Q & A with Bryan Gould
The former Labour leadership candidate discusses his 1992 campaign and the misconception within the Labour Party that will not die.
IFTC spoke to former MP and shadow cabinet member Bryan Gould about his decision to run for leader and deputy leader at the same time, his motivation for standing, and why moving to a mythical centre ground could backfire for Labour today.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
You ran for both leader and deputy simultaneously in the 1992 contest. Do you remember how that decision was made and the rationale behind it?
BG:
Yes, I recall what it was, although I think in retrospect I was mistaken. It was generally thought that John Smith would win the leadership election. I wanted to convey to my supporters that they could safely vote for me because I would also stand for the deputy leadership in the hope of winning that if I lost the leadership.
I could protect them—it sounds a bit dramatic, but it was assumed that if you voted against the winning candidate for the leadership, your own individual prospects would suffer. I felt that there would be a number of people who would perhaps contemplate voting for me, but would feel that they should vote for John Smith because he was the likely winner—they needed to vote for him to ensure that they would get promoted or get a good job or whatever. I thought that by going for the deputy leadership as well, that that factor would be negated.
But I was quite wrong to think that. It confused my supporters, who weren’t quite clear whether they were being required to vote to me for the leadership or the deputy leadership. It was also seen as a concession that I was unlikely to win the leadership, and I think there were those who thought that by voting for me for the deputy leadership, they’d done what they could. All in all, it was a rather messy situation that I had created inadvertently, and I think that it was a mistake.
You confronted some of the more divisive policy issues facing the party in 1992, while the other candidates seemed to either prioritise continuity or were more focused on internal reform. Did you feel like that during the campaign?
BG:
Yes, I thought there was quite a lot from the Kinnock leadership that needed to be pursued and defended. I saw myself more on the left of the party than on the right and it seemed to me that in the battle to free the party of the Militant tendency, [the right] had become quite powerful in parts of the party.
When the right realised that the Militant tendency wasn’t the big bad ogre that they had feared, they thought they could take control of the party. The exchange rate mechanism—and indeed Europe as a whole—economic policy, the trade union influence, on all of these issues I think they moved the party to the right. I was very reluctant to do that, and I felt that the party needed to stay where it was, if not more definitively than it had done.
I think I was quite a strong supporter at the time of what became known as “modernisation.” I wanted to see the party recognising where it had failed over the period of the Kinnock leadership: It had failed to get public support.
I became very interested in the success of Mrs. Thatcher’s sale of council houses and the extent to which working people felt that they had suddenly been liberated by a Tory government. They were no longer tenants of the local authority and were able to buy their own homes. That was a very powerful factor in politics I think over that period. I was very keen to make sure that Labour didn’t get wrong-footed again by holding on to old beliefs.
I thought we had to recognise that voters had aspirations and so I made a speech at a party conference. I had become interested in the whole concept of employee share ownership and the possibility that working people could become part owners of the enterprise that they worked for, and I made a speech on that topic and I got howled down by a number of people—I remember Reg Race [MP for Wood Green] was one in the audience who saw me as selling out to the Tories. They didn’t seem to grasp that what I was trying to do was to make sure that we weren’t wrong-footed by the Tories, who had begun to flirt with ideas of that kind. So, I saw myself as a moderniser, but not as moving away from traditional Labour values.
What I think happened over this period was that Neil Kinnock was urged to stay on, not because Peter Mandelson and others thought that he was the best leader or could win an election, but just to hold the fort until Blair and Brown could take over. This was a long-standing plan of people like Mandelson, Tony Blair, and Gordon Brown to a lesser extent. They saw it as very important that Kinnock would stay in place until the party was ready to elect Blair and Brown. That meant getting rid of people like me, Robin Cook, or even John Prescott at the time, who might have challenged from a different viewpoint.
The Labour Party under Neil Kinnock, who I’d supported throughout this period, had lost elections one after another. To suddenly rush forward and anoint a new successor without pausing to think where we had gone wrong and what we should do better [would have been a mistake]. That was the reason I stood—not in the great conviction that I was going to win. In some ways I was really standing to ensure that the party had a chance to reconsider its position.
[The party] did take that chance in due course. But in my view, it made the wrong choice. It decided that the future lay with New Labour. New Labour won an election, won a couple of elections, because Tony Blair was a very effective campaigner and a very attractive candidate, but I don’t think the Labour Party has yet recovered from the wrong turn that I think New Labour was.
A lot of your policy stances, particularly on economic policy, turned out to be very prescient. You stressed the need to revaluate the way banks lend, then we had the financial crisis of 2008. You were an advocate for a Keynesian approach to fighting recessions, then we saw the pain of austerity through the Cameron-Osbourne years. Do you feel vindicated by the events of the last 30 years?
BG:
That’s certainly the way I might look at it. I think it’s fair to say that I was just about the only senior Labour politician who had any coherent and rational critique of what the Tory government was doing and had done, and what Labour might do instead.
It was easy enough for Labour politicians to say they disagreed with Tory economic policy, but very few had any rational or compelling understanding of why it was wrong. We can see in retrospect that over this period, when we had also opened up our markets to manufactured goods from Europe, British manufacturing was really crucified. Because we had an overvalued exchange rate brought about by monetary policy, we were, quite deliberately almost, making ourselves uncompetitive in the face of an incoming flood of efficiently manufactured German goods. British manufacturing is still on its knees as a consequence of all that.
You argued in 1992 that the Tories are always going to be more convincing guardians of the status quo than Labour, and that moving to a mythical centre ground will not win elections. Do you still feel this way?
BG:
I think there is still that mistaken belief that what Labour voters want is the comfort of what they know and what they’ve experienced before, that they’re hostile to change. I don’t think that is true for a moment. I think Labour voters are desperate for a convincing account of why what the Tory government does is wrong, not just in intention, but in effect.
This notion that there is some mythical centre ground that the voters will embrace I think is quite wrong. Labour voters traditionally have voted Labour because they see it as offering something different. That is what we need to do, because something different is what is needed.
Britain has been very badly governed now for 20 or 30 years. Those chickens have now come home to roost. Britain is now a sad shadow of what it once was because of a whole range of very serious mistakes that have been made—essentially by Tory governments. I’m inclined to include in the concept of Tory governments, New Labour governments. It’s a bit unfair but nonetheless, on some of the issues that mattered greatly, there was very little distinction between New Labour and the Tories.