Culture Wars

by James Curran

  19. P. Gould The Unfinished Revolution; how the modernisers saved the Labour Party (London: Abacus 1989), p. 19.

  20. Quoted in C. Hughes and P. Wintour Labour Rebuilt: the new model party (London: 4th Estate 1990), p. 50.

  21. Op cit, p. 48.

  22. The Times 18 November 1986.

  23. Financial Times 20 November 1986. Interestingly this particular report appeared on the same day that a Gallup poll showed that Labour had regained its poll lead. It put Labour on 40%, the Tories on 36% and the (SDP/Liberal) Alliance on 22% compared with the previous month when Gallup had Labour and Conservatives both on 38% with the Alliance on 22.

  24. Quoted in E. Shaw The Labour Party Since 1979 Crisis and Transformation (London: Routledge 2002) p. 75.

  25. Vincent Hanna passed away in 1996. It is, perhaps therefore no more than a minor footnote of political history, that it was Hanna’s production company that was originally awarded the contract to undertake the research for Neil Kinnock’s 1987 election tour (work which was subsequently sub-contracted to this author). The original negotiations took place between Hanna and Patricia Hewitt.

  26. Guardian 5 February 1987.

  27. Financial Times 4 February 1987.

  28. The Times 2 February 1987.

  29. Financial Times op cit.

  30. Guardian 3 March 1987 quoted in Heffernan and Marqusee, p. 73.

  31. The Times 6 March 1987.

  32. Hughes and Wintour op cit, p. 19.

  33. Heffernan and Marqusee op cit, p.74.

  34. Sunday Times? 8 March 1987.

  35. Butler and Kavanagh, p. 72.

  36. Hughes C and Wintour, p. 183.

  37. Eric Shaw, p. 61.

  38. Based on Gaber’s experience in 1986–7 as a media consultant working for Labour.

  39. Quoted in Hughes and Wintour, p. 23, and the author’s private correspondence.

  40. Confidential report by I. Gaber ‘General Election Location Searching’ submitted to the office of the Leader of the Opposition 1986.

  41. All quotes from copy of Gould presentation slides, in author’s private collection.

  42. National Centre for Social Research ‘British Social Attitudes’ http://natcen.ac.uk/our-research/research/british-social-attitudes/.

  43. Minkin, p. 168.

  44. See Heffernan and Marqusee Defeat from the Jaws of Victory.

  45. L. Baston ‘Labour Local Government 1900–99’ in Brivati and Heffernan, p. 78.

  46. Quoted in Hughes and Wintour, p. 156.

  47. ‘Labour and Britain in the 1990s’ NEC paper November 1990 quoted in Heffernan and Marqusee. p. 98.

  48. This research was undertaken by LFF a market research firm then owned by Lord McIntosh, the Labour leader of the Greater London Council who was deposed by Ken Livingstone in 1980.

  49. Gould 1998, p. 158.

  50. Sun 14 March 1986 quoted in Thomas, p. 104.

  51. Terry Coleman writing in the Guardian 7 December 1987.

  52. S. Fielding The Labour Party Continuity and Change in the Making of ‘New’ Labour (Basingstoke: Palgrave 2003), p. 73.

  53. Hughes and Wintour, p. 46.

  54. S. Fielding, p. 73.

  55. A process well-documented by Minkin.

  56. S. Heffer Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell (London: Orion 1999), p. 459.

  57. Quoted in H. Young One of Us: A Biography of Margaret Thatcher (London: Pan1989), p. 111.

  58. Observer 3 September 1995.

  59. C. Prosser (2017) What Was It all About? The 2017 Election Campaign in Voters’ own Words British Election Study www.britishelectionstudy.com/bes-findings/what-was-it-all-about-the-2017-election-campaign-in-voters-own-words/#.WYLsW4jyvIU.

  60. Explored in more depth in Chapter 4.

  61. J. Major Speech to Conservative Group for Europe 22 April 1993 www.johnmajor.co.uk/page1086.html. The full quote: ‘Fifty years on from now, Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county [cricket] grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist’.

  62. Gould, p. 69.

  63. ‘Strategic Observations on the British Elections’ [sic], report by Stanley Greenberg, 8 June 1995, quoted in Gould, p. 258.

