[A-List] UK state: John Smith RIP?

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

We live in interesting times. There has been an outbreak of syrupy
reminiscence concerning Tony Blair's predecessor as Labour Party leader, who
died ten years ago. This sort of nostalgia serves various purposes. In
Scotland, it is used as a means with which to cement (or these days shore
up) Labour's unionist hegemony, partly by distancing the image of the party
from the Middle England sensibilities projected by Blair. A glance at the
Scottish newspapers yesterday and today will give you a taste of this.

http://www.theherald.co.uk/news/15726.html
http://www.sundayherald.com/41860

It's also an important means of Gordon Brown maintaining his claim upon the
succession. For this he will need solid support north of Berwick, and the
mantle of Smith is the means by which Gordon keeps the wholly undeserved
image as "conscience of the party". Too many appear eager to play along with
this monstrous lie, despite the fact that Gordon's antics at the Treasury
have extended privatisation far beyond what the Conservatives had thought
possible.

Then there is the spectacle of Older Labour English stalwarts like Prescott
(significantly) and Hattersley (far less so) distancing themselves again
from Tony because of the relatively unreconstructed nature of Smith as
opposed to the "modernisers" originally grouped around Neil Kinnock (Charles
Clarke, Peter Mandelson, Patricia Hewitt -- the "beautiful people" as
Prescott sneered). Hattersley and Smith were both on the right of the
party -- Atlanticists at a time when to be so was closely associated with
the US Cold War prerogative of getting Britain as far as possible into the
European Union. Priorities have changed, of course, and Hattersley betrays
his attachment to the social chauvinism that sustains a belief that Britain
can be a "third force" and go it alone, etc. Smith's case is interesting,
however. His image as consummate europhile is periodically burnished when
necessary, as when Tony wants to appeal to the Older Labour members
concerning European integration. But Smith was on the organising committee
of the Bilderberg Group, and was very much involved in the sort of
activities that Hugh Gaitskell engaged in throughout the 1950s and 60s up to
his death. For this is exactly where Smith comes from in terms of Labour
politics.

I've no doubt that Smith would have been a "better" PM, inasmuch as he would
have avoided the treacle associated with Blair's style and would have
preferred a much more straightforward approach to presentation. He would
have been more effective at keeping the left of the Labour Party on-side,
which is not actually something to be preferred, since it only would have
maintained the illusion that the Labour Party, gutted by the Kinnock
"reforms", would have anything truly significant to offer by way of curbing
the power of capital. Smith, after all, led the so-called "prawn cocktail
offensive" in which, prior to the 1992 general election, he and Mo Mowlam
trawled their wares around the boardrooms of the City of London in the
desperate effort to prove just how responsible Labour had become under
Kinnock. Brown continues this sterling work today. I suspect Smith would
have been far less eager to ditch as many of the symbols of social democracy
that Blair has rejected, and he would probably have been far less cavalier
in his approach to privatisation (probably renationalising British Rail),
but it comes down again and again to matters of style over substance. Would
Smith have been different? By much less than the crocodile-teared mourners
would have us believe.

The evocation of a "leader lost" is merely the wistful, forlorn nostalgia of
those whose time had run out, resurrected with greater force now because of
the widespread disillusion with Blair within his own party. But his own
party is no more able to get out from under US hegemony than Blair unless it
is prepared to bite the bullet and go hell for leather into the eurozone.
And I'm little convinced that Smith, the great europhile, would have been
any more capable of engineering such an outcome than his successor.

-----

The abiding myth about John Smith

He would have won in 1997 and made a better prime minister

Talk about it

Roy Hattersley
Monday May 10, 2004
The Guardian

It was hard to convince John Smith that I intended to leave the House of
Commons. Even on the evening in May 1994 when I told him that I intended to
announce my political retirement the next day, he clearly believed that I
would have second thoughts before morning. So, having warned me that I could
not join his government from the House of Lords, he moved on to more
interesting topics. Principal among them was the performance of the shadow
cabinet.

I recall only two of his comments. Harriet Harman was, he insisted, more
able than I allowed. And Gordon Brown - having offended colleagues by
announcing his windfall tax without consulting them - was in temporary
eclipse. "If there were a vacancy tomorrow," John suggested, "Tony Blair
would become leader of the Labour party." Then he added: "Fortunately, there
won't be one and Gordon Brown will recover." John Smith died later that
week. So I never told him my real reasons for leaving parliament.

The proper explanation would have embarrassed us both. To explain that all I
wanted in politics was about to happen - that the Labour party was set for
victory, but I was part of its past while he was its future - would have
been impossible. We had been friends for more than 20 years without a
sentimental word passing between us. On the day I lost the Labour party
leadership election, a major union (whose members had balloted for me)
wanted to break its mandate and change sides. John Smith "put the general
secretary right". He was immensely bad tempered when I tried to thank him.

It is the sentimentality which he despised that has prevented me from ever
writing "if John Smith had lived ...". Dead heroes should be left to rest in
peace - not disinterred and made to fight battles of which, in life, they
had not even heard. But, on this anniversary weekend, I fear that my
fastidious view of friendship has contributed to a persistent myth. Ignorant
and ill-intentioned people still claim that, without Tony Blair, Labour
would have suffered a fifth defeat.

The idea that John Smith - with no more original idea than "one more
heave" - would have lost the 1997 election was assiduously fostered by the
more disreputable supporters of "the project". They hoped that, by
diminishing the old Labour leader, they would exalt the new. Put aside the
implication that they must have been short of honest argument. Remember that
it was the constitutional change to "one member one vote", on which John
Smith risked his career, that made Tony Blair's leadership possible. Then
read Bob Worcester's Explaining Labour's Landslide. John Smith would have
been elected in 1997 and there would have been a Labour government.

There can be little doubt that if John Smith had become prime minister, his
government would have avoided the errors which lay at the heart of Labour's
early failure to improve the public services - the freezing of income tax
rates and the acceptance of the spending plans inherited from the Tories.
And I do not believe that Britain would have marched to war in step with the
United States. About one thing I am sure: John Smith would have wanted his
government to be judged by what it did, not what its spokesman claimed.

He knew that politics had to be well-presented. But he wanted policy to come
first and presentation afterwards. That is why he would have exiled Peter
Mandelson and Philip Gould to the political wilderness. His view of "spin"
was more than a question of taste or contempt for fashion. It was a
byproduct of the quality that distinguished him from many politicians. In
the week of his death, Clare Short told me why she had "loved" John Smith.
During a difficult debate in the parliamentary Labour party, he had said:
"Some things have to be done simply because they are right." And nobody had
doubted that he meant it.

I admit that I am hugely biased in all these judgments. John Smith was my
friend. And there were times, during the turbulent 1980s, when he thought it
his special duty to ride shotgun on my bumpy journey through the Labour
deputy leadership. I used to tell him that the problems were of his own
making. He had announced (without consulting me) that I would gladly serve
under Neil Kinnock. The partnership would, he judged (whatever the order of
precedence) hold the Labour party together. He was right.

John Smith would have been a great prime minister, and I would have sat at
home in Derbyshire knowing that the great battles for social democracy,
which we fought together in the 1980s, had been won to some purpose. But,
overlaying all those judgments is the simple fact that I miss him. However,
I know that is not the sort of thing that he would want me to talk about.