LABOUR'S SHABBY CAPITULATION ON BOSNIA

Tribune leader, 21 August 1992

Labour’s silence on the crisis in Bosnia – or, rather, its barely audible mumbling about sanctions and hu­manitarian aid – is, of course, explicable. It is, after all, a terribly complex crisis and, from April until July, Labour was stuck with a shadow Foreign Secretary whose main concern was his impending retirement to the back benches.

Gerald Kaufman's replacement, Jack Cunningham, unfortunately knows noth­ing whatever about foreign affairs and thus has to be kept in purdah. Worse still, the second-in-command at foreign affairs, George Robertson, is almost as clueless. He has spent most of the past decade dealing with the minutiae of EC affairs and has shunned non-Foreign Office ad­vice on the break-up of Yugoslavia. To cap it all, the party has not replaced its senior international officer, Mike Gapes, who became an MP in April.

Is this any way to run a political party that hopes to be taken seriously, let alone one with ambitions for government office within five years? What has happened in Bosnia in the past five months is not a "civil war" requiring from Britain 1,800 "peace-keeping troops" to escort food convoys: it is the most outrageous case of naked aggression in Europe since the sec­ond world war.

The complicity of the governments of western Europe in the Serbian land-grab, codified in the EC's cantonisation plan for Bosnia of March 18, ranks with the 1938 Munich agreement as an example of cowering before militarist expansionism.

The Foreign Office, moreover, has been in the vanguard of this disastrous diplo­macy. Even if it were too late to intervene militarily to repel the bloody advance the Serbian irregulars (and it is not, despite the cosy consensus among much of the "quality" press that Bosnia should be written off) Labour should surely be at­tacking the government for its incompe­tence, prevarication and turpitude.

Instead, the party's spokesmen, suppos­edly on a "summer offensive" against the Tories, have gone out of their way to avoid offending the government. Since he took over from the ineffectual Mr; Kaufman, Mr Cunningham has bravely avoided public appearances. Meanwhile, Mr Robertson has. uttered, not a word of criticism of the EC or the Foreign Office, opening his mouth only to express his . sense of helplessness and, unforgivably, to back the government’s rejection of the use of armed force except in a "peace­keeping" role - a position that guarantees Serbian hegemony in Bosnia.

It now seems that Labour is prepared even to endorse the government's view that a show of air-power above Iraq to aid President George- Bush's flailing re-election campaign is a greater priority for the international community than dealing with Bosnia (or indeed the Soma­li famine and civil war).

By any standards, this is a shabby performance, particularly on the part of Mr Cunningham: Mr Robertson can at least plead that he has only been following or­ders. Mr Cunningham should never have been appointed: unless he bucks up his ideas in the next month, he will deserve to lose his job.

BEYOND WELFARISM

Tribune, 7 August 1992

Defending the welfare state is all very well, but it is not enough if Labour wants to win elections, argues Paul Anderson

With its leadership contest over, its new front bench team in place and the To­ries in disarray on the economy, it makes some sense for Labour to put behind it the soul-searching that followed the debacle of April 9 and to concentrate on attacking the government.

But it would be foolish for Labour to put everything into the promised summer offensive against John Major and forget the longer term. Even if a succession of opinion polls shows Labour under John Smith well ahead of the To­ries, the severity of the election de­feat will still demand some serious thinking about how Labour should pitch its appeal if it is to have a hope of winning in 1996 or 1997.

So far, unsurprisingly, most of the contributions to the debate about Labour's predicament have been concerned with what went wrong in 1992. For want of better explanations, it is generally ac­cepted that the defeat had some­thing to do with certain key voters not trusting Labour and other key voters feeling that Labour would do nothing for them.

Beyond this consensus, however, has been little but sweeping statements of the continuing validity of Labour's values and bickering about which details of style or sub­stance should have been changed for Labour to do better. Hardly anyone has dared to suggest that Labour's whole strategy needs to be changed for the next election: that, instead of organising its ap­peal to voters around the core of defence of the welfare state, as it has done since the mid-eighties, it should adopt a radically different approach.