  64. S. Cohen Folk Devils and Moral Panics: Creation of Mods and Rockers (London: Routledge 2002).

  65. Shaw, p. 193

  66. Gould op cit, p. 20.

  67. Gould, p. 175.

  68. P. Hewit New Statesman and Society 14 August 1988.

  69. Daily Mail 30 April 1992.

  70. The Times 12 March 1992.

  71. Daily Mail 10 April 1992.

  72. D. Hill ‘The Labour Party’s Strategy’ in Political Communications: the General Election Campaign of 1992 I. Crew and B.Grosschalk (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1995), pp. 38–40.

  73. The Times 24 March 1992.

  74. Sunday Times 12 April 1992.

  9

  THE BLAIR ASCENDANCY

  Ivor Gaber

  Following his defeat in 1992, Neil Kinnock stepped down as Labour leader. On the day after the election, the Sun front page famously declared: ‘It Was the Sun Wot Won It’1 which elicited Kinnock to respond:

  I express no bitterness when I say that the Conservative-supporting press has enabled the Tory Party to win yet again when the Conservative Party could not have secured victory for itself on the basis of its record, its programme or its character.2

  The man who succeeded Neil Kinnock as Labour leader – John Smith – could not have been less like him, apart from sharing a Celtic heritage, although in the case of Smith this was Scots rather than Welsh. Smith was described by the then BBC’s Political Editor, Andrew Marr, as ‘Placid, secure, self-certain … a Gaitskell-supporting moderate’.3 He had been Kinnock’s Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer and, apart from a falling out during the 1992 campaign, these two very different men had worked well together. Smith was the favourite from the start of the leadership campaign and eventually defeated Bryan Gould, seen as the ‘soft left’ candidate, by an overwhelmingly 90% to 10%, taking over the leadership in July 1992.

  However, Smith did not subscribe to the Mandelson/Gould school of thought that the party needed to change still more radically if it was ever to be electable. Indeed, Smith was thought to share the sentiments of those in the party leadership who, following the 1992 defeat, felt that there had been ‘too much glitz and not enough substance’ and who believed that, following the Party’s progress at the polls from 1983 to 1987 and then 1992, ‘one more heave’ was all that was required in order to get Labour into power.4

  Smith adopted a less confrontational attitude to the party than had Kinnock. He did not believe that the party, or its polices, were in need of further radical surgery. He sought to avoid unnecessary confrontations, which resulted in him trying to introduce changes in policy ‘surreptitiously’5 for fear of antagonising either the party or the public. Referring to Peter Mandelson, Marr describes Smith as taking ‘an instant dislike of the Mephistopheles of the modernisers’ although Marr adds ‘which may have been tinged with Scottish Presbyterian’s homophobia’.6

  In one sense, Smith was very lucky. Within weeks of winning the leadership, the Conservative Government had stumbled into a major financial crisis which forced the UK to withdraw from the precursor to the Euro, the Exchange Rate Mechanism, in September 1992, giving Smith the opportunity, in his maiden parliamentary speech as Labour leader, to describe Prime Minister John Major as ‘the devalued Prime Minister of a devalued government’.7 From that point onwards, the Conservative Government’s fate appeared sealed although it took six months for Labour to move into a lead in the opinion polls; but once there the party remained in front. At the time of Smith’s sudden death in March 1994, its lead over the Conservatives stood at 23%.

  Despite his brief tenure in office, Smith was responsible for two major changes in terms of organisation and policy. Organisationally, after much proddi
ng from party colleagues, he persuaded the 1993 Labour Party conference to abolish the trade unions’ block vote and introduce a one-man-one-vote system for determining party policy; in policy terms he committed a future Labour government to establishing a Scottish (and subsequently Welsh) Parliament.

  Whilst Blair and Brown remained in their front bench posts, Smith very deliberately excluded Mandelson and Phillip Gould from his inner circle. The Shadow Communications Agency was put into cold storage, as were the strategy and techniques of media management that the Party had developed under Kinnock. The advent of the Smith regime led to a deep sense of frustration and unease among the modernisers. Labour adviser Phillip Gould was, at the time, very concerned that if Smith continued to ignore the lessons that he believed the Party had learnt under Kinnock, then it was by no means guaranteed success at the next election.8 Peter Hyman, who was to become one of Tony Blair’s key aides wrote:

  I could sense too, and share, the exasperation that some had for the ‘one more heave’ strategy that John Smith employed, the assumption that if Labour held tight it would win next time round.9

  In their post-election analysis of what went wrong for Labour in 1992, Patricia Hewitt and Phillip Gould’s explanation of why Labour remained ‘not trusted’ was simple:

  The party had not changed enough … there were too many who went along with the Kinnock project of change not because they believed in the need for change or in the kind of change he was offering, but because they thought it might win.10

  They argued that voters were not fools and that they recognised that the party’s grassroots had not gone through the same conversion process as its top leadership clearly had undergone – if the Party was not convinced, then why should the voters be, they asked? Much of the supporting evidence for this assertion came from a series of focus groups Phillip Gould conducted in the wake of the 1992 defeat.

