be­comes no longer sustainable. The real danger is that we shall not be able to move the exchange rate at all because we're already in the first stage of economic and mone­tary union. The aim of virtually ev­eryone in it is to go straight to­wards absolutely rigid exchange rates followed by a single currency and a central bank."

The official Labour position, of course, is that devaluation is not on the agenda. The Shadow Chan­cellor, John Smith, and his team have concentrated on the need to make the European central bank politically accountable, suggesting that the Council of Economic and Finance Ministers, Ecofin, should be given an enhanced role in over­seeing its workings.

Shore is scathing about this po­sition: "There's no way that a Eu­ropean central bank could be made accountable to European finance Ministers collectively," he says. The Dutch draft of the Maastricht treaty, the basis for the current ne­gotiations, "contains provisions specifically designed to maintain the inviolability of the bank from political interests".

"This is what it says about inde­pendence in Article 107: 'Neither the European central bank nor the national central banks shall seek or take instructions from Commu­nity institutions or bodies from any Government of a member state or other body.' The rest of the clause is very significant: 'The Community institutions' – that includes Ecofin – 'and bodies and the governments of the member states undertake not to seek to in­fluence the members of the deci­sion-making bodies of the Euro­pean central bank and the nation­al central banks.'

"Tough stuff, and to make dou­bly sure, the president of the Euro­pean central bank is appointed for one term only of eight years. If that doesn't secure his indepen­dence, nothing else will."

Worse, he says, the draft treaty virtually guarantees the imposi­tion of tight fiscal policies, dashing the hopes of those who would like Europe to adopt expansionary poli­cies.

"Article 105 reads: ‘The primary objective of the European system of the central bank will be to main­tain price stability.' Nothing is spelt out in the treaty about furthering other economic priorities apart from one single clause say­ing 'We shall go for growth, em­ployment and all these other good things.' It's a purely declamatory article. All the detailed clauses are about the independence of the bank and the relationship between the bank and the Council of Minis­ters or Ecofin.

"So you have to be a great opti­mist, frankly, to believe that this treaty allows for any development of the kind that's wanted. The plain truth is that only some Gov­ernments in Europe are actually in the expansionist high-employment tradition. Many of them are not. Germany is quite content with a tough deflationary bias."

"There is nothing in the draft treaty which foreshadows interventionism at the European level. At least two or three of the gov­ernments sitting round the table claim to be socialist but they have put forward no such proposal – or if they have done their voices have been so feeble that they have not been reflected in a single draft clause of the treaty."

Shore is also critical of the draft treaty proposals on excessive bud­get deficits. "Article 104b reads: 'Member states shall avoid exces­sive government deficits' – a plain, unequivocal instruction to all governments. And then an ex­cess deficit is defined. The public sector borrowing requirement must not be more than 3 per cent of gross domestic product. And government debt must not be more than 60 per cent of gross domestic product. We're caught badly on the 3 per cent rule. No Labour govern­ment can afford to have its hands tied on public expenditure and the borrowing requirement."

"We abandoned controls over trade when we went into the Euro­pean Community. More recently, we have abandoned control over capital. The Single European Act allows for the totally untrammeled movement of capital, forbids any preferential use of public purchas­ing power to assist our own nascent or troubled industries as we have done in the past, and pro­vides for any takeover bids and mergers to be decided only by the European Commission.

"All those powers of intervention have gone and we're left with just two macro-economic powers: one is to determine interest rates and exchange rates, and that goes completely if you have a single curren­cy; the second is, of course the PSBR. That is what is being hand­ed over. You tell me what a Labour government can do."

"Supposing all the arguments of the front bench are right and all we need to do is converge. How on earth do you converge? The economy is already in a state of mass unemployment, the balance of pay­ments problem is worse than it's ever been. How do you deal with that, frankly, without changing the value of the pound? Supply side measures are excellent, but they take five years before they begin to yield a dividend. And if, in the end, we've trained and educat­ed people to find jobs somewhere on the Rhine, that isn't what the British people want. Is Labour go­ing to live with more than 2 mil­lion unemployed for five years? That would show an extraordinary poverty of ambition and relaxation of the political will."

As for the notion that a Euro­pean federal interventionism might develop in the longer term, "It's wishful thinking. If you say to me 'Right, take a really long view, after 20 years of miseries inflicted on the whole of Europe, after the breakdown of the system that's now being envisaged, is it possible that something might emerge, a federal Europe government, with federal powers of intervention across the whole continent?' Well, nothing is impossible, but it's a long way off."

In any case, he says, he does not find a federal Europe particularly attractive or believe it workable. "I'm not basically wedded to the idea that good government comes on a continental scale. The United States is the only example we have of a modern continental economy but, my god, very special circum­stances enabled it to be created. People were poured into a pre-set institutional mould. There was a common language and a lot of oth­er things which have made for rea­sonably strong federal govern­ment. Try to translate that into European terms."

The British, he says, "have much more confidence in trying to decide their own fate through their own elected institutions rather than putting their faith in a Euro­pean Parliament in which we'd be one-seventh of the total and which would involve, if it were to be workable, huge transfer payments from the wealthy countries to those that are most disadvantaged."

So what should Labour be say­ing about Europe? "There's no question of withdrawal from the European Community," says Shore, nor should the EC simply be left as it is: he agrees with the front bench that the Community should be extended to eastern and northern Europe. But that is about as far as he is prepared to go in praising Labour's official line. He does not even accept that, bad as EMU and EPU might be, the alter­native of staying out would be even worse.

"We've handled it very badly tac­tically as well as strategically," he says. "For reasons that I really don't understand, we've been say­ing that we ought to immerse our­selves ever more deeply in a feder­al Europe.

"The clear message to the British people is that the Labour Party no longer believes that it can seriously solve the problems of the United Kingdom without embark­ing on the wrong and perilous path to a federal union in which all the strategic decisions affecting the welfare of the British people are taken by others and not by people who are directly elected. That is a terrible thing to have to deal with in terms of winning the battle for public opinion.

"I'm not saying that I hope there is hostility towards Europe in British public opinion. That kind of sentiment is no good at all. But there is still a very strong belief in this country that despite all our imperfections we can run our own democracy pretty well. Long may we continue to believe it."