Yet that is precisely what Labour needs. Instead of falling back on defence of the welfare state, the party must frame its programme for 1996 or 1997 with Europe and economic policy at the core and significant roles for environmentalism and democratisation.

Europeanisation

The future of Europe was barely mentioned during the election campaign, mainly because of a general sense among politicians that only they are interested.

On the detail of the Common Agricultural Policy (or even the Maastricht treaty), such a view is probably correct. But there are good reasons for questioning it in other areas. The perception that Britain lags behind its EC part­ners in wages, technology, social provision, transport, culture - in fact, just about every indicator of prosperity - is widespread among the public. Unease about the To­ries' lukewarm attitude to the whole project of European union is commonplace. So too, however, is the notion that the EC as currently constituted is remote, bureaucratic and undemocratic.

Labour can tap all these feelings by articulating a vision of a Britain fully committed to a democratic federal Europe in which:

• the European Parliament is giv­en massively increased powers at the  expense  of the  intergovern­mental Council of Ministers and the non-elected Commission;
• the   principle   of  subsidiarity (maximum appropriate decentrali­sation of decision-making) is applied not to empower national gov­ernments but to give a greater role to elected regional and local government;
• a high priority is given to widen­ing the EC to include the countries of the European Free Trade Area and the former Soviet bloc.

Economic strategy

On its own, however, a radical shift in Labour's position on the political organisation of Europe is not enough. The economic poten­tial of Europeanisation needs to be tapped.

Put crudely, Labour's main problem hi the 1992 election was popular disbelief in the efficacy of its proposed remedies for Britain's economic crisis. Labour was still considered by a large number of its target middle-class voters to be in­capable of managing the economy, while many working-class voters, traditionally its core supporters, did not reckon that the party's rather timid proposals would do anything to put the country back to work. Labour's economic policy came over as essentially a policy for redistribution - tax and bene­fits - and nothing else.

This was mainly because Labour's economic advisers were saying, quite rightly, that there was no hope of a Labour govern­ment being able to put some sort of late-seventies-style alternative economic policy into practice. As President Francois Mitterrand found to his cost in the early eight­ies, Keynesianism in one country is no longer feasible.

Labour's problem was that it had nothing to replace Keynesian­ism in one country as an approach to managing the economy. "Sup­ply-side" measures apart, it really was reduced to offering redistribu­tion and nothing else.

Just about the only way round this is to develop a Europe-wide reflationary economic strategy, ini­tially to be carried out intergovernmentally but to be transferred to democratically accountable Euro­pean institutions as soon as possi­ble.

Of course, Labour could not de­velop such a strategy on its own, let alone implement it: it would, at very least have to draw its sister European social democratic parties into the frame and would almost certainly have to go further, bring­ing in non-party economists as well as sympathetic Christian Democrats and liberals.

Democratisation

The Europeanisation theme can be carried still further if Labour frames its plans for constitutional reform in the language of catching up with the democracies of our EC partners. First-past-the-post elec­tions for parliament, an unelected second chamber and rigid central­ism make British democracy a laughing stock throughout the EC.

The idea that "electoral reform" lost Labour the last election and should therefore be shunned is ut­terly without foundation. Certain­ly, Labour leaders made fools of themselves a week before polling day by refusing to give straight an­swers about the party's intentions, but that was a matter of indeci-siveness tinged with opportunism, not electoral reform.

It is also doubtless true that the prospect of a Liberal Democrat-Labour coalition government put off many disillusioned Tory sup­porters who were toying with the idea of voting Liberal Democrat. That was simply a by-product of the closeness in the opinion polls of the two main parties, which in­evitably led to media speculation about possible governing coali­tions.

Labour should move as quickly as possible to adopt the Additional Member System for the House of Commons, regional assemblies and the Scottish and Welsh parlia­ments. This is the only system to combine one-member constituen­cies and proportionality. The party should propose a new federal sec­ond chamber composed of repre­sentatives of the regional assem­blies.

This is essentially the structure of the German political system. Its advantages in delivering stable growth and affluence to its citizens could be exploited ruthlessly by Labour.