  Smith, who died suddenly in 1994, was succeeded by Tony Blair who resumed the modernising project begun under Kinnock. Blair, armed with Gould’s focus group findings, clearly saw it as central to his mission to persuade voters that the Party had radically changed from the one that had previously been identified with the ‘loony left’. Blair and his colleagues felt that Smith’s leadership had been an interregnum in the long-term process of transforming the Labour Party from old to new Labour. Even as late as 1994 it was clear, or at least clear to them, that the party had still not succeeded in convincing significant sections of the electorate that the Labour’s change was real and fundamental.

  That this image might, or might not be, a false one engendered by a hostile media was of little consequence to Blair and his inner circle – their job was to get Labour elected. Thus, rather than challenge this image, he sought to exaggerate it so that the differences between ‘old’ and ‘new’ Labour appeared greater than they actually were. In Fielding’s words: ‘He [Blair] deliberately made the party’s break with its past appear more apparent than it actually was’.11 Blair believed that, whilst Kinnock had taken heroic steps in changing the Party, he had been less successful in persuading the British public that the changes were for real. Thus, Blair believed that by using the phrase ‘New Labour’ at every possible opportunity he was reinforcing the message that this was a different Labour Party from the one in voters’ minds that was preventing them from supporting the Party at the polls.

  Nonetheless, New Labour did argue in favour of gender equality – one area of ‘loony left’ politics that the leadership felt less uncomfortable with. This was both because they were instinctively, and generationally, committed to equality between the sexes but also because their polling was telling them that this was an effective way of closing the gender gap. Labour was seen as a male-dominated party that used macho language and adopted macho posturing, and anything that could be done to correct such a perception would be electorally beneficial. New Labour sought to bridge this gap by changing its policies and its organisation. An element of positive discrimination in favour of women was introduced into elections for the Shadow Cabinet in 1989 and four years later this was extended to the selection of parliamentary candidates. Thus, all-women shortlists, argued for vociferously by the Labour left, were put into effect under New Labour.

  However, Lewis Baston is among doubters as to New Labour’s real commitment to gender equality. He suggests that Labour adopted women-only shortlists as a result of the momentum that had been built-up on the issue by the left:

  The party leadership reluctantly came around to the view that all women shortlists were necessary in 1992–93, a step which would have been impossible had the local left not raised the profile of sex equality … The politics of social inclusion with which Labour successfully ends the century owes much to the initiatives that came through local government in the 1980s.12

  Ironically, it was with the support of some of the more right-wing unions, keen supporters of Neil Kinnock’s leadership, that were persuaded that if Labour was to ever win again then a real commitment – both in policy and internal structures – had to be made to gender equality. Thus, on one raft of issues – lone parents and increasing support for working mothers – New Labour pushed the policy agenda into the terrain of the left. Indeed, according to Hughes and Wintour:

  Labour reformers … insisted that the party would not be fully reconstructed until it had been imbued with feminism. Research prepared by the [Shadow Communications] agency for ‘Labour and Britain in the Nineties’ showed that for some time women had been less likely to vote Labour than men.13

  Following its 1997 general election victory, the Blair government demonstrated an overwhelming desire to retain the trust of the electorate with assurances that it would not be embarking on any radical measures, which sometimes overcame its genuine commitment to gender equality. Within the first few months of the Labour Government coming to power, Harriet Harman, a politician formerly identified with London’s ‘loony left’ and New Labour’s first Secretary of State for Social Services, was tasked with persuading her fellow women MPs to support a cut in benefit for single parents – plans inherited from the outgoing Conservative Government. Fiscally, the measure was an irrelevancy, the amount of money being saved was minimal, but Blair and his advisers saw this as an emblematic issue with which to demonstrate the extent to which Labour had changed; how better to do this than to have the change championed by someone formerly identified with the ‘loony left’? A report in the Guardian began:

