THE BENEFITS OF SUMMER MADNESS

New Statesman & Society leader, 1 September 1995

Labour seems to have learned the lessons of its Littleborough and Saddleworth by-election campaign: that no-holds-barred populism cannot work

After what seems in every newspaper office to have been an eternity of desperate scrabbling for decent domestic political stories, the silly season is at last drawing to a close.

The senior politicians and spin-doctors are trickling back from the Dordogne and Tuscany and starting their preparations for the conference season; the so-called B-teams that have been holding the fort over the summer are packing their bags for what they reckon are well-deserved belated rests.

A little later than most years – because the TUC has at long last been persuaded not to hold its Congress during the school holidays – normal political life is resuming again.

Unusually, however, it is resuming in circumstances significantly different from those before the break – particularly for the opposition parties. It's too early to tell whether there has been any movement in public opinion in the past few weeks: the first polls to be taken since the controversy in the Labour Party that dominated the news in the middle of August and the hoo-hah over water shortages, are published at the end of this week.

But there has been a perceptible change in the relationship between Labour and the Lib Dems. Just about the last significant event in British politics before most of the leading players went off with their buckets and spades was the by-election in Littleborough and Saddleworth, won by the Lib Dems from Labour after an unusually bitter campaign.

The consensus among the commentators the day after the count was that everyone had grounds to be well pleased: the Lib Dems, most obviously, because they had gained one of their main target seats from the Tories; Labour because it had come from distant third in 1992 to a close second; and the Tories because they had not done quite as disastrously as they had feared.

Within a couple of weeks, however, Littleborough and Saddleworth had started to look less of a success for Labour, as a wave of criticism of the party's campaign tactics in the by-election swept through the ranks. That criticism – most eloquently expressed by Richard Burden, the MP for Birmingham Northfield, in these pages three weeks ago – was widely reported, often in a ludicrously sensationalist manner. But its significance has been missed.

Put fairly simply, Labour ran the Littleborough and Saddleworth campaign as a dry run for the general election –much as it used the 1991 Monmouth by-election to try out themes that dominated its efforts in the 1992 general election. Resources and people were poured in, the tactics meticulously planned.

But whereas in Monmouth the all-out campaign focused on the Tory threat to the health service, in Littleborough and Saddleworth Labour spared no effort in pillorying the Lib Dem candidate for his "soft" line on drugs, raves and immigration and his enthusiasm for raising taxes.

The outrage that this generated throughout the party has been a major shock to party strategists, who have long worked on the assumption that the party is so desperate to win the next election that it will put up with anything to get Tony Blair into Number Ten. For all the wounded expressions and claims that the dirtiness of the Littlebor-ough and Saddleworth campaign has been exaggerated, the Labour leadership now knows that it cannot rely on the acquiescence of a large section of the party if it decides to base the next general election campaign on no-holds-barred populism, attacking the Lib Dems from the authoritarian right.

That is all to the good. So, too, is the first practical expression of this knowledge, the announcement by shadow home secretary Jack Straw in the Guardian last week that Labour's commitment to a referendum on the electoral system for the House of Commons will not, after all, be dropped by the party.

That commitment is the single most important sym¬bol not just of Labour's belief in a radical programme of constitutional reform, but also of its openness to the pos¬sibility of working with the Liberal Democrats in government. As NSS argued two weeks ago, its abandonment – as urged by Labour's numbskull tribalist tendency – would have been a disaster for Tony Blair's credibility as a democratic reformer and, particularly after Littleborough and Saddleworth, a fatal blow to the prospects for Lib-Lab co-operation either before or after the general election.

Unsurprisingly, the Lib Dems – who this week launched an economic policy that to all intents and pur¬poses is the same as Labour's – are pleased as punch with the referendum pledge. So too is NSS. That little spell of "summer madness", as John Prescott called it, seems to have knocked some sense into Labour heads.

IRELAND AFTER A YEAR OF PEACE

New Statesman & Society leader, 25 August 1995

A year after the IRA ceasefire, there is no room for complacency. All-party talks must start soon – and all sides must give ground

 The IRA ceasefire is one year old this week. That is cause for some cheer: there has been peace in Northern Ireland during that time, apart from a few isolated shootings and the occasional riot. But it is decidedly not a cause for complacency.

The period of peace has shown us two important things aboutthe erstwhile terrorists. First, Sinn Fein enjoys the limelight and recognises that it gets more of it in peace than after violence. Second, traditional loyalists have been outflanked by the creativity of former loyalist para¬militaries, whose commitment to peace has proved as strong as that of republicans.

Perhaps more importantly, peace has made the lives of the ordinary people of Northern Ireland that bit more civilised. People feel free to shop and socialise in central Belfast and Derry. Tourists have flocked to the region as never before, not least from the Republic. The people want peace to go on.

For several months after the IRA declared its ceasefire, ministers appeared on the Today programme to question the permanence of peace. Having accepted that peace seemed more permanent than temporary, Sinn Fein was allowed to appear on news bulletins. Now the ministers ask: when will decommissioning begin? That is an important issue, but certainly not the only one at the moment. No mantra can be a substitute for positive action.

When the talks do start, the agenda must face up to economic and social issues, as well as political structures. Unemployment must be tackled, not least in those areas from which the extremes draw their support. Unity of purpose between loyalists and nationalists exists on gaining European Commission funds for the region. The tourist boards North and South have gained from greater cooperation. Such social and economic partnerships can help to dispel much political distrust.

