THE EVENTS of early June, Neil renunciation unilateralism and the resignation of Denzil Davis as Labour's defence spokesperson, have fully confirmed the decision to contest the leadership. To have a party leader abandon and reverse a long established policy on television and then as a result to lose his defence spokesperson in parliament is an indication of the depth of the problem in the Labour Party and the width of the anxiety across the party at the way things are developing.
From the beginning Eric Heffer and 1 have said that the leadership campaign was not about personatues. It was polltical. It was about policy. When it was decided to nominate candidates for the leadership it was known that the policy review was coming.
The issue which has now taken centre stage is our defence policy - unilateralism. It was never intended by the leadership that we should enter the next election with a defence policy comparable to the unilateralist one on which we fought the last election. All that was unclear was when they intended to attempt to alter it.
The British public is streets ahead of the Labour leadership. The document bruam wine world, walen was the poucy review paper on international and defence questions, has no analysis of the world as we shall find it in the 1990s.
The situation is really that we don't have an independent nuclear deterrent. It is totally dependent on the United States. This is even clearer with Trident. If the Americans turn off the switch it simply won't work.
Star Wars Second the polls now show that Gorbachev is far more trusted than Reagan. This is not a question of individuals. Gorbachev knows that for the Russian economy to recover he must disarm, whereas the Americans have actually relied on rearmament to sustain their economy. That is the difference between a capitalist and a communist economy. Star Wars is the way that the Pentagon refreshes high technology industry in the United States via the defence budget.
I believe we should present our "defence policy' as a 'peace policy. Don't misunderstand me, I'm a unilateralist completely. But people are beginning to perceive a change in the whole international landscape. They think the EuroInstead of capitalising on this we are retreating. At the last election, by very careful manipulation of the defence document, we already stepped back from New Zealand's position of not letting US ships with nuclear weapons enter our ports, or aircraft with nuclear weapons land at our airfields.
Defence The retreat on defence spending, which has now been made explicit. was started before the last election. The conference decisions which were carried before that election, by a two thirds majority, were threefold: mutual dissolution of NATO and the Warsaw Pact, reduction of defence expenditure to the same percentage of the GDP as our European allies, and the non-nuclear policy.
Of these three principles the proposal to reduce defence expenditure was abandoned before the last election. In the last manifesto we said we would spend more on conventional weapons. Now the NEC has made this explicit by voting against reducing defence spending to the same level as our European allies.
If we take the other policy review papers, that on the economy is entirely lacking in any analysis as to why things are as they are. The situation is attributed to the government, to the failure of exchange rate policy, macro-economic policy and so on. There is no explanation of what is going on. There is no reference to past experience where Labour governments which have come in with high expectations which have been frustrated by pressures from banks and multinationals. The document even claims that job satisfaction is as important to the employer as it is to the employee! Above all the economic policy document has abandoned entirely the idea that economic power may be in any way linked to ownership. It is a fundamentally anti-democratic document, an anti-socialist document.
Unions Then there is the document People at work' which downgrades the role of the trade unions. The party leadership wants the trade unions for the electoral college, but they don't want the trade unions to play a leading part in the development of future economic policy.
The original draft of the document said that works councils would be open to everyone as in Sweden and West Germany. Although the trade unions would 'influential" WONKS councils, it would be the works council and not the trade union that would be at central.
There was no reference to the fact that trade unions are more popular than they have been for fifteen years. All the emphasis is that a Labour government would work with business, with the CBI, with Chambers of Commerce and so on, not that it would work with the trade That draft created so much anxiety that it was withdrawn. But it was indicative that such a document could come forward in the Labour Party at a high level.
Then there is the paper on Economic Equality. This contains the nearest thing to a pledge in the policy review - which is that higher tax rates will not rise above those prevailing in European countries. So we have a firm policy for higher tax payers.
But when I moved an amendment at the bottom end of the scale, that we would write off all the debt owed by the poor under the social fund — in the way that the Rover debts were written off, or
Socialist Action July 1988
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Labour leadership election. Socialist Action asked TONY BENN for his assessment of the policy review.