Counting on Mr Kitson
Peter Paterson
The humiliation of Mr John Silkin is not the least of the crimes to be laid at the door of Mr Alex Kitson, temporarily the leader of the Transport and General Workers' Union, as the extraordinary election for the deputy leadership of the Labour Party approaches its climax. Or it may be that Mr Kitson is guilty not of crimes but of appalling blunders.
In any event, the Silkin affair will echo on long after the result of the election is announced in Brighton on Sunday, whether he is still a candidate by then or not. While the former Chief Whip has a strong stubborn streak which makes him less than amenable to the advice of those who have been helping him to run his campaign, it may be that the only way for him to salvage the dignity he has displayed throughout the contest would be for him to withdraw from the ballot before the weekend.
Mr Kitson's role in Mr Silkin's downfall has been simple and deadly. It was he who, with the acquiescence of Mr Foot, persuaded him to run in the first place, with the promise that he would be guaranteed, as a sponsored T and G Member of Parliament, the union's vote at least in the first ballot for the deputy leadership. But it was a promise on which Mr Kitson could not deliver.
Nor was it in the true spirit of the encouragement offered to Mr Silkin for Mr Kitson then to mount the shambolic consultation exercise within the union which had to be thrust aside because it showed unexpectedly strong support for Mr Denis Healey. And it was then left to the hapless Mr Kitson to announce that the union's national executive had decided to recommend that their mighty bloc vote would, after all, be cast in favour of Mr Tony Benn on the first ballot — the very thing he had struggled to avoid throughout the proceedings. Although he is not one to allow it to show publicly, Mr Silkin must be feeling extremely bitter towards his incompetent erstwhile ally.
Mr Kitson, in charge of the union during the illness of Mr Moss Evans, and this year's chairman of the Labour Party in his own right, may have brought other troubles down on his head as a result of his manoeuvrings. For while Mr Benn and his supporters have been performing their spectacular dismantling job on the Labour Party constitution, they have also been quietly beavering away to get a bigger share. of power for activists within the trade union movement. So they benefit in two ways from what has happened inside the Transport Union: they get the biggest single vote in the electoral college for their man, and they can at the same time exploit the mistrust created by the mishandling of the consultation process.
The fact that the vote is theirs by overturning the wishes of the rank and file membership of the union is not as ironic as it might appear. Mr Benn is not an advocate of widespread participation in the making of such decisions but an elitist who believes in power for the activists who, in his eyes, have the inestimable advantage of being immune to the siren voices of corrupt mass media. The influence of a hostile press and broadcasting system will have to be smashed before Mr Benn would be willing to adopt the Churchillian maxim of 'Trust the people'.
It is not, however, just the Bennites who stand to gain from the fiasco in the Transport and General. If the unions are to control 40 per cent of the electoral college which will eventually have to elect not just a deputy leader — which in any case is a' meaningless, virtually ceremonial job — but a leader of the Labour party, the way they reach a decision is obviously of interest to a wider public than simply the candidates and their supporters. In Mr Kitson's union the process has erupted in scandal and confusion, but other unions, too, have avoided the spotlight falling on equally shakylooking procedures only by the fortunate chance that they came up with the results that their leaders wanted.
Traditionally, unions hate outsiders interfering with their rule books, and very often the circumstances created by the new constitutional arrangements in the Labour Party are not covered in the rule books anyway. But if leadership elections are to be seen to be fair, something more is needed than the kind of vague injunction issued to regional secretaries and committees to gauge opinion among the members by whatever method seems to them appropriate. Postal ballots would be the fairest approach, but would be seen by activists who mistrust such extremes of democracy as leading straight to the imposition of similar voting systems for the election of officials. In the current case, rejecting the opinion of the membership, however imperfectly gathered, the Transport and General can only give impetus to the efforts of the Social Democrats and the Tories to persuade union members not to pay the political levy along with their subscriptions.
The Labour Party itself will have to consider limiting the length of leadership campaigns, now that it has seen how much destruction months of campaigning can inflict. Financial limits will also have to be placed on the candidates, who have spent very large sums indeed this year: Mr Benn, personally the wealthiest of the current contenders, has not, it is said, financed his campaign himself, but the money has been forthcoming from somewhere. Should not the National Executive Committee demand a financial statement from each candidate?
The key issue, however, is whether the switch of the Transport Union vote will ensure victory for Mr Benn on Sunday. A lot can happen between now and Sunday — may indeed have happened since this article was written. The TGWU delegation could ignore their executive's instructions. Or a withdrawal by Mr Silkin would obviate the need for a second ballot, and upset the plans of some unions and MPs to vote for him and then to abstain in the run-off. Would Mr Neil Kinnock and his fellow Tribune groupers then stick to their intention to abstain rather than vote for Mr Benn?
It may be that the key to the outcome now depends upon the most volatile element in the electoral college, the Labour MPs. In the bizarre arithmetic practised in this particular college, the votes of eight MPs account for one per cent of the total — the precise equivalent of 160,000 trade union votes. So 24 Tribune abstentions would deprive Mr Benn of just three per cent of the possible votes, to be set against the 7.3 per cent he has gained from the Transport Union.
The latest breathtakingly exact forecast I have from the Healey camp is that on what his supporters term the worst possible scenario — although I would have believed that it was possible to conceive of one worse — he will retain the deputy leadership with 51.5 per cent of the vote. That is assuming that Mr Benn will have the backing of the miners and NUPE, the public employees' union, Mr Kitson's battalions, and most of the constituency parties.
It is doubtful, unless Mr Foot can demonstrate a great deal more toughness than he has so far, whether such a narrow defeat would dissuade Mr Benn from challenging for the deputy leadership again next year. In which case, God help the Labour Party, and all who sail in her.
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