Eventually, there must be moves towards political agreement. Nobody should expect overnight solutions. Sinn Fein may cling to a belief in a united Ireland in public, but even it is beginning to acknowledge the realpolitik already accepted by the major parties south of the border. Traditional unionists must be prepared to be as flexible as the newer loyalist parties. Power-sharing will need to develop, a new assembly will have to be created. But the greater cross-border cooperation will be as far as aspirations for unity can go for the moment.

In the longer term, Europe may offer more answers. The Commission has supported the peace process. The two most formidable politicians in the North, John Hume and Ian Paisley, both sit in the European Parliament. Europe has backed cross-border regional schemes in north western Ireland for years. In the future, politicians may be more pragmatic and increasingly prefer to deal with Brussels rather than London. That is no united Ireland. But it is infinitely preferable to the status quo before the ceasefire.

Private Lee Clegg may well have been a victim of circumstances, which led to his conviction for killing a young joyrider. But his premature release was the single most destabilising action of the British government in the past year. For the sake of a few extra backbench votes, John Major seemed prepared to sacrifice years of painstaking work. Fortunately, after a few days of protest, the issue has gone away.

There are ways for Major to redeem his position in Ire¬land. First, the London government shoulduse the Clegg release as a backdrop for more vigorous action to transfer prisoners home from British jails to Northern Ireland. Second, the parole board should become more flexible with non-violent Republican and Loyalist prisoners.

But it is not simply the British government that must make gestures. The IRA does not want to lose face; as Gerry Adams reminded a Belfast audience recently, the IRA has not gone away. So any expectation that the Provos will have dumped their arms outside Stormont on the way into talks is a fantasy. They could, however, arrange for a significant increase in the number of arms dumps "discovered" by the Garda and the RUC. That should allow Sinn Fein to take part in all-party talks. While they're at it, they should also end the punishment beatings of nationalist dissidents.

The talks must begin soon. There is growing impa¬tience about the speed of progress. Discount the dis-gruntled former Irish premier Albert Reynolds, who joined Sinn Fein to attack the decommissioning precon-dition. Listen instead to the current government in Dublin, which has been disappointed by both the pace of change in London and the insensitivity of some of Major's actions.

GHOST AT THE FEAST

New Statesman & Society, 25 August 1995

Bryan Gould talks to Paul Anderson about the Evening Standard, Tony Blair, and why he quit British politics

Bryan Gould is still thinking of suing the Evening Standard for publishing an article under his name last week that was written by 19-year-old Nick Howard, the son of the Home Secretary.

"Many years ago when I was a law don I used to teach the law of libel," he says, sit­ting in his office at the University of Waikato in New Zealand, where he is now vice-chancellor. "And there's no doubt that I was libelled. The only ques­tion is whether it's worth doing anything about it in the light of the fairly prompt apology the Standard gave me last week." He hasn't done anything yet—but he's tempted because the Standard was just a bit lackadaisical. "It's at least worth get­ting an opinion on it. I still find it difficult to believe that it took them as long as it did—three-and-a-half days—to realise that anything was wrong. I mean, Nick Howard had sent the piece to four other papers. Surely someone on one of those papers must have noticed. Yet it was only when I discovered it that the Standard did anything."

Gould didn't see the offending article until after he'd read all the press com­mentary on it. "It was at the bottom of a pile of faxes sent me by my publisher," he explains. "I read them over breakfast last Thursday morning. I was astonished at the tone of the coverage and quickly real­ised from the quotes that things were being attributed to me that I'd never writ­ten. Then I came across a copy of the arti­cle itself." He laughs. "It bore no relation to what I was saying. But initially it was quite difficult getting it over to people that I wasn't complaining about being rewrit­ten but that the article was not mine."

In the end, however, he managed to persuade the Standard late on Wednes­day evening (New Zealand is 12 hours ahead of British Summer Time) that a completely different piece had been sub­stituted for his original. The paper's edi­tor, Stewart Steven, responded by setting up an internal inquiry into what had gone wrong, then published the story of what had happened in Thursday's edition, along with the article Gould had submit­ted in the first place and a grovelling apol­ogy to its author.

The cock-up soon eclipsed the sup­posed left-wing rebellion against Tony Blair as the silly season domestic politics story of the week. By the time Blair arrived back in Britain from holiday for the VJ Day commemorations—extracts from Gould's memoirs in the Guardian notwithstanding—the crisis alleged to be gripping his party had all but vanished.

Which only goes to show that the Labour leader is a very lucky man. What Gould actually wrote for the Standard is significantly more trenchant in its ques­tioning of Labour's whole strategy than anything else that has appeared in the past three weeks—despite its assertions that "Tony Blair has had a brilliant first year as Labour leader" and "looks a racing certainty" to win the next election.

The core of his argument is familiar to anyone who followed his career in the four or five years before he bowed out of British politics last summer—but it hits a particularly sensitive chord with the Labour leadership now because it chal­lenges directly the idea that Blair marks a fresh start for the parry. "Labour's new leader did not suddenly strike out in a new direction," he wrote. "He inherited an electoral strategy which goes back to the late 19803. It originated with Neil Kinnock after the 1987 election defeat, it was given new emphasis by John Smith, and it has now been carried to new heights by Tony Blair. That strategy is one of 'safety first'. Its essence is that Labour should do or say nothing which might conceivably alienate the voters."

And that, for Gould, is a major prob­lem. "What happens if the Tories, by some miracle, recover their popularity and disaffected Conservatives are tempted to return to the fold as happened in 1992?" he went on. "What is to bind them to their current and perhaps tempo­rary intention of voting Labour? Surely it would be more sensible for Labour, while they have the chance, to give these voters positive reasons for voting Labour so that they are less likely to revert to type if the Tories should engineer a brief recovery." So far, the Labour leadership has not made a reasoned answer.