Empowerment

But electoral reform and regional­ism are not the only elements of the democratisation programme that Labour should develop. One of the biggest successes of the Tory Party in the past 13 years has been to persuade people that it stands up for those who feel pow­erless in the face of state bureau­cracy.

The right-to-buy scheme for council tenants persuaded thou­sands that the Tories meant to give people control over the things that most affected their everyday lives. Opt-out schools could play a similar role in the nineties.

Labour has to develop a populist anti-bureaucratic politics of the Left. This does not mean reluctant­ly accepting Tory measures as faits accomplis. Nor does it mean mere­ly adopting a rhetoric of opposition to "vested interests" or simply promising entrenched rights. Labour has to take the initiative across the board with bold, tangi­ble proposals for empowerment in every sphere.

Giving people a greater say at work – with a programme to en­courage rapid growth of producer co-operatives and democratic em­ployee share-ownership schemes, a commitment to a "co-determina­tion" model of industrial relations, and policies to give new rights to trade unionists and to members of pension schemes – must be a prior­ity.

So must proposals to encourage self-build housing schemes and self-management of housing for those unwilling or unable to buy, measures to democratise and de­centralise local government and the health and education services, and policies to increase consumer rights far beyond what is envis­aged by the government's various charters.

The goal of empowerment should be central to Labour's Com­mission on Social Justice, which must be a fundamental review of the party's approach to tax and benefits and not an excuse merely to chip away at the principle of universality hi welfare provision.

Universality is essential if the welfare system is to give people the sense of security that is the prerequisite for confident au­tonomous action. For Labour to ac­cept the Tory view that all we need is a minimal "safety net", means-tested welfare system would be disastrous. Indeed, there is a strong case to be made for extend­ing rather than reducing the scope of universality by adopting a basic income scheme as the core of a new welfare settlement.

Environmentalism

The environment was another big issue notable by its absence from the 1992 general election cam­paign. The consensus among the politicians, apparently borne out by the opinion polls, was that in the middle of a recession voters are less concerned with global warm­ing than with jobs and mortgages.

Whatever the truth of this con­sensus, it is likely that the next election will not be taking place in a recession and that worries about the environment among voters will be even more widespread than in the late eighties.

Meanwhile, the need for govern­ment action, especially on global warming, will have become more urgent and more apparent, much to the embarrassment of the To­ries, with their attachment to non­intervention and "letting market forces decide".

Once again, Labour has an op­portunity to seize the initiative by developing an alternative pro­gramme, particularly on energy, where Labour should go for giving a massive boost to research into sources of renewable energy, and transport, where the need to re­duce carbon dioxide emissions meshes perfectly with Labour's en­thusiasm for public transport. Once again, the British government's poor record compared with most of our EC partners should be  a focus for Labour's attack.

Demilitarisation

With the end of the cold war, the government is making severe cuts in defence spending. We have al­ready seen massive redundancies among defence sector workers and there are many more to come.

Labour's response so far has been cautious in the extreme. The party promised a defence diversification agency at the 1992 election but, largely because an inordinate amount of time had been spent ar­guing about who would oversee it, very little work had been done on what the agency would actually do. Developing the proposal for a DDA is now a high priority.

But Labour needs more than just a policy for the defence indus­try: it has to work out what Britain's defence needs really are. Calling for a full defence review and arguing that British nuclear weapons should be included in multilateral arms reduction nego­tiations might have worked as a holding operation in the run-up to the last election but in the next five years the party will have to go much further.

The whole security system in Europe is in a state of crisis. With the Soviet threat no more, the Balkans torn by war and ethnic tensions in the former Soviet Union threatening to explode, NATO is desperately searching for a role in the post-cold-war world. Pressure is growing for the devel­opment of the Western European Union into the main security or­ganisation on the continent. With the current pace of nuclear arms reduction talks, the time is fast ap­proaching when the other nuclear powers demand that French and British nuclear forces are included in negotiations.

