The 'Dream Ticket' tactic... and the failure of the Meacher tactic
Socialist Action1980sPhil HearseTranscribed or corrected by hand from the printed page.
Phil Hearse reports from Brighton
THIS YEAR's Labour Chair, Sam McCluskie, caught the mood of the conference in his opening address, and succinctly summed up the 'Dream Ticket' project. The return of the Tories, he said, 'was our fault'. Three years of internal bickering had resulted in defeat. 'Words like "sell out" and "traitor" have been used in this party. That must end at this conference. We must unite around the new leadership and policies'.
The essence of this line of argument was, of course, that the Bennite left was responsible for the election defeat. But in counterpoint McCluskie stated: 'We didn't lose the election because of our policies — we didn't campaign for them' — an obvious swipe at the right wing.
McCluskie's message was exactly that put forward by Kinnock in his speech later in the day — an end to internal bickering, support for the leadership and the 'existing policies'. But the message has an important twist.
Under the guise of keeping the left wing rhetoric, a real change of policy is being prepared. Upon arriving in Brighton delegates found that a new statement of party policy has been prepared by the NEC — *Campaigning for a Fairer Britain*. Disingenously stating that 'our programme is not static', the NEC have prepared a real shift on the crucial issues of the Common Market and defence.
On the EEC, under the rubric of 'A socialist voice in Europe', the NEC states that 'At the end of (the next European parliament) Britain will have been a member of the EEC for 15 years — and this will be reflected in our pattern of trade, the way our economy works and our political relations overseas' (!). In other words, barring catastrophe we should stay in.
On defence, instead of unilateralism, the document pledges to include Polaris in arms negotiations, calls for a multilateral freeze and a change in NATO strategy to 'No first use' of nuclear weapons.
The shift on defence strategy was underlined at Sunday's meeting of the NEC where the TGWU resolution re-affirming the party's unilateralist stance was only carried by 14 votes to 11, with Kinnock abstaining.
Kinnock's speech to the conference on Sunday afternoon aptly summed up the present situation in the party so far as the leadership was concerned. There is no way it could be called a right wing speech — indeed it was brimming with left wing rhetoric. The need to attack unemployment and the danger of nuclear war were central themes, as was the obligatory quote from Nye Bevan.
But the core of the speech was that the kind of election defeat suffered by Labour last June must never be allowed again. The internal fighting has to stop — and the left has to keep quiet.
The election of Kinnock embodies the hopes of many people on the left of the party. There is no way, given the left shift of the past three years, that an open right winger could have won the leadership. But to unify the party, Kinnock and his Labour Co-ordinating Committee team *are* preparing a political shift to the right — they gave notice of that through the document *Campaigning for a Fairer Britain*.
If Kinnock really wants unity, then the left has two preconditions. The first is that there are no further witch hunts, and the second that there are no further retreats on party policy. Neither of these preconditions seem likely to be met.
...and the failure of the Meacher tactic
THE STATISTICS of the leadership and deputy leadership elections need careful interpretation before conclusions are drawn. By giving all results as a percentage of the total electoral college, the tellers covered up some interesting facts. But even these opaque figures don't conceal the enormous Kinnock victory — and the fact that Michael Meacher got *less* votes in the constituencies than Roy Hattersley in the deputy contest.
Looking first at the leadership election, there is no doubt that Eric Heffer's 6.3 per cent of the total electoral college is a big disappointment for the left. But Heffer suffered from the tactics of the left itself.
In the trade unions he was virtually wiped out. In the CLPs in many places he was running a close second to Kinnock — but close seconds are not recorded in the vote, only victories. Assuming that 620 constituencies voted, Eric Heffer must have received the vote of around 40 as opposed to about 10 for Hattersley.
In scores of constituencies the left was split between Kinnock and Heffer, but in most the Heffer supporters remained a minority — a case maybe for allocating constituency votes according to the proportion received by each candidate in each constituency.
Eric Heffer did best, paradoxically, in the Parliamentary Labour Party — about 30 MPs voted for him as opposed to about 53 for Hattersley and 100 plus for Kinnock.
Most of all the Heffer campaign suffered from the failure of even sections of the 'hard' left to rally round his campaign. Tony Benn, for example, kept almost silent for a long period on his preference for leader. Meacher remained silent throughout, but emphasised his affinity with Kinnock.
The tactic in the Benn camp was to keep Heffer at arms length, and stake everything on a big vote for Meacher. This tactic blew up for obvious reasons.
Having allowed the Kinnock steam roller through unopposed, the Benn camp was completely disarmed when Kinnock turned on Meacher and made it clear to the whole world that he much preferred Hattersley. The net result of this fiasco was that Meacher didn't even beat Hattersley in the constituency section, a massive reversal of the Benn-Healey result two years ago. This should be a lesson to the left — that you can't deal with fundamental problems by means of a manoeuvre. Loving-up to Kinnock resulted in a kick in the teeth.
Still, there were some positive results from Michael Meacher's campaign. Despite his failure to win the NUPE vote, on a branch block vote he received 209,000 votes. In COHSE, the vote split 50-50 between Meacher and Hattersley. This means that tens of thousands of low paid workers voted for him.
His eventual failure to get the TGWU vote was doubtless a result of the late 'dream ticket surge'. More disappointingly still, the 6-1 vote against Meacher in the coalfields shows how deep the 'unity for victory' rhetoric has gone.
One last point about the results must however be made. The results of those candidates who have made no genuflections towards the left at all — Shore in the leadership elections and Dunwoody and Davies in the deputy leadership elections — were absolutely appalling.
Peter Shore failed to get a single constituency vote, and probably didn't come second in more than a handful either. Virtually all of his 3.17 per cent came from the PLP.
Without the votes of 20 or so MPs he would have receieved 0.033 of the electoral college. These figures show how far the right wing has to go to reassert its dominance. The problem is that Kinnock looks likely to give them a helping hand.