Not that the former Dagenham MP is some wild revolutionary. His memoirs, published next month as Goodbye to All That, record the progress of an ambitious young man from a modest conservative family – a little less affluent than Blair's – from a colonial backwater. Born in 1939, he did so well at school and uni­versity that he made it to Oxford and a junior position in the Foreign Office. After that, it's a story of self-confidence frustrated by Britain's anti-meritocratic class system: a job as a promising young law don (in Oxford again), a spell in the 19708 as a promising young Labour MP for Southampton Itchen, a couple of years as a promising young TV journalist after he lost his seat in 1979. Then he won the safe Labour seat of Dagenham in 1983.

The glory years –the bits of the mem­oirs serialised in the Guardian last week­end—were in the mid-1980s, when, given a key job by Neil Kinnock, he became Labour's most promising all-round television performer. After that, however, he faded, after bitter in-fighting in Labour's upper echelons (faithfully recounted in the book). Removed from a front-bench economic portfolio in 1989, he said goodbye to British politics last year after losing his bid for the party lead­ership in 1992 to John Smith.

His problem was that he was a diehard s opponent of anything to do with European economic integration—and, by the time he was a contender for Labour's top job, the thinking left that was his natural constituency had embraced not just Europe but (for the most part) Europe even on monetarist terms. Gould left over Maastricht and what he saw as the failure of the left to mount a defence of national control of the economy. His memoirs are far from triumphalist.

Still, Gould is the first frontbencher from the Kinnock era to tell the story on the record, and he's sure that he has a rele­vant message even now. "I don't think that the situation has changed that much," he says of the past five years of British politics. "Underlying politics don't change very fast. In the 1980s, the left lost its intellectual self-confidence in the face of Thatcherism.

Towards the end of the decade, many people lost faith in Thatcherism, but Labour was so shell-shocked that it didn't take the initiative. The party is still cowering in the trenches, even though the Tories under John Major have no stomach whatsoever for defend­ing the territory."

The alternative, he believes, is for Labour to become "more positive". But what does that mean? "We should say: 'Vote for us for a better health service, bet­ter schools, better public services. We'll intervene in the economy to secure full employment,'" he says.

Unsurprisingly, he has few illusions that anything of the sort will happen. "Of course, most people who are responsible for Labour strategy now will throw up their hands in horror at this and say: "That's exactly what people don't want to hear. They're terrified of government, they don't want to pay bigger taxes.' Well, I'm not saying that you'll convince every­one with a positive message, but the ground is much more fertile for this mes­sage than the current strategists believe. Labour will never have a better opportu­nity to put it forward than right now. The Tories are discredited. No one believes that they've got the answers.

"I'm not saying that you blurt out any­thing that's at the top of your mind—you work it out extraordinarily carefully, then you go and spell out three or four well-prepared policies in some detail. You really press those very hard, confidently. It's a commonsense, almost precautionary strategy."

For all this, Gould insists that his enthusiasm for Tony Blair is genuine. "I think Tony, by virtue of his general image and rhetoric, is a more convinc­ing exponent of almost anything than John Smith or Neil Kinnock was," he says. "But this should encourage his advisers to give him his head more and allow him to be bolder in terms of sub­stance. It's a pity that they can't put into his mouth words of more substance than they have done. He's striking the right poses. But my fear is that sooner or later – and we could be getting per­ilously close to this point – his oppo­nents are really going to nail him on the disparity between the rhetoric and the substance."

But Gould has few expectations that his former colleagues in the shadow cabinet will save Blair from a grisly fate. "The dif­ficulty that I eventually faced up to was that there weren't many people who took my view," he admits. "I still maintain that I represented between 35 and 40 per cent of party opinion in 1992 in the broad sense of people who wanted to see more radical policies, full employment and all of that. But I'm not sure there are too many that would go along the whole way with me.

"Take the current shadow cabinet: there are people like Michael Meacher, David Blunkett—we immediately start running out of names here—to some degree people like John Prescott, and then very soft left people like Frank Dobson and Jack Straw—they'd be instinc­tively sympathetic but for reasons of Realpolitik would never give me any sup­port. They always saw their own career advance as much more important. Frankly, the difficulty is that there isn't a great body of people who think much further than the next shadow cabinet election."

Gould's book comes out next month and he'll be back in Britain to launch it. Not that he wants to come back perma­nently—"I really have no regrets about leaving," he says. And, although he remains fascinated by everything politi­cal and has good relations with the New Zealand Labour Party leadership, he has no plans to get into New Zealand politics. "The British Labour Party needs to take note of the monetarist turn that the New Zealand Labour Party took in 1984," he says. "To some extent, over the ERM, British Labour has seen the same thing happening already. The New Zealand experience is an object lesson for Labour in Britain.

"There's constant speculation here that I'm going to get involved in politics here. But I've no intention of doing so, and I've no regrets about leaving political life in Britain. Certainly when something like this Evening Standard nonsense crops up and the phones start going, both my wife and I say 'Thank God we're not involved in this on a permanent basis.' There's a life beyond Westminster and one of the problems with British politics is that too many people in Westminster don't realise that."

There but for...

Much fun has been had at the expense of the Evening Standard since it emerged that it had run a piece last Monday written by 19-year-old Nick Howard, son of the Home Secretary, under the by-line of Bryan Gould.

Surely someone would have thought that there was something a bit odd about an article by a man in his mid-fifties beginning: "I was three and a half during the Winter of Discontent, never watched Michael Foot give a speech on television and have no memory of the 1989 election campaign"? The editors at the Standard apparently thought Gould was imagining himself as a first-time voter – as the standfirst it published proclaimed.

