The Death of John Smith: 15 years on

"The Second Commandment calls on us to love our neighbours as ourselves. It does not expect human fraility to be capable of loving our neighbours more than ourselves: that would be a task of saintly dimensions. But I do not believe that we can truly follow that great Commandment unless we have a concept of concern for our fellow citizens which is reflected in the organisation of society."

John Smith, Labour Party leader, 1992-94

“We are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich"

Peter Mandelson

Rupa tagged me on this John Smith thing that's been doing the rounds (the former Labour leader died 15 years ago last week). Here's my answers to the questions.

Where were you when you heard John Smith had died?

It was a school day and I was round a friend’s house at lunchtime when the news came on the TV.

How did you view John Smith when he was leader and how do you view him now?

Smith came across as a strong, credible and articulate politician. Labour were 23% ahead of the Conservatives in the polls at the time of his death, with the width and depth of the government’s unpopularity very much established. The 1992 election had been a dispiriting missed opportunity to remove the Tories from office, but it was now reasonably clear that Smith was capable of winning the next election and repalcing Thatcherism with something if imperfect then at least somewhat better. So from a political point of view, his death created an unwelcome sense of uncertainty about the future - in terms both of Labour's electibility and its political direction - where before there had been decent grounds for optimism.

Do you think he would have made a good Prime Minister?

Its hard to say, but we do know what happened in his absence. Labour moved sharply to the right, essentially embracing Thatcherism albeit with a few softening aspects. The results are well known. An economy consisting of a consumer credit bubble teetering atop a property bubble tottering above a financial bubble, whose collapse led to the worst recession in decades. Inequality worse than at any time since records began. Poverty on the rise. Corporate welfare masquerading as investment in public services under the guise of the PFI. And an illegal war of aggression, launched in collusion with a US government of the hard right, sold on disinformation and resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands, the displacement of millions and one of the greatest humanitarian catastrophes of the last ten years. Those, of course, are just the highlights.

My sense is that few, perhaps even none of those things – the very worst of New Labour - would have happened under Smith. New Labour was a significant departure even from his fairly run-of-the-mill brand of social democracy. I’m under no illusions about the shortcomings of the pre-Blair Labour Party as a force for progressive change. Even Clement Atlee’s government, which implemented the most progressive domestic agenda yet seen in Britain’s history, fought a vicious colonial war in Malaya and began the plotting that later led to the overthrow of Iran’s elected government, a coup effected in order to maintain Western control over that countries oil reserves. I’m sure that Smith would have done many things that I disagreed with, even things that would have appalled me, not least in foreign affairs. But I find it unlikely that his administration would have been remotely as cynical and disastrous as those of Blair and Brown.

What do you think is his lasting legacy?

Tragically, Smith’s overriding legacy is probably the disappointment of his premature death in terms of its implications for the country.

Thatcherism was widely discredited and its replacement with a British version of social democracy would have improved the lives of millions (and also raised the possibility of a subsequent move to something more progressive still, perhaps along Scandinavian lines). There was a very reasonable possibility of that happening while Smith was alive and leading the Labour Party.

Instead, by establishing a neo-Thatcherite consensus and reducing politics to managerial questions within those constraints, Smith’s New Labour successors – in the name of pragmatism and, laughably, “what works” – locked Britain into the political-economic model which is now collapsing around us and which both Labour and the Tories appear morally and intellectually incapable of abandoning.

That’s where we are now, and its hard not to wonder how different things might have been had Smith lived and the Labour Party not fallen into the hands of those who succeeded him.