Labour needs to do some deep thinking: first, about what it wants (and what is needed) from a new European security system and, secondly, about its precise ne­gotiating positions on nuclear arms. In both cases, its delibera­tions should be informed by the conviction that the demilitarisa­tion of international relations is the best way of ensuring lasting peace and security.

All this does not in itself add up to a detailed programme for Labour in the next five years. But it is, I hope, the basis for a coher­ent and credible left agenda for the mid-nineties and beyond, with plenty to appeal to working-class and middle-class voters. Does any­one out there agree?

LEFT UNITY: NICE IDEA, SHAME ABOUT REALITY

Tribune leader, 7 August 1992

For some on the left, the lessons of Labour's leadership contest and John Smith's distribution of Shadow Cabi­net and front-bench posts are clear. "The triumph of the right is now complete," declared Ken Livingstone in the New Statesman last week. The genuine soft left has to cut itself free from the Brown, Blair, Cook, Straw 'realist' wing, recog­nising that in everything but name, these people are now on the right wing of the party every bit as much as Jack Cunning­ham." The left of the Tribune Group of MPs should line up with the Campaign Group and run a joint slate of candidates for the next set of Shadow Cabinet elec­tions, he argued.

Few have expressed themselves so di­rectly and publicly, but a version of Mr Livingstone's position is shared by plenty of other left MPs. In the medium term at least, left unity in parliament is a high priority, they believe.

Up to a point, it is difficult to disagree. Labour is insufficiently radical and is in danger of getting even worse. The idea of persuading radicals in the Parliamentary Labour Party to work together is an at­tractive one. If, instead of squabbling, left MPs could come together on a com­mon platform, the chances of putting Labour on a radical course might be in­creased.

The problem is that it is increasingly difficult to define the Labour left as a group of people with a common political platform. Of course, the left has common values. Anti-militarism is one; the sense that labour should be empowered against capital is another. The left believes that people should have more control over the decisions that fundamentally affect their everyday lives.

So one could go on – but these common values do not yield agreement on the great issues of the day. On these, from the European Community through electoral reform to the importance of Green poli­tics, the left is deeply divided. Most im­portant, on the economy, where once there was left consensus on the neo-Keynesian protectionism of the Alternative Economic Strategy, there is not one left position but a raft of competing ideas, with fundamental disagreements about devaluation, the possibilities of European alternative economic strategies, nationalisation and much more besides.

Add the continuing arguments on the left about toleration of Leninist entrists in the Labour Party and about the future of the block vote at Labour conference, and it is difficult to see how a comprehen­sive platform could be devised to bring together the left rather than divide it.

It follows that it is not always very easy these days to define who isn’t on the left. Abandoning principles in the pursuit of power is all too familiar a phenomenon, and it is just about possible that some or even all of “the Brown, Blair, Cook, Straw ‘realist' wing" of the soft left have sold the pass on everything they once be­lieved, as Mr Livingstone claims. But the evidence for his assertion is patchy, to say the least.

Unless serious signs of apostasy ap­pear, the energy that Mr Livingstone would like to see spent on realigning and rebuilding the left would be better used simply to encourage open no-holds-barred debate on Labour's future, no one in the party excluded.

BOSNIA NEEDS ARMED INTERVENTION TO SURVIVE

The six weeks since Tribune – then alone  among  British  newspapers – first argued for limited military inter­vention to save Sarajevo from the bloody siege by Serbian irregulars should have been used by the governments of west­ern Europe to make the necessary military preparations and then to send in the aircraft and troops.

Instead, the British and American governments have resisted all calls for military force to stop the siege, taking refuge in hand-wringing and hoping against hope that sanctions and peace talks will yield some result.

Meanwhile, the crisis in Bosnia has de­veloped precisely as any intelligent ob­server knew it would. The Serbs have consolidated their positions and contin­ued the grisly programme of "ethnic cleansing”; and the Croats, at first hesitant about getting in on the act in Bosnia for fear of what might result, have pitched in with a vengeance. The carving-up of Bosnia between Serbia and Croatia is now well advanced.