But there was a whole lot more in Howard's effort that should have set the alarm bells ringing. Take this for starters: "The Labour Party developed out of Marxism and the desire for public ownership of industry was based on the idea that human nature is good, and yet is distorted by the workings of capitalism." Or this:"... even during the 1980s it was ideology developed from Marxism which motivated the Labour opposition to the privatisations and the union legislation." Gould would never write such simplistic drivel even if he were pretending to be a teenager.

Not that the rest of the press has very much to crow about. On Tuesday nearly every other papers wallowed the story unquestioningly. "The queue of malcontents attacking Tony Blair's leadership was joined yesterday by Bryan Gould," reported Patrick Wintour in the Guardian, adding that his criticisms were "similar to his assaults on Labour's two previous leaders". Jon Hibbs described Gould in the Telegraph as "the latest left-wing figure to undermine Tony Blair's leadership"; in the Independent, John Rentoul wrote of "an unexpectedly bitter attack on Tony Blair". According to John Deans in the Mail, Gould had "fanned the flames of revolt burning beneath Tony Blair"; in the Express, Patrick Hennessy had it that he had "launched the most powerful assault on Mr Blair since the Labour leader's year-long honeymoon was ended by MP Richard Burden's attack on his tactics last week". The Sun's Pascoe Watson wrote of "a devastating attack", and the other tabloids carried similar pieces without by-lines.

It wasn't until Tuesday afternoon that rumours started doing the rounds that all was not as had first appeared – and it was only late on Wednesday that Gould himself realised that the problem was not insensitive editing but that the wrong piece had been published under his by-line. On Thursday came the Standard's grovelling apology – and by Friday all the journalists who had taken the story at face value were having a good laugh at the Standard's expense.

As for NSS – well, we went to press too early to get the full story but late enough to excise all mention of Gould from last week's issue. With deadlines just a couple of hours earlier, we would have ended up with as much egg on face as Fleet Street's finest.

PR: WE NEED A REFERENDUM

New Statesman & Society leader, 18 August 1995

A referendum on how the Commons is elected would give fresh legitimacy to Britain's democracy. Tony Blair should throw all his weight behind the idea

In a week in which media coverage of the Labour Party has been notable mainly for silly season fantasies about rebellions against Tony Blair's lead­ership, one story deserves to be taken very seriously: that of the drive by defenders of the first-past-the-post electoral system to get Labour conference this October to ditch the party's commitment to a referendum on electoral systems for the House of Commons.

With two major unions against the referendum (the Transport and General, and Unison), a third wavering (the GMB) and Tony Blair, never an enthusiast for electoral reform, apparently unwilling to defend the existing policy, the chances are high that the conference will vote for no change. But if it does this, it will have thrown away Labour's single most important commit­ment to constitutional reform and destroyed the credibil­ity of Blair's claims that he and his party are now commit­ted to pluralism. For his own sake, Blair must think again – and make it clear that he wants the existing policy to remain.

Of course, it is easy to see why opponents of a referen­dum – all of them, without exception, opponents of elec­toral reform – have made their push this summer to have the policy reversed. Many in the Labour Party accepted a referendum on electoral systems as a way of keeping the Liberal Democrats sweet, when it looked as if Labour would need tactical votes from Lib Dem support­ers, or even coalition with Paddy Ashdown, to have any hope of power. Today, Labour is riding high in the opin­ion polls, and it looks likely that it will be able to form a government on its own. Sops to the Lib Dems seem more a diversion than a necessity.

It could look very different at the time of the next general election. As Blair himself has said repeatedly, a massive opinion-poll lead nearly two years before an election guarantees nothing. Labour could yet find that it needs Lib Dem supporters' tactical votes or Lib Dem MPs' backing in the Commons, in which case a decision now to ditch a referendum on electoral systems will look asinine at best (as indeed will Peter Mandelson's  Littleborough and Saddleworth by-election campaign).

There's also the small matter of what dropping the referendum policy will do to Labour between now and the election. John Smith adopted it as a compromise to wind up the Plant commission on electoral systems and prevent a long and bloody internecine conflict between electoral reformers and opponents of change – and up to now it has worked a treat. If conference votes to abandon it, the least that can be expected is widespread (and justifi­able) resentment among the reformers. That is not something to be dismissed lightly – according to the most recent survey by Patrick Seyd and Paul Whiteley of Sheffield University, two-thirds of Labour's new mem­bers are in favour of electoral reform and only a fifth are against it.

But enough of realpolitik. The most important reason for supporting a referendum on electoral systems for the Commons is not that it facilitates pre-election Lib-Lab cooperation (welcome although that would be) or that it prevents acrimonious rows inside the Labour Party. Rather it is that a referendum would give the British people the chance our democracy needs to decide the sort of polity in which we live – and thus the chance to con­sign the winner-takes-all tribalism of first-past-the-post to the proverbial dustbin of history.

Put bluntly, the legitimacy of Britain's democratic sys­tem needs to be re-established. Popular disenchantment with the political process, particularly among the young, is at an all-time high. Politicians increasingly are seen as untrustworthy and venal, while the system is more and more viewed as remote and irrelevant.

It may well be true, as the defenders of the status quo argue, that most people care more about jobs, housing and the health service than about the electoral system, but that is beside the point. It is only when the people have a direct say in determining the basic rules of our democratic process that it will regain the popular support it needs to thrive.

In this sense, the holding of a referendum is more important than its outcome. NSS is a long-standing supporter of the German-style additional-member system of proportional representation: we would of course campaign vigorously for its adoption, and for an end to first-past-the-post, in a referendum campaign. But if the status quo won, we would have no choice but to enthusiastically embrace the people's choice.

