POLITICS

They sought it with symbols, they sought it with care

NOEL MALCOLM

In November 1988 Patricia Hewitt, the Labour Party 'policy co-ordinator' (and former press secretary to Neil Kinnock), sent a note to her colleagues which quoted Bruce Babbitt on the American Demo- crats: 'The Party has succeeded in scrub- bing the graffiti of its past off the wall, but we still have not painted the mural of the future.'

What Labour needed, she told them, was 'two or three memorable policies which will make life better for you and your family'. And in a further note she explained: 'We are looking for symbolic policies. The classic Tory symbolic policy was selling council houses. A good Labour symbolic policy was the Open University'. Now, I have nothing against the Open University; but even the gear-shift from 'classic' to 'good' does not quite prepare one, I feel, for the bathos of that last sentence. If that is the best model that Labour can find for sketching the mural of the future, then looking for symbolic poli- cies must be unrewarding work indeed.

I owe these quotations to Colin Hughes' and Patrick Wintour's Labour Rebuilt (Fourth Estate, £6.95), an account of the 'policy review process' in the Labour Party which is full of illuminating details. (My favourite being this one: 'With the help of a computer bought on the proceeds of his appearance in an advertisement for red leicester cheese, Livingstone tried to oper- ate an alternative economic review.) Its central theme, persuasively argued, is that the remodelling of Labour over the last three years has been more than a matter of image-management, market research and shopping-list socialism. At the heart of this process, it suggests, has been a consistent search for symbolic policies.

As early as May 1986, when David Blunkett complained that the party was campaigning on 'isolated and unconnected policies', Mr Kinnock responded with the following *Planation:

The campaign deliberately selects symbolic policies — such as under-fives provision, cervical cancer screening, a ban on lead in petrol, and home improvement grants — to illustrate our commitment to general values. The reason for this approach is very simple: the extensive research we did before the

campaign launch showed that, in the ab- stract, people found it difficult to see how

our values related to their daily lives. Linked to particular policies, those values came alive.

The search for symbolic policies may have been continuous. But what these quota- tions from Mr Kinnock and Miss Hewitt suggest is that it cannot have been all that consistent, because the very idea of a symbolic policy has been subject to fluc- tuating inconsistency. Mr Kinnock's re- marks seem to imply that a party's main purpose at an election is to get people to vote for its values, and that policies are just handy educative devices for giving people a rough idea of what those values are. But Miss Hewitt' S 'two or three memorable policies which will make life better for you and your family' sounds altogether more pragmatic: such policies (of which the sale of council houses surely was a classic example) are memorable precisely because they 'make life better' for a significant section of the electorate. They are not mnemonics for something else.

The relation between policies and values is, I believe, much looser and less strictly deductive than most people in the policy- making business realise (or, at any rate, admit). Values are often vague, general terms which people are happy to agree with in vague, general terms — much happier, in fact, than they would be if asked fo agree with specific applications of those values. Most so-called Green values come in this category, I suspect.

The most successful policies are the ones which have some straightforward, practical appeal for the electorate; they do not need to be directly deducible from abstract values, but it helps if a few connections can be made. Strict rules of logic do not apply here. With the sale of council houses, it was sufficient to make the connection with rolling back the public sector, encouraging sturdy independence, etc, and never mind that the huge discounts on these houses were un-Thatcherite hand-outs of public money. The strictest applications of values 'Oh dear! In the last three years it hasn't grown at all!'

often turn out to be the most unsuccessful policies — witness the poll tax..

Policies, then, are a bit like works of art. Reading an abstract description of the qualities which are embodied in a late Van Gogh may be very interesting, but only a hard look at the painting itself will enable you to decide whether you like it or not. If you do like it, then by all means think about the qualities it embodies, the overall style of late Van Gogh, and so on. But it's the actual picture that counts. Nobody ever sold an abstract quality at Sotheby's.

For several years now, Mr Kinnock has been worrying about his party's lack of a Big Idea. All I am suggesting is that the truth is the other way round: what his party lacks is a few Big Policies. Labour has never been short of abstract ideas. Its latest generation of ideas (Mr Hattersley's theories about freedom, for example) are of a wonderful, exemplary abstraction; all they require is a policy or two to make them mean something.

If the Labour Party had gone hunting from the outset for a small number of Big Policies', they might have found some by now. Instead, they spent the best part of two years trying to work out all their policies again from first principles. Not surprisingly, the image-managers ancl popularisers grew tired of this process, and decided that the only way to find some policies was to go out into the streets armed with questionnaires and ask people what they wanted. This is the way to get lots of little policies — more cervical cancer screenings and home improvement grants, that sort of thing — but no big ones. The sale of 'council houses would never have been arrived at by this method. In policy terms, they have ended up with not a 'Van Gogh but a collage of objets: trouves on the one hand, and an abstract catalogue on the other.

There was a printing error in this column last week. Describing Mr Chris Patten's constituency', which he holds by a narrow majority from the SDP, I predicted for the next election a shift along the spectrum, 'with disillusioned SDP voters voting Labour, and disillusioned Tory voters. vot- ing SDP — in which case Mr Patten might conceivably scrape home once more'. The printed version, by omitting the first six words, rendered my conclusion incompre- hensibly stupid.