It is not too late to rescue the situation. Sarajevo is still holding out – just. However emboldened they have been by the criminal prevarication of the British and American governments, the Serbian mili­tias are still not in a position seriously to resist what the big powers could throw at them; the same goes for their Croatian counterparts. But in another couple of months  it will be too late.

THE ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF MR LAMONT

Tribune leader, 31 July 1992

Less than four months into their fourth term, the Tories are in an almighty mess on the economy. The re­covery they promised has foiled to mate­rialise. Every economic indicator shows that the recession is as deep as ever. Company failures are still growing. So is unemployment. A Confederation of British Industry survey published this week reports that 57 per cent of manufac­turers' order books are below normal and two-thirds of manufacturers are working below capacity.

True to form, the Chancellor, Norman Lamont, has responded by claiming yet again that recovery is imminent and ar­guing for patience while his anti-infla­tionary policies create the foundations for sustained growth. He has ignored crit­ics who have argued that sterling is over­valued, that the fight against inflation is not the main priority at the depth of a re­cession or that the reduction of public spending is idiotic in an economy suffer­ing a collapse in demand.

In such circumstances, and with its new Shadow Cabinet in place, there is no reason why Labour cannot have a field day baiting the Government over its performance – and indeed this week Gordon Brown, the new Shadow Chancellor, set to work with relish.

But it is one thing to attack the Govern­ment and another to come up with an altentative to its policies. And Labour is rather short of ideas about how it would do things differently.

It is true that the party has, since the election, made it clear that it would not be averse to devaluation of sterling, al­beit by way of a general realignment of currencies within the exchange rate mechanism of the European Monetary System involving, crucially, the revalua­tion upwards of the Deutschmark. It is true, too, that Labour has said that a re­cession is not the time to engage in public spending cuts, which will remove yet more demand from an already depressed economy. Then there are Labour's long­standing commitments to "supply-side” measures: extra spending on training, tax breaks for investment and so on.

All of this is most sensible. Sterling is over-valued, spending cuts are a bad idea and supply-side measures are essential. But it does not add up to a radical alter­native to the Tories* basic approach. De­valuation of the pound against the Deutschmark within the ERM would certainly ease the pressure on British ex­porters for a while, which is what makes it necessary. 

But it is no panacea. Be­cause of the import-reliance of the British economy, its most significant effect would be to cut real wages for a while - hardly die stuff of socialist dreams, even if it temporarily improved competitivity. Sim­ilarly, the spending cuts, effectively the downside of over-generous pledges in the run-up to the election, are not particular­ly significant in macroeconomic terms (although they could well be viciously shared out). And supply-side measures are not a short-term answer to recession. 

So what should Labour do? The traditional left response is to call for a reflationary alternative economic strategy for Britain. But any nation-state-based at­tempt to reflate would founder in the face of a massive flight of capital. Britain sim­ply is not big enough to cope with the mo­bility of capital in the contemporary glob­al economy. What would be possible, how­ever, is a co-ordinated Europe-wide reflationary strategy, organised either inter-governmentally or through new Euro­pean economic institutions. Labour should start work now with its European social democratic sister parties on pre­cisely such a programme, making the call for Europe-wide reflation the core of its assault on the Tories' miserable economic record.

PARTY NEEDS A CUTTING EDGE

Tribune leader, 24 July 1992

If the talk in the corridors of Westmin­ster is correct, two of the key posts in the new Shadow Cabinet, due to be an­nounced today (Friday), have been decid­ed for weeks. Unless John Smith decides at the last minute to change his mind, Gordon Brown will be the new Shadow Chancellor and Tony Blair will become Shadow Home Secretary.

Both are well fitted to their new jobs. Mr Brown has proved himself a capable trade and industry spokesman with a good grasp of the economic realities cur­rently facing Britain – not always hither­to a precondition for being given the post – and promotion should give him the au­thority and confidence to develop the Eu­rope-based strategy for redistribution, demilitarisation, environmentalism and growth that he knows Labour needs.

Mr Blair, taking over from a decent but unimaginative sixties social democrat, Roy Hattersley, has a chance, well within his capacity, to develop his brief as a nineties libertarian, more conversant than his predecessor with the politics of race, gender, electoral reform and rights that has energed at the centre of British radical politics in the past decade.

