Interview by Pat Kane and Hugh Richards WHAT do you think of the chances of success on the three issues on democracy at the Labour Party conference?
I'm not in the business of counting the votes. One thing that I'm pretty sure about is that if the delegates who come to the conference - the trade union and constituency delegates — had an absolutely free vole themselves on all these issues, there would be overwhelming support for the three changes. I've little doubt about that..
But, of course, it's not quite as simple as that. You're dealing with the way the trade union vote Will be exercised. My own belief is that this argument has been won in the minds of active people, but that is not the same as saying that it will produce an immediate electoral victory for those who hold that view.
Whatever happens at conference we mustn't get hyped up on Blackpool 1980. The campaign for democratic reform will take a very long time.
Mandatory re-selection seems the most likely issue to succeed, since it has been going on now for nine or ten years. The other ones are in an earlier stage of development. They will all be won before the decade is out, and I would think before the next five years are out.
What effect do you think this will have on the party itself?
I don't believe institutions of themselves solve problems, because institutions without analysis, or without campaigning or all the rest of it, can become empty vessels.
But if you have, as you do have within the Labour Party, a genuine socialist party that has been trying to get out for a long time, then if the institutions are blocked this is never reflected on the parliamentary side, or indeed on local government. If you can clear the blockage out of the way the party would be what it is, a genuine socialist party.
I've never had any doubt that it does contain the genuine instrument for socialist transformaThat is the way that clears the blockage, but what comes through the pipe depends on what there is at the active end of the party. Do you support the TUC-Labour Party Liaison Committee?
The Liaison Committee was set up in good faith, and it took us 2½ years to set it up.
In 1970 the unions didn't want to know the Labour Party, the parliamentary party, after all the things that had happened. Finally we got it set up in February '72, nearly two years after the election, and I think that the original concept of PORKERS the Social Contract - the phrase has come to mean wage controls - but the original concept was of a joint programme for the transformation of our society by collaboration between the unions and the Labour Party.
There was never any reference to wages in it, and even in the October '74 manifesto there was a phrase which I drafted myself which said that the Social Contract is not solely nor primarily about wages, it is about a change in society.
As the manifesto was ditched and reversed by the Labour government so increasingly we got back to the old scenario, that it was all due to the trade unions, and the thing ended up with a rigid 5 per cent pay norm.
But there is no reason why that should be the case, As Bob Wright said, people would make all sorts of sacrifices for socialism but not for our present social structure. I think that's quite right.
It's a pity the term Social Contract has been union leaders who vote lost because in its original formulation it was absolutely correct. It is an essential element for another Labour government in its work of transformation. Without it you are in difficulties, and I wouldn't like to see the Labour Party and the trade unions become separated.
By that I don't just mean contacts between Cabinet members and the TUC. General Council. It has to be an integration of activities right down the line to workplace branches and all the rest of it. The relationship has become very centralised and that's one of the strange reasons why the trade union leaders are supporting the Parliamentary leaders against the rank and file. There's a move to democracy within the Labour Party. Shouldn't that also apply to the trade unions?
I think the two go side by side. Frankly, unless you win the argument in every trade union as well as in the Labour Party you'll be frustrated when it comes to the exercise of the vote at the Labour Party conference.
I think that process is already underway, and it will intensify and become more urgent if at this year's conference it appears that the trade union vote is being used to frustrate democracy in the ¡party.
The paradox is that the trade union block vote would be used to prevent the trade union influence from being exercised on the Labour Party: The trade union leaders who vote against the changes will be voting to neutralise and negative the influence of trades unionism on the Labour Party - the very opposite of what it would appear to be.
You have spoken at meetings on the role of the Rank and File Mobilising Committee in the Labour Party. Can you say what your position is on that.
The great weakness of the left has been its traditions. Both outside and even inside the party there has been a great splinter activity: the Women's Fightback, the Socialist Campaign for • a Labour Victory, and so on. What to me was extremely pleasing was that so soon after that Central Hall debate in March on the future of the left, which wasn't particularly good, the left sud. denly realised you're fighting in penny-packets. You've got to come All of a sudden, and very much to my surprise, there was the development of the Mobilising Committee in May.
Two years earlier the Labour Co-ordinating Committee was intended to do a similar thing, and it did meet a great response. It's rooted in the grass roots and not in the Parliamentary faction, which is very important because the Parliamentary side, without roots outside, is weak and to some extent ineffective.
When the Militant tendency came in to the Mobilising Committee, which I think is important, all of a sudden it began to come alive. This is the process of building the general coalition of the left, with the women's movement, the black groups, the ecological groups, the peace movement and so on It will be needed first of all within the Labour Party and the labour movement, and it then becomes the launching pad for carrying this outside the Labour Party to win support. It would be a terrible pity if this process were to be brought to an end by the Blackpool conference. It's a process that has to be encouraged if it's going to continue. I think it will continue...
What would be the ingredients of a new common programme between the unions and the par ty? These would be the policies which have emerged from the trade unions and the party, which have been very radical from ?72 onward and are much more radical as a result of the ex perience of the past six years. PotS Gonna ple of that General Council's compor which was adopted with the support of th Engineering Union and the Transport Unlo included the demand for a 35-hour w without loss of pay ...
That has been emerging for some time, and eve the engineers' strike last summer, which thi AUEW was drawn into, was about hours. t wasn't successful, but it was about the rig issues.
I think this will emerge very strongly a don't believe formulation ano manifesto - particularly if it is drawn up the we want, a rolling manifesto that goes beforet conferences before it is put to the public don't think it could fail to demand that elen in it.
Obviously, between now and 1984 the tr
ment what is going on, mine ine way it has failed in its historic purpose.
I've never believed that change is triggered off at the top. Change always begins at the bottom and permeates through to the top.
The votes in the House of Commons indicate but they don't actually deterissues develop. Insofar as the Labour Party has become an electoral organisation through revisionist leadership, to that extent The combination of industrial and community activity and struggle with a process of persuavocated in the House of Commons parliamentary spokesmen, which it is not, and if that were in the manifesto, and if we won an eledtion, and that were done that would be a tremendously significant change the policy arguments plus, democracy taken together, and campaigned for vigorously by the Mobilising Committee, represent the best hope we have at the moment for the Labour Party to revert to what it is all about and what it was, meant to be about. by the port is there. get rid of the Thatcher government - after 20 years of silence on socialism you can't short cut it by industrial muscle. You've got to tackle the yreal argument, which is that these arguments have to be injected into the public consciousness and then you have to build support. That supThe trouble is at the moment the media won't allow an alternative to be presented, because they re afraid it would be too popular. One of the greatest tributes that Fleet St pays to the
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"The against the changes will be voting to neutralise the influence of trades unionism on the Labour Party'