The first question that must be asked of the cabal trying to get Labour to ditch a referendum is not why they so like the present system, but why they don't want to let the people decide.

GREATER SERBIA IS DEAD

New Statesman & Society leader, 11 August 1995

The Croat victory in the Krajina shows that the Serbs are not invincible – but it is not necessarily good news for Bosnia

The past week has seen the most significant turn­ing point in the war in former Yugoslavia since it began in 1991. On that, everyone agrees, regard­less of political persuasion. For the first time, the forces of Serb nationalism have suffered an overwhelm­ing – in fact, catastrophic – military defeat, and have been forced to cede territory seized and "ethnically cleansed" in the first couple of years of the conflict.

The first, obvious lesson of the successful Croatian assault that took the Krajina, overthrew the rebel Serb nationalist regime in Knin and relieved the besieged Bosnian government enclave of Bihac, is that the Serbs are far from invincible on the battlefield. They can be forced to yield their conquests. Slobodan Milosevic rose to power in the 19805 promising a Greater Serbia stretching from the Macedonian border with Greece to the Adriatic coast. His militarist dream motivated the Serb nationalist land-grab in Croatia and then Bosnia when the Croats and Bosnians decided to secede from Yugoslavia rather than submit to his hegemony. Now it is shattered.

It is hardly surprising that the first response to the news of the Croatian victory among the Bosnians fight­ing Serb nationalist occupation of their own country was unalloyed glee. Of course, the Krajina Serb forces were not as large or as well-equipped as those of the Bosnian Serbs, and it is relatively easy to reinforce the Bosnian Serbs from Serbia proper, particularly in eastern Bosnia. It is unlikely to be as easy to crush the Bosnian Serb army as it was to crush its Krajina counterpart.

Nevertheless, just weeks after the fall of Srebrenica and Zepa to the Bosnian Serbs, the Bosnians appeared, in the immediate aftermath of the Croatian victory, to have grounds for optimism. With Serb morale at an all-time low, the Bosnian Serb leadership apparently irrevocably divided and Bihac relieved, it seemed that the military prospects of the Bosnian government – and therefore the prospects of restoring a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, liberal society to the whole of Bosnia – were rosier than they had been since the beginning of the war.

As the dust has settled, however, the picture has begun to look more complex and rather less optimistic. Most obviously, almost the entire Serbian population of the Krajina – estimates range up to 200,000 people – have decided to flee rather than find out whether the Croats will keep their promises of democratic rights and reli­gious tolerance. No matter that it appears, on the scanty available evidence, that the Croat army did not engage in "ethnic cleansing" as practised by Serb nationalists in Bosnia – the result is a giant refugee crisis, accurately described by a United Nations High Commission for Refugees spokesperson as "a major humanitarian cata­strophe". Croatia's insistence that it will welcome the return of Serb Croat citizens and will guarantee the rights of all who are not war criminals will reassure only a handful of those who have left. Even at this early stage, it seems likely that many Krajina Serbs will become per­manent exiles in Serb-occupied Bosnia, adopting a stance of resentful ultra-nationalism.

Then there is the whole question of the intentions of Croatian president Franjo Tudjman now that he has taken the Krajina. Is there an understanding with Milo­sevic, formal or informal, for the latter to sit back and watch the Croats defeat the Krajina Serbs in return for Tudjman allowing the Serbs to keep Eastern Slavonia? More important, is there a deal to carve up Bosnia between Belgrade and Zagreb? So far, the evidence for a Tudjman-Milosevic pact is weak and circumstantial: Tudjman's scribblings on the back of a menu, Milose­vic's inaction last weekend and his attempt to supplant Radovan Karadzic with Ratko Mladic as Bosnian Serb leader. The evidence against, on the other hand, is no stronger: veiled Croatian government threats to take Eastern Slavonia by force, Tudjman's public appearance with his ally president Alija Izetbegovic of Bosnia, the despatch of Serbian tanks in an easterly direction.

Obviously, a deal is a worse prospect for the Bosnians than no deal – but even in the absence of one there is a real danger that the Sarajevo government will now find itself even more at the mercy of Zagreb's whims than it has been so far. Control of supply routes to Bosnia has long been used by the Croats to ensure that the Bosnian government has only the military capacity that they want it to have. With Tudjman successful in his primary aim of taking the Krajina, the Bosnians could find all too easily that their supply of arms is effectively cut off. More than ever, it is imperative that the arms embargo on the Bosn­ian government is lifted.

WHO CARES?

New Statesman & Society, 7 July 1995

John Major has claimed a conclusive victory in being re-elected to the Tory leadership – despite failing to get the backing of more than a third of his party. But how much does it matter who leads the Tories? Not a lot, say Paul Anderson and Steve Platt. Any leader would face broadly the same problems – and go for broadly the same ‘solutions’

Whoever they'd voted for, the Tories would still be in. For all the sound and fury in the press and on television, the underlying mood in the country towards the Conservative Party leadership elec­tion is "Who cares ?" The parliamentary excitement that Simon Hoggart, writing in the Guardian, described as "Glastonbury for the politi­cal classes"  – "they will endure any priva­tion, any discomfort and loss of sleep just to say they were there"  – was received with about as much enthusiasm in the nation at large as might have been conjured up at the Glastonbury music festival for a final-night set by a Young Conservatives' skiffle band.

The reason is partly the general disaf­fection with politics  – and particularly parliamentary politics  – that is currently abroad throughout the democratic world. But it is also, more importantly, the fact that the Conservatives' political project has run out of steam; and no amount of tinkering with the personnel who are meant to be running the locomotive will get it going again.

