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A tragic death and the new Labour coup

John Smith’s death 20 years ago today enabled the ditching of social democracy by “modernisers” Blair and Brown. That era is far from over, says JOHN ELLISON

The 20th anniversary of the sudden death of John Smith on May 12 1994, after 22 months as leader of the Labour Party, is upon us. 

We are reminded both of his untimely passing and of what has happened to the Labour Party since. Two months later Tony Blair became leader and with him the party fully embraced “new realism” — in other words, obedience with open arms to the dictates of the City of London and Wall Street.

If this has changed under Ed Miliband’s leadership, the change has not been great.

Labour’s current policy looks too much like a mildly humanised version of the uninhibited class-war stance of David Cameron’s coalition government. 

John Smith’s election as leader began in July 1992, soon after the Conservatives’ fourth consecutive election win under John Major, leading to the resignation of two-times loser Neil Kinnock. 

Electoral success for Labour by a smallish margin had been predicted by the polls, and defeat had a particularly sour taste after 13 years of Thatcherism. 

Smith was shadow chancellor and personally respected within the labour movement. His replacement of Kinnock after nine years as Labour leader came as a relief to a good many Labour supporterswho felt he was not up to the job. 

Then, as now, the national press was overwhelmingly anti-Labour, while TV channels were hardly its supporters. 

Among other put-downs, Labour had for years been tirelessly depicted as intending to tax everybody more — a charge which it might have done more to answer by promising taxation cruelty exclusively for the rich. The election result was not astonishing.

Yet Labour’s score of MPs (271), its share of the vote (more than 34 per cent), and its improved voter tally, up by one and a half million since 1987, was welcome. 

The Tories, on the other hand, while gaining an overall majority of 21 seats — 80 less than in 1987 — had acquired some of its seats with slim majorities, 17 of them by less than 1,000 votes. The longer term future for the Tory party as the party of government did not appear especially bright.

Smith, formerly a barrister, and a solid House of Commons debater, had been an MP since 1970. Though on the social democratic right of the party, and (in the words of Paul Foot), “not a liberal,” he subscribed to public ownership and full employment. 

The 1980s had witnessed Kinnock’s tolerance of the coal mining industry’s destruction, of the defeat of the National Union of Mineworkers and — in blithe fashion — of a barrage of false corruption allegations against miners’ leader Arthur Scargill. 

Witnessed too was the wretched Thatcherite policy showcase — anti-welfare, low taxes and the diminution of social housing stock through the flagship Right to Buy policy of selling council-owned homes on the cheap. But instead of a sustained fight against the Thatcherite juggernaut, Kinnock had commanded serial expulsions of leftist members of the Labour Party as he sought to burnish his anti-left credentials.

Labour’s policies underwent a major policy review in the late 1980s, just as rising shadow ministers Gordon Brown and Tony Blair were establishing themselves as leading “modernising” voices. 

Symbolic of their increasing confidence was a moment in late 1987, when a review paper by left-leaning MP Bryan Gould, favouring nationalisation and renationalisation, was about to be dispatched to the printers. Gould was confronted by Brown and Blair, who demanded — unsuccessfully — that all references to public ownership be deleted from the report. 

By 1991, with a general election not far away, “modernising” was taking its toll on traditional Labour positions, and Smith was reportedly — though privately — regarding Kinnock as more of a liability than a blessing. 

An understanding was reached that year between Kinnock, Smith and Brown over aspects of domestic policy if Labour won the election. They agreed not to revoke the Conservatives’ trade union legislation or to advocate a return to the 83 per cent top tax rate which preceded the Thatcher government’s arrival in power in 1979. 

The Labour Party manifesto for the 1992 election also said goodbye to earlier commitments to bring electricity, gas and water back into public ownership, leaving an imprecise promise to extend public control of the electricity industry. The space between Tory and Labour policies had become much smaller.

 

I

n the shadow cabinet elections, following Smith’s election as leader in July 1992, Brown came top and Blair second. Brown was made shadow chancellor, and Blair shadow home secretary. A third newly elected “new realist” MP was Peter Mandelson. 

Smith had a particular dislike for the publicity gimmickry customised by Mandelson as Kinnock’s “communications” director. Mandelson had reportedly engaged in feeding stories to the press which promoted the careers of his proteges Brown and Blair and undermined those of rivals. Smith banished him to the back benches. 

Known for permitting the expression of dissent from shadow ministers, Smith was unenthusiastic about the absolutist pro-business policies peddled by “the modernisers,” and quietly discontinued Kinnock’s vendetta against the miners’ union. 

Almost half way through the period of Smith’s leadership, in May 1993, Tony Benn attended a meeting of the Labour Party’s national executive committee at which both Brown and Blair were present. 

Smith spoke about the party’s relationship with the trade unions. Benn stated his concerns that the party was being dismantled, that its link with the trade unions was to be broken, that Clause Four of the 1918 constitution (pledging as an objective the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange) was being attacked and that a pact with the Liberals was being encouraged through the expression of support for proportional representation. 

For good measure he added: “These so-called modernisers are really Victorian Liberals, who believe in market forces, don’t like the trade unions and are anti-socialist.” It was well said.

At the beginning of December 1993, Benn’s diary noted the viciousness of a Conservative Budget. It included cuts in benefits and the increase of the retirement age for women to 65, which was, he wrote, “outrageous,” but what Brown said on air was, he thought, “negative, negative stuff.” “Nobody is talking,” he wrote “about what needs to be spoken about.”

After Smith’s death, the march of “the modernisers” to inglorious power that had begun during Kinnock’s leadership and had paused to a degree under Smith, resumed. Before long, reversing the previous pecking order, Blair was leader, and Brown shadow chancellor. And Mandelson was back in a position of influence as a Blair adviser. 

In October 1994, at the end of the party conference, Benn recorded: “They played ‘The Red Flag’ in jazztime and people waved Union Jacks…another Mandelson gimmick. Just turns your stomach.” 

Soon afterwards Clause Four was removed from the Labour Party constitution.

May 1997 brought a landslide Labour majority of 179 on the back of an almost two million rise in the Labour vote. But the Blair-Brown government arrived with unpublicised baggage — the lowest percentage voter turnout since 1935, a figure which four years later fell again to under 60 per cent. 

Blair-Brownism brought more privatisation, more reliance on the financial services industry in an increasingly deregulated world market, more finger-wagging miserliness about welfare benefits, and more than ever Britain played the part of the foreign policy fist of the US. 

It was a lethal mix of a cocktail for Britain’s working people. 

Twenty years later, this unpalatable glassful is still largely on offer. Not before time, it should be poured down the sink. 

How about it, Mr Miliband?

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