Beyond these two, however, the picture is hazy - and for good reason. The result of the Shadow Cabinet ballot was not known when Tribune went to press. With more than 50 contenders for the 18 or so places up for election by the Parliamen­tary Labour Party and the likelihood of several surprises, everything was up for grabs.

Mr Smith has indicated that he will ap­point a Shadow Cabinet of all the talents, and that those who opposed him and Margaret Beckett in the leadership and deputy leadership contests will be consid­ered fairly for posts in the new line-up. He has also promised a welcome promo­tion to senior positions of some of Labour's most able women politicians. But much remains vague. In particular, the third "big" job in the Shadow Cabinet, Shadow Foreign Secretary, is apparently a contest between Jack Cunningham and Robin Cook, with the "loser" being given trade and industry.

Mr Cook is the man to go for. Unlike Mr Cunningham, he has shown a sustained interest in, and engagement with, the world outside Britain, and he is unencumbered with the old cold-war Atlanticist baggage that has debilitated Labour thinking on foreign policy for too long. Mr Cunningham has given no indication that he sees the future of foreign policy as anything but business as usual. Mr Smith should appoint the man who might be prepared to break the old mould.

Perhaps, though, the old hierarchy of tasks is no longer what it was. There is no reason, for example, to consider that the defence or environment portfolios are any leas important these days than the "big three". On one hand, there is no more important question facing Britain or the world than the burgeoning ecologi­cal crisis; on the other, whoever takes the defence spokesperson's job will have to preside over Labour's response to the massive cut-back in war preparations that is attending the end of the cold war.

Yet there has been no speculation about who gets either defence or environ­ment. For Tribune, the best bet would be to keep Bryan Gould where he is at envi­ronment - for him to shadow William Waldegrave on the Citizen's Charter would be a waste of one of Labour's best talents on one of the Tories' least con­vincing initiatives. On defence, the im­portant thing is that whoever is appoint­ed must be given the autonomy to push the case for reducing the role in the coun­try's affairs of the military-industrial complex. As with Shadow Foreign Secre­tary, it would be best to appoint someone who is not a cold-war Atlanticist. Mr Smith has a chance to give the Shadow Cabinet a radical cutting edge. With the leadership and deputy leader­ship in such safe hands, he should reward imagination and flair rather than seniori­ty and solidity.

NOW TO OPEN UP A PROPER DEBATE

Tribune leader, 17 July 1992

The election of John Smith to the Labour leadership has been so certain for so long that this weekend's special Labour conference will be something of a non-event. After the initial outrageous behaviour of the union bosses in bounc­ing Labour into an early election which only Mr Smith had a hope of winning, the leadership and deputy leadership con­tests have been dull in the extreme. Despite the best efforts of Bryan Gould to raise issues of substance, there has been little intelligent discussion either of why Labour lost on April 9 or of what its di­rection should be in the next four or five years. Since it became obvious, a month or so ago, that Margaret Beckett was clear favourite for the deputy leadership, observing the contest has been worse than watching paint dry.

Mr Smith faces a daunting task as lead­er. Although since April 9 Labour has seen little of the back-biting that charac­terised the aftermath of the 1979 defeat, and despite the likely size of his majority on Saturday, the party is deeply divided over the most important questions cur­rently facing it: Europe, electoral reform and its links with the trade unions. Hav­ing expected to win on April 9, moreover, the party faces a severe crisis of morale, worse even than after the 1983 debacle. Forget about the electoral mountain that Mr Smith will have to climb if he is to be­come Prime Minister – first he has to act to bring the party together and give its worn-out, disillusioned members a renewed sense of purpose.

He will not be able to do either if, when he dishes out positions in the Shadow Cabinet next week, he is seen to reward his supporters and punish the losers. Even though Mr Gould and Mr Prescott have proved unable to win sufficient sup­port among Labour Party members and affiliated trade unionists to come close to winning on Saturday, they remain repre­sentatives of strong currents of opinion in the party, particularly among activists, and their records as front-bench spokes­men in recent years, on the environment and transport respectively, should be enough to secure them places in the top rank of the Labour leadership. At very least, they should keep their current jobs in the reshuffle.