The Tories have opted to stick with John Major  – but none of the leadership options aired in the three years since the Black Wednesday debacle left the Tories economic credibility in shreds, let alone during the leadership election, would have made a blind bit of difference. Every conceivable alternative to Major  – a left-wing Tory like Kenneth Clarke, a right-winger like John Redwood or Michael Portillo, or a populist like Michael Heseltine  – would get the same answer from the electorate: we've found you out, you got away with it last time when you ditched Thatcher, but you can't pull the same stunt twice.

Neither Major nor any of the other politicians floated as potential leader is a likely winner of the next election; none is even popular. The best bet in last week's Economist /MORI opinion poll was Michael Heseltine. He, it seems, would have brought about just a 2.5 per cent swing to the Conservatives from Labour (reducing the current adjusted poll split from 55:31 in Labour's favour to 53:34). Michael Portillo would have meant a 1.5 per cent swing away from the Tories; Gillian Shephard would have produced a 2 per cent negative swing, John Redwood one of 2.5 per cent. In other words, we are talking about marginal changes in voting preferences, which might have made a difference to Tory MPs in marginal con­stituencies (a 1 per cent swing either way amounts to about 20 seats won or lost), but which would have affected only the scale, not the likelihood, of a Labour victory at a general election.

If Redwood's 89 votes and the 22 abstentions on Tuesday show that more than one-third of Tory MPs have no faith in John Major  – and refused to back him in what was in effect a confidence vote rather than a real leadership election  –  the result also reflects the lack of an electorally credible alternative leader. The scale of the revolt against Major should have been sufficient to prompt his resignation: as NSS argued last week, anything more than a 50-strong rebellion in a de facto vote of confidence for a Prime Minister with a Commons majority in single figures ought to have led to him handing in his notice. That it didn't (and that there is no demand among Tory MPs for it to do so) reflects a recognition that Major is probably the Tories' least-worst option to lead them into the next election. It says much about the parlous state of their party that a Prime Minister kneecapped by the third of MPs who refused to back him, limping along at the head of a divided government, is reck­oned a better bet at the polls than any available alternative.

But enough of electability: what of policy? On the surface, the election campaign was fought on the difference between John Major's steady-as-she-goes brand of consolidatory Toryism and John Redwood's bright, burning permanent revolution of Thatcherite orthodoxy. Much was made during the leadership campaign of the prospects, in the event of a victory for the right  – either immediately or later  – of a radical change in the theory and practice of Toryism. In reality, where is the difference?

The Thatcherite project, in both its original and its revanchist guise, is founded on four pillars of fundamental­ism: Euro-scepticism (better described as Euro-phobia); anti-statisrn (more accu­rately, anti-state service provision and public spending); economic laissez-faire (except where this interferes with "national" or other vested interests); and social authoritarianism.

Whether one compares Major and Redwood, or Heseltine and Portillo, or any other combination of possible candidates for the Tory leadership, the real differences in terms of the policy they would implement in office between now and the election are relatively minor. After all, these are all people who found it as easy to serve as ministers under Thatcher as Major, and who, with minor exceptions, would be just as happy to do so under any of a variety of potential suc­cessors. The Conservative Party has always been a coalition  – far more so than it sometimes appeared during the 1980s Thatcherite hegemony; and both its left and right wings have always had to trim their programmes to keep that coalition intact and their party in power. What is unique about now is not so much the differences within the party (which were every bit as intense at both the beginning and the end of the Thatcher premiership) as the failure of the party leadership to manage them.

Even on the question of economic and monetary union in Europe the gap is often as much one of rhetoric as reality. It was John Major not Redwood who told BBC's Breakfast with Frost on Sunday, "I'm not a federalist and I'm not going to lead Britain into a federal Europe", and that, "There is no possibility whatsoever of all the members of the European Union going forward in 1999 or for years and years and years afterwards, if ever, no possibility at all." The Tory right may play a rhetorical nationalist card, but the truth is that they are not so far removed from Major in practice; and when it comes to the crunch, any Tory leader would be directed by the underlying economic imperatives  – it was Margaret Thatcher, after all, who signed up to the Single European Act.

On other issues, too, Sunday's Frost interviews were illuminating. Redwood, reportedly hostile to universal state bene­fits, such as pensions and child benefit, was at pains to say that such reports were "nonsense". On privatisation he said he was in favour of putting the Post Office into private ownership "but I don't think it's possible this parliament". On tax cuts and public spending he was indetermi­nate. The autumn tax-spending budget may well include what he and his sup­porters seek anyway. The fact is that, regardless of their individual preferences or policy nuances, all of the potential leadership candidates would have been faced by the same objec-tive circumstances on taking office. First, they would have had to keep their party together  – hence no wild lurches to left or right. Just as the Europhobes are now demanding their pound of flesh in return for rallying behind John Major, so too would the left of the party have put the brakes on a Redwood- or Portillo-led party. The requirement for party unity militates against any substantial devia­tion from the course on which the Tory party has been set throughout this parliament.

Second, any leader would have had to have a constant eye on restoring the Tories' position in the polls. While this might make attractive a touch of populist Euro-bashing and some tax or spending redistributions in favour of doubting Tory voters, we can expect the same sort of thing from Major as might have been produced by his rivals.

Third, and most important, there is the economy. Above all, this determines how much the Tories can give away in pre­-election tax cut sweeteners (see below). Short of a Lawson-like leap into inflationary hyperspace, there is not a lot of room for manoeuvre; Kenneth Clarke's strategy as Chancellor is the only one available to them. And anyone who seriously believes, with John Redwood, that there is scope for pain-free cuts in public spending (he came up with the highly improbable  – and widely dis­missed  – figure of a £5 billion saving on "waste") is forgetting the fact that the Thatcher and Major cabinets have spent 16 years failing to find any.

Major's victory claims  – and the absurdly unquestioning way in which they have been taken at face value by some journalists who ought to know bet­ter  – cannot disguise the fact that noth­ing has really changed. Broadly the same policies will be followed by broadly the same team.

Inside his party, Major's gambit has helped to coalesce a coherent right opposition, which, for all the warm words on unity earlier this week, will not go away and will continue to cause him trouble. Outside, although the leadership campaign and cabinet reshuffle may give him a short-term poll fillip, he remains the most unpopular prime minister since polling began.

There is a widespread and growing opinion among Tories now that they will lose the next election anyway, so it's a matter of minimising the scale of the coming defeat and looking towards their route back to power. The experience of Canada's Progressive Conservatives, who fell from power to holding just two seats in the last general election there, is telling in this light. Norman Lamont told his colleagues on Monday: "The Conserv­ative Party is facing a wipe-out, a Cana­dian-style defeat at the polls. Can we really go on with the kind of leadership we have had in recent years?" Clearly, the majority of his colleagues decided they could  – "for fear of finding something worse".

The truth is  that behind Lament's spectre of a Canadian-style wipeout is a growing view among some Tories that even this can now be regarded as acceptable as a means to the reformation of the party as one of the hard right. This is what has happened in Canada, where the formerly centrist Progressive Conservatives have refor­mulated themselves along Thatcherite lines and made an astonishing political comeback, winning control, for example, of Ontario in recent elections. But this could only happen to the British Conserv­ative Party in opposition after a substan­tial election defeat.

That's the point at which people may really have to begin to care about who leads the Tories.

It's not the economy, stupid

If theTories' prospects in the next general election were a matter solely of the performance of the economy, they would have little to worry about. The past couple of years have seen steady growth, low inflation and falling unemployment-and all the signs are that Britain is on a long-term upward trend economically. If the "feel-good" factor is lacking, it is largely because of the depressed state of the housing market and the widespread fear of indebtedness that remains after the collapse of the 1980s house-price boom-and that, ironically, could be anything but a bad thing forthe economy as a whole.

The government's economic strategy for the next election has been in place since soon after the pound fell out of the exchange rate mechanism of the European monetary system in September 1992.The idea, put simply, has been to use tax increases and public spending cuts both to dampen the inflationary pressures likely in any economic recovery (particularly one taking place after a big devaluation) and to reduce government borrowing, while keeping interest rates high enough to check inflation, but low enough not to undermine the recovery. The intention of the past two budgets was to reduce government borrowing to the level at which pre-election cuts in income tax would be feasible.

And that, broadly speaking, is what has happened. Growth is strong and export-led, and inflation is under control, partly because of the state of the housing market, partly because of tax increases, partly because of the weakness of the trade unions. Government borrowing is coming down.And everything points to the Tories being able to cut income tax in the run-up to the general election.

Last week'sTreasury summer economic forecast, which updates and revises the figures in last November's budget, is admittedly not all good news for the government. Its forecasts of inflation and government borrowing are up on those in the budget, while the estimated growth rate is down. But the differences are small-and in the case of the public sector borrowing requirement almost unimportant because the trend in the next three years is so steeply downward.

The figure for the PSBR for 1995-96 – what the government needs to make up the difference between spending (just over £308 billion) and revenue (nearly £285 billion) – is forecast as £23.6 billion rather than the £21.5 billion estimated last November. The forecast for growth of gross domestic product is 3 per cent not 3.25 per cent, and that for end-of-year inflation 3 per cent instead of 2.5 per cent. Taking into account fiddling the figures, otherwise known as theTreasury's predilection for pessimism in its prognoses(its growth forecasts this time are particularly gloomy, although some say that this also means that inflation will be higher than it thinks),the economy seems to be more or less on the track the Tories want. As Chancellor Kenneth Clarke put it last week, Britain is "well on the course for tax  cuts” – either this autumn or next year or both.

It would be wrong, however, to assume that the government has much room for manoeuvre. The tax cuts in the pipeline can only be modest – certainly not enough to cancel out the tax increases imposed since 1993 – unless there is either a significant further reduction in public spending, on top of the savage cuts already announced, or an increase in public borrowing. The former would be difficult to achieve without inflicting more severe pain on an electorate that gives every sign of having had enough: even John Redwood's supporters couldn't take seriously his proposal for saving £5 billion by cutting down on waste. The latter, unless it were packaged very cleverly, would ata stroke undo the government's five years hard labour trying to prove to the markets that it would never again take the risks that the then Chancellor, Nigel Lawson, took with inflation in the late 1980s.

In other words, if the Tories want tax cuts – and they are the only thing they have left that resembles an electoral trump card there is no alternative to the strategy that Clarke has been pursuing over the past two years, whether European monetary union is a goal (the PSBR forecasts show that Britain will meet the Maastricht treaty's convergence criteria on public borrowing in 1996-97) or whether it is ruled out. Labour's best hope is that the Europe row eclipses this hard truth – not least because its only big difference with Clarke is that it would use the leeway in the public accounts not for tax handouts to ordinary voters but for spending on education, training, infrastructure and tax breaks for long-term investment, none of which has quite the same populist appeal.

The BBC wot done it?

Someone, somehow, managed to nobble the BBC. The coverage that BBC television gave to the result of the Tory leadership election was little short of blatant propaganda for John Major.

