The Cross Kinnock Bears

...The decision by Britain's Trade Union Congress to expel the large, democratically-run electricians' union from its ranks because it signed independent and no-strike deals with management sits uncomfortably with the Labor leadership, which resisted pressure to expel that union from Labor Party affiliation as well...

...None of these positions is a vote-winner, as Kinnock well knows, despite his own emergence from the party's fiery Left wing...

...Not only does the prospect of rallying the party to electoral victory over Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's Tories seem remote, but the Laborites themselves—after being trounced in three straight national elections—appear determined to keep things that way...

...To the loud cheers of Left-wingers, Todd told the conference he wanted nothing to do with proposals Kinnock had put forward as a basis for reordering party priorities...

...New forces are coming into play in the party...

...As for the principle of unrestricted trade union activity, in Britain it has often meant that strike decisions are made by an unrepresentative handful of union executive board members...

...As so often before, the Labor Party emerged from its annual conclave looking both silly and irresponsible: After first seeming to give its leader overwhelming support, it then did its best to cut him down to size...

...Only the memory of Clement Attlee, who replaced Winston Churchill in office at the end of World War II, is treated with reverence, and that is because he founded the British welfare state...

...While digesting this painful irony, Kinnock must contemplate the fact that not only do Labor Party chiefs get a rough going over from their followers while they are in office, they are not even honored after they have given up the reins to someone else...

...John Edmonds of the General and Municipal Workers, Bill Jordan of the Amalgamated Engineering Union, and most members of the Labor Party executive committee unabashedly show signs of espousing the "New Realism" that the Toddites, Bennites and other traditionalists scorn...

...The first item that had to be cleared up, though, was the challenge to Kinnock's retention as party leader from the far Left, again favoring Tony Benn, formerly Viscount Stansgate...

...Norman Gelb writes regularly for The New Leader on British affairs...

...In practice this has come to mean unqualified unilateral nuclear disarmament, unrestricted trade union activity, and nationalization of the country's primary industries and services...

...If Kinnock is successful in this approach, the would-be guardians of oldfashioned ideological purity will find themselves increasingly isolated in a Labor Party exasperated by being kept out of office longer than the Left wing party of any other major European country...

...By contrast, Kinnock's predecessors as leader of the British Labor Party—Michael Foot, James Callaghan, Harold Wilson and Hugh Gaitskell— arouse disdain, and often much worse, in important segments of Labor Party's ranks...

...On the issue of renationalizing the industries Thatcher's Tories have been privatizing with gleeful vengeance, Labor has had to face up to some undeniable realities...

...Wilson, the last genuinely popular British Labor prime minister, is spoken of with contempt as a onetime party dictator who made some unseemly appointments to the House of Lords...

...Recognizing that Labor policies across the board have been unpopular with the electorate, he has committed himself to a thorough review of those policies— another way of saying he intends to alter them in a manner that will increase their appeal to the voters...

...Furthermore, any attempt to renationalize them is likely to deal a heavy blow to labor at the polls even from the ranks of its natural constituency, for millions of trade union members have also been made shareholders by the Tories...

...Perhaps someday Kinnock's party might go so far as to shed its longstanding suicidal compulsions...

...In this respect they do rather worse than their counterparts in other countries: The administration of Jimmy Carter, for instance, was hardly a shining moment in the history of the American presidency, but Carter is for the most part treated with honor and respect at Democratic Party functions and occasions...

...Unfortunately for Kinnock, a large number of vocal Laborites—whose approach to politics verges on the theological—insist theirs is a "Socialist" party, and that its policies must accordingly be Socialist in content...

...It would be foolish to suggest that Kinnock is already on his way to leading the British Labor Party to electoral triumph...

...Instead of responding with crusading unity to indications that the Conservative Party may finally be vulnerable to defeat, they seem convinced that an essential part of the political process is to go for each other's throats—and particularly the throat of Neil Kinnock, the leader they have just re-elected virtually by acclaim...

...Still, the sizable nuclear disarmament bloc in the party will never forgive Attlee for having brought Britain into the nuclear weapons club...

...Yet his problem is more general than that...

...Several of the industries that were inefficient money-losers and had to be trimmed down while nationalized are currently making healthy profits and being expanded...

...But that isn't how it happened...

...He went on to guarantee failure for Kinnock's effort to have Labor formally adopt a strategy of "unilateral, bilateral and multilateral" nuclear disarmament, even though everyone knew the mix was really a fudge to evade the voters' objection to the unilateralist position Todd insists Labor has to follow...

...All of these matters surfaced at the recent annual Labor Party conference held in the seaside city of Blackpool—a resort that is experiencing hard times because so many British working-class families now prefer to take their vacations in Spain and elsewhere abroad (including Miami...

...No sooner had Todd thrown his weight behind the Labor leader than he proceeded to stab him in the back...

...Mikhail S. Gorbachev has no difficulty reconciling his socialism with the retention of nuclear weapons...

...Despite the setback he suffered at the Labor conference, Kinnock appears determined not to let himself and his policy review get bogged down in the parochial squabbling that is as much a part of Labor Party proceedings as flag-waving is for the Republican Party in the United States...

...Even more troubling to many Laborites, there is growing argument that the Party's traditional notions are not necessarily Socialist either...

...As it happens, the nuclear weapons issue is the one currently causing Kinnock the most grief with his party followers...

...Kinnock and his allies are sensitive to the fact that more than half of the country's trade union members did not vote for Labor candidates in the last parliamentary election...

...That Kinnock easily dealt with, receiving almost 90 per cent of the delegates' votes and apparently consigning Benn to political oblivion...

...Yet the changes taking place within its leadership and ranks might transform its character...

...The French, Italian and Spanish Socialists have had no problems accommodating themselves to multilateral nuclear disarmament and market-economy practices...

...Since his triumph was achieved with the assistance of Ron Todd, general secretary of the Transport and General Workers' Union, Britain's largest union, the way seemed clear for Kinnock to dominate the conference and receive from it full support for the fundamental policy review he has set in motion...

...Nevertheless, Kinnock has reason not to be overly downhearted...

...Even Oskar Lafontaine, once the far-Left firebrand of West German socialism, has bent with the tide and reshaped his policies and pronouncements to appeal to the political center...

...To those who question his ideological zeal he retorts that his first duty is to regain political power in Britain for Labor, because only then can "socialist" policies (whatever they are) be implemented...

...Ron Todd, who confesses to using a filofax and gets around in a chauffeur-driven Jaguar, may have poured scorn on "sharp-suited, cordless telephone socialism," but a growing number of Labor and trade union figures are abandoning the conviction that modernization of attitude and aspiration is treason to the working class...