The Shadow Cabinet is only the first of many challenges that Mr Smith must face, however, and it is by no means the most important. Once the new front bench is in place, he and his colleagues will have to address the far bigger prob­lem of the party's woeful shortage of ideas and hick of confidence about its raison d'etre.

In the nine years of Neil Kinnock's lead­ership, Labour threw out a large amount of ideological baggage, much (but not all) of which was undoubtedly outmoded. But, with the exception of Roy Hattersley's vague and arid redefinition of the philosophical basis of social democracy, in all that time Labour never came up with anything to replace the old baggage. Iconoclasm and argument were discour­aged in the interests of unity and market­ing men made all the key decisions.

Labour now desperately needs to think through its political project – not its de­tailed policies or its core values, but what it wants to achieve in the next 20 or 30 years. To do that it has to have at least two years of open, wide-ranging discus­sion, in which heterodoxy, experimenta­tion and participation by people outside the narrow confines of the Labour leader­ship are positively encouraged by the party at every level.

That does not mean opening up the par­ty again to Leninist parasites. But it does mean the creation of an atmosphere of tolerance and pluralism. One of Mr Smith's first acts should be to declare that, for a little while at least, he will play the role of gardener while a thousand flowers bloom.

TO SAVE INDUSTRY, GET OUT OF DEFENCE

Tribune leader, 10 July 1992

“We are not a global power, nor do we have aspirations to be a global power. We are primarily a middle-ranking European power.”

So said Malcolm Rifkind, the Secretary of State for Defence, on Tuesday, the day he published the Government's 1992 de­fence White Paper, and it is difficult to disagree with the sentiments. Britain's world empire is long gone, its economy is only the fourth biggest in Europe (and sixth biggest in the world) and its influ­ence in world affairs is minimal.

Yet the practice of Mr Rifldnd's Min­istry of Defence does not match his mod-eat rhetoric. For all the talk of a new de­fence strategy in the White Paper and for all the spending cuts planned in the next five years, British military procurement decisions are still being made as if the cold war were in full swing.

The most obvious sign of this is the MoD's decision to place the long-delayed order for the fourth Trident nuclear sub­marine with the VSEL shipyard in Bar­row. That decision will be widely wel­comed there because it will save the yard from closure for a few more years. But there is absolutely no rationale for the fourth Trident boat except as a job-creation scheme. In the absence of a Soviet nuclear threat, precisely whom is Trident supposed to deter? Is it really worth spending £33,000 million or so over the next 30 years to provide insurance against the unlikely eventuality of a rogue Third World state acquiring not just nuclear weapons but also the ability and desire to threaten Britain with them?

But Trident is not the only evidence of continuing MoD delusions of grandeur. Almost as telling is its response to the German government's decision last week to pull out of the production phase of the four-nation European Fighter Aircraft. The Germans, after more than two years of weighing up the options, have decided that EFA is not the sort of fighter that they will need at the turn of the century. Because it is designed to counter the very best Soviet aircraft, it is extremely com­plex and therefore expensive. But because the cold war has ended, there is no need to counter the very best Soviet air­craft. The Germans believe that they can make do with a cheaper fighter.

There is no reason that Britain cannot do the same. Indeed, as with Trident, the only rationale for continuing with EFA in its current form is as a job-creation scheme. There is no military reason for producing such a high-tech aircraft and the export market for EFA is shrinking by the month.

Labour has responded to all this by ex­pressing concern about jobs and the preservation of Britain's manufacturing base, which is fine as far as it goes. In the long run, however, the fact is that Britain cannot remain reliant on military indus­try if it is going to compete in the interna­tional markets of the next century. Labour must make it clear that, rather than paying billions to keep the shipyard workers of Barrow employed on Trident and the British Aerospace workforce beavering away on EFA, the answer is to switch that expenditure to civilian projects, particularly retraining and research and development, to give British high-tech manufacturing a chance to prosper beyond the end of the decade.