  Tony Blair’s honeymoon with his own party ended dramatically last night when 47 Labour MPs defied a three-line whip to stage an unexpectedly emphatic vote against the lone parent benefit cut … He had staked considerable authority on facing down the rebellion in the name of New Labour solidarity behind his election manifesto.14

  However, given New Labour’s publicly declared position on gender issues, and the fact that there were now over 100 women Labour MPs in the House, this token gesture engendered a great deal of hostility and bitterness and created a sense of distrust between the leadership and the Party at large. This was despite the fact that in the subsequent budget the Chancellor of the Exchequer more than made up for the symbolic cut that Harman had been forced to put through the House (she herself was shortly after sacked from the Cabinet – scant reward, it was suggested, for her apparent willingness to put herself in the front-line of New Labour’s confrontation with lone parents).

  In some ways, it could be argued that New Labour was a tribute to the perceived power of the focus group – a research tool that Phillip Gould was particularly attracted to. President Clinton was once quoted as saying: ‘There is no one more powerful today than the member of a focus group. If you really want to change things and you want to get listened to, that’s the place to be’.15 Gould had been using focus groups as the basis of his understanding of what Labour needed to do to become electable ever since the establishment of the Shadow Communications Agency seven years earlier. Focus groups can be a very useful research tool, but they can also be il
lusory, particularly if the person leading the group is not the dispassionate researcher that the text books advocate. And Gould certainly was not. He describes his first encounter with a focus group:

  No one trained me, I just did it. And I loved it. I loved the direct contact with the electorate, the way that I could put arguments, hear arguments, confront arguments, develop ideas, feel the intensity of a point of view and hear the opinions, attitudes and emotions of ordinary members of the public …. I do not just sit there and listen. I challenge, I argue back, I force them to confront issues.16

  Exciting stuff it might be, but objective research it certainly was not. If, and it’s not a big ‘if’, Gould was convinced that one of Labour’s major weaknesses was the perception that it was not trusted, and that the principle cause of this was that the Party was perceived to be dominated by the ‘hard left’, it is hardly surprising that he came back with the news that that was exactly what people believed – especially in the light of his own particular ‘research method’. As one reads Gould’s account of his encounters with focus groups, it is difficult to dispel from one’s mind the image of a hapless group of focus group subjects sitting in a North London front room, being forced to ‘admit’ (a la 1984) that it was the ‘loony left’ that had kept them from voting Labour.

  Gould recounts how he achieved these ‘results’. He used a technique of ‘show cards’ and prodded respondents to talk about ‘acceptable and ‘unacceptable’ fields of politics – an extremely problematic notion (who is defining ‘acceptable and ‘unacceptable’?). He reported responses such as: ‘It’s outrageous – they’re spending a million pound on parks for gays and lesbians in Camden … There are too many loonies’.17

  Such responses cannot be divorced from the methodologies used to obtain them in the first place. It has been well-documented that one of the problems facing quantitative researchers is what Elizabeth Noelle-Neumann first characterised as the ‘spiral of silence’18 – certain attitudes and views become deemed as ‘socially acceptable’ and others ‘unacceptable’. Thus respondents, when faced with researchers (particularly face-to-face), seek to give the ‘correct’ i.e. socially acceptable answer (in the 2015 election it worked against the Conservatives and in 2017 against Corbyn’s Labour Party – which is perhaps a partial explanation as to why, in both elections, the pollsters underestimated the parties’ respective votes). Thus, if the ‘spiral of silence’ effect operated during a phone or internet-based encounter, then how much more must it come into effect when focus group respondents find themselves in a room having to ‘argue’ with an enthusiast for the New Labour project? In essence (as a result of his enthusiasm for the ‘project’ rather than anything more malevolent), Gould was presenting the Labour leadership with the output of his ‘research’ as objective information when in fact it was more akin to the data garnered from old-fashioned political canvassing. The significance of this is that Gould’s views about what voters were thinking carried significant weight in Labour’s inner circles. In his own words: ‘I was seen as the voice of the electorate’.19 Gould’s belief was not universally shared; indeed, Tony Blair notes in his memoirs: ‘how extraordinary the confluence was between his (Gould’s) own thoughts and what the groups seemed to say’.20