BBC2 was the only terrestrial television channel to cover the events of Tuesday afternoon live. At first, it did reasonably well: the chat in the run-up to the result was as competent as any warm, scene-setting flannel for the Trooping of the Colour or Royal Ascot. Then came the announcement – followed, to the shame of all concerned – by the most concentrated, most effective piece of Conservative Central Office puff-broadcasting put out on the television airwaves since the Gulf war.

The BBC had put the unctuous David Dimbleby into the chair for the programme: he proclaimed with a smile that the result of the ballot was a stunning success for Major. The corporation's chief political correspondent, Robin Oakley, was then used as the sole instant analyst: he described Major's victory in equally gushing terms. Next came 40 minutes, uninterrupted, of Tories declaring that less than two-thirds of the vote was a tremendous result for Major.

No matter that every newspaper apart from those in the Express stable had reckoned that much less than a 75 per cent vote for Major would be a disaster for the Prime Minister's credibility – an opinion shared by all but the Major loyalists on the BBC staff. No matter that John Redwood's vote was much higher than anyone had estimated it would be. And no matter either that the Tory leadership election had left the electorate as a whole stone cold.

By the time Tony Blair came on to say, somewhat ineffectually, that it wasn't quite as wonderful for Major as Dimbleby, Oakley and Major's other supporters claimed, the damage had been done. The TV coverage had set the agenda: from then on, everyone else was responding to its euphoric tone.

It is a measure of the dispassionate professionalism of the BBC's rank-and-file political staff that it took only until the midnight radio news for them to inject some scepticism into the coverage – but even that was too late. Those responsible for the spinning on the Tory side deserve to enjoy at least several magnums of the best champagne: they did their job better than anyone could have expected. But everyone who sucked the Central Office line at the BBC deserves a brickbat.

IS MAJOR FINISHED?

New Statesman & Society leader, 6 May 1995

It would take just 50 Tory MPs to fail to vote for the Prime Minister next Tuesday to make his position untenable

Is John Major finished? We'll find out next Tuesday, when the Tories' vote of confidence in his leader­ship takes place. With a majority in the Commons of only eight, his credibility, already in tatters, will be utterly destroyed even if just 50 Tory MPs fail to vote for him. Any more than that would surely be enough to prompt his immediate resignation and a real leadership election contested by the Tories' heavyweights.

As Ian Aitken argues on page 14, what all the pundits thought last week was a brave gamble by the Prime Min­ister is now looking increasingly like a stupid act of des­peration. This is only partly because of the decision of John Redwood to resign from the cabinet and take on Major in the first round of the leadership contest. Red­wood is, of course, a somewhat more substantial figure than most of the back-bench Europhobes who were being tipped as stalking-horses before he announced his candidacy, and, unlike Norman Lamont, he cannot be easily dismissed as a sour man eager to extract his revenge.

But he is not really a serious challenger for the Tory leadership. He has the charisma of a speak-your-weight machine, and his programme is a mish-mash of discred­ited free-market dogma, xenophobic nationalism and crude authoritarianism – including his backing for the return of the death penalty – that is radically at odds with the mood of the country. His few concessions to the "One Nation" Tory left are superficial and wholly unconvincing. Only a party that had completely taken leave of its senses would consider him less of an electoral liability than Major. Even the Tories are not yet totally barmy.

All the same, Redwood has turned out to be as good a stalking-horse as anyone, and it is by no means unlikely that there will be sufficient votes for him and abstentions next Tuesday to force Major to resign. What then? It is, of course, impossible to tell – and Tory leadership elec­tions have a habit of yielding surprising results. Neither Margaret Thatcher nor Major were favourites for the job when they got it in 1975 and 1990 respectively, and it's quite feasible that 1995 will follow a similar pattern.

Nevertheless, the smart money has to be on Michael Heseltine emerging from the second round as leader.

He can rely on the support of the pro-Europe left of the party, whose other favourite, Kenneth Clarke, is consid­ered too divisive to become leader; and he has wide­spread support among the large swathe of "unpolitical" Tory MPs who are worried about nothing more than the prospect of losing their seats: alone of the obvious candi­dates, he is considered by his party as a vote-winner. He also has the backing of that part of the Europhobe right that has written off the next election and is prepared to put up with Heseltine's Europhilia because it reckons that he can be relied upon to resign as soon as he loses the election. At this point, they believe, Michael Portillo or some other right-winger – perhaps Redwood will be a really credible candidate by then – would be a shoo-in as leader of the opposition.

But enough of speculation. Whatever happens, one thing is certain: the Tory party is now in a state of civil war over its policy towards Europe, and there is no sign that any result next Tuesday, or in the second round if there is one, or in November if Major hangs on severely but not mortally wounded, can possibly provide a resolution. There is no leader who can command the confidence of the whole party, no compromise that can be assured of widespread consent. The best that any leader could hope for would be a ceasefire until the next election – but that, as Major himself has discovered in the past year, is some­thing that the Europhobes will not allow.

All of which makes a fascinating spectator sport for journalists and others obsessed with politics, but it leaves the electorate as a whole completely cold. Most people rightly see the Tories' divisions over Europe as a symp­tom – like sleaze – of political exhaustion. The Tories have, quite simply, been in power too long, and everyone knows it apart from themselves. They might limp along until 1997 under Major or under a new leader – but they cannot regain either their sense of purpose or the sup­port of the electorate that they lost so soon after they lied their way to victory in 1992.

The country does not want the current Tory leader as Prime Minister – and it doesn't want another Tory leader as Prime Minister. If Major really were brave, he would have done the decent thing – and